Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Fine. We’ll put it on Ike’s tab.”

  “Ike?”

  “Didn’t I mention it? I manage Kitty City for Ike Wetzel.”

  “And run the show over here, too? The Kitty City crowd has a lot invested in the competition.”

  Lindy squinted down the sidewalk and made a face. “It’s our job. Look. Now, there’s somebody who really should take a walk on the wild side.”

  Temple followed Lindy’s gaze to a sign-carrying figure pacing in the hot sun twenty feet away. She could read this block-letter message better than Crawford’s. RESPECT, NOT RHINESTONES: STOP STRIPPING WOMEN OF DIGNITY AND CUSTOMERS OF MONEY. The letters “W.O.E.” underlined the sentiment.

  “Ouch,” Temple said. “Politically correct’ protesters could use the murder to justify their position, and draw the press’s attention to it, rather than distracting the media from it. Are many picketing the competition?”

  “Only one at a time, so far, but the signs suck.”

  As if overhearing Lindy’s pronouncement, the protester’s measured walk brought her within speaking distance.

  “You don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Lindy yelled in a disgusted tone.

  The woman came nearer. She embodied everything that gave feminists a rap as ugly man-haters—minimal makeup... short, serviceable brown hair... thin gold hoop earrings... unexciting clothes. Only the fact that she remained pretty despite, and perhaps because of, her pared-down style ruined the stereotype.

  “Do you know what I’m complaining about?” she asked Lindy quietly.

  “You bet I do, kiddo.” Lindy threw Temple a knowing glance. “Say, I was heading over to a strip place to give this PR lady the grand tour. Want to come along and see what you’re stalking around mad about?”

  “Degradation doesn’t require a microscope.”

  “Degradation! What about the degradation of working a minimum-wage dead-end job and supporting hungry kids? What about being too beat to have any kind of life but drudgery? Hell, strippers aren’t downtrodden. They’re doing the trodding down for a change.”

  “To make money from men, for men.”

  “And for themselves! More than they’d make waiting on some Snob City bitches in a restaurant.”

  The protester blinked at Lindy’s fury, but visibly counted to a commendable ten before she tried replying.

  Temple leaped into the opening. “Lindy used to be a stripper, but I know from zip about it. Why don’t you join us and see for yourself?”

  The woman hefted her sign uncertainly.

  “By the way, what does WOE stand for?” Temple asked.

  “Women Opposing Exploitation.”

  Lindy hooted. “Why oppose it? Why not use it?”

  “Then that would be WUE,” Temple said promptly. “Women Using Exploitation.”

  “That's ridiculous,” the protester retorted.

  “Sometimes that’s the way it is,” Lindy said. “What’s the matter, don’t you want to see the truth? Chicken?”

  The protester twisted her poster stick, looking around for rescue.

  Temple remembered her own reluctance to ride the Hesketh Vampire. Visiting a strip joint wasn’t as dangerous, but might seem just as intimidating.

  “Leave the sign with the parking valet,” Temple suggested with such certitude that the protester did as she said.

  The parking attendant graciously accepted the sign and a tip, but leaned the sentiment facedown against the Goliath's white stucco side. The protester cast an unhappy look back at her abandoned principles as the trio stepped forward while the bellman whistled up a cab.

  In two minutes flat the three women were crammed black leggings to pale pantyhose to blue jeans in the backseat of a white Whittlesea Blue cab, headed for Kitty City.

  Temple, of course, sat in the peacemaker’s middle—blessed are they—and eased tensions by asking questions. The protester's name was Ruth Morris. She was thirty-something, and a paralegal for a divorce lawyer. Lindy's last name was Lukas and she had been divorced three times. Neither Temple nor Ruth admitted to having seen a stripper do her stuff except on television.

  “I see enough gyrating seminaked women in the background every time a TV or movie private eye goes into a bar,” Ruth said darkly.

  “I've seen some seminaked gyrating men on the talk shows,” Temple admitted, “and women. But those acts must be cleaned up for Oprah and Phil and Sally.”

  Lindy didn't comment, so a short silence lengthened into a lull. Garish La Vegas daylight flitted past the taxi's closed windows as the air-conditioning hummed. On the far horizon the hazy blue mountains snagged a crown of clouds.

  “Will there be women in the audience?” Ruth asked finally, sounding less enthusiastic about the expedition by the minute.

  “Sure,” Lindy answered. “It's now an ‘In’ thing for women to go to strip joints with their dates.”

  Ruth's unstyled hair shook with her head. “That's putting a stamp of approval on their own sex's subjugation.”

  “What's subjugated about making a hundred to two hundred and fifty bucks a night?” Lindy demanded.

  “Too many women are well paid for doing things that harm themselves—making porno movies, prostitution. The pay wouldn't be so good if the work weren't demeaning.”

  “Wait a minute!” Lindy sounded righteously indignant. “Only a few strippers moonlight in that other stuff. Most are strippers, period.”

  Temple jumped in before she got caught in the cross fire. “What exactly are most strippers, period?”

  “Dancers,” Lindy answered. “Erotic entertainers who work hard for a living. Some are also ex-cheerleaders, good-time girlfriends, girls you went to high school with—”

  “And abuse victims.” Ruth leaned past Temple to address Lindy. “Physical and/or sexual abuse victims with damaged self-esteem who have a sexually unhealthy need for the distance and control the stage gives them.”

  Lindy’s eyes darkened, but she didn’t respond with her usual hair-trigger answer.

  “Is that always true?” Temple asked Ruth.

  “Pretty much so. A lot of girls are runaways from abusive fathers. If sexual abuse was involved, they’ve confused intimacy with exhibitionism and self-display, and sometimes even pleasure with pain.”

  The scratch of Lindy’s lighter sounded like a derisive tsk-tsk. She defiantly lit a cigarette and puffed a stream of smoke into the crowded cab. “Big words for someone who’s never seen the real thing in the flesh.”

  The cab made a lurching turn, then the driver, a chubby guy in his forties with a black mustache and a baseball cap, turned around.

  “You wanta go to Kitty City or a debating society? We’re hee-eere.”

  13

  The Naked Nose

  I am strictly the monogamous sort: one at a time.

  Therefore, it is not surprising that I do not keep a wide-open eye on the doings of Miss Temple Barr once I have discovered that the Divine Yvette is back in town.

  Not that Miss Temple Barr’s attractions have diminished in any respect. If anything, they have improved with age—i.e., during the five weeks that I have consented to room with her. It is true that she sponsored my odious outing to the veterinary clinic, but she meant well. As for the unappetizing pellets with which she has mounded my plate of late, I can overlook that, and that is all I do with them. I do not need to rely on foreign food or home cooking. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers for my better meals, and must say that I have fared quite well.

  No, my infatuation for the Divine Yvette predates the entrance of Miss Temple Barr into my life. And, face it, this petite furperson with a penchant for silver fox is exactly my type. One cannot argue with a match made in cat heaven.

  Luckily, the Divine Yvette is as taken with me as vice versa. This is not always the case in the mean streets and the real world. Some unrequited dudes are forced to howl their hearts out, singing the l-Found-My-Baby-but-She-Ain’t-Looking-for-Me blues in the nigh
t.

  Even more luckily, the Celestial Jewel of my heart and other, less fashionably mentionable parts takes me for a hero. To hear her tell it, I attacked the fleeing murderer and was rewarded with a boot in the backside for my trouble. Yet I was still able to leap ten feet across the room and prevent her canvas ark from smashing into the wall.

  The lady was asleep at the time, and far be it from me to present myself in a less noble light.

  Yet misfortune did enter the scene of Love’s Young Dream. First came the perplexing human pantomime. After calming Yvette, if not myself, I amble over to the wall, loft atop a conveniently close chair seat and cautiously sniff as much of the suspended lady as I can reach. Until my nose for news has registered its impression, I believe nothing of what I see, and even less of what I hear.

  Once satisfied that the poor little doll is dead and in no need of further attentions, I return mine to the contents of the pink carrier. No sooner have the Divine Yvette and I settled down for some romantic trans-mesh smooching, when I hear a sneaky step in the hall.

  The newcomer is none other than the miserable dude with whom I tangled a time or two at the ABA. Naturally, he does not look down, so he fails to notice Yvette and myself—mostly myself, for Yvette is as well-veiled as a novice in a convent in her carrier, and I am hard to miss unless you are not looking for me, which this Puke-cannon person is definitely not doing.

  “Glinda—” he calls softly. “It’s Crawford. The others said you never went upstairs. I know you stayed behind because you wanted a private rendezvous. Glinda—”

  Hearing him makes me want to reconsider my romantic notions, permanently.

  And is this guy blind, or what? First he pokes his nose into the hanging costumes. Then he sniffs out the various makeup containers that litter the countertop, although he is massively deficient in the sniffer, like all of his breed. Even a perfumed Pomeranian would have noticed by now the distinctive odor of death in the room.

  But Crawfish Puke-cannon, may his tribe get rabies, bumbles through looking—not high and low, where he would at least spy the dangling damsel on the far wall, or yours truly huddled beneath the counter—but right in front of his prying nose, which instead is investigating one of the absent stripper's canvas bags.

  I hiss a disgusted warning, but he is too deaf to hear it over the grind of the air-conditioning system. He pauses to taste a fingerful of frosting he scoops from a lurid wreck of cake on the counter, then moves on. He has almost reached the wall before he notices the suspended bare legs. Had Miss Temple Barr stumbled onto this murder scene, she would have fixed on those magenta satin spikes from the doorway, and have followed them up to their logical conclusion, or, rather, the dead woman's conclusion.

  Now Puke-cannon’s basset-hound brown eyes are widening to display their bloodshot whites, as unappetizing a sight as squid-eyeball sushi. He looks up, and up, and up to the dead dancer's sad, tilted face. He whitens, stumbles backward into a series of chairs, which he pushes aside. Then, right by me he pauses and turns.

  One last look at the far wall and its macabre decoration, and he is out of there faster than an Irish Setter on No Doz.

  Then things commence to get hectic. In no time flat, a couple of brave souls peek in to verify the Puke-cannon claims. They retreat. I am forced to bid my Lost One a long goodbye (which has certain compensations).

  I no sooner desert the dressing room for a bird’s-eye view atop a costume cabinet in the hall than I hear the hysterical approach of little pink feet: the extremities of the Divine One’s so-called owner (a convention my kind accepts only to lull human companions into the proper state of ignorance as to who really has the upper mitt in such arrangements).

  Miss Savannah Ashleigh proceeds to wail in the hall and demand that someone enter the dressing room and extract “her Darling" from the awful place. Cooler heads point out that the police will want to see the scene untouched.

  She does not care, Miss Ashleigh declares, pacing back and forth, what the police want to see. Her Darling must not be subjected to such stress. She clutches her throat, a gesture I find tasteless given the likely means of the deceased's death, but then I also find Miss Savannah Ashleigh is untalented enough to give even tastelessness a bad name.

  At length another old friend from the ABA strides onto the scene. I could jump down on her head from here, and contemplate that, considering the bad time Lieutenant C. R. Molina saw fit to give the delightful Miss Temple Barr in that instance.

  Instead I eavesdrop, yawning. The sound of yammering, excited humans is hard on the ears. Eventually I drop into a meditative state, repeating a soothing mantra, tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah” (Carp is a personal favorite of mine, but its short, sharp name does not lend itself to musing upon.) With such a password to psychic peace, I could snooze at a dogfight, and often have.

  I stay only long enough to see the Divine Yvette borne from the room at the hands of Lieutenant Molina herself.

  “The carrier has to stay until our technicians are done with it,” she tells Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who is draping her right shoulder with Yvette’s languid length and making much over her. (Meanwhile, Yvette is making blue-green goo-goo eyes at me atop the cabinet.)

  “Oh, thank you, Lieutenant,” babbles Miss Savannah. “See how the Poor Baby is purring with joy at reuniting with Momsy! Please tell me what you think happened to My Darling in that awful room. We will be in the private dressing room next door.”

  Once Yvette is safe in the silicone bosom of her family, I see no point in sticking around like a used Band-Aid. No one will listen to me even if I should deign to offer my eyewitness testimony. I will be taken no more seriously than Miss Savannah Ashleigh, which is a dreadful state of affairs.

  I retreat like the shadow I so much resemble and repair to the Circle Ritz to think things over. One thing needs no thinking: the Divine Yvette is still too close for comfort to the murder scene, and likely, to the murderer, as yet unknown.

  This is why a day later I find myself in another dressing room occupied by little dolls in the business of dressing down. I have long made a habit of visiting the chorus girls’ backstage digs to pick up a nugget of good gossip (much tastier and more nourishing than this Free-to-Be-Feline stuff, believe me), get some strokes and lots of female admiration with no strings attached.

  My favorite hangout is the Crystal Phoenix, but I have graced similar scenes in such establishments as Bally’s, the Flamingo, the Sands, Dunes, et cetera. I avoid the Mirage on principle, despite its many piscatorial attractions, including a shark tank. Some heavy muscle of the feline variety prowls that turf. These individuals wear black and white prison-striped suits, which is appropriate: their kind has often been kept behind bars, for good reason. They all answer to the name of "Tiger,” being associates of Siegfried and Roy, the magicians, and outweigh me by several hundred pounds.

  I may be feisty, but I am not witless.

  However, in all my rambles, which include the Lust ’n’ Lace downtown, I have never touched pad to the dressing room of Kitty City, for reasons other than the odiously inaccurate name of said establishment. Besides not having a single specimen of the advertised sort inside, Kitty City's little stripper dolls are always rushing from one club to another and have little time for exchanging pleasantries with a dude of my sort. Plus they live on Mars bars and diet soda, a regimen only slightly less appealing than Free-to-Be-Foolish.

  I am not surprised to find that the Kitty City dressing rooms are less nicely appointed than others of my experience. Nor do I advertise my presence. I arrive in the late morning, the better to establish myself in a snooping spot before the first wave of lovelies hits in time for the lunchtime show. The deserted dressing room is barer than Mother Hubbard's cupboard and equipped with rows of mirrors that could betray my position of concealment, could I find one.

  So I boldly leap atop one long countertop and inspect the place, not even pausing to admire my handsome reflections in the facing mirrors. The bruised
Formica bears the residue of many long nights and a merry-go-round of dolls coming and going, most of it not visible to the naked eye. However, it is cat’s play to my naked nose.

  Amid the bouquet of scents—body makeup, cheap perfumes, and (ugh!) coconut oil—I detect a faint odor of almonds. There is not the bitter overtone to the scent that would indicate poison, but it is an unusual smell that I have encountered twice before in the dressing rooms of the Goliath Hotel. Common scent is not what the riddle-solving investigator needs. Still, one of the three sources of this particular perfume is... none other than the Divine Yvette. I see a yet-unplumbed link between the murder at the Goliath, the stripper's competition, and Kitty City.

  Girlish voices echo in the unadorned hall. While I debate playing musical cubicles in the adjoining rest room, the sound of oncoming footsteps forces me to dash for the only cover: an open metal locker currently occupied by a teal nylon gym bag. I dive into a tangle of jungle-print G-strings, feeling right at home with all those spots and stripes, and tunnel under the bag’s limp folds. There is a lot of me to hide and not much bag. I freeze, sensing the arrival of intruders not two feet away.

  "God.” One contralto voice replays a classic line. “What a dump.”

  “What’s this?” trills a soprano.

  I can do nothing but shut my eyes as I await discovery and its traumatic consequences. At the least I will get kicked out. At the worst, I might be carried off on another visit to another veterinary clinic, which are no more than legalized shooting galleries with hypos, in my opinion.

  “Can’t anybody even shut a damn locker door?” this high-pitched voice asks.

  The locker door bangs shut, leaving me in the dark lit only by the luminous strips of the locker vent. Talk about a slammer. The latch is on the outside, and three feet up. Discovery, I decide, is no longer my Waterloo, but my salvation.

  14

  Kitty City Nitty-Gritty

  Temple looked out from the cab at a windowless, bunkerlike cinderblock building whose only reason for existence seemed to be supporting the massive neon sign frame above it. Nothing was less glamorous than an unlit neon sign by daylight. The curved white-glass tubes that spelled out Kitty City looked dingy, and the cat shapes cavorting beside the name resembled ferrets.