She finished lacing the first boot and stared at me in disbelief. “What kind of network?”
“A distribution network, Jasmine. Sales. In a big way. And I think they’ve been using your tour as a front.”
“My tour? Using me and my name to sell drugs?”
At my nod, her face went rigid. “And because of my past, you assumed…”
“It was more than just your past that suckered me in. They’ve gone to great lengths to make it look as if you were personally involved in the murders.”
She stepped toward me with the limping gait of someone with one shoe off and one on. She stopped only inches from my face. “You said ‘to make it look like.’ Does that mean you no longer suspect me?”
“Of the murders? No, I don’t.”
“What about the drugs?”
“The jury’s still out on that.”
Her face went stony and she swung away from me. She snatched up the waiting boot and jerked it onto her foot.
There was a knock on the door. “Five minutes, Miss Day.”
“Leave me alone,” she said wearily. “Just go away and leave me alone. I’ve got a show to put on.”
When she bent over to slip on the second boot, the neckline of the jumpsuit fell open, offering a brief glimpse of what lay underneath. A glimpse and a reminder.
“Jasmine, let me help you. Let’s try to get to the bottom of this together.”
Her fingers were busy lacing the boot. She didn’t look up at me. “Fat chance,” she said. “You’ve helped me enough already. Ed told me from the beginning that if there was any trouble, it would be my ass.”
She finished with the boot and straightened up abruptly, but she didn’t look in my direction as she stalked over to the dressing table and picked up a pot of makeup. With a practiced hand she began to touch up her face. When she finished, she set the makeup back on the counter, her eyes defiantly meeting and holding mine in the reflection in her mirror.
There was another knock on the door. “Curtain, Miss Day.”
She stood up. “I’d better go,” she said.
“I have a witness who says the killer let himself into the Morris-Thomas house with a key to the front door. I’m willing to bet the key to that house is here, either in your dressing room or your purse, or in your hotel room.”
Without a word, Jasmine opened a wire drawer underneath the Formica top of the dressing table and pulled out a small, white, beaded clutch bag. She unsnapped the top and held the purse upside down above the table.
A collection of junk tumbled out of it onto the counter. There were several tubes of lipstick, some unidentified makeup containers, a nail file, a hodgepodge of loose change, an open checkbook with some paper money visible inside it, a few slightly used tissues, and a collection of credit-card receipts. There were also some keys, a single hotel room key along with two other separate key rings.
She looked down at the pile and frowned. “That’s not mine,” she said.
“What’s not yours?”
She started to reach for one of the two key rings, a chain with a Greenpeace Save-the-Whales charm on it. I caught her hand in midair.
“Don’t touch it,” I commanded.
For a moment our eyes met. Then she nodded quietly and allowed her hand to drop to her side.
There was another urgent pounding on the door. “Jasmine, where the hell are you?” Alan Dale shouted. “It’s time. You’re on.”
“I’m coming,” she answered. She started for the door.
“Break a leg,” I told her.
She stopped, her hand on the knob, and turned to look at me. All the anger and rage had drained from her face. She gave me a wan imitation of a smile.
“Are you going to come watch?” she asked. “Since it’s my farewell performance, I plan to put on one hell of a show.”
“I’d like to,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
She grinned, ruefully. “I don’t mind.”
Jasmine Day opened the door then. The members of the orchestra were fidgeting with their instruments, tuning them, checking them out, making noise to cover the fact that the second act was slow in starting.
I watched as she took a deep breath and squared those slender shoulders. She did a final check, her hands smoothing the material of her jumpsuit, patting the wig to be sure it was in place, straightening her collar.
She seemed to grow taller as she stood there, becoming somehow more imposing. Westcoast Starlight Productions might have canceled the tour, but there was no doubt in my mind that Jasmine Day was every inch a star. I watched her go, striding with feline grace toward the piano I knew waited for her on the other side of the stage.