Cat In An Aqua Storm

25

The Kitty City Connection

The phone on the nightstand had an electronic panic attack, jolting Temple wide awake. New-fashioned phones rang like a hysterical Moog synthesizer being choked off in the middle of an aria, she thought, grabbing the red plastic high-heeled shoe masquerading as a telephone. According to the amount of light filtering through the miniblinds on the French doors, morning had arrived.

Temple cradled the heel against her ear, hopeful that Molina had reconsidered and wanted to know more about her theory.

“Hi, kiddo!”

“Electra? I called you last thing last night, but you weren’t home. I was worried.”

“Piffle. You think anyone would give me trouble in that biker babe outfit? When did you do your last thing last night and call?”

“Nine-thirty. I was a little tired.”

“Heavens to Boadicea, dearie! I wasn’t done gossiping until midnight. Want to come up for some whole-wheat pancakes and tofu?”

“Yeah!” Temple’s enthusiasm expressed a hunger for the forthcoming information, not the menu. “I’ll be there as soon as I’m dressed.”

“Don’t bother to dress for breakfast.” Electra chuckled. “After a few hours in the Goliath dressing rooms and at Kitty City, clothes seem downright unnatural.”

Getting into them had struck Temple as unnatural lately, she told herself after she hung up and jumped out of bed. She was slightly cheered to find her right shoulder loose enough to wiggle into a pullover top.

Louie awaited in the kitchen. He lay on the black-and-white tiles making like a grinless Cheshire cat: parts of him faded into the black and stood out against the white. At his length and width, he sprawled over several tiles.

“How about some almost-fresh tuna on your Free-to-Be-Feline?” Temple scraped the last of the can’s contents atop yesterday’s allotment of dry food.

The cat leaned his nose nearer to sniff, but did not deign to rise.

“Louie, you need a better diet at your age! The vet is going to think you’re an incorrigible case.”

Taking her own nutrition lecture to heart, Temple swallowed her regular regimen of bullet-sized vitamin pills with a glass of tomato juice before snatching today’s fire-engine-scarlet patent-leather tote bag from the sofa and racing up to Electra’s penthouse apartment, her heart going pitty-pat. She was not only about to get inside information on the competition from a source she could trust, she would finally see the inside of Electra’s place. Even Max had never broached this holy of holies.

The elevator was particularly cranky that morning, clanking up the three floors. It disgorged her with a final, miffed metallic squeal. Temple walked the few steps to Electra’s set of double doors and rang the mother-of-pearl doorbell. Craftsmen still used touches like that in the fifties.

The heavy wooden double doors muted a mellow echo of her own doorbell, but in a moment one swept open.

The day’s muumuu was yellow and violet, splashed with tasteful streaks of lime green and turquoise. It flowed, a Technicolor wave of polished cotton, from Electra’s neck to her bare toes.

“Come in!” the landlady ordered. “Don’t you look snappy today! Let’s see.”

“Thanks.” Temple had coordinated her red-and-white knit sailor top with a short navy pleated skirt and white, navy and red Charles Jourdan pumps. Her outfit could give Molina a lesson in how to wear navy-blue. She spun decorously, until the pleats fanned out.

“Lovely. So normal, after what I’ve seen lately. I decided breakfast on the patio would be nice. It’s still shady.” Electra took Temple’s wrist to lead her through the mirrored vertical blinds that lined the entry hall, creating a fun-house effect.

In a room beyond, Temple stared at the blond fifties television cabinet she had glimpsed once before. Atop it still stood a huge, green glass globe on a tarnished brass base, whose design represented either colliding Studebakers or copulating elephants, Temple couldn’t decide which.

Even as Temple followed Electra into the next room, she was aware of drawn-blind dimness, of massive shadowy pieces of period furniture—several sofas, for instance—and the evasive scent of eucalyptus.

A genteel thump in a farther room made her stop, resisting Electra’s firm pull. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Electra said.

“But I thought—” A movement brushed along the baseboard edging the parquet floors. Then the bottom fringe on a buxom forties sofa undulated like a hula skirt. “Electra, do you have pets?”

“You cannot own an animal,” Electra replied haughtily.

“Pests, then?”

“What kind of a landlady do you think I am?”

“Then ghosts?” Temple suggested in exasperation.

“I’m afraid not. Not that I haven’t tried. Séances have been held up here in the penthouse since the building was erected in 1953.”

“That’s fascinating. I’d like to—” Temple was jerked through an open French door into the rude shock of daylight.

This high, on the fifth floor, the low-lying clutter of Las Vegas vanished as if it had never been. Only the tall towers of hotels probed the sky as the desert’s faded rose, gold, azure and green bled toward the horizon like running watercolors. The mountains, hazy blue in their serene distance from the hot, yellow-white hurly-burly of the city, kept company with frothy clouds tinted with the exact flattering shade of a baby pink spotlight.

The view was the least of it. The entire rooftop was upholstered in green—covered with potted topiary trees, beds of plump-leaved succulents and cacti with textures as weird and varied as anything on earth.

“Hurry,” Electra said, “you don’t want your pancakes to get cold.”

Temple eyed the only table. A large circle of glass rested atop an abomination: a ring of chubby, gilded plaster Oriental figures with raised hands that were either modeled on Wu Fat in Hawaii Five-O reruns, or the big-bellied Oriental god of luck reproduced in an infinitude of cheap versions.

Atop these gaudy, somewhat ungainly gentlemen—floating on the glass like lily pads on water—were rainbow-colored carnival glass plates, cheap giveaways from days gone by, now dear.

Temple regarded stacks of plump brown pancakes centered on the wavy-rimmed plates. A dollop of white stuff resembling sour cream or Zymonal reposed beside them.

At least there was coffee. She took a sip from a steaming Porky Pig mug.

“Chicory,” Electra announced as she sat, watching Temple fight not to spit out her mouthful. “Now try your wheat cakes. If you must have something unhealthy, here’s a tub of no-cholesterol vegetable oil.”

Temple eyed this concession warily. As far as she was concerned, butter was butter. Pretenders weren’t much tastier than axle grease, but the heavy-textured pancakes needed something. She used her knife tip to scoop out a blob of the pale stuff.

The tofu beside her pancakes shook like Santa Claus’s belly as she smeared her cakes and dug in. Not half bad, if you chewed fast. Electra was dribbling something that resembled rat droppings atop her cakes.

“Raw bran,” she explained.

“Okay,” Temple said. “What about the raw facts? What did you find out at the Goliath?”

“Lots.” Electra tilted her head as she chewed a bite, toying with her shoulder-dusting earrings, a cornucopia of apples, cherries, bananas and pineapples so appropriate to the breakfast hour. “What do you want to know first?”

“About Dorothy Horvath. I actually met the second victim, and saw for myself that she had an abusive lover. But Dorothy was the first, and she’s still a mystery to me.”

“Dorothy—oh, you mean Glinda. Yeah, they all knew Glinda.” Electra pushed the half-dozen colorful wooden bangles ringing each arm up like sleeves as she braced her elbows on the cool glass tabletop and leaned forward to tell Temple all.

“A lot of these dancers live on a very simple level. They don’t worry about who’s gonna be president, or pollution in Mexico City, nothing global or political. Survival is their prime directive, as they say on Star Trek. The only higher education they got was in the College of Carnal Knowledge, and that too early. They figure the world handed them a raw deal, and they’re going to make the best of it. A lot of them pick bad boyfriends and make bad loans. A lot live from day to day, and blow any windfalls on froufrou for the stage, or lots of cheap civilian clothes, or drugs. Or on bad boyfriends again. A lot are what you’d call single mothers—not like Murphy Brown. They had kids when they were still kids themselves. If they’re working for anything besides the bright lights and a G-string full of tips, it’s to keep those kids from getting the same raw deal they got. But they still pick bad men—bikers, the big bad wolf kind, smooth-talking club owners who run their joints like a company store and bleed the girls by fining them flat. Abusers.”

“I get the picture,” Temple put in.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m putting them down. They’re doing their best with a bad deal. Poor Glinda—that face of hers was worth a million bucks, but the brain behind it wasn’t worth enough to make a local call at a pay phone. They say she acted like a ten-year-old. Never quite understood what happened to her—or why, or why it kept happening again and again. She could move on that stage like liquid lightning, but she was a patsy for any smooth operator with a rough reputation who came along. She was going to lose her kids to her first husband, an upright type whose contempt drove her into exotic dancing and who was using her work as a reason to get custody of the kids. Some of the dancers are fighters, some aren’t. Glinda wasn’t.”

“Maybe that was why she based her act on The Wizard of Oz. She wanted to be whisked away to a better world.”

“Or she wanted to go home to a place like Kansas that she never had. Sad story. Sad girl. Guess hubby has the kids for sure now.”

“What about him? Where does he live? Could he have—?”

Electra fanned her hands to stop Temple’s jackhammer questions. “I thought of that, too. Still stationed abroad after the Desert Storm call-up. And he was a shoo-in to get custody anyway, from what the other dancers told me. Glinda kept missing her court dates, so afraid the system wouldn’t help her that she made sure it didn’t.”

“It’s hard to understand self-esteem so low that it can be that self-destructive,” Temple said. Her fork skated a bit of pancake into the pile of tofu. “I can see it, from my one encounter with the kind of a world that sticks out a fist and strikes you down every time you move. Eventually, you’d stop moving.”

Electra patted Temple’s hand to the accompaniment of jangling bangles. “Glinda hoped, in that loony, kiddish way of hers, that winning another Rhinestone G-string would establish that she was an artist, an entertainer, that it would help her get her kids.

“That’s what I was trying to say, these dancers aren’t fools, but they fool themselves,” Electra went on. “They can use the business, or the business can use them. Some girls barely eighteen perform for ten grand a week at uptown clubs. They don’t have to take tips or talk to customers or touch them. They’re exotic dance queens like in the classy old burlesque days. Other girls the same age are bussed around from town to town and dump to dump, paid ten bucks a night and all the tips they can writhe out of men, no more than bar girls selling drinks with their bodies. The sleazy club owners fine them their tip money for so-called ‘infractions,’ and then fire them if they want to develop their careers by taking time off to be in a contest like this. Some club managers are little more than pimps, forcing green kids into dancing until they’re afraid they can’t do anything better. Then there are the seasoned ones, the hardheads. Nobody does them out of their pay, they come and they go of their free will, and essentially take the money and run. Most of them run back to stripping, though, because no other job they could get pays those kind of tips, or offers that kind of spotlight.”

“Whew. You heard it all. What about Katharine—Kitty Cardozo? She wasn’t like poor Glinda North. She had nothing to lose, except a woman-beating man worth getting rid of. She had her own business—”

“She got the business, Temple, just like Glinda. Wait’ll you hear the stuff I dug up. That’s why I was at Kitty City. Who do you think it’s named after?”

“Lots of strip joints play on cat names. The Pussycat Lounge down Paradise, Le Chat Noir—”

“Only one is named Kitty City, and that’s because Kitty—your Kitty!—started it. Or her then-husband did. Twelve years ago. Named it in her honor. She was the star. Then they split. Kitty claimed she owned half, but had no papers to prove it. It seems she trusted them to the office safe, and guess who got custody of that when she walked out?”

“Her husband?”

“The one and only. What a sweetie. Say, I might have a new career. Kitty City doesn’t use novelty acts, but they’re willing to let me try out.” Electra tossed her head. Not much of her moussed midnight-black hair moved, but her earrings shimmied like everyone’s sister Kate. “The Vampire and I just might blow their carburetors.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Swear to Sally Rand! I’m telling you, I could have a sixth career here.”

“Speaking of which, what about your wedding chapel clients while you’re tripping the light fantastic?”

“Listen, there are two dozen wedding chapels in Vegas. Let ’em eat rice cakes somewhere else for a couple of days. The Lover’s Knot will still be here tomorrow. This is fun!”

“I'm glad you’re enjoying yourself. You certainly got a lot of information. I bet Molina would give her best penny loafers for half of what you know.”

“Don’t count on it. That woman is all over that place like a bad dream. I’ve been interviewed by one of her associates already.” Electra paused. “Not bad. About fifty-three. Decent build. Cute little bald spot.”

“Electra! You’re beginning to sound like one of the dancers. Keep your mind on business.”

“Okay. Here’s something I kept hearing, and finally this little voice starts ringing in my ears, sort of breathy, like Marilyn Monroe. Maybe I’m channeling her, who knows? Anyway, it keeps saying: What name keeps coming up, dummy, in all the gossip? And guess what does?”

Temple was at a loss, especially after the Marilyn Monroe allusion out of left field. “Joe DiMaggio?”

“No, silly! Even—get this!—even Savannah Ashleigh has a connection. The word is she’s judging this competition because, if she doesn’t, some photos from her past might show up in the North American Examiner.”

“That supermarket rag!”

“Yes, well-read but not good for the career in ‘filmah.’ ”

“You talked to Savannah Ashleigh, too?” Temple was impressed. Electra knew how to get in there and boogie.

“Oh, yeah. She admired my earrings. I promised to make her some. Glinda did a stint at Kitty City, too. And that’s where Savannah got her start more years ago than she’d care to let on. Supposedly, some sleazy photos of her would have hit the street if she hadn’t agreed to judge this year’s competition. Actually, everyone thinks that some scandalous photos in the right places could jump-start her stalling career, except hers are so old that she no longer displays the top form she used to, and the contrast would be shocking.”

“So Savannah, Glinda and Kitty all worked, even began their careers, at Kitty City?”

“Them, and more. It’s a big club, in a big-club town.”

“You’re not saying that the same man who cheated Kitty of her interest in the business and is blackmailing Savannah, who gave Glinda her start and who wants you to audition is—”

Electra nodded. “The one, the only, and the oily. Ike Wetzel.”