Her hostess was wearing orchid silk slacks with a pale blue stretch-satin sleeveless top reminiscent of the fifties, even though it was hot stuff in the designer nineties.
Temple was fascinated by the hostess's angularity. When she sat she folded herself like a flamingo; she seemed all acute angles, knees and elbows. Yet she moved with an almost supernaturally fluid grace.
Michelle Bonard.
"Your name is so familiar," Temple said, shaking out the heavy white linen napkin. "I'm embarrassed to say I don't know why."
Michelle laughed lightly. "It's because my face and body are more important than my name."
"You're a model! You do the series of ads for . .. for--"
" 'Secret, the scent that lulls your senses. You can't keep a man if you don't have a Secret.' "
Now the breathy, slightly accented voice raised an image of magazine ads and television commercials.
"And you were married to Darren Cooke; you were the woman who made a mate out of the world's most. .. famous bachelor."
"You were going to say notorious."
"No, I was thinking notorious."
Michelle's weary smile grew a little warmer. Despite her outward calm, she was taking Darren's death poorly. Her skin, pale and perfect, looked almost transparent. Like many very thin women, her face quickly reflected her emotional state. The prominent cheekbones stood out starkly and the hollows beneath them were unhealthy-looking. The thin skin beneath her famous pale blue eyes looked sooty with fatigue.
"It's pasta and vegetables, is that all right?"
Temple started at the question. She had been thinking pasty complexion and rutabaga eye-circles.
"Sure," she answered, taking a serving of the dish Michelle uncovered.
Michelle transferred a half cup of spiral noodles and perhaps three small clumps of broccoli and two of cauliflower to her own plate. Temple wondered if this were the successful model's diet, or the model-in-mourning diet.
"You've done PR in Las Vegas for some time, Miss Barr?"
Temple nodded while the forkful of deliciously seasoned pasta clogged her mouth.
"Almost two years, which is a long time to stay in Las Vegas."
"Darren and I were married three years ago, in December, in Paris."
Temple nodded politely. The waiter had poured them each a glass of wine so red it was almost bloody. Michelle sipped hers.
"No one dreamed he would ever marry, least of all him. No one believed that it would last, though it did, to his death. We spent time apart, given our various commitments on two continents, but... the marriage seemed good. He adored his little Cookie-snookie." Michelle's hands covered her face.
Temple went silent, afraid Michelle was crying.
But she was smiling, and the smile lingered when she lifted her head again. "I'm glad he had that opportunity, to know the joy of a child, and that Padgett had an opportunity to know her father. She'll remember him. She's young, but she'll remember him, even if only vaguely."
Temple did not openly disagree, though she wasn't so sure. What did she remember back to the age of two or three? Darn little. She still didn't know why she was here, but figured that Michelle would let her eat most of the meal before she brought up rhymes and reasons, and maybe recriminations. She was a classy lady, and Darren Cooke hadn't deserved her. Maybe that's why he'd killed himself: his insatiable urge to cheat on even the world's nicest, most photogenic bride.
Temple gummed down the main dish as best she could, and picked at the salad. Eating hearty in front of a skeletal widow seemed as bad as giggling at a funeral. Besides, anxiety was turning her stomach into an acid chamber.
"All done?" Michelle observed sadly. Perhaps she felt their somber moods had slighted the food.
Temple nodded and sipped the velvet-soft warm wine. Perfect. "Why did you call me here?"
she finally asked.
"You knew my husband."
"Very slightly. 'Knew' is too strong a word. Talked to him briefly on a couple occasions."
"And one of them was the day of his death." The faintly blue eyes rested unblinkingly on Temple's face.
"Yes. But how do you know about me?"
Michelle Bonard bit her bloodless lip, then reached into a side pocket of her lilac pants, which were so tight that Temple was amazed she would store anything there, or attempt to extract it. Ruins the designer lines, you know, like (shudder) cellulite.
What she withdrew was a business card. Temple's card.
Temple studied it, perplexed. "How did you get that?"
"I did not. Darren had it. And, see, he marked the date down himself."
Temple saw the scrawled numbers: eleven seventeen ninety-six. "I don't understand, I gave him this card on ... Saturday at Gangster's. So why did he write Sunday's date down?"
"Because Darren had a ... what you call a system. He always took a trophy from his conquests, then marked it with the date of their ... encounter. He couldn't stop using the system any more than he could help having these encounters. I knew where he concealed his
'evidence.' Not even the police have seen this."
"Wait a minute! I did give him my card, I did attend his Sunday brunch on his invitation, but I never was one of his 'conquests.' "
"You needn't spare my feelings, Miss Barr. I knew all about his past, and his present obsession. I simply want to know his mood on that last day, that last night. Find some reason why he would do it, throw his life away after all these years of struggling with his obsession. As long as the sex was safe, and he assured me it was, I understood that he couldn't stop, and I couldn't let jealousy destroy Cookie's life, and ours."
"I'm not 'sparing' you. I was not Darren Cooke's last lay, that's all. I spoke to him at the brunch, and I do have a clue to why he might have despaired that night. But it doesn't have anything to do with sex, believe me."
Michelle frowned. "He only marked the belongings of women with whom he had sex."
"Well, maybe it was wishful thinking in my case, because it sure didn't happen. Listen, I am currently caught between two men. I do not need any other liaisons cluttering up my already-subdivided heart, mind and body."
She leaned back in her chair, as if to reassess Temple, then sipped her silken wine. "For some reason, I believe you. He never much cared for petite women, or redheads. Then why were you at his brunch?"
"He'd heard Savannah Ashleigh"--Michelle rolled her eyes; that one she would never believe innocent of anything--"call me Nancy Drew."
"Nancy Drew?"
"All-American girl detective from the century's earlier decades. I've . . . stumbled into cases of wrongdoing and have a bit of a reputation as a crime-meddler, if not a crime-solver, around town."
"Crime?" Michelle's back straightened into a ramrod.
"Your husband thought I could help him; I said I'd try, but I warned him I was an amateur. He took me into the bedroom"--Michelle's back stiffened even further--"to show me some letters he kept in a manila envelope."
"Blackmail."
"In a sense. Maybe just vitriol. The writer claimed to be an adult daughter of one of his earliest liaisons. She was bitter, of course, and taunting. Sounded quite obsessed, and was certainly hounding him from city to city. I told him he needed the police to handle this, or a very expensive and discreet detective agency. He was... quite broken up about it, that he hadn't known about her and that now she hated him. I told him she could be a twisted fan who only imagined she's his daughter, but I agreed she might be dangerous, and must be found and charged with harassment."
Michelle had clapped her corded hand over her mouth early in Temple's recital, her eyes darkening with deep emotions, disbelief, regret, fear and sorrow.
"I don't know why he marked me a conquest," Temple said softly. "Oh, as I left, he made some sort of veiled suggestion, which I rather huffily rebuffed. But it was half-hearted, and nothing more than that ever happened between us. I maybe spent forty minutes with him, between some chitchat at Gangster's and the tete-a-tete at the Goliath."