Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Not one woman, asking for money, asking for marriage, asking for anything. The women have never asked for anything. I guess I was enough."

"Or you weren't worth asking for."

He looked up. "I'm a rotter, aren't I? Never married, never wanted to ... until lately. The man women love to love, and love to hate and maybe both." He pointed to the phone. "She hates me. She's never met me except through tabloid TV but she hates me. I've been sitting here listening to the drone of her disconnected hate for half an hour. Look at those letters."

Temple didn't want to. This wasn't work for Nancy Drew. This was the dregs of someone else's life, not clean like a dead body you don't know. This was a live body on the dissecting table. She didn't need to crawl over it like a maggot.

"Listen. I don't have any friends," he said. When she looked up, his smile was crooked, but working on being charming again. "Just girlfriends. I can't tell my wife. We have a daughter. It would scare her to death that some ... stranger from my past is out there, hating me, hating us.

Maybe hating our kid. I love that little girl." His voice almost broke. "Me now . . . maybe Padgett later."

"This is way over my head."

"I know. But for right now, I need to talk to somebody who's totally outside of it. Nobody I know, nobody I don't know. Don't you see? You're just right, like Baby Bear. I need somebody who's over their head, like me. Until I can sort it out, and then, I'll do the right thing and I'll tell the police and hire the bodyguards, but right now I need Nancy Drew, you know. Somebody normal, who's as surprised as I am, but just a little bit objective."

Temple had started to skim the letters. They weren't what she had thought. The envelopes were sealed with fanciful stickers. The letters themselves were illustrated with rubber stamps and multicolored inks. Artworks of a sort, expressing admiration and connection and a desire to be friends. Like letters a foster child in a foreign land would write a sponsor at first, crude, reaching-out letters, eager and innocent.... The handwriting changed, Temple saw as she shuffled through them, carefully organized by date and rubber bands. Organized by his hand, this man who had someone to do everything for him but solve his life puzzles.

"What's your name again?" he asked.

"Temple Barr."

"Temple. Good name. Like all my friends are naming their kids. We're old hell-raisers and late-life dads, but we can afford it. We can afford to give our kids weird wacky names, and the position and money to live 'em down. They don't have to be Tom, Dick or Harrys; Joanne, Marjorie or Marys. Padgett. It's got class. It says I'm somebody unique, right?" He frowned as he glanced at the droning phone receiver.

"What name does she sign?" Temple asked, turning to the letters' second and third pages.

Nothing. Your daughter . No name other than that.

"I called," he said. "Called them up, called them all up, everybody I could think of, or whose phone number I could find. No, they said, no abortions, no hidden clauses, no kids. I was careful.

I knew to be careful. Wouldn't you think the woman would know?"

Temple nodded. "Weren't there other women, not-famous women who maybe didn't know how to be so careful?"

"I didn't exploit anyone. They knew what it was. They were of age. They were smart, attractive women. So what's the sin in that? I didn't want to be tied down. The house, the car, the dog, the wife, the kid. Everything a 'the.' Me 'the' husband. I wasn't cut out for that. So they called me a playboy. The guys always leered and the women, they kept coming. It was so easy."

Temple sighed. "Maybe she isn't your daughter. Maybe she just thinks so."

"Does that make her any less . . . worrisome. Or dangerous?"

"No. Maybe more so. Look, Mr. Cooke. Call the police, call a crack private-investigative agency. Don't sit here in a hotel room with a bottle of ouzo and a stranger."

His head lifted. "I feel better."

"Is that all it's about? You feeling better?"

"No. But that's something. I tell you, I was ready to jump out of one of these tinted-glass windows when that call came through."

Temple felt an awful clutch in her stomach, a sense that she was standing on a road alone, watching a train wreck about to happen.

"Look," she said. "I've gone through these letters, but I've used a tissue to touch them. There could be fingerprints. Go to the police, or to an investigative agency with police like powers, and I imagine a few are well-known in Hollywood. You do have friends! You have all those aging guys you used to party with. They'd understand. They could be in the same fix. They'll help you.

They're powerful people--"

"No! We're not powerful. We just got seduced into thinking we were because we were rich and famous. In a way, I want to meet her. I want to see what kind of girl she is, maybe explain."

"That's the worst thing you could do." Temple replaced the letters, handed back the envelope, stood. "I can't help you. I can only tell you what you already know."

He nodded, looked down, finally picked up the receiver, ponderously, in slow motion, and hung it up.

"You could stay," he said, slyly, like a dying man who enjoys bargaining with the Devil, even if it's the devil within.

Temple felt the room rock. If she'd had the manila envelope still in her hands, she would have crushed it.

"Is that, really, always your only bottom line? Haven't you learned anything? Hasn't this taught you anything? I could be your daughter's age. I could be your daughter."

He shrugged. "I'm lonely. I'm lonelier than I've ever been. Is it so bad to want to be not lonely?"

Temple tried to think back to when she had been the teensiest bit flattered to be i nvited to Darren Cooke's hotel house party. She had, and it was not that long ago.

"Maybe not," she said finally, "but there are better ways to work on being not lonely.

Propositioning strangers isn't one of them."

"So you need rings and regulations to sleep with someone."

"No, but I need ... self-respect, on both sides."

She turned before she picked up her ouzo glass and did something B movieish like tossing it in his face. That face was too tormented, even as it resorted to what had always worked for it before.

"Nobody's ever turned me down before," he called after her, as an afterthought, a warning, a plea.

She turned from the closed door. "They will." Then she opened it and walked out.

Chapter 14

Partners in Crime

"I am never," Temple told Louie when she returned to her condo and peeled out of her Hollywood-brunch garb like a snake shedding a particularly loathsome skin, "going to involve myself in possibly criminal matters again. And you can quote me."

Louie blinked to indicate that the message had been received. He then watched wide-eyed while Temple disappeared into the bathroom for an unprecedented midday dip. She left behind a trail of knee-high hose, a tangle of shed leggings and a tent of white shirt.

Also two tipsy shoes leaning against the wall, black with extremely pink and fluffy feather arrangements on each toe. Feathers, oh my. Louie jumped down to the floor.

The bathroom door opened.

"And leave my shoes alone, you unreformed feather freak!"

Temple snatched the heels into the bathroom with her, shutting the door with an emphasis that was second cousin to a slam.

Louie sniffed the place where the prey had been, hunting that indefinable avian essence, then lumbered out into the main room, where he presumably could pursue predatory thoughts without being subjected to ESP.

Beyond the closed bathroom door, up to her neck in hot water, as usual, and up to her nose in mounds of bubbles, Temple regretted taking out her bad temper on Louie. Poor little guy had worked hard the past two days, then when he craved a little feather-sniffing, she had treated him like a pervert.