Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “He draws a blank now.” Molina managed not to sound triumphant. “And it’s not just the absence of a paper trail. He left no trail at all: no driver’s license, school records, employment. He’s a Nowhere Man from—what did you call it? Ephemera.” She almost tasted the word. “That means all the here-today, outdated-tomorrow publicity materials a show produces? The word does suit Mr. Mystifying Max. Looks like... somebody... made all those photos vanish. Presto chango.” Temple put a hand to her forehead. She was feeling punk, but had skipped her prescribed Tylenol because she had to get back to the Goliath and do her job. So not even photos remained of Max. Maybe she had dreamed him up.

  Molina leaned forward, her resonant voice lowering confidentially. “You are contacting that self-help group?”

  “Yes! All right? I’ll go over next week.”

  “Fine,” Molina said, backing off, drawing away. “You still sure that you don’t have so much as a wallet shot?” she added.

  Temple stared at her. “You’d use it against Max.”

  “Maybe, if we found him first, we’d save him from somebody else.”

  Temple sat back in the plain, hard chair. Her head hurt, along with a lot of other things. The hard truths she’d been hearing lately about Max, about herself, hurt too. She wondered if she’d hate herself in the morning for saying this.

  “I’ve got a poster,” Temple admitted. “There should have been dozens still around. People like to collect posters.”

  “Great.” Molina stood as if a bargain had been struck and it was time to go, probably straight back to Hades. “I’ll stop by your place for it tonight. Say, seven?”

  Temple nodded slowly. It hurt her head. She certainly wasn’t going out this evening. What better than to entertain the Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?

  “Lieutenant! Telephone,” bawled a man at an nearby desk.

  With a farewell nod, Molina moved briskly away. Temple gathered up her tote bag, making sure everything was inside. She felt like a thousand-year-old lady today, not daring to trust either her body or her mind to go through even routine motions.

  Unappetizing faces danced in the background of her mind. Why would she want to finger those hoods? She would only have to see them again in court.

  A few desks away, Molina’s low voice escalated into an incredulous “What?”

  Temple looked in that direction. Molina was bending over the desk, scribbling furiously.

  “Right,” she was saying impatiently. “What time this morning? Right away.” She hung up the phone and barked something to a man at a farther desk. He jumped up, grabbing a khaki sport coat and some keys off a rack.

  Molina was stuffing her kangaroo jacket pockets with the paper she’d written on, her pen and notebook. She glanced up at Temple watching her. “Did you drive here?”

  “Yeah. I can do it—just.”

  “You up to stopping by the Goliath?”

  “I was planning on it. I’ve got business there.”

  “So have I. Give me your car keys. I’ll have a uniform drive your vehicle over later. Let’s get going now.”

  Temple complied and rose, teetering slightly on her heels. Maybe they were a bad idea today, but then again, they made a statement. “What’s happening, Lieutenant?” she asked.

  Molina glanced over her shoulder at the other detective right behind her. “Another stripper’s been murdered. Now let’s go.”

  The two officers didn’t wait for Temple to react, or wait for her, period.

  She jammed her tote handles over her left shoulder and hurried after them, feeling like Dorothy tripping down the Yellow Brick Road in her flashy new shoes, on marching orders from a distinctly enigmatic Witch of the North. She didn’t relish encountering another Glinda at the Goliath.

  Maybe Midnight Louie could play Toto.

  Keeping up with the long-striding cops made Temple’s head ache anew. She was hardly aware of passing through the bowels of the downtown cop shop, which would have fascinated her on a less stressed occasion.

  After huffing up three flights of stairs, the party ended up at a rooftop lot. The male detective, apparently junior to Molina, got the car, a white Ford Crown Victoria. Suited Molina’s autocratic style, Temple thought. Molina threw herself in the front passenger seat. Temple wrested the back door open and hopped—ow—in.

  They were off.

  “No siren?” Temple asked in the lengthening silence.

  Molina twisted in the seat to regard her. “The victim is dead. Five minutes isn’t going to change anything. You have a thing for sirens, or what?”

  Temple flushed and sat back in the seat. She resisted an urge to perch, imagining what unsavory passengers might have sat here before her—pimps, pushers, child molesters. But this was an unmarked car. Maybe only unmarked citizens rode in it.

  “Temple Barr,” Molina explained to her partner. “Does freelance PR around town. Has a penchant for finding bodies.”’ She nodded over her shoulder at the driver. “Detective Sergeant Wayne Dindorf.”

  That was it for introductions, and so far no explanation why Molina had invited—ordered?—Temple along.

  “The body was found this morning at nine,” Molina droned from her notes for the sergeant’s benefit. “None of the performers had arrived yet—must be late risers—so no one’s identified it.” She checked her watch, and the car spurted forward as the driver registered her gesture.

  Now, that was clout, Temple thought enviously. A mere flick of the wrist and some man puts the pedal to the metal.

  Temple wondered how male coworkers got along with Molina, or how hard it had been for her to get her position and retain cordial authority over men who might have—or might have felt they ought to have—gotten the lieutenant’s job.

  In the distance, the Goliath’s garish towers glittered like fresh powder snow streaked with gold dust and blood. Their car rolled up under the entrance canopy and paused, the sergeant flashing his badge at the sandaled parking valet who rushed over. The valet backed off, kilt flapping, and the car stayed right where it was.

  The moment they got out of the car, they were off. Temple trotted along in the wake of two fast, determined, long-legged people. Who needed Louie to play Toto? She was Toto. Crowds parted as if at the behest of Moses.

  Molina led them straight to the ballroom where the strippers would perform. Nervous hotel security men guarded the closed doors. Temple recognized them for what they were at once.

  Hotel security men always wore street clothes and always looked like the Iranian secret police: grim, vigilant men with eyes like eagles’ and an implicit ability to do all kinds of unthinkably nasty things if necessary. If they didn’t look like that, welshing gamblers wouldn’t sell their next of kin to pay up in a hurry.

  Molina was not impressed. The men opened the double doors, and she brushed past, Dindorf and Temple in her wake.

  The ballroom looked like the morning after New Year’s Eve. Scattered chairs and equipment stood in place, but without a throng of people at work, the vast area was a deserted set lacking all vitality.

  Not quite deserted. Temple followed the two detectives toward the pool of spotlights where a few forlorn figures stood.

  No one was talking, which lent a furtive, almost funereal air to their presence. Temple couldn’t decide whether the people looked sad, or guilty, or a bit of both.

  Molina began announcing their party’s names and ranks while still twenty feet away—Molina’s and Dindorfs, not Temple’s. This omission made her the uneasy object of quick, surreptitious glances. The others could be speculating whether she was a mystery expert on murder, or a chief suspect.

  The identity of the welcoming committee became quickly clear. Arthur Hencell, WASPish head of hotel security. Lisa Osgood, a hyperactive young blond woman who handled hotel special events. Hipolito Herrera, the pudgy middle-aged maintenance man who had found the body when opening up the ballroom for the day.

  “Where are the people
who expected to work in here today?” Molina asked.

  “The Caravanserai Lounge,” Lisa Osgood answered nervously. “We’re, uh... storing them there until the police let them back in here. How long—?”

  “Hours, maybe not until tomorrow. I’d find another place to practice” was Molina’s encouraging answer.

  “You’re not sending any black-and-whites?” Hencell’s question edged dangerously close to an order graced at the last moment with an interrogation mark.

  “Don’t worry. The coroner’s ambulance and the M.E. will use the back entrance. Nothing awkward will be wheeled through the casino, only the usual money carts.”

  Temple folded her lips to keep from smiling at the security chief’s livid face as he suffered Molina’s sardonic reply.

  Molina turned to the maintenance man with more warmth than she had shown the higher-ups. “What time did you—” Her question broke off suddenly, for no reason Temple could discern. And then, “¿A qué hora descubrió el cuerpo?” Molina asked in Spanish that flowed into one long phrase.

  “A las nueve.” The man’s face, his entire body, relaxed as he began an outpouring of Spanish, his hands and arms gesturing.

  Molina nodded, and pulled out her notebook.

  “Nine o’clock,” he repeated laboriously in English at the end of his spiel.

  His last hand wave directed Temple’s attention to the metal skeleton of jungle-gym-like scaffolding that stood near the raised stage.

  Something lay crumpled over the low bar nearest the floor. Temple’s shiver started at her tailbone and worked its way up her spine to her scalp. Falling over Chester Royal at the ABA had been a macabre accident. She hadn’t known the man was dead until it was too late to get hysterical about the fact.

  This was the first dead body she had approached with the same cold certainty as the police. She didn’t like the feeling, the sense that this investigation was about a collection of facts and circumstances rather than the tragic end of a personality, of a specific human being’s hopes.

  “Ven conmigo, Señor.” Molina’s head-jerk indicated only the maintenance man. Dindorf, his own notebook in hand, closed in on the other two hotel personnel.

  Torn, Temple decided to follow Molina despite the language barrier. She needed to understand what murderous force was stalking the event she was responsible for. You couldn’t do PR in an information vacuum.

  Molina and Herrera had paused by the metal framework and stood looking down, like mourners at a grave, speaking quietly in Spanish. The language’s musical cadence seemed to soften death’s implicit ugliness. Temple eased closer, her heels muted by the garish carpeting. She couldn’t see... the body, only flexed lace-stocking-clad legs lying together, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s, as if their owner had fallen under the onslaught of sudden disaster, had never known what hit her, maybe. An emerald green spark winked at Temple in the dim light.

  The shoes!

  She brushed past the obscuring bulk of Señor Herrera to see.

  “Oh... no.”

  Molina looked up. “You know her?”

  Temple studied the fallen form, dancer-graceful even in death. She recognized the black cat mask she had suggested, even if she couldn’t fully see the face.

  “Know her? Not by any name other than Katharine. I saw her in the dressing room yesterday afternoon, before... my own mishap.”

  “This was no mishap,” Molina reminded her.

  “Couldn’t she have fallen?” Temple asked hopefully. “Especially with the mask—” She stopped, realizing that her brilliant show-saving suggestion might have been fatal.

  Molina pointed to the neck, which was obscured by a narrow black muffler, and squatted beside the body. “Did you see her in costume yesterday?”

  Temple nodded.

  “Was that part of it?”

  “No. Her neck was bare, like most of the rest of her. The only new item is the mask. She must have made it and come back later to practice with it in private.”

  Temple pulled out her glasses and put them on before leaning over the corpse. Poor Katharine, so hopeful again, so fatally doomed to lose.... “Wait! That thing around her neck—it’s not a scarf. It’s a tail!”

  “Torn from the rear of her costume?” Molina asked.

  “Probably. I saw her working out her Catwoman act on the grid early yesterday, but she didn’t have it on when I saw her in the dressing room. It was this clever tail, like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. Some tiny remote control made it entwine and twitch.”

  “Then there’d be a wire.” Molina studied the busy carpet pattern for a moment before her pencil darted out like a yellow snake and lifted a tiny curling wire from the floor.

  She rose slowly, almost painfully. “Another stripper killed with a piece of her own costume, Interesting M.O.” Molina turned to Herrera. “Gracias, Señor.”

  Her encouraging smile faded as she looked past him to Temple, the light laugh lines vanishing at the edges of her icy blue eyes. “And I’ll want to know everything you know about the victim. Stick around until I finish setting up the investigation and get these hotel people off my back.”

  Molina turned and headed for the others, leaving Ternple and Señor Herrera to contemplate the body, a study in the sleek black of her brief costume and the pale, luminescent white of her artistically revealed skin. The mask had worked splendidly, Temple saw, though she found the addition of black lipstick sinister rather than sensual.

  Only yesterday Katharine had experienced hopes and hurts. Sometime after their dressing-room talk she had made the mask and come back to try it in her act. She was going on with the show. Now it would go on without her. So would her kids. So would “he,” the man who had needed to hit her. Temple would have something incriminating, at least, to tell Molina.

  Hipolito Herrera knew none of that. He knew only what he saw: youth and death entwined into one sad, bizarre figure.

  “Muy linda," he murmured, shaking his head. “Muy triste.”

  Temple didn’t have to speak Spanish to translate those universal sentiments. “Very pretty,” she agreed. “Very, very sad.”

  Molina had bigger fish than Temple to grill. While Temple waited for her turn at interrogation, she asked Lisa to plug a phone into a ballroom jack, then settled near one wall with two chairs—one for a makeshift desktop—and the directory from her tote bag. Before she’d left the condo that morning, she had scribbled down the numbers of any callbacks on her answering machine. Until every last possible TV or radio show is scheduled or scratched off the list, a PR person never rests. Neither pain, nor unexpected blows, nor dark of night, et cetera.

  Her return calls went smoothly, although everybody commented that she sounded tired today. Temple didn’t bother explaining that her jaw wasn’t willing to open as much as usual, which made her usually free-flowing words ooze out like molasses.

  By then the coroner’s crew had gathered around the body, along with police photographers and forensic technicians. Temple would have loved to have watched this procedure, but she had work to do. She again snagged Lisa from the anxious trio of hotel observers and got directions to an office with a typewriter, then slipped away without anyone but the watchdogs on the outer doors noticing. As soon as her clerical work was done, she headed right for the Caravanserai Lounge, a sprawling array of cocktail tables lit by Aladdin’s lamps under a chiffon ceiling tent strung with strips of fairy lights.

  Midmorning attendance at the Caravanserai was usually light. Now every table was occupied by displaced dancers, most wearing workout clothes, a prominent few stripped down to performance shreds and earning passersby’s stares. Smoke hovered above the motley crew like the steel blue haze from a volley of fired guns.

  In the thickest of it, she found Lindy.

  “Hi,” Temple greeted her. “Here’s the schedule for the local talk shows. Think you can make it?”

  “If the cops let me.” Lindy’s foot yanked a vacant chair away from the table. “Si
t down. You look frazzled already.”

  Temple used the copy of the schedule to fan away clouds of smoke. “No thanks. I have to get this copy to Ruth outside.”

  Lindy’s laugh expired in the dry wheeze of a cigarette cough. “Sorry about the smokiness. Strippers are on the weed.”

  “Just nicotine?”

  “Isn’t that enough? Say, what’s going on? Why won’t they let us in the ballroom?”

  “Plenty. You’ll find out soon enough. Just be prepared to get some questions about it at the radio stations.” Lindy’s tough face crinkled in sympathy. “Not another fatality? Jeez. A strip show’s supposed to liven people up, not lay them out.”

  “I’d better not say anything,” Temple said, retreating before she started coughing herself. Her bruised ribs couldn’t take the stress.

  She switched to her sunglasses before going outside—great camouflage for blue-gray eyes simultaneously shadowed by black, blue, and purple.

  Ruth’s one-woman picket line had doubled. A reedy man with sparse hair on both head and upper lip and a couch-potato paunch now paced nearby. His sign read:

  MEN WANT WIVES AND TOTS, NOT SEX AND FLESHPOTS.

  They weren’t picketing together. They were arguing loudly, and drawing a crowd. Beyond them, the Goliath colossus scowled down with lofty pagan scorn.

  “This is not a religious issue,” Ruth was saying. She jammed her slipping sunglasses against her nose. “It’s sociological and sexist.”

  “Brazen women don’t have to be naked to offend the Lord,” the man returned, glaring pointedly at her.

  Ruth looked about ready to conk his bald spot with her sign when Temple pulled her aside and broke up the act.

  “I’ve got the radio-station schedule,” Temple said. “Lindy’ll meet you here forty-five minutes before the shows.” She dug in her tote bag. “Here are some blank cassettes. See if you can get the station to run a tape while you’re on. You can cab it to the stations from here. Keep the receipts and I’ll reimburse you. Okay?”

  “Everything’s okay except Lindy meeting me here,” Ruth said. “I’ve had it with the holier-than-thou set. I’ll meet her inside, maybe stick around and watch the goings-on. Learn something that way.”