"You? Cute little cheerleader-type you?" Jake's naturally pallid face had turned a lighter shade of gray. "Involved in murders?"
"Only indirectly."
"I should hope so!"
"So tell me something that will help me understand what Cheyenne tried to tell me and couldn't.
Because I wasn't listening to him that night. You shared this cramped space for what, twenty-four hours? You must have heard, seen something significant."
Jake shrugged and made a face. "Just the usual. He came in, fighting jet-lag with that kind of show-biz energy you can call on to keep going no matter what."
"Not drugs?" Temple thought of another motivation: a new, exciting jet-set lifestyle running on speed and sex appeal. . . maybe even smuggling.
Jake's headshake was final. "Naw. I can tell the difference between a two-hundred-dollar high, a Java jag and Mother Nature's freebies. I've done it, run on the dead certainty of performing. That's what he was high on: doing this pageant and coming out good." Jake's serious voice sank into a Brando drone.
"He coulda been a contendah--"
Interviewing a professional comic was like opening a bag filled with cartoon characters all screaming to get out at once. Temple nodded, encouraging Jake to say more.
"Man, he had energy, though. Made me feel my age, and I don't like to get that personal with myself.
You should have seen him, dashing out to handle last-minute details. He got that horse here without tipping anybody off but a pal or two. He wanted to surprise the other contestants, too. He wanted 'em all to know he had a leg up on them. Get it? 'Leg up'? Horse?"
"I get it. So he did have business to take care of once he got here. He could have left the hotel and seen--or been seen by--almost anybody."
Jake nodded solemnly. "He did act. . . abstracted, though, rehearsal morning. He dashed out with one of his duffle bags, and when he came back, he kinda threw it in a corner as if he didn't like what was in it. Like it wasn't really part of him. Now that you nag me to death about it, he acted a little schizy. Even asked me to run out and get him a Pepsi, when he'd been guzzling nothing but Evian water. He was--"
"Worried?"
"Maybe. Or maybe he wanted to get rid of me for a while. When I came back, he didn't say much.
Just grabbed his stage kit, stood up in that skimpy outfit, what would you call it--teeny weeny loincloth and itty bitty medicine bag and great big quiver on his back, which come to think of it, was a hell of a phallic symbol. Lord, that would make the ladies quiver! I guess, looking at him as Navaho Joe, I knew my chances had been shot in the heart." Jake's arms spread wide to display his unremarkable body in its unremarkable clothes. "What's to say?"
"You've got nerve," Temple admitted. "I bet the ladies will love you, especially the hunky-cover-model haters."
"The ladies, God bless 'em, love a lot of guys like me. These studly types with mammoth muscles are just window dressing. For looking at, not into."
"Perfect Kens," Temple mused. "As in Ken and Barbie." She recalled Matt's dislike of his own good looks for the superficial attention they brought him. "Still, beautiful people have real feelings. And fears.
Somebody must have feared Cheyenne--Charlie Moon--enough to kill him."
"You think that was the motive? Not jealousy?"
"What kind of jealousy, that's the question."
"And a good question. Was it a maddened contestant, afraid he'd lose the crown to a hot contender?" Jake donned a guilty, hang-dog look. "Or was it some red-hot lover afraid of losing Cheyenne, period?" Jake twirled an imaginary mustache.
"Did you glimpse any romantic hunky-panky around here?"
"In less than two days? Hardly likely." His face flickered with sudden remembrance. "Say, I did see Cheyenne holding cocktail glasses with an author in the hotel bar, pretty late the first night we got in."
"Who?"
He shrugged. "Haven't seen her again. Not one of the pageant participants, for sure. Classy lady. I was gonna say 'older,' but I bet she's only a few years older than me, so I better watch it. Still a looker. Your size. Red hair, too, but hers isn't as bright."
Temple's blood froze. She recognized a spot-on description of her aunt Kit when she heard it.
"What time Wednesday night?"
"Time I saw them? Oh, say around eleven. She was old enough to be his mother, but Cheyenne seemed like a cosmic kind of guy. I bet details like age, gender and national origin didn't faze him one bit."
Temple, though still in shock about Kit, was not surprised to have her bisexual suspicions confirmed by an impartial source.
"Don't look so shocked, sweet thing." Jake sounded like a counseling older brother, but he misread what had really shocked her. "Consenting adults try all sorts of combinations nowadays. But I doubt anything is going on at this convention. Too much performance pressure for the boys. Everybody's way too stressed out by the pageant to have time for romancel"
Jake, sprawled against the dressing table, then assumed a maniacally suave expression that ludicrously altered his homely face, and not for the better. "Unless you aren't doing anything tonight, ba-bee?"
"Sorry, Fabrizio Junior." Temple stood, patience and interview ended. "All booked up."
Chapter 25
True Confessions
C. R. Molina cruised the Crystal Phoenix hotel lobby, cursing casino floor plans that always forced people to pass gaming attractions on the way in or out.
She disliked the constant clatter of slot machines, especially when she was trying to think. Not that she had much to think about: only the inevitable end of the romance convention, and with it the exit of all likely suspects in the Charlie Moon murder.
She knew that the odds on solving the case by Monday were longer than the odds on a nickel slot machine payoff. So the chugchug-chug of doomed coins down mechanical gullets sounded like the Failure Machine engine revving up before running her over.
This annoying convention murder case particularly rankled, coming, as it did, on the heels of her unexpected and spectacularly unproductive encounter at the Blue Dahlia the very night before the morning of Charlie Moon's demise.
Recalling the frustrating skirmish with Max Kinsella brought to mind her always-annoying head-to-heads with a known associate of the elusive magician: Temple Barr. Molina could not believe she had encouraged the woman's nosiness on this case. But in some instances, any sort of information was worth the effort. Even as she mentally stalked the thin grungy line of her remaining options during a swift passage through the gaming area, Molina's professional eye was on automatic record. One anomaly pricked her consciousness: a pit boss engaged in deep discussion. Pit bosses watched, they did not talk. Especially not to rank casino amateurs like ...
Molina stopped in her tracks, letting tourists jostle her as they scurried for their slot machines of choice. The stance of the person with the pit boss was even more naggingly out of place than the becalmed supervisor.
She spun into a different direction and quietly circled the pair beside the inactive craps table, approaching so she faced the pit boss.
Spike Saltzer was a casino veteran, a seventyish man with supernaturally shiny, full black hair and a perpetual tan. The tan was his only Las Vegas vice; Spike didn't smoke, drink or do drugs. Sometimes she even wondered if he slept. He had been married since Bugsy Siegel had died, to the same woman, and attended the Golden Light Church. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he missed no abnormal action on a gaming floor, so he had spotted Molina almost as soon as she had him. He didn't show it, except to back off from his conversation partner.