“Not a hundred percent effective. Maybe she had a baby once—? Doesn’t that ever happen?”
A silence, then Niki spoke. “We don’t talk about that if it does. It’s as much a secret among us as it is out there in Henderson or some hoity-toity suburb. We mind our own business. And Madonnah minded her own even more than we did.”
“She doesn’t seem like she was part of the gang.”
“She wasn’t,” Kiki said. “Some of us are like that. Private. Good-time girls maybe had bad times once. We don’t ask, and we don’t tell.”
“That makes it tough to solve a murder.”
“It makes it tough to get anything on any of us, too,” Lili said, standing. “We’re done here, Mr. M., unless you want to pay for something personal.”
He shook his head. He’d actually managed to put names with faces during their talk, but what they offered was pretty nameless and faceless anyway.
He sat there for a minute, enjoying the silence. Madonnah had been an odd duck here, though none of them had put it that way. He suddenly realized that she had a room here, and he wanted to see it. He could ask Miss Kitty and make a big, public deal of it. Or—
“Miss Zazu, I presume,” he said, rising as a tall, angular black woman entered the room without posing in the doorway.
“I hate cops,” she said.
“Good. I’m not one. I’m just the preview.” He didn’t bother sitting again.
This woman wouldn’t domesticate and with her five-inch hooker spikes she was taller than he. Taller than most men.
“I’m betting,” he said, “that you’re like the others. You didn’t have much to do with the late Madonnah.”
The dark eyes set in ivory whites blinked. She lived to contradict. “We talked some. Madonnah weren’t so standoffish as those cows think.”
Ah. A rebel in the house. “Could one of them have killed her?”
“Didn’t have the balls.”
“I’d like to see her room.”
Those corrosive eyes flicked him with disdain, like he was some kind of ghoul.
“None of the others knows anything about her,” Matt admitted. “When someone gets murdered . . . somebody thinks he or she has a reason.”
“None of the others bother knowing anything about her. They likes to pretend they get down. They flash. They players. You wanta see her crib? C’mon, motormouth man.”
Matt wasn’t sure he should walk the long hall with this bad girl but he wanted to find some trace of a personality for Madonnah. Anything.
“You’re the only one seems to have a reaction to her.”
“I watch. She was one lone sistah. She always watched others, but she not watch herself.” Zazu paused. They were in the demi-dark, only closed doors facing each other for another sixty feet. “I didn’t watch close enough.”
She resumed walking.
“I’m sorry.”
She stopped, stared at him like a cat from the dark. After a long pause, she resumed walking. “Maybe you is.”
He let out a breath.
“Maybe not,” she added.
Matt found her dead seriousness a relief from the forced whorehouse gaiety the other women broadcast. Here was someone who didn’t beat death off like an encroaching moth around a porch light.
“Her room.” Zazu stood in the hall while Matt opened the door—with his jacket bottom to avoid leaving prints on the knob, just in case; they were already all over upstairs—and stepped inside.
Light flared on, weak through the standard opaque glass dish that concealed a cheap one-bulb ceiling fixture. Zazu had reached inside to flip the wall switch. She must have been in here often enough to not worry about prints. These rooms looked like cells: stripped to essentials. Madonnah’s didn’t have even a framed photo, a goofy giveaway key ring of a Care Bear. A personal set of nail polish.
“Nothing much here,” he commented.
“Sometime nothing much says a lot.” Zazu was looming behind him, in the room without making a sound.
Despite, or because of that, he used a tissue from the plain discount-store box on the bedside table to open drawers, gawk in the closet.
“Bathroom’s down the hall. We don’t get private accommodations, not even for tending our privates.”
This woman didn’t sugarcoat things. “It’s a public business, isn’t it? Not many secrets.”
“No secrets. Or . . . almost none.”
“You know one? Or two?”
“Maybe. I don’t tell.”
“Not even if it would help find Madonnah’s killer? I found her, you know. Tried to breathe life back into her. Too late.”
“Y’all’s not even supposed to be here!”
“That’s true.”
“Why’d she die when y’all came here when you weren’t supposed to be here?”
“You’re saying it’s our fault?”
“I’m saying you had a part in it, and you can’t get outta that.”
A bitter taste burned in his mouth. The saliva of a dead woman he couldn’t raise. The salt of an accusation he couldn’t lay to rest that rang both false and true.
Zazu was the last of the good-time girls he had to interview, and she had been a heller.
But she left him alone in the dead woman’s bedroom.
Matt looked around again, carefully. Women’s bedrooms weren’t his area of expertise. Another big box of tissue with aloe and vitamin E sat on the dresser. He pulled several free and stuffed them in his side jacket pockets.
This wing was fairly new, but it had a makeshift look. The closet had sliding doors, one mirrored. He used a tissue to ease it open, trying not to regard his own full-length image as it glided past. Picture yourself here. He could see the Sapphire Slipper Web page come-on now. No.
But come on, he wasn’t snooping on his own behalf. No scruples needed.
The farther half of the closet was full of stacked cardboard boxes, probably house supplies, storage. The wooden clothes pole held mismatched empty wire hangers, some colored, some white, most the bronze color favored by dry cleaners.
A few T-shirts and dresses and skirts hung there. It was the faceless Styrofoam heads on the shelf above that entranced him. Wig stands. Marilyn Monroe blond, Cleopatra black, rainbow-streaked, long, short. He wasn’t familiar with the singer Madonna’s various chameleon “looks,” but he did realize that these wild wigs would make a good shtick for a hooker. And a natural disguise.
He’d read that a prostitute’s greatest fear was seeing her own father walk through the door, maybe an indication of how much she feared the father figure, or how much he may have abused her. This woman had been determined not to be found, no matter who walked through the door, and apparently her wig trick had worked, until tonight.
Matt bent to pull her luggage out into the room. A medium-sized hardcase one, probably for the wigs, and a couple of backpacks. All were scuffed and scratched. He guessed she traveled by bus rather than air. The luggage tags held empty forms, never filled in.
They were empty, not even a stray gum wrapper left inside.
At the dresser, the drawers stuck in the dry air and came out only when jerked, and then they opened crooked. He dropped the tissues back in his pocket and lifted her personal lingerie. Plain cotton, with what Temple called camisole tops instead of bras. The large plastic makeup bag on the dresser top was marked inside with red and black lines, as if it had been lashed. But it was just the unintended strokes of lip liner and eyeliner pencils, all in bold colors: scarlet, black, blue.
As his tissue-holding fingers riffled through, he noticed that everything was well used, not new, the exteriors smeared, not neat and clean like Temple’s. These were working tools, not playthings.
A tall bottle of lotion next to the tissue box must be makeup remover.
This time Matt stared at himself in the mirror above the dresser. Here was where Madonnah saw herself bare, and, he’d bet, no one else did.
He went to the door. It had one of thos
e center-knob lock buttons, so she could have privacy. He grabbed a couple of tissues from his pocket and turned the lock.
Back at the dresser, he found her working clothes in the second drawer. Black and baby blue corsets with garters and marabou feather edgings. Stockings ranging from nurse white to sheer black to fishnet to sheer with lavish tattoos printed on them and even rhinestones. He counted. There were six fishnet ones; even pairs, none missing. Filmy thises and thats. A box of tangled jewelry, mostly black and glittery or rhinestones or lengths of pearls.
The bottom drawer held spike heels, all four inches tall, exaggerated, in shiny patent leather, white or black or sliver or red. All the heel tips were worn, and they were tumbled together. The soles looked remarkably clean. Never worn outdoors.
Her purse was in that bottom drawer too, under the shoes.
Matt pulled it out and put it on the dresser top.
It was an inexpensive black microfiber shoulder bag. It had an outside zipper, an inside zipper on that flap, an exterior three-quarter zipper that revealed credit card slots and a driver’s license window and pen-holding nooses, all at easy, organized access.
Every slot was empty, except one. The driver’s license was from Indiana. The photo of a youngish woman with brown hair and bangs reminded him of the mousiest wig on the shelf. Obviously what she wore when traveling.
There was another zippered compartment at the back of the lining It was empty except for a penny and a few crumbs of something long since inedible.
He pushed his fingers behind each empty credit card slot. Nothing.
But this was a purse of a thousand compartments. He was sure that had she flown with it, airport security would have missed a couple of places in this bag of tricks.
He found another zipper inside the outer inner face of the bag.
There! His half a gum wrapper! And on the plain back, a phone number jotted down in faded pencil. It looked like something even the owner had forgotten.
So he committed it to memory, not knowing where the area code was from.
He dropped the purse back into place in the bottom drawer and pushed it shut with his borrowed tissues.
As he stood and looked around a last time, he couldn’t help thinking the room was so devoid of personality and effects that it resembled a simple convent bedroom for postulants who had left all worldly goods behind. The late Madonnah, had her wigs been headdresses and her clothes habits, reminded him more of a nun than a courtesan.
Matt pulled a couple fresh tissues from his pocket and unlocked and opened the door. He felt confident he’d left as little trace on the room as she ever had.
Louie’s Imps
As soon as my Miss Temple has finished with that old gang of ours I head to the Midnight Inc. Investigations rendezvous spot, the upstairs hallway.
The presence of a dead body and a live Fontana brother on watch discourages all but the stout of heart from venturing up here.
Luckily, my breed is expected to venture where no man has gone before, or will go again, so I duck into a doorway niche to another bedroom and wait for my troops to reassemble.
Ma Barker is either still in the murder room and needed a distraction to dart out again, or she had departed before the Fontana brother called to the downstairs family powwow had returned to his post.
Her I am not worried about. In either case she will think of something, and act on it.
Nor do I worry about Miss Midnight Louise. I know she has been soaking up every bit of gossip, every inadvertent verbal slipup, every guilty whiff of sweat from the assigned bridesmaids below.
Besides her well-honed street smarts from her life among the homeless, she has a personal aversion to dames who are overde-pendent on the regard and support of the male of the species, any species. So I can count on her to not take any of these Fontana squeezes at face value, and know that if she has run across a hot clue she will follow it on her own.
Therefore, I am not surprised that the dainty Satin is the first of my three operatives to return to base operations.
“Turn up any hot clues?” I ask.
I do not expect an affirmative, seeing Miss Satin is new at the shamus stuff.
“I did not find any, but Mr. Max Devine seems to have.”
“Matt! It is Matt Devine.”
“Max, Matt, what is the difference? No more than Kitty, Kit.”
“Let me tell you, there is a big difference to those names among the humans I associate with, and, come to think of it, between Kitty and Kit too.”
For while Matt is Miss Temple’s current swain, I explain, Max is the previous one, now missing.
Miss Satin shrugs her vibrissae as her muzzle makes a charming moue.
“Humans are way too anal-retentive. We cats like to bury our leavings both physical and emotional as soon as possible. You are lucky that your untimely impact with a Brinks truck impressed you on my memory, so I developed a sentimental attachment.”
I am starting to get that I am not a priority among most of the females of my breed. Except at breeding time.
“So what is Mr. Matt’s hot clue?”
“I was able to tail him unnoticed to the courtesans’ break room and slip into the bedroom of the one known as Miss Madonnah. She was a mysterious lady. Never looked the same twice. Apparently she’s the number one candidate for the murder victim. He unearthed something in the purse in her bottom dresser drawer. It was a gum wrapper with something written on it.”
“What?”
“It was Juicy Fruit, a particularly cloying and unmistakable scent.”
“Not the variety of gum! What was written on the wrapper?”
“Something short. I was hiding under the bed and couldn’t see it without leaping up and out, and pulling Mr. Matt’s arm down, and that would not be a wise undercover move.”
“Actually, it would have been great. People expect us to make unexpected attacks on their extremities and you might have been able to read the message.”
“Unlikely at that speed. His lips did move as he attempted to memorize it. Humans often do that sort of pantomime.”
“Memorize it. It must be a number!”
“To what?”
“Perhaps a Swiss bank account. Who knows? We must find out more.”
“I suppose it could be a number to the safe,” she muses.
“Safe? What safe? Where?”
“In Miss Kitty’s office, inside a hidden closet.”
“I suppose she does handle a great deal of cash. Many of the gentlemen callers would not want their stay recorded on a credit card.”
“No, but the corporate name is Desert Deposits, so it is not a dead giveaway.”
I shudder. “That sounds like coyote droppings to me. I had a bad experience with that once.”
“A coyote, or droppings?”
“Both,” I reply tersely. “What else might be kept in the safe?”
“The courtesans’ IDs. Oh, and probably the surveillance films.”
This makes my neck hairs stand to attention.
“There are surveillance tapes?”
“Not in the bedrooms, of course. That would be illegal, but in the bar, parlor, and foyer, just to keep a record of our clients. In case one is naughty.”
“I have news for you: they all are ‘naughty’ just for being here.”
“I mean, if one is rough with a courtesan, or is drunk. Miss Kitty is careful to back up any testimony she might have to give. Humans can be brutal.”
“No kidding! The safe is very interesting. You must find out what kind of number Mr. Matt found.”
“Humans do not exactly confide in us.”
“But he will surely communicate this to Miss Temple. I must remain here until the rest of the crew checks in. Go back downstairs and glue yourself to Miss Temple or Mr. Matt, without attracting attention.”
“That is silly. I always attract attention.”
I give her and her turquoise cape the once-over. Good point.
�
�Make it look like you are hanging around for food or flattery,” I advise. “They will never suspect a thing.”
Missing Max
Garry Randolph had two roles to play that awful morning.
One was genuine. Heartfelt.
His charge was gone, had vanished. Overnight. His “nephew, Mike Randolph.”
This grief he didn’t have to feign. Max was . . . was . . . is . . . so much to him. Pupil. Peer. Partner.
The clinic bedroom reeked with treachery. An overturned IV stand. Far under the bed, a full hypodermic needle. It rested in Garry’s capacious suit coat pocket now. Not for him, or his physical type, the sleek fitted suit. For him the large, lumpy one, capable of holding as many magicians’ tricks as a suit coat the size of the Colosseum in Rome . . . .
“But what happened here?” he asked the supervising doctor, acting as ignorant as he felt for once.
“These head cases can get strange obsessions. The man, who knows what he was thinking, simply ran. Fled who knows what demons in his stressed brain?”
The man, thought Randolph, ran because his life was threatened. Garry had no doubt the syringe would prove to be filled with something fatal.
Max! Out of his head but still possessed of that rare, acute prescience Garry had seen in him as a terrorism-wounded boy of seventeen. A middle-class American boy catapulted into the worst the world had to offer, the worst of global politics a man or boy could face.
Garry had faced it too long. He yearned for a happy ending. The restoration of memory. The restoration of peace. Hope. Happiness.
Now, here, he was called upon to exert all his old, devious skills.
“Perhaps,” he suggested to the night physician, “we should talk to his psychiatrist about this.”
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