Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Ladies-in-Waiting

Temple moved on to the parlor, where Kit had corralled the Sapphire Slipper’s staff.

Kit came snowshoeing over the thick wool carpet to Temple like a happy puppy.

“I’ve been getting acquainted with the girls,” she whispered. “What a tragicomic bunch of life stories! They’re a whole play by Eugene O’Neill via Neil Simon. They make A Chorus Line look like Little Orphan Annie. I’m getting an idea for a revue here. A play. A novel!

“A bunch of women are trapped in snowstorm in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, only it’s in Nevada—maybe the mountains, there’s snow there, right?—and there are no men in the cast. Just the women talking: whores and wives and would-be wives. Wolves howling in the distance—”

“A perfect offstage role for the Fontana pack,” Temple interrupted.

“Wolves? No, these would be real wolf voices, tribal brutality at bay, the Taliban, maybe—”

“Kit, I hate to derail the creative muse when it’s mingling Medea with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with White Fang, but I just learned something pretty awful, and—worse—maybe relevant.”

“About what?”

“About who,” Temple whispered, grabbing her aunt’s thin wrist and pulling her into the archway to the bar, where Fontana Inc. awaited under the supervision of Van von Rhine. “The girlfriends said Aldo’s significant other died a year ago. She was an aerial performer and fell during practice. Broke her neck. Did you know that?”

Kit had sobered instantly, plunging from creative mania into deep concern.

“Yes. He told me, of course. He said he liked that I did something safe. What could happen to a writer?”

“No wonder the poor man freaked when you were mistaken for me at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and attacked with a garrote.”

“I think that only made both of us realize we didn’t want to be apart.”

“Maybe you’re not so safe. We assumed you were attacked because you wore a pink hat and are my physical double.”

“Yeah?”

“But what if it was because you were seeing Aldo morning, noon, and midnight?”

Kit had always been a fast study. She bit her lip and looked around the not-so-innocent rooms that surrounded them. “That’s what you learned from interviewing the Fontana brothers’ ditsy girlfriends?”

Temple nodded. “Maybe one’s not so ditsy, but got fixated on Aldo—”

“Maybe crazy like a fox.” Kit nodded too. “Maybe you better interview these real ‘foxes’ fast to get an idea of what’s really going on in this henhouse.”

“Maybe, and amen.”

Temple found that the sisters of joy, gathered en masse in a Victorian-style parlor with no men around to make them bill and coo, looked a lot like of dispirited hens on a rococo roost. All that blue together was starting to look . . . tired. Even tawdry.

Not only their feathers, but their faces seemed to droop.

“Wouldn’t you all normally be hard at work now?” Temple asked as she sat on a plump, tiger-striped ottoman.

“Depends on what you consider ‘work,’ “ one noted in a desultory voice.

“Earning money,” Temple said briskly. She wasn’t going to be trapped into thinking of them as “exotic.” It wasn’t a coincidence that another euphemism for their ancient profession was “workingwoman.” And not a coincidence that employed women from the 1890s streets of New York to modern-day Baghdad were called “no better than whores.”

Except here in Vegas a workingwoman could get stoned on the job in a whole different way than in a fundamentalist Muslim country.

And in Nevada, the authorities policed these “chicken ranches.” The women were healthy, protected, and drug-and disease-free. Elsewhere in Las Vegas, the roulette wheel was in fine fettle and you pays your money and you takes your chances, as the carnival barkers say.

She had set aside the troubling question of Aldo’s dead significant other and was regarding the young women gathered around, all mostly under thirty or nearing forty at the outside, with a teacher’s fond expectations.

Temple understood that they had been primed to perform.

“The first thing we need to establish,” Temple said in a slow, serious tone, “is who the dead girl upstairs is. You know that the police will have to be called. When they are, they’ll come here in force, along with a lot of forensics staff.

“It won’t be as gory or glamorous as CSI: Las Vegas, but it will sure disrupt everybody’s lives. The more information we can dig up now so you can give it confidently and truthfully to the police, the better off everyone will be.”

“Except that dead girl.”

The first to talk back was a skinny black woman.

“True,” Temple said. “I’d better get your names.”

“They’re simple. We use the alphabet so our clients can remember to ask for us again.”

“Alphabet pseudonyms?” Temple asked doubtfully.

“We even sit in alphabetical order.”

“So the clients know where to spot you the second or twelfth time around?”

“Right. On the far left of the first sofa is Angela, then Ba-bette, Crystal, Deedee, Fifi, Gigi, Heather, Inez, Jazz, Kiki, Lili, Niki, and I’m Zazu.”

There were a lot more blondes of every shade among the residents than among the bridesmaids, curled, or tousled, or spiky. It made the girls harder to tell apart.

“So everyone who’s here is someone who should be here?” Temple asked.

There was a pause, almost as if a moment of mental communion occurred, then all the bedheads nodded.

“Then who is she?” Temple got up to show the dead woman’s cell phone image to everyone in reverse alphabetical order, studying their reactions.

“Nobody we recognize for sure,” said the first one, Zazu, who wore a blue peignoir over skimpy French underwear. At least Temple assumed it was French, since she had never seen the like, even online.

The others agreed in turn, in different words, but just as definitely.

“That hairdo is way too long and loose for one of us.”

“Men like piled and teased hair that’s easy to disarrange.”

“That there’s a receptionist pageboy. No guy would ask her for anything but directions.”

Their instant summations were unnerving. Temple realized that their world was one of appearances and snap judgments. So they were judged by the customers, and so they judged everyone.

Like Kit, Temple found the house girls amazingly open and even chatty once the ice had been broken. They reminded her of teenagers at a pajama party. Theirs was an all-female society. Of course men came into it every night, and then they performed their agreed-upon sexual pas de deux with whoever paid.

But the real culture of the Sapphire Slipper wasn’t the hordes of men who arrived and departed, but the ongoing daily gossip, pampering, laughing, interaction of the women. Temple had sensed the same sort of high school camaraderie in the dressing room of a strip club she had once visited undercover.

These women had never gotten past the trauma of their families, the casual bonding of girls in passage, the sharing of fripperies and laughs, the bored, knowing, eyebrow-raising worldliness of girls who’d had to grow up faster than was good for them.

In a strange, warped way, they were convinced that anyone who subscribed to a monogamous, straight way of life was either deluded or a liar.

To answer the famous song line, “Is that all there is?” they were sure that this, their commercially intimate lives, was all that there was.

It was only in going over her notes of their names and descriptions later that she noticed the E and M girls were missing before the string jumped to Zazu at the end.