Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“You know me?” Matt asked as she swaggered over on her four-inch spikes, jerked open the refrigerator door and regarded the contents long enough to give him a good rear view.

She finally found a can of some new-wave high-energy drink and joined him in sitting at the gray Formica-topped table.

“I never thought you’d be a customer out here at the Sapphire Slipper,” Angela said.

“I’m not. I was hijacked. We town guys all were.”

“I looove your voice on the radio. It’d be a real kick to hear it whispering in my ear some night. Tables turned.”

He ignored her come-on. “So you’ve actually heard my program?”

“We all have, honey, coming down from a night’s work in here. Unwinding. Gettin’ down. Who do you think we tune in to? Mr. Mellow Midnight.”

He knew he had long-haul truckers and night casino staff in his invisible audience, but he’d never dreamed whole brothels of shady ladies would tune in. “You close at midnight, then?” he asked, surprised.

“That’s our hours, noon to midnight. It’s a long drive back to anywhere from here, and even good-time guys and hookers gotta sleep sometimes.”

He eyed the hall off the kitchen. “Those are your quarters?”

“Yup. You wanta see?”

Matt thought it might be illuminating. “Yeah. Do all the . . . places have this arrangement? The guest bedrooms up front and fancy, and a, like, dorm for the residents in back?”

She stood and leaned over him, as her lips enunciated the words only inches from his. “No, my Midnight Man. Some of the lower-end places have the girls work out of their living quarters. In a way, it’s more convenient.”

But this was more convenient for a murderer, to kill on what amounted to a stage set, far from where the residents actually slept.

Matt stood. “My curiosity is purely academic.”

“Yeah, sure.” She smiled enticingly over her filmy blue shoulder as she led him down the dim, plain hall. She reminded him of the huge plaster figure atop the Blue Mermaid Motel, a knowing creature in her element, relishing that he was out of his.

It took five minutes to figure out the courtesan’s quarters were as bare and practical as a convent. How unnerving that women consecrated to no sex and women living on nothing but sex ending up in such spare, unsensual circumstances.

He saw single beds without head or footboards, cheap motel dressers bought by multiples with matching bedside tables. Blinds on windows. Everything institutional, although stuffed animals lined up against the plain beige walls and the dresser tops here were littered with gaudy rhinestones and garters, not the simple string of rosary beads and a small photo of the old folks at home. There were no photos of anyone but these women, taken at formally happy moments, in a line in the parlor, laughing in the break room. They were family.

Nuns, of course, were an old and dying breed. These women were a breed as old as prehistory probably, and not dying out at all.

“Knowing the layout of the place will help put the murder in perspective,” Matt commented as they returned to the main room.

“ ‘The place.’ You can’t even call it a chicken ranch. A brothel. A bordello. A whorehouse. You give all that advice out night after night to sad and lonely people, but you never give us spirit-lifters out here on the desert a moment of thought or credit. Send some of those road-weary truckers thinking too hard on their lonely lives our way, Mr. Midnight. That’d be some real good counsel.”

“If you’d give them the same personal attention you’re giving me right now, I can see your point.”

“You can see a lot more than that, but you’re not looking. Engaged, I hear, like tall, dark, and Aldo. That doesn’t stop guys from coming out here.”

“How’d you get that information?”

“Those ditsy girlfriends. They chatter up a storm. Not used to being rounded up in a group and kept isolated out here in the desert.”

“The resident girls aren’t chat-happy?”

“This is our workplace, hon. It’s hard work catering to men who expect a hundred percent every minute for their money. We get worn-out. No time for pajama party gossip. We are the pajama party.”

“Do you have any . . . protection?”

“You speaking sexually? We are all condoms all the time. Every place, every act.”

“Um, no. I meant a . . . union.”

“Not here. We do have an ‘association’ and bylaws. We’re freelance workers like your girlfriend. We accept jobs, see them through, get paid, kick back a commission to our landlord for room and board and providing the necessities, and move on in a few weeks to another place, another part of the country.”

“You like that?”

“Which parts?”

“The rootlessness.”

“You bet. Not everybody can travel for their job and get paid for it. There are a lot of laughs going on all over this country. We work the hot spots. East Coast, West Coast, and Vegas. Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast some. Gambling brings out high rollers or would-be high rollers. Both winning and losing brings ‘em home to the Sapphire Slipper.”

“What brought Madonnah back to the Sapphire Slipper?”

Angela forgot her seductress act to think before she spoke. Sincerely. “I don’t know. Our schedules are our own. That’s one of the best parts of the job. Thinking about it, that probably is her upstairs. Like her to slip in unnoticed, but she sure didn’t leave that way this time. I don’t know why she came back before she was expected. Maybe because she liked doing the unexpected. She was—”

“What?”

“A loner. Kept to herself. We don’t have to bond like Lassie and Timmy here, but sisterhood helps. She kept aloof.”

“Stuck-up?”

Angela shook her head. “Not that. Just deep inside her own troubles maybe. Like she was just visiting. Always. Just visiting. Tuned out, that’s exactly what she was doing. Only it was the planet, not just our little ole whorehouse.”

Matt digested Angela’s analysis. These women saw a lot of men, and women, at their worst. He trusted Angela’s instincts. That’s what hookers and midnight radio shrinks relied on. Their instincts about strangers in the night.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Next!” she announced as she flounced through the doorway.

“And you are—?” he asked the busty brunette who paused in the doorway to show off her saloon girl figure.

“Babette, Daddy.”

He hated that “Daddy” thing. “I’m Matt.”

“We know who you are. We’re your regular listeners. It’s a thrill to have you on our turf, to see you in person, and isn’t that a nice sight? Are we what you like?”

“I like women,” Matt said. “All ages and stages.”

“Yeah?” Babette was nearing forty as far as Matt could tell. The maternal sort, with all that natural or assisted mammary development. There was a courtesan here for every druther. Even it was mother. Babette heaved her boobs atop the table and crossed her arms in front of them. “What can I do for you, baby?”

Ten minutes later he was ushering Babette out to bring in Crystal.

“Why the alphabetical names?” he asked the thirtyish woman. She was lean with a narrow harsh face and wore a lot of Goth gear he tried to ignore. He was sure her looks determined her shtick.

“We use different names in different places. Vegas attracts a lot of johns. The alphabet helps keep them grounded to who’s who and who does what.”

“And the dead woman . . . ?”

“Madonnah? Guess she turned out to be a kind of Jonah, didn’t she?”

He was surprised to hear this Wicked Queen woman make a biblical reference.

“Oh, I was raised on the Holy Book,” she said, her dark eyes glittering like the iridescent spiky black tattoos on her upper arms. “Whomping my bare bottom with it until I bled.”