Cat In An Aqua Storm

15

Little Girl Lost

The three women debarked from their cab—they had hailed one on Paradise—amid a flurry of cordial goodbyes. While Ruth headed for the Goliath valet stand to retrieve her sign, Lindy and Temple dashed inside.

The lines were drawn, Temple knew, but at least the combatants were willing to talk turkey on the live airwaves. Meanwhile, Lindy led Temple to the second-floor hotel suite that served as competition central.

Though the rooms were empty now, the normally neat furniture sat askew. End tables were littered with ashtrays, bowls of stale popcorn and paperwork. All Temple wanted was an empty chair and an unengaged telephone.

She plopped down, dropped her heavy tote bag beside her and dug out her straining personal organizer. Phone numbers took up half the bulk. Time to play radio-station roulette. She dialed one string of numbers after another, quickly learning who was in, who was out, who was interested, who was too busy to talk.

After forty minutes of nonstop calling, Temple had lined up three talk shows in the next four days and had four more shows scheduled to call her back, Whether producer or interviewer, the radio people she contacted loved the notion of strippers calling in and baring their souls instead of their bodies for a change. Las Vegas took its exotic entertainers for granted, but with guests lined up to debate the issue, stripping suddenly got a lot sexier, as far as radio ratings were concerned. Nothing made for good media like a major clash of opinions.

Satisfied but talked out, Temple restored her precious sourcebook to the tote bag, then cruised the littered tabletops for something nutritious. She was forced to settle for seven stale pretzels and three green M&Ms.

All the competition personnel, she decided, must still be down in the ballroom trying to whip lights, action and cameras into shape for the big show on Saturday night.

Taking the elevator down, she found herself wondering why the murderer had killed his victim so early into competition week. Only half the performers had arrived yet. Only half the chaos was available to confuse matters.

She charged through the teeming lobby, well aware that all Las Vegas hotel lobbies resemble sets for the film, Airport, with tour groups booking in and booking out in long, luggage-clogged lines... all Las Vegas hotels, that is, except for the unfortunate few that aren’t doing big-time business. Their lobbies resemble deserted bowling alleys.

Pausing to glance into the ballroom, Temple viewed the same controlled chaos she had penetrated before. She hesitated, wondering if Ike Wetzel would make a good sparring partner for Ruth on the talk shows. No, too inarticulate. He was one of those maddening men who retreat to smug, smirking silence in the face of female outrage, like the ever-lovable Crawford Buchanan.

She didn’t spot any reporters milling about, and sighed her relief. The murder had already run its sensational course in a town brimming with sensation and crime. All she had to do now was organize sufficient, sedate publicity and beat off any overeager news people.

In that case, she could go home and pound out her radio schedule so far, or... since she was here anyway, she could check out the dressing room again. Alone. She headed for the back stairs, her mind manufacturing ways to justify her nosiness if anyone—say Lieutenant Molina—caught her snooping.

She figured that the police had been over the dressing room with a forensic fine-tooth comb by now. She should have the place to herself, and, without Lindy present, something about the murder scene that nagged at her might become clear.

Her heels clattered in four-four time down the concrete stairs. No one had seen her, proving that the murderer hadn’t needed to be clever, just lucky. The Goliath was a massive beast of a hotel whose functional underbelly was often deserted if you knew when to explore it.

In the nondescript corridor narrowed by racks of muslin-covered costumes Temple tried to muffle her ringing footsteps. Just because the place was deserted was no reason to announce herself to ghosts.

One ghost haunted a different dressing room. She paused, then pushed open a door she had entered many times before.

A glamorous wardrobe of glittering gowns occupied the costume niche where Max’s deliberately subdued performance clothes had hung not many months before. Either a female impersonator occupied the room now, or some glamour-puss songstress.

Temple advanced to the mirror, saw herself looking perfectly respectable and as guilty as any trespasser. Cosmetics spewed across the glass-topped Formica counter, and none of these makeup bulbs showed the tattletale gray of burnout.

She almost expected to glance down and find Max looking back at her in the mirror. Funny how you conversed with a person’s image when he was using a mirror, as if he really were on the other side of it... already. Was that where Max had gone? Behind the illusion of his own image?

Temple eyed the distinctly female cosmetics, an odd combination of expensive Borghese eyeshadows and inexpensive Maybelline products. Although the room’s fixtures and furniture remained the same, it had been essentially transformed somehow. The magician had changed it into something else by making himself disappear. It held memories that smelled faintly stale.

Temple shook her head, at the room and at herself. She was about to back out, feeling like an intruder who had stumbled onto a stage set for a play she wasn’t in.

Then her mirror’s-eye view spotted something odd atop the wicker sofa on the opposite wall. How often had she perched on its chintz upholstered arm after a show, waiting for Max’s makeup to come off, ready to keep him company until he came down from the exuberant high of performing? Stop it! she ordered herself, and walked over to the sofa to inspect the anomaly.

A pink gym bag. That fit the overfeminine, slightly junky touches in the room. The mesh side insets, Temple thought, must help air out soggy exercise wear.

Something moved behind that pastel barrier.

She jumped back, her heart beating, the heavy tote bag swinging hard into her hip, once, twice.

“Ow.”

The contents of the bag echoed her complaint. Only its cry of protest sounded more like “Wow.”

How had she forgotten the unforgettably feminine feline darling? Certainly she hadn’t paid much attention to the cat carrier at the time. Temple crouched down until the mesh was on eye level and peered inward. Two gleaming round eyes gazed back. Long spidery silver hairs brushed the mesh.

“Aren’t you the natural beauty! Of course. Yvette. Savannah Ashleigh’s pampered baby cat.” She could see the same unreadable silvery script embroidered across the bag’s top. As Temple’s forefinger scratched the mesh, Yvette’s delicate pink nose outlined in flattering black tilted to sniff it.

“Well. I hope your mistress comes back soon. We don’t want you all alone down here witnessing any more murders—like mine!”

Temple stood, aware of the deserted dressing rooms surrounding her, of the recent, nearby violent death lingering with a kind of half-life. Even if Max’s strong personality had left no aura in this room, perhaps the dead dancer’s brutal passing had managed to haunt the entire area.

Temple hurried out of the dressing room, embarrassed by the thought of explaining her presence to a suddenly returned Savannah Ashleigh. She wouldn’t even want to explain it to herself.

Down the hall, the door to the murder scene stood ajar. Temple halted, even though she knew that doors are always ajar in deserted dressing rooms. The last thing weary, absconding performers want to deal with is closing doors behind them.

Still, she tiptoed closer, managing to keep her reverberating heels just off the floor. She eased inside without having to push the door further open. The cloak-shrouded end wall caught her eye instantly. Had the victim been posed there deliberately, she wondered, like dead meat on a hook? Cruel and crude, but then so was using the woman’s own prize G-string for a hangman’s noose.

Was there a message in the manner of death, the place of death? Temple thought so. Maybe if she stood very still and emptied her mind, an intuition would creep in.

A strangled whimper ruined her concentration.

Temple’s eyes jerked from the wall of gaudy cloaks to the opposing rows of mirrors and chairs that lined the dressing room. Empty. She turned. Only lockers stood behind her, pushed up against the wall with some of the doors sprung, the shiny gray enamel paint chipped off like cheap fingernail polish.

No one could hide in a locker. Not a murderer then. Not even a figment of her imagination now.

Yet, she had heard a noise, very near. She wasn’t hallucinating. Temple looked around again, methodically: along the ceiling line, down the row of chairs. Last, she examined the hanging costumes—from the fuchsia turkey-feather numbers jammed together at the far end to the equally imaginative exotica imported by the visiting strippers, and the truly tasteless high heels and boots lined up under them.

A muffled hiccough. The last gown on the left, a scarlet-sequined bodice with a ruffled Flamenco skirt, trembled.

Temple looked down again, below the froth of glamorous hems. This time she spied a jazzy satin pair of spike heels with a rhinestone-framed cat face on the toe. They were inhabited by real feet and legs.

She strode over and pushed back the scarlet costume. The hanger screeched against the rod like a scalded cat, making Temple jump along with her discovery.

A petite, dark-haired woman huddled against the wall, hands over her face, shivering, as well she might in her black spangled T-back bikini bottom and strapless bra.

“Pm sorry,” Temple apologized. Nothing was more embarrassing, for both parties, than finding a stranger crying.

The woman shook her head, too distraught to speak.

“Is there anything I can do—?” Expecting a negative answer to that inanely ineffective question, Temple retreated, prepared to tiptoe out again.

A hand left the face and then seized her wrist. “Is he still out there?” the woman asked. Her voice was strangely low and hoarse for such a small woman, choked with emotion and something else. Fear.

“He?” Temple repeated.

The hand tightened painfully on Temple’s wrist bone. “The man! A man. Any man. Is he out there?”

Temple shook her head. “No one was around but me. And a cat.”

Relief allowed the woman’s hunched shoulders to drop two inches, but she kept her face and body pressed to the wall. One hand still covered her eyes, as if to keep them from seeing something horrible.

“Hey,” Temple said gently, “I sometimes look pretty awful in the mornings, but I’m really not a scary person. Come on out. It’s just us two down here, honest.”

The woman laughed tentatively, peeking at Temple through spread fingers, like a child. “You’re not... with the show.”

“I’m doing public relations for it.”

“Why are you down here?”

“I came to check out the murder scene,” Temple admitted sheepishly, her eyes flicking to the far wall. “I’m congenitally curious.”

“Oh.” The woman sighed instead of sobbed this time and turned around to put her back to the wall.

She may have been tiny, Temple noticed, but she had a dynamite hourglass figure. Her vivid coloring suggested the Hispanic, or Italian.

“What’s your name?” Temple asked.

The woman’s long dark lashes fanned up and down behind her hand as she studied Temple’s linen suit, tote bag, high heels and, finally, her face.

“K-Katharine,” she said in a subdued, shy tone.

“All right, Katharine, why don’t you come out of there? Those ruffle sequins must scratch! I’ll prove that there’s no one here but me.”

Katharine edged out like a child from a closet, a bizarre image when combined with her seminaked, fully female form.

“Those are downright awesome shoes,” Temple said with sincere admiration. “I’ve got a cat with big green eyes almost as bright as those rhinestones.”

“Thanks.” Katharine turned one foot so Temple could admire the shoes fully—see how cleverly the shape mimicked a cat stretching. The high heel was its hindquarters raised in the air, the sole its ground-touching belly. The toe formed its extended front legs. A twining ankle strap mocked a tail.

“Darling outfit!" Temple pronounced. “Did you think that up yourself?”

Katharine nodded solemnly. “You’re sure no one’s out there anymore?”

“Swear to God on Ginger Rogers’s dancing shoes. Did”—Temple eyed the far wall, the suggestively empty hook.—“did remembering the murder scare you? Were you suddenly afraid that the murderer might still be around?”

Katharine shook her head of naturally wavy dark hair, as lush as Counselor Troi’s Cretanesque hairpiece on the new Star Trek spin-off. Temple wasn’t often jealous, but this tiny, ultra-zorchy woman made her feel a pang. In junior high she would have traded all of her record-setting Girl Scout cookie sales for some blatant sex appeal like this any day. It wasn’t fair: this brunette bombshell wasn’t even tall.

“I didn’t even remember that—the murder,” Katharine was saying. “It happened so fast, but then it always does.”

“What? What happened?” Temple demanded a bit impatiently.

Katharine’s shoulders twitched hopelessly, then she lowered her hand from her face.

“Oh, my God.” Temple saw reddened eyes of Swiss-chocolate brown, tear-smeared mascara, those Daddy Longlegs lashes, and natural, too! It had taken her a few more seconds to notice the subtle swelling of Katharine’s cheekbones, the bruises beginning to congeal around her lovely eyes.

“Someone hit you! The man you were asking about. Who?”

Katharine shrugged. “Don’t do no good to say. It’s done. It did what he wanted. I—I can’t compete, not looking like this.”

“You don't know how you look—it’s not so bad....” Brown eyes turned bitter black. “I know how I will look, like a three-D sunset by competition Saturday. He knows how it'll look, too. Like shit. Knows just how much to hit, and how hard.”

“Ice! I'll get some from the machine down the hall—I saw it yesterday! We’ll put ice on your face. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

Temple sprinted away, grabbing her clutch purse from the tote and clawing out quarters in transit. The soft-drink machine stood only twenty-five feet away. She congratulated herself on remembering it while waiting for a paper cup to pop down, lopsided. She straightened the cup just before a mother lode of crushed ice crashed into it, then jerked it away, letting the clear liquid Sprite dribble down the drain.

Katharine was sitting at the counter staring disconsolately into the mirror when Temple returned. “Ice won’t do no good—what’s your name, anyway?”

“Temple. Here, I’ll wrap the ice in this towel.” She snatched a clean but rouge-stained one from the counter-top. “Hold that there.”

“Thanks,” her patient said. “Still won’t help the color.”

“Makeup.”

“You gotta look perfect for the judges. They’ll see.” Temple hated hearing that anything was hopeless. She had a feeling that Katharine had been told that everything was hopeless for as long as she could remember. Temple’s eyes roamed the dressing room, looking for inspiration. The cloaks—no, Katharine needed to hide her face, not her body. Hardly her body, that was the whole point. But... her face was not.

Temple pointed at the cat-faced shoe at their feet. “Cat cloak!” Katharine looked puzzled, rightfully. Temple’s inspiration came so fast she stumbled over the words. “Mask. You’ll make a cat mask to match the shoes!” Brown eyes opened wide, then winced half-shut again. “Yeah. I could do that—maybe.”

“Sure you can! Then how your face looks won’t matter. What’s your routine, the music?”

“ ‘Batman.’ Only I play Catwoman.”

“Perfect! It’ll be even better than before. Trust me.” Katharine, dazed into docility, nodded while clasping the homemade ice bag over one eye.

“Will he... come back?” Temple asked next.

“No. He’d figure this took care of it.”

“Why did he do it?”

She shrugged. “He likes to. And I’m gonna leave him. Soon. I got my own business, my card—” She patted around for a purse, then sank back into the chair in chagrin. “No room for cards on this costume. Upstairs in my purse. He wanted to talk, he said, alone, so we came down here. Anyway, I have this private stripping service, for parties, you know? Good clean fun. Gags. Go-go grandmas, guys in clown costumes, whatever fits the occasion. I win this contest and get the prize money, even if I don’t, I’m outa stripping myself. But a win would help my business. Grin ’n’ Bare It. That’s the name of my business, spelled ‘b-a-r-e.’ Cute, huh? I got four people working for me part time. We do singing telegrams, ‘birthday suit’ strips, lots of things. Pm not just... a dumb stripper, you know. I’m an entrepreneur.”

“Sounds great.” Temple had noticed how Katharine’s spine had straightened as she began talking about her business. “If you need a PR person, here’s one of my cards.” She squatted to dig through her tote bag.

Katharine’s hand on her arm made her pause. The expression in her one visible brown eye was serious, a curious mixture of supplication and defiance. “I wasn’t crying ’cuz it hurt, you know. Only ’cuz it ruined my chances.”

“I... know.”

Temple tried not to think how a woman had learned to take pride in not crying when it hurt.