I walked inside the cool, brick-floored lobby and liked what I found. The lobby was comfortably furnished and quiet except for the occasional sound of muted laughter that drifted in from Oliver’s, the candlelit hotel lounge off to the right of the registration desk.
An efficient young desk clerk greeted me cheerfully.
“Jasmine Day,” I said.
“Oh, are you Mr. Beaumont?” the clerk asked.
“Yes.”
“Miss Day left word for you to go on up to her room. Sixth floor. To the right after you step off the elevator and all the way to the end of the corridor.”
As I stepped into the elevator I felt like an imposter, as if I had no right to be there, but Jasmine was the one who had assumed we were going to dinner. I decided my best strategy was to shut up and enjoy it.
I knocked on the door at the end of the corridor. It was opened by Jasmine Day herself. She was wearing a variation on a man’s white racer-backed tee shirt, except that it had an intricate rhinestone design bordering the neck and shoulders. The shirt came down to her knees and was cinched in just above her hips by a loose-fitting gold lamé belt.
Her long legs were encased in a pair of very close-fitting tights that ended just above well-formed ankles. Her shoes, three-inch hooker heels, were made of delicate gold lamé straps.
Jasmine Day tossed her head impatiently, loose blonde hair shimmering across her shoulders. “Well, are you going to come inside, or are you going to stand out there gawking all night?”
Hastily I went inside. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
Jasmine Day shut the door behind her. She leaned against it for a fraction of an instant looking up at me. “That’s all right,” she said resignedly. “I suppose I should be used to it by now.”
Briskly, she walked past me into the room. Near the window was a seating area made up of two plush apricot chairs and a matching couch. Between them, on a glass coffee table, sat a single cup of coffee. She picked it up and took a sip, studying me carefully over the rim of the cup.
“So you’re a friend of Dan Osgood’s,” she said noncommittally.
I made no reply to her comment. I glanced around the room uneasily. It was evidently a suite. There was nothing in sight that remotely resembled a sleeping area. A round conference table in one corner was buried beneath several bouquets of flowers as well as a basket of fruit and an unopened bottle of champagne.
“Fans,” she explained. “I guess they enjoyed the show.”
She had finally given me a conversational opening I figured I could handle. “So did I,” I ventured. “You throw everything you’ve got into your performance.”
“Not everything,” she said evenly. “There are some things I hold back.”
The coffee cup rapped sharply against the glass-topped table as she set it down. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you here before we went to dinner.”
She motioned me toward the unoccupied chair opposite her. I moved mechanically toward the chair, conscious of her unblinking eyes riveted on my face, aware of the almost hypnotic effect her voice had on me.
“We have to go over the ground rules,” she said quietly.
“Over what?”
“The ground rules.” She smiled, seeming to enjoy my obvious discomfort. “You see, every so often the guys who end up with Ed Waverly’s comp tickets think it’s a package deal, that if we go to dinner, I’ll be dessert.”
“Miss Day, I…”
She held up a hand, effectively silencing me. “So this is what we’ll do. We’ll go have a quiet little dinner someplace. You talk and I’ll listen, or vice versa. Then you bring me back here and I’ll come up to my room alone, all right?”
“Right,” I said, nodding in agreement.
Jasmine Day smiled brightly in return, revealing a dazzling array of perfectly formed, straight white teeth. “Good,” she said, “but just in case you forget, there’s one more thing I should mention.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a brown belt hanging in my closet. It doesn’t have anything to do with my wardrobe.”
It was a moment or two before her hands-off-or-else meaning soaked into my thick skull, but I finally got the picture.
“Let’s go, then,” I said abruptly, getting up. “Our dinner reservation is for ten forty-five. The kitchen closes at eleven-thirty.”
As we rode down in the elevator, Jasmine Day casually reached out a hand and took my arm. I suddenly felt as if I was caged up with a lioness who had momentarily sheathed her claws. It didn’t improve my already limited ability as a conversationalist.