“I’m okay,” she shouted down. “I just learned that my worst enemy, who was boasting about snagging the strippers’ convention away from me, has landed in the middle of a juicy murder. Not me this time, him!”
“Are you jubilant,” Matt shouted back, glistening golden in the sun, “or jealous?”
Temple sobered. A woman was dead and Crawford Buchanan wasn’t equipped to do anything about it but wring his pale white hands. She sat down and considered Matt’s question again, seriously. Then she rose, leaned over the patio wall and invited him over for supper.
“Supper,” she repeated when she opened the door to Matt’s prompt ring at five o’clock. “Not dinner. I don’t do dinner.”
“What’s the difference?” He presented her with a chilled matte black bottle of Freixenet. He was wearing a champagne linen short-sleeved shirt that made his tan and his brown eyes sing like the Song of Solomon.
“This says dinner.” Temple hefted the wine bottle before depositing it on the table. “But it can stay for supper anyway. Supper is a little deli this, a little leftover that. For supper you can over-garlic the bread and bum the beans. For dinner you have to be perfect. For supper you can have your wine in a supermarket glass. For dinner”—she went up on tiptoe in her high-heeled Anne Klein emerald leather sandals, opened the shallow cabinet high over the stove hood and batted at the long-stemmed glasses just out of reach.
Matt came over and took down two of the hand-blown cobalt goblets.
Temple settled back to earth with a relieved sigh. “For dinner you drink out of craftware.”
“Very nice.” Matt set the princely glasses at the colorful Fiesta ware places already set in the dining room corner. “I’m glad I brought dinner.”
“And heeeere’s supper.” Temple swooped the plates of deli breads, homemade crab salad, cold baked beans and artistically arranged fresh veggies from the refrigerator.
They settled down to the food without a lot of small talk or fanfare, which she liked, although she belatedly realized that the large, handmade wineglasses would hold a lot of sparkling bubbles.
“I hope you don’t think I’m too much of a ghoul after my outburst this morning,” she said as soon as the main dishes had made the rounds.
“You do seem to have a certain detachment about murder.”
“Well, the first time, it created a crisis on my job. It’s hard to empathize with a fly in the ointment, especially when he’s as widely loathed as the late Chester Royal turned out to be.”
“What’s the story on this murder at the Goliath? Why are you so...”
“Excited by it? Simple. You see, I could have had that strippers’ convention PR job, only I turned it down. Not Crawford Buchanan. He’s too greedy to reject any sure thing. So it could have been me and not Crawford Buchanan who’s up to his neck in a murderous mess. If I’d stumbled onto a body a second time, you can bet that Lieutenant Molina would have put me in thumbscrews.”
“That homicide detective! He sounds like a terror, or a throwback to the days of brass knuckles.”
Temple chewed crab salad and her impulses, then forbore telling Matt that her bête noir of the law was female. It made her look less in need of sympathy.
“Why did you turn the convention down?” he asked.
“This is one of the few times when I can grandly say, ‘principle.’ All that flesh on parade makes me uneasy, the notion of teasing a bunch of paying customers. Even regular working women are sometimes tempted into acting or looking like bimbos to get male attention.”
“Aren’t there men strippers now, too?”
“Oh, sure, but it’s the same thing. Besides, they’re all overblown plastic musclemen, about as attractive as steroid robots.”
“Then you don’t like them because you don’t find their type attractive?”
“And stripping seems demeaning. On the other hand, I guess they make a lot of money doing it, so who can blame them?”
“You can. You blame Crawford Buchanan for being greedy.”
“Don’t make me sound like a prude or a pauper. What upsets me is that I came closer than I want to think about to getting tangled in another murder. Which explains my unholy glee.”
“You had a hand in solving the last one. What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s not my job. My job is getting good publicity for my clients. I hate messes, and murder makes a mess you wouldn’t believe. But this time it’s in Crawford’s lap, not mine.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Matt lifted his glass. “What’s the story on this Crawford guy?”
“The bane of my life since I got to Vegas. Goes everywhere. Writes a sleazy woman-chasing column about the nightlife for the Las Vegas Scoop. Has no sense of shame or ethics. Would steal a client from the Pope.”
Matt choked on his wine at her heated description.
“Really, Matt! He’s the most slimy, sexist, smug, smarmy... PR person to pollute a press club.” Temple settled back for a sip of her own wine. “I shouldn’t let him get to me.”
“Is he getting to you, or the murder?”
“You keep asking these pointed questions.”
Matt smiled. “That’s my job.”
“You’re good at it. I always seem to need to explain my motives to you.”
“That’s not the idea. My questions are supposed to help you explain your motives to yourself.”
“You’re a model counselor,” she admitted more seriously before rising to dash into the kitchen for the crème de menthe chocolate mousse that would crown their plain supper. Temple was adept with desserts if nothing else edible. “A lot of people wouldn’t understand why Buchanan infuriates me,” she said when she came back and sat down after placing the dessert dishes.
Matt nodded. “It’s the injustice of it all, of Buchanan’s golden survival while he breaks every rule. In a way, you envy him.”
“I do not!” Temple meditated over her parti-colored mousse, dipping tiny spoonfuls from the deep narrow dessert glass and then letting them melt on her tongue. “Maybe I do envy his chutzpah.”
“We all envy the insensitive people of the world. They suffer less.”
“True.” Temple had noticed Matt’s wry tone on the last comment. “You must talk to a lot of suffering people.”
“You mean in my job?”
“You’re saying the sufferers are all around us. They are us.” He ate his mousse as methodically as she, in silence. “The ones who call you, though,” she said finally, “must be doubly desperate.”
“They don’t call me. They call the hot line. They call a distant, nonjudgmental voice. Someone who can’t see them, find them, accuse them. A disembodied conscience or savior.”
“Doesn’t it ever get to you? Dealing with all that misery?”
He shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Sometimes you help.”
“You can never know how much, though. Some callers you’ve given up on may have saved themselves. Some you’re sure will make it, won’t.”
The wine bottle tilted in Matt’s hand as it bowed deeply to Temple’s glass. That’s when she realized that they had drunk a lot, that her cheeks were flushed even as she felt suddenly sober, unbuoyed by bubbles, thinking about life and death. He was slow to answer.
“No, you can never really know what happens to the voices on the line when they hang up. Some you hear from again after a long silence. Some just vanish.”
Temple swallowed hard. “Not knowing must be the worst thing on earth,” she said fiercely.
Matt’s warm brown eyes met hers, broke the polite barrier they always erected, penetrated hers like burning swords. “No. The worst thing is knowing.”
5
Sick to Death