“Perhaps I could ask you a few questions now to save time later?”
Savannah’s shrug drew the eye to firm, smooth shoulders dusted with pearlescent powder.
Temple dragged a metal folding chair over a small clot of cables and plunked it down just far enough from the actress so she wouldn’t be asphyxiated by fumes from her least-favorite scent, Emeraude.
“What kind of atmosphere are you hoping to gather for your new film?” Temple began gamely, notepad in lap and no. 2 pencil poised in hand.
Savannah Ashleigh rolled the fingers of her right hand as if balancing an invisible ball upon them. “Um, mood stuff, you know what I mean?”
“You’re... ah, a... method actress, Miss Ashleigh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sure sounds like it,” Temple added.
“And right now my mood is not good.” She paused after this pronouncement, as if expecting somebody to offer to make up for it. Alas, everybody in the room was busy about his or her business. Temple was Savannah’s only audience. Her heavy lashes, invisibly implemented, lowered in frustration. “I’m not getting it. The Vibrations. The Ambience. The Core Experience.”
“What kind of movie are you doing involving strippers?”
“Film,” Savannah corrected with more articulation and energy than she’d shown thus far, so much that the word came out, “fil-mah.”
“And my subject is an exotic dancer, not a stripper,” she went on. Her hands, the only animated portion of her anatomy at the moment, planted themselves delicately on her bare collarbones. “A wonderful script. So... moving. I am trying to find the spiritual center of... of all this.”
Temple took another look at the pre-rehearsal chaos and just nodded. “What makes a girl become a stripper?” she asked.
Savannah Ashleigh leaned closer without altering the taut blandness of her expression. Emeraude emitted a powdery, choking scarf of scent that tightened around Temple’s throat.
“Some,” the actress said in a stage whisper, “are failed dancers. Some are failed women. Most do not look well naked unless they are moving. I, of course, am portraying an exceptional exotic dancer.”
“Oh?” Temple searched the computer in her head for the right references. “Mata Hari? Sally Rand? Blaze Starr? Tempest Storm? Come to think of it, I’ve got a car called that.”
“I can’t say,” Savannah said. “The script is secret. Really, I can’t talk.” Temple was tempted to agree. “I’m so upset after yesterday.”
“Yesterday? You mean—”
“Oh, that awful incident.”
“The... murder?”
“Yes, we are most upset by it.”
“We?”
“My Darling and I. My Darling was in the dressing room when it happened.”
“Your... darling was a witness? What did he see?”
“She,” Savannah Ashleigh corrected with as much sternness as a face that resembled a Franklin Mint porcelain of a Southern belle could muster.
“She.” Temple considered and found no comeback to that one.
Savannah Ashleigh bent, again from the waist, as if that were the only joint in her lithe but lifeless body, and lifted a rectangular, pale pink canvas bag from the floor beside her chair as Exhibit A.
“They think,” she confided in her strange pulsing whisper, “that the miscreant left his footprint on the side. So they dusted my Darling’s home-away-from-home.”
“Footprint. Dusted. Darling.” Temple knew she was babbling, but Savannah Ashleigh didn’t seem to notice.
The actress unzipped the top and withdrew a limp handful of silver-gray fur. She arrayed it on her lap, which was mostly lace-patterned white pantyhose.
“Oh, the darling!” Temple exclaimed, understanding.
Savannah’s pale blue eyes lit up for the first time. “My Darling Yvette was alone with that monster! She witnessed the entire... act. And it was hideous.
He... hit the poor girl first.”
Savannah’s hand pantomimed a sudden karate chop.
“Then he... hoisted her unconscious body.”
Her exquisitely expressive hands mimed lifting an offering to a god.
“Then he wrapped a rhinestone G-string around her neck and hung her from a costume hook high”—here the deliberately dusky voice went small and wee, like a little girl’s—“on... the...wall.”
She sank back against her upholstered chair back, exhausted. “Yvette saw it all, heard it all. I cannot even begin to guess what trauma this has caused, but I can tell you this: my Darling has not been herself since yesterday morning!” Narrowed eyes and heavy emphasis had Temple retreating even as Emeraude advanced.
Temple lowered her head to examine the downcast darling. For all the fur, Yvette seemed petite. Temple found a calm but breathtakingly wistful face with round aqua eyes outlined in black mascara, and a rose-colored nose emphasized by the same natural accent line.
“She’s gorgeous!” Temple admitted with more sincerity than she had managed to muster for Savannah Ashleigh so far. “I have a jet black cat, but he’s just a stray.”
“Yvette has not a stray hair on her body. She is a purebred shaded silver Persian. Her full name is Diamond Bleu Moon Sirena Yvette.”
“Is she... adult? She’s so small.”
“Yvette is two,” Savannah said, “and she always travels with Momsy.”
“Louie—my cat—is much bigger. He weighs over nineteen pounds.”
“Yvette weighs six-point-eight pounds,” Savannah said with satisfaction, “She is not designed to be subjected to rude shocks. If I come across the miserable man who murdered that poor girl and apparently kicked my Darling Yvette, I will string him up myself. Personally.”
Savannah Ashleigh’s long fingernails convulsed on the darling Yvette’s coat, but luckily it was thick enough to buffer the owner from its mistress’s fury on her behalf.
“The police are sure the killer was a man, then?” Temple asked.
“Who else would kill a woman like that—hang her from her own G-string? Nasty sort of thing a man would do. And I know few women who would kick at a cat.”
“But Yvette was in her carrier. He might not have noticed what his foot hit—”
“Not have noticed? Her name is written plain to see right on the top. Y-v-e-t-t-e.”
Temple examined the writing in question, a tortured silver script that looked more like “Gavotte” to her. “He might have been in a hurry.”
“That is no excuse.” Savannah hoisted the limp feline in one hand and draped her into the carrier as if dropping a chiffon scarf into a drawer. “I see that I dare not leave my Darling out of my sight in a common dressing room. My private dressing room was not yet assigned, since the competition has booked the penthouse suite for me. Some of these hotel buffoons tried to hint that I didn’t require a downstairs dressing room! Idiots. A moment’s carelessness and look what happened. Yvette has not eaten her Free-to-Be-Feline since yesterday morning.”
“Oh, really,” said Temple, interested for the first time. “Have you tried putting some deli turkey over the top?”
“Not even Alaskan salmon will work, although I might have better results with Cajun shrimp. Yvette has a most piquant palette.”
“No kidding.” Temple leaned nearer for a consultation across the noxious moat of Emeraude. Feline eating habits—or the lack of them—drove human companions to desperate measures. “Have you ever thought of trying...”
11
The Naked and the Dead
Temple had learned in her TV reporting days that the best way to sniff out a new environment was to follow her nose for novelty. The born newshound’s tenacious curiosity often leads down offbeat byways that no one else would bother investigating. She'd snagged some of her best news stories that way. If she followed her instincts, she’d have a handle on the stripper competition by noon.