“Knowing the layout of the place will help put the murder in perspective,” Matt commented as they returned to the main room.
“ ‘The place.’ You can’t even call it a chicken ranch. A brothel. A bordello. A whorehouse. You give all that advice out night after night to sad and lonely people, but you never give us spirit-lifters out here on the desert a moment of thought or credit. Send some of those road-weary truckers thinking too hard on their lonely lives our way, Mr. Midnight. That’d be some real good counsel.”
“If you’d give them the same personal attention you’re giving me right now, I can see your point.”
“You can see a lot more than that, but you’re not looking. Engaged, I hear, like tall, dark, and Aldo. That doesn’t stop guys from coming out here.”
“How’d you get that information?”
“Those ditsy girlfriends. They chatter up a storm. Not used to being rounded up in a group and kept isolated out here in the desert.”
“The resident girls aren’t chat-happy?”
“This is our workplace, hon. It’s hard work catering to men who expect a hundred percent every minute for their money. We get worn-out. No time for pajama party gossip. We are the pajama party.”
“Do you have any . . . protection?”
“You speaking sexually? We are all condoms all the time. Every place, every act.”
“Um, no. I meant a . . . union.”
“Not here. We do have an ‘association’ and bylaws. We’re freelance workers like your girlfriend. We accept jobs, see them through, get paid, kick back a commission to our landlord for room and board and providing the necessities, and move on in a few weeks to another place, another part of the country.”
“You like that?”
“Which parts?”
“The rootlessness.”
“You bet. Not everybody can travel for their job and get paid for it. There are a lot of laughs going on all over this country. We work the hot spots. East Coast, West Coast, and Vegas. Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast some. Gambling brings out high rollers or would-be high rollers. Both winning and losing brings ‘em home to the Sapphire Slipper.”
“What brought Madonnah back to the Sapphire Slipper?”
Angela forgot her seductress act to think before she spoke. Sincerely. “I don’t know. Our schedules are our own. That’s one of the best parts of the job. Thinking about it, that probably is her upstairs. Like her to slip in unnoticed, but she sure didn’t leave that way this time. I don’t know why she came back before she was expected. Maybe because she liked doing the unexpected. She was—”
“What?”
“A loner. Kept to herself. We don’t have to bond like Lassie and Timmy here, but sisterhood helps. She kept aloof.”
“Stuck-up?”
Angela shook her head. “Not that. Just deep inside her own troubles maybe. Like she was just visiting. Always. Just visiting. Tuned out, that’s exactly what she was doing. Only it was the planet, not just our little ole whorehouse.”
Matt digested Angela’s analysis. These women saw a lot of men, and women, at their worst. He trusted Angela’s instincts. That’s what hookers and midnight radio shrinks relied on. Their instincts about strangers in the night.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Next!” she announced as she flounced through the doorway.
“And you are—?” he asked the busty brunette who paused in the doorway to show off her saloon girl figure.
“Babette, Daddy.”
He hated that “Daddy” thing. “I’m Matt.”
“We know who you are. We’re your regular listeners. It’s a thrill to have you on our turf, to see you in person, and isn’t that a nice sight? Are we what you like?”
“I like women,” Matt said. “All ages and stages.”
“Yeah?” Babette was nearing forty as far as Matt could tell. The maternal sort, with all that natural or assisted mammary development. There was a courtesan here for every druther. Even it was mother. Babette heaved her boobs atop the table and crossed her arms in front of them. “What can I do for you, baby?”
Ten minutes later he was ushering Babette out to bring in Crystal.
“Why the alphabetical names?” he asked the thirtyish woman. She was lean with a narrow harsh face and wore a lot of Goth gear he tried to ignore. He was sure her looks determined her shtick.
“We use different names in different places. Vegas attracts a lot of johns. The alphabet helps keep them grounded to who’s who and who does what.”
“And the dead woman . . . ?”
“Madonnah? Guess she turned out to be a kind of Jonah, didn’t she?”
He was surprised to hear this Wicked Queen woman make a biblical reference.
“Oh, I was raised on the Holy Book,” she said, her dark eyes glittering like the iridescent spiky black tattoos on her upper arms. “Whomping my bare bottom with it until I bled.”
“Did you know Madonnah’s real name?” he said, unwilling to go there.
“She said Mary Jo once, but I’ve heard Miss Kitty call her Nonah once too. I don’t know which is the real one, but we take names close to our own. Like Jazz was Jasmine.”
“And you, Crystal?”
“Crystal is beautiful, fine glass and it cuts.”
He noticed the scars on her forearms. Self-cutting. She noticed him noticing and sneered. “Cathy. What a wimp that little bitch was.”
“Crystal shatters,” he reminded her. “But you are far from being a wimp.”
“I’m not a fan,” she said. “You don’t live in a real world.”
“Agreed. Not that real a world. So you thought Madonnah was a wimp too.”
“Did I say so?”
“Yeah. Loud and clear.”
“You think you hear things, over the airwaves. You think you see things.” She glanced at her scarred and tattooed arms. “I could show you some things, if you had the guts to come up to my room.”
He didn’t, and he knew it. “No one can go there but you, until you’re ready to come out.”
“Scared?” Jeering again.
“Damn right. You win. At last.”
She drew back, not liking the ease of her victory. “I have nothing to tell you.”
“Not anymore. Thanks for the insight on Madonnah. It might help.”
She stood, glowering. “I don’t want help.”
“No, but I thought you might want to help. A little.”
“She was okay. I guess.”
Crystal turned in a crackle of black taffeta skirts and left.
Matt wiped the invisible veil of sweat off his upper lip before . . . Deedee came in.
Temple would pay for setting these brassy, sassy, glassy women on him, but not in the way Crystal would want.
Matt took notes, but Deedee, Fifi, and Gigi were as featherweight as their names, which really were: Dolores, Frances, and Geraldine. Too many girls were still named after their grandmothers. They had seen Madonnah around for three years. She kept to herself, was a little nervous. Seemed like she wasn’t really cut out for the Life. Didn’t have much fun, but delivered for the johns.
Matt turned over a page in his Hello Kitty notebook, courtesy of Miss Kitty.
These big-eyed kitty drawings reminded him of the slitty-eyed real cats prowling the Sapphire Slipper. He’d never admit it to Temple, but he found Midnight Louie’s presence . . . encouraging. That old tomcat always knew where the rats were hidden. Matt thought he’d glimpsed the old boy hanging around that sleek Sapphire Slipper house cat, Baby Blue. He hoped Louie would not let blatant sex appeal divert him from his forever mission of protecting Temple.
Then there was the matter of the Bed between them. Matt knew Louie was used to taking his leisure on Temple’s California king mattress. Matt wasn’t about to share her horizontal time with a cat, especially not after they were married. He supposed he and Louie would just have to duke that out between them. Matt was a reasonable man, but he knew who would win that contest. B
lack topped blond except in Temple’s human love life.
“I’m Heather,” breathed a Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy voice from the doorway.
She was a provocative blend of the two. Matt was reminded of a photo of MM he’d seen, wearing a dark Jackie K wig (way before she’d become Jackie O, which made her Jackie K-O in some weird way), and pearls and palazzo pants and a soft flowing blouse.
The odd thing was that Marilyn had never looked more relaxed than in that prism high-fashion outfit. Otherwise she was molded, pinched, corseted, and confined until overflowing like these SS women.
Matt found himself confounded by this eternal cultural icon of madonna-whore. The really weird part was both celebrated women had been deemed to play both those roles in their tumultuous private lives.
“Heather,” he said, playing for time. “On the hill?”
“Not Scottish. Maybe Heather as in ‘heathen.’”
“Another fan, I guess. You know my history. You have the advantage.”
“That’s nice.” She slithered around him, touching his shoulder with a false fingernail, before she sat. “I like the advantages.”
“What about Madonnah?”
“Her? Didn’t belong here. Didn’t want to play the game. Games. She didn’t even listen to your show.”
“No!” Matt feigned horror. “I thought I was the house DJ after-hours.”
“Not just you.” Heather pushed herself up to grab a bunch of chilled grapes from the refrigerator.
Matt thought: Roman orgy. Was he programmable! Putty in their practiced hands.
“We loved your clients, is that what you’d call them?” Heather had a lovely English accent. Maybe her real name was . . . Helena. He could be bewitched if he didn’t know better. “Charming people. You are always so considerate of them. Reminds us of our own jobs. Consideration. Quite a lost art, don’t you think?”
He nodded.
“It won’t help you solve bloody murder, of course. The people who do that are always inconsiderate. Look at Sherlock Holmes. Snooty sort! Hercule Poirot! Another airy-fairy! But not you.”
Heather, with her hooked nose, too close-set eyes, and rugged complexion had managed to seat herself on his lap to fondle his shirt buttons.
He laughed. “Of all the seducers at the Sapphire Slipper, you’re the one having the most fun. What about Madonnah?”
Heather gazed past his shoulder, imperiously. “No. No, Madonnah. No fun fast, as the Americans say. A very sober girl. Scared sober, I should say. Not like you, Bertie Wooster Baby. You’d like to be scared out-of-your mind drunk.”
“Not now. Not here. Thanks very much. Mind the gap,” he added in the robotic tone of a London Underground recorded message as he stood to unlap her and show her out the archway.
She growled and snapped at him, but went.
Mind the gap! Matt couldn’t believe he was ably parading prostitutes in and out of his lunchroom office like an Inspector of the Yard. Temple had a lot to answer for.
Inez was a Latina beauty with a tender manner. He could see her reared as a good girl, wearing a white mantilla and clutching a white First Communion prayer book and rosary at Mass . . . until some junior high gang-banger deflowered her in a back car seat and it was all over, the days of white and roses. Her culture was black and white, bad and good, and she was suddenly done wrong and irremediably bad.
So she went the way she’d been pushed.
She was a lovely girl, and his heart ached for her, but she wasn’t used to observing and making judgments, just living in her narrow aisle of deserved (she thought) purgatory.
He sent some Hail Marys after her, but doubted they’d catch up to her scurrying spike-heeled steps.
It was starting to weigh on him, like too many confessions heard in a row, the lives lived and not lived here. The ghosts of gaiety and ghastliness that make up the all-too-human condition.
What was he learning?
That the courtesans were gypsies, birds of passage who often bunked together but made no lasting ties. Not with the johns and not with one another. They shared the intimacy of sisters and lovers everywhere they went, but went everywhere alone.
That didn’t seem likely to lead to murder. Yet, maybe where sex was so casual, death would be too. Matt couldn’t fathom these women. He’d picked up that they liked their tawdry notoriety. They burbled about Web pages and blogs and steady customers always welcoming them back wherever they went. About MySpace.com and You Tube.
He found the lifestyle all too depressing. Sure, some of the women showed obvious signs of the childhood abuse that leads to sexual acting out. But some really seemed more like entrepreneurs, peddling their flesh with gusto and even glee of a sort.
Still, they were hooked on the midnight sob stories he heard on WCOO-AM radio.
Still, there was always one more rich john who would drape them in goodies, or a lonely one who’d leave consoled, or a reluctant one, like Matt, who needed to be cajoled. It was unnerving to think that he could have sex with every one of these women, or even several at once, all for what was a reasonable price for his income level.
But he’d been reared a Roman Catholic, not a Roman emperor, and orgies were not for him. Nor celibacy, anymore. Thank God.
And still Jazz and Kiki and Lili and Niki and that ole devil Zazu to go. It already felt like a long night, and no one was having any fun yet.
“What is it with the names?” he asked Jazz.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to reinvent yourself?” She was a fresh-faced pixie of a girl, with acne spots peeking through the pancake and the Clearasil. Maybe . . . twenty-two.
“I think we all do, sometimes.”
“Well, we can be whoever we want. Someplace else, we’re somebody else. Someplace else I use an English accent and go by Dana. “ ‘Wot’ll ya ‘ave, Ducks?’ ”
Jazz giggled at his expression. “You don’t have to take that personally. You’re better-looking than I’d thought, though. Most radio guys sound like Dr. Kool on the airwaves and look like Moby Dick the whale off the air. We get a lot of DJ guys. With us, on the other hand, whatcha see is whatcha get. We’re more honest.”
“Looking good isn’t that important.”
“Say you! I know. I mean, I’ve seen hookers with faces to die for. Bodies too. Models, only they’re too well endowed for the human hanger trade. Some of those don’t do too well at this. Snobby, I guess. They scare the guys.”
“What about Madonnah?”
“Madonnah? She wasn’t bad-looking. Never the kind of girl to play Queen La-ti-dah in the back of the house. Not that enthusiastic about her work. You got to work it, you know. Flash it, flaunt it, make a guy want to spend hard cash on some fun with you. She didn’t seem like a girl who was in it for fun.”
“She didn’t make much money then?”
“Enough, I guess. It kept her on the circuit. Some of the girls you know from the skin out. Some you never know. She was one of the never-knows, that’s why it was so weird she was killed. You wouldn’t have thought anyone was that . . . what’s the word?”
“Passionate about her?”
“Yeah. She was laid-back. Despite our profession, that is not a salable quality.”
Jazz bounced out in her gymnast-pixie way to make room for Kiki, Lili, and Niki.
Matt was asking for the others in groups now, figuring K, L, and N wouldn’t have much new to tell him. And he was wearing out from the parade of bouncing, flagrant party girls. Sultans and polygamists bewildered him. But the impulse to combine proved unwontedly provocative.
“Say, Mr. Midnight. I guess you’re up for a group scene!”
One was a blonde, one was a brunette, and one was auburn-haired. He knew he’d never remember who was Kiki or Lili or Niki, so he thought of them as gold, bronze, and copper.
They wanted to swarm him, but he made them take chairs at the table like civilized girls.
“This is serious. One of you is dead, and the police will soon be interrogating
all of you for real.”
“So you’re our practice run,” the blonde suggested. “Ask away. We are all way too friendly by profession to commit murder.”
“Killers don’t advertise,” he answered. “They don’t have the look written all over them.”
“You know what you have written all over you?” the brownette asked suggestively.
He didn’t encourage her with an answer, but she rushed on uninvited. “You look like Mr. First Time in a house of pleasure. Could we give you a welcome party!”
“Is there a lot of that?”
“Welcome parties?” asked the redhead, Niki. “Every night.”
“I mean clients wanting multiple courtesans.” He was beginning to appreciate the old-fashioned dignity of the term courtesan.
“They almost all want it,” blondie said.
“But they can’t all afford it,” brownie added.
“And some just don’t dare to admit it,” the redhead finished, eyeing him as no doubt the latter.
“Do you get a lot of bachelor parties here?” he asked.
They shrugged in triplicate, and chorused, “Some.”
“It’s not like we get the Fontana brothers in one big bunch ever.” Kiki was the blonde.
“What a shame this gig was a bust,” Lili, the brownette, said.
“None of the houses in the state can put up a sign saying, ‘The Fontana Brothers Were Here.’ That would be a huge notch on the bedpost, let me tell you.”
“I’m relieved to hear that my almost-in-laws are so upstanding.”
Niki, the redhead, loosed a shower of laughter. “What you just said!”
Matt realized any Nevada chicken ranch was a House of Double Entendres, and he was unwary enough to deliver them COD.
“Always glad to amuse,” he added. “Now. About your dead associate.”
“Associate,” Kiki mocked. “I guess that’s what we do, girls. Ass-o-shi-ate.”
“This isn’t fun and games. Madonnah is dead. You girls must feel something about that. Maybe a john was after her for some reason. Sneaked in and killed her.”
“Look,” said Lili. “Nevada is the only state where sex trade workers are guaranteed clean and protected. We can’t come in here and work unless we check out weekly. So we don’t have violence and all that stuff that comes with working the streets with pimps. It’s a great gig, and when we’re off elsewhere, we make real sure we’re fit to come back here. So there are no tooth-gnashing johns raving about scabbies or herpes or anything bad. It’s more likely they’ve got the diseases, and we see that what breeds in Vegas, stays in Vegas, thanks to c-o-n-d-o-m-s.”
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Page 19
