Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She’d have to get over that. Anything Crawford Buchanan could do, she could do better.

  In the next hour she met and quizzed a confusing array of acts. Bambi and Thumper, a rare man-woman stripping team, explained that some local ordinances decreed women-only and men-only stripping nights to skirt the X-rated area of live sex shows.

  Wholesome and smiling like insurance sellers, the couple sported matching glossy brown tans and bright lime thong-style bottoms. Bambi had submitted to donning a tight, cutoff T-top for the rehearsal, but the thin material left nothing to the imagination but the placement of any identifying marks.

  Near the stage, an arresting pair of gilt-haired twins in gold lamé bikinis were mirroring each other’s moves through and around the prop of an empty-looking glass frame.

  “Bikinis?” Temple asked. She didn’t consider beach-wear imaginative enough for a stripping costume, despite the fact that some current bathing suits seemed designed to give local decency codes a workout.

  The twins immediately posed as if modeling the swimwear, stomachs taut, rears firm, and bosoms high, wide and handsome.

  “I’m Gypsy,” said one.

  “June,” trilled the other in the exact same vocal tone.

  “Wait’ll you see our act,” Gypsy added.

  “Gold body paint from head to toe,” said June.

  “And we don’t wear the bikini top for our act.” Gypsy.

  “Just darling little golden cones.” June.

  “With gold chain tassels.” Gypsy.

  “Gold paint?” Temple interrupted their informative duet. “Isn’t that stuff dangerous? Didn’t a body double die from it in Goldfinger?”

  “We’re a body double and we’re not dead,” June resumed in turn.

  “Say,” said Gypsy, flashing perfect teeth. “That’s cute: Body Double. Maybe we should have named our act that.”

  “Our name is cute, too,” June insisted, executing an eerily identical smile.

  Temple tumbled. “What is it?”

  “The Gold Dust Twins,” they declaimed together, turning cartwheels in opposite directions, so spokes of bare brown legs flashed by.

  They finished and came together, clonelike.

  “How did you get into stripping?” Temple asked.

  “Easy,” said Gypsy.

  “As pie,” June added.

  “We did dance and gymnastics together,” Gypsy said.

  “And cheerleading and modeling.” June.

  “And our bodies were great.” The modest Gypsy.

  “And the money is great.” The practical June.

  “How much?” asked the curious Temple.

  The twins regarded each other and shrugged in tune.

  “Depends on the quality of the clubs, but five hundred a night,” Gypsy said.

  “Special dates, up to fifteen hundred.” June.

  “One thing is sure.” Gypsy.

  “Beats Doublemint gum commercials. Have you seen those yucky green maillots the latest twin models were wearing?” June’s expression grew pained.

  “Vile,” Gypsy agreed, also wincing. “Like fifties girdles.”

  Temple nodded, too. “You’re right. Gold’s the only way to go, onstage and off.”

  She moved on, unable to resist computing what five to fifteen hundred a night added up to compared to her off-again, on-again freelancer’s income. Maybe she could do a Munchkin act. But before she got carried away, there were more mysteries to conquer in the art of the striptease.

  An earnestly bouncy young woman in a pearl-dotted fuchsia spandex cummerbund that somehow had been stretched to cover the essentials, however barely, top and bottom, answered Temple’s question as to how she got started.

  “Majorette,” said the girl who performed by the name of Racy. “And I played golf and tennis in high school.”

  She bent over from the waist, hands to the floor, without flexing her knees. Spandex boldly left where spandex had been before, exposing cleavage north and south.

  “So you’re basically an athlete,” Temple hazarded.

  Racy stretched her lean ectomorphic form into a backward shimmy. “Yeah, I guess you could say so.”

  Temple left her there, defying gravity, and gingerly approached an Amazon with Cher-black hair tumbling down her lean bare back. Black was her color: thigh-high patent leather boots and a silver-studded wet-look G-string/teddy combination topped with a velvet garter belt. Open-knuckled wrist-length black gloves and an understated leather riding crop completed the outfit.

  She posed in the mirror, jutting hips in turn, cocking out first one knee, then another, analyzing her looks and movement with concentrated objectivity.

  “May I ask your stage name?” Temple said a bit diffidently.

  The woman flicked a glance to Temple’s notebook. “What are you writing down?”

  “Just some notes to myself. I’m doing PR for the competition, but got in late—”

  “Oh, you replaced that Buchanan creep.”

  “Right.”

  “Well.” Shoulders shrugging, the woman returned her eyes to her image in the mirror and took a straddling stance while flinging her whip-hand behind her head.

  This was a big-boned, plain woman, despite her aggressively erotic attire. Temple wondered how much she appealed to men on the town, with her lanky body, bony shoulders and stingy breasts.

  “Switch Bitch.” The woman threw the words sharply over her shoulder at Temple, like a whip lash.

  “I beg your pardon?” Temple responded, bridling. Was the creature inviting her to trade places?

  The long, serious face peered past the false fall of luster-less curls. “My stage name,” she repeated patiently. “Switch Bitch.”

  “Oh.” Temple nodded and wrote it down, desperately wondering how she could work that into a family-rated press release. Maybe she should stick to mentioning the straight acts, like Randy Candy, Lacy Lavender, or the ever-tasteful Otto Erotica.

  She wandered on, clutching her notepad amid a mob carrying far more lethal props, beginning to feel that she was overdressed.

  She didn't have to worry about approaching one of the he-men stalking to and fro with musclebound gait: a veritable Hercules stomped into her path, pectoral muscles twitching on his bare and hairless bronzed chest. Hadn't any of these people heard about overexposure to UVs?

  “Hi” was his ancient yet unoriginal gambit. “You're new here.”

  “Yup.”

  “Don't be shy, little lady. Find a spot and get to work.”

  “I am. I'm doing PR for the competition, so I’m going around getting a feel for—er, a grip on... I'm learning about the contestants.”

  “Great.” He grinned down at her in utter self-satisfaction, blocking her way with his inescapable nudity as well as his formidable physique. As a stray riff from another stripper’s nearby boom box surged to a climax, he circled his hips and ground a pelvic bump in her direction.

  Temple gazed on massive thigh muscles oiled to mahogany perfection, and a commendably flat groin clothed only in a glossy gold G-string and apparently housing a croquet ball. She was not impressed. She had heard about rock stars and their socks in the crotch trick.

  “Ah, very nice,”, she said, taking advantage of his frozen pose to skitter around and past her human obstacle.

  “Hey, don’t you want my name?”

  The man actually sounded hurt, so Temple stopped a safe distance away, turned and held her pen at the ready.

  “Ken,” he said, flashing teeth, charm and smoldering eyes. “I’m with Newd Dudes. N-e-w-d. We’re the hottest group on the Coast.”

  “Newd Dudes,” Temple repeated. “Shrewd. See ya.” And she clattered away so fast she bumped into someone.

  “Oh. Sorry!” Temple recognized the T-shirt. “Lindy, isn’t it?”

  The woman nodded, glanced back at the still idiotically grinning Newd Dude, then jerked her head toward the ballroom doors. “Listen. I could use a smoke in peace. Come on down to the
dressing rooms, and I’ll fill you in on more stuff about the contest.”

  Temple hesitated. She wasn’t crazy about cigarette smoke, but she could use a break from so much blatant skin. Not being used to it, she didn’t know where to look. She felt like a nun in a nudist camp.

  “Shell shock,” Lindy said with a grin that revealed she could read Temple’s mind. “Civilians always get it the first few hours. Come on, there’ll be fewer girls down in the dressing rooms and you can get some straight dope. Strippers don’t screw around with half-assed answers.”

  “No, they don’t. I can see that,” Temple agreed as Lindy propelled her past an agile miss engaged in bending from the waist and sliding to the floor by doing the splits. “Isn't the dressing-room area where the murder occurred?"

  Lindy was making top time in her battered sneakers, but she stopped on a dime at Temple's question.

  “Yeah. It's hard for the girls to use that room now. Dorothy was a sweet girl. But that Savannah Ashleigh bitch wouldn't keep the room after the killing—claimed it upset Yvette, her cat—so the regular working girls got it."

  “That’s right." Temple followed Lindy into the relative normalcy of the hall outside the ballroom. “Savannah Ashleigh's cat was in the dressing room during the murder. If only cats could talk." She considered how much Midnight Louie had already witnessed of her life and times. “On the other hand, thank God they can't."

  12

  WOE vs. WHOOPE

  No matter how ritzy or glitzy the hotel, its understage dressing rooms are as welcoming as a warehouse basement. Temple knew that. What point was there to installing such luxuries as wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstered chairs and decorative countertops in the theatrical equivalents of Grand Central terminal? Too many itinerant bodies come and go, spilling lurid makeup, burning out the bare bulbs that surround the inevitably smeared mirrors and dropping sequins from slowly disintegrating costumes like gaudy tears shed at their passing.

  Yet Temple found herself standing hushed in the cavernous dressing room beneath the Goliath's glittering superstructure to which Lindy had led her. She was spellbound as usual by the tawdry glamour of these cold, hard-surfaced places where people transform themselves and emerge to perform wonders in the way of song, dance, and in miming emotion or magic.

  One of these human butterflies had not emerged from the cocoon beneath the stage to spread her performer's wings in the spotlights, Temple reminded herself.

  “Where—?" she began.

  Before she could finish her question, Lindy pointed to a row of gorgeously feathered capes hanging about six feet from the floor. The single crooked finger of one empty wrought-iron hook beckoned, as might the ghost of Dorothy Horvath.

  Everything about the room reverberated with absence, rather than presence. The flimsy wooden seating common to dressing rooms—battered, round-seated ice-cream chairs with splayed legs—sat askew to parallel gray Formica countertops. A dressing room, even empty, always held its breath in expectation of a chatty, frantic throng of invaders.

  Lindy's lighter scratched in the silence, conjuring flame, then the faint perfumes of fluid and sulfur—presto, a lit cigarette made a dramatic entrance into the dormant setting.

  The mundane sound and scent of smoking banished the spell of recent death. Temple stared at the opposite wall and mentally counted cloaks. “What happened to the sixth cape that should have been on the empty hook?”

  Lindy’s first drag on the cigarette ended with a smoky “I don't know." Her voice creaked like a scratched LP record. “Don't know what happened to Dorothy's prize G-string, either. The cops probably have ’em both."

  Temple approached an abandoned chair, curled her fingers around the curved wooden seat back and gently shook it. Its feet screeched against the floor as it rocked to and fro.

  “Tippy," she pronounced. “These chairs always are. Doesn't help the suicide theory, the victim having to balance on a tippy chair to reach that hook."

  “Hey, strippers are used to high heels." Lindy leaned against the countertop, inhaling with the true nicotine addict's slowness. “Wouldn't a murderer have to climb a chair to hoist poor Dorothy up, too? A tippy chair would be twice as hard on him.”

  “The police say it's a him?”

  “Well... a mostly naked woman strangled with a G-string. Who else? Besides, strippers always have man trouble.”

  “They're not the only ones,” Temple muttered as she strolled through the space, getting its feel, trying to impress the fact of a murder on her fond memories of a dozen dressing rooms exactly like this one, including Max's upscale private dressing room just down the hall.

  A mostly eaten birthday cake frosted with turquoise and pink rosettes sat on a cardboard tray atop the counter. All that remained of the sweet, icing sentiments, also turquoise, were the looped terminal y’s of “Happy,” “Birthday,” and the birthday girl's name. Was it Missy? Cindy? Lindy? Or Dorothy?

  The room was filled with discards. Powder dusted the worn countertop, snaring a lone bobby pin in its tinted toils, while an abandoned false eyelash lurked in a corner like a curled spider. The scents of a dozen cheap perfumes melded into olfactory goulash. A two-inch-long pencil with no lead lay on the floor. The same corner that harbored the eyelash also held a bit of paper flotsam.

  Temple picked up the crumpled shape: beige and orange, with black printing on flimsy card stock. Some kind of ticket—? A clue?

  “Food stamp,” Lindy's down-to-earth voice said flatly.

  Temple dropped it as if she had been caught stealing. Or was she just guilty that she hadn't recognized it? No matter how dicey her cash flow got, she could afford food, even Free-to-Be-Feline.

  Lindy ambled around the place, too, pausing before a mirror. Six of its framing makeup bulbs had gone gray and cold instead of pouring out the usual white-hot glare. Her fingers touched an eight-by-ten glossy photo stuck into the mirror frame's lower right corner.

  “Someone must have put this here,” Lindy rumbled pensively, and coughed.

  Temple came to join her in staring at the portrait: pale hair and features scribed by a classic oval, posed at a flattering Hollywood tilt, caught in stark theatrical tones of black, white and shades of gray.

  Even without a hint of coloring, the face was gorgeous. Perhaps a makeup artist could analyze the proportions, features and their balance, could explain why the face was so mesmerizing. Temple wouldn’t want that. The face spoke for itself, radiated an inner expectation that enhanced the outer loveliness.

  “Dorothy Horvath?” she asked.

  Lindy nodded, tears turning her dark eyes into slick, black marbles. “She was a beautiful kid, a drop-dead knockout. She would start her act in an organdy pinafore that went electric blue-white under the overhead ultraviolet lights. Called it her ‘Dorothy act,’ 'cuz she came from Kansas, she said. Funny, quiet kid with a face to die for.” Lindy realized how apt that expression was, and winced before dragging deeply on the cigarette.

  “ ‘Glinda North,’ ” Temple said. “I understand her stage name now. It’s after the good witch of the north in The Wizard of Oz. Maybe Dorothy wished for a fairy godmother like Glinda. What about the men in her life?”

  Lindy shrugged. “Same old story, and, anyway, who knows?”

  Temple studied the photograph. “Beautiful women often complain that no one relates to the real person inside.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lindy said with another shrug.

  “Hey, you’ve got a great face.”

  “Maybe.” Lindy’s quirky smile wanted to, but didn’t quite, believe Temple. “Once you’re past thirty in this game, you can either be an old stripper trying to keep up with the young stuff, or an old ex-stripper.”

  “Don’t say that!” Temple gave a mock shudder. “I’m not that far from thirty myself. Now I learn another career choice is kaput. I’ll have to keep slinging press releases.”

  Lindy waved a dismissing hand. “You don’t look a day over eighteen.”

 
; “Don't say that, either. That's the story of my life.” Temple shook her head at Glinda North's glamorous photo face. “I wish I knew the story of hers.”

  “Come back later, when the other girls are here. Maybe you can put the pieces together. We all know a little bit about each other. Can't help it in such close quarters.”

  “But no one had an obvious motive to kill her, not even a jealous rival?”

  Lindy shook her lusterless black-dyed hair. “No way. We all looked out for Dorothy. That girl couldn't string two safety pins together without losing one.”

  Temple eyed Lindy's world-weary features. “Is your age the only reason you don't strip anymore?”

  “No. I manage a club. The money in stripping's good, but you get tired of that eight-hour bump-and-grind.” She looked at Temple, then puffed on her cigarette. “You ever see strippers work?”

  “The... topless hotel shows.”

  “No, not those hoity-toity, touch-me-not walking department store dummies loaded down with eighty pounds of feathers and rhinestones. I mean real working strippers, who get down and get dirty with the guys in the front row. That would help you understand the life more than bumbling around upstairs. Come on, I'll take you.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where else? Kitty City, my alma mater.”

  While Temple contemplated objecting to the word “bumbling,” Lindy crushed her cigarette in the discarded lid of a makeup tin. She strode from the room with such surety that Temple clicked along in her silent wake, her high heels echoing eerily on the concrete floor.

  In no time the pair was jostling through the stream of incoming crowds until they hit broad daylight outside the Goliath. Shocking. Lindy and Temple stood blinking in the bright, blazing heat that drenched them the moment they left the entrance canopy’s shade. The Goliath’s massive desert white exterior trimmed with scarlet and gold almost outdazzled the sun.

  Temple paused to don her prescription sunglasses. “My car’s in the ramp way out back. We’ll have to take a cab.”