Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

" You were his midnight visitor?" Temple sounded more confused than she meant to.

The Voice had called Matt since Darren Cooke's death, so how could Matt have heard a woman arrive during a call from some other sex addict, at the same time as this woman here actually did visit Darren Cooke's suite?

"And how! He was ready. He went from the dumps to the Alps in five seconds flat. It gave me a sense of power. Him needing a woman that bad. Needing me." She sat suddenly on the desk's front edge, all threat gone.

"So we went into the bedroom, and did it."

Temple, her legs as weak as Jell-O straws, sat again in the chair.

Alison knew she had a paralyzed audience. She went on with a kind of holy satisfaction.

"This is what I trained to do since I was fifteen, and Mama finally told me who my father was. I went to secretary school not only to get the skills to get close enough, but to get an idea of how to dress and groom my nails, how to speak and write properly. It would have been so easy to grow up like I really was from the gutter he left us in, but I knew I'd never have any thing better, never have any peace, until I prepared for my Plan, and executed it."

"He was your father, and you had sex with him?"

"He thought so, but I wasn't really there," she said witheringly. "I was back in junior high, where they made fun of me and my clothes and ways. I could even smell the lead-pencil shavings in the dirty, smudgy sharpeners."

"And that was your plan, always?"

"Part of it." She looked sly and smug now.

Temple could think of nothing more to do than to interview her. She knew how to keep people talking about themselves. Although Alison had no obvious weapon on her, she was armed with obsessive years of vengeful plotting. It made her formidable beyond any gun or knife.

While she had talked, and Temple had asked, Temple had been studying the room in quick glances. Matt's voice came into her head: "Anyone who attacks you knows what weapon he'll use; only you know what weapon you can find and use."

Temple hadn't sat down out of shock, or a wish to give Alison the advantage of a greater height over her. She'd sat because the chair had rollers. On the vinyl-tiled floor she could suddenly push off and get away, or get to something, faster than Alison could react. But what to flee to? What to use to overpower this demonically driven young woman?

"So after you and he were through--"

"I told him who and what I was. He was... sputtering. He couldn't believe it, but I convinced him. Before she died, Mama had given me the date he was in town, what show he had been doing, what he drank that night, everything. From the day she told me, I kept a scrapbook of anything I could find about him. Old stuff, new stuff. Where he went, I went in my mind. The letters didn't start until I was almost ready. I wanted to let him know what he had left out there.

Who he had left out there, alone."

"But neither your mother nor you gave him a chance to know you."

"Did he come back to his one-night stands to see how they were doing a year or twenty later? This man was a machine. A jackhammer just loose on the street, smashing into anything around it. If you were a woman, and got in his path, you got drilled and were supposed to like it.

And, then, after all that damage, he had the gall to get married."

The words "get married" rang with contempt.

"To have 'a baby.' His first baby, the papers said. Not quite. That's when I began the letters, a couple of years ago. Then I tried to get a job with him. I had to make him think I would be another easy one, but just a little bit hard, so he'd actually hire me to wear me down. Boy, did it bother him to find me so hard. I could see it in his eyes. So I tormented him for nine months, and kept sending my letters and watched him fall apart."

"I still don't understand what you got out of all this, besides revenge."

Alison picked up a letter opener that Temple had been discreetly eyeing. The pewter handle was molded into the masks of tragedy and comedy, so it was probably an award Cooke had won.

She laughed, throwing her head up as if to defy a higher power. "I was going to get money, honey. Lots of money. That's what I told him. This was gonna be the most expensive night in his whole life. He was going to pay for sex, for once. If he didn't want me telling my story to all the tabloids: I SLEPT WITH DADDY DEAREST! If that would hurt his career, or his reputation or his marriage or his new little girl, why then he'd have to pay me. He'd have to give me half of everything he had, and then he'd give me the other half."

She shrank into herself a little. "For a while there, I thought he was getting so freaked out that he'd kill me, especially when I told him Stage Two of my Plan." Her face screwed into distaste. "But he caved in. He started whining and swearing that if he'd known I existed he would have been there. Sure. He said I couldn't hurt innocent people, and I said I was innocent before Mama told me and before people started hurting me."

She shook her head. "He was pathetic when I left, but I never thought he'd kill himself. What a stupid thing to do! He had a show, he had lots of money. I woulda left him keep some. I woulda kept quiet. Did I want the world to know this creep was my father? That I had to screw him to get anything out of him, any time, any attention, any money? It would have worked fine!

But then he had to get dramatic and go kill himself."

She glanced at Temple. "So he left your card on his nightstand. For all I knew, you'd let him drill you, so I wrote the date down, just in case they could tell he'd had sex, so they would think you were his last woman. Then I'd be clear, and a lot poorer." She sighed. "It was over too fast. It wasn't any fun. He wasn't even a good lay."

"That's not the way genetic evidence works," Temple said, surprised to find her voice hoarse. She hadn't said much in a long time. "They'd have had to test us pretty quickly to prove anything. Besides, he'd showed me your letters. That's why I was in the bedroom, as I told the police. The daughter would have been a suspect sooner than any woman in the vicinity. You had a built-in alibi; you didn't have to use me."

"You read my letters?" Her face twisted with anger again.

"Skimmed a few, that's all."

"Those were private! I can't believe he showed them to anyone. And to you, a stranger. Or are you lying? You could be lying about everything."

She stood up, the pewter dagger in her hand jabbing toward Temple.

"He was honestly upset by those letters, Alison. And not just because you might have frightened him. He was trying to straighten out, trying to make his marriage work. I do believe that. He did love his baby daughter, and I think he would have loved you if he'd known about you. Babies were the only women he didn't have to perform for. Why didn't you just write him, nicely, when you first found out?"

"Because my mother said he wouldn't care. He'd been a young man, and young men don't look back. He was too rich and famous to care. He probably didn't like children."

"Maybe. But he did finally marry a woman, and have a little girl. Maybe he was thinking about getting older, and leaving all he had earned behind him. Maybe he wanted a little boy or girl to leave it to. Maybe that could have been you."

"No!" She stabbed the letter opener into the wooden desktop so hard it stuck there.

Temple had been hoping for that when she goaded her. Hoping that she'd strike the desk and not Temple. The letter opener might pull out easily enough, but Alison would have to go for it, and by then Temple would have propelled herself back to the copier, and pushed it over at Alison if she followed. Then she could spin the corner water cooler into the center of the room.