“You do read Christie,” Molina pounced again.
He shrugged. “Had to do something on all those sit-down security jobs after I left the L.A. Police Department.”
She was smiling like the cat who’d nailed the Camembert.
“Okay,” said Temple. “Agatha Christie is not going to solve this thing for us, no matter who reads her, including me. It’s interesting that Salter is such a persnickety chef he didn’t eat from the buffet the hotel provided the cast. He would be easy to poison without hurting anyone else.”
“A suspect with a conscience?” Molina asked. “No collateral damage.”
“Or,” Rafi said, “a suspect who wanted to make dead sure he or she got the intended victim. Any diagnosis yet on the cause of Salter’s tummy upset?”
“The forensic staff is overworked, as usual here.”
“L. A. East?” Rafi suggested, almost sympathetically.
Molina sighed, and nodded.
Hmm, Temple thought. “Okay,” she said. “The first two cases are iffy as official ‘incidents,’ but Salter did collapse of food poisoning, Wandawoman did pass out from drugs, and someone substituted real ammo for the blanks in Motha Jonz’s garter gun.”
“‘Ammo’?” Rafi echoed her with amusement. “Sounding real cop shop there, kid.”
“Zoe Chloe gets around.”
“Can we keep on track?” Molina said. Ordered.
That was the real Molina, too. All work and no idle talk. No wonder she didn’t get along with anyone.
Temple shrugged. “All the dancers are responsible for keeping track of their costume pieces, but the costume and prop people are all over the dressing rooms. It would be easy to do the switch. I could have done it.”
“It was a revolver,” Molina said. “Only three of the bullets were live.”
“That conscience again,” Rafi noted.
“One could kill.” Molina was adamant.
“But Motha Jonz wasn’t aiming for a vital organ,” he said.
“Could have hit one so easily.”
“Didn’t,” he said.
“Doesn’t prove anything,” she said.
Temple inserted herself into the verbal Ping-Pong match. “This is an odd incident. Was it aimed against José or CC or Motha Jonz?” she asked.
Rafi leaned back, arms folded as if Temple had just gotten off a killing salvo for him.
“Temple’s really hit the bull’s-eye, Carmen. The loaded stage gun hurt both of them, the Cloaked Conjuror physically, but Jonz . . . I guess in reputation and morally, you’d say. This incident will bring up her sordid past, and she easily could have been made into a killer.”
“Nothing new for her,” Molina said, “she hung out with enough of them.”
“The only criminally involved celebrity dancer,” Rafi pointed out, “involved with the most potentially lethal ‘prank,’ if you want to call it that.”
“She’d gotten away from all that,” Temple objected.
“But had ‘all that’ gotten away from her?” Rafi shot back.
Molina sat up, her vivid blue eyes flashing with speculation. She caught her breath as if she had a sudden stitch in her side as well as an inspiration.
Rafi’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is really wrong with you, Carmen?”
“Shut up. I’m thinking.” She glanced feverishly from him to Temple, and back again, her tone rising as she began speaking. “That may very well be it. I don’t keep up with tabloid papers or TV gossip shows or online rumor. Barr! Just what all was Glory B. put into jail and rehab for?”
“Uh, I don’t exactly—”
“Think!”
“I don’t have to,” Temple said, turning to flip open her laptop. “I can do a search for it.”
She keyed in some words and then clicked through various sites. “I know Glory B. was DWI in her new Porsche and rowdy when arrested. She hit another car . . . here it is! Last year. Just had her license for four months. Leaving a nightclub. God, she not only let down her hair but the whole top of her dress and it didn’t have much to begin with. Anyway, the text says the car she hit was occupied by a mother and nine-year-old daughter . . . mother’s face hit by the air bag, daughter on passenger side had intrusion from the collision. Ooh. Both legs broken. Lawsuit. Hush-hush settlement. Glory B. did ten days in jail and three months public service, volunteering at an animal shelter, and required time in AA.”
Temple looked up. “And Glory B. could have broken both legs or her back if that jungle gym failure had been more . . . effective.”
Molina looked both grim and triumphant. “That is a triple-A class motive.”
Rafi wasn’t so sure. “That ‘dirty trick,’ if it was that, was lame. Glory B. was fine.”
“It was the first attempt, Molina said. “Practice makes perfect.”
“There’s an escalating element to the incidents,” Temple said. “Glory B. just had a minor fall. Chef Salter got really sick, and the Cloaked Conjuror could have been killed. That could show a variety of amateurs, some good, and some bad. At being bad, I mean. Nobody is good.”
“Or one person learning?” Rafi asked.
“Damn, we are good!”
Temple and Rafi turned to Molina to see a glitter in her eyes and fever spots on her dusky cheeks. Stick an orchid behind one ear and she’d look like Carmen the lounge singer.
“I mean,” Molina said . . . modified, “there might be some good ideas floating around there. Number one is we raise security on the show tomorrow night ten notches. Done deal?” she asked Rafi.
“Signed, sealed, and delivered,” he agreed.
Temple was just glad he hadn’t made it “delivered with a kiss.”
That would have been just too icky even for a post-tween like her.
Rehearsed to Death
“You sure this daily dance gig ain’t burnin’ out your baby browns, boy wonder?” Ambrosia asked Matt as they shut down their mics and she became just plain Leticia again.
He nodded as he yawned.
His “Midnight Hour” stint at WCOO-AM was over. Rehearsing dance numbers days to perform them live on TV evenings, then doing a two-hour live radio show at midnight was getting to him.
Leticia also passed him a yellow message form as soon as he had hung up his headphones for the morning. “Two A.M. and all is well, or not well?” she pressed.
“No rest for the wicked,” he muttered, reading the name and phone number, then the message scrawled beneath them, and groaning. “So my Dancing With the Celebs taskmistress is insisting I need an after-hours, early-morning rehearsal to ‘brush up’ my tango footwork. I’m glad this is the last dance. You remember the formidable Tatyana?”
“You sure that’s all she wants?”
“Sure. This woman is all business.”
“All business shaking her jiggle parts.”
“You seemed to have that routine down too, when you visited me at the rehearsal,” he reminded her with a laugh. “No, life is all work and no play with Tatyana. The other prodance instructors lighten up a little, but never her. You’d think she wanted to rehearse me to death.”
“Then don’t go. You’re the ‘celeb,’ sweet boy. Show a little temperament yourself. You’re too easygoing, Matt. Always accommodating other people. I like that when I’m the ‘other people,’ but you need to put your foot down more.”
“Believe me,” he said, rising, “I’m putting my foot down plenty these days. Especially in those Spanish dances. It’s okay, Leticia,” he said. “You know it’s always hard to settle down after two hours live on the air anyway.”
“Yeah, you and Wayne Newton. Or should I say Elvis?”