Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

"A lot of secretaries do it, forge their bosses' signatures. I bet they get pretty good at mimicking their handwriting too."

"Personal assistant," she corrected. "I wasn't just a secretary, though it sure looks like it now." She eyed the office and rubbed a sweatshirt sleeve against her damp forehead, making the improbably magenta bangs stand up like soldiers on parade.

"Why kill yourself? Surely his widow will want you to stay on as an employee and sort through things."

"No. I don't think she will. And, anyway, I don't want to stay any longer than I have to."

Harried, she eyed the idling copy machine.

Working over a warmed-up copy machine under a deadline can be a sweaty job. Temple knew, having done it just the other night. But she guessed that something else might be making Alison Darby so hot under the collar.

"Just tell me if you wrote Sunday's date on my card in Darren's bedroom that day. Because it isn't quite his handwriting."

"How do you know?" The tone was sassy teenage challenge.

"Because," Temple said gently, "I looked at Darren's other cards, with his real handwriting on them, in the box in his office, right back there."

Alison glanced backward, as horrified as if the ghost of Cooke had strolled out from the office.

"And I copied them, like you're doing now." Temple nodded to the pile of index cards beside the copier. "Look. I know you were trying to protect your boss. I don't know what you thought you'd accomplish by making me seem like one of his conquests, but that won't hold up. Michelle has my card now, and the police will have it soon."

"Michelle!" Alison cast anxious glances from Temple to the copier. "Why would she have it?"

"I'm not quite sure. You may have left it in his bedroom to be found, or have brought it here to the recipe box, where it was accidentally found. Michelle might have come in one day--"

"I couldn't refuse her keys to the office."

"No. But you didn't have to point a finger at me through my card. I was only in the bedroom with Darren for a few minutes--"

"That was always enough for him!" she spit out.

"But it wasn't enough for me. And all the time in the world wouldn't have been enough for me if the man were Darren Cooke."

"You ... didn't like him?"

"Let's sit down at the desk, at least. Oh, I liked him. He could be very charming. But I knew his reputation, his game, that's all. I wasn't about to play."

Alison regarded her with a certain numb approval. "You would have been an exception."

"You were an exception too, weren't you?"

She paused on the brink of saying something, then broke into wild, almost operatic laughter, too forced to be genuine. Maybe it was early hysteria.

"A notable exception," she finally panted between the gusts of harsh laughter that rocked her. "To the end."

"You know what I think?" Temple said, keeping her voice even and low. "I think you marked my card because you were trying to protect him."

"Protect him?" Her light eyes stared as if Temple were speaking Urdu.

"I think you found his body that Monday morning before anyone was alerted. Maybe you went back to the suite early. He had to be at Gangster's by nine. Maybe he usually went over the schedule bright and early every morning.

"Only this morning, he was dead. When I left Sunday noon, he was depressed. He could have gotten a lot more depressed by midnight. I think you didn't want it to look like a suicide, so you marked my card and brought it here and put it in the box, hoping suspicion would fall on me, a handy stranger. That's why you didn't destroy that incriminating recipe box. You hoped that if the police suspected something other than suicide, they would hunt farther afield, learn about Darren's office and then find my card, dated the last of all his ladies.

"You didn't know that I would be the last person to be suspected of anything, since I'm known to the local police already--"

"You are? My God, what are you?"

Temple shrugged modestly. "What my card says. A PR freelancer. I help the police sometimes. I can help you now, if you'll just confirm my scenario. Then all the pieces will fit together. I'm not angry that you tried to implicate me, I just want to know why you wanted to implicate someone in what was so clearly going to be declared a suicide."

" Why? " Her fingers drove into her scalp at the temples, pushing her short hair spikes into a punk Mohawk. "You're right. I found him. That morning. Such a shock. Such a surprise. I didn't expect him to escape."

"Escape--?"

"I had to think. I didn't know what the police would conclude. If they'd realize it was suicide, or wouldn't know he had a motive--and then some!--for that. I wanted to cover everything. So I did what I did, don't even remember half of it, except I handled everything with a plastic bag left over from the party." She glanced up, smiling crookedly. "I even wrote Sunday's date on your card with that damn plastic around the pen. That's why the writing wasn't perfect! Usually my imitations of his handwriting are perfect."

"We--"

"You're not alone?" Alison looked wildly around the office.

"My associates," Temple went on, giving an unforgivably wrong impression, but beginning to feel a bit uneasy. Alison appeared to have emotions and motives Temple hadn't dreamed of.

"They thought for a while that Darren made a call late that night, just as someone unexpected was arriving. A woman, of course."

"He ... called someone that night? At midnight?"

Temple nodded, watching Alison unravel with every revelation. Amateurs should never involve themselves in criminal matters; they have no idea of the consequences.

"That lead turned out to be ... unreliable," Temple said. "Still, you should know that ... we have a fair idea of why he killed himself, and there's no sense in letting it go public. Such a sad, private story should remain private."

"You . . . idiot!" Alison was standing, her hands still clawing her scalp, as if they would start pulling out hanks of hair at any moment. "Keep it private! I don't want it private. I want the world to know what he was, especially now that he's escaped. What have I got to lose, lady? You tell me. You think you know why he committed suicide? Well, think again. I know . "

The intensity of her furious, taunting tone startled Temple. Everything she said to try to make things better seemed to madden Alison more.

"I'm only trying to handle this delicately--"

"There's no delicate way to handle it." Alison began pacing behind the desk, back and forth like a caged hyena. "Delicate?"

"Then you know about the letters?"

"Of course I do. First of all, I was his personal assistant these last nine months. Nine months.

Such a nice, round number. I got all the mail. He couldn't get there first without making a suspicious fuss about it."

"You didn't... read them first?"

"Yes, I did. I read them first, because I wrote them first."

Adrenaline pushed Temple to her feet, although that didn't do her much good. She suddenly realized that Alison Darby was bigger-boned and taller than she, and much more agitated.

"How did you know that the call was made at midnight?"

"Because it was around then that I arrived. I wasn't exactly checking my watch, but I should know roughly the time for the most important moment of my life."

"You found him at midnight, then? Dead?"

"No." She came deliberately around the desk, ready to push her face up against Temple's to make herself exactly clear.

Temple forced herself not to back up, knowing any weakness would only undermine her position. Tracking a woman who had hastily implicated her in a suspicious death was one thing; confronting a possible murderer was another.

"He was alive then, our Darren," Alison said, seeing him again. "Very much so. A little drunk, but he was used to functioning that way. And seeing me really perked the old guy up. Pulled out all his energy and charm. He'd been working on me for months, for so long that he'd given up. I had been the one Untouchable around him, and then there I was, in my French negligee I'd paid half a month's salary for, and he paid me pretty good. That's the only thing I'll miss. The salary."