Cat In A Diamond Dazzle

Chapter 24

Jake of All Trades

"Cheyenne's dressing room? Sure thing." He jerked his head in a forward direction to indicate Temple was to follow him.

With thirty-three guys making five costume changes en masse somewhere in the Crystal Phoenix basement, Temple felt more secure asking a passing stranger for guidance than blundering around on her own.

Her guide was amiable, and also tall, but more lanky than hunky. In fact, he reminded her of Tiny Tim's cuter younger brother, which wasn't saying much for his looks.

But Temple followed his long legs as fast as she could without her high heels clicketying like a typewriter on the harsh concrete floors. She soon discovered that the pageant contestants had been given a vast, empty storage space as a dressing room. Long rows of imported folding chairs and tables topped with plug-in makeup mirrors had been curtained into two-person cubicles. Still, with thirty-plus contestants, any real privacy was--as always in theatrical ventures--a snare and a delusion.

Now that she had seen the dressing rooms, killing Cheyenne in the dark confusion of the spacious stage wings made much more sense than trying to do the deed discreetly in one of these cramped, confessional-sized, cloth-walled booths.

Temple's anonymous guide stopped by the burgundy entrance curtain to one cubicle and swaged it back, bowing with a sweeping gesture for her to enter.

She saw nothing inside she didn't expect to see . . . and smell. Theatrical makeup never hid behind floral additives; it broadcast a strong, oily-waxy odor. Temple eyed open tins of bronze body makeup, a much-fingered clear plastic bottle of some kind of oil, and an upstanding chorus line of mousses and other modern hair shapers and bodifiers necessary for long tresses, no matter the sex. That was one of the two adjacent tables. The other table top suffered from a neatness verging on abandonment, except for a blue folder, a box of tissue and a lone tin containing a pallid golden sun of makeup.

"Mine," the man said, noticing her surprise at the lack of cosmetics.

Temple turned, even more surprised. "You're a contestant?"

"Over forty." The man slumped onto his metal folding chair to gaze into a tilted makeup mirror rimmed with unlit theatrical bulbs, like the matching unit on Cheyenne's cluttered tabletop. The overhead fluorescent cast a sunken, sallow visage into the mirror. He made a deprecatory face. "More over forty than most. Jake Gotshall. And you are--?"

"Temple Barr. I work for the Crystal Phoenix."

"I guess I'm what you would call a wild card contestant." Jake smiled at his ghastly reflection.

He reminded Temple of Gumby, another elastic, vague figure dating from a few decades ago. Call it aging hippie. Jake's hair was long, but thin, lackluster and graying. From an ebbing hairline it dwindled into a limp ponytail that thinned into split ends before reaching his shoulder blades. His features were Gumby-soft too: no overshot ledge of jaw and chin to cast a shadow on massive pectorals; no lush eyebrows shading deep-set eyes. After a few days of seeing Incredible Hunks, Temple was amazed to realize that Jake looked completely masculine while claiming not a single characteristic that could be termed "hunkish."

He smiled at her expression.

"No doubt you're wondering why I called you all together here. Actually"--he looked carefully around Temple for signs of other people--"you're alone." His voice assumed an Alan Alda self-mockery. "No doubt you're wondering why I called you here alone?" His straggling eyebrows quirked upward in patented ogling villain style.

"I wanted to come here," Temple pointed out. "I took you for a stagehand."

"Oh, cruel fate! Does this indicate that my chances for this year's Incredible Hunk are not hunky-dory? Don't I look like the late hunk's dressing-room mate?"

Temple sat, gingerly, on Cheyenne's empty folding chair. "Apparently you are, whether you're sure about it or not. I knew Cheyenne, very casually. I wondered what had happened before he went on stage. Maybe you can tell me."

Jake leaned his elbows on the makeup table, hands cupping his amiable, if not particularly attractive face. "You're being too polite. You know you're dying to ask what I'm doing in an Incredible Hunk contest. Instead of inquiring about my late mirror-mate, you should wonder how I got past the contest doormen, in this case doorwomen."

"Enlighten me."

He grinned and leaned closer, revealing rather gray and crooked teeth. "I know a terrific photographer. Besides, I do some stand-up comedy, and figured this gig would give me an unlikely new shtick. Here's my photo." He slipped an eight-by-ten from the blue folder and spun it toward Temple.

"You do have a helluva photographer." Lots of shadow and tricky highlighting had given Jake an intense, aging Hamlet look. Too bad the man in person completely contradicted the image. He more resembled an aging ham-actor, period. From the stamp on the back, the photo wizard was a woman.

Temple would have to look her up if she ever needed a really flattering portrait. "Is that all it took to enter? A good photograph?"

He nodded. "And some bio sheets, with vital statistics." When Jake flexed his arm, as he did now, his plaid shirtsleeve remained loose and unimpressive. "Of course I lied a lot." He peeked, like Tiny Tim, from behind a strand of graying hair that had escaped the rubber band at his nape.

Temple started laughing. "You're a shill. A walking lampoon! What did the pageant organizers do when they actually saw you?"

"Screamed bloody murder until they realized that ejecting a pre-accepted candidate would be bad press. So they made the best of it. I'd showed up, hadn't I? Paid my money and they took a chance.

Besides, I'm warm and breathing, and they were really short of entrants in the over-forty category this year. I, as you can see, am tall, and about as over forty as you can get."

"Forty-nine?" Temple guessed.

"And three-quarters. That's what I put down as my chest measurement."

"Three-quarters?"

"Forty-nine and three-quarters."

"So you're more of an outside observer than the other contestants," Temple said thoughtfully, still smiling.

"Yeah. I mean, who'd watch me? So I watch them. And, boy, do they watch themselves a lot. A few of these guys are so hooked on mirrors that they can't even look at who they're talking to. Beauty is a consuming business, isn't it?"

"Don't ask me. So the contestants are pretty self-absorbed, but the people-watching must be enlightening."

"Fascinating," he responded Mr. Spock style, with cocked eyebrow and aloof tone. When he saw that Temple had recognized the delivery, he added a wry smile. "He wouldn't have stood a chance here either. Not with those Mickey-Mouse-on-Mars ears."

"What have you concluded so far?"

"Besides that I don't have a chance in Hairspray Hell of taking that super-Hunk title? Okay. Most of these guys are pros with attitude, ambitious models or actors hoping to catch one more eye, one more camera, one more big rolling wave of media attention. Some are fun-loving off-camera types, regular guys good-looking enough to enter on a dare from their girlfriends. These guys usually have expectations as ordinary as a day job. Only one other jokester like me slipped in for fun and self-humiliation." Jake spun his makeup tin.

"Why do it? Couldn't you have imagined a male beauty pageant to put in your comedy act?"

Jake shrugged. " A Current Affair, Hard Copy and Hot Heads don't show up, cameras running, for any exercises in imagination that I've dreamed up. Look at Pat Paulsen, the comic who regularly runs for president. He's not so nuts. He gets loads of coverage, and even a nanosecond on national TV can jump-start a career. Hey, regardez Kato Kaelin." Only he pronounced the name of the world's most hyphenated man, the live-in hanger-on in the O.J. Simpson case, "Ka-toe Kae-Iin," in a tres, tres phoney French accent.

"A world did, and you know what? He didn't have anything there to boost."

"Whatever. Maybe me and the other dud--as opposed to stud--just want to say . . . hey, regular guys can be romantic too."

"What about Cheyenne? Was he a prime contender? Was he going to win?"

Jake's shaggy head shook. "Who knows? He had all the right stuff--and seemed hip enough, but... he never gave me a clue about himself. He came storming in, one of the last contestants to arrive, fresh off some transatlantic flight, smelling of first class. I hated his washboard guts."

"What does first class smell like?"

"Leather and champagne and stewardess. He plunked down a couple of duffle bags--as you saw from his costume, there wasn't much of it; all he needed otherwise was a tux, jeans, spray mousse and his Evian water. What a guy!"

"Knowing a murder victim should enliven your act."

"Sure. I can say all the cover hunks were knocking each other dead."

"You really think the murder is going plural?"

Jake's genial, flaccid face--he had a good old gray gelding look--tightened with alarm. "Shit, I hope not! I didn't enlist for hazardous duty with no pay. Waggling your tush for a few hundred screaming women shouldn't be a terminal offense."

Temple sat at Cheyenne's vacant place, lost against the mirror's reflected burgundy curtains. Even traveling light, Cheyenne carried more hair accessories than Temple kept on her whole cosmetics shelf at home. She picked up a small sleek aluminum canister of mousse, as compactly packaged as Mace. It felt full. She set it down quickly, imagining how many times a living Cheyenne could have still used it.

"Nobody came for his things but the police," Jake noted. "The duffle bags with his clothes and stuff. I glimpsed an electric shaver, a fancy blow dryer, some foreign magazine, French or Italian. They left the glop."

He nodded at the slick array of bottles and canisters. "Maybe someone killed him for single-hairedly doing in the ozone layer."

Temple touched another of the aluminum soldiers on parade. "These are pump-sprays, not aerosol containers. All politically correct. He wasn't hurting anything."

"He must have been hurting somebody's chances, or why kill him?"

"It doesn't have to be a pageant rival. Take your pick of possible killers: a jealous lover; an ex-lover of a new lover; a would-be lover spurned. Maybe even a terminally irritated author who hates cover hunks getting all the attention and the money."

"The authors hate these guys?"

"Maybe I exaggerate, but many of these women have labored for peanuts book after book. To see some pretty boy walk off with big bucks for standing around buck naked for an hour might be a trifle aggravating. It's a theory."

"Holy hair-mousse!" Jake flattened his hands on his dressing table top, as if about to spring himself into orbit. "It's bad enough to sashay out in your skivvies in front of hundreds of screaming women, but to think that some of them might be screaming for your blood--! That's gruesome."

"Cheyenne was killed at the first rehearsal, not at the pageant, but all sorts of suspects were around that morning: fellow contestants--"

"I didn't do it," he screamed melodramatically, going down on his knees. "You know I'd never win no matter who I eliminated. I could off the entire lot and still lose. I'm innocent, I tell you, innocent."

Temple refused to be distracted by theatrics. Comics were always on, always improvising. It didn't make them the world's most astute witnesses. She wondered what Molina had made of this guy, while continuing to tick off suspects on her autopsy-red fingernails.

"And stage crew. Then don't forget the fans... you know, those pudgy, eminently overlookable sweet midlife ladies who volunteer to help you hunks shake your tushies into those skin-tight pants. Demented fans are not unknown in the entertainment biz. Several lady authors were milling around too, trying to figure out who they'd escort on the big night."

"None were milling around me," Jake reported glumly, pushing himself back into the folding chair.

"Listen." Temple leaned forward on her chair--Cheyenne's chair--and nailed him with a dead-serious look. "I know life is a cabaret, my friend, but even a professional jokester must occasionally notice more than how his jokes are going over. Cheyenne was worried enough about something to want a tete-a-tete with me the night before he died. Why? Because I'm a PR person? Because I work the hotels and conventions, know the scene? Or because I've been involved in solving a few murders."

"You? Cute little cheerleader-type you?" Jake's naturally pallid face had turned a lighter shade of gray. "Involved in murders?"

"Only indirectly."

"I should hope so!"

"So tell me something that will help me understand what Cheyenne tried to tell me and couldn't.

Because I wasn't listening to him that night. You shared this cramped space for what, twenty-four hours? You must have heard, seen something significant."

Jake shrugged and made a face. "Just the usual. He came in, fighting jet-lag with that kind of show-biz energy you can call on to keep going no matter what."

"Not drugs?" Temple thought of another motivation: a new, exciting jet-set lifestyle running on speed and sex appeal. . . maybe even smuggling.

Jake's headshake was final. "Naw. I can tell the difference between a two-hundred-dollar high, a Java jag and Mother Nature's freebies. I've done it, run on the dead certainty of performing. That's what he was high on: doing this pageant and coming out good." Jake's serious voice sank into a Brando drone.

"He coulda been a contendah--"

Interviewing a professional comic was like opening a bag filled with cartoon characters all screaming to get out at once. Temple nodded, encouraging Jake to say more.

"Man, he had energy, though. Made me feel my age, and I don't like to get that personal with myself.

You should have seen him, dashing out to handle last-minute details. He got that horse here without tipping anybody off but a pal or two. He wanted to surprise the other contestants, too. He wanted 'em all to know he had a leg up on them. Get it? 'Leg up'? Horse?"

"I get it. So he did have business to take care of once he got here. He could have left the hotel and seen--or been seen by--almost anybody."

Jake nodded solemnly. "He did act. . . abstracted, though, rehearsal morning. He dashed out with one of his duffle bags, and when he came back, he kinda threw it in a corner as if he didn't like what was in it. Like it wasn't really part of him. Now that you nag me to death about it, he acted a little schizy. Even asked me to run out and get him a Pepsi, when he'd been guzzling nothing but Evian water. He was--"

"Worried?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he wanted to get rid of me for a while. When I came back, he didn't say much.

Just grabbed his stage kit, stood up in that skimpy outfit, what would you call it--teeny weeny loincloth and itty bitty medicine bag and great big quiver on his back, which come to think of it, was a hell of a phallic symbol. Lord, that would make the ladies quiver! I guess, looking at him as Navaho Joe, I knew my chances had been shot in the heart." Jake's arms spread wide to display his unremarkable body in its unremarkable clothes. "What's to say?"

"You've got nerve," Temple admitted. "I bet the ladies will love you, especially the hunky-cover-model haters."

"The ladies, God bless 'em, love a lot of guys like me. These studly types with mammoth muscles are just window dressing. For looking at, not into."

"Perfect Kens," Temple mused. "As in Ken and Barbie." She recalled Matt's dislike of his own good looks for the superficial attention they brought him. "Still, beautiful people have real feelings. And fears.

Somebody must have feared Cheyenne--Charlie Moon--enough to kill him."

"You think that was the motive? Not jealousy?"

"What kind of jealousy, that's the question."

"And a good question. Was it a maddened contestant, afraid he'd lose the crown to a hot contender?" Jake donned a guilty, hang-dog look. "Or was it some red-hot lover afraid of losing Cheyenne, period?" Jake twirled an imaginary mustache.

"Did you glimpse any romantic hunky-panky around here?"

"In less than two days? Hardly likely." His face flickered with sudden remembrance. "Say, I did see Cheyenne holding cocktail glasses with an author in the hotel bar, pretty late the first night we got in."

"Who?"

He shrugged. "Haven't seen her again. Not one of the pageant participants, for sure. Classy lady. I was gonna say 'older,' but I bet she's only a few years older than me, so I better watch it. Still a looker. Your size. Red hair, too, but hers isn't as bright."

Temple's blood froze. She recognized a spot-on description of her aunt Kit when she heard it.

"What time Wednesday night?"

"Time I saw them? Oh, say around eleven. She was old enough to be his mother, but Cheyenne seemed like a cosmic kind of guy. I bet details like age, gender and national origin didn't faze him one bit."

Temple, though still in shock about Kit, was not surprised to have her bisexual suspicions confirmed by an impartial source.

"Don't look so shocked, sweet thing." Jake sounded like a counseling older brother, but he misread what had really shocked her. "Consenting adults try all sorts of combinations nowadays. But I doubt anything is going on at this convention. Too much performance pressure for the boys. Everybody's way too stressed out by the pageant to have time for romancel"

Jake, sprawled against the dressing table, then assumed a maniacally suave expression that ludicrously altered his homely face, and not for the better. "Unless you aren't doing anything tonight, ba-bee?"

"Sorry, Fabrizio Junior." Temple stood, patience and interview ended. "All booked up."