Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “They think,” she confided in her strange pulsing whisper, “that the miscreant left his footprint on the side. So they dusted my Darling’s home-away-from-home.”

  “Footprint. Dusted. Darling.” Temple knew she was babbling, but Savannah Ashleigh didn’t seem to notice.

  The actress unzipped the top and withdrew a limp handful of silver-gray fur. She arrayed it on her lap, which was mostly lace-patterned white pantyhose.

  “Oh, the darling!” Temple exclaimed, understanding.

  Savannah’s pale blue eyes lit up for the first time. “My Darling Yvette was alone with that monster! She witnessed the entire... act. And it was hideous.

  He... hit the poor girl first.”

  Savannah’s hand pantomimed a sudden karate chop.

  “Then he... hoisted her unconscious body.”

  Her exquisitely expressive hands mimed lifting an offering to a god.

  “Then he wrapped a rhinestone G-string around her neck and hung her from a costume hook high”—here the deliberately dusky voice went small and wee, like a little girl’s—“on... the...wall.”

  She sank back against her upholstered chair back, exhausted. “Yvette saw it all, heard it all. I cannot even begin to guess what trauma this has caused, but I can tell you this: my Darling has not been herself since yesterday morning!” Narrowed eyes and heavy emphasis had Temple retreating even as Emeraude advanced.

  Temple lowered her head to examine the downcast darling. For all the fur, Yvette seemed petite. Temple found a calm but breathtakingly wistful face with round aqua eyes outlined in black mascara, and a rose-colored nose emphasized by the same natural accent line.

  “She’s gorgeous!” Temple admitted with more sincerity than she had managed to muster for Savannah Ashleigh so far. “I have a jet black cat, but he’s just a stray.”

  “Yvette has not a stray hair on her body. She is a purebred shaded silver Persian. Her full name is Diamond Bleu Moon Sirena Yvette.”

  “Is she... adult? She’s so small.”

  “Yvette is two,” Savannah said, “and she always travels with Momsy.”

  “Louie—my cat—is much bigger. He weighs over nineteen pounds.”

  “Yvette weighs six-point-eight pounds,” Savannah said with satisfaction, “She is not designed to be subjected to rude shocks. If I come across the miserable man who murdered that poor girl and apparently kicked my Darling Yvette, I will string him up myself. Personally.”

  Savannah Ashleigh’s long fingernails convulsed on the darling Yvette’s coat, but luckily it was thick enough to buffer the owner from its mistress’s fury on her behalf.

  “The police are sure the killer was a man, then?” Temple asked.

  “Who else would kill a woman like that—hang her from her own G-string? Nasty sort of thing a man would do. And I know few women who would kick at a cat.”

  “But Yvette was in her carrier. He might not have noticed what his foot hit—”

  “Not have noticed? Her name is written plain to see right on the top. Y-v-e-t-t-e.”

  Temple examined the writing in question, a tortured silver script that looked more like “Gavotte” to her. “He might have been in a hurry.”

  “That is no excuse.” Savannah hoisted the limp feline in one hand and draped her into the carrier as if dropping a chiffon scarf into a drawer. “I see that I dare not leave my Darling out of my sight in a common dressing room. My private dressing room was not yet assigned, since the competition has booked the penthouse suite for me. Some of these hotel buffoons tried to hint that I didn’t require a downstairs dressing room! Idiots. A moment’s carelessness and look what happened. Yvette has not eaten her Free-to-Be-Feline since yesterday morning.”

  “Oh, really,” said Temple, interested for the first time. “Have you tried putting some deli turkey over the top?”

  “Not even Alaskan salmon will work, although I might have better results with Cajun shrimp. Yvette has a most piquant palette.”

  “No kidding.” Temple leaned nearer for a consultation across the noxious moat of Emeraude. Feline eating habits—or the lack of them—drove human companions to desperate measures. “Have you ever thought of trying...”

  11

  The Naked and the Dead

  Temple had learned in her TV reporting days that the best way to sniff out a new environment was to follow her nose for novelty. The born newshound’s tenacious curiosity often leads down offbeat byways that no one else would bother investigating. She'd snagged some of her best news stories that way. If she followed her instincts, she’d have a handle on the stripper competition by noon.

  Not that Temple really wanted a handle on the dizzying array of activities erupting all over the ballroom. A rapid glance around showed a circus of firm flesh on the half shell, most wearing little more than a thong-style G-string... Samsons with bulging muscles and oiled tans and long hair tickling their shoulder blades... Delilahs with thin thighs and flat stomachs and breasts that were anything but flat. The current robust, hirsute view made the trendiest health-club exercise floor seem populated by dull and flaccid duds.

  All of these beautiful people in motion were under-studying Narcissus, gazing raptly into perimeter mirrors as they stretched muscles and studied costumes under the overhead spotlights. Taken together, they seemed larger than life, not just because they all conveyed a kind of in-person, airbrushed comeliness, but because even most of the women were model-tall.

  Temple felt like Pinocchio at the fair, an undersized stranger out of her depth and in danger of succumbing to something, even if it was only amazement. Her gaze inventoried the huge ballroom while she decided who to approach first: the Amazonian miss with Raggedy Ann red hair who was affixing helium-filled balloons to her skimpy bikini, or the apparently naked, tattooed muscleman emerging from the bottom half of a gorilla suit.

  “Barr, is it?” a male voice behind her said, gruffly.

  She turned, expecting Billy Goat himself in person. She was relieved to face one of the few fully clothed men in the room. However, a peach knit shirt under a Madras plaid sport jacket paired with black trousers was no advertisement for the post-Eden advantages of clothing. Once past the color clash, she saw a man in his thirties: good-looking in an aggressive, humorless blue-collar way.

  “Ike Wetzel,” he introduced himself. “Lindy said you were good at your job, but I might as well tell you I woulda got along with Buchanan better. I see enough of broads all day in my work.”

  “What is your work?” Temple asked, knowing that a self-directed question turneth away wrath, or at least sour preconceptions.

  “I run Kitty City.”

  She looked blank.

  “On Paradise Road.”

  “Oh, the topless place. You’ve got the sign showing cats in anatomically incorrect positions.”

  “Right.” His muddy brown eyes flicked her up and down, an unconscious gesture designed either to take in what she was wearing, or to mentally take it off. “I’m cosponsoring this competition thing. A lot of my girls have their hopes pinned on it. I don’t want this murder messing up their chances.”

  “It sounds to me like the only person this murder has messed up so far is the victim.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Wetzel suggested. He frowned, an expression that came easy to the permanent furrow between his dark brows even when he was trying to look genial, which he wasn’t at the moment. “It’s bad enough that we got cops all over the premises. Your job is to get the attention off the corpse and back on the corpuscles—on what every red-blooded guy wants to know about the greatest strippers in the world.”

  “I understand,” Temple said, “but aren’t men competing, too?”

  “Yeah, a few.” Wetzel snorted his opinion of that trend. “Separately, though. Concentrate on the gals. They draw the real dough. Male strippers are a passing fancy, except in the gay clubs. And even in the straight clubs, broads don’t tip as good as guys do.”

  “Maybe women don’t ge
t the same service,” Temple answered coolly, recognizing a moment too late that she had let herself in for any number of double entendres.

  Not to worry. Ike Wetzel wouldn’t recognize an opening for a double entendre if it parlay-vouzed Français with a Milwaukee accent and asked him to dance. Down-the-middle-of-the-bowling-lane kind of guys don’t notice linguistic detours.

  “Women’s hearts just aren’t in it,” he commented disdainfully. “Watching guys strip is good for a giggle when they’re out in a gaggle, but they’re not connoisseurs of the art.” He pronounced it “con-no-sirs.”

  “So lay off the guys and the old dames. Stick to the foxy chicks.”

  “Any other advice?” Temple’s temper simmered behind her most professional facade. Ike Wetzel seemed as impervious to veiled indignation as he was to treading on professional toes.

  “Well-—” He no doubt intended his knowing smirk to be a confidential grin. “Off the record, put your time in on my girls. They do real well at these things. If you’re nice to me, I might even be able to tip you off early who’s gonna win.”

  “Mr. Wetzel, if my job included being nice to everybody, I wouldn’t get anything done.”

  “Just letting you in on who’s who around here. Buchanan knew the score.”

  “Exactly what did Buchanan know?” a new voice asked sharply. The voice was low, an excellent thing in a woman, but hardly soft and gentle, and that was an even more excellent thing in a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department homicide lieutenant.

  Wetzel turned, his eye whites widening as he found C. R. Molina regarding him with an expression even more perfectly deadpan than his own.

  “Buchanan knew—knows—the clubs, the scene,” he sputtered. “You know what I mean, Lieutenant.”

  “I hope so.” Lieutenant Molina turned deliberately to Temple, her blue eyes narrowing. “You homesick for the ABA, or what?”

  “ ’Scuse me,” Wetzel said, eager to be off. “I gotta take care of some things.”

  The women watched him leave in mutual silence, then returned to the business of fencing each other.

  Molina hadn’t changed a bit, Temple saw. She was wearing one of her nondescript neutral-tone poplin suits, even in July—navy, this time. She hadn’t shrunk by so much as one of her imposing five-foot-ten inches. She hadn’t loosened her by-the-book manner one tiny turn of the screw. And she hadn’t plucked one forceful hair from her luxurious black eyebrows.

  “I’m filling in for Crawford Buchanan on publicity,” Temple told the policewoman, finally answering her ABA jibe.

  “Since when does Barr race to the rescue of Buchanan?”

  Temple wished that high heels elevated her to more than a scant five-foot-four. “He's had a heart attack," she said with high dignity.

  “I’m aware of that. It happened during my interrogation. I repeat: since when do you run to Buchanan's rescue?"

  “I know he's a creep, but..."

  Molina raised her formidable eyebrows, obviously not about to be convinced by the quality of mercy.

  Temple shifted her weight to her other heel, and her defense to fiscal issues everybody understands, presumably even police personnel. “The job pays well," she said in steely tones.

  “Make up your mind, are you here in the cause of guilt or greed?"

  “Maybe I just know how it feels to stumble over a dead body when you're the one who's supposed to keep things running smoothly."

  Molina abruptly changed the subject. “Buchanan was badly shaken, though he probably didn't admit it to you. Not a pretty murder."

  “Not... a suicide?"

  Molina's long, disconcerting silence forced Temple to fall into her trap and babble on, giving information instead of getting it. “Hanging seems a cumbersome way of killing someone, but I guess the victim had taken a blow to the head first, so it can't be suicide."

  “Why not? The victim could have banged her head while mounting the dressing room chair to position herself by the hook. And how did you know about the head wound?"

  “Someone told me."

  “Who?"

  Temple hated revealing a source, especially a ludicrous one. “Savannah Ashleigh."

  “Savannah Ashleigh—? You do get around. How long have you been here?"

  “About an... hour."

  Molina sighed and reached into her side jacket pocket. Temple had never seen the lieutenant carry a purse. What little makeup she wore, and any necessities, must be crammed into her pockets along with a badge and a gun, presumably.

  Temple studied the plain-Jane card Molina’s fishing expedition produced for her perusal.

  “Call me if you hear anything that you think that I don’t know,” Molina said. “This is another cast-of-thousands murder scene, and I can’t afford to ignore rumors. But keep your nose out of the murder investigation.” Molina turned to go.

  “Wait, Lieutenant! What do you know, so that I know what you don’t know, and don’t try to tell you what you already do know?”

  “That’s one of those Temple Barr tortuous tunnels of illogic, isn’t it? Anyone ever tell you that you were terminally nosy?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then let me be the first. All right, the facts will be in the papers, many of them. You might as well get the proper information from the horse’s mouth so you don’t go blundering into trouble.”

  “Could we sit?” Temple asked.

  Lieutenant Molina glanced down at Temple’s baby-doll shoes and shook her head. “Those things can kill you.” But she pulled a vacant folding chair over and sat.

  Temple sank onto the abandoned chair behind her. Even sitting, Molina loomed, but at least Temple didn’t feel like a tourist overshadowed by the Statue of Liberty freshly togged out in navy poplin.

  “I just skimmed the news story last night,” Temple admitted. “Who was the victim?”

  Molina pulled a narrow-lined notepad from her roomy jacket pocket and flipped through. “Went by the stage name of Glinda North. Real name: Dorothy Horvath. The other strippers say she had a face that would stop even a zombie in his tracks. The manner of her death took that away along with her life. Born March 4, 1963, in Tucson, Arizona. Claimed to be twenty-six. Birth certificate says thirty. Not much traceable family, schooling, employment record. There rarely is for these women. The clubs, the road, they’re home for strippers, a big, extended family.”

  “And do they have family quarrels?”

  Molina smiled tightly and shut her notebook. “Funny you should ask. Most definitely. Over men, over billing, over acts, over costumes. That rhinestone G-string she was found hanging from—”

  “How is that possible, Lieutenant? A G-string is pretty skimpy. Is there enough of it to hang from?”

  “Men in jail cells have hung themselves from shoelaces. There’s plenty of play in a G-string, and most stage G-strings are pretty strong. They’re tip-money clips, after all. Plus, the strippers lose that thin thread of decency, and they’re violating some state’s obscenity laws. That’s a jailable offense. ’’

  Temple smiled her agreement. “I remember from my Guthrie Theater days in Minneapolis. No matter how delicate they look, stage costumes are made industrial-strength to hold up to repeated wearings. And rhinestones would have to be stitched to some powerful backing, like flesh-colored horsehair netting.”

  The lieutenant nodded without comment, which told Temple that Molina had investigated her background thoroughly enough to know that Temple had worked PR in regional theater.

  “This wasn’t just any rhinestone G-string,” Molina added.

  “There’s a difference? You have been taking a crash course in burlesque, Lieutenant!”

  “A definite difference here. Glinda North won the G-string that killed her two years ago in this same competition. She was making a comeback. The other strippers thought she stood a good chance of winning a second Rhinestone G-string.”

  “Like family,” Temple repeated slowly, “and like family quarrels. Sibling rivalry. One
of the other strippers might have wanted to keep Glinda from competing.”

  “Just don’t forget that when you’re tripping through the tulips here in Pastie Land. Keep out of what you don’t understand.” Molina stood and moved her chair back to its former place, as if anyone would care amid that orchestrated chaos. Maybe Molina did.

  Temple frowned, biting her lip, as she imagined what a strangled face would look like: swollen, distorted, discolored? No wonder Crawford had keeled over, especially after seeing someone he had hoped to date—the two-timing rat!—in that condition.

  “You don’t really think Crawford might have done it?” Temple asked Molina’s already retreating navy blue back.

  The tall lieutenant turned and paused a few feet away. “Anybody might have done it.”

  “Not me,” Temple couldn’t resist pointing out. “This time I didn’t find the body.”

  “But Buchanan did. Rivalry, remember? Maybe you wanted his job. You got it, didn’t you?”

  “Hey!” Temple was on her feet, indignant. “I turned this puppy down. I was offered it first and refused.”

  “You did?” Lieutenant Molina stalked back to stare down at Temple. “Why?”

  “I find the ambience a little cheap, all right?”

  “True, pasties aren’t as highbrow as books.”

  “And I’m not sure women would do this for a living if they weren’t exploited.”

  “What about the men?”

  “I don’t know,” Temple confessed. “I hope to find out.”

  “Stick to your amateur sociology,” Molina advised, amusement seeping through her stoic facade. “Keep out of amateur crime-solving.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Molina no longer looked amused. She turned on her sensible heel—Temple had checked her footwear out: navy-blue, low-heeled matron-issue for fallen arches, ick!—and left Temple teetering atop a coil of heavy cable.

  She picked her way among the cables, trying not to let the bulky tote bag overbalance her.

  Where to start in such a wonderland of overexposed flesh? Despite Temple’s theatrical background, which inured her to casual states of undress backstage, she found this single-minded focus on presenting the naked flesh disconcerting.