"Little Miss Curlytop!"
Danny Dove greeted Temple with such a radiant smile that she couldn't have her usual hissy fit when compared to the adorable Shirley, which happened all too often due to her petite size, wavy red hair and first name.
"I knew we'd have you back up on your toes in no time flat,'' he went on. ''Speaking of flats, how do you like your 'Las Vegas Deluxe' set?"
"Looks great. Very Busby Berkeley."
Danny frowned so severely that even his perfectly marcelled blond hair seemed to pucker under its trendy retro-pomade. "Busby Berkeley is too awfully camp these serious, pre-millennium days, darling. Shall we say very mock-Memphis, like the Luxor?"
"Whatever, it's splendid, Danny." Temple eyed the exaggerated Las Vegas skyline etched in colored chalk on stretched black velvet panels that fenced the back of the stage. "How are your special effects coming?"
Danny rolled his eyes with delight. "Orgasmic!"
Temple had not meant to inquire into Danny Dove's private life, but before she could utter words to this effect, he went on in living color and full plume.
"Only--please, dear Miss Temple!--enough of these naughty no-no's like your backward tumble down the stairs. We're using the stage elevator from the magic shows for the end of your skit. Then we drench the whole chitty-chitty-shebang with an absolute oh-my-miasma of dry-ice mist, tinted passion-fruit crimson. The piece de resistance prop will drop from above; the most tacky deus ex machine of all time. Voila."
He pointed high into the murky stage flies to a huge, hovering silver disc.
"Thanks to my percolating purple-crimson mist," Danny promised, "our UFO will appear to rise from the nether regions, with forty glamorous chorines dancing the Watusi around its spiral ramp--a bit of the old Busby, there. Then we yank the bloody thing upward in a finishing flourish ... all lights blinking and smoking like mad, with the girly chorus singing their little glotti out. Smashing."
Temple craned her neck upward and nodded politely, trying to picture the effect. Mentally she added glittering fairy lights and neon constellations to the black-velvet-painting night-sky backdrop. Danny was right. Smashing.
"Looks cheap to me." a sneering voice said.
How did Crawford Buchanan get up here? Temple wondered with irritation. Where were her upstanding body guards when she really needed them?
''This is stupid." Crawford obviously enjoyed standing behind the pair and carping. ''You're making a big mistake, Dove, putting big bucks into this dumb number. Who wants to see the Goodyear Blimp on stage besides opera-goers?"
For emphasis, and to demonstrate his disdain, Buchanan jerked a cable that trailed to the stage floor, part of the intricate network that hoisted the big silver blob.
Danny Dove turned on Crawford Buchanan as if he had been talking pig swill. ''I am the director. You are the bureaucrat who stapled a few skits together. I make this garbage work, and most of it is, especially your scripts."
''What would an effete toad-dancer like you know about entertainment?"
Temple, PR instincts to the fore, edged between the two men, truly a showdown of pygmies.
She was too much of a pipsqueak herself to act as an effective buffer, especially balanced like a stork on one leg. But matters were desperate. Veins were standing out on Danny Dove's forehead, and Crawford's dark-lashed eyes were venomous slits. Another kind of Dove was called for, the peace-keeping female of the species.
"Guys, please!"
Crawford brushed her aside, literally, the better to face off with Danny Dove.
Ordinarily a soft shove wouldn't have damaged more than Temple's dignity. With the weakness of her ankle, though, it pushed her into a flat-footed stumble. Temple grabbed for the nearest stable object (other than the testosterone-tempered Dove and Buchanan).
Her hand curled around the hanging rope. Temple heard the pound of running feet: a herd presumed. The Flying Fontana Brothers should have kept Awful Crawford offstage in the first place.
The rope jerked her upright again. Then, just as she grabbed for a shred of balance, the entire length of cable dropped past her in punishing coil after coil, like a whipsnake.
''Watch out!" a man shouted.
Temple looked up to see a sky of silver collapsing down upon her, upon them all.
A flying tackle of Fontana brothers--pale as Cool Whip-- rushed forward in a wedge formation. Temple, Danny, Crawford ... all were swept away, wood chips in a water drain.
Temple had enough wits about her to see that the two arguing ,men had toppled like bowling pins under the force of Fontanas leveled at them.
She herself--oh, my--was levitated in the manner of a musical comedy vamp, so she perched on the impeccably padded (and probably impeccably pecced) shoulders of Fontanas twain. She couldn't lean over far enough to read their name tags and find out who her rescuers were, specifically. Too bad.!
In the wings, frantic tech crew members male and female were swinging from various ropes.
Under their combined weight and quick thinking, the footloose UFO had halted in mid-air just three feet above the stage.
When four Fontana boys applied themselves to the ropes like dapper but demented bell-ringers, the mechanism lifted slowly into the darkness of the flies where it belonged.
''Oh, my God.'' Danny Dove had forgotten spats with obnoxious show chairman. "Dear girl!"
He leaped up to look up at Temple with devastated eyes. "You could have been killed.
"We could have been killed." Crawford Buchanan was rising from the floor with far less grace and speed than Danny Dove. His prized ice-cream suit looked as if it had been double-dipped in soot. He glared accusingly at Temple.
"Don't look at me," she said, pleased to be in a position to stare down at Crawford as if he were a bug. "I didn't write this unauthorized landing into the script."
"We were all in jeopardy, but our dear Miss Barr was in the direct . . . line of fire, so to speak." Danny extended a hand, which Temple took.
She found herself wafted to the floor like a thistledown ballerina. Danny's looks were deceiving; the dancer/choreographer was as strong as piano wire.
"That UFO weighs a ton," he fretted. "I don't understand--"
A Fontana brother--Ralph--came swinging down from the flies like Flynn to the rescue, only on a rope and a hope instead of a wing and a prayer.
''Cut," he pronounced, displaying the end of the fallen cable.
"Sabotage," Danny instantly diagnosed. His eyes narrowed at the descending Adonis in Armani. "I love your earring."
"It's nothing," Ralph said modestly, missing the point and Danny's proclivities, if he had not missed the Significance of the sliced rope.
Temple again felt an overwhelming urge to intervene. Interpret. Peacemake. Oh, blessed are the seriously straight, for they shall be politically incorrect until death do them part.
Until . . . death.
She looked up at the UFO rising jerky foot by foot to the rhythm of the stage ratchets, rather like bad poetry.
"Danny, do you think--?"
"I definitely do, darling." His demeanor was utterly serious now. "First the stairs. Now the . .
. alien object. I'm dreadfully sorry, dear lady, but I fear that you are the subject of a nasty objective. I always thought that this show would be murder."
Chapter 22
Skits Ahoy!
"I don't get it," Temple said. ''Why are you making a federal case out of this? It was just a stupid stage accident."
She looked from Lieutenant Ferraro to Lieutenant Molina, fervently hoping that this was a nightmare induced by a conk on the head' with a fake UFO: not one but two homicide officials interrogating little old her. Again. Molina smiled, and when Molina smiled at something Temple had said, that usually meant trouble.