Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Temple put a hand to her throat. It didn't help. "Maybe ... maybe he knew that I knew his costume included a glove."

"Glove?" The glitter in Molina's eyes showed her instant grasp of its significance.

"The only pageant competitor," Temple said, to make it plain, "who was wearing anything on any hand onstage during the cover costume segment."

"A glove wasn't on the body."

"Exactly. He never wore it onstage, not even in rehearsals, but it was part of his costume originally.

His costume. There wasn't much to it--tight pants, wrestling championship-size belt, long hair and one black leather glove. He was planning to enter with a hawk on his wrist."

"A live hawk?"

"A dead one wouldn't sit up straight."

"Which hand?"

Temple shook her head. She didn't know; besides, weren't the police supposed to find those things out?

"You'll have to come down to headquarters," Molina said, standing.

Temple remained sitting on the black velvet cushion she had once considered a scene of the crimes of the heart, not of homicide.

"Why?" she asked.

"We'll need your fingerprints. At least. Got someone to drive you?

Oh, Lordy, she was a wanted woman. Temple stared toward Electra, Danny and Kit. She almost jumped out of her skin, or, rather, her decolletage. Matt Devine had materialized next o Electra. Was he starting to develop traits like the Mystifying Max's? She glanced back at Lieutenant Molina, who was noting Matt's presence with interest.

"Drive me? You mean I might be . . . edgy. I suppose so--"

"I'd expect some prints on the hilt, after the way you were flailing around, according to witnesses. I want to make sure I know whose prints are whose. You didn't know what you were doing, did you?"

Temple couldn't claim that she did, so she said nothing. She had a right to keep silent. She had a right to an attorney. She had a right to run for her life, but she wouldn't.

She begin to understand how Max might have felt if he'd found the body in the Goliath ceiling first.

What's to say about being found hand-in-glove with a corpse? Better to skedaddle first and answer questions later, or never.

"Am I under arrest?"

"You just get right down to fingerprinting and let me worry about technicalities. I'll tell 'em you're coming."

"Thanks," Temple said faintly, rising and walking across the stage as if it were covered in seashells.

Fabrizio's body still lay faceup, worthy of a bestselling cover. Temple remembered the line from The Duchess of Malfi: "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."

She averted her eyes and went to the runway's end. Nicky Fontana and Van von Rhine had joined the charmed circle, so a spate of human friends waited to help her down the stairs.

"Anybody got a Black Mariah?" she joked in a shaky croak from the runway. "I need a ride to headquarters."

Matt insisted on driving Temple. After all, he had said, ending the friends' debate, he wasn't involved in whatever this convention was, and could spare the time. Danny had to stay at the theater to insure that the investigation did not disrupt more than it had to. With the pageant scheduled for the next evening, the situation was critical. Nicky Fontana grudgingly agreed to Matt's acting as Temple's chauffeur; Temple knew he was aching to hot-rod to police headquarters in his traffic-cop-spurning silver Corvette.

Temple insisted on her own imperatives. First she went to the dressing room. Quincey was there, smoking a cigarette she had borrowed from someone. She tamped it out hastily in a makeup tin cover.

"Gosh, are you all right?" she asked, jumping up, big-eyed.

"Sort of," Temple said hoarsely. "Can you help me out of this rig? I've got to go to police headquarters."

"Oh, God!" Quincey's fingers were ice-cube cold on Temple's back, shaking as she undid hooks and pulled open underlying corset lacings. "That creep Lacey was telling that scary woman lieutenant all sorts of stuff about you and Fabrizio, about how he tried to force you into posing with him until Danny Dove stopped him. Rotten snitch!"

"It's okay. The lieutenant knows me. She wouldn't believe I stabbed him."

"You didn't, then?"

Temple turned to regard her emergency undresser. "No! If I were going to kill someone, it would be for more serious crimes than attempted sweeping off the feet."

"I don't know--" Quincey's hands grew still on the lacings. "Some men keep making slimy remarks and treat the women they're with like dirt while ogling every other woman around . . . or girl. You could kill them."

Temple turned, jerking the laces from Quincey's nerveless fingers. "No," she said very definitely. "Not just for being creeps, or sexists. I wouldn't do it, and you wouldn't."

"I-I guess not. But... oh, what a groady mess this Incredible Hunk thing is! I thought doing this would be cool, glamorous, something, but I just feel... yucky."

Temple grinned. "It's not easy to be a femme fatale --oops! I didn't mean that literally. Everything will be okay. Only one more day until the pageant, and then this show is over forever." Temple slapped her bra to her newly useful chest (for holding up gowns) while her ebbing costume sank around her feet to a lavender cloud on the floor.

She stepped out of it as if avoiding dog doo-doo. "I hope I never have to wear this dopey costume again."

Quincey's pale smile looked automatic. She was scrounging the dressing room for a match to relight her crushed cigarette butt by the time Temple was dressed and ready to leave.

Matt was waiting upstairs, alone, a gilt vision in yellow sports shirt and buff slacks.

"Everybody did as you said and went about their business," he told her.

"Even Louie?" she wondered with a smile.

"He dashed off the minute you left us. Maybe he had urgent business downstairs, too."

"Yvette," Temple diagnosed as they walked through the casino to the parking garage exit. "Not a person," she said quickly. "A cat. Female. Persian. Savannah Ashleigh's pampered purebred darling.

Louie crashed a cat-food commercial shooting to pay court, and Ms. Ashleigh, a one-time film star by her own lights, stopped me in the hall this morning to rake me over the Kitty Litter for not controlling my beast."

"She sounds like the uncontrolled beast." Matt handed her something. "I got you some throat lozenges."

"Thanks." Temple picked a roll open and took one. "I'm not good at keeping my mouth shut."

When he opened a glass exit door (the Crystal Phoenix had rising phoenix-shaped Plexiglas handles), the outside warmth and daylight struck her like molten honey.

"Aaah." She stopped to soak it up.

"Are you sure you're all right? Lieutenant Molina has no right to order you downtown for fingerprinting right after such an awful attack."

"She has the right. And I don't mind. I don't remember touching a knife-hilt, so I'm sure my prints aren't on it. I doubt anybody's will be, except maybe Fabrizio's."

As they walked to the parking ramp, Temple dutifully sucked the lozenge.

"What kind of convention is this, anyway?" Matt asked.

"Too complicated to explain and still save my voice. Romance novels and everybody who's involved in reading, writing and producing them."

"And your aunt is one of them?"

"An author. We hadn't seen each other since I was a kid."

Matt nodded, opening the door to the ramp. While they waited before the elevator for the doors to open, Temple husbanded her saliva so she could talk without rasping.

"You probably don't understand why I was wearing that lurid dress, letting strange men make pretend-love to me onstage."

"Well--"

"I was undercover. Yes, I know it's ridiculous; normally one doesn't have to undress to go undercover, except maybe female cops on the vice squad. But Molina encouraged me to snoop, believe it or not.