Cat In An Aqua Storm

7

The Cookie Crumbles

Overhead fluorescent lights lent Crawford Buchanan’s normally pasty complexion a sallow tinge. The breath-mint-green hospital gown did nothing for him, either, except to tinge his silver hair yellow. Temple rebelled at expressing false sentiments, so her “Gosh, Crawford, you look... tired” avoided coming out “awful” only by a hair.

He lay in the industrial-strength hospital bed, puny and pathetic. Temple unconsciously lowered her voice to a genuinely solicitous level. “How are you feeling? Is it... serious?”

“The heart attack? I’ll live.” His voice was still a surprisingly deep basso he played like a cello. “The murder? If they nail me for it, I may not live,” he added gloomily.

“You? A murderer?” Temple hovered on the brink of laughter. “Victim, maybe, but perpetrator—”

“Listen, T.B., you’ve been where I’m sitting, or lying, rather. I found the goddamn body! You know how that looks.”

“PR people may kill stories, but they don’t kill people. Nobody could seriously suspect you.”

“How about Lieutenant Too-tall Molina?”

“She is the suspicious sort,” Temple conceded.

“Listen. I want you to take over for me.”

“No way! I turned the job down, remember? Why should I take it now that it’s a hot potato? Besides, Molina doesn’t like me, either.”

Even in a hospital bed Buchanan managed to preen. He rolled his big, cow-brown eyes. “Oh, she likes me, all right. She just suspects me, too.”

Temple strangled a groan in view of the surroundings. “Why? Lieutenant Molina may have a suspicious nature by profession, but what would make her think you particularly would kill a stripper? And how was it done, anyway?”

He paled, if that was possible. The pallor emphasized his dark, thick eyebrows and the languid-lashed eyes as melting as a panda’s. His hand clenched the slack sheet over his chest.

“She was in the dressing room. Alone. Very alone. I took her for a costume at first... only the lights around one mirror were on and all the costumes glitter so you can’t tell what’s real from what’s unreal. She was hanging—”

He stopped, shut his eyes, the lashes resting on the puckered bags beneath them. Temple kept quiet, moved despite her dislike of Buchanan, recalling the moment a few weeks before when she had found herself sprawled across the corpse of Chester Royal in the Las Vegas Convention Center booth.

“How... how was she hanging?” Temple made herself ask.

His eyes opened slowly, but the words came out staccato. “G-string. Rhinestone. G-string.”

“How? From... what did it hang?”

“I don’t know! You think I looked that close? I’d gone nearer to see what was wrong, what—it—was that was turning there silently like a becalmed wind chime. Feathers fluttering, rhinestones twinkling. Looked like a damn Mardi Gras figure on a float. An animated costume. But it wasn’t—animate or a costume.”

Temple sat down on the varnished wooden seat of the tasteful Swedish modem visitor’s chair, the shape and surface so conspiratorially slick that she thought she might slide right off it onto the floor. She’d seen a lot of dressing rooms at the Guthrie Theater and, before that, in amateur theatrical playhouses. She understood the dramatic quiet of an empty dressing room and its eerie occupation of hanging costumes. But this costume was empty only by virtue of death. She realized she was shaking a little, like a hanging costume in the stuffy, backstage air. “Who was she?” she asked.

“Just a stripper.” Buchanan’s answer shocked Temple out of her newfound empathy. “One of the girls.”

“Why should Molina suspect you of doing it, even though you found her?”

His languid eyes eeled away from her direct gaze. “I... might have... asked her out.”

“Asked her out? Or picked her out? Did you walk up and ask her out, or did you sidle by and play with her hair, the edges of her feathered costume, then glide away before she could object? Did you hang around, annoy her, make a nuisance of yourself? Get noticed by everyone else?”

“What are you trying to do? Turn a few friendly overtures into a sexual harassment case?”

“Listen, C.B., your idea of friendly overtures to the opposite sex falls somewhere between a boa constrictor’s and a caveman’s.”

The heavy hospital door hushed open. Temple whirled, hoping a nurse hadn’t caught her being unsympathetic with a sick man.

The overhead florescent pulled the features of the dishwater-brunette who entered into a lugubrious mask, but she was no nurse. A teenage girl with a sullen, pimple-dotted face shadowed her.

The two advanced to Buchanan’s bedside.

“Merle,” he introduced the woman, as if her first name were all that was necessary.

“We’d gone to the cafeteria for a bite,” Merle apologized to Temple. “I came straight from work and never stopped at home.” She glanced with quick concern to Buchanan. “What about your fish? When should I feed them?”

“Tonight when you get home will be fine,” he said shortly.

The silence stretched out like a patient anesthetized upon a table. Temple studied the mousy woman across the white sheets. A pleasant, not striking face. Little makeup. Why did downtrodden women always seem to have pale eyelashes, so their sad eyes floated in a flesh-colored aspic that emphasized their bland passivity?

The young girl, the woman’s daughter by every other feature, on the other hand, burned. Burning, Blackboard Jungle teenage eyes missed nothing and judged everything. Everyone.

The pitiful twosome should have strengthened Temple’s resolve to keep out of Buchanan’s business. Instead they sealed her fate.

“Okay,” she told the man in the bed linens. “I’ll go on with the show. It’s being held at the Goliath, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“My favorite hotel,” Temple added darkly. The Mystifying Max had just finished an engagement at the Goliath when he disappeared.

She tried to edge inconspicuously out of the room, but Merle and daughter followed her out into the hall.

“He says he’ll be all right,” Temple repeated dutifully.

Merle nodded, her wan features slack with worry. “The heart attack was minor, although it’ll be an adjustment. The notoriety—”

“He loves it,” the teenager put in.

Temple searched discreetly for a wedding ring on Merle’s left hand and found none. The daughter’s ears dangled an intriguing array of silver scorpions, spiders and peace symbols. Her features were still blurred in her pale, blotched skin, but Temple discerned some fine bones and a future beauty peeking past the studied disdain that drew her youthful lips and eyes dolefully down.

“Quincey—!” Merle admonished her daughter. “Crawford has had some terrible shocks. Can't you forget your everlasting wrangles even in the face of illness?”

The girl looked down at her thin arms folded over her barely there breasts. She gave no answer except the unspoken “Oh, Mother...” screaming from her stance and expression.

Sweet sixteen, and stuck with Crawford Buchanan for a stepfather of sorts, Temple guessed, for this gangly, tall girl could never be his natural issue.

“Thank you, Miss Barr.” Merle ignored her daughter’s disregard. “C.B.’s spoken of you so frequently. I knew we could count on you.”

“No trouble,” Temple assured her insincerely. She glanced once more at Quincey, who was leaning against the wan wall making Kim Basinger lips, then left on the echoing click of her high heels.

A live-in girlfriend, she mused in disgust, but that didn’t prevent him making bachelor noises. Maybe this murder would scare Crawford Buchanan straight and make him stick closer to home. Not that Quincey would appreciate that.

Temple reconsidered. There was something worse than having Crawford Buchanan for a quasiprofessional colleague. Oh, to be in the Terrible Teens and have Crawford Buchanan for a stepfather!