Cat In An Aqua Storm

12

WOE vs. WHOOPE

No matter how ritzy or glitzy the hotel, its understage dressing rooms are as welcoming as a warehouse basement. Temple knew that. What point was there to installing such luxuries as wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstered chairs and decorative countertops in the theatrical equivalents of Grand Central terminal? Too many itinerant bodies come and go, spilling lurid makeup, burning out the bare bulbs that surround the inevitably smeared mirrors and dropping sequins from slowly disintegrating costumes like gaudy tears shed at their passing.

Yet Temple found herself standing hushed in the cavernous dressing room beneath the Goliath's glittering superstructure to which Lindy had led her. She was spellbound as usual by the tawdry glamour of these cold, hard-surfaced places where people transform themselves and emerge to perform wonders in the way of song, dance, and in miming emotion or magic.

One of these human butterflies had not emerged from the cocoon beneath the stage to spread her performer's wings in the spotlights, Temple reminded herself.

“Where—?" she began.

Before she could finish her question, Lindy pointed to a row of gorgeously feathered capes hanging about six feet from the floor. The single crooked finger of one empty wrought-iron hook beckoned, as might the ghost of Dorothy Horvath.

Everything about the room reverberated with absence, rather than presence. The flimsy wooden seating common to dressing rooms—battered, round-seated ice-cream chairs with splayed legs—sat askew to parallel gray Formica countertops. A dressing room, even empty, always held its breath in expectation of a chatty, frantic throng of invaders.

Lindy's lighter scratched in the silence, conjuring flame, then the faint perfumes of fluid and sulfur—presto, a lit cigarette made a dramatic entrance into the dormant setting.

The mundane sound and scent of smoking banished the spell of recent death. Temple stared at the opposite wall and mentally counted cloaks. “What happened to the sixth cape that should have been on the empty hook?”

Lindy’s first drag on the cigarette ended with a smoky “I don't know." Her voice creaked like a scratched LP record. “Don't know what happened to Dorothy's prize G-string, either. The cops probably have ’em both."

Temple approached an abandoned chair, curled her fingers around the curved wooden seat back and gently shook it. Its feet screeched against the floor as it rocked to and fro.

“Tippy," she pronounced. “These chairs always are. Doesn't help the suicide theory, the victim having to balance on a tippy chair to reach that hook."

“Hey, strippers are used to high heels." Lindy leaned against the countertop, inhaling with the true nicotine addict's slowness. “Wouldn't a murderer have to climb a chair to hoist poor Dorothy up, too? A tippy chair would be twice as hard on him.”

“The police say it's a him?”

“Well... a mostly naked woman strangled with a G-string. Who else? Besides, strippers always have man trouble.”

“They're not the only ones,” Temple muttered as she strolled through the space, getting its feel, trying to impress the fact of a murder on her fond memories of a dozen dressing rooms exactly like this one, including Max's upscale private dressing room just down the hall.

A mostly eaten birthday cake frosted with turquoise and pink rosettes sat on a cardboard tray atop the counter. All that remained of the sweet, icing sentiments, also turquoise, were the looped terminal y’s of “Happy,” “Birthday,” and the birthday girl's name. Was it Missy? Cindy? Lindy? Or Dorothy?

The room was filled with discards. Powder dusted the worn countertop, snaring a lone bobby pin in its tinted toils, while an abandoned false eyelash lurked in a corner like a curled spider. The scents of a dozen cheap perfumes melded into olfactory goulash. A two-inch-long pencil with no lead lay on the floor. The same corner that harbored the eyelash also held a bit of paper flotsam.

Temple picked up the crumpled shape: beige and orange, with black printing on flimsy card stock. Some kind of ticket—? A clue?

“Food stamp,” Lindy's down-to-earth voice said flatly.

Temple dropped it as if she had been caught stealing. Or was she just guilty that she hadn't recognized it? No matter how dicey her cash flow got, she could afford food, even Free-to-Be-Feline.

Lindy ambled around the place, too, pausing before a mirror. Six of its framing makeup bulbs had gone gray and cold instead of pouring out the usual white-hot glare. Her fingers touched an eight-by-ten glossy photo stuck into the mirror frame's lower right corner.

“Someone must have put this here,” Lindy rumbled pensively, and coughed.

Temple came to join her in staring at the portrait: pale hair and features scribed by a classic oval, posed at a flattering Hollywood tilt, caught in stark theatrical tones of black, white and shades of gray.

Even without a hint of coloring, the face was gorgeous. Perhaps a makeup artist could analyze the proportions, features and their balance, could explain why the face was so mesmerizing. Temple wouldn’t want that. The face spoke for itself, radiated an inner expectation that enhanced the outer loveliness.

“Dorothy Horvath?” she asked.

Lindy nodded, tears turning her dark eyes into slick, black marbles. “She was a beautiful kid, a drop-dead knockout. She would start her act in an organdy pinafore that went electric blue-white under the overhead ultraviolet lights. Called it her ‘Dorothy act,’ 'cuz she came from Kansas, she said. Funny, quiet kid with a face to die for.” Lindy realized how apt that expression was, and winced before dragging deeply on the cigarette.

“ ‘Glinda North,’ ” Temple said. “I understand her stage name now. It’s after the good witch of the north in The Wizard of Oz. Maybe Dorothy wished for a fairy godmother like Glinda. What about the men in her life?”

Lindy shrugged. “Same old story, and, anyway, who knows?”

Temple studied the photograph. “Beautiful women often complain that no one relates to the real person inside.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lindy said with another shrug.

“Hey, you’ve got a great face.”

“Maybe.” Lindy’s quirky smile wanted to, but didn’t quite, believe Temple. “Once you’re past thirty in this game, you can either be an old stripper trying to keep up with the young stuff, or an old ex-stripper.”

“Don’t say that!” Temple gave a mock shudder. “I’m not that far from thirty myself. Now I learn another career choice is kaput. I’ll have to keep slinging press releases.”

Lindy waved a dismissing hand. “You don’t look a day over eighteen.”

“Don't say that, either. That's the story of my life.” Temple shook her head at Glinda North's glamorous photo face. “I wish I knew the story of hers.”

“Come back later, when the other girls are here. Maybe you can put the pieces together. We all know a little bit about each other. Can't help it in such close quarters.”

“But no one had an obvious motive to kill her, not even a jealous rival?”

Lindy shook her lusterless black-dyed hair. “No way. We all looked out for Dorothy. That girl couldn't string two safety pins together without losing one.”

Temple eyed Lindy's world-weary features. “Is your age the only reason you don't strip anymore?”

“No. I manage a club. The money in stripping's good, but you get tired of that eight-hour bump-and-grind.” She looked at Temple, then puffed on her cigarette. “You ever see strippers work?”

“The... topless hotel shows.”

“No, not those hoity-toity, touch-me-not walking department store dummies loaded down with eighty pounds of feathers and rhinestones. I mean real working strippers, who get down and get dirty with the guys in the front row. That would help you understand the life more than bumbling around upstairs. Come on, I'll take you.”

“Where to?”

“Where else? Kitty City, my alma mater.”

While Temple contemplated objecting to the word “bumbling,” Lindy crushed her cigarette in the discarded lid of a makeup tin. She strode from the room with such surety that Temple clicked along in her silent wake, her high heels echoing eerily on the concrete floor.

In no time the pair was jostling through the stream of incoming crowds until they hit broad daylight outside the Goliath. Shocking. Lindy and Temple stood blinking in the bright, blazing heat that drenched them the moment they left the entrance canopy’s shade. The Goliath’s massive desert white exterior trimmed with scarlet and gold almost outdazzled the sun.

Temple paused to don her prescription sunglasses. “My car’s in the ramp way out back. We’ll have to take a cab.”

“Fine. We’ll put it on Ike’s tab.”

“Ike?”

“Didn’t I mention it? I manage Kitty City for Ike Wetzel.”

“And run the show over here, too? The Kitty City crowd has a lot invested in the competition.”

Lindy squinted down the sidewalk and made a face. “It’s our job. Look. Now, there’s somebody who really should take a walk on the wild side.”

Temple followed Lindy’s gaze to a sign-carrying figure pacing in the hot sun twenty feet away. She could read this block-letter message better than Crawford’s. RESPECT, NOT RHINESTONES: STOP STRIPPING WOMEN OF DIGNITY AND CUSTOMERS OF MONEY. The letters “W.O.E.” underlined the sentiment.

“Ouch,” Temple said. “Politically correct’ protesters could use the murder to justify their position, and draw the press’s attention to it, rather than distracting the media from it. Are many picketing the competition?”

“Only one at a time, so far, but the signs suck.”

As if overhearing Lindy’s pronouncement, the protester’s measured walk brought her within speaking distance.

“You don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Lindy yelled in a disgusted tone.

The woman came nearer. She embodied everything that gave feminists a rap as ugly man-haters—minimal makeup... short, serviceable brown hair... thin gold hoop earrings... unexciting clothes. Only the fact that she remained pretty despite, and perhaps because of, her pared-down style ruined the stereotype.

“Do you know what I’m complaining about?” she asked Lindy quietly.

“You bet I do, kiddo.” Lindy threw Temple a knowing glance. “Say, I was heading over to a strip place to give this PR lady the grand tour. Want to come along and see what you’re stalking around mad about?”

“Degradation doesn’t require a microscope.”

“Degradation! What about the degradation of working a minimum-wage dead-end job and supporting hungry kids? What about being too beat to have any kind of life but drudgery? Hell, strippers aren’t downtrodden. They’re doing the trodding down for a change.”

“To make money from men, for men.”

“And for themselves! More than they’d make waiting on some Snob City bitches in a restaurant.”

The protester blinked at Lindy’s fury, but visibly counted to a commendable ten before she tried replying.

Temple leaped into the opening. “Lindy used to be a stripper, but I know from zip about it. Why don’t you join us and see for yourself?”

The woman hefted her sign uncertainly.

“By the way, what does WOE stand for?” Temple asked.

“Women Opposing Exploitation.”

Lindy hooted. “Why oppose it? Why not use it?”

“Then that would be WUE,” Temple said promptly. “Women Using Exploitation.”

“That's ridiculous,” the protester retorted.

“Sometimes that’s the way it is,” Lindy said. “What’s the matter, don’t you want to see the truth? Chicken?”

The protester twisted her poster stick, looking around for rescue.

Temple remembered her own reluctance to ride the Hesketh Vampire. Visiting a strip joint wasn’t as dangerous, but might seem just as intimidating.

“Leave the sign with the parking valet,” Temple suggested with such certitude that the protester did as she said.

The parking attendant graciously accepted the sign and a tip, but leaned the sentiment facedown against the Goliath's white stucco side. The protester cast an unhappy look back at her abandoned principles as the trio stepped forward while the bellman whistled up a cab.

In two minutes flat the three women were crammed black leggings to pale pantyhose to blue jeans in the backseat of a white Whittlesea Blue cab, headed for Kitty City.

Temple, of course, sat in the peacemaker’s middle—blessed are they—and eased tensions by asking questions. The protester's name was Ruth Morris. She was thirty-something, and a paralegal for a divorce lawyer. Lindy's last name was Lukas and she had been divorced three times. Neither Temple nor Ruth admitted to having seen a stripper do her stuff except on television.

“I see enough gyrating seminaked women in the background every time a TV or movie private eye goes into a bar,” Ruth said darkly.

“I've seen some seminaked gyrating men on the talk shows,” Temple admitted, “and women. But those acts must be cleaned up for Oprah and Phil and Sally.”

Lindy didn't comment, so a short silence lengthened into a lull. Garish La Vegas daylight flitted past the taxi's closed windows as the air-conditioning hummed. On the far horizon the hazy blue mountains snagged a crown of clouds.

“Will there be women in the audience?” Ruth asked finally, sounding less enthusiastic about the expedition by the minute.

“Sure,” Lindy answered. “It's now an ‘In’ thing for women to go to strip joints with their dates.”

Ruth's unstyled hair shook with her head. “That's putting a stamp of approval on their own sex's subjugation.”

“What's subjugated about making a hundred to two hundred and fifty bucks a night?” Lindy demanded.

“Too many women are well paid for doing things that harm themselves—making porno movies, prostitution. The pay wouldn't be so good if the work weren't demeaning.”

“Wait a minute!” Lindy sounded righteously indignant. “Only a few strippers moonlight in that other stuff. Most are strippers, period.”

Temple jumped in before she got caught in the cross fire. “What exactly are most strippers, period?”

“Dancers,” Lindy answered. “Erotic entertainers who work hard for a living. Some are also ex-cheerleaders, good-time girlfriends, girls you went to high school with—”

“And abuse victims.” Ruth leaned past Temple to address Lindy. “Physical and/or sexual abuse victims with damaged self-esteem who have a sexually unhealthy need for the distance and control the stage gives them.”

Lindy’s eyes darkened, but she didn’t respond with her usual hair-trigger answer.

“Is that always true?” Temple asked Ruth.

“Pretty much so. A lot of girls are runaways from abusive fathers. If sexual abuse was involved, they’ve confused intimacy with exhibitionism and self-display, and sometimes even pleasure with pain.”

The scratch of Lindy’s lighter sounded like a derisive tsk-tsk. She defiantly lit a cigarette and puffed a stream of smoke into the crowded cab. “Big words for someone who’s never seen the real thing in the flesh.”

The cab made a lurching turn, then the driver, a chubby guy in his forties with a black mustache and a baseball cap, turned around.

“You wanta go to Kitty City or a debating society? We’re hee-eere.”