“Hey,” Temple said. “Buck didn’t have to be hired. Wasn’t a teenager shot and killed during the gunplay on the Strip? I need my laptop. I could look that and all the other celebrity ‘sins’ right up. There are hundreds of sites on stuff like that.”
Rafi had a cell phone to his ear. “Nadir here. Collect a hot pink laptop from the—?”
He handed Temple the phone and she described it and told the guard where in the central bedroom it was. Then Rafi took back the phone and said he wanted the laptop in the dancing show greenroom “yesterday.”
“‘Hot pink’?” Molina mocked. “Can you never stop being girly?”
Matt pulled Temple close to his leather-clad side. “I don’t ever want her to.”
“You see the benefits,” Temple purred, watching Molina look away and shake her head. Temple straightened up and got back to business.
“Maybe that messenger boy shot in the rap star shoot-out was a relative of Buck’s,” she said.
“But Buck didn’t try to kill Motha Jonz,” Matt said. “Rafi, your gangsta rap slaying idea is interesting. Exchanging live ammo for blanks was the most dangerous dirty trick, but Motha Jonz was the shooter. The Cloaked Conjuror and José were more in danger from her.”
Temple had sat on an empty guard’s chair and now looked up and nodded.
“She might have gotten a police charge out of the incident,” Temple said. “That would have hurt her career even more than it has been. And she might have been found guilty and convicted.”
“What about all those other dirty tricks?” Matt wondered. “What was the point?”
“Obvious.” Molina was brusque. “Diversions to mask that you were a target, the target. I don’t know if he intended the Cloaked Conjuror to be injured by Motha Jonz’s loaded gun, but the fact that he did get hurt got us police thinking the whole thing might be a follow-through on the continual death threats he gets.”
“There must have been more to it,” Matt insisted. “We’re missing something.”
“What about the shoe incidents?” Temple asked.
“You would get on the shoes,” Molina said, rolling her eyes. “They were the most minor ‘accidents.’ At worst, Olivia could have twisted her ankle. As it was, her dancing through the problem and CC upholding her only enhanced her ratings with the audience. And you told me your nosy cat pretty much targeted very early on that the stage mother dosed her own daughter’s shoes with the pepper spray for the same reason—audience sympathy and votes.”
Molina eyed Rafi. “Now do you understand why I’m so set against Mariah getting into the kid performer stuff?”
“Wait a minute.” Temple sat up straighter. “I’m getting something. I’m seeing something.”
“So now you’re psychic?” Molina said.
“No, I’m . . . I don’t see how it relates to Hank Buck, that’s all. But, what you said: the onstage ‘accidents’ raised the victim’s scores. They got a sympathy vote. Olivia’s heel was first and the rating went up. That inspired Yvonne Smith to make Sou-Sou an underdog with another, far more dramatic shoe problem. And it worked. Her daughter’s score went up.”
Rafi was leaning forward, elbows on knees. “That’s right. It snowballed. Salter was poisoned, Wandawoman drugged, CC shot, and Matt was personally attacked by someone in Juarez’s guise. That had to be Hank, but could Sou-Sou’s mother have set up the other incidents to disguise the fact that her daughter’s problem was staged? And then there’s Temple’s idea. Maybe somebody in the competition or around the competition is a relative of the people these celebrities hurt. I mean, look at them. They’re quite a crew. In a way what happened to them fit their crimes.”
Matt caught his drift and kept the ball rolling. “Glory B. was the first one to have an almost accident even before the first show. She fell on the jungle gym and Danny Dove thought it had been tampered with. She got a DUI citation for an accident a few months ago, and a little girl has serious leg injuries.”
“I just Googled Glory B. online to get the facts straight,” Temple said. “There’ll probably be a huge settlement for the family of the girl. I don’t find anything obviously bad about Olivia,” Temple said, “but Keith Salter was all over the entertainment gossip shows for some cases of food poisoning at his restaurant in Aspen. E. coli. It was especially bad. A toddler died. No one was found derelict, but the media loved broadcasting the problem because Salter had raked so many other chefs over the coals on his Butcher’s Holler show.”
Molina spoke. “The hospital said there was no way to ever tell if his poisoning had been accidental, or intentional.”
“Wandawoman being drugged in the pasodoble?” Matt asked.
“Oh, my gosh,” Temple said, “that could have been done to make you look bad too. I’ll look her up.”
Molina shook her head. “Who needs detectives anymore? Everything is online.”
“And it stays there forever,” Temple said. “Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
“The ‘bad’ refers to Zoe Chloe, right?”
Temple, tapping away on her laptop keyboard, shrugged at Molina. “Zoe Chloe has her uses. I just wish I could figure a way to earn money off of her popularity.”
“Everybody wants to earn money these days, especially these annoying celebrities behaving badly,” Molina noted.
“Maybe even Hank Buck,” Temple said.
“What are you getting at?” Rafi asked.
“Let’s say he always was in this to get Matt. I know, we don’t know why, but it looks like that. Let’s say . . . he saw he could use the competition to get other people too. Then he went wild, was a revenge machine. All these celebrities going wild in Hollywood and Vegas, getting away with things. That could irritate a law officer, right?”
“Irritate. Not drive nuts.”
“What if he already was nuts?”
“Any evidence?”
“Only in what he did at the other end of his mania.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at, who could hate Glory B., Olivia, Chef Salter, Wandawoman, Motha Jonz, and Matt enough to persecute them? Persecute. But kill? The only person Hank Buck tried to kill was Matt.”
“He’s the most innocent of the innocent,” Molina protested.
“That before his tango, or after?” Rafi asked.
“Forget the dancing,” Molina snapped. “The last thing this is about is dancing. The dancing was the pretext.”
“Amen,” Temple said. “And there was Hank Buck, full of whatever venom he had, having all these people on his turf, and at his mercy. Most of all, for reasons we don’t know, Matt.”
Dirty Larry’s buzz-cut dirty blond head came through the greenroom door.
“Our boy Buck is reaching smack high. He’ll be singing his soul out like Janis Joplin and I’ve got the camcorder and a tape recorder rolling to capture every sweet, demented syllable of it.”
Hank Buck was handcuffed, wrists in front of his body, his face was relaxed and dreamy.
Temple couldn’t believe this man had been active enough less than fifteen minutes ago to grab her, lift her, try to kill her.
Two young uniformed EMTs sat near him.
He was wearing hospital scrub pants. The uniform cargo pants were laid out beside him, one rear pocket torn and traces of blood on the seat and down the legs.
Matt and Temple looked inquiringly at Molina.
“Your cat removed the rear pocket when he went berserk,” she told Temple. “I don’t know how he ID’d Buck. Maybe by smell. When we got Buck subdued we saw the blood and the emergency people took a look.”
She paused, took a deep breath. “It’s like he got caught on a fence with exposed nail heads recently. He’s got four infected gouges down both sides from his buttocks to his calves. Must have hurt like hell. Maybe your cat just smelled blood.”