Cat In An Aqua Storm

28

Louie Takes a Powder

Matt Devine was shadowboxing, Asian-style, by the pool when Temple returned to the Circle Ritz at four that afternoon.

She paused under the shade of the solitary palm to watch until he finished an arcane sequence, straightened and smiled at her.

“Did your regular caller reach you last night?” she asked.

He shook his head and walked over. His white exercise clothes were clean and unwrinkled. Nothing about him spoke of heat or effort. The man was supernaturally cool, Temple thought, not for the first time. Yet his face was troubled.

“She didn’t call. If she hasn’t—I doubt she will again.”

“What do you think happened?” Temple asked with concern. She hated people dropping out of her life before their stories were resolved. Matt made his living by dealing with such frustration.

Matt sat on the lounge chair, despite its dusting of wind-blown oleander petals. “What happened? Good or bad. Nothing in between. She could have solved her problem and left the abusive guy. She could have gone back to him, broken. I’ll never know.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I’ve got a feeling. That’s what you go by when you counsel people over the phone, in the dark. Instinct. I feel that... she’s gone, one way or the other.”

“She was in an abusive relationship, but had hopes of getting out?”

“Yeah.” He regarded her with new curiosity. “Not a new story.”

“And she had called every day until, was it Tuesday night?”

“When I wasn’t there, right,” he answered a bit self-accusingly.

“Hey, she still didn’t call, even if you had been there. Ever think of it that way, Mr. Guilt Trip?”

He smiled ruefully. “You’re looking better, and you must be feeling better, if you’re delivering pep talks. When are you going to get serious about working out, learning some self-defense?”

Temple sighed heavily, then sat on the end of the lounge chair now that Matt’s weight stabilized it. The shade was pleasant, the sound of the muted traffic predictable, almost peaceful.

“When I feel up to physical education. Right now, I could use a pep talk myself,” she admitted. “They found two more bodies this morning.”

“What?” Matt sat up so quickly that the lounge foot almost collapsed.

“Hey! Yes, now it’s four dead in all. Not even Rambo could stop the national press from overrunning the event—although the organizers seem strangely indifferent to the notoriety. Molina and the Metropolitan police force are convinced they’re after a serial killer hung up on sexy women. They’ve got enough uniformed officers running around the Goliath to make them part of every act. Oh. And Crawford Buchanan showed up today. He’s doing just dandy, well enough to be out working on a sleazy tell-all about this mess for the Las Vegas Scoop.”

“What about your theory?”

“That,” she said darkly. “Molina gave me the birth dates for ‘fair of face’ and ‘full of grace,’ but now that ‘full of woe’ has been knocked piewacky—two dead at once and a day skipped—I don’t feel like pursuing my fantasies. At least I was able to help Molina.”

“That would be the day. How?”

“I’d talked to the victims—twin-sister strippers, who went by the names of June and Gypsy.”

“They were twins?”

She nodded. “Did an act in metallic body paint as the Gold Dust Twins. That’s what killed them, the paint. I’d talked to them about how lethal that stuff can be if you don’t leave a bare patch of skin somewhere to breathe. From what Molina said—and this was before the autopsy—there weren’t any obvious bare spots. And they knew better.”

“So the killer had to get close enough to paint them without their getting suspicious before it was too late?” Temple nodded, then bit her lip. “Unless... they’d been quarreling. Gypsy had invited their father to the competition without June’s knowledge. She claimed he had sexually abused her as a child, but June denied it.”

“Not uncommon. Denial is the backbone of the dysfunctional family.”

“But it would be weird, to abuse one twin daughter and not the other. Maybe the father told himself it didn’t count that way. Anyway, June was against Gypsy’s ‘statement.’ So one or the other of them could have painted her twin solid gold, waited for her to collapse, and finished painting herself completely then.”

Temple watched Matt absorb her somewhat confusing scenario.

“Murder-suicide. It’s possible.” Matt rubbed his chin, an unnecessary gesture. With his blond coloring, he’d never suffer from five-o'clock shadow. “Did you get the twins’ birth dates?”

“Why bother? Molina gave me the first two, but now my theory is impossible. Besides, Molina isn’t talking to me unless it’s an interrogation.”

“When has it been any different between you and Lieutenant Molina? In the meantime, why don’t you check on the birth dates you’ve already got?” '

“Is that therapy, counselor?”

“Common sense. Use what you have.”

“Right.” Temple stood, then checked her wristwatch. “I guess the public library is still open, dam it.”

“Why the library?”

“Who else has one of those perpetual calendars that shows what day of the week it was for the last one hundred years? Speaking of which, that’s about how old I feel. Have you seen Louie lately, by the way?”

Matt shook his head. “Not hide nor hair.”

Everybody was AWOL, Temple thought as she went upstairs. Electra was practically living at the Goliath. Temple had heard a distant vroom-vroom at about three p.m. that indicated the Hesketh Vampire was going through its paces onstage. Louie was almost always gone, as he had been ever since...

Temple turned the key and opened her mahogany door. Dead ahead on the slice of kitchen floor visible stood the banana split dish overflowing with brown-green pellets.

She marched over, picked it up and dumped the contents down the garbage disposal. They made a quite satisfactory racket getting ground up, she observed.

She next did what Matt had suggested. The library’s reference-desk personnel sounded harried, but easily found the needed calendar. Temple read the woman on the other end of the phone the dates: March 4, 1963, and April 22, 1958.

One was a Monday, and one was a Tuesday. In the right order.

Temple screamed and jumped up before the phone was fully hung up. No doubt the library staff was used to bettors calling from bars and other unstable inquirers.

She sat down again, sobered. Since when did women-hating, brutal serial killers of strippers docilely follow nursery rhymes?

She went to the bedroom to change, still mulling it over. Clothes lay everywhere—on the closet floor, near the bed.

Temple stiffened on the threshold. She had been so obsessed with the Goliath murders that she had almost forgotten her own peril. Had those two men come back and trashed her bedroom? Why hadn’t she learned how to lay grown men flat with one well-placed kick? Maybe those thugs weren’t just after Max. Maybe they had something to do with the Goliath murders...

She was already too deep into the condo to retreat from intruders who might be lurking at her back, and the phone was across the room. But why hadn’t they attacked her when she was calling the library from the living room? An abiding respect for public institutions?

Ridiculous.

And her clothes. Most of them had slipped off the hangers. She went over to inspect the damage, and picked up a red knit dress. The zipper was undone. What kind of room-tossing hoodlum stops to neatly undo the zippers? She looked around some more.

Oh, no! Her Hanae Mori green silk, crumpled again, on the floor! She whipped it aloft, unable to help admiring the fall of emerald silk folds. Another gaping zipper. Were these guys metal freaks, or what? Something had wafted to the floor when she lifted the dress.

She looked. A powder puff. The fluffy dressing-table kind. Pink. Ugh. She bent and picked it up. A diagonal white satin ribbon on the back bore the brand name in flowing script. Yvette. The puff part glimmered with opalescent flakes. A subtle whiff of Emeraude assaulted her nostrils.

Temple now knew what had inspired the name of the actress’s cat, but how had Savannah Ashleigh’s powder puff arrived at the Circle Ritz? On the wings of a dove?