Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Break Dancing

Darned if the brothel “break room” didn’t resemble any small business cafeteria, if it was for a funky, loosely run operation.

Matt took in the Formica-topped vintage dinette sets scattered over the vinyl tile floor. Their chrome legs and trim were age-dulled, but their cheerful seat covers in maroon, purple, yellow, and red plastic resembled a field of large, gaudy mushrooms.

A big white refrigerator was the elephant in the room, dwarfing a roomy microwave on an adjacent wheeled cart. A similar cart hosted a small TV. If small Lucite trays holding fingernail files, polish, and glue, lip gloss and mascara wands weren’t lying on the tables, Matt would have felt as at home as in a convent kitchen.

But the Age of Innocence was past, and this kind of communal living had nothing churchly about it.

Matt’s impression of the resident courtesans had been that they all looked alike. This open call interview session Temple had dreamed up for him would force him to discover differences and, perhaps, suspects.

It was likely one of their own, after all, who lay murdered upstairs. He shivered, more because Miss Kitty had kicked up the air-conditioning when it was obvious they’d be stuck out here with the body for a few hours. But that was like trying to stop the Red Sea from parting with an air machine.

“Howdy, Mr. Midnight. My name is Angela. We’re coming in alphabetically, so you get the heavenly body first.”

Angela paused in the doorway in typical temptress pose, one arm up along the frame, the other hand on her hip. At least she wore something, a sheer peignoir over a corset with garter straps and thong panties. Matt would never get what was hot about such outfits. Must be hangovers from Victorian repression. Analyzing that kept him from ogling Angela’s celestial form, which did look slim and firm and shiny in a Barbie doll sort of way he found a little too perfect.

“You know me?” Matt asked as she swaggered over on her four-inch spikes, jerked open the refrigerator door and regarded the contents long enough to give him a good rear view.

She finally found a can of some new-wave high-energy drink and joined him in sitting at the gray Formica-topped table.

“I never thought you’d be a customer out here at the Sapphire Slipper,” Angela said.

“I’m not. I was hijacked. We town guys all were.”

“I looove your voice on the radio. It’d be a real kick to hear it whispering in my ear some night. Tables turned.”

He ignored her come-on. “So you’ve actually heard my program?”

“We all have, honey, coming down from a night’s work in here. Unwinding. Gettin’ down. Who do you think we tune in to? Mr. Mellow Midnight.”

He knew he had long-haul truckers and night casino staff in his invisible audience, but he’d never dreamed whole brothels of shady ladies would tune in. “You close at midnight, then?” he asked, surprised.

“That’s our hours, noon to midnight. It’s a long drive back to anywhere from here, and even good-time guys and hookers gotta sleep sometimes.”

He eyed the hall off the kitchen. “Those are your quarters?”

“Yup. You wanta see?”

Matt thought it might be illuminating. “Yeah. Do all the . . . places have this arrangement? The guest bedrooms up front and fancy, and a, like, dorm for the residents in back?”

She stood and leaned over him, as her lips enunciated the words only inches from his. “No, my Midnight Man. Some of the lower-end places have the girls work out of their living quarters. In a way, it’s more convenient.”

But this was more convenient for a murderer, to kill on what amounted to a stage set, far from where the residents actually slept.

Matt stood. “My curiosity is purely academic.”

“Yeah, sure.” She smiled enticingly over her filmy blue shoulder as she led him down the dim, plain hall. She reminded him of the huge plaster figure atop the Blue Mermaid Motel, a knowing creature in her element, relishing that he was out of his.

It took five minutes to figure out the courtesan’s quarters were as bare and practical as a convent. How unnerving that women consecrated to no sex and women living on nothing but sex ending up in such spare, unsensual circumstances.

He saw single beds without head or footboards, cheap motel dressers bought by multiples with matching bedside tables. Blinds on windows. Everything institutional, although stuffed animals lined up against the plain beige walls and the dresser tops here were littered with gaudy rhinestones and garters, not the simple string of rosary beads and a small photo of the old folks at home. There were no photos of anyone but these women, taken at formally happy moments, in a line in the parlor, laughing in the break room. They were family.

Nuns, of course, were an old and dying breed. These women were a breed as old as prehistory probably, and not dying out at all.

“Knowing the layout of the place will help put the murder in perspective,” Matt commented as they returned to the main room.

“ ‘The place.’ You can’t even call it a chicken ranch. A brothel. A bordello. A whorehouse. You give all that advice out night after night to sad and lonely people, but you never give us spirit-lifters out here on the desert a moment of thought or credit. Send some of those road-weary truckers thinking too hard on their lonely lives our way, Mr. Midnight. That’d be some real good counsel.”

“If you’d give them the same personal attention you’re giving me right now, I can see your point.”

“You can see a lot more than that, but you’re not looking. Engaged, I hear, like tall, dark, and Aldo. That doesn’t stop guys from coming out here.”

“How’d you get that information?”

“Those ditsy girlfriends. They chatter up a storm. Not used to being rounded up in a group and kept isolated out here in the desert.”

“The resident girls aren’t chat-happy?”

“This is our workplace, hon. It’s hard work catering to men who expect a hundred percent every minute for their money. We get worn-out. No time for pajama party gossip. We are the pajama party.”

“Do you have any . . . protection?”

“You speaking sexually? We are all condoms all the time. Every place, every act.”

“Um, no. I meant a . . . union.”

“Not here. We do have an ‘association’ and bylaws. We’re freelance workers like your girlfriend. We accept jobs, see them through, get paid, kick back a commission to our landlord for room and board and providing the necessities, and move on in a few weeks to another place, another part of the country.”

“You like that?”

“Which parts?”

“The rootlessness.”

“You bet. Not everybody can travel for their job and get paid for it. There are a lot of laughs going on all over this country. We work the hot spots. East Coast, West Coast, and Vegas. Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast some. Gambling brings out high rollers or would-be high rollers. Both winning and losing brings ‘em home to the Sapphire Slipper.”

“What brought Madonnah back to the Sapphire Slipper?”

Angela forgot her seductress act to think before she spoke. Sincerely. “I don’t know. Our schedules are our own. That’s one of the best parts of the job. Thinking about it, that probably is her upstairs. Like her to slip in unnoticed, but she sure didn’t leave that way this time. I don’t know why she came back before she was expected. Maybe because she liked doing the unexpected. She was—”

“What?”

“A loner. Kept to herself. We don’t have to bond like Lassie and Timmy here, but sisterhood helps. She kept aloof.”

“Stuck-up?”

Angela shook her head. “Not that. Just deep inside her own troubles maybe. Like she was just visiting. Always. Just visiting. Tuned out, that’s exactly what she was doing. Only it was the planet, not just our little ole whorehouse.”

Matt digested Angela’s analysis. These women saw a lot of men, and women, at their worst. He trusted Angela’s instincts. That’s what hookers and midnight radio shrinks relied on. Their instincts about strangers in the night.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Next!” she announced as she flounced through the doorway.

“And you are—?” he asked the busty brunette who paused in the doorway to show off her saloon girl figure.

“Babette, Daddy.”

He hated that “Daddy” thing. “I’m Matt.”

“We know who you are. We’re your regular listeners. It’s a thrill to have you on our turf, to see you in person, and isn’t that a nice sight? Are we what you like?”

“I like women,” Matt said. “All ages and stages.”

“Yeah?” Babette was nearing forty as far as Matt could tell. The maternal sort, with all that natural or assisted mammary development. There was a courtesan here for every druther. Even it was mother. Babette heaved her boobs atop the table and crossed her arms in front of them. “What can I do for you, baby?”

Ten minutes later he was ushering Babette out to bring in Crystal.

“Why the alphabetical names?” he asked the thirtyish woman. She was lean with a narrow harsh face and wore a lot of Goth gear he tried to ignore. He was sure her looks determined her shtick.

“We use different names in different places. Vegas attracts a lot of johns. The alphabet helps keep them grounded to who’s who and who does what.”

“And the dead woman . . . ?”

“Madonnah? Guess she turned out to be a kind of Jonah, didn’t she?”

He was surprised to hear this Wicked Queen woman make a biblical reference.

“Oh, I was raised on the Holy Book,” she said, her dark eyes glittering like the iridescent spiky black tattoos on her upper arms. “Whomping my bare bottom with it until I bled.”

“Did you know Madonnah’s real name?” he said, unwilling to go there.

“She said Mary Jo once, but I’ve heard Miss Kitty call her Nonah once too. I don’t know which is the real one, but we take names close to our own. Like Jazz was Jasmine.”

“And you, Crystal?”

“Crystal is beautiful, fine glass and it cuts.”

He noticed the scars on her forearms. Self-cutting. She noticed him noticing and sneered. “Cathy. What a wimp that little bitch was.”

“Crystal shatters,” he reminded her. “But you are far from being a wimp.”

“I’m not a fan,” she said. “You don’t live in a real world.”

“Agreed. Not that real a world. So you thought Madonnah was a wimp too.”

“Did I say so?”

“Yeah. Loud and clear.”

“You think you hear things, over the airwaves. You think you see things.” She glanced at her scarred and tattooed arms. “I could show you some things, if you had the guts to come up to my room.”

He didn’t, and he knew it. “No one can go there but you, until you’re ready to come out.”

“Scared?” Jeering again.

“Damn right. You win. At last.”

She drew back, not liking the ease of her victory. “I have nothing to tell you.”

“Not anymore. Thanks for the insight on Madonnah. It might help.”

She stood, glowering. “I don’t want help.”

“No, but I thought you might want to help. A little.”

“She was okay. I guess.”

Crystal turned in a crackle of black taffeta skirts and left.

Matt wiped the invisible veil of sweat off his upper lip before . . . Deedee came in.

Temple would pay for setting these brassy, sassy, glassy women on him, but not in the way Crystal would want.

Matt took notes, but Deedee, Fifi, and Gigi were as featherweight as their names, which really were: Dolores, Frances, and Geraldine. Too many girls were still named after their grandmothers. They had seen Madonnah around for three years. She kept to herself, was a little nervous. Seemed like she wasn’t really cut out for the Life. Didn’t have much fun, but delivered for the johns.

Matt turned over a page in his Hello Kitty notebook, courtesy of Miss Kitty.

These big-eyed kitty drawings reminded him of the slitty-eyed real cats prowling the Sapphire Slipper. He’d never admit it to Temple, but he found Midnight Louie’s presence . . . encouraging. That old tomcat always knew where the rats were hidden. Matt thought he’d glimpsed the old boy hanging around that sleek Sapphire Slipper house cat, Baby Blue. He hoped Louie would not let blatant sex appeal divert him from his forever mission of protecting Temple.

Then there was the matter of the Bed between them. Matt knew Louie was used to taking his leisure on Temple’s California king mattress. Matt wasn’t about to share her horizontal time with a cat, especially not after they were married. He supposed he and Louie would just have to duke that out between them. Matt was a reasonable man, but he knew who would win that contest. Black topped blond except in Temple’s human love life.

“I’m Heather,” breathed a Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy voice from the doorway.

She was a provocative blend of the two. Matt was reminded of a photo of MM he’d seen, wearing a dark Jackie K wig (way before she’d become Jackie O, which made her Jackie K-O in some weird way), and pearls and palazzo pants and a soft flowing blouse.

The odd thing was that Marilyn had never looked more relaxed than in that prism high-fashion outfit. Otherwise she was molded, pinched, corseted, and confined until overflowing like these SS women.

Matt found himself confounded by this eternal cultural icon of madonna-whore. The really weird part was both celebrated women had been deemed to play both those roles in their tumultuous private lives.

“Heather,” he said, playing for time. “On the hill?”

“Not Scottish. Maybe Heather as in ‘heathen.’”

“Another fan, I guess. You know my history. You have the advantage.”

“That’s nice.” She slithered around him, touching his shoulder with a false fingernail, before she sat. “I like the advantages.”

“What about Madonnah?”

“Her? Didn’t belong here. Didn’t want to play the game. Games. She didn’t even listen to your show.”

“No!” Matt feigned horror. “I thought I was the house DJ after-hours.”

“Not just you.” Heather pushed herself up to grab a bunch of chilled grapes from the refrigerator.

Matt thought: Roman orgy. Was he programmable! Putty in their practiced hands.

“We loved your clients, is that what you’d call them?” Heather had a lovely English accent. Maybe her real name was . . . Helena. He could be bewitched if he didn’t know better. “Charming people. You are always so considerate of them. Reminds us of our own jobs. Consideration. Quite a lost art, don’t you think?”

He nodded.

“It won’t help you solve bloody murder, of course. The people who do that are always inconsiderate. Look at Sherlock Holmes. Snooty sort! Hercule Poirot! Another airy-fairy! But not you.”

Heather, with her hooked nose, too close-set eyes, and rugged complexion had managed to seat herself on his lap to fondle his shirt buttons.

He laughed. “Of all the seducers at the Sapphire Slipper, you’re the one having the most fun. What about Madonnah?”

Heather gazed past his shoulder, imperiously. “No. No, Madonnah. No fun fast, as the Americans say. A very sober girl. Scared sober, I should say. Not like you, Bertie Wooster Baby. You’d like to be scared out-of-your mind drunk.”

“Not now. Not here. Thanks very much. Mind the gap,” he added in the robotic tone of a London Underground recorded message as he stood to unlap her and show her out the archway.

She growled and snapped at him, but went.

Mind the gap! Matt couldn’t believe he was ably parading prostitutes in and out of his lunchroom office like an Inspector of the Yard. Temple had a lot to answer for.

Inez was a Latina beauty with a tender manner. He could see her reared as a good girl, wearing a white mantilla and clutching a white First Communion prayer book and rosary at Mass . . . until some junior high gang-banger deflowered her in a back car seat and it was all over, the days of white and roses. Her culture was black and white, bad and good, and she was suddenly done wrong and irremediably bad.

So she went the way she’d been pushed.

She was a lovely girl, and his heart ached for her, but she wasn’t used to observing and making judgments, just living in her narrow aisle of deserved (she thought) purgatory.

He sent some Hail Marys after her, but doubted they’d catch up to her scurrying spike-heeled steps.

It was starting to weigh on him, like too many confessions heard in a row, the lives lived and not lived here. The ghosts of gaiety and ghastliness that make up the all-too-human condition.

What was he learning?

That the courtesans were gypsies, birds of passage who often bunked together but made no lasting ties. Not with the johns and not with one another. They shared the intimacy of sisters and lovers everywhere they went, but went everywhere alone.

That didn’t seem likely to lead to murder. Yet, maybe where sex was so casual, death would be too. Matt couldn’t fathom these women. He’d picked up that they liked their tawdry notoriety. They burbled about Web pages and blogs and steady customers always welcoming them back wherever they went. About MySpace.com and You Tube.

He found the lifestyle all too depressing. Sure, some of the women showed obvious signs of the childhood abuse that leads to sexual acting out. But some really seemed more like entrepreneurs, peddling their flesh with gusto and even glee of a sort.

Still, they were hooked on the midnight sob stories he heard on WCOO-AM radio.

Still, there was always one more rich john who would drape them in goodies, or a lonely one who’d leave consoled, or a reluctant one, like Matt, who needed to be cajoled. It was unnerving to think that he could have sex with every one of these women, or even several at once, all for what was a reasonable price for his income level.

But he’d been reared a Roman Catholic, not a Roman emperor, and orgies were not for him. Nor celibacy, anymore. Thank God.

And still Jazz and Kiki and Lili and Niki and that ole devil Zazu to go. It already felt like a long night, and no one was having any fun yet.

“What is it with the names?” he asked Jazz.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to reinvent yourself?” She was a fresh-faced pixie of a girl, with acne spots peeking through the pancake and the Clearasil. Maybe . . . twenty-two.

“I think we all do, sometimes.”

“Well, we can be whoever we want. Someplace else, we’re somebody else. Someplace else I use an English accent and go by Dana. “ ‘Wot’ll ya ‘ave, Ducks?’ ”

Jazz giggled at his expression. “You don’t have to take that personally. You’re better-looking than I’d thought, though. Most radio guys sound like Dr. Kool on the airwaves and look like Moby Dick the whale off the air. We get a lot of DJ guys. With us, on the other hand, whatcha see is whatcha get. We’re more honest.”

“Looking good isn’t that important.”

“Say you! I know. I mean, I’ve seen hookers with faces to die for. Bodies too. Models, only they’re too well endowed for the human hanger trade. Some of those don’t do too well at this. Snobby, I guess. They scare the guys.”

“What about Madonnah?”

“Madonnah? She wasn’t bad-looking. Never the kind of girl to play Queen La-ti-dah in the back of the house. Not that enthusiastic about her work. You got to work it, you know. Flash it, flaunt it, make a guy want to spend hard cash on some fun with you. She didn’t seem like a girl who was in it for fun.”

“She didn’t make much money then?”

“Enough, I guess. It kept her on the circuit. Some of the girls you know from the skin out. Some you never know. She was one of the never-knows, that’s why it was so weird she was killed. You wouldn’t have thought anyone was that . . . what’s the word?”

“Passionate about her?”

“Yeah. She was laid-back. Despite our profession, that is not a salable quality.”

Jazz bounced out in her gymnast-pixie way to make room for Kiki, Lili, and Niki.

Matt was asking for the others in groups now, figuring K, L, and N wouldn’t have much new to tell him. And he was wearing out from the parade of bouncing, flagrant party girls. Sultans and polygamists bewildered him. But the impulse to combine proved unwontedly provocative.

“Say, Mr. Midnight. I guess you’re up for a group scene!”

One was a blonde, one was a brunette, and one was auburn-haired. He knew he’d never remember who was Kiki or Lili or Niki, so he thought of them as gold, bronze, and copper.

They wanted to swarm him, but he made them take chairs at the table like civilized girls.

“This is serious. One of you is dead, and the police will soon be interrogating all of you for real.”

“So you’re our practice run,” the blonde suggested. “Ask away. We are all way too friendly by profession to commit murder.”

“Killers don’t advertise,” he answered. “They don’t have the look written all over them.”

“You know what you have written all over you?” the brownette asked suggestively.

He didn’t encourage her with an answer, but she rushed on uninvited. “You look like Mr. First Time in a house of pleasure. Could we give you a welcome party!”

“Is there a lot of that?”

“Welcome parties?” asked the redhead, Niki. “Every night.”

“I mean clients wanting multiple courtesans.” He was beginning to appreciate the old-fashioned dignity of the term courtesan.

“They almost all want it,” blondie said.

“But they can’t all afford it,” brownie added.

“And some just don’t dare to admit it,” the redhead finished, eyeing him as no doubt the latter.

“Do you get a lot of bachelor parties here?” he asked.

They shrugged in triplicate, and chorused, “Some.”

“It’s not like we get the Fontana brothers in one big bunch ever.” Kiki was the blonde.

“What a shame this gig was a bust,” Lili, the brownette, said.

“None of the houses in the state can put up a sign saying, ‘The Fontana Brothers Were Here.’ That would be a huge notch on the bedpost, let me tell you.”

“I’m relieved to hear that my almost-in-laws are so upstanding.”

Niki, the redhead, loosed a shower of laughter. “What you just said!”

Matt realized any Nevada chicken ranch was a House of Double Entendres, and he was unwary enough to deliver them COD.

“Always glad to amuse,” he added. “Now. About your dead associate.”

“Associate,” Kiki mocked. “I guess that’s what we do, girls. Ass-o-shi-ate.”

“This isn’t fun and games. Madonnah is dead. You girls must feel something about that. Maybe a john was after her for some reason. Sneaked in and killed her.”

“Look,” said Lili. “Nevada is the only state where sex trade workers are guaranteed clean and protected. We can’t come in here and work unless we check out weekly. So we don’t have violence and all that stuff that comes with working the streets with pimps. It’s a great gig, and when we’re off elsewhere, we make real sure we’re fit to come back here. So there are no tooth-gnashing johns raving about scabbies or herpes or anything bad. It’s more likely they’ve got the diseases, and we see that what breeds in Vegas, stays in Vegas, thanks to c-o-n-d-o-m-s.”

“Not a hundred percent effective. Maybe she had a baby once—? Doesn’t that ever happen?”

A silence, then Niki spoke. “We don’t talk about that if it does. It’s as much a secret among us as it is out there in Henderson or some hoity-toity suburb. We mind our own business. And Madonnah minded her own even more than we did.”

“She doesn’t seem like she was part of the gang.”

“She wasn’t,” Kiki said. “Some of us are like that. Private. Good-time girls maybe had bad times once. We don’t ask, and we don’t tell.”

“That makes it tough to solve a murder.”

“It makes it tough to get anything on any of us, too,” Lili said, standing. “We’re done here, Mr. M., unless you want to pay for something personal.”

He shook his head. He’d actually managed to put names with faces during their talk, but what they offered was pretty nameless and faceless anyway.

He sat there for a minute, enjoying the silence. Madonnah had been an odd duck here, though none of them had put it that way. He suddenly realized that she had a room here, and he wanted to see it. He could ask Miss Kitty and make a big, public deal of it. Or—

“Miss Zazu, I presume,” he said, rising as a tall, angular black woman entered the room without posing in the doorway.

“I hate cops,” she said.

“Good. I’m not one. I’m just the preview.” He didn’t bother sitting again.

This woman wouldn’t domesticate and with her five-inch hooker spikes she was taller than he. Taller than most men.

“I’m betting,” he said, “that you’re like the others. You didn’t have much to do with the late Madonnah.”

The dark eyes set in ivory whites blinked. She lived to contradict. “We talked some. Madonnah weren’t so standoffish as those cows think.”

Ah. A rebel in the house. “Could one of them have killed her?”

“Didn’t have the balls.”

“I’d like to see her room.”

Those corrosive eyes flicked him with disdain, like he was some kind of ghoul.

“None of the others knows anything about her,” Matt admitted. “When someone gets murdered . . . somebody thinks he or she has a reason.”

“None of the others bother knowing anything about her. They likes to pretend they get down. They flash. They players. You wanta see her crib? C’mon, motormouth man.”

Matt wasn’t sure he should walk the long hall with this bad girl but he wanted to find some trace of a personality for Madonnah. Anything.

“You’re the only one seems to have a reaction to her.”

“I watch. She was one lone sistah. She always watched others, but she not watch herself.” Zazu paused. They were in the demi-dark, only closed doors facing each other for another sixty feet. “I didn’t watch close enough.”

She resumed walking.

“I’m sorry.”

She stopped, stared at him like a cat from the dark. After a long pause, she resumed walking. “Maybe you is.”

He let out a breath.

“Maybe not,” she added.

Matt found her dead seriousness a relief from the forced whorehouse gaiety the other women broadcast. Here was someone who didn’t beat death off like an encroaching moth around a porch light.

“Her room.” Zazu stood in the hall while Matt opened the door—with his jacket bottom to avoid leaving prints on the knob, just in case; they were already all over upstairs—and stepped inside.

Light flared on, weak through the standard opaque glass dish that concealed a cheap one-bulb ceiling fixture. Zazu had reached inside to flip the wall switch. She must have been in here often enough to not worry about prints. These rooms looked like cells: stripped to essentials. Madonnah’s didn’t have even a framed photo, a goofy giveaway key ring of a Care Bear. A personal set of nail polish.

“Nothing much here,” he commented.

“Sometime nothing much says a lot.” Zazu was looming behind him, in the room without making a sound.

Despite, or because of that, he used a tissue from the plain discount-store box on the bedside table to open drawers, gawk in the closet.

“Bathroom’s down the hall. We don’t get private accommodations, not even for tending our privates.”

This woman didn’t sugarcoat things. “It’s a public business, isn’t it? Not many secrets.”

“No secrets. Or . . . almost none.”

“You know one? Or two?”

“Maybe. I don’t tell.”

“Not even if it would help find Madonnah’s killer? I found her, you know. Tried to breathe life back into her. Too late.”

“Y’all’s not even supposed to be here!”

“That’s true.”

“Why’d she die when y’all came here when you weren’t supposed to be here?”

“You’re saying it’s our fault?”

“I’m saying you had a part in it, and you can’t get outta that.”

A bitter taste burned in his mouth. The saliva of a dead woman he couldn’t raise. The salt of an accusation he couldn’t lay to rest that rang both false and true.

Zazu was the last of the good-time girls he had to interview, and she had been a heller.

But she left him alone in the dead woman’s bedroom.

Matt looked around again, carefully. Women’s bedrooms weren’t his area of expertise. Another big box of tissue with aloe and vitamin E sat on the dresser. He pulled several free and stuffed them in his side jacket pockets.

This wing was fairly new, but it had a makeshift look. The closet had sliding doors, one mirrored. He used a tissue to ease it open, trying not to regard his own full-length image as it glided past. Picture yourself here. He could see the Sapphire Slipper Web page come-on now. No.

But come on, he wasn’t snooping on his own behalf. No scruples needed.

The farther half of the closet was full of stacked cardboard boxes, probably house supplies, storage. The wooden clothes pole held mismatched empty wire hangers, some colored, some white, most the bronze color favored by dry cleaners.

A few T-shirts and dresses and skirts hung there. It was the faceless Styrofoam heads on the shelf above that entranced him. Wig stands. Marilyn Monroe blond, Cleopatra black, rainbow-streaked, long, short. He wasn’t familiar with the singer Madonna’s various chameleon “looks,” but he did realize that these wild wigs would make a good shtick for a hooker. And a natural disguise.

He’d read that a prostitute’s greatest fear was seeing her own father walk through the door, maybe an indication of how much she feared the father figure, or how much he may have abused her. This woman had been determined not to be found, no matter who walked through the door, and apparently her wig trick had worked, until tonight.

Matt bent to pull her luggage out into the room. A medium-sized hardcase one, probably for the wigs, and a couple of backpacks. All were scuffed and scratched. He guessed she traveled by bus rather than air. The luggage tags held empty forms, never filled in.

They were empty, not even a stray gum wrapper left inside.

At the dresser, the drawers stuck in the dry air and came out only when jerked, and then they opened crooked. He dropped the tissues back in his pocket and lifted her personal lingerie. Plain cotton, with what Temple called camisole tops instead of bras. The large plastic makeup bag on the dresser top was marked inside with red and black lines, as if it had been lashed. But it was just the unintended strokes of lip liner and eyeliner pencils, all in bold colors: scarlet, black, blue.

As his tissue-holding fingers riffled through, he noticed that everything was well used, not new, the exteriors smeared, not neat and clean like Temple’s. These were working tools, not playthings.

A tall bottle of lotion next to the tissue box must be makeup remover.

This time Matt stared at himself in the mirror above the dresser. Here was where Madonnah saw herself bare, and, he’d bet, no one else did.

He went to the door. It had one of those center-knob lock buttons, so she could have privacy. He grabbed a couple of tissues from his pocket and turned the lock.

Back at the dresser, he found her working clothes in the second drawer. Black and baby blue corsets with garters and marabou feather edgings. Stockings ranging from nurse white to sheer black to fishnet to sheer with lavish tattoos printed on them and even rhinestones. He counted. There were six fishnet ones; even pairs, none missing. Filmy thises and thats. A box of tangled jewelry, mostly black and glittery or rhinestones or lengths of pearls.

The bottom drawer held spike heels, all four inches tall, exaggerated, in shiny patent leather, white or black or sliver or red. All the heel tips were worn, and they were tumbled together. The soles looked remarkably clean. Never worn outdoors.

Her purse was in that bottom drawer too, under the shoes.

Matt pulled it out and put it on the dresser top.

It was an inexpensive black microfiber shoulder bag. It had an outside zipper, an inside zipper on that flap, an exterior three-quarter zipper that revealed credit card slots and a driver’s license window and pen-holding nooses, all at easy, organized access.

Every slot was empty, except one. The driver’s license was from Indiana. The photo of a youngish woman with brown hair and bangs reminded him of the mousiest wig on the shelf. Obviously what she wore when traveling.

There was another zippered compartment at the back of the lining It was empty except for a penny and a few crumbs of something long since inedible.

He pushed his fingers behind each empty credit card slot. Nothing.

But this was a purse of a thousand compartments. He was sure that had she flown with it, airport security would have missed a couple of places in this bag of tricks.

He found another zipper inside the outer inner face of the bag.

There! His half a gum wrapper! And on the plain back, a phone number jotted down in faded pencil. It looked like something even the owner had forgotten.

So he committed it to memory, not knowing where the area code was from.

He dropped the purse back into place in the bottom drawer and pushed it shut with his borrowed tissues.

As he stood and looked around a last time, he couldn’t help thinking the room was so devoid of personality and effects that it resembled a simple convent bedroom for postulants who had left all worldly goods behind. The late Madonnah, had her wigs been headdresses and her clothes habits, reminded him more of a nun than a courtesan.

Matt pulled a couple fresh tissues from his pocket and unlocked and opened the door. He felt confident he’d left as little trace on the room as she ever had.