What about Gangster's revue, she wondered? And the A La Cat commercial built around it?
She should call the director and see if tomorrow's location shoots were still on.
Temple scurried for the phone, the folded paper still in her hand. But when she began dialing, she found she was punching in Matt's number. Four-fifteen. He should be home. He should have about forty-five minutes before he left for work.
"Matt," she began as soon as the receiver was lifted. "There's been terrible news. Could you come down and help me interpret it? I'm pretty amazed, and dazed."
"News?" he asked. "From your family?"
"No, no, nothing personal. Not really. More professional. I just don't know what to make of it."
"I'll be right down," he promised, obviously having given up on getting any details over the phone.
Temple wandered to her door, reading the short article for a third time. She still shook her head in disbelief. She had seen the man only a bit more than twenty-four hours ago. It was hard to picture him dead. And if the suicide theory fell through, would anyone from the brunch remember that she had been closeted in his bedroom with him? Temple winced. What a compromising position. She wondered if she should have called a lawyer rather than an ex-priest.
Matt's knuckles rapped once and she had the door open.
"Thank you for not ringing the bell! I think it would have sent me up the wall. Here's the paper. That's the article. Come sit down, then tell me what you think."
He read as he walked, his white-blond brows knit into a small frown. Absently he bumped into the coffee-table leg, then just as absently compensated his direction to stumble around it to the sofa, where he sat.
This time Midnight Louie, also frowning, skittered away before anyone else treated him like a seat cushion.
Matt sat without incident, still reading, or rereading, the article. He looked up to find Temple sitting on the edge of the next cushion.
"This is the performer at Gangster's," he said.
She nodded gravely. "Imagine. I actually sort of knew the man. I almost feel guilty for turning down his proposition."
Matt looked shocked, perhaps as much by the circumstances as the fact of Temple's association with Darren Cooke.
"Look. He'd asked for my help."
"You never said what kind of help."
"Mystery-solving of a sort. Anyway, he took me into the bedroom."
"You went? And you never mentioned the bedroom before."
"He said he had something to show me."
"Etchings? Temple, I may have been out of the swing of things for years, but even I've heard of that old ploy."
"Oh, the proposition was probably just an afterthought. A tension-reliever after the main course proved unpalatable. Because he did have so mething pretty serious to show me. I guess I can tell you now."
"What?"
"I don't know whether to call them blackmail letters, or threatening letters. They were from a young woman who claimed to be his daughter. As far as he knew, he'd never fathered a child, but given his impressive list of women seduced, it's possible one gave secret birth to a child."
"What did this ... child want?"
"Hard to say if it was recognition, or money eventually. She seemed disturbed. It's even possible she's an adoptee who fantasized that Darren Cooke was her father."
"So how could you help him?"
"I couldn't. Or I did, by telling the truth. I told him this was a job for the police, or for a discreet private detective. He didn't want to hear that. When I tried to leave, he suggested I stay for horizontal consultation."
She glanced apologetically at Matt. "I'm sorry I didn't take your own recent encounter with seduction more seriously. Women get to expect it, but in this case I found it insulting. I mean, I shouldn't have; there I was, this nobody turning down this famous performer. Except I felt used; that pretext about me helping him, it was all so manipulative. I think he would have gladly taken any solid suggestions I had. But the bottom line was still... my bottom line."
Matt smiled. "You warned me that I was unlikely to correctly interpret Janice's motives. Now I'll tell you the same thing. Sounds like Darren Cooke was under a lot of pressure. I'd bet he wasn't as debonair a proposer as usual."
"Maybe." Temple sighed and clasped her upper arms. "But now I've got to wonder if I--my rather uppity turndown--contributed to his death."
Matt had bent his head to read the article again, searching for revelations among the tersely worded statements. That wasn't going to happen, but she smiled at his earnest profile, the boyish way his blond hair brushed his forehead. He looked like a dedicated student puzzling out a particularly difficult problem.
Sensing her observation, the schoolboy looked up to reveal the dark pessimistic expression of a thousand-year-old man.
"Temple, if you were right, and my mysterious caller were Darren Cooke, I may have been the last person to speak to him alive. I may have heard him inviting the woman who drove him to suicide, or was his killer, into the room."
"You!"
"My caller got through to me around midnight. He was railing as usual, gibing me, in a really foul mood. I sensed that I shouldn't let him off the line, despite the abuse, and then he had a visitor. I heard him walk to the door. He sounded... pleased. Invited her in and hung up. Now I've got to wonder if something I did pushed him into an uncustomary vulnerability."
"Matt! You're saying we both might have had a hand in Darren's death! I asked you down to ease me off this guilt trip, and you heap a bigger one on yourself!"
His twisted smile was still engaging. "Yeah. I'm a real success as a counselor. Should we tell Molina or somebody?"
"No! God, no. It's speculation on both our parts. Someone else may have been calling you.
Maybe it was Darren's lost daughter's call that drove him to self-destruction. Those letters of hers did not sound well balanced. We'd be nuts to insert ourselves into this case on hasty conclusions."
"Maybe the police could allay our suspicions."
"Right, and charge us as accessories before the fact, or something. I do not trust the police to put our guilt trips into perspective. They don't have the time to take weird little exercises in blame into account."
"But we'll probably never know if our suppositions are right if we don't present them to the police and get their reactions."
"As for me, I don't want police reactions in a sticky celebrity death, do you? It wouldn't help your counseling career."
"Maybe not, but that job is worth nothing to me if I blew it and drove a man to suicide."
"Matt, I'm sure you didn't. You're much too conscientious for your own good. You said your caller sounded happy about his visitor. That doesn't sound like an imminent suicide victim."
"Nooo--"
"And maybe you could say something cheering to me now, like I should take it as a compliment that Darren Cooke asked me to do the bedroom tango. Like ... he reall y had been turned down before, and so just laughed at my indignant act. Besides, he didn't die until twelve hours after I kissed him off. It's obnoxiously self-important to think that what I did and said at noon would kill a man at midnight."
Matt was smiling again. "I don't know why you called on me. You can talk yourself into something better than anybody else. And, in the meantime, you've also managed to convince me that the coincidence would have been too much. I couldn't have been talking to Cooke.
There must be thousands of sex addicts in this town."
"Right," Temple said with a brisk nod. "And thousands of eager flamingos in the flock for Darren Cooke. No sense brooding over the one that got away."
"I'm glad you got away."
"Ditto."
They smiled at each other.
"I suppose you have to rush off to work now."