Cat In An Aqua Storm

30

A Stitch in Time . . .

“Another opening, another show.”

Temple was as capable as anyone of responding to the backstage hullabaloo that attended the dress rehearsal of everything from the rawest amateur theatrical to the biggest Broadway hit. Competition preliminaries were much the same.

Yet it was hard for her not to brood. By now Molina had made a stunning about-face and taken Electra’s flaky idea of reviving Kitty Cardozo. Temple hadn’t minded for a moment that a petite and pretty Asian undercover officer used to playing hookers would don the dead stripper’s identity. Professionals each had their roles, and risk-taking was Officer Lee Choi’s prerogative. Besides, she had the requisite raven hair.

Temple’s depression didn’t kick in until three p.m. Friday, when she glimpsed Officer Choi strutting about the wings, a perfect body double for the dead woman. Those high-heeled cat shoes were awesome.

More than that, she hated being reminded of the living Kitty Cardozo she had met briefly, whose hopes and hurts she had glimpsed, as Matt Devine had heard of them over the phone. It seemed cruel to animate the carapace of the woman, her performing persona, one that she had planned to set aside for good soon.

Almost as bad was watching Electra as Moll Philanders participate in the backstage bustle, hovering over the Vampire in its below-stage position near one of the stage elevators, mingling with undercover officers and strippers as if born to be wild indeed.

Temple, meanwhile, had been consigned to cold storage.

“I understand that you consider it part of your job to be on the scene for the preliminaries,” Lieutenant Molina had told her. Temple was beginning to hate hearing that Lieutenant Molina understood. “But I don’t want you mistaken for Kitty Cardozo. Despite the hair, you’re the same build. Don’t confuse matters. Stick to the dressing rooms downstairs where it’s safe.”

“I used to think parking ramps were safe,” Temple objected.

“They weren’t,” Molina snapped.

The lieutenant herself was done up as a stage technician in blue jeans and oversized T-shirt, her dark hair drawn back into a sweat band. The new look didn’t fool Temple for a moment. Molina would broadcast authority in a Bozo the Clown costume. How myopic was a murderer supposed to be?

“Downstairs!” Molina ordered as if Temple were somebody’s misbehaving canine, when the performers and tech people were in place and all the real fun was about to start upstairs.

Chaos reigned in the dressing rooms. Savannah Ashleigh was having hysterics over some missing rhinestone earrings. Since Yvette’s disappearance she had become even more the quintessential spoiled movie star. In the common dressing rooms, strippers thronged back and forth, modesty a foreign concept, as they fussed with last-minute touches,

A dozen panicked voices cried for safety pins as costumes revealed their eleventh-hour genius for falling apart. Hair that had performed docilely for weeks would not curl, pin up or stay put. Hair spray clouded the air.

Zelda, the competition’s buxom wardrobe lady, ran to and fro, a jingling wire ring of safety pins fixed like a badge of courage upon her motherly breast. She ran to first one victim then another, saving the day with safety pins and calm, fixing fingers. Part dorm mother, part madam, she tarted up her girls for the preliminaries like a society mama primping daughters for a debut.

Wilma, the costume lady, was there, too, wearing a bright pink smock-top over her black slacks as if she were pregnant, and whisking out new T-back G-strings for suddenly insecure strippers who felt their acts needed a little more flash.

Temple winced to see a run developing on Wilma’s supply of black lipstick. The macabre color had been ultra-effective with Kitty’s cat mask. Now everyone had seen it on Electra, who found it the perfect partner for heavy metal and leather. Switch Bitch was commandeering the last tube as six others pressed around, pleading to try it.

Temple rolled her eyes as she caught Wilma’s harried glance. Madness, all madness.

The first onslaught of performers suddenly deserted the dressing room like a flock of frightened birds. Who’s on first? Forget it, Bud and Lou, not you guys. The other strippers soon followed, unable to resist rating their peers from the wings, even if watching made them nervous about their own acts.

Zelda moved to Savannah’s dressing room. The actress wasn’t needed today, but wanted to perfect the timing on the six costume changes, each representing a queen of burlesque, that she would accomplish during the final competition. If there was any method to her acting, it was in being the consummate choreographer of her own image.

Temple sat in an abandoned chair in the community dressing room, her feet in their spirited electric-blue spikes braced on the concrete floor. A Milky Way of spilled iridescent powder glimmered on the long makeup counter before her. In the sandwich of reflecting mirrors, she glimpsed her own blue back, a clutter of makeup littering both countertops, and Wilma sitting in her customary seat nearest the door, her ring of teeny-weeny spandex G-strings lying unmauled for the moment.

The dressing room speakers broadcast backstage chatter from the wings and the muffled blare of the sound system spinning its discs. Someone was shouting for quiet.

Temple rose and went over to Wilma. “We’re kind of useless now.”

The older woman nodded, serene.

Temple let her fingers riffle through the gaudy-patterned G-strings, elastic-puckered flights of fantasy. “Do you ever sell this stuff to civilians who want to perk up their lingerie wardrobes?”

“Heavens, no. The department stores have enough bustiers and bikini bottoms to satisfy ordinary people nowadays. Those models aren’t strong enough for the stage, though. That’s why my girls buy from me.”

“How did you get into doing this?”

Wilma’s broad face frowned. A more down-home, ordinary woman you could not find. Her work-thickened fingers roved among the sleazy, shiny fabrics meant to showcase sleek thighs and taut tummies.

“I sewed for my daughters when they were in gymnastics,” Wilma said in a dreamy, reminiscent monotone. “Bright, sturdy costumes. I got used to working with stretchy material, which is tricky. These girls need the same.”

“Your girls must be grown now.”

Wilma nodded. “Grown. Gone. I still sew.”

“And you still have girls who need you.”

Wilma nodded again.

Above them, the remote drone of backstage chaos continued. Upstairs, Officer Choi was strutting her stuff as Kitty Cardozo for an audience that included a possible killer. Suddenly, Temple didn’t resent being removed from the scene of the police trap. She wasn’t a cop or a private dick. She was an onlooker, like Wilma, a temporary face on the fringe of this exotic lifestyle, though Wilma had made a habit of attaching herself to this milieu. These girls would never outgrow her. Their faces and names might change, but their needs never would.

“Why do they do it?” Temple asked, pulling a chair over. Its four feet screeched across the concrete, as if protesting the dislocation. She sat and squelched the sound.

“Do you have children?” Wilma asked out of the blue.

Temple shouldn’t have been taken aback by such a question, but she was. She hadn’t heard it in awhile. Max would have been great with children. On the other hand, in other ways, Max would have been terrible with children, because he was one himself yet, in a still, small, irresponsible corner of his soul.

“No,” she said. Such questions never required a complicated answer.

“Then you’ve never seen the amazing innocence of a young child close up. Never seen how... trusting kids are. How smiling, utterly loving, and attractive. My girls—all curls and tiny white teeth and laughing eyes. Gigglers. In love with the world. Maybe I was young and pretty like that, but I’ve long forgotten it. You see it in a child and you wonder what we’ve all forgotten. You envy them.”

Temple watched the woman’s work-worn face soften with memories. Years and wrinkles fell away. The straight strands of her unstyled gray hair seemed to curve and grow brown again. Was part of having children, Temple wondered, ending up lonely and nostalgic for them?

“I don’t know about that,” Temple admitted. Her most recent maternal instinct had been fretting over Midnight Louie’s feeding regimen and intermittent absences. “But I’ve seen photographs, school photos, in the paper of some poor kid who’s been abused to death, and I’m always amazed that a child living that kind of nightmare can still give the camera a dazzling, hopeful, trusting smile.”

“The world spits on that trust.” Wilma’s white-knuckled fist shook her G-string ring. Her hands were large, the knuckles coarse and swollen, Temple noticed. Sewing must hurt the arthritic joints. A rumpled clutter of G-strings fell back to the countertop. “All that lovely innocence, mangled by its makers. Poor girls. Poor girls. Don’t understand. Didn’t see themselves. And them, the corrupters, they blame the seductive power of innocence. Innocents, that’s what all these girls are”—Wilma looked bitterly around the dressing room, judging every tawdry detail in the makeup lights’ glare—“though they don’t believe it, though they’d laugh and say they know better now. Corrupted innocents.”

“Big words,” Temple said. Old-fashioned, hellfire preacher words. “Are your daughters... in the business?”

Wilma nodded, her neutral-colored eyes distant. “Somewhere.”

“You’ve lost touch?”

“Lost them, yes.”

“I’m sorry. Was it a bad marriage?”

“Worse than I knew. I thought he only hit me, that that’s all he did. I thought I could take it, that I had to take it. I was so scared, so sure I had to be doing something wrong to make him mad. I stayed as long as I could. Too long.”

“What happened to your daughters?”

Her bleak eyes deadened further. “I found out he’d been messing with them, all the time. They were terrified of him, too.”

“How old were they?”

“When I finally found out? Six.”

Temple’s indrawn breath whistled between her teeth at the awfulness of it. “Then you took the kids and left?” Wilma’s head shook almost imperceptibly. “Then I had a breakdown. Nobody talked about such things then. Incest only happened in the Bible. I was committed to an institution.”

“And the kids?”

“Stayed with him. He was the father, and the mother was-—incompetent, they said.” Wilma’s lips distorted into a crooked smile that reminded Temple of a controlled, silent scream. “I was pretty confused and upset. No one believed me. And the kids were too scared to tell. He’d seen to that.”

She looked at Temple, her eyes clearing. Her tone became more vibrant, almost as if she were snapping out of a trance. “Oh, say, hon, did you get banged up too?” A strong, twisted hand reached toward Temple’s cheek.

Temple found herself dodging the gesture, even as she was shocked by how rude that was. “I’m fine. Just a... dumb accident.”

Wilma’s sympathetic expression grew weary. “Yeah. Sure. But look, I got some terrific cover-up in my bag. You’d be surprised how many of these dancers, come in banged up from here to Sunday—legs, arms, faces. Try it.”

Temple took the small tube of makeup, which claimed that the contents would cover bums and birthmarks: She’d never used this heavy-duty stuff before, so she gingerly dabbed some at the edges of her eyes. In the mirror, the lurid coloration that had seeped through her usual cover-up vanished.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” Wilma said in the same, sad monotone. “You don’t need to take that. You don’t need to work here.”

“I’m not a battered woman,” Temple said swiftly. “I was mugged. And I can’t let a setback like this keep me from working. Here, can I buy this tube—?” She reached for the tote bag on the floor.

Wilma’s hand, hard and warm, caught her wrist and held it, before she could extract her clutch purse.

“You don’t have to pay. I never charge anybody for that stuff.”

“Thanks.”

“A girl like you, brought up right, you shouldn’t be here.”

“I won’t be, much longer.” Temple tugged her hand free, straightened in the chair, took in the eerie emptiness of the dressing room with the sound of onstage life coming in faint and fuzzy over the loudspeaker.

“How old are you?” Wilma asked suddenly.

“Twenty-eight,” Temple answered. An icy spasm clutched her stomach.

“Twenty-eight. A good age. Old enough to know better. Young enough to not feel yourself falling apart yet. When’s your birthday?”

“I’m a Gemini,” Temple said, stalling for time. Her mind was dancing like water on a hot griddle, sizzling with warning. Birthday talk seemed so sinister... No one had been a bit interested in birthdays lately, except her and the murderer. No—! Birthdays expressed Wilma’s motherly instincts. Temple wouldn’t even think this way if she hadn’t been so overstressed and overworked, seeing death in unlikely places, in innocent faces.

Wilma was nodding, taking out needle and thread to repair one of the G-strings, as she considered Gemini. “May-to-June. A nice time of year to be born. Not a bad time to get married, either, or to have children, or to die. You’re a June baby, though, right? Right in the heart of Gemini?”

“June,” Temple answered reluctantly.

“What date?”

“Why?”

Wilma’s sparse eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I do a little cake for my girls’ birthdays. It’s no problem. They dance it off. You youngsters could eat an elephant and still look like toothpicks, with all the prancing you do. And all to that awful, loud, repeating music.”

“You bring cakes for each one’s birthday?”

Wilma nodded. “Homemade. My last was a Lady Baltimore. Nobody makes Lady Baltimore cakes anymore, but nothing’s too good for my girls.”

“I noticed some half-eaten cake in this dressing room earlier in the week.”

Wilma gave another complacent, grandmother-sewing kind of nod. “That was my Lady Baltimore, what was left of it. They gobble it up like little pigs.”

“Then you... know their birthdays?”

“Course I do. Couldn’t make the cakes otherwise. When is yours, dear? I’ll make you a Red Devil’s Food, haven’t made one of those for ages. When’s your birthday?”

“June,” Temple temporized, “and not for a days and days. Wilma, what do you think about the killings?”

“Terrible,” the woman said. “Terrible things. What was done to my girls was terrible.”

Temple had a feeling that Wilma was not talking about the murders, but about the wrongs that preceded them. “Then you knew Glinda and Kitty, and the twins?”

“I know all my girls,” she said.

“Did you know that Glinda and Kitty had abusive men in their lives, and that one of the twins was molested by her father?”

“Only one?” Wilma’s face slackened with shock. “Only one twin? No, it must be that only one admitted it, and the other denied it. Denial is very common in such cases.” Wilma sounded like a parrot mouthing the party line dispensed in some shrink’s office, but then, she ought to know that routine, Temple thought.

“That’s true,” Temple agreed. “How sad that those women won't be here to perform tomorrow. And they all celebrated birthdays so recently.”

I remember doing cakes for them, but were their birthdays that recent?”

Temple ticked off the dates on her fingers. “Dorothy/Glinda was March. Kitty was April. And the twins were June—Gemini like me. Isn’t that odd?”

Wilma shrugged and tied off a knot. She picked up a polished chrome sewing shears to cut the thread. “Everybody has to be born sometime.”

“But isn’t it odd that the victims’ birthdays are almost in sequence through the calendar: March, April, June. Except that May is missing.”

Wilma paused to think. “No, it’s not.”

“It’s not? You mean that there’s another victim nobody knows about?”

Wilma pursed her lips. “You had to know the girls. You had to be around to listen. Gypsy and June. Everybody knew they were stage names. Everybody figured they referred to those famous strippers, Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister June Havoc.”

“They didn’t?”

“Yes, they did, except that June was June’s real given name to begin with. You see?”

Passing laughter reverberated in the hall for a moment as a last gaggle of strippers rushed upstairs. Wilma rose and drew the dressing room door shut on the sound.

Temple’s mouth opened and her hands clenched. “I don’t see anything,” she admitted.

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this.” Wilma resumed her chair but set her sewing things aside. “They hated it themselves, and tried to forget it. Sometimes twins are funny about things. June and her sister were born a few minutes apart.”

Temple nodded. “On June 1, 1967.”

“No.” Wilma was definite. “I heard it from their own lips. June was born on June 1, 1967. At twelve-thirteen a.m.”

“And—omigod. Gypsy was born earlier, the night of May 31st, and christened... May!”

Wilma smiled fondly. “They hated all the school jokes about ‘May’ and ‘June.’ I think they even hated being separated by as much as midnight. Those girls were so close. It would have been cruel to kill one and leave the other.”

An ugly thought trespassed in Temple’s mind. “Just as it was the height of cruelty to abuse one, and not the other! Gypsy was right. Her father had victimized only her to intensify his manipulation of the girls. And she’s the one who changed her name, May, because she had come to loathe the man who called her by her birth-name only to violate her.”

Wilma’s face wore a prudish expression. “I wouldn’t know about that, except that Gypsy was set on inviting their father to the competition. I wonder if he knows they’re... gone? I wonder if he’ll find out when he comes?”

“More to the point, would he even care?”

“No. If he cared about anything other than his sick needs, he wouldn’t have done what he did, hurt his girls beyond fixing. You can break human beings, but you can’t mend them. You can’t baste them together again. Nobody takes care of the broken ones. I gave the twins their cake June 1st. May yearned to be June. Maybe she wanted to share her sister’s innocent memories. Now they won’t have to remember anything ugly.”

“So May 31, 1967, had to have been a Wednesday,” Temple mused, drawing her forefinger through the glittery line of opalescent powder that Wilma sold and that Dorothy, Kitty, June and Gypsy had used. All gone now, dust from a dead butterfly’s wing. Beautiful, fragile fairy dust, like Tinker Bell’s. Temple had seen that sheen somewhere else... on a powder puff. Savannah Ashleigh had used the same stuff on Yvette. And had bought it from the same source. And Midnight Louie—

“Gracious!”

Wilma’s exclamation made Temple jump. The woman was squeezing her fingertip until it reddened. She had pierced her finger with a needle.

“Have you got a kerchief?” Wilma asked.

“I’ll look.” Temple, confused, her heart pounding, trying to think when all that came into her mind was the unthinkable, lifted the tote to the countertop and slapped its contents to the Formica piece by piece until she delved deep enough to find out.

Her clutch purse with its cargo of cash, credit cards and driver’s license was the first item out, then her bulging day arranger and address book, then her cosmetic bag, then...

Wilma had picked up the clutch purse and unsnapped the flap. .Temple was about to protest this incursion on her most valuables. Then she remembered the little plastic window inside that displayed her driver’s license.

Wilma was smiling and nodding at that very item.

The license, Temple recalled, listed her address, her number, and her DOB, as police shorthand put it. Date of Birth.

Stricken, she stopped rummaging through her belongings to state at Wilma. Opalescent dust, even on a powder puff meant for a pampered pussums. Oh, Louie, that wasn’t a fuzzy “mouse” you dragged home for the heck of it, but a vital clue! The murderer had left a trail in powder. Temple’s renegade forefinger drew an exclamation point in the glittery dust that had decorated four dead bodies and one cat.

She knew who the murderer was. Unfortunately, the murderer knew exactly who she was now, and that she knew.

Wilma set Temple’s clutch purse aside to snap open the huge silver ring to release a spandex G-string. She was a beefy woman with strong hands and a mission. Temple realized that she had just made her hit list.