“My patty, her knee. But she put it there first.”
“Do you think she’s trying to pump you?”
“Please put that more genteelly, Garry. I can’t tell if she’s a sincere therapist, or a sinister inquisitor-cum-watchdog masquerading as a sexy lady. She’s clever. Mentally agile. As with a lot of Frenchwomen, flirting is a genetic marker. Mostly, I think her sessions are worthless for liberating my memory, but good for my ego.”
“So she could be worth it under the label of ‘morale’?”
“Under the label of ‘not looking suspicious, and doing what they tell us.’ She does exercise my wits.”
“Your casts are coming off soon. Then it’s physical therapy.”
“No. I want out. You say I have good instincts. I’m sensing an . . . atmosphere here. I’m being watched. The minute these casts are cracked open, you break me out. Say we’re using a private therapist at my fabulously equipped retreat in . . . Bahrain.”
Garry chuckled. “The details may be escaping you, my boy, but your style is perfectly intact. You always could charm the snakes into the basket.”
He hadn’t wanted to trouble the old man. He knew he was being watched by a lot of people, people patients weren’t expected to notice, like cleaning personnel, nursing aides, certainly Mademoiselle Fraulein Doctor Schneider. He was also going crazy kept down and inactive by these damnable casts. Did he really need them? Were they a ploy to keep him prisoner?
Then the memory of his body soaring toward that shiny black wall from unsupported space returned. He was lucky to be alive. Like a drunk driver, she’d said, too out of it to tense up and get really hurt. He wheeled himself to the window, back and forth, a form of pacing he couldn’t manage physically.
Was he really that in command of his mind and body, enough to convert that fatal hit into a minor accident? Certainly he hadn’t managed to keep his memory. But memory loss in severe accidental injuries is common. What wasn’t normal, at least for his expectations; it wasn’t coming back. The memory. His legs weren’t the problem. He was relatively young. They’d heal. He was an athlete of sorts, even if he didn’t buy the role of mountain climber.
He expected more from his memory. From himself. Damn it! Now was not the time to have a little brain crash! He paused to stare up at the postcard peaks rising like a colossal shark’s maws around him. He shivered. Cold. Icy. Killing. Everything he didn’t like in a landscape. Everything he didn’t like in a woman.
Ladies-in-Waiting
Temple moved on to the parlor, where Kit had corralled the Sapphire Slipper’s staff.
Kit came snowshoeing over the thick wool carpet to Temple like a happy puppy.
“I’ve been getting acquainted with the girls,” she whispered. “What a tragicomic bunch of life stories! They’re a whole play by Eugene O’Neill via Neil Simon. They make A Chorus Line look like Little Orphan Annie. I’m getting an idea for a revue here. A play. A novel!
“A bunch of women are trapped in snowstorm in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, only it’s in Nevada—maybe the mountains, there’s snow there, right?—and there are no men in the cast. Just the women talking: whores and wives and would-be wives. Wolves howling in the distance—”
“A perfect offstage role for the Fontana pack,” Temple interrupted.
“Wolves? No, these would be real wolf voices, tribal brutality at bay, the Taliban, maybe—”
“Kit, I hate to derail the creative muse when it’s mingling Medea with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with White Fang, but I just learned something pretty awful, and—worse—maybe relevant.”
“About what?”
“About who,” Temple whispered, grabbing her aunt’s thin wrist and pulling her into the archway to the bar, where Fontana Inc. awaited under the supervision of Van von Rhine. “The girlfriends said Aldo’s significant other died a year ago. She was an aerial performer and fell during practice. Broke her neck. Did you know that?”
Kit had sobered instantly, plunging from creative mania into deep concern.
“Yes. He told me, of course. He said he liked that I did something safe. What could happen to a writer?”
“No wonder the poor man freaked when you were mistaken for me at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and attacked with a garrote.”
“I think that only made both of us realize we didn’t want to be apart.”
“Maybe you’re not so safe. We assumed you were attacked because you wore a pink hat and are my physical double.”
“Yeah?”
“But what if it was because you were seeing Aldo morning, noon, and midnight?”
Kit had always been a fast study. She bit her lip and looked around the not-so-innocent rooms that surrounded them. “That’s what you learned from interviewing the Fontana brothers’ ditsy girlfriends?”
Temple nodded. “Maybe one’s not so ditsy, but got fixated on Aldo—”
“Maybe crazy like a fox.” Kit nodded too. “Maybe you better interview these real ‘foxes’ fast to get an idea of what’s really going on in this henhouse.”
“Maybe, and amen.”
Temple found that the sisters of joy, gathered en masse in a Victorian-style parlor with no men around to make them bill and coo, looked a lot like of dispirited hens on a rococo roost. All that blue together was starting to look . . . tired. Even tawdry.
Not only their feathers, but their faces seemed to droop.
“Wouldn’t you all normally be hard at work now?” Temple asked as she sat on a plump, tiger-striped ottoman.
“Depends on what you consider ‘work,’ “ one noted in a desultory voice.
“Earning money,” Temple said briskly. She wasn’t going to be trapped into thinking of them as “exotic.” It wasn’t a coincidence that another euphemism for their ancient profession was “workingwoman.” And not a coincidence that employed women from the 1890s streets of New York to modern-day Baghdad were called “no better than whores.”
Except here in Vegas a workingwoman could get stoned on the job in a whole different way than in a fundamentalist Muslim country.
And in Nevada, the authorities policed these “chicken ranches.” The women were healthy, protected, and drug-and disease-free. Elsewhere in Las Vegas, the roulette wheel was in fine fettle and you pays your money and you takes your chances, as the carnival barkers say.
She had set aside the troubling question of Aldo’s dead significant other and was regarding the young women gathered around, all mostly under thirty or nearing forty at the outside, with a teacher’s fond expectations.
Temple understood that they had been primed to perform.
“The first thing we need to establish,” Temple said in a slow, serious tone, “is who the dead girl upstairs is. You know that the police will have to be called. When they are, they’ll come here in force, along with a lot of forensics staff.
“It won’t be as gory or glamorous as CSI: Las Vegas, but it will sure disrupt everybody’s lives. The more information we can dig up now so you can give it confidently and truthfully to the police, the better off everyone will be.”
“Except that dead girl.”
The first to talk back was a skinny black woman.
“True,” Temple said. “I’d better get your names.”
“They’re simple. We use the alphabet so our clients can remember to ask for us again.”
“Alphabet pseudonyms?” Temple asked doubtfully.
“We even sit in alphabetical order.”
“So the clients know where to spot you the second or twelfth time around?”
“Right. On the far left of the first sofa is Angela, then Ba-bette, Crystal, Deedee, Fifi, Gigi, Heather, Inez, Jazz, Kiki, Lili, Niki, and I’m Zazu.”
There were a lot more blondes of every shade among the residents than among the bridesmaids, curled, or tousled, or spiky. It made the girls harder to tell apart.
“So everyone who’s here is someone who should be here?” Temple asked.
“Then who is she?” Temple got up to show the dead woman’s cell phone image to everyone in reverse alphabetical order, studying their reactions.
“Nobody we recognize for sure,” said the first one, Zazu, who wore a blue peignoir over skimpy French underwear. At least Temple assumed it was French, since she had never seen the like, even online.
The others agreed in turn, in different words, but just as definitely.
“That hairdo is way too long and loose for one of us.”
“Men like piled and teased hair that’s easy to disarrange.”
“That there’s a receptionist pageboy. No guy would ask her for anything but directions.”
Their instant summations were unnerving. Temple realized that their world was one of appearances and snap judgments. So they were judged by the customers, and so they judged everyone.
Like Kit, Temple found the house girls amazingly open and even chatty once the ice had been broken. They reminded her of teenagers at a pajama party. Theirs was an all-female society. Of course men came into it every night, and then they performed their agreed-upon sexual pas de deux with whoever paid.
But the real culture of the Sapphire Slipper wasn’t the hordes of men who arrived and departed, but the ongoing daily gossip, pampering, laughing, interaction of the women. Temple had sensed the same sort of high school camaraderie in the dressing room of a strip club she had once visited undercover.
These women had never gotten past the trauma of their families, the casual bonding of girls in passage, the sharing of fripperies and laughs, the bored, knowing, eyebrow-raising worldliness of girls who’d had to grow up faster than was good for them.
In a strange, warped way, they were convinced that anyone who subscribed to a monogamous, straight way of life was either deluded or a liar.
To answer the famous song line, “Is that all there is?” they were sure that this, their commercially intimate lives, was all that there was.
It was only in going over her notes of their names and descriptions later that she noticed the E and M girls were missing before the string jumped to Zazu at the end.
Happy Hooker?
Temple adjourned to the bar off the parlor with a sense of relief, probably false. She felt on common ground here, however bizarre the situation.
A sober group of men surrounded several of the round tables, sitting on leather club chairs.
The liquor labels fronting the mirrored back of the bar were all high-end. Heavy crystal ashtrays suitable for cigars centered every polished tiger-maple tabletop.
Temple would have to say that if she were a resident sizing up the night’s customers, she’d be one happy hooker. Matt’s Polish-blond hair stood out among the dark Italian ones like a headlight, but not one guy here was shabby, including Uncle Mario, whose teeth were as snow-white as his silk tie against a black shirt. The man’s old-style gangster look made portly into muscle and balding into moneyed.
The younger Fontanas were hipper in every respect, but still radiated a slightly Old World air of elaborate courtesy that won over women everywhere.
Van von Rhine was the other blonde in the room, and Temple had missed seeing her at first. She was perched on a navy leather barstool and had faded into the faceted glitter of the mirrored bottles behind her.
After Temple had surveyed the scene, Van waved her over. “How’s it going?”
“I’m learning a lot about hordes of strangers.” Temple joined Van at the bar, deciding that an elevated seat would command more attention from this armada of men.
She skillfully hopped up via the crossbar, which anyone who is five feet tall masters early. She felt like a judge at a bench, which was just the inner buttressing she needed to play the authority card here.
“You seem one short.”
They frowned, straightening their ties and their postures.
“Not short in height, in number.”
Emilio dashed around the archway. “Sorry, I just heard from, er, Fifi, that it was the guys’ turn for grilling.”
“Who’s guarding the murder room door?” Nicky asked as their uncle nodded with grave disapproval.
“Um, three of the girls. That way they watch one another. I’ll get back up there as soon as Miss Temple lets me go.”
And she bet that he was a lot more eager to pass the time with three courtesans than here.
Smiling at the tables, she said, “I’ll need to use you guys as a sounding board. First, I’d like your impression of how the abduction was managed, and what you all did, and where, when you arrived here.”
There was the expected universal, awkward silence.
“Did any of you suspect something was wrong before you arrived here?”
Dark heads shook.
“The right limo was gassed up and idling for us. We hopped in,” Aldo said.
“Like lambs to the slaughter,” Macho Mario growled dolefully.
Imagining him as a lamb was quite the funny-bone tickler. Temple bit her lip and caught Matt’s eye, who gave his answer. “I didn’t know what normal was for these events, so it all seemed uneventful to me.”
“There was one surprise,” Aldo noted.
“What was that?” half-a-dozen basso voices wondered.
“Your cat,” he told Temple, “hitched a ride in my groomsmen-mobile. I didn’t recall anyone inviting Midnight Louie to be a ring bearer.”
“Have you seen him since you all were ushered inside?” She hadn’t yet encountered him in the living fur, which was odd.
“No, ma’am,” Emilio said smartly. “He must have run off and hid at all the strangers and commotion.”
That didn’t sound like Louie, who had a habit of running toward strangers and commotion. Where was the big lug now?
“I saw him upstairs,” Matt put in. “In fact, he led me upstairs.”
Several of the boys laughed lustily. “Hey, there, Matt, maybe he wanted to rush up to where the action was,” Ralph jibed.
“The action was dead,” Matt said.
A pall fell like a winding sheet over the naturally boisterous Fontana spirits.
“Sorry, man,” Ralph said. “We only heard about the body on the bed. We didn’t have to find it.”
The other brothers nodded somberly, but Temple was sure they’d expected to find lots of bodies upstairs at a brothel, live ones. And, frankly, she doubted that dead ones would much upset seasoned wise guys. But she’d never tell Matt that. He’d be shocked.
You could play along with the Fontana boys’ pussycat facades, but you should never forget their Berettas weren’t just a high-tech fashion accessory.
Temple pulled out Nicky’s cell phone and asked him to take the images of the dead woman around to all the tables. There was much tsking and glum murmuring among them, but no Fontana claimed to recognize the girl.
Wonderful! Total strikeout. The victim was utterly unknown by anyone now in the Sapphire Slipper. Not likely. How was Temple going to find a murderer among this cast of dozens? And by tomorrow afternoon, yet?
Start at the point you know, she told herself.
“Okay. This question is for all you younger generation Fontanas. How’s your relationship with your current girlfriend and how long have you been associated?”
There was a stunning silence. Most guys don’t talk relationships even when plied with vodka and needle nose pliers to their private parts. Why were they going to breathe a word in this communal setting?”
“Please, guys. You were the ones deemed worthy of nicking, which set this whole insanity in motion. I don’t have time to take you aside one by one for a private tête-à-tête. The police may be more private about interviewing you, but they’ll be a lot less understanding.”
Macho Mario snorted. “The police aren’t understanding at all. Okay, girlie, you didn’t ask, but I’ll come clean. I’ve been a widower for twelve years. I ain’t never be
en to the Sapphire Slipper. I can still get my own girlfriends at any bar in Vegas.”
“Have you ever dumped a girlfriend since you were an eligible bachelor again?”
“For one thing, I have never been eligible. I have lawyers who see to that. For another, I know that a guy my age and weight can’t be choosy. I also know my rep attracts the little dolls. I have never been known to say no to a little doll, hence they do not leave me unless a wedding ring comes along from some new beau. Then it’s no hard feelings, aloha.”
Macho Mario’s unabashed confession got the brothers rushing to spill their guts.
“It was Aldo,” Armando said. “Flipping over your aunt. That got our girlfriends all stirred up. Then they try on the bridesmaid gowns and say they hate them, and only a bridal gown will do. Vera Wang, yet.”
Rico shook his head at their oldest brother. “When Nicky tied the knot, we all thought he was just young and didn’t know better. No offense, Van. And, although he was the youngest, he’d always wanted to settle down early, go straight, have a hotel of his own, and kids. Or kid, in your case. How is little Cinnamon, anyway?”
“Safe at home now, and in preschool otherwise,” Van said, “which is more than can be said about any of you, then or now.”
The brothers managed to look both sheepish and suave, en masse.
Van nudged Temple in the side. “Fontanas do ‘guilty but innocent’ so well. I’d like to see your stone-cold police lieutenant, Molina, handling this gang in an interrogation room.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Temple answered. She addressed the Fontanas again. “All your girlfriends hate their bridesmaid gowns?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Mamma mia, does she!”
“Already offered it as a car rag for the Viper.”
“But Kit and Van put a lot of thought into them,” Temple objected. “The colors are sophisticated, the lines elegant, and there’s no bow on the butt. What more could they want?”
There was a long, sullen silence.
“Bridal gowns,” Temple answered herself.
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