Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “You argue?”

  “Not often,” Gypsy said proudly. “But this time June’s being a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “You’re the one who wants to blow our whole act.”

  Temple sat up straighter, despite her fatigue, as befits an arbiter. PR people are problem solvers, first and foremost. “What’s the matter?”

  Gypsy sighed and sat down, first checking to insure that her derriere left no gilded imprint on the chair seat. Temple was relieved. With June still standing, she had a foolproof way to tell them apart.

  “It’s about coming out of the closet,” Gypsy said.

  “The closet,” Temple repeated numbly. They were gay and in love with each other? Bizarro.

  “No, it isn’t that,” June snapped. “Gypsy’s got it all wrong. She invited Dad to the competition Saturday without telling me, even sent him a plane ticket. Can you imagine? Our parents don’t know anything about... all this.”

  June’s wide-armed gesture showed off more than the aura of the dressing room.

  “I see,” Temple said.

  “No, you don’t,” the seated Gypsy argued. “Neither does June. It’s a statement. Our father needs to confront our lives.”

  “What’s to confront?” June asked. “We dance nearly naked, and are damn good at it. We make a nice bit of money.”

  “I want him to come to the competition.”

  “I don’t!”

  “He has to see what he did.”

  “Gypsy! You’re not reviving that crazy story again.”

  “It’s not crazy. I’m not crazy. It’s true.”

  “Dad never touched me.”

  “He did me. Plenty.”

  Temple felt a cold chill in her stomach as she realized exactly what issue was tearing the single-minded twins’ unanimity apart. Beneath their pert manners, their fit, agile forms and the glamorous gilt, lay an ancient rot.

  “Why would he?” June demanded. “We always had everything the same. Same teachers, same clothes, same food, same sicknesses. Why would Dad mess with you and not me?” She almost sounded jealous.

  “I don’t know!” Emotion made Gypsy’s voice tremble. “Maybe because doing it to only one of us would cause twice the pain. That’s why I invited him. To see us both.”

  “Gypsy! Mom will know.”

  “Maybe Mom should know. Maybe Mom always knew what our father did.”

  June turned to Temple. “She’s crazy! Isn’t she?”

  “She’s your sister,” Temple answered. “Do you think so?”

  Her calm took the edge off of June’s anger. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nobody’s closer to me than my sister. How could I not know—how could she not tell me all these years?”

  “Shame,” Temple said.

  “June.” Gypsy reached a tentative, golden arm out for her sister, like Yvette batting at a fringe. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “But you’ll hurt Dad.”

  “I’ll make him see.”

  “See what?”

  Good question, Temple thought. Was the child Gypsy secretly eager to perform for her molesting father? Did she crave his attention and arousal despite herself? Is that why she stripped, to tease the other men in her audience who could see and not touch? Or did she want revenge, to taunt their father with the fact that she was now a woman with a sexuality he could no longer control? Did she want to show that she had dragged the unknowing June into her own need for exhibitionism that his sickness had caused?

  “What will he see?” Temple asked, echoing June.

  “What we are,” Gypsy said. “What we became. What he did to us. And that he can’t do it anymore.”

  “Us,” June repeated. “You said it was just you.”

  Gypsy sighed. “It was never just me, Junie. It was all of us. It’s what our father did to all of us.”

  “Maybe we won’t make the Saturday finals,” June suggested almost hopefully.

  “We always do,” Gypsy answered.

  Our Father, Temple concluded, was definitely not in Heaven. Nor would he be, if he came to the competition Saturday night.

  23

  Nursery Crimes

  It was a good thing Temple was not a Supreme Court Justice.

  She had advised the Gold Dust Twins to see a counselor together, and then consider family counseling. Not a judgment of Solomon that cleaved to the heart of the matter, but a waffling, trendy modem way to deal with a form of human grief as old as Sophocles and Oedipus. She had then left.

  “I thought you were headed home an hour ago.”

  At the words, Temple came to a dead, guilty halt while skirting the Goliath’s Caravanserai Lounge on the way out. Molina’s voice was right behind her, the law’s long arm apparently had at last extended its reach beyond the ballroom.

  She turned. “Ah, I needed a drink first.”

  “You’d have been better off if you’d actually had one,” Molina noted sourly. “Don’t you know when to quit?”

  “I was just leaving now. Honest.”

  “Good. Rest assured that I will call you,” Molina added with sweet sarcasm, “in case there are any major breaks in the case that you should know about. Now get outa here.”

  Temple hated to turn tail, but her energy was at its end. A chorus of aches and pains from her eyebrows to her knees had reached fever pitch.

  Still, she felt like an AWOL from the French Foreign Legion as she dragged herself and her heavy tote bag through the clustered tables. Besides, the ambience had choked her. The color and confusion of readying a show made her homesick for the theater. She hated it when frailties kept her from the thick of things. Imagine how many clues were floating around this mob, just waiting for an agile intelligence to pick them up....

  The sound of intense voices broke into her reverie. Two women stood at the cocktail tables that had been drafted as the competition’s field desk while the ballroom was unavailable. One of the women was Lindy, scanning a sheet of paper and smoking up a storm. A second woman, whose black iridescent hair matched her iridescent black-leather motorcycle jacket, was giving her the hard sell.

  “—just blew into town,” the woman, who looked quite ordinary to Temple among this crowd, was saying. She hadn’t removed her sunglasses. Temple wondered if she had any unsightly bruises to hide.

  “It’s awfully late to enter,” Lindy objected.

  “Any rules against it?”

  “Not exactly—”

  “Not exactly means no. When can I get into the rehearsal room?”

  “That depends on the police.”

  “Say, hotel security is getting awful tight.”

  “It’s not that,” Lindy said, saying no more.

  Temple trudged past the pair, amazed by contestants who would stop at nothing and even pay for the privilege of baring their bottoms. The bizarre conversation followed her like faint and argumentative rap music.

  “Your stage pretty strong?” the new contestant was asking.

  “You don’t weigh that much, honey.”

  “Thanks, but it’s not me. It’s my bike.”

  “You use a bike in your act? I suppose that’s encouraging to over-sixty types.”

  “Not that kind of bike,” was the contemptuous answer. “Mine’s a real bike. Weighs a thousand pounds.”

  “A... motorcycle?”

  Not only Lindy was incredulous. Temple, almost out of earshot, stopped cold. She turned slowly to study the over-the-hill Hell’s Angel.

  “Listen,” Lindy was telling her, “we’ve had grand pianos and baby elephants on our stages. I think we can handle one overweight motorcycle.”

  “Okay. There’s my money. Count me in.” The motorcycle moll moved on.

  Temple backtracked, catching Lindy about to slip the entrant’s sheet into a red manila folder. “Who was that masked woman?”

  “The one in the sunglasses? I don’t know. Never heard of or saw her before. That’s not odd. She’s in the Over-Sexty division.”

  �
��What did she put down on her form?”

  Lindy pouted in concentration. “This has gotta be only her stage name. That’s all we require.”

  “Which is—?”

  “ ‘Moll Philanders.’ I don’t get it.”

  “I do! Any address?” Temple twisted to read it upside down. Then she cased the cocktail area, looking for a figure that reminded her of Elton John in drag.

  The phantom contestant had settled at the Four Hunks’ table. Temple’s jaw dropped. The woman finally whipped off her seventies wraparound sunglasses to reveal green, snakeskin-patterned eyelids outlined in black glitter. The Fab Four obviously found the effect awesome. They were hooting and laughing and nodding their trendily styled heads.

  While they were thus diverted, Electra Lark looked coolly in Temple’s direction and winked.

  Temple turned again and hobbled out—yes, limping now, and so tired she thought that she saw a black cat dash from the shadow of one table-underside to another. Why .just “a” black cat. Why not...?

  “Et tu, Louie?” she muttered darkly. She had been naive to think he would meekly go home just because he’d been discovered. Had she, when Molina had told her to? At least the lissome Yvette was zipped up tight for the night.

  She sat in the Storm after she finally pulled into the Circle Ritz lot and turned off the motor, sensing the temperature change as the icy interior air slowly warmed to the hot sun.

  Her face felt like an aching mask, her body like it wore an iron cast. She hated to give the Mother Machree of the LVMPD any credit, but she did indeed need a rest.

  Temple extracted herself from the car, free to groan now that no one could hear, and stumbled inside. No one joined her on the elevator or passed her in the hall, but that was typical. Most residents had nine-to-five jobs that kept them away for predictable hours.

  At the turn of a key she was home again. The condo was empty, cool, serene. She stood motionless beside the door, trying to sense any intruder. Then she slipped off her shoes and peeked into the office and the bedroom in turn, but the condo was secure. Hers alone. Sometimes that unplanned solitariness wasn’t too bad.

  After rummaging in the refrigerator, she came up with a bacon-bit, tomato, lettuce and tuna sandwich. Had to polish off the open tuna can left over from—hah!—breakfast. A generous mound of Free-to-Be-Feline sat in the bowl, untouched.

  She bent to haul the half-liter bottle of Blush Light from the bottom cabinet and pried off its metallic collar with her long, strong fingernails. Lacking the energy to stretch up for the wineglasses on the highest shelf, she paused. Inside the lower cupboard she found an odd, root-beer mug, filled it with ice and poured in the pale coral wine.

  “So it’s crass to have wine over ice,” she told her ever-present Invisible Critic. “I am home alone, and I’m going to relax and enjoy it.”

  She headed for the bedroom, dragging her tote bag over the crook of one arm, her hands full of tuna sandwich and a frosty mug of wine.

  One high heel was left high and dry in the living room. The other was walked out of, left standing solitary in the bedroom doorway. The moment the tote hit the unmade bed, Temple pulled out the day’s notes. Cheyenne’s card fell to the coverlet. Did he do massages? Prob-ab-lee. She dropped the card on the nightstand and laid her glasses atop it.

  The tiled bathroom awaited like a Big White Set from a thirties Astaire/Rogers movie—sleek, moderne and ready to reverberate. The elderly white porcelain tub was long, deep enough to drown in and had a divinely wide, old-fashioned rim.

  She turned the faucets to the position where hot and cold blended into a pulsing stream of pure nirvana, set her sandwich and mug on the tub edge, and began peeling off her clothes—slowly, not like a stripper, but like someone whose muscles screamed at every motion.

  For once Temple was grateful that the fifties bathroom did not, repeat, did not sport a full-length mirror. Temple leaned over the pedestal sink to check her face in the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet mounted above it. Thanks to the would-be Westmore brothers’ impromptu facial behind the Goliath, she could skip eye shadow for several days. Technicolor bruises tinted the skin around her eyes, and now were turning a rotten-banana yellow along the edges. Yellow Was a sign of healing, but also too ugly to disguise as a heavy hand with the magenta and purple eyeshadow.

  She stood on tiptoe to peek at the bruises on her torso. Still at the blue-plum stage in size and color, ugly and deep. Temple winced to realize that, despite their best efforts, those men hadn’t really gotten around to seriously hurting her.

  From the now-muffled rush of the faucet, she sensed that the bathwater was rising. She dipped in a toe, then climbed over the high edge and sat gingerly, her skin twitching at the sudden lap of hot water before settling into it like a nervous cat into a petting hand. Aaah. She lay back, munched some sandwich, sat up to chugalug a little wine.

  She thought of Electra going undercover at a strippers’ convention, and laughed. Moll Philanders, indeed! Crazy old girl. And was Louie really still on the premises, or had she hallucinated him? Not to worry, not with two prime crime solvers like Louie and Electra on the scene in her stead. Sure.

  Temple sighed as a sense of slow draining dripped down her arms like an IV of molasses-thick wine. Tension and worry were siphoning down her fingertips into the warm water. The tub was deep and long enough to float in when it was filled to the top. It would be, because she had bought this plastic thingamajig that sealed off the overflow drain, just so she could float like she had when she was a kid. The advantage of being petite.

  So Temple drifted in the soapless, clear water like a fetus in amniotic fluid, detached, isolated, the seeds of future thoughts spinning disconnectedly around her.

  This is Wednesday. The contest is Saturday, when Daddy Gold Dust is in for a big surprise. Three more days to get through before it’s all over. And it is all over for Dorothy and Kitty. Kitty. Another “y”-ending name. Had Kitty been the birthday girl on the cake? Was her real name Katharine? Sure. Katharine, that was what she had been called in grade school, the name that the scared kid peeking out from the costume niche had used. Kitty had come later, Kitty for short. Kitty was tougher, Kitty had reason to be. Poor kids. One dead on Monday, one on Tuesday.

  Temple sat up with a splash. Monday’s death, and Tuesday’s. And Monday’s child is fair of face, but Tuesday’s child is... far to go? No. Works for a living? No. Monday’s child is fair of face, and Tuesday’s child is... all space. Ace. Mace. Place. Is bace/dace/face/gace/ hace/jace/case/lace! Is lavender and lace? Mace/nace/pace/ race/tace—trace/brace/grace. Grace.

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace! Not anymore.

  She leaned forward to jerk the faucets shut, then stopped, grabbing the porcelain tub grips, dripping onto her sandwich as she stepped down to the bath mat and pulled the towel off the chrome bar behind her.

  The hotel-size Turkish towel swaddled her like a graceless sari. At six-four, Max couldn’t stand squinky towels. She waddled, wet and enervated, into the bedroom to dial the Goliath. Still knew the main switchboard number by heart.

  She asked for Lieutenant Molina, and finally got her. Then she told her the theory.

  Silence. “You think the killer is following this nursery rhyme?” Molina asked. “Just because you linked the two victims to the first couple lines?”

  “Maybe! But that’s not the important thing. If the murderer is following the rhyme, there’ll be more deaths—or attempted ones.”

  “You know the next lines?”

  “No, but I could call the library. I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Commendable, but the, ah, ordeal you went through could throw off your emotional equilibrium. You’re liable to see shadows behind every bush for a while.”

  “And serial killers in every nursery rhyme?”

  “I didn’t say that, but your theory is thin, to say the least. Anyone could twist the rhymes to apply to most of the women here. They’re all ‘fair of face and full of grace,
’ or could pass for it on a cloudy day. Sorry. Get some rest, and leave the detection to the pros.”

  Temple sat and dripped on her bedspread after Molina had hung up. She called the library anyway and jotted down the eight lines the librarian looked up. Wednesday’s child was full of woe. According to the tales she had heard about the strippers' pasts and private lives, that was probably another universal truth.

  WOE. That was the name of the organization Ruth Morris belonged to. Was Ruth in danger? When had she been born? But no: she wasn’t a stripper. Far from it. What came next? Thursday’s child, she saw, scanning ahead, “has far to go.”

  So do we all, she agreed with Molina. So do we all. Too bad Electra was at the Goliath, or Temple would try her theory out on her. Or on Matt.

  But she didn’t have his number, she was too tired to go up to his apartment and she was probably all wet anyway.

  She read ahead to Friday’s child. Loving and giving. Saturday’s child “has to work for its living.”

  And Saturday all these children turned sex icons would be doing just that, gyrating for dollars. And for other, less tangible rewards that had their roots in the past.

  She must have fallen asleep on the bed, wrapped in the damp towel. The room dripped with blinds-drawn, deep afternoon lethargy when she awoke to the sound of jangling. Not jangling, ding-donging. Her glorious doorbell.

  She stumbled to the light switch, then blinked at her watch until she could read it. Six-something. She rushed for the door, tripping over her discarded shoes.

  Luckily, she had not been too exhausted to use her chain lock. Turning the deadbolt seemed more than her aching arm could handle, but she finally edged the door open enough to peer out.

  “Oh, Matt! I was thinking of you. I mean, I was thinking of you just before I fell asleep—” No, that wasn’t cool, might as well cut to the gory chase. “There’s been another murder at the Goliath!”

  He took her non sequiturs with Matt-style equanimity. “I’d like to hear about it, but can I come in first?”

  “Yes, but I’m not dressed. I’ll be right back out.”

  She undid the chain and left it swaying while she retreated to the bedroom. Not that the huge towel wasn’t perfectly modest. It just made her look like a resuscitated mummy, and walk like one too.