"But I didn't," she confessed in a low voice. "I still don't, since even you couldn't be certain."
"But the fingerprints--!"
"Don't match," Molina admitted, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. The failure.
"Don't match?"
He stared into her face, a handsome man her own height, who couldn't, wouldn't dream of intimidating her except with the moral indignation he had rightfully leveled at her. Using him without telling him why was part of her job. Most parts of her job were not nice.
Matt Devine settled into his own uneasy speculations, his emotions finally as readable as face-up playing cards. He was starting to learn the game of self-defense. She frowned. Using someone as undefendedly honest as Devine was more than mean; it was rotten. She suspected that his family history was tortured, now she could see the proof of that.
"It's a good thing I didn't call my mother--" He thought aloud, making her kick herself again for good measure.
Yet the reflex of official suspicion would not be denied. If the Devine/Effinger family history was so tormented, Matt Devine could have killed the man who called himself Cliff Effinger, not knowing any better than she who he really was.
"Thanks for finally telling the truth," he said, looking up.
She wished she could be sure enough to say the same.
Chapter 26
Another Opening, Another Shoe
Shades of the late, great Gridiron Show! Temple was once again racing through the theatrical underbelly of the Crystal Phoenix, thinking about skits, costumes and crime. This time she was in cover-model costume, so she had long, heavy lavender brocade skirts to drag along. Good thing she had packed her Guthrie costume.
Off-the-shoulder necklines may be tailor-made to drive historical romance heroes crazy. They are also designed, she found, to drive anyone who wears them--except a broad-shouldered linebacker--
insane. She shrugged as she ran, wanting the material either on or off. It persisted in riding her shoulder rim like a gargoyle clinging to a cathedral ledge.
Her ice-cold fingers jerked up one brocade shoulder . . . what self-respecting romance heroine wouldn't have cold fingers when she was about to rehearse a pose-down with a cover hunk? Heavy on the hunk, no doubt, and light on the rehearsal. She'd heard the author escorts buzzing about a contestant who'd tried to goose any passing female last year.
Though Danny had promised to steer obstreperous sorts away from her, he wasn't God and couldn't control everything. And with Crawford Buchanan's stepdaughter Quincey, a not-so-sweet sixteen, among the cover models, Temple was bound to inherit some of the lusty overflow directed away from Quincey. Temple could hardly plead maidenly qualms at thirty.
She circled her neck to ease a cramp, rebelling against a fall of hot, heavy red hair, also part of the complete covergirl's costume. The hairpiece still felt prone to ebb down her back like an auburn sun sinking slowly in the West, so she jabbed oversize bobby pins into her coiffure as she went, hoping to hit hair, wig or something anchor able, even scalp would do in a pinch....
Of course she had to wear extremely flat-footed satin slippers, so naturally she slipped on the slick concrete and went skating ahead of herself until she caught a costume rack pole, tilting it to perform a fancy circle-stop against the wall.
Temple leaned against the concrete blocks and panted. Running in this heavy, theatrical getup did her composure no good. At least she hadn't damaged the "real" costumes. She eyed a frothy row of still-swaying sequins, pearls and feathers from the Phoenix's nightly revue. The pageant people, of which she was now one, were transients, mere borrowers of this space and these facilities. Interfering with the true show people would be a professional discourtesy.
Righting herself and the rack, her glance was caught by something underneath it that twinkled. She couldn't have stumbled upon another entrance to the underground tunnels, because those were all sealed. What she saw was a shoe, no doubt.
A shoe in fact. It lay toppled. Only the sole was visible, as smooth and untouched as fresh-laid linoleum. But a tiny rim of glitter visible around the toe beckoned like a tinfoil smile, and Temple found herself smiling back. Some people smiled at babies. She smiled at shoes. So sue her!
Oh, what the heck! She could at least see what it looked liked. That was her eternal quest, after all.
She sank into airy layers of her costume's velvet and brocade skirts, then crouched by the rack and bent forward despite the strict disinclination of her corset. She finally managed, with a few grunts, to touch her fingertips to the shoe.
The difficulty made her all the more set on seeing the hidden shoe. That rim of glitz looked mighty like solid silver-white rhinestones. Wouldn't it be wild if this was it? The shoe! Maybe a show-girl (shoegirl?) wore it onstage nightly.
By inching the sole closer with her fingernails, Temple was finally able to pinch her fingers on the toe and work the shoe close enough to pick up.
Except it was... a boot. And what a boot! She stared, stunned, like a Cinderella with an absolute klutz for a fairy godmother.
Oh, it was a fancy boot: inlaid flame-patterns of silver leather, with rhinestones scattered hither and thither like glitzy exclamation points. Though flashy enough to be a women's boot--it was like a size . . .
Bigfoot. And all the rhinestones did glitter, but most were big and clunky. In a word, crude. Sorry, fairy godmother, you aren't klutzy, but your taste in boots sure as shootin' is! Of course showgirls, being almost six feet tall, usually wear fairly large-size shoes. Maybe this was an escapee from a Western routine. Rhinestone Clementine. The old California folk song ran through Temple's mind, with new words. In a basement, in a ho-tel, excavaaaating for a crime, toiled a miner, old-bootfinder and her name was Ne'er-on-time. Light she was and like a fairy, but her boots were number nine. Big old bootsies, for giant tootsies, not the shoes she'd hoped to find.
Temple stood up, painfully, the big, bad boot in hand, and puzzled. Here she was, hunting the prize designer pumps and here she had found--instead--a crude rhinestone boot that Trigger wouldn't wear on a bad mane day. Surely this ghastly thing had a mate! She couldn't bear to bend over again, so she tried to sweep the long costumes up from the floor with her slipper-clad foot. All right, she kicked the hems into a froth. No other boot lay revealed under the rack. Yippee cayaaaa! This was a lonesome boot.
So a boot had been forgotten under the costume rack. Discarded, or deliberately ditched? Why?
Temple was expected on-stage right now for some serious hunk-hugging. What to do? She tapped the boot's virgin sole against one palm, undecided. Why was it unworn and abandoned? She would have to contemplate that mystery later.
She bolted back down the empty hallway, back to the two-mirror cubicle she shared with the sullen Quincey. There she dumped the boot in her canvas totebag. She would worry about it later. Right now, she had more pressing matters, like two hundred and twenty pounds of bare, muscled serial hunk to contend with.
Fabrizio stood, wide-stanced, hands on hips (what big hands, what lean hips!), hair tossed back over his shoulders (what luxuriant hair, what broad shoulders!) facing the stage.
That was where his audience was, at the moment. The house seats were empty, but the stage teemed with testosterone and its most spectacular by-products. Thirty-three handsome heroes, restless as a wayward wind, wandered the risers, which squeaked for mercy under their conjoined weight.
Fontana brothers roved in a restless pack, all clad in tight black-denim jeans.
Danny Dove sat cross-legged on the stage floor like a power-mad elf, facing the models--frowning, pointing and projecting his voice to the wings.
"You. Three feet to the left. Not you with the three left feet! Come to think of it, don't move a muscle. We haven't got accident insurance. Just kidding, gang. And you in the tape-measure suspenders.