"Enlighten me."
He grinned and leaned closer, revealing rather gray and crooked teeth. "I know a terrific photographer. Besides, I do some stand-up comedy, and figured this gig would give me an unlikely new shtick. Here's my photo." He slipped an eight-by-ten from the blue folder and spun it toward Temple.
"You do have a helluva photographer." Lots of shadow and tricky highlighting had given Jake an intense, aging Hamlet look. Too bad the man in person completely contradicted the image. He more resembled an aging ham-actor, period. From the stamp on the back, the photo wizard was a woman.
Temple would have to look her up if she ever needed a really flattering portrait. "Is that all it took to enter? A good photograph?"
He nodded. "And some bio sheets, with vital statistics." When Jake flexed his arm, as he did now, his plaid shirtsleeve remained loose and unimpressive. "Of course I lied a lot." He peeked, like Tiny Tim, from behind a strand of graying hair that had escaped the rubber band at his nape.
Temple started laughing. "You're a shill. A walking lampoon! What did the pageant organizers do when they actually saw you?"
"Screamed bloody murder until they realized that ejecting a pre-accepted candidate would be bad press. So they made the best of it. I'd showed up, hadn't I? Paid my money and they took a chance.
Besides, I'm warm and breathing, and they were really short of entrants in the over-forty category this year. I, as you can see, am tall, and about as over forty as you can get."
"Forty-nine?" Temple guessed.
"And three-quarters. That's what I put down as my chest measurement."
"Three-quarters?"
"Forty-nine and three-quarters."
"So you're more of an outside observer than the other contestants," Temple said thoughtfully, still smiling.
"Yeah. I mean, who'd watch me? So I watch them. And, boy, do they watch themselves a lot. A few of these guys are so hooked on mirrors that they can't even look at who they're talking to. Beauty is a consuming business, isn't it?"
"Don't ask me. So the contestants are pretty self-absorbed, but the people-watching must be enlightening."
"Fascinating," he responded Mr. Spock style, with cocked eyebrow and aloof tone. When he saw that Temple had recognized the delivery, he added a wry smile. "He wouldn't have stood a chance here either. Not with those Mickey-Mouse-on-Mars ears."
"What have you concluded so far?"
"Besides that I don't have a chance in Hairspray Hell of taking that super-Hunk title? Okay. Most of these guys are pros with attitude, ambitious models or actors hoping to catch one more eye, one more camera, one more big rolling wave of media attention. Some are fun-loving off-camera types, regular guys good-looking enough to enter on a dare from their girlfriends. These guys usually have expectations as ordinary as a day job. Only one other jokester like me slipped in for fun and self-humiliation." Jake spun his makeup tin.
"Why do it? Couldn't you have imagined a male beauty pageant to put in your comedy act?"
Jake shrugged. " A Current Affair, Hard Copy and Hot Heads don't show up, cameras running, for any exercises in imagination that I've dreamed up. Look at Pat Paulsen, the comic who regularly runs for president. He's not so nuts. He gets loads of coverage, and even a nanosecond on national TV can jump-start a career. Hey, regardez Kato Kaelin." Only he pronounced the name of the world's most hyphenated man, the live-in hanger-on in the O.J. Simpson case, "Ka-toe Kae-Iin," in a tres, tres phoney French accent.
"A world did, and you know what? He didn't have anything there to boost."
"Whatever. Maybe me and the other dud--as opposed to stud--just want to say . . . hey, regular guys can be romantic too."
"What about Cheyenne? Was he a prime contender? Was he going to win?"
Jake's shaggy head shook. "Who knows? He had all the right stuff--and seemed hip enough, but... he never gave me a clue about himself. He came storming in, one of the last contestants to arrive, fresh off some transatlantic flight, smelling of first class. I hated his washboard guts."
"What does first class smell like?"
"Leather and champagne and stewardess. He plunked down a couple of duffle bags--as you saw from his costume, there wasn't much of it; all he needed otherwise was a tux, jeans, spray mousse and his Evian water. What a guy!"
"Knowing a murder victim should enliven your act."
"Sure. I can say all the cover hunks were knocking each other dead."
"You really think the murder is going plural?"
Jake's genial, flaccid face--he had a good old gray gelding look--tightened with alarm. "Shit, I hope not! I didn't enlist for hazardous duty with no pay. Waggling your tush for a few hundred screaming women shouldn't be a terminal offense."
Temple sat at Cheyenne's vacant place, lost against the mirror's reflected burgundy curtains. Even traveling light, Cheyenne carried more hair accessories than Temple kept on her whole cosmetics shelf at home. She picked up a small sleek aluminum canister of mousse, as compactly packaged as Mace. It felt full. She set it down quickly, imagining how many times a living Cheyenne could have still used it.
"Nobody came for his things but the police," Jake noted. "The duffle bags with his clothes and stuff. I glimpsed an electric shaver, a fancy blow dryer, some foreign magazine, French or Italian. They left the glop."
He nodded at the slick array of bottles and canisters. "Maybe someone killed him for single-hairedly doing in the ozone layer."
Temple touched another of the aluminum soldiers on parade. "These are pump-sprays, not aerosol containers. All politically correct. He wasn't hurting anything."
"He must have been hurting somebody's chances, or why kill him?"
"It doesn't have to be a pageant rival. Take your pick of possible killers: a jealous lover; an ex-lover of a new lover; a would-be lover spurned. Maybe even a terminally irritated author who hates cover hunks getting all the attention and the money."
"The authors hate these guys?"
"Maybe I exaggerate, but many of these women have labored for peanuts book after book. To see some pretty boy walk off with big bucks for standing around buck naked for an hour might be a trifle aggravating. It's a theory."
"Holy hair-mousse!" Jake flattened his hands on his dressing table top, as if about to spring himself into orbit. "It's bad enough to sashay out in your skivvies in front of hundreds of screaming women, but to think that some of them might be screaming for your blood--! That's gruesome."
"Cheyenne was killed at the first rehearsal, not at the pageant, but all sorts of suspects were around that morning: fellow contestants--"
"I didn't do it," he screamed melodramatically, going down on his knees. "You know I'd never win no matter who I eliminated. I could off the entire lot and still lose. I'm innocent, I tell you, innocent."
Temple refused to be distracted by theatrics. Comics were always on, always improvising. It didn't make them the world's most astute witnesses. She wondered what Molina had made of this guy, while continuing to tick off suspects on her autopsy-red fingernails.
"And stage crew. Then don't forget the fans... you know, those pudgy, eminently overlookable sweet midlife ladies who volunteer to help you hunks shake your tushies into those skin-tight pants. Demented fans are not unknown in the entertainment biz. Several lady authors were milling around too, trying to figure out who they'd escort on the big night."
"None were milling around me," Jake reported glumly, pushing himself back into the folding chair.
"Listen." Temple leaned forward on her chair--Cheyenne's chair--and nailed him with a dead-serious look. "I know life is a cabaret, my friend, but even a professional jokester must occasionally notice more than how his jokes are going over. Cheyenne was worried enough about something to want a tete-a-tete with me the night before he died. Why? Because I'm a PR person? Because I work the hotels and conventions, know the scene? Or because I've been involved in solving a few murders."