Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Finally. An interesting response.

“Why?” Temple shot back.

The sudden silence said a lot. Kohled eyes consulted kohled eyes. A communal sigh and continued, now sullen, silence.

“What name is the M for?” Temple goaded. “What’s the matter? Can’t you spell it?”

“It is an odd spelling,” Inez said quietly. “But then, she’s an odd girl.”

“Miss Fritzi Ritzi House Favorite, you mean,” Lili said.

“She has a shtick,” Zazu added.

“What is the name?” Temple asked again.

“Madonnah. M-a-d-o double n-a-h.” Zazu again. She didn’t seem to have issues with the missing girl.

It took Temple a second to visualize the spelling. “Like the rock star, only different.”

“She has a Madonna shtick,” Niki said. “Always changing her hair color and style, her nails, her makeup. Even her own mother couldn’t keep up with recognizing her.”

“Her shtick is being a prima donna,” Lili said. “She doesn’t have to sit in a presentation row like the rest of us, selling her wares. She picks her johns from watching on the surveillance camera. We hardly see her.”

“Then,” Temple said, picking up the cell phone, “these photos could be of her. Care to look again?”

“We haven’t heard she’s here again,” Kiki objected.

“She sounds like someone who could have slipped in anytime,” Temple pointed out.

They shrugged and passed around the cell phone images again.

“Can’t say. Could be her. Even we didn’t glimpse all of her looks. We just know she’s in the house when there are these secret assignations in the Starlet room.”

“She’s Miss Kitty’s pet.”

“Like Baby Blue, the cat?” Temple asked.

“Like, I don’t know,” Crystal said. “Like some weird recluse. Maybe she has a special talent in the sack. We don’t know. She comes and she goes, and we hardly know when or where. If we run into her in the break room or the hall or the bathroom, she’s like a freaky geek. No chitchat, no zippers help pulled up and down. Just in and out. She does her job that way, she’d get no johns. But they love the shtick and keep asking for her.”

“Madonnah,” Temple repeated.

Deedee handed the cell phone back to Temple as it finished its rounds. “Could be her. Who knows?”

Miss Kitty might, Temple thought.

“Thanks,” she told them. “Sorry I was so rough on you. I need the info.”

They stared at her. “Honey,” said Zazu, “you is a declawed kitten.”

Temple was not encouraged, but she was wondering how Matt would take knowing he’d given CPR to a hooker called Madonnah.

Loving Dangerously

Matt snagged Temple as she was passing through the bar to the kitchen for something bracing for further interviews, like a Red Bull energy drink. It was no surprise that she’d spotted a large stock of those in the refrigerator.

“Does the busy interrogator have a minute?” he asked, stopping her by the doorway where the opportunities for overhearing were minimum.

“Oh, Matt. It’s so impossible. Meeting every Fontana girlfriend and trying to remember who goes out with whom and unravel how they came up with this scheme and who might have had an ulterior motive.”

“And you haven’t even factored in the resident ‘courtesans’ yet.”

She groaned. “Whoever set up this murder, if it was indeed set up, knew how to confuse the issue three times over. I finally beat a lead on the identity of the victim out of the resident courtesans.”

“That’s great! Why are you moaning about not making progress then?”

“She was a real mystery woman, made a shtick out of always being in disguise.”

“I thought those abundant Venus on a clamshell locks were a little unreal.”

“She worked under the name Madonnah, spelled with an h on the end and was almost never seen. She picked her johns, not the other way around. The others were not too taken with her prima donna ways. So . . . one of them could have killed her in a fit of jealousy.”

“That’s why I think you should let me interview the courtesans.”

“You?”

“I am a professional counselor. The theory being that many sex industry workers have abuse issues, I might pry things out of them easier than you. A lot of women like this call into ‘The Midnight Hour.’ “

“It’s true that they probably think women like me are hopelessly naive about the world as they see and live it.” Temple glanced back toward the parlor, where bare parts of half-clad courtesans were visible through the archway. “These pros would eat a good boy like you alive.”

“Maybe not. I know how to get past well-varnished facades. And I’m not as good as I used to be.”

Temple lofted an eyebrow. “In the behavior sense, not the bedavior sense.”

“See? I’m more qualified than ever for the job. Let me try.”

She considered his request, realizing that he still regretted the call girl’s death at the Goliath. Apparently, their tête-à-tête that night had been a revelation to both. Matt’s priestly years of celibacy made him a mystery to worldly women like hookers, Temple bet. They’d probably sense that he didn’t have the ordinary male vulnerability to their wiles and seductions and mind games. He was firmly neutral in that department, almost like a gay friend. Yet not gay at all.

“They’ll be enchanted with you, and probably let their hair and their guards down,” Temple decided. “Pick a room upstairs to set up in, and go to it.”

“Not upstairs, not their working environment. If they have private quarters, there must be a gathering room there.”

So it was that half an hour later the first courtesan, glancing significantly at her sisters in suspicion, announced that she was having a visit with “Mr. McDreamy Midnight” in the break room and slunk off through the Fontana boys’ bar—applause and whistles—through the girlfriends’ kitchen—hoots and the clatter of tableware—to the low rambling annex where the women of the Sapphire Slipper actually bathed and slept and did their nails.

Temple hoped that she was doing the right thing. Which was hard to determine in a brothel.

Break Dancing

Darned if the brothel “break room” didn’t resemble any small business cafeteria, if it was for a funky, loosely run operation.

Matt took in the Formica-topped vintage dinette sets scattered over the vinyl tile floor. Their chrome legs and trim were age-dulled, but their cheerful seat covers in maroon, purple, yellow, and red plastic resembled a field of large, gaudy mushrooms.

A big white refrigerator was the elephant in the room, dwarfing a roomy microwave on an adjacent wheeled cart. A similar cart hosted a small TV. If small Lucite trays holding fingernail files, polish, and glue, lip gloss and mascara wands weren’t lying on the tables, Matt would have felt as at home as in a convent kitchen.

But the Age of Innocence was past, and this kind of communal living had nothing churchly about it.

Matt’s impression of the resident courtesans had been that they all looked alike. This open call interview session Temple had dreamed up for him would force him to discover differences and, perhaps, suspects.

It was likely one of their own, after all, who lay murdered upstairs. He shivered, more because Miss Kitty had kicked up the air-conditioning when it was obvious they’d be stuck out here with the body for a few hours. But that was like trying to stop the Red Sea from parting with an air machine.

“Howdy, Mr. Midnight. My name is Angela. We’re coming in alphabetically, so you get the heavenly body first.”

Angela paused in the doorway in typical temptress pose, one arm up along the frame, the other hand on her hip. At least she wore something, a sheer peignoir over a corset with garter straps and thong panties. Matt would never get what was hot about such outfits. Must be hangovers from Victorian repression. Analyzing that kept him from ogling Angela’s celestial form, which did look slim and firm and shiny in a Barbie doll sort of way he found a little too perfect.