He turned to hand Temple the mike and returned to the judges’ dais. Olivia had been standing on the fringe and smiled tearfully as she walked over to stand by Matt. All three embraced, not with the usual euphoria of a great dance finished, but with a survivor’s fervor.
Temple stood between them, holding the mike, while the judges held forth.
Danny was the evening’s Iron Man. His calm control eased everyone back into normality.
“What can you say to perfection?” he began, then answered himself. “Bravo and brava! And to Miss Tatyana”—he turned to see her standing, subdued for once, in the wings—“let’s have her step into view for a round of applause. She choreographed the most superbly sexy tango I have ever seen.”
Applause and shouts erupted.
“And,” Danny added, “though the audience and judges were unaware of it, I’ve been told that Matt was recovering from blood loss from a previous attack with a knife in the wee hours this morning, but he and Tatyana were able to still stage an unbelievable routine.
“As for the dancers, you completely gave yourselves over to your roles. You were precise, you were edgy, you embraced the music even more intimately than you embraced each other. You gave us an incredible experience. Ten.”
Leander Brock was silent for a long, dramatic moment. “I confess that my emotions have been through a buzz saw. To go from the thrill of watching . . . no, experiencing such a dazzling tango, to the life-and-death struggle that followed on this stage . . . to think that an event designed to raise money for deathly ill children might have resulted in someone’s death on this very stage, it’s too much for me. I can only thank God and second Danny. Ten.”
Savannah too seemed as subdued as Tatyana. Then she threw her score cards on the floor at Matt and Olivia’s feet.
“You two are off the charts. I’d give you a fifteen if I could. That was Oscar-worthy acting and entertainment. And Matt, honestly, I thought you were too nice to win this thing. Dirty dancing is where it’s at these days. But you were amazingly, sizzlingly, devilishly, almost X-rated naughty in that dance and I loved it! Tell me you haven’t sold your soul to the Devil, because I’d sure like to be next in line for it.”
She smiled at Olivia. “Sistah, you give all us seasoned ladies hope! What about those sexy flicks and splits? Have you been possessed by the ghost of that leggy legend, Cyd Charisse, who just left us not too long ago? Like Fred Astaire said of her decades ago, you were ‘beautiful dynamite’ in that tango. Ten with whipped cream on top, because you two got me in a lather.”
The standing ovation lasted for two minutes.
Danny nodded at Temple and held out a sealed envelope.
The mike was shaking in her hands and her knees were trembling. She faced the audience but her eye was on the floor director, who nodded encouragingly and held up two fingers. Two minutes to go. Two minutes to fill. She wanted to rush backstage and hear what Hank Buck had confessed to. He was just now probably reaching the euphoric spill stage.
“I have to admit that I am not up to the usual Zoe Chloe Ozone speed right now,” she began. “The events tonight have been too awesome, as have been everyone on this stage, cast and crew, including the security and law enforcement personnel who averted a tragedy I would tend to take very personally no matter what had happened.”
The audience laughed lightly, easing tension.
She smiled. “It’s appropriate that we honor first the winner of the junior competition, for this show was produced to raise hope for the young. The scholarship will benefit . . .”
She struggled to open the thick paper of the envelope while holding the mike.
“Would you believe my hands are shaking?” she asked the audience during the lull.
More laughter and applause.
“The scholarship will benefit”—now her voice went shaky—“Patrisha Peters.”
Shrieks from offstage brought an ecstatic Patrisha and her partner Brandon running to Temple and the mike.
“Thank you all so much,” Patrisha said, in tears. “This has been the best experience of my life and, gosh, dancing with a Los Hermanos Brother was the coolest thing in the world.”
The other Hermanos brothers and the girl contestants and their mothers came running on stage to surround the winning couple, with the judges soon joining them and the adult contestants streaming out from backstage to surround and embrace Olivia and Matt.
Temple stood alone at the mike watching the floor director’s two spread hands, the fingers counting down from ten.
“And so we thank you all for your generous votes and will meet one more time tomorrow to name the winning Dancing With the Celeb stars. Same time, same place, and same cast, thank God.”
Danny came up to hug Zoe Chloe just as the final little finger folded into the director’s palm and he beamed at Temple for her perfect timing.
Even the audience came streaming down onto the stage now, dazed and happy and emotionally drained.
“Oh, Danny,” Temple said, finally allowing tears of relief and joy to saturate his shoulder. “Thanks for getting me through this. I was so out of character at the end. I just couldn’t conjure Zoe Chloe.”
“You did it just right. Zee Cee will be back tomorrow all sass and savvy. After all, she’s going to be the sole MC, if she wants to be. Buchanan is history on this show. Matt and Olivia are mobbed right now, but I bet you want to catch up with your police ‘posse’ backstage, so let’s slip away and let you do what you do best, unravel this conspiracy.”
“Yes, please.”
Dial M for Motive
Molina intercepted them outside the greenroom, which was now a temporary police interrogation room.
“He’s not happily hostile yet. It’s hard to tell how much he’s had and how fast it worked,” she told them, as Danny slipped away to return to the love fest on stage.
“But I’m not too late?” Temple said. “I didn’t miss anything?”
“This show hasn’t started yet. But this is the guy.”
“Why would anyone hate Matt that much?” Temple asked.
“A teensy bit prejudiced, are we?” Molina asked in turn, as Rafi joined them. But she smiled.
“It’s a legitimate question,” Temple insisted. “This guy is a local. The only thing vaguely aggressive Matt did since coming to town was to track down his stepfather. So this Hank Buck was a friend of that scumball? Really? I can’t believe that. Cliff Effinger didn’t have any friends. Whoever tied him to the bow of the pirate ship at the Treasure Island so he drowned could not have been Matt. If that was anything, it was a hit.
“And another thing,” Temple added. “What about the Barbie Doll Killer? Could Hank Buck be it?”
“I doubt it,” Molina said. “I can’t deal with that issue here and now, but I have a nasty suspicion that I’m gonna get on ASAP. Right now why Buck wanted to kill Matt is a priority.
“My detectives are even now breaking down Buck’s bio like he was Lee Harvey Oswald,” Molina said. “They’re going to his neighbors, his car mechanic, anyone. If there’s a connection to Matt, they’ll find it. Two attempts at murder must have a powerful motive behind them.” She looked over her shoulder to Mariah’s father. “He was one of yours.”
Rafi shook his head. “He was one of yours first. That was on his application that my people pulled. He was hired here before I was, but before that he was on the force. We found no record of dishonorable discharge. Your detectives are trying to find out why he quit the force. He was seeing the department psychologist, but those records are protected.”
“Not for long. Either way,” Molina said, “he was one bad cop, public or private. Why’d he target this event and these people?”
“That’s sure what I wonder,” a new voice said.
They all turned, shocked to see that Matt had joined them, and doubly shocked by the sight of his current tough-guy tango image.
“I finally escaped my fans,” he said. “I want to know why this guy almos
t killed me and Temple. I don’t see a reason.”
“I don’t see it, either,” Rafi admitted. “It’d make more sense if one of the celebrity dancers who was a victim of dirty tricks was the murder target. I can see it being Motha Jonz. Buck could have been hired to off her by the gangsta rappers, say, whoever Motha Jonz was involved with at the time of the Vegas shoot-out. I could see using the dance show to do that.”
“Hey,” Temple said. “Buck didn’t have to be hired. Wasn’t a teenager shot and killed during the gunplay on the Strip? I need my laptop. I could look that and all the other celebrity ‘sins’ right up. There are hundreds of sites on stuff like that.”
Rafi had a cell phone to his ear. “Nadir here. Collect a hot pink laptop from the—?”
He handed Temple the phone and she described it and told the guard where in the central bedroom it was. Then Rafi took back the phone and said he wanted the laptop in the dancing show greenroom “yesterday.”
“‘Hot pink’?” Molina mocked. “Can you never stop being girly?”
Matt pulled Temple close to his leather-clad side. “I don’t ever want her to.”
“You see the benefits,” Temple purred, watching Molina look away and shake her head. Temple straightened up and got back to business.
“Maybe that messenger boy shot in the rap star shoot-out was a relative of Buck’s,” she said.
“But Buck didn’t try to kill Motha Jonz,” Matt said. “Rafi, your gangsta rap slaying idea is interesting. Exchanging live ammo for blanks was the most dangerous dirty trick, but Motha Jonz was the shooter. The Cloaked Conjuror and José were more in danger from her.”
Temple had sat on an empty guard’s chair and now looked up and nodded.
“She might have gotten a police charge out of the incident,” Temple said. “That would have hurt her career even more than it has been. And she might have been found guilty and convicted.”
“What about all those other dirty tricks?” Matt wondered. “What was the point?”
“Obvious.” Molina was brusque. “Diversions to mask that you were a target, the target. I don’t know if he intended the Cloaked Conjuror to be injured by Motha Jonz’s loaded gun, but the fact that he did get hurt got us police thinking the whole thing might be a follow-through on the continual death threats he gets.”
“There must have been more to it,” Matt insisted. “We’re missing something.”
“What about the shoe incidents?” Temple asked.
“You would get on the shoes,” Molina said, rolling her eyes. “They were the most minor ‘accidents.’ At worst, Olivia could have twisted her ankle. As it was, her dancing through the problem and CC upholding her only enhanced her ratings with the audience. And you told me your nosy cat pretty much targeted very early on that the stage mother dosed her own daughter’s shoes with the pepper spray for the same reason—audience sympathy and votes.”
Molina eyed Rafi. “Now do you understand why I’m so set against Mariah getting into the kid performer stuff?”
“Wait a minute.” Temple sat up straighter. “I’m getting something. I’m seeing something.”
“So now you’re psychic?” Molina said.
“No, I’m . . . I don’t see how it relates to Hank Buck, that’s all. But, what you said: the onstage ‘accidents’ raised the victim’s scores. They got a sympathy vote. Olivia’s heel was first and the rating went up. That inspired Yvonne Smith to make Sou-Sou an underdog with another, far more dramatic shoe problem. And it worked. Her daughter’s score went up.”
Rafi was leaning forward, elbows on knees. “That’s right. It snowballed. Salter was poisoned, Wandawoman drugged, CC shot, and Matt was personally attacked by someone in Juarez’s guise. That had to be Hank, but could Sou-Sou’s mother have set up the other incidents to disguise the fact that her daughter’s problem was staged? And then there’s Temple’s idea. Maybe somebody in the competition or around the competition is a relative of the people these celebrities hurt. I mean, look at them. They’re quite a crew. In a way what happened to them fit their crimes.”
Matt caught his drift and kept the ball rolling. “Glory B. was the first one to have an almost accident even before the first show. She fell on the jungle gym and Danny Dove thought it had been tampered with. She got a DUI citation for an accident a few months ago, and a little girl has serious leg injuries.”
“I just Googled Glory B. online to get the facts straight,” Temple said. “There’ll probably be a huge settlement for the family of the girl. I don’t find anything obviously bad about Olivia,” Temple said, “but Keith Salter was all over the entertainment gossip shows for some cases of food poisoning at his restaurant in Aspen. E. coli. It was especially bad. A toddler died. No one was found derelict, but the media loved broadcasting the problem because Salter had raked so many other chefs over the coals on his Butcher’s Holler show.”
Molina spoke. “The hospital said there was no way to ever tell if his poisoning had been accidental, or intentional.”
“Wandawoman being drugged in the pasodoble?” Matt asked.
“Oh, my gosh,” Temple said, “that could have been done to make you look bad too. I’ll look her up.”
Molina shook her head. “Who needs detectives anymore? Everything is online.”
“And it stays there forever,” Temple said. “Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
“The ‘bad’ refers to Zoe Chloe, right?”
Temple, tapping away on her laptop keyboard, shrugged at Molina. “Zoe Chloe has her uses. I just wish I could figure a way to earn money off of her popularity.”
“Everybody wants to earn money these days, especially these annoying celebrities behaving badly,” Molina noted.
“Maybe even Hank Buck,” Temple said.
“What are you getting at?” Rafi asked.
“Let’s say he always was in this to get Matt. I know, we don’t know why, but it looks like that. Let’s say . . . he saw he could use the competition to get other people too. Then he went wild, was a revenge machine. All these celebrities going wild in Hollywood and Vegas, getting away with things. That could irritate a law officer, right?”
“Irritate. Not drive nuts.”
“What if he already was nuts?”
“Any evidence?”
“Only in what he did at the other end of his mania.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at, who could hate Glory B., Olivia, Chef Salter, Wandawoman, Motha Jonz, and Matt enough to persecute them? Persecute. But kill? The only person Hank Buck tried to kill was Matt.”
“He’s the most innocent of the innocent,” Molina protested.
“That before his tango, or after?” Rafi asked.
“Forget the dancing,” Molina snapped. “The last thing this is about is dancing. The dancing was the pretext.”
“Amen,” Temple said. “And there was Hank Buck, full of whatever venom he had, having all these people on his turf, and at his mercy. Most of all, for reasons we don’t know, Matt.”
Dirty Larry’s buzz-cut dirty blond head came through the greenroom door.
“Our boy Buck is reaching smack high. He’ll be singing his soul out like Janis Joplin and I’ve got the camcorder and a tape recorder rolling to capture every sweet, demented syllable of it.”
Hank Buck was handcuffed, wrists in front of his body, his face was relaxed and dreamy.
Temple couldn’t believe this man had been active enough less than fifteen minutes ago to grab her, lift her, try to kill her.
Two young uniformed EMTs sat near him.
He was wearing hospital scrub pants. The uniform cargo pants were laid out beside him, one rear pocket torn and traces of blood on the seat and down the legs.
Matt and Temple looked inquiringly at Molina.
“Your cat removed the rear pocket when he went berserk,” she told Temple. “I don’t know how he ID’d Buck. Maybe by smell. When we got Buck subdued we saw the blood and the emergency peopl
e took a look.”
She paused, took a deep breath. “It’s like he got caught on a fence with exposed nail heads recently. He’s got four infected gouges down both sides from his buttocks to his calves. Must have hurt like hell. Maybe your cat just smelled blood.”
Or maybe, Temple thought, Louie just recognized a man he had marked earlier, perhaps when Matt had been attacked by Buck posing as Zorro.
But, wait, Louie had been sleeping hard in her bedroom when Matt managed to reach her cell phone, so that couldn’t be.
Just another mystery to go unsolved.
“Bastard,” Buck crooned gently as he recognized Matt, rocking back and forth on the sofa so many celebrities had sat on. “It would’ve felt so good to kill you.”
“Why?” Molina asked. “Why kill Matt Devine?”
“Bastard,” he muttered. “Umm, feels so good. Felt so good getting those stupid, pampered ‘celebs.’ They all get off too easy.”
Rafi stood behind Molina, a cell phone to his ear. “Alch says Buck did work the gangsta rap slaying case,” he whispered in her ear. “Just, ah, guarding the crime scene stuff. But he saw the main players, the dead boy, the glitzy car.”
“So you did the dirty tricks,” Molina pushed.
“Sure. Hey, it helped up the votes and donations. I was jes’ helpin’ those poor little bald cancer babies, right? Good guy. Better guy than some rich, spoiled assholes making fools of themselves on the stage. I am a good guy! Bitch got it all wrong. Needed some slappin’ around.”
He suddenly giggled, a truly chilling sound: childish, secret, mean.
“Took her out for a few dances around the floor. Mop it up with her. Had her trained to do housework on her face.”
Temple felt her stomach turn.
Molina turned to stare at Rafi.
He nodded soberly.
“Girlfriend or wife?” Molina asked.
“Wha’ does it matter?” His head was rolling on his neck, his eyes not connecting with anything. “Not there anymore. I don’t care now. She’s quiet. So quiet. Bastard. Thinks he’s God? Tellin’ women things. Interferin’ in my life. My wife. Leave? Leave? Tell her to leave? She’s left now, bastard. She’s gone. Who you gonna tell now? You gotta die. I’m gonna do it. Finish the job. It feels so good. I was so smart. Stupid, stupid cops. Turn on a brother. They do it too sometimes. Bastard. Get ’tween a man and his life. Uh, man and his wife. She’s gone.”
Cat in a Topaz Tango Page 33