“When I feel up to physical education. Right now, I could use a pep talk myself,” she admitted. “They found two more bodies this morning.”
“What?” Matt sat up so quickly that the lounge foot almost collapsed.
“Hey! Yes, now it’s four dead in all. Not even Rambo could stop the national press from overrunning the event—although the organizers seem strangely indifferent to the notoriety. Molina and the Metropolitan police force are convinced they’re after a serial killer hung up on sexy women. They’ve got enough uniformed officers running around the Goliath to make them part of every act. Oh. And Crawford Buchanan showed up today. He’s doing just dandy, well enough to be out working on a sleazy tell-all about this mess for the Las Vegas Scoop.”
“What about your theory?”
“That,” she said darkly. “Molina gave me the birth dates for ‘fair of face’ and ‘full of grace,’ but now that ‘full of woe’ has been knocked piewacky—two dead at once and a day skipped—I don’t feel like pursuing my fantasies. At least I was able to help Molina.”
“That would be the day. How?”
“I’d talked to the victims—twin-sister strippers, who went by the names of June and Gypsy.”
“They were twins?”
She nodded. “Did an act in metallic body paint as the Gold Dust Twins. That’s what killed them, the paint. I’d talked to them about how lethal that stuff can be if you don’t leave a bare patch of skin somewhere to breathe. From what Molina said—and this was before the autopsy—there weren’t any obvious bare spots. And they knew better.”
“So the killer had to get close enough to paint them without their getting suspicious before it was too late?” Temple nodded, then bit her lip. “Unless... they’d been quarreling. Gypsy had invited their father to the competition without June’s knowledge. She claimed he had sexually abused her as a child, but June denied it.”
“Not uncommon. Denial is the backbone of the dysfunctional family.”
“But it would be weird, to abuse one twin daughter and not the other. Maybe the father told himself it didn’t count that way. Anyway, June was against Gypsy’s ‘statement.’ So one or the other of them could have painted her twin solid gold, waited for her to collapse, and finished painting herself completely then.”
Temple watched Matt absorb her somewhat confusing scenario.
“Murder-suicide. It’s possible.” Matt rubbed his chin, an unnecessary gesture. With his blond coloring, he’d never suffer from five-o'clock shadow. “Did you get the twins’ birth dates?”
“Why bother? Molina gave me the first two, but now my theory is impossible. Besides, Molina isn’t talking to me unless it’s an interrogation.”
“When has it been any different between you and Lieutenant Molina? In the meantime, why don’t you check on the birth dates you’ve already got?” '
“Is that therapy, counselor?”
“Common sense. Use what you have.”
“Right.” Temple stood, then checked her wristwatch. “I guess the public library is still open, dam it.”
“Why the library?”
“Who else has one of those perpetual calendars that shows what day of the week it was for the last one hundred years? Speaking of which, that’s about how old I feel. Have you seen Louie lately, by the way?”
Matt shook his head. “Not hide nor hair.”
Everybody was AWOL, Temple thought as she went upstairs. Electra was practically living at the Goliath. Temple had heard a distant vroom-vroom at about three p.m. that indicated the Hesketh Vampire was going through its paces onstage. Louie was almost always gone, as he had been ever since...
Temple turned the key and opened her mahogany door. Dead ahead on the slice of kitchen floor visible stood the banana split dish overflowing with brown-green pellets.
She marched over, picked it up and dumped the contents down the garbage disposal. They made a quite satisfactory racket getting ground up, she observed.
She next did what Matt had suggested. The library’s reference-desk personnel sounded harried, but easily found the needed calendar. Temple read the woman on the other end of the phone the dates: March 4, 1963, and April 22, 1958.
One was a Monday, and one was a Tuesday. In the right order.
Temple screamed and jumped up before the phone was fully hung up. No doubt the library staff was used to bettors calling from bars and other unstable inquirers.
She sat down again, sobered. Since when did women-hating, brutal serial killers of strippers docilely follow nursery rhymes?
She went to the bedroom to change, still mulling it over. Clothes lay everywhere—on the closet floor, near the bed.
Temple stiffened on the threshold. She had been so obsessed with the Goliath murders that she had almost forgotten her own peril. Had those two men come back and trashed her bedroom? Why hadn’t she learned how to lay grown men flat with one well-placed kick? Maybe those thugs weren’t just after Max. Maybe they had something to do with the Goliath murders...
She was already too deep into the condo to retreat from intruders who might be lurking at her back, and the phone was across the room. But why hadn’t they attacked her when she was calling the library from the living room? An abiding respect for public institutions?
Ridiculous.
And her clothes. Most of them had slipped off the hangers. She went over to inspect the damage, and picked up a red knit dress. The zipper was undone. What kind of room-tossing hoodlum stops to neatly undo the zippers? She looked around some more.
Oh, no! Her Hanae Mori green silk, crumpled again, on the floor! She whipped it aloft, unable to help admiring the fall of emerald silk folds. Another gaping zipper. Were these guys metal freaks, or what? Something had wafted to the floor when she lifted the dress.
She looked. A powder puff. The fluffy dressing-table kind. Pink. Ugh. She bent and picked it up. A diagonal white satin ribbon on the back bore the brand name in flowing script. Yvette. The puff part glimmered with opalescent flakes. A subtle whiff of Emeraude assaulted her nostrils.
Temple now knew what had inspired the name of the actress’s cat, but how had Savannah Ashleigh’s powder puff arrived at the Circle Ritz? On the wings of a dove?
29
Born to Be Child
“What are you doing here?” Lieutenant C. R. Molina asked a trifle bitterly Friday morning. “There hasn’t been another murder.”
Molina’s world-class blue eyes—Temple could give credit where credit was due—lay stranded in maroon circles. Her hair was more lusterless than usual, and she was unconsciously twisting the loose class ring on her right hand. At eleven o’clock, both women were already frazzled.
“1 don’t know,” Temple answered, aware of a mirroring bitterness in her own voice. “WHOOPE apparently doesn’t need PR advice since the murders have made it world-famous. I guess I’m about as effective as you are, Lieutenant.”
“PR is window dressing. Murder is people’s lives.”
“I know. And I still think—”
“I don’t care what you think.”
“I know. But you do care what I know.”
“What do you know?”
The ballroom was bustling in preparation for afternoon and evening preliminaries. Seminaked men and women fussed with costumes, props, lights, music. Technicians lent state-of-the-art finesse to the process. Media people buzzed around, thrilled by the crude energy, the obvious glitz, the titillating lure of sex and death.
No one police lieutenant, no one PR woman could do a damn thing to stop it.
“I knew,” said Temple, “that Kitty Cardozo was abused, and was fighting it. I suspect that she was calling a local hot line with the same message she gave me: she was breaking free, she was going to live her own life.”
“Matt Devine?” Molina asked tersely. “She was calling him?
“Like clockwork. Until Tuesday night.”
“What happened Tuesday night?”
“I was attacked. Matt s
kipped work to stay at the Circle Ritz with me. Kitty was killed.”
“Devine stayed with you?”
“Yes. Strictly defensive, Lieutenant.”
Molina moved her nervous hand from her ring to her forehead, where she brushed back her thick hair. “I checked him out.”
“Matt?”
“No college record, no degrees. No driver’s license in this state. The hot line director stonewalls on his background. You seem to have found another mystery man.”
“With all this going on, you had time to play peek-a-boo in Matt’s life? My life? Again?”
“Maybe you have a pattern: mysterious men and murder. By the way, we haven’t found anything out on your attackers.”
“ Attackers-schmackers, so what! You probably think I hallucinated that, too. Listen. You didn’t like my nursery-rhyme pattern. Well, it works! I did my own checking out, with the public library. Both of the first victims were born on the right days.”
“And murdered on the wrong ones? Is there a right day for it, Barr?”
“How about today?”
Molina visibly stiffened. Temple was impressed with herself. Height didn’t matter here, or position. Only results. She had a feeling she was beginning to think like a hard-nosed homicide lieutenant.
“So.” Molina deliberately modulated her voice to noncommittal silk. “Tell me what the library said.”
Temple did.
Molina nodded. “It does fit. Perfectly. Do you realize what a... twisted mind it would take to follow your plan?”
“No more twisted than a random stalker.”
“It doesn’t figure. Whoever’s killing them is taking a tremendous risk. Some of these killers have massive egos. They enjoy the game of taunting the police. The murderer has got to be someone close to the competition. Now you say it’s someone who had access to their birth dates.”
Temple shrugged. “Look at a driver’s license in an unguarded purse. Call the library and find the right date.”
“And bypass victim B, C and D because they were born on the wrong day of the year?”
“Why not, if you’ve got a cornucopia of victims?” Molina was silent again, thinking. “There must be... three hundred entrants in this competition.”
“Three hundred and four,” Temple said with PR person precision.
“Almost as many as days in the year.”
Temple nodded.
“Your whole approach is crazy,” Molina said.
“Maybe we’ve got a crazy killer.”
“Hmm. What do you want?”
“The birth date of the latest victims. I don’t even know their last name.”
“Standish.”
“As in 'Miles’?”
“So the records say.”
“And the date?”
“June first, nineteen sixty-seven.”
“That young?” Temple was surprised.
“That young. You’re pretty young yourself.”
“Sixty-five. Hey! I guess I am.”
“Where are you off to? What are you going to do?”
“Call the library again,” Temple answered, sprinting away. The phone that Temple had requested the day before still sat on a chair by the wall. She had to call information to get the Clark County Library number. The librarian consulted a perpetual calendar and was quite certain. June 1, 1967, had been a Thursday.
“Thursday’s child has far to go,” Temple repeated speculatively. But what about Wednesday’s? Why had Wednesday’s child (“is full of woe”) been left out?
While she was sitting there puzzling it out, the corner of her eye caught a flurry of black leather coming in at seven o’clock low. Temple braced herself for Switch Bitch, but when the figure arrived, she got Motorcycle Moll. “Electra! You haven’t been home.”
‘‘Tell me about it. Listen, did you know that Glinda North—Dorothy Horvath—was lesbian?”
“No. Um, what has this to do with anything?”
“Well, she wasn’t great bait for a sex-crazed heterosexual serial killer.”
“Was that really why she was afraid of losing her kids?”
“You bet.” Electra’s black-lipsticked mouth took a grim downturn.
“But... she was a stripper.”
“You’ve met Switch Bitch?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Don’t let the wrong half of that name fool you. She’s a work-in-progress. In the name as in the person, and the commercial, it’s what’s up front that counts,”
Temple’s preconceptions did a U-turn. “Switch...? You mean—?”
“This is strictly confidential,” Electra added. “Lifestyle necessities aren’t anybody’s business, and I don’t usually tattletale. But this is a multiple murder case.”
“Why would a transsexual and a lesbian work as strippers?”
“They’re both making a point without having to get down and dirty about it, like a prostitute,” Electra said. “The transsexual gets to show off the body work, and the lesbian gets to make money off men without having to get screwed by them. Makes a lot of sense. What doesn’t is that I have a funny feeling about the murderer, now that I’ve imbibed the ambience. Maybe it’s Marilyn. She was used long before she got any clout, you know, and she knew it. Poor kid. Poor tossed-around kid.”
“Electra, I hardly know ye.”
“Trust me. Marilyn says... my instincts say that this killer is totally loony.”
“You don’t need a doctoral degree—”
“Flush the killer out.”
“How?”
“Play the game. What if—what if one of the victims came back? Didn’t lie down and play dead?”
“That works on TV if the killer thinks he or she missed. But everybody in the competition saw the body bags go out of here.”
“You’re forgetting that the killer may be following a different logic. Even if I were only half loony, I wouldn’t like seeing my victim walking around. I might snap. Do something stupid.”
“Or dangerous. And how could you fool the killer? Oh.”
“An idea, dear?”
“Kitty Cardozo added a cat mask to her costume just before she was killed. It would be easy to resurrect her with someone the right height and weight.” Temple thought a moment longer. “Like me. I’d have to color my hair, though.”
“Can I interrupt this beauty discussion?” Molina’s voice came from over Temple’s shoulder. When the tall lieutenant wanted to eavesdrop, she could do it literally. She eyed Electra’s black leather “Wild Bunch” getup. “Haven’t I seen you before?”'
“It wasn’t in a lineup, honest,” Temple said. “This is my landlady, Electra Lark.”
Molina nodded slowly. “You were the J.P. who officiated, if you can call it that, at the parody of a memorial service for Chester Royal at the Lover’s Knot Wedding Chapel.”
“Sure was,” Electra admitted breezily.
Temple was amazed that Molina recognized her chameleon landlady, then recalled that Electra had colored her hair black on that occasion, too.
The lieutenant turned to her. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“ What did the library say about the Standish women’s birth date?”
“Oh. You don’t want to know.”
“I’m standing here, aren’t I?”
“A Thursday,” Temple said.
Molina digested that for a few seconds. “That makes Wednesday’s murder a day late and a dollar short.”
“Unless Wednesday’s child was killed elsewhere—and the Standish twins were killed after midnight, so both of them were Thursday’s victims.”
“Looks like they were killed around midnight, but I’ll need the medical examiner’s report to confirm that. And there weren’t any similar deaths in town last night. Besides, why would the killer change M.O.s now? Every victim was a contestant.”
“Too many police around? Too much attention?”
Molina shook her head. “The birth days must be a crazy coincidenc
e. The killer is saying more by using elements of the victims’ costumes as weapons. Perhaps he’s expressing a hatred for their manner of work, for women as sex objects in general.”
“Say, Lieutenant,” Electra put in, “speaking of sex objects. We were just discussing an idea—”
“Electra, no!” Temple warned.
“Don’t you think that the killer would go ape if you had one of the victims parading around here in costume like she was alive? That kitty costume Temple was telling me about would work perfectly. In fact, Temple’s the right size—”
Molina’s face stiffened with rage. “Amateur theatrics belong in TV mystery shows. Nobody’d fall for that old chestnut, anyway. And if you think I’d let a civilian go traipsing around in a murder victim’s costume on some long shot that it might unnerve the killer, you’re crazier than the murderer.”
“I’d never do it,” Temple interjected hastily. “Thighs.”
Molina turned on her like a junkyard dog. “Thighs?” she barked.
“I don’t wear anything that makes my thighs look like flesh-colored Jell-O, and stripper costumes don’t leave anything to the imagination. Although I would wear the cat shoes,” she added meditatively. “They were really cool.”
By now Molina was trying to control laughter rather than anger. “It’s too bad vaudeville is dead,” she finally said. “You two would make quite an act.” She turned to Electra. “You knew Max Kinsella, then?”
“Oh, sure. He was such a doll.”
“Odd. Ms. Barr is a lot less enthusiastic about him.”
“Now,” Electra retorted. “All Max owed me when he left was a month’s mortgage, and Temple took that over, poor kid.”
“Yeah. I saw that the mortgage is in both their names.” She turned back to Temple. “That could make things inconvenient if you want to move in the seven years before he’s legally declared dead.”
“Seven years—I never thought of that.” Temple caught her breath. It was one thing to adjust to Max’s being gone for good, another to write him off as dead and figure out the legalities.
“Think about it,” Molina advised before walking away.
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