"Crawford, you dragged me into it against my better judgment in the first place."
"Yeah, but then I thought I could dump your skit and that would be that. I had no idea Dove would jump on it like a frog on a lilypad."
"You . . . planned to dump my skit? Why?"
"Because this is my show. I was gonna write all of it."
"Then why ask me, beg me, to go over to the Las Vegas Scoop on a Saturday and write my fingernails to the bone all day?"
The phone line was suddenly, tellingly silent.
"Maybe I just wanted to see you," Crawford said in a sullen tone at last.
"See me what?"
"Sweat," he admitted. "There you were, hogging the Gridiron's big opening and closing numbers year after year. This time you were gonna show up for the big night and find it was a big bust. Only that damn wrist-waving Danny Dove wouldn't go along--"
''What a dirty trick, but then, why am I surprised? I guess I doubted even you were that rancorous."
''Listen." Crawford's voice had gone deeper and softer, so it hummed like bass static over the wires. "Maybe I was planning on playing the jerk, but it's not so funny now. Some big muscle around town isn't happy about what's in your skit. They've been sending plenty of messages--to me, like I'm responsible or something. I've got some of those messages on my answering machine. Anonymous. They want your skit out of the show. Maybe they want you out of the picture. I'm telling you to stay away from the Crystal Phoenix and the Gridiron. If you don't, and it's curtains, don't say I didn't warn you, which is more than you did for me when the E.T. special was crashing down on my head."
"Crawford, are you saying someone's trying to close down the show because of my skit?
Why? What's in it?"
"Obviously it isn't very funny, which was what I told Dove, and now the powers that be have noticed that. So, stay away. That's what I'm going to do, until the coast, and the cast, are ' clear."
He hung up without saying goodbye.
Like maybe there was no point, like maybe she was dead already.
Temple stared at her computer screen with its paltry sprinkle of words: 'The good times never stop at Three O'Clock Louie's."
Underneath Crawford's usual bluster Temple had sensed genuine fear. In his own craven way, he was warning her to do as he was doing and desert the Gridiron.
So. It was his project. So what if Danny Dove was left in the lurch? He'd get something mounted. And the Flying Fontana Brothers Security Syndicate was crawling and clambering all over the place. Johnny Diamond was set to sing Temple's medley of satirical show tunes, surely he'd be all right. Nobody would dare to mess with a big name like that. But what on earth could be so threatening about her skit?
And if the accidents were intended to discourage the production, whoever was arranging them didn't know the old maxim that ''the show must go on." Troopers like Danny and Johnny and the eager semi-amateur cast weren't about to bow out because of some dubious accidents.
Unless those "accidents" included the murder of the man in the ceiling, Matt's missing stepfather, Cliff Effinger.
Temple saved the gibberish on her screen and gave it a name: 3Louie. No wonder she had mistaken the black cat at Temple , Bar for Midnight Louie; she'd seen so darn little of him lately that she'd forgotten exactly what he looked like. In fact, the last place she had seen her Louie was at the Phoenix. . . .
Temple retreated to the DOS prompt, then turned computer and screen off. The last, small luminescent letters vanished.
The same could not be said of the string of bright, pulsating question marks on the screen of Temple's mind.
******************
Eightball O'Rourke's neighborhood was as shabby as ever.
Temple glanced back at her aqua Storm poised at the curb like a brilliant blue butterfly that had just landed. She hated to leave it unattended, that shiny bluebird of happiness in this neighborhood of rusted-out heaps of trouble.
She paused at the front door, then pushed the scabrous bell. Its surface was rough with coats of over painted green enamel.
While she waited she studied the peeling paint patterns of the front forest-green screen door. Then she rang again.
Should have phoned first, she told herself, but she hadn't even known where she was going when she left the Circle Ritz.
A third ring was equally unable to stir the low stucco house with its gravel roof. The swamp cooler at its core grunted mechanically from the so-called peak of the shallow roof.
The door was shaded by scrawny eaves-high bushes too insect-eaten to declare a type.
Temple waited, shifting from one tennis shoe to the other, watching little red ants dance a conga line up the cracked sidewalk to her feet.
The big wooden front door creaked, then gaped open.
Eightball stood there in his undershirt, blinking.
''Should have phoned first," he said. ''I been working late, sleeping days. I'll get me a shirt."
He vanished, leaving Temple to pull open the rickety screen door and edge inside.
The house broadcast the same musty smell of her last visit, the deep-down halitosis of an old house. Eightball appeared, buttoning a short-sleeved polyester shirt of indeterminate color.
Temple followed him down dim halls, through shadowy rooms into the same sparse office with the billiard-table-size desk and narrow band of windows under the ceiling.
He flicked on an overhead light and sat at the desk. "So what's up?"
Temple sat on the lumpy green leather chair, escapee from some fifties-vintage office--or dump--and tried to come up with a reasonable explanation of why she was there. "I visited Three O'Clock Louie's the other day." Eightball nodded, fussing to fasten the second-to-the-top button on his shirt. It was pale green.
Undershirt, Temple thought. Who wore undershirts anymore, especially in a hot spot like Las Vegas? And this wasn't even your Sears Catalog model with the short sleeves and v-neck, but a tank-type sleeveless undershirt that smacked of pre-Clark Cable and It Happened Last Night innocence. That was Eightball and the Glory Hole Gang, all right--1930's kind of guys in a nineties world hung up on Calvin Klein's Obsession instead of old standbys like undershirts and B.O.
Maybe, she thought, Crawford Buchanan wore pale yellow undershirts to match his cowardly streak.
"What did you think of it?" Eightball asked. He lit a cigar that looked like a Doberman turd with gangrene.
Temple restrained herself from fanning away the smoke; the smell was more lethal anyway.
"Think of what? Oh, the restaurant! Interesting. Not a bad name. Needs a lot of work."
Eightball nodded at each of her inane comments.
Temple edged forward on the chair. ''It has a lot of possibilities. Especially . . . well, if I--you guys--drew on your Glory ' Hole background."
He squinted as he exhaled a storm-blue thunderhead of smoke. ''You mean ... tie it in with the ghost town concession?"
"Thematically, yes. Let's face it. You fellows are enough local color for a megacity like Los Angeles, much less Las Vegas. Just the name of the place: 'Three O'Clock Louie's.' It reeks of speakeasies and jazz, bathtub vodka and guys with shoulder holsters and cigarette holders, dolls with garters and I gats."
"Bathtub gin."
"Did I say something else? Sorry, I'm . . . distracted."
"We were all just kids during Prohibition," Eightball said doubtfully.
"Sure, but you were there. And wasn't Jersey Joe Jackson there too?"
"That skunk." Eightball was so agitated that he stubbed out his cigar in the tray-size olive-green glass ashtray on his desk:
Temple thanked whatever gods may be.
"Skunks can be ver-ry colorful," she pointed out with singsong significance.
''If you like black-and-white, as in prison stripes."
Temple beamed. "See what I mean? Convicts in stripes. You fellows are soooo colorful.
About Jersey Joe Jackson--"