Cat in a Sapphire Slipper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  That name was so familiar and yet not quite right. Grand was the missing word, maybe. A pseudonym? Garry Grand? Gandy. Gandhi?

  Answers were dancing like a cloud of annoying gnats flitting in front of his eyes.

  Almost he could name them, each and every one of those trembling motes.

  But he couldn’t catch and trap and fix a word on a single gnat.

  Crime Scene

  Miss Kitty, the madam, introduced the place’s cook-bartender-piano player, Phylliss Shoofly.

  Temple winced to recognize a play on the name of that right-wing Madonna of rectitude, Phyllis Schlafly. The pun was similar to porn performers’ names Temple had run across. Velva Dixon, for instance. Or H. V. Load.

  Phylliss looked like lesbian muscle. Every brothel needed one.

  Temple rolled her eyes to think of Matt wandering around in this palace of subculture and the sex trade. Way more than he’d bargained for on a simple jaunt to a bachelor party.

  First, to put this cast of dozens in their proper holding tanks.

  “Let’s be sexist about assigning rooms to our suspects,” Temple said. “Van, you round up everything with the last name of Fontana in the bar area. Electra, you herd the bridesmaids into the kitchen. Kit, you and Miss Kitty and Miss Shoofly can stay here in the parlor with the resident ladies.”

  “Where will you be?” Kit asked.

  “Upstairs, in my ladies’ chambers.”

  As Temple turned, she jerked to glimpse Midnight Louie sitting in the archway. No . . . this was a fluffier, smaller black cat with halo of turquoise marabou for a ruff. What was the lurking Louie up to? Not like him to avoid the spotlight. Had he seen this hotsy-totsy house cat named Baby Blue? Probably. Maybe he was like any human male in a bordello distracted from business by the scenery. Heck, that was why the men went there!

  Temple moved into the foyer to take the front stairs and spotted the two missing men sitting together on the top step, neither looking distracted by courtesans. In fact, both looked equally grim and chagrined.

  Matt took Temple’s hand to steady her as she sat on the steps below them. All this excitement on top of a few glasses of champagne was wearing.

  “Nicky Fontana,” she said, “what makes you think I can find a murderer in this mess?”

  “I need you to?” When Temple was silent, he added, “Matt needs you to?”

  Temple glowered. “What’s all this about Matt being in danger of imminent arrest? Are you trying to panic me?”

  “It’s true,” Matt put in. “I ended up hiding from the armed and dangerous bridesmaids in the one room that produced a dead body.”

  “So you witnessed the murder?”

  “No.”

  “So you heard the murder?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you were there?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “What is this: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? You admit you were in the room.”

  “Not quite, Temple. I was in an adjacent . . . chamber.”

  She glanced at Nicky. “Just how kinky was this room setup anyway? ‘Chamber’?”

  “A voyeur’s room,” he answered. “Two-way mirrored wall.”

  Temple drilled Matt with another disbelieving look. “Then you could at least see something even if the ‘viewing chamber’ was soundproof.”

  “ ‘Viewing chamber’ sounds so funereal,” he objected. “No, I couldn’t see anything because I shut the interior blinds. I was as good as blind and deaf, and while I was waiting in the dark, someone brought that poor girl into the outer room and strangled her with a fishnet stocking.”

  “Do you have any idea how long you were in there?”

  Matt glanced at the inexpensive stainless-steel watch on his left wrist. “Doesn’t glow in the dark. Felt like the anteroom of eternity.”

  Temple eyed Nick Fontana. His watch was a Rolex and had dials inside of dials on the watch face and a bunch of indiscreet diamonds scattered here and there.

  “Mine glows in the dark as well as prepares sushi,” he admitted. “We both hid out for half an hour. We heard the patter of high-heeled feet coming and dove for the most concealing place possible. Matt happened to be near one of the kinkier setups when the bridesmaid and hooker posse arrived, that’s all.”

  “And where were you?”

  “In the hall linen closet. It was extremely commodious, as you can imagine, and soft. I also could hear gales of girlish laughter as the ‘good’ girls inspected the nightly haunts of the ‘bad’ girls.”

  “You Fontana boys always land on your assets,” Temple grumbled. She turned to Matt. “If only you had one perverted bone in your body, you could have peeked.”

  “I know! I blew it. I might have saved her life.”

  Temple didn’t have an answer to that truly tragic possibility.

  “Maybe not,” Nicky said.

  They both stared at him while he explained.

  “It was pretty populous up there for over a half an hour while the ‘bad’ girls were showing the ‘good’ girls around. It was like a sorority house giggle-in. I’m guessing that someone dragged the dead girl into a room everyone had already looked at, and strangled her. After everyone was through ‘inspecting,’ the killer dumped her on the bed so it would confuse the time of death and who had done it.”

  “You’re assuming one of the other women did.”

  “Maybe not. We two guys were roaming around up here undetected. Why not some other guy, someone who knew the place a lot better than we did?”

  “The only guys present here now—and then—were the ones trucked in by Gangsters. And how was that managed anyway?”

  “The drivers were switched,” Matt said. “No one would notice through the heavy tint glass on the exterior and interior limo windows. When we arrived here and went in, Nicky and I were the last to leave the limo. By the time we hit the foyer, we saw something was wrong inside the place. We tried to duck back outside to regroup, except the ‘chauffeur’ was waiting just outside the closed front door to discourage us with a big automatic weapon.” He glanced at Nicky. “What would you say it was?”

  “I thought an Uzi at the time, but since the driver wore nothing but black fishnet stockings, black high heels, a black jacket, and visored cap, I wasn’t exactly registering the make and model of the weapon she was toting. Her legs, however, were extremely high caliber.”

  Temple grimaced. “Good thing Van isn’t hearing this sexist—and worse, useless—evaluation. Did the driver rejoin the bridesmaids’ ranks?”

  Nicky and Matt exchanged a look and shrugged as one.

  “We weren’t downstairs after that to count noses,” Matt said.

  “I’m presuming there are eight bridesmaids, but whether the driver was one, I don’t know,” Nicky added. “My brothers’ girlfriends come and go.”

  “Probably why this set has contracted wedding fever now that Aldo has broken custom and popped the Big Question.”

  “I’ve been married forever,” Nicky objected, “and that never motivated my brothers’ girlfriends to go nuptial.”

  “It’s the fever of the fresh catch,” Temple said. “Aldo is also the oldest, thus the most confirmed bachelor. If he goes—”

  “So could the whole tribe.” Matt nodded sagely. “It’s a form of mob hysteria.”

  “Don’t mention ‘mob,’ ” Nicky said with a superstitious shudder. “There’s a hidden planet here. Those girls could have been egged on, unbeknownst to themselves, by one of Uncle Mario’s rivals. Fontana family public embarrassment would not only be satisfying, but would put us all under a microscope and severely hamper our lifestyles.”

  Temple clapped a hand to her forehead. “So we not only have loony lady friends, but opportunistic rivals. It makes more sense that a rival crime family murdered an innocent bystander to put the Fontanas in hot water than a miffed girlfriend going overboard at a hokey-jokey bachelor party and strangling a strange woman. The first thing is to identify the victim.
I suppose I’d better see her.”

  Each room had its own indented entryway, so the various doors were not visible from staring down the long, half-lit hallway. When Matt and Nicky led Temple to the murder room, she gave a little jump to see a tall, pale figure on guard at the door.

  “No ghost,” Nicky said. “Just Emilio. I thought having someone guard the body was a good idea. We shouldn’t cross the threshold because of compromising the evidence more than it already is. Can you see enough to be useful?”

  Temple had leaned inside to crane her neck left and right, and down and up, avoiding the bed and its occupant.

  “That huge mirror wall in the rococo frame is the one that’s see-through from the other side?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “It’s a small room, maybe eight-by-ten, with mini-blinds on the inside window. There’s a table with a low-level lamp. And a chair. I sat on it; but it felt creepy.”

  “Kind of like taking a seat in a porno movie house,” Nicky suggested. “Not that I frequent such places,” he added quickly.

  “Like any place illicit,” Matt said, “it had a nasty feel to it.”

  “So you stood?” Temple asked.

  “No. I moved to sit against one wall. I didn’t need or want to see anything through that secret window.”

  “Was the floor carpeted, like the bedroom?”

  Matt thought. “Yes, I guess. It wasn’t cold anyway.”

  “It wouldn’t be,” Nicky said, “out here in the desert, but the steel-blue carpeting continued through the false baseboard on the section of wall that was a hidden door. How’d you find it?”

  “The seam was a bit off. And I was desperate. Those women hooting up a storm in the hall were heading my way. I had no idea proper young women could be so rowdy, and bawdy.”

  “Oh, Matt,” Temple said, “they probably ate up a tour of a bordello by its residents the way I’d devour a backstage tour of a major Vegas magic show. I’m a little weird that way, preferring magicians’ illusions to peeks into a bordello. Women find ‘naughty’ very interesting.”

  “Men too,” Nicky added.

  Matt said nothing, just sighed pointedly.

  Temple studied the room. “Definitely on the kinky side. You’re sure the mirror above the bed is not see-through?”

  “No,” Matt and Nicky said in unison.

  “No, or not sure?”

  “It’s pretty irrelevant. When I found Matt in here bending over the girl on the bed, doing CPR,” Nicky said, “I just checked on her condition, dead, and his, in shock, and got us the hell out of there.”

  “What did you learn from bending over her?” Temple asked Matt.

  “That her eyes were blue, to match the decorating scheme. Maybe it was a color-coordinated murder. And the thin black scarf around her throat flared at the ends so I could see it was a fishnet stocking. They are stockings, aren’t they, not panty hose?”

  “I’m not an expert on fishnet stockings,” Temple said. “They have a long rep as sexy entertainer accessories, on the trashy side, although they came back into high fashion briefly a couple of years ago. The manufacturers are always trying to get women back into hose again, even in this suffocatingly hot climate. Didn’t work with me.”

  “Does with Van,” Nicky said. “She’s an executive woman; dresses to the nines.”

  “I dress to the Easy Eights,” Temple said with a smile, offering her bare calf and foot in its medium-heeled mule.

  “Speaking of the Not-Easy Eights,” Nicky said, “we need to discover if this corpse is one of my brothers’ significant others, or one of the resident ladies.”

  “The madam didn’t recognize her.”

  “Okay, she might be somebody entirely unknown, but then how did she end up here?”

  “How did most of us?” Temple asked. “You twelve guys were hijacked.”

  “An imported body,” Nicky mused. “That’s kinky. I suppose she could have been imported in the limo trunk without anyone the wiser. Where do you hide a semi-naked dead woman you want to ditch?”

  Matt added, “We need to identify her. Is she known to the people who are here now? Not that they wouldn’t lie. How can we try to identify her without entering the room again?”

  Nicky flourished his cell phone, hit a button and rapidly clicked through close-up and distant photos of the seminude dead woman. “While I was guiding you out of the crime scene, I took these. You were pretty stunned. Giving CPR to an almost nude dead woman would do that. Damn cell phone may not get great signals way out here, but the photo feature works swell.”

  Temple shivered to see the woman’s features close up in the small screen, as blank of expression as a doll’s face. She was young and pretty enough to be either a sex-for-hire object of desire, or a Fontana girlfriend. Such a waste.

  “First thing,” Nicky said, “I’m going to search around here for her clothes. I doubt she arrived here undressed, and even a resident would start with more than some inciting lingerie at least. Maybe she was undressed just before, or after, her murder.”

  “Why?” Matt asked, appalled.

  “Confuses the issue of who she . . . was,” Temple said, “and therefore, who might have killed her. Whoever did it must have acted on impulse. You couldn’t set up a situation like this.”

  “Well,” Nicky pointed out, “eight vengeful bridesmaids did. Maybe one of them figured she could off a rival while she was at it.”

  “But your brothers surely weren’t ever customers here?”

  Nicky frowned at Temple. “I’d say no, they don’t have to patronize brothels. But there are a lot of them and I certainly don’t keep up with their entertainment and personal lives.”

  “And there’s always Uncle Mario,” Matt put in.

  “Of course!” Temple eyed Nicky. “An older man might need more . . . exotic stimulation.”

  “Hey. I do not speculate about my uncle Mario’s affairs, criminal or personal. You’d have to ask him.”

  “Or the madam,” Temple said hopefully, trying to avoid a fate worse than death, a fate that might bedeath if she inquired too much into Macho Mario’s virility. “That Miss Kitty is getting to be on friendly terms with him, come to think of it. I’ve spotted them canoodling in the bar.”

  “You’re the detective,” Nicky told her. “Your fiance and I are your prime suspects and none of my family is absolved. Go to it. Dig up all the dirt on all and sundry that you can.”

  Mama Molina!

  “Hey, Ma!”

  Mariah came tearing into the bedroom, throwing her backpack on the bed’s foot.

  “Slow down, chica!” Carmen pushed her pistol and remote close to the pillows.

  Mariah had moved from tween to teen keeping Hispanic slang, but not other words. Hence her mother was no longer “Mama” but “Mom” or “Ma.”

  “I forgot! Next week is What Your Daddy Does. I was wondering if you could—”

  “No problemo. Uncle Morrie will be happy to show up and help.”

  “‘Problemo!’” Mariah whined. Whine was the new “beg.” “You’ve already been there and done that. That is so boring! To have cops for both days. Can’t I, can’t you—”

  “You don’t like Uncle Morrie? Honey, he has kept us going when I’ve been off work. You don’t realize what he’s done for us, for me.”

  “He’s good. I like him fine. Only I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if . . . if we did the same thing as for the father-daughter dance next fall? You know.”

  She was trying to make Mom come up with daughter dear-est’s obvious and only conclusion. What She Really, Really, Really Wanted.

  Only Carmen’s head had ached all day, in pulsing tempo with her stitches. Next fall was a long, long time away. This was only May and school would be ending soon. Luckily, Carmen would be on her feet by then. In a few days. Good as new. Hah!

  “Honey . . .”

  “I want him! Matt. It would be so cool. I mean, he’s famous. He’s on the radio.”

  Mariah was no
t alone, Carmen reflected. Thank God he was finally taken. Temple Barr had won the brass ring that lonely, late-night, radio-listening women all over Vegas lusted for, including her alarmingly hormonal daughter.

  She thought as fast as she could.

  “I don’t know, honey. He said okay for the fall dance, but this is coming up so fast. He’s a busy man.”

  “He works nights, and this is a daytime gig. I mean, middle school. Come on, Mom!”

  Mariah’s cheeks glowed rosy with emotion, warming her dark eyes. She had the as-yet-unmade-up beauty of the young.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Mariah made a face, but left to make supper for them. Something microwaved that would be tippy on Carmen’s lap tray and leave oily, red-dye-tinged sauce on the paper napkin and on the bedspread, if she wasn’t careful.

  Carmen sighed. It still hurt.

  Damn. Matt was Temple’s official guy now. She couldn’t keep drafting him for absentee father duty. Even the fall dance was a terrible imposition. He was an ex-priest, for God’s sake. Children were the last thing he had signed up for.

  She wondered if Temple wanted any. If they would have any.

  None of her business. Mariah was her business. Mariah and her phantom dead dad. The cop killed trying to assist a stranded motorist.

  The fake. The figment of her mother’s imagination.

  Now Carmen was lying about the present, about her unauthorized breaking and entering at Kinsella’s house, and worrying about Dirty Larry using his knowledge of that against her.

  Oh, what tangled webs we weave, and all that.

  What Your Daddy Does Day.

  Somehow Carmen didn’t think Our Lady of Guadalupe grade school was looking for a Who’s Your Daddy Day.

  War was hell, but family relations could be hellacious.

  Three Cat Night

  My worst nightmare has come true.

  I am trapped in a strange place by a gang of three.

  I have no escape route, no allies, no alternatives.

  I have been hounded upstairs, where I had hoped to take a restoring snooze in the establishment’s linen closet while I let my little gray cells get cooking on a subconscious level.