"Tsk-tsk." He minced backward. "And here I was going to get a closeup for Hot Heads." He had to lean closer to whisper, "These romance broads aren't half as photogenic as you, T.B. Most of them fill up the camera and then some."
"Maybe they're fed up with you," she suggested. "Haven't you got anything better to do than hang around and harass women?"
"Hey, it's my job." His long, thick eyelashes flickered. "I get paid to do this."
"That's what is wrong with this country," Temple said, turning her back on both him and the camera.
That didn't stop Crawford Buchanan. Temple watched Kit and Electra bloom in an aura of light as the cameraman panned down Temple's head to her shoes.
"If I had the Midnight Louie shoes," she muttered under her breath, "the Austrian crystal kick would burn out the camera sensor."
"You were saying something about sensuality," Buchanan purred in her ear. Or maybe he growled.
Men did that a lot in some romance novels.
Temple would have loved to G.R.O.W.L. back, but instead she did the mature thing and ignored him, until finally the bright lights drew away and faded.
"Is he gone?" Temple asked her companions.
They nodded.
"Next time he comes around," Electra said, "I'll tell you when he's leaning close again so you can stomp his instep with your steel heel."
"You need to meet a better class of men." Kit focused like a very chic Doberman on a nearby group of people. "Ah. There stands an abandoned husband. Husbands, and men in general, are rare in this crowd; isolation is an occupation for them. Want to do some sleuthing on the sly? Follow me."
Throwing her hands up at Electra, Temple did so. All too soon she found herself confronting one tall man standing like a lonesome pine in a sea of overdressed shrubs.
"Hello," Kit said warmly. "Haven't seen you in ages! Remember the G.R.O.W.L. reception in New York at the romance writers' convention a couple of years ago? Kit Carlson, better known, I devoutly hope, as Sulah Savage."
"Oh, yes," the man said with relief.
Besides being tall, he was pleasant-looking in a low-key way, nice but not exciting, the perfect man to be somebody else's husband. Although he was doing a good impression of a man happily alone in a world of women and content with doing nothing but gawking, he was clearly glad to see a possibly familiar face. He gazed uneasily at Temple, as if he should know her too.
"My, ah, cousin," Kit extemporized, deftly erasing their age difference, and thus enhancing hers.
"Temple Barr. She writes for Women's Work magazine, you know, the mag about rags-to-riches women entrepreneurs. Their circulation is massive. I'm sure they'd love to do a story on your darling wife."
Kit glanced toward an animated knot of women who were either in a feeding frenzy around the chip and dip table, or gathered to worship a face familiar only lately to Temple from the ripped-off back of a paperback book.
"Quite the popular girl," Kit said in her blatantly artificial social voice. A woman would have instantly heard the underlying satire; a man, or at least this man, merely nodded politely. "Temple, this is the man behind the woman behind the bestsellers, Sharon Rose. I know your last name is different. . .
Herbert--?"
"Harvey," he said.
"Oh, sorry! Harvey--?"
His shook his head with a smile. "No. Herbert Harvey."
"Oh."
How unfortunate, Temple thought, to have two first names.
Herbert Harvey nodded shyly at her. "I'm sure my wife would be delighted to have another national magazine article. She was featured in Martha Stewart's celebrity holidays issue. Quite a spread. She had the down-home Fourth of July picnic with old-fashioned bottles of Coca-cola on ice in a washtub and country ham on a checkered tablecloth."
This was not the sort of upscale entertaining Temple expected from a filthy rich, bestselling author.
Then she remembered Kit describing Sharon Rose's books as "nauseatingly" homey and sentimental.
Having been assigned her role and then handed her cue by Kit, Temple wrote and recited her first speech, which was not brilliant.
"Do you often attend these conferences, Mr. Herbert ... I mean, Harvey?"
"That's all right. Everybody's always getting my names mixed up. Just call me Herbert." He sighed and looked over the animated crowd, whose dominant female voices were going a mile a minute. "I just come now and again, when it's convenient. I'm on my way to do some hunting in western Canada."
Now that was more like lifestyles of the rich and famous! Canadian hunting trips, with guide, cost a bundle.
"Where do you and Mrs. Herbert live?"
"Muncie, Indiana. I was an assistant school superintendent there." He looked somewhat lost for a moment. "I'm retired now.
No need to work." He glanced again toward his wife's charmed circle, as if worried.
Temple guessed that Hervey Harbert, or whatever, was still in his forties. His wife's fame and fortune had made his entire career redundant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled expectantly at Temple, waiting for her to toss back the conversational ball. She figured she'd learn more by letting him take the lead, which he did.
"Tell me about your job. Interviewing all those successful women must be interesting work."
"It is." Temple nodded brightly. "Sometimes annoying."
"Annoying?"
"Well, they're so rich and busy, and I'm just a freelance writer. I wish I could write one of these romances--"
"The pay isn't good at the beginning," he warned her. "And it's a lot of hard work in a pretty cutthroat business. Sharon has had to fight for every inch of progress she's made. She travels more than she writes."
"I don't think I'm cut out for romance writing anyway. Crime writing, now's there's an area I might go for. You did hear about the cover model murder?"
Herbert frowned and cleared his throat. "I guess they have to put those guys on the covers to sell books, but it's kind of hokey, don't you think--these prima donna musclemen? Oh, some of them seem decent enough fellows, but the women sure make idiots of themselves swooning over them."
Temple smiled conspiratorially. "I agree! It's embarrassing to see all these middle-aged women chasing the nearest pretty pectoral as if they were mainlining hormones. Shallow and silly. Pure ego-building."
Herbert blinked. He couldn't tell if Temple was putting him on or not. But he laughed, nervously, and that's when a short, plump woman with a really overcooked permanent in a shade of not-too-blond brown materialized by his side, her arm possessively through his. She was smiling, but through her teeth, and she made no effort to conceal her intense annoyance with them both.
"Thank you," she told Temple in steel-wool tones meant to rub her raw. "Thank you, miss, a mere stranger, for keeping my Herb busy while I was chatting with all my fans."
With that she jerked her entwined arm and led Herbert Harvey away like a delinquent labrador retriever brought to heel. He lumbered off faithfully.
Temple felt herself flushing, not for her masquerade, but for Sharon Rose's awful behavior to both of them. The nerve, as if Temple were some vamp trying to lure away a lawfully wedded husband just by talking to the man! As if he couldn't be trusted to be away from her uxorial claws for one minute. Why hadn't wifey-pooh bothered to include Herbert in her adoring circle, if she feared that he couldn't talk to another woman without imminent danger of seduction?
Kit cruised up, both hands brimming with goblets of white wine. "She just writes romance, remember? She doesn't necessarily know a thing about men, or marriage."
"I suppose that's an expert speaking." Temple took a glass and sipped before she forgot herself and spit. "What a-- Too bad I don't use those words about other women."
"Oh, make an exception. I know just what you mean." Kit turned to beam on the new, adjusted scene: Sharon Rose in bloom amid her admiring wreath of fans, ignored by nearby husband Herbert, who was sticking up like a transplanted stalk of hollyhock desperately in nee
d of water, or something much stronger.
"Her Herb," Temple repeated in the same pointed, trendy tone of voice.
"Are you stuttering, dear?"
"No, I'm trying to fathom that paranoid, possessive mentality. She must be insecure."
"Brilliant deduction."
"Still, why me? A stranger. What does she do to women who actually know her?"
"Grinds them into the ground with teeth-gritted pronouncements about how they should do everything from family rearing to writing a sex scene. And she smiles every moment. She'll go after men like a pit bull, too. I've seen her trotting around conventions with a whipped-dog male agent on one side and a humiliated female editor on the other, both two steps behind. That lady has a genius for dysfunctional living, actually. That's the book she should write: How to Whip Ass and Stomp Egos for Fun and Profit. "
"I could see someone murdering her. "
"No such luck. Nor does her husband strike me as the type to knock off a cover hunk, do you think?"
"Never! Why?"
"Oh, I happened to see the sales cover flat of Sharon Rose's new book before I left New York, Satin and Sagebrush. And it was Cheyenne's last, best moment, believe me. A smashing painting of him in cowboy gear, minus shirt and pants. Her 'personal pen pal' notes on the inside back bubbled about how fun it was to witness a cover shoot with a rising star."
"Then you came here and recognized him?"
"When I saw him dead. And undressed. He was reclining on the cover."
"That's a new angle. I suppose you didn't want to tell me until I had experienced the Rose of Sharon personality close up and personal. Ouch! Do you suppose I'll have the stomach to approach her later and ask some pointed questions?"
"It depends on how badly you want to know the answers."
While they talked quietly, Temple had been vaguely aware of a civilian, a woman in a modest knit top and slacks, standing, two or three feet away, out of earshot but clearly waiting.
"Yes?" Temple said.
She approached diffidently. "I saw you talking to Miss Rose. She seems awful nice."
"Hmm," said Temple in that politely noncommittal way the British have mastered since the time of the Norman invasion.
"I'm much too nervous to ask her for an autograph. Maybe I can just ask you about her. Is she as wonderful as her books?"
The woman's eyes were shining, as was her unpowdered nose. She would never be a bestselling novelist who touted down-home virtues while she ran roughshod over other people with a cattle prod.
How do you tell hero-worshipers that their idol has feet of corrugated steel?
Temple didn't. "She was lovely, just lovely." Temple smiled.
The woman nodded and floated off to the fringes of Sharon Rose's admirers.
"A legend is born," Kit muttered. "We all know what she's really like, having felt her bite as well as her bark, but we have to hear readers coo over her as if she were a plaster saint. And she doesn't write worth a damn, either. That's show biz. No justice."
"It would be nice if Sharon Rose had murdered Cheyenne."
"Nice, but pure fiction I fear. She doesn't need to kill anyone; she shrivels their spirits while they're still living, like her poor husband."
"Opposites do attract," Temple mused as they cruised through the mob looking for the blue-green neon of Electra's hair.
"Or maybe you're attracted to opposites. Your two guys look pretty diametrically different."
"I wish you wouldn't call them 'my two guys' as if I had a harem! Everything's on hold, at the moment, with everyone. Nobody is nobody's anything."
"Maybe you had better not try writing a romance. You don't make sense when you get excited, and that's fatal in the sex scenes."
"Fine," said Temple. "I'm more interested in fatalities than sex at the moment, anyway. Now let's find Electra so we can watch this show get on the road."
Kit kept meek silence as they do-si-doed around the room, stopping whenever someone recognized Kit or, more likely, the pseudonym on her name badge.
"Sulah Savage! I love your books!" the typical greeting would begin, an approach guaranteed to put a seraphic smile on the face of the hailed author. "When's the next 'Love's Inquisition' book coming out? I loved Reynaldo's story."
"My Spanish epic," Kit murmured modestly to Temple as they moved on, leaving an excited fan in their wake flashing Kit's phony signature at all her friends.
"Doesn't it feel funny to sign a made-up name?" Temple asked.
"Heavens no! I made it up myself. Besides, it's like playing a role.
When I appear as Sulah Savage, I'm in character as Sulah Savage. It's liberating to have an official alter ego."
"This is all about role-playing, isn't it?" Temple said.
"I told you, this is bookselling. Hype. Theater."
"Maybe the murderer was playing a role too. Or Cheyenne was. One he hadn't counted on playing."
"Of course Cheyenne was playing a role. That was his job."
"His job." Temple thought about that too. "I need to see more of what a cover hunk's job is like."
"Well, forget that for now and grab a chair, because Electra has been nice enough to save a couple seats at that table just ahead, and I hear the podium mike being tested by amateurs." A horrible screeching momentarily froze the assemblage before fading. "Showtime!"
"I've got to work on a good pseudonym," Electra said as soon as they sat down. "I've been talking to readers and they all say the name is very important."
"Electra Lark is a fabulous pen name!" Kit argued indignantly. "Not so long it will run off a book cover, but different as well as pretty."
"Everybody says it sounds like a pseudonym." Electra took a heartfelt slurp through the straw in her Blue Hawaii. "Besides, it isn't alliterative."
"All that alliteration is regarded as hokey today," Kit said. "You forget that I've been doing this for ages. I'd never use Sulah Savage now, but it's too late."
"What were you thinking of using?" Temple asked Electra.
"I've always wanted to be a Vivian."
"Well," Kit said, "we all know I didn't want to be an Ursula." She eyed Temple. "Did you ever cherish visions of another name?"
Since Temple Kinsella was the only speculating Temple had ever done in that area, and it was hardly a harmonious name, or appropriate to mention now, she kept quiet. Then some imp of unconscious invention put the name Temple Devine in her head. She swallowed her wine wrong, laughing the entire time as Kit and Electra pounded her on the back.
On the low, long staging area, spotlights were brightening.
"I think I'd keep Temple Barr," she whispered when she could talk again.
They both nodded, no longer interested, eyes focused on the narrow area of light in the darkened ballroom.
There followed the usual opening ceremony rituals at conferences everywhere, only with a romance novel twist. The president of G.R.O.W.L. welcomed the authors and readers. The president of Fabrizio's fan club came up and presented him with a sterling flacon for his new cologne, "Macho Man."
"Temple's been picked up by him," Kit leaned across her to tell Electra.
"No!" Electra leaned across Temple from the other side. "I've heard that he accosts women in elevators." She frowned. "I've also heard that he really doesn't care for women at all. So I guess both rumors can't be true."
By the time the two had finished hashing over Breezy's inclinations and/or lack of them, the model himself was gone, golden locks, silver flacon and all that muscle.
By the time Temple had realized that there was something very different about this opening ceremony--all the officials at the mike were women--the few obligatory speeches were over.
Another woman bathed in the spotlight, only she had the Barbie-doll hair for it. Temple blinked, and then a breathy monotone hyperventilated into the microphone.
"Ladies and ... ladies. And laddies." She glanced coyly to her left. Temple could just see the shining crowns of a long line of male models
.
"Oh, no," Temple moaned to her wine glass.
"My official duties don't begin until the pageant Saturday night, but I'm proud and pleased to introduce the contestants." A furious rustling of papers came over the mike.
"Who is she?" Kit was asking, dumbfounded.
"Looks like we didn't listen to the introduction. That has to be Las Vegas's version of Norma Desmond, the film star Savannah Ashleigh."
Beside her, Electra jolted into life from a long reverie. "That's it. My pseudonym. Great name."
"You can't use it, Electra. It's already her pseudonym, whatever her real name was."
"And besides," Kit put in consolingly, "it's much too long for a book cover. I've never heard of her,"
she added.
"You're lucky. I had to interview her during the Stripper Killer case. I would have gotten more, and more sensible information, out of her cat Yvette."
"Yvette? For a cat?"
"You should see it. A Persian, of course, a silver thistledown with tiny little teeth and claws. She keeps it in a pink canvas carrier."
"Savannah Ashleigh did what in a pink canvas carrier?" Electra demanded.
"Never mind. We better hush up while she's talking. I guess that's what you call it."
With another wicked giggle, this time shared with Kit, Temple settled down to serious listening. A clue might pop out from the mouths of babes. It was possible.
The mouth of this babe, though, continued to stumble over the models' names and vital statistics.
Perhaps Savannah needed reading glasses and was too vain to use them. Or perhaps she had never been able to read and talk at the same time.
Once called, the men bounded onto stage with the same eagerness as if they were about to be introduced to Sharon Stone. Confident, charming, each with a prepared off-the-cuff comment, they made Savannah Ashleigh look like the aspiring performer.
Female heads nodded approval all over the room, and each contestant was ushered off with enthusiastic applause, especially the blond-white-haired surfer male nurse who flung heart-shaped wrapped candies into the audience.
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