Cat In An Aqua Storm

21

A Walk on the Wild Side

The palace guard was loath to let Temple enter the ballroom again until she used the password of Molina’s name and rank. She doubted these private cops much feared the regular force, but they wanted them out of their territory as fast as possible.

Despite Molina’s grumblings, the crime scene was clearing. Nothing remained of the body but a faint powdery luminescence on the carpeting—fairy dust from a Tinker Bell whom no one had cared about enough to clap for.

Molina joined her, looking harried. “Tell me about your encounter with the victim.”

“Her name,” Temple said pointedly, “was Katharine. With an ’a-r’ in the middle. I picked that up from her pronunciation, so... precise. Like a child’s who is lost and wants to make sure you understand perfectly so you can get her home again.”

“Katharine? You’re sure?”

Temple turned at Molina’s sharp tone. “Of course. I hadn’t been knocked half silly yet.”

“I don’t mean to contradict you—” Molina frowned, whether at her own train of thought or at what she was about to tell Temple wasn’t clear. Molina consulted her notebook in the spotlight glare that was both too intense and too diffuse to read by.

“That’s odd.” She pursed her lips. “Everyone I talked to said her name was Kitty. Kitty Cardozo. She’s well known around town, worked here for years. Has a kid attending UNLV.”

“A kid in college?” Now Temple was puzzled. “She didn’t look a day over twenty-four.”

Molina’s eyes stayed on her notebook. “Thirty-five. Started young.”

“Stripping or having kids?”

Molina sighed. “They usually start both too soon. Now tell me about her.”

“Did... anyone take off the mask?”

“For the final photographs, after the coroner arrived.”

“Then you saw—?”

“The bruises and contusions were present when you saw her, then—when was that?”

“Four-fifty. I was on my way out.”

“You stopped in the dressing room. Why?”

“Soaking up local color.”

“You seem to prefer your local color bloodred.”

“That’s below the belt, Lieutenant. Yeah, I was curious about the murder. I had a feeling—”

“Yes?”

“Something seems funny about it... them. Like they’re messages.”

“They’re messages that some sick men out there get off on killing women, especially those in sexually titillating lines of work.”

“You’re sure it’s a man?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Both victims were serious contenders for winning the contest. Dorothy had won before and her face would launch a thousand flashbulbs. Katharine—Kitty—had a body that would freeze film into Playboy-ready shots, and the skill and grace to show it off.”

“So you think a competitor killed them. I suppose a physically fit woman could have killed either one. But I’m not interested in your theories, Ms. Barr.”

“Just the facts, ma’am.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. I found Katharine—Kitty, in the dressing room. Actually, I heard her sob first. She was hiding among the costumes, pressed up against the wall like a hurt child. You know how an animal hides when it’s scared, with its tail or ears sticking right out in plain sight, as if you can’t possibly see them. That’s the way she was hiding. I saw her shoes first.”

“You would,” Molina interrupted.

“What’ll happen to those shoes, and her costume? They were so clever. Kitty made them herself.”

“Police property room, until after the trial, if there is one. Go on.”

“Anyway, I coaxed her out, and that’s when I saw her face. Little did I know my own would look a lot like it in a few minutes. Kitty was afraid of a man. She kept asking if ‘he’ was out in the hall.”

“There goes your jealous vixen theory.”

“Maybe. Kitty could have had two enemies. She said that she would he all right, that she was ready to make the break from this guy. That’s why he hurt her. He wanted to ruin her chances of winning the contest, because the money would help her get on her own. But she was going anyway. I know it.”

“How?”

“By the way she spoke about her plans, her business.

She called herself an ‘entrepreneur.’ She sounded like a kid selling lemonade.”

Molina’s gaze dropped to her notes again. “ ‘Grin ’n’ Bare It.’ ”

Temple nodded soberly. “A gag stripping business. ‘Good clean fun,’ according to Kitty. She was heartbroken to have her face ruined for the competition. Even makeup wouldn’t cover everything, she said. I can see now she’s right.”

“Yeah. Your dark glasses indoors are a nice punk touch,” Molina said, not unsympathetically. “Anybody else been bothering you today?”

“Only the police and the ballroom security guards,” Temple answered, deadpan.

“Go on.”

“That’s it. I suggested a cat mask to match the rest of the costume, and she lit up like a kid who’s getting a Nintendo for Christmas. I left her happy and high on her act, only—”

“Yes?”

“Only she wanted me to know that she hadn’t been crying because she’d been hit, but because it hurt her chances to be in the contest. I wondered then why it was so important not to cry when you’re hit.”

“And now—?”

“Now I know.”

“So. You left her with so much hope that she went out and made the mask, then she returned after regular hours to work with it—why?”

“Privacy. She probably needed to find out if it would handicap her vision, make her clumsy. She was poetry in motion. And she didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. If she performed smoothly in the mask on a trial run, she could show up in it for the rest of the rehearsals and no one would ever suspect it hid something.”

Molina flipped her notebook shut. “Stay out of my investigation. If you think of anything more, tell me. See the self-help group. Go home now.” Molina paused. Her next sentence came out of the blue of suddenly angry eyes. “I’m going to get this bastard.”

Molina marched back to the knot of police.

Temple, aching all over, was tempted to take Molina’s advice. That was the problem, she was taking Molina’s advice on too many things lately. Time for a little authority-flaunting.

She went back to the cocktail lounge, where idle dancers were starting to order lunches and drinks. The gathering had the halfheartedly festive air of a picnic forced indoors on a rainy day. they had to be here, they might as well make the best of it.

So should Temple.

She avoided Lindy’s table. It was too easy to gravitate to someone she knew. A guide to a new milieu was useful, but not if the escort kept Temple from taking chances and learning something not in the guidebook.

Temple paused beside the table of the only silver-haired woman in the area who didn’t owe it to bleach. “Mind if I sit here?”

“Go right ahead.”

Temple sat down and sized up her table partner: a grandmotherly sort, her hair tightly permed, wearing one of those plaid cotton dusters that don’t constrict the wearer and pass for street wear among the Golden Age set. Front buttons, decorative bias tape trim on the pockets and a Peter Pan collar kept it from qualifying as a muumuu, but just barely.

“Are you competing in the Over-Sexty division?” Temple asked politely, managing to not even stumble over the coy title.

The woman’s scandalized look quickly turned into a chuckle. “Heavens, no! I’m much too old and fat for that in any category. What are you thinking of, girl? These contests have some standards.”

“Sorry. I don’t know much about it. I’m doing public relations work and am trying to get oriented.”

“PR?” A gleam brightened the woman’s pale hazel eyes. “Well, then, you’ll want to know about my Kelly. Here she comes now.”

Temple turned to look in the direction that attracted her tablemate’s beaming maternal gaze.

A long-stemmed brunette was mincing between the crowded tables, carrying two glasses and two bottles of beer from the bar, and a small bowl of popcorn clenched doggy-style in her teeth.

The prodigally endowed daughter made a professional waitress dip at the table to disencumber herself of the food and drink, then glanced curiously at Temple through the black fringe of false eyelashes top and bottom.

Mama Kelly did the honors. “This here’s the competition PR lady, honey.”

“Oh, hi. Get us tons of publicity, hear? I’ve got a super act.”

Temple eyed Kelly’s blue-gingham pinafore and matching, supernaturally bright blue eyes. Molina’s eyes were arresting, but light enough a blue, however electric, to convince. This woman’s contact-lens-store teal clashed with her disingenuous air of Southern comfort.

“You’re mother and daughter?” Temple asked a bit uncertainly.

“I used to be darker and thinner,” the mother said wryly, chuckling again.

“I used to be shorter,” the daughter added with a wink.

Temple laughed. “And only Kelly goes onstage?”

Mama answered. “What do you think? I want to ruin her chances? Mildred Bartles is the name. How do you do?”

No one had said “How do you do” to Temple in a coon’s age. She found it charming.

“Temple Barr. I admit I’m astounded. I figured most mothers of strippers wouldn’t want to know what their darling daughters were doing.”

“Then they are dumb mothers,” Mildred answered genially. “Kids these days do what they want. You can either fight ’em, or join ’em.”

“But not onstage?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a backstage mother. I help her rehearse, I sew all the costumes. Travel around with her for company. Life on the road can get lonely.”

“Then strippers don’t date the men from the clubs.”

“Lordy, I should hope not!” The indignation came from the beauteous Kelly. Her cerulean eyes drilled into Temple’s. “No matter how it looks, stripping is a business and it pays pretty fair. All that happens between the customers and the strippers is what you see onstage or out front. A little tease, a little talk, and—hopefully—a lot of tips.”

“What if a man wants more?”

“Then I give him a freezing look and make clear he’s out of line. Some girls,” she added disdainfully, “are willing to be whores, but they don’t last. The clubs don’t want their dancers disappearing before pumpkin time, and the rest of us don’t want to ruin our reputations.”

By now, Temple didn’t find the notion of strippers preserving their reputations laughable. “But you must know the public is highly titillated by your occupation.”

“Titty-what, honey?” Kelly produced a dimple that proved she could tease offstage as well as on. “You got to ditch those big words. A lot of us didn’t go no further than high school.”

“People are curious,” Temple said, “about why you dance almost-naked for an audience of the opposite sex.”

“Oooh.” Kelly shook her long fingers to indicate a topic too hot to handle. “Well, if we were whores, like they thought, we’d wouldn’t waste our time and energy dancing first. We are performers,” she said matter-of-factly. “Some of us are terrific and some of us are stinko. We bust our butts giving a good show, and then we’re outa there. Listen, it beats waitressing, and I spent a lotta hours breaking my fingernails on trays loaded with forty pounds of restaurant ware. What’s the difference? You give service for a lousy wage and make your money in tips. Except the tips are a damn sight better for strippers.”

“Still, the club makes the real money in liquor sales.”

“So does the restaurant.”

Temple eyed the mother. “How did your daughter grow up to do this?”

Mildred Bartles accepted a full and nonfoamy glass of beer expertly poured by her daughter before musing on the past. “Since she was a tiny thing Kelly was a bolt-lightning of energy. Begged for dance lessons. It wasn’t easy. Her father had run off. I was waitressing and no spring chicken—where do you think I got these varicose veins?”

She thrust out a foot in a canvas wedgie. Temple glimpsed swollen ankles and veins like angry red crayon marks. “Kelly was too cute and too smart to end up like her mom. She started as ring girl at wrestling matches when she was fifteen, then got a job waitressing at a topless club.”

“That’s how most of us break in,” Kelly said. “We see how the moves go. We also see how much better the tips are.”

“But you’re paid to cozy up to a lot of strange men.”

“So is Meryl Streep.”

“Some of those guys are pretty revolting.”

Kelly shrugged her handsome shoulders, flapping the ruffled gingham cherub wings that covered them. “Most of them are just lonely. Harmless. They pay for attention, and they get it. It’s a transaction. Damn few ever step over the line. They know what the girls are there for and how they make their money. It’s worth it to them to stuff a rolled-up fifty in my G-string, better than gambling with it. And we’re stars, girl, to them.”

Temple believed Kelly, but she wasn’t satisfied that the stripper’s life was that simple.

“What about Dorothy Horvath?”

“Who?” Both Bartles spoke in tandem.

“The woman who died Monday.”

“Oh, you mean Glinda.” Kelly nodded sadly. “We' almost all use stage names, and that was hers. Dorothy.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like her. Maybe that was the point.”

“She was getting away from her past then, remaking it?”

“Most of these girls,” Mildred said, leaning forward to prop both elbows on the tabletop, “have had bad breaks, that’s true. Some of it’s pretty sad. Fathers that were beaters, or worse. I didn’t let Kelly in for any of that. I could have remarried a time or two, but by then it was pretty plain that she was going to be a looker. I didn’t want no stepfather messing her up just because 1 was as desperate for a man, or a man with a job, as a dog for a bone. No, sir.”

“That’s admirable,” Temple said, meaning it. She didn’t need Ruth and her statistics to know that stepfathers or a live-in boyfriends often abused the children of another man, and that their mothers didn’t—couldn’t, wouldn’t—see it because of their own abused pasts, or their financial dependence or their fear of independence.

“So,” Temple summed up, “you’re your daughter’s big sister. You support her, travel with her—”

“Hey,” Kelly put in, interrupting a pull on her beer, “I support her. I told you the money was good.”

“I meant emotionally, not economically,” Temple clarified.

“We support each other,” Mildred put in, pushing back one of her strapping daughter’s errant little-girl curls. “Don’t we, sweetie?”

“That’s right,” Kelly said. “We’re a team.”

Mama Rose and Gypsy these two were not. Temple sensed an easygoing affection between them that would be the envy of many mothers and daughters in primly proper families, often hopelessly estranged themselves. This duo liked and needed each other, despite, or maybe because of, the daughter’s supposedly seamy line of work.

She eavesdropped on her own thoughts, then analyzed them. “Supposedly”? Was she getting converted to life on the wild side? She suddenly recalled her own mother’s horror when Temple had developed a yen for amateur theatricals in high school. The playhouses were invariably in “bad” neighborhoods and the other cast members, especially the males, were suspect from the first read-through until the cast party.

That might be an interesting angle for a newspaper feature... strippers’ moms. Yeah. Temple eyed the cocktail area, looking for more story sources.

Ike Wetzel held court at a round, slate-topped table amid a harem of female strippers. The waitress was circling to deliver another round of drinks, her skimpy veils floating around her metal bikini.

Temple couldn’t join that table, not even in her most professional capacity, without aligning herself with the harem, so she looked farther afield.

Four he-men in muscle T-shirts hunkered around a tiny cocktail table meant for the intimacy of two, long-neck beers rampant before them.

Temple supposed it was her duty to investigate the male side of the issue, but approached gingerly, wary of blazing pelvises. The guys seemed a lot more up front, excuse the expression, she told herself, about enjoying their notoriety.

She marched over the carpet and paused beside the gathered hunks. “Hi, guys. I wonder if you could answer some questions?”

“Anytime, pretty lady,” said one.

Another rose and lumbered over to a nearby table, politely asking if a vacant chair was taken. Even if it was, would anybody in their right mind say so?

He efficiently swept it under Temple’s derriere as she sat, and took his own chair again.

She tried to avoid nudging knees with anybody, but given the smallness of the table and the quantity of knees, not to mention their massiveness, that seemed impossible. Temple was used to feeling small among the rest of the population. With these guys, she felt like a fly in an elephant yard.

“You with Entertainment Tonight?” a man with Schwarzenegger muscles and crew cut asked.

“No. I’m doing public relations for the competition. If ET wants to do a competition segment, or if I can talk them into one, then maybe you guys’ll get lucky and meet Lisa Hartman. But probably not,” she warned. “She doesn’t do every segment in person.”

“Shucks. What’s your name?” asked another.

“Temple Barr.”

“Temple’s a neat name.”

“Would sound great onstage,” another put in.

“Any relation to Candy Barr?” teased the third, citing a famous stripper.

“Only in our apparent addiction to... chocolate. Really, if you guys wouldn’t mind talking about your work, I’d be able to put together a press release.”

“Yeah, let us do release the press!”

“All right!” the others agreed, slapping the heels of their hands together while Temple blinked at such enthusiastic physical force.

Maybe she had become subconsciously leery of big men since... no! She couldn’t get paranoid. For all their muscular presence, not one of these guys was more than twenty-four, and they all exuded a wholesome, careless energy that was rather engaging. If only they’d been around when the bad guys had decided to do a drum riff of “Night and Day” on her torso...

So she asked questions, they answered, and she soon could put names—stage names—to individuals rather than clones.

Kirk wore his hair wild-man-long. It brushed his well-developed shoulders and gave him a wicked, rock-star look. He would ride a motorcycle (probably a Hesketh Vampire, without a helmet), although a woman of any experience at all would realize that underneath he was a moody, Marlon Brando kind of guy. “You “know... sensitive.” Umm-hmm.

Stetson’s sun-streaked blond hair was long only in back. His tanned, muscled body radiated an outdoorsy, oil-rig-working, skin-cancer-defying, construction-crew kind of macho. The Last American He-man. Performing was putting him through pre-med.

The crew cut was Butch, of course. Butch was all man, and all muscle, and one day he hoped to be Mr. Universe. And maybe be in movies, like Arnold. Saint Arnold.

And Cheyenne, lean, rangy Cheyenne: dark-eyed, dark-haired, racially and sexually ambiguous, a dangerous trait in the Age of AIDS, but attractive, perhaps for that reason. Cheyenne was truly the strong, silent type, and finally admitted after repeated questions that he was an actor, kind of. He had auditioned for a soap recently. Temple could picture him in seminaked, steamy close-ups, getting tons of fan mail from ladies who would never think beyond the obvious.

Finally, Temple got around to her eternal “Why?”

“The money’s great!” said Butch.

“And it’s fun,” Kirk added.

“The chicks are really into it. You should see ’em,” Stetson said. “Here at the competition doesn’t count. It’s an audience of your peers. You should come to a club and watch us.”

“Yeah,” said Temple, “the women perform solo, but you guys usually go onstage in a group. Why? Chicken?” It felt good to pass on Electra’s challenge. The question also loosened whatever inhibitions they had left.

“Naw,” Kirk said. “But it’s true that guys are a new wrinkle in the club game. We’re not supposed to package it and sling it around unless we’re gay.”

“Is that why you emphasize the muscles and the macho poses?” she asked.

Butch shook his virtually hairless head. “We’re body builders, first and foremost. That’s what you gotta understand. We’re used to performing at bodybuilding competitions in no more than a posing pouch. Stripping isn’t much different.”

“Except we get paid for it,” Stetson put in.

“Man, those tips...” Cheyenne’s smile was slow and sensual.

“You don’t feel it’s undignified—?”

“Hell, yes!” Kirk burst out. “But they don’t ask at the bank how dignified your money is. Besides, it’s a kick to watch women act like raving animals for a change.”

“They know it’s not real,” Temple pointed out.

“Yeah.” Kirk was definite. “It’s not real, and that’s okay. Too much of life is real.”

“Like the murder of those female strippers,” she suggested.

The young men’s faces grew sober for the first time.

“Bummer,” Kirk murmured.

Stetson shook his blond head. “It almost makes you feel guilty. We guys get all the hoopla and the good clean fun, and the girl strippers get the sick.”

“You think a psycho did it?” Temple asked.

“Who else?” Cheyenne asked angrily. “Look. We’re doing this and no one will think we’re trash because of it. But women—they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Maybe none of us said it, but it’s healthy to be up-front about your sexuality. But when they do it, women always get a bad rap.”

She was surprised by their angry-young-men passion, by their guilt on behalf of their own gender. “I was going to ask if stripping is exploitive.”

They nodded in concert.

“We exploit our audiences, you know?” Kirk said. “They exploit us. But we both know it.”

“We make money.” Stetson added. “We show off what we worked on, our bodies. We get to be somebody, not just some body. It’s the same for the women, except... a lot of them use stripping to work out deep identity and self-esteem problems. And when the men pant and pay, it’s not a harmless joke, like it is for us. It’s history. Some men can prey on women in nasty ways.”

Temple nodded. She liked these young men. Their work/art/identity was much more clear-cut than it was for the women. They were earthy, attractive, and they knew the score. They would be safe to fantasize about. And to not take seriously.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve helped.”

They couldn’t understand that they’d helped with more personal issues than understanding the urges to strip or make money.

“My card.” Cheyenne handed her a plain white two-and-a-half-by-three. Cheyenne, it read. And a phone number.

Everybody, she thought wearily as she walked away, is an entrepreneur.