Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Still, they were hooked on the midnight sob stories he heard on WCOO-AM radio.

Still, there was always one more rich john who would drape them in goodies, or a lonely one who’d leave consoled, or a reluctant one, like Matt, who needed to be cajoled. It was unnerving to think that he could have sex with every one of these women, or even several at once, all for what was a reasonable price for his income level.

But he’d been reared a Roman Catholic, not a Roman emperor, and orgies were not for him. Nor celibacy, anymore. Thank God.

And still Jazz and Kiki and Lili and Niki and that ole devil Zazu to go. It already felt like a long night, and no one was having any fun yet.

“What is it with the names?” he asked Jazz.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to reinvent yourself?” She was a fresh-faced pixie of a girl, with acne spots peeking through the pancake and the Clearasil. Maybe . . . twenty-two.

“I think we all do, sometimes.”

“Well, we can be whoever we want. Someplace else, we’re somebody else. Someplace else I use an English accent and go by Dana. “ ‘Wot’ll ya ‘ave, Ducks?’ ”

Jazz giggled at his expression. “You don’t have to take that personally. You’re better-looking than I’d thought, though. Most radio guys sound like Dr. Kool on the airwaves and look like Moby Dick the whale off the air. We get a lot of DJ guys. With us, on the other hand, whatcha see is whatcha get. We’re more honest.”

“Looking good isn’t that important.”

“Say you! I know. I mean, I’ve seen hookers with faces to die for. Bodies too. Models, only they’re too well endowed for the human hanger trade. Some of those don’t do too well at this. Snobby, I guess. They scare the guys.”

“What about Madonnah?”

“Madonnah? She wasn’t bad-looking. Never the kind of girl to play Queen La-ti-dah in the back of the house. Not that enthusiastic about her work. You got to work it, you know. Flash it, flaunt it, make a guy want to spend hard cash on some fun with you. She didn’t seem like a girl who was in it for fun.”

“She didn’t make much money then?”

“Enough, I guess. It kept her on the circuit. Some of the girls you know from the skin out. Some you never know. She was one of the never-knows, that’s why it was so weird she was killed. You wouldn’t have thought anyone was that . . . what’s the word?”

“Passionate about her?”

“Yeah. She was laid-back. Despite our profession, that is not a salable quality.”

Jazz bounced out in her gymnast-pixie way to make room for Kiki, Lili, and Niki.

Matt was asking for the others in groups now, figuring K, L, and N wouldn’t have much new to tell him. And he was wearing out from the parade of bouncing, flagrant party girls. Sultans and polygamists bewildered him. But the impulse to combine proved unwontedly provocative.

“Say, Mr. Midnight. I guess you’re up for a group scene!”

One was a blonde, one was a brunette, and one was auburn-haired. He knew he’d never remember who was Kiki or Lili or Niki, so he thought of them as gold, bronze, and copper.

They wanted to swarm him, but he made them take chairs at the table like civilized girls.

“This is serious. One of you is dead, and the police will soon be interrogating all of you for real.”

“So you’re our practice run,” the blonde suggested. “Ask away. We are all way too friendly by profession to commit murder.”

“Killers don’t advertise,” he answered. “They don’t have the look written all over them.”

“You know what you have written all over you?” the brownette asked suggestively.

He didn’t encourage her with an answer, but she rushed on uninvited. “You look like Mr. First Time in a house of pleasure. Could we give you a welcome party!”

“Is there a lot of that?”

“Welcome parties?” asked the redhead, Niki. “Every night.”

“I mean clients wanting multiple courtesans.” He was beginning to appreciate the old-fashioned dignity of the term courtesan .

“They almost all want it,” blondie said.

“But they can’t all afford it,” brownie added.

“And some just don’t dare to admit it,” the redhead finished, eyeing him as no doubt the latter.

“Do you get a lot of bachelor parties here?” he asked.

They shrugged in triplicate, and chorused, “Some.”

“It’s not like we get the Fontana brothers in one big bunch ever.” Kiki was the blonde.

“What a shame this gig was a bust,” Lili, the brownette, said.

“None of the houses in the state can put up a sign saying, ‘The Fontana Brothers Were Here.’ That would be a huge notch on the bedpost, let me tell you.”

“I’m relieved to hear that my almost-in-laws are so upstanding.”

Niki, the redhead, loosed a shower of laughter. “What you just said!”

Matt realized any Nevada chicken ranch was a House of Double Entendres, and he was unwary enough to deliver them COD.

“Always glad to amuse,” he added. “Now. About your dead associate.”

“Associate,” Kiki mocked. “I guess that’s what we do, girls. Ass-o-shi-ate.”

“This isn’t fun and games. Madonnah is dead. You girls must feel something about that. Maybe a john was after her for some reason. Sneaked in and killed her.”

“Look,” said Lili. “Nevada is the only state where sex trade workers are guaranteed clean and protected. We can’t come in here and work unless we check out weekly. So we don’t have violence and all that stuff that comes with working the streets with pimps. It’s a great gig, and when we’re off elsewhere, we make real sure we’re fit to come back here. So there are no tooth-gnashing johns raving about scabbies or herpes or anything bad. It’s more likely they’ ve got the diseases, and we see that what breeds in Vegas, stays in Vegas, thanks to c-o-n-d-o-m-s.”

“Not a hundred percent effective. Maybe she had a baby once—? Doesn’t that ever happen?”

A silence, then Niki spoke. “We don’t talk about that if it does. It’s as much a secret among us as it is out there in Henderson or some hoity-toity suburb. We mind our own business. And Madonnah minded her own even more than we did.”

“She doesn’t seem like she was part of the gang.”

“She wasn’t,” Kiki said. “Some of us are like that. Private. Good-time girls maybe had bad times once. We don’t ask, and we don’t tell.”

“That makes it tough to solve a murder.”

“It makes it tough to get anything on any of us, too,” Lili said, standing. “We’re done here, Mr. M., unless you want to pay for something personal.”

He shook his head. He’d actually managed to put names with faces during their talk, but what they offered was pretty nameless and faceless anyway.

He sat there for a minute, enjoying the silence. Madonnah had been an odd duck here, though none of them had put it that way. He suddenly realized that she had a room here, and he wanted to see it. He could ask Miss Kitty and make a big, public deal of it. Or—

“Miss Zazu, I presume,” he said, rising as a tall, angular black woman entered the room without posing in the doorway.

“I hate cops,” she said.

“Good. I’m not one. I’m just the preview.” He didn’t bother sitting again.

This woman wouldn’t domesticate and with her five-inch hooker spikes she was taller than he. Taller than most men.

“I’m betting,” he said, “that you’re like the others. You didn’t have much to do with the late Madonnah.”

The dark eyes set in ivory whites blinked. She lived to contradict. “We talked some. Madonnah weren’t so standoffish as those cows think.”

Ah. A rebel in the house. “Could one of them have killed her?”