Such behavior is likely to look suspicious, if not downright psychotic, to the police professionals who will soon descend on our parlor play of the moment.
It strikes me that Miss Temple, who spent most of the past year defending Mr. Max from Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s relentless suspicions, has traded one fiance for another, and for the same outcome. She must now defend Mr. Matt from Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s relentless suspicions.
At least, it occurs to me, Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina likes Mr. Matt Divine, maybe more than she realizes.
Hmm. Sad to say, but it might best serve our cause (Mr. Matt Devine) if said homicide lieutenant got her size nines out here and took over this messy, confusing crime scene straight out of that movie musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Brother! I am sure glad that we feline dudes do not do matrimony.
Wheel of Misfortune
The ladies in the front parlor were still playing Game Boys. Apparently, they’d never updated to the latest techie toys.
The odd appropriateness of their choice of amusement hadn’t occurred to them, although it had certainly stunned Temple. She supposed they had a lot of odd hours to while away in their profession.
Miss Kitty was knitting, and Ms. Phyliss Shoofly was torturing the ivories on the upright piano in the bar. She was playing the title song to the musical, Cabaret.
Apparently not just life, but death, was a cabaret, my friend. Because life here clearly went on, with time to be killed as well as paid for.
Temple paused on the threshold, studying the women’s odd combination of undress and gussied up with such fripperies as fingerless chiffon gloves, garter belts and hose, teeny-tiny thongs, high heels, and low-cut mini-corsets.
The various shades of blue reminded Temple of Matt’s “Virgin Mary blue,” the pastel not-quite-turquoise shade found on Catholic holy cards of the Virgin and Tiffany jewelry boxes. That was an odd combo of the sacred and the secular.
Here the blues ran the gamut from a military navy blue speaking of bondage and discipline to ruffles of the palest sky blue, speaking of sugar and spice and everything nice. Yet it all was exaggerated, whether butch or babyish. It all went to extremes, like elaborate theater. Like a cabaret.
“I’m surprised you don’t play solitaire with real cards,” Temple remarked as she came in and sat down on one of the few free chairs.
“Cards?” one woman jeered. “If the guys knew we had cards in the house they’d hole up with them and start gambling. We want their concentration, and their money, on us.”
“Is that why the Sapphire Slipper is so far out on the desert?” Temple asked.
“To keep the men captive?”
“Sure,” answered Miss Kitty, rising and moving among the courtesans. “Pretty and pleasing as my girls are, gambling is a more magnetic vice. It’s hard to lure big spenders away from the tables. That’s why I keep a cigar bar stocked with world-class spirits, and why my cook can whip up big game dishes as well as cow and crawfish. And, of course, my girls are the best in the state at their specialties.”
“Do you often rent the whole house to special parties?”
“Sure. Conventioneers. PACs.”
“Political Action Committees?” Temple couldn’t help sounding shocked.
Miss Kitty’s plump features folded into a complacent smile.
“We put the Action in PACs.”
“So nothing about this booking set off any red flags?”
“Only the green flags of moolah. The girls enjoy a big party. There are group scenes. Some customers request special, high-dollar attention.”
“Would you say you and your staff were disappointed when you discovered this was a kidnapping party?”
“Hell, no. Surprised at first, sure. But then we eyed the ‘victims’ and thought this would be a laugh riot. My girls are ready to do vixens-in-charge any time.”
“And it didn’t bother you that the men were captives?”
“Pretty willing captives, once everything became clear.” Miss Kitty leaned against a floral-upholstered easy chair. “I’m going to set out some sodas and chips in the kitchen. The girls are used to a bedtime snack about now. They burn a lot of energy before the wee hours. As for what goes on here, Miss Barr, we aim to please our customers, and I’ve never known a man to object to some sexy teasing.”
Matt would have, Temple knew, but he wasn’t caught in the same net as the Fontana brothers. As for the brothers, once they recognized their girlfriends, they would have gone along with the mock-kidnapping. They would know that sampling the house goods was only a tease. The whole idea was to claim the brothers, once and for all.
All for once, and once for all. Like the Three Musketeers’ “all for one and one for all.”
It was just a bit of nonsense and fun, until the dead girl had landed in their midst.
Temple punched up the photos on Nicky’s cell phone.
“Look. I’m going to send these pics around again. One of you might recognize the girl in them on a second round. Nobody else has a clue.”
Game Boys idled in laps. Whitened teeth bit into reddened and plumped-up lips. The phone passed from woman to woman, each one expertly clicking through the three photos Nicky had taken, then shrugging and shaking her head. The screen was small and the quality was iffy.
The dead girl was not a game.
Babette handed the phone back to Temple when the circle had been completed. “Can’t say I recognize her. She could be a Fontana girlfriend.”
“They’re all accounted for.”
More shrugs. Game Boys were in play again on several laps.
“Listen,” Temple said, annoyed by the indifference. “Something is fishy here and I want answers. I’ll be a lot easier to deal with than the police. I bet they like to rake hookers over the coals.”
“We are legal,” Angela said.
“We are courtesans, not hookers.”
“We don’t lure men, they come looking for us. We are a cut above.”
“Then if you’re a cut above, why can’t you spell?” Temple asked, cuttingly.
“Huh? Who says we can’t?”
“Well, you don’t know your alphabet.”
“ABCs? We know a lot more than that.”
“Then why are E and M missing from your roster?”
“E is a sucky letter for glamorous names. I mean, Emily, Eleanor, Evelyn, Edith. Sound like freaking dead schoolteachers. That’s not the kind of school we teach.”
“And M?” Temple pointed out. “Surely M is promising. Mitzi, Muffin, Mimi . . . I guess you may be a cut above but you’re not very creative thinkers. Might that carry through into the bedroom?”
She had them riled and spitting. Playing Bad Cop was fun. No wonder Molina did it. They protested in a blizzard of comments.
“Hey, that’s not fair!”
“You don’t know nothin’ about us.”
“That M is taken. Reserved. We can’t use it.”
Finally. An interesting response.
“Why?” Temple shot back.
The sudden silence said a lot. Kohled eyes consulted kohled eyes. A communal sigh and continued, now sullen, silence.
“What name is the M for?” Temple goaded. “What’s the matter? Can’t you spell it?”
“It is an odd spelling,” Inez said quietly. “But then, she’s an odd girl.”
“Miss Fritzi Ritzi House Favorite, you mean,” Lili said.
“She has a shtick,” Zazu added.
“What is the name?” Temple asked again.
“Madonnah. M-a-d-o double n-a-h.” Zazu again. She didn’t seem to have issues with the missing girl.
It took Temple a second to visualize the spelling. “Like the rock star, only different.”
“She has a Madonna shtick,” Niki said. “Always changing her hair color and style, her nails, her makeup. Even her own mother couldn’t keep up with recognizing her.”
“Her shtick is being a prima donna,” Lili said. “S
he doesn’t have to sit in a presentation row like the rest of us, selling her wares. She picks her johns from watching on the surveillance camera. We hardly see her.”
“Then,” Temple said, picking up the cell phone, “these photos could be of her. Care to look again?”
“We haven’t heard she’s here again,” Kiki objected.
“She sounds like someone who could have slipped in anytime,” Temple pointed out.
They shrugged and passed around the cell phone images again.
“Can’t say. Could be her. Even we didn’t glimpse all of her looks. We just know she’s in the house when there are these secret assignations in the Starlet room.”
“She’s Miss Kitty’s pet.”
“Like Baby Blue, the cat?” Temple asked.
“Like, I don’t know,” Crystal said. “Like some weird recluse. Maybe she has a special talent in the sack. We don’t know. She comes and she goes, and we hardly know when or where. If we run into her in the break room or the hall or the bathroom, she’s like a freaky geek. No chitchat, no zippers help pulled up and down. Just in and out. She does her job that way, she’d get no johns. But they love the shtick and keep asking for her.”
“Madonnah,” Temple repeated.
Deedee handed the cell phone back to Temple as it finished its rounds. “Could be her. Who knows?”
Miss Kitty might, Temple thought.
“Thanks,” she told them. “Sorry I was so rough on you. I need the info.”
They stared at her. “Honey,” said Zazu, “you is a declawed kitten.”
Temple was not encouraged, but she was wondering how Matt would take knowing he’d given CPR to a hooker called Madonnah.
Loving Dangerously
Matt snagged Temple as she was passing through the bar to the kitchen for something bracing for further interviews, like a Red Bull energy drink. It was no surprise that she’d spotted a large stock of those in the refrigerator.
“Does the busy interrogator have a minute?” he asked, stopping her by the doorway where the opportunities for overhearing were minimum.
“Oh, Matt. It’s so impossible. Meeting every Fontana girlfriend and trying to remember who goes out with whom and unravel how they came up with this scheme and who might have had an ulterior motive.”
“And you haven’t even factored in the resident ‘courtesans’ yet.”
She groaned. “Whoever set up this murder, if it was indeed set up, knew how to confuse the issue three times over. I finally beat a lead on the identity of the victim out of the resident courtesans.”
“That’s great! Why are you moaning about not making progress then?”
“She was a real mystery woman, made a shtick out of always being in disguise.”
“I thought those abundant Venus on a clamshell locks were a little unreal.”
“She worked under the name Madonnah, spelled with an h on the end and was almost never seen. She picked her johns, not the other way around. The others were not too taken with her prima donna ways. So . . . one of them could have killed her in a fit of jealousy.”
“That’s why I think you should let me interview the courtesans.”
“You?”
“I am a professional counselor. The theory being that many sex industry workers have abuse issues, I might pry things out of them easier than you. A lot of women like this call into ‘The Midnight Hour.’ “
“It’s true that they probably think women like me are hopelessly naive about the world as they see and live it.” Temple glanced back toward the parlor, where bare parts of half-clad courtesans were visible through the archway. “These pros would eat a good boy like you alive.”
“Maybe not. I know how to get past well-varnished facades. And I’m not as good as I used to be.”
Temple lofted an eyebrow. “In the behavior sense, not the bedavior sense.”
“See? I’m more qualified than ever for the job. Let me try.”
She considered his request, realizing that he still regretted the call girl’s death at the Goliath. Apparently, their tête-à-tête that night had been a revelation to both. Matt’s priestly years of celibacy made him a mystery to worldly women like hookers, Temple bet. They’d probably sense that he didn’t have the ordinary male vulnerability to their wiles and seductions and mind games. He was firmly neutral in that department, almost like a gay friend. Yet not gay at all.
“They’ll be enchanted with you, and probably let their hair and their guards down,” Temple decided. “Pick a room upstairs to set up in, and go to it.”
“Not upstairs, not their working environment. If they have private quarters, there must be a gathering room there.”
So it was that half an hour later the first courtesan, glancing significantly at her sisters in suspicion, announced that she was having a visit with “Mr. McDreamy Midnight” in the break room and slunk off through the Fontana boys’ bar—applause and whistles—through the girlfriends’ kitchen—hoots and the clatter of tableware—to the low rambling annex where the women of the Sapphire Slipper actually bathed and slept and did their nails.
Temple hoped that she was doing the right thing. Which was hard to determine in a brothel.
Break Dancing
Darned if the brothel “break room” didn’t resemble any small business cafeteria, if it was for a funky, loosely run operation.
Matt took in the Formica-topped vintage dinette sets scattered over the vinyl tile floor. Their chrome legs and trim were age-dulled, but their cheerful seat covers in maroon, purple, yellow, and red plastic resembled a field of large, gaudy mushrooms.
A big white refrigerator was the elephant in the room, dwarfing a roomy microwave on an adjacent wheeled cart. A similar cart hosted a small TV. If small Lucite trays holding fingernail files, polish, and glue, lip gloss and mascara wands weren’t lying on the tables, Matt would have felt as at home as in a convent kitchen.
But the Age of Innocence was past, and this kind of communal living had nothing churchly about it.
Matt’s impression of the resident courtesans had been that they all looked alike. This open call interview session Temple had dreamed up for him would force him to discover differences and, perhaps, suspects.
It was likely one of their own, after all, who lay murdered upstairs. He shivered, more because Miss Kitty had kicked up the air-conditioning when it was obvious they’d be stuck out here with the body for a few hours. But that was like trying to stop the Red Sea from parting with an air machine.
“Howdy, Mr. Midnight. My name is Angela. We’re coming in alphabetically, so you get the heavenly body first.”
Angela paused in the doorway in typical temptress pose, one arm up along the frame, the other hand on her hip. At least she wore something, a sheer peignoir over a corset with garter straps and thong panties. Matt would never get what was hot about such outfits. Must be hangovers from Victorian repression. Analyzing that kept him from ogling Angela’s celestial form, which did look slim and firm and shiny in a Barbie doll sort of way he found a little too perfect.
“You know me?” Matt asked as she swaggered over on her four-inch spikes, jerked open the refrigerator door and regarded the contents long enough to give him a good rear view.
She finally found a can of some new-wave high-energy drink and joined him in sitting at the gray Formica-topped table.
“I never thought you’d be a customer out here at the Sapphire Slipper,” Angela said.
“I’m not. I was hijacked. We town guys all were.”
“I looove your voice on the radio. It’d be a real kick to hear it whispering in my ear some night. Tables turned.”
He ignored her come-on. “So you’ve actually heard my program?”
“We all have, honey, coming down from a night’s work in here. Unwinding. Gettin’ down. Who do you think we tune in to? Mr. Mellow Midnight.”
He knew he had long-haul truckers and night casino staff in his invisible audience, but he’d never dreamed whole brothels of
shady ladies would tune in. “You close at midnight, then?” he asked, surprised.
“That’s our hours, noon to midnight. It’s a long drive back to anywhere from here, and even good-time guys and hookers gotta sleep sometimes.”
He eyed the hall off the kitchen. “Those are your quarters?”
“Yup. You wanta see?”
Matt thought it might be illuminating. “Yeah. Do all the . . . places have this arrangement? The guest bedrooms up front and fancy, and a, like, dorm for the residents in back?”
She stood and leaned over him, as her lips enunciated the words only inches from his. “No, my Midnight Man. Some of the lower-end places have the girls work out of their living quarters. In a way, it’s more convenient.”
But this was more convenient for a murderer, to kill on what amounted to a stage set, far from where the residents actually slept.
Matt stood. “My curiosity is purely academic.”
“Yeah, sure.” She smiled enticingly over her filmy blue shoulder as she led him down the dim, plain hall. She reminded him of the huge plaster figure atop the Blue Mermaid Motel, a knowing creature in her element, relishing that he was out of his.
It took five minutes to figure out the courtesan’s quarters were as bare and practical as a convent. How unnerving that women consecrated to no sex and women living on nothing but sex ending up in such spare, unsensual circumstances.
He saw single beds without head or footboards, cheap motel dressers bought by multiples with matching bedside tables. Blinds on windows. Everything institutional, although stuffed animals lined up against the plain beige walls and the dresser tops here were littered with gaudy rhinestones and garters, not the simple string of rosary beads and a small photo of the old folks at home. There were no photos of anyone but these women, taken at formally happy moments, in a line in the parlor, laughing in the break room. They were family.
Nuns, of course, were an old and dying breed. These women were a breed as old as prehistory probably, and not dying out at all.
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Page 18
