She snatched it from his hand and read the first lurid subhead. “ ‘A Comely Come-on from an Ecdysiast’! Crawford, even you admitted that the poor Horvath woman wouldn’t have given you the time of day in a Swatch factory.”
“I wanted to convey a feeling for the victim when she was alive and beautiful. Haven’t you heard of the New Journalism?”
“ ‘She eeled past me in a scent of roses and regret’—oh, God! You don’t even get to the first murder until the fourth paragraph. And the last subhead, ‘Catwoman Caught by Batman’? Crawford, this is salacious, self-aggrandizing and totally fictional.”
“Thank you,” he said complacently, reaching to take his treasure back. “Don’t wrinkle it.”
Temple refolded the tear sheet and slapped it atop the papers piled on his lap. “Stay home. Stay out of print. Stay out of my way, or I’ll see that WHOOPE sues you and your fish wrappings to kingdom come.”
“I got you a job,” came the injured whine. “Most people would be grateful.”
“Want to do something to make me really grateful? Retire.”
Temple stomped away over the black spaghetti of cables still strewing the carpeting. Electra’s pancakes were beginning to back up in her stomach, and she really didn’t want to taste them again. It would be a perverted kind of poetic justice if she ended up with a heart attack and Crawford Buchanan replaced her.
“Whoa—! You’re a real fireball today.”
Temple stopped by the smoke signal hovering above one of the scattered ballroom chairs—Lindy’s. Ike Wetzel sat in the chair next to her, puffing on a cigar.
“I’ve just had a chat with my predecessor,” Temple said. “He’s written a smarmy story about the murders for his scandal sheet.”
“I know.” Lindy waved some of her own smoke away and patted a vacant chair seat. “Sit down. We’re not worried about that. No one takes ‘Buchanan’s Broadside’ seriously.”
Wetzel brooded for a moment, then broke into the conversation. “Frankly, much as I hate to say it, the murders are getting us some big-league press coverage.”
“I was going to write a blanket press release,” Temple said, “then set up a system to funnel interviews and make sure that marauding press people don’t disturb the contestants.”
Wetzel laughed. “Forget it. Listen, strippers get so much bad press that all this attention for some plain old murders is gravy. These girls love to stop whatever they’re doing for an interview. Pictures are even better. Don’t sweat it.”
He rose, his cigar ash perilously close to falling off, and headed for the stage.
Temple watched him, an overbuilt short-legged man, a walking inverted pyramid of touchy pride and prejudice. His every word and mannerism made plain that he didn’t expect to have his will crossed. He could hit a woman he considered lippy.
“How long were Kitty and Ike married?” she asked Lindy, looking down quickly to judge the woman’s reaction.
Lindy drew on her cigarette until she frowned from the effort. “You’ve been busy. Maybe seven, eight years. They broke up about three years ago.”
“They couldn’t still have been seeing each other?”
“Never say never.”
“Did he... hit her?”
Lindy shrugged and screwed her cigarette butt into a slick of watered-down scotch at the bottom of a hotel glass. “Who knows? Could have. Ike’s a funny guy. Changes. Like he was always against his girls competing in the contest. Fired them if they took the weekend off to do it—that’s not unusual, a lot of clubs don’t want us to waste time on things like dreams. Just fling that ass and sling that booze at the customers. So Ike was real hard-nosed about WHOOPE, the whole deal. Then, this year, he lightened up. Got himself put on the board. Said we were gonna do it right. Strange guy.”
“Strange business,” Temple added. “Don’t any women own clubs?”
Lindy’s dark eyes widened. “Say, you read my mind. I’d like to get something like that going. But clubs cost money. A night’s lights can run twenty-five hundred dollars. Rent, three grand a week and up. Then there’s liquor trouble, fight trouble. Clubs need bouncers. It’s a man’s game.”
“Do you know who Kitty was seeing recently?”
“Some guy.”
Lindy’s disinterested tone promised no new revelations. Temple had heard the dancers confiding every fact of their private lives:
“I’m in love with this neat guy.”
“My kid got ninety-three on his math test yesterday.”
“Hey, hon, I’m so worn out from last night I don’t even want to wiggle my butt.”
“I’d like to beat the shit out of my old man.”
Dressing-room girl talk revolved around guys and kids and bum pasts, all generic, like the customers. Facing such a transient, casual milieu, even Molina would have a hard time solving a murder times two.
Temple had watched the action near the stage while brooding on the frustrations of getting juicy gossip from a rolling stone.
“At least you all have access to the stage setup again,” she said. “The prelims are tomorrow, and showtime is only fifty-some hours away.”
“Yeah. Except now that we have the ballroom back, the cops have banned us from the dressing rooms.”
“What?”
“Just this morning. We got here around ten to find yellow tape stretched across the hall. Everybody’s been changing in the wings.”
“Crime scene tape? But why now—?”
“Yeah. Took ’em awhile to get around to putting it up. Cops must be like the lazy stripper—a little behind in their work.”
Temple glanced quickly to the ballroom wall. Buchanan’s chair was empty, the cane gone. She scanned the room, trying to see past all sorts of arresting getups. There—the would-be Mark Twain garb. Luckily, pale colors stood out in a crowd, especially one where the dominant color was black.
Buchanan was wandering around the floor ogling the female strippers. No doubt his press credentials aided and abetted. She assessed the acts available, and hoped they would suffice to keep the miserable weasel occupied while she headed downstairs to find out why the police would waste their time putting up crime tape two days too late.
Lindy was right. The back stairs were no longer the discreet, deserted route they had been. A yellow tape blocked the bottom, and beyond it stood a uniformed officer.
Temple descended anyway, wishing that her high heels were not so percussive.
“You can’t enter, ma’am,” the officer told her when she paused on the bottom step.
She liked the additional elevation. “Can I at least ask what’s going on?”
“You can ask,” he said.
“Isn’t it odd to cordon off a crime scene after the lab people have been and gone?”
“They haven’t,” he answered.
Temple opened her mouth to ask another unwelcome question when the rising wail of a distraught woman interrupted her. Obviously the woman was deeply anguished.
Temple stared at the officer, puzzled. “Is Lieutenant Molina—?”
Molina herself suddenly stepped into the picture, like a magician, all at once. Temple jumped, even though she knew Molina had merely been out of sight down the hall, and had stepped forward when she heard Temple’s voice.
“You know a Savannah Ashleigh?” Molina asked.
Temple nodded, recognizing the exasperated note in her voice despite the official monotone.
“She’s hysterical. Do you think you could get a sensible word out of her?”
Temple shrugged slowly.
“Let her through,” Molina told the officer.
He pulled the tape free of one wall.
“Well, come on,” Molina said.
Temple hesitated a moment longer. With her high heels and six inches of riser, she was exactly Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s height. She hated to abandon such a rare advantage. Muffled wails were too great a temptation to resist, however, especially when they were movie-star muffled wails.