Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“Did you know Madonnah’s real name?” he said, unwilling to go there.

“She said Mary Jo once, but I’ve heard Miss Kitty call her Nonah once too. I don’t know which is the real one, but we take names close to our own. Like Jazz was Jasmine.”

“And you, Crystal?”

“Crystal is beautiful, fine glass and it cuts.”

He noticed the scars on her forearms. Self-cutting. She noticed him noticing and sneered. “Cathy. What a wimp that little bitch was.”

“Crystal shatters,” he reminded her. “But you are far from being a wimp.”

“I’m not a fan,” she said. “You don’t live in a real world.”

“Agreed. Not that real a world. So you thought Madonnah was a wimp too.”

“Did I say so?”

“Yeah. Loud and clear.”

“You think you hear things, over the airwaves. You think you see things.” She glanced at her scarred and tattooed arms. “I could show you some things, if you had the guts to come up to my room.”

He didn’t, and he knew it. “No one can go there but you, until you’re ready to come out.”

“Scared?” Jeering again.

“Damn right. You win. At last.”

She drew back, not liking the ease of her victory. “I have nothing to tell you.”

“Not anymore. Thanks for the insight on Madonnah. It might help.”

She stood, glowering. “I don’t want help.”

“No, but I thought you might want to help. A little.”

“She was okay. I guess.”

Crystal turned in a crackle of black taffeta skirts and left.

Matt wiped the invisible veil of sweat off his upper lip before . . . Deedee came in.

Temple would pay for setting these brassy, sassy, glassy women on him, but not in the way Crystal would want.

Matt took notes, but Deedee, Fifi, and Gigi were as featherweight as their names, which really were: Dolores, Frances, and Geraldine. Too many girls were still named after their grandmothers. They had seen Madonnah around for three years. She kept to herself, was a little nervous. Seemed like she wasn’t really cut out for the Life. Didn’t have much fun, but delivered for the johns.

Matt turned over a page in his Hello Kitty notebook, courtesy of Miss Kitty.

These big-eyed kitty drawings reminded him of the slitty-eyed real cats prowling the Sapphire Slipper. He’d never admit it to Temple, but he found Midnight Louie’s presence . . . encouraging. That old tomcat always knew where the rats were hidden. Matt thought he’d glimpsed the old boy hanging around that sleek Sapphire Slipper house cat, Baby Blue. He hoped Louie would not let blatant sex appeal divert him from his forever mission of protecting Temple.

Then there was the matter of the Bed between them. Matt knew Louie was used to taking his leisure on Temple’s California king mattress. Matt wasn’t about to share her horizontal time with a cat, especially not after they were married. He supposed he and Louie would just have to duke that out between them. Matt was a reasonable man, but he knew who would win that contest. Black topped blond except in Temple’s human love life.

“I’m Heather,” breathed a Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy voice from the doorway.

She was a provocative blend of the two. Matt was reminded of a photo of MM he’d seen, wearing a dark Jackie K wig (way before she’d become Jackie O, which made her Jackie K-O in some weird way), and pearls and palazzo pants and a soft flowing blouse.

The odd thing was that Marilyn had never looked more relaxed than in that prism high-fashion outfit. Otherwise she was molded, pinched, corseted, and confined until overflowing like these SS women.

Matt found himself confounded by this eternal cultural icon of madonna-whore. The really weird part was both celebrated women had been deemed to play both those roles in their tumultuous private lives.

“Heather,” he said, playing for time. “On the hill?”

“Not Scottish. Maybe Heather as in ‘heathen.’”

“Another fan, I guess. You know my history. You have the advantage.”

“That’s nice.” She slithered around him, touching his shoulder with a false fingernail, before she sat. “I like the advantages.”

“What about Madonnah?”

“Her? Didn’t belong here. Didn’t want to play the game. Games. She didn’t even listen to your show.”

“No!” Matt feigned horror. “I thought I was the house DJ after-hours.”

“Not just you.” Heather pushed herself up to grab a bunch of chilled grapes from the refrigerator.

Matt thought: Roman orgy . Was he programmable! Putty in their practiced hands.

“We loved your clients , is that what you’d call them?” Heather had a lovely English accent. Maybe her real name was . . . Helena. He could be bewitched if he didn’t know better. “Charming people. You are always so considerate of them. Reminds us of our own jobs. Consideration. Quite a lost art, don’t you think?”

He nodded.

“It won’t help you solve bloody murder, of course. The people who do that are always inconsiderate. Look at Sherlock Holmes. Snooty sort! Hercule Poirot! Another airy-fairy! But not you.”

Heather, with her hooked nose, too close-set eyes, and rugged complexion had managed to seat herself on his lap to fondle his shirt buttons.

He laughed. “Of all the seducers at the Sapphire Slipper, you’re the one having the most fun. What about Madonnah?”

Heather gazed past his shoulder, imperiously. “No. No, Madonnah. No fun fast, as the Americans say. A very sober girl. Scared sober, I should say. Not like you, Bertie Wooster Baby. You’d like to be scared out-of-your mind drunk.”

“Not now. Not here. Thanks very much. Mind the gap,” he added in the robotic tone of a London Underground recorded message as he stood to unlap her and show her out the archway.

She growled and snapped at him, but went.

Mind the gap! Matt couldn’t believe he was ably parading prostitutes in and out of his lunchroom office like an Inspector of the Yard. Temple had a lot to answer for.

Inez was a Latina beauty with a tender manner. He could see her reared as a good girl, wearing a white mantilla and clutching a white First Communion prayer book and rosary at Mass . . . until some junior high gang-banger deflowered her in a back car seat and it was all over, the days of white and roses. Her culture was black and white, bad and good, and she was suddenly done wrong and irremediably bad.

So she went the way she’d been pushed.

She was a lovely girl, and his heart ached for her, but she wasn’t used to observing and making judgments, just living in her narrow aisle of deserved (she thought) purgatory.

He sent some Hail Marys after her, but doubted they’d catch up to her scurrying spike-heeled steps.

It was starting to weigh on him, like too many confessions heard in a row, the lives lived and not lived here. The ghosts of gaiety and ghastliness that make up the all-too-human condition.

What was he learning?

That the courtesans were gypsies, birds of passage who often bunked together but made no lasting ties. Not with the johns and not with one another. They shared the intimacy of sisters and lovers everywhere they went, but went everywhere alone.

That didn’t seem likely to lead to murder. Yet, maybe where sex was so casual, death would be too. Matt couldn’t fathom these women. He’d picked up that they liked their tawdry notoriety. They burbled about Web pages and blogs and steady customers always welcoming them back wherever they went. About MySpace.com and You Tube.

He found the lifestyle all too depressing. Sure, some of the women showed obvious signs of the childhood abuse that leads to sexual acting out. But some really seemed more like entrepreneurs, peddling their flesh with gusto and even glee of a sort.