Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Pausing to glance into the ballroom, Temple viewed the same controlled chaos she had penetrated before. She hesitated, wondering if Ike Wetzel would make a good sparring partner for Ruth on the talk shows. No, too inarticulate. He was one of those maddening men who retreat to smug, smirking silence in the face of female outrage, like the ever-lovable Crawford Buchanan.

She didn’t spot any reporters milling about, and sighed her relief. The murder had already run its sensational course in a town brimming with sensation and crime. All she had to do now was organize sufficient, sedate publicity and beat off any overeager news people.

In that case, she could go home and pound out her radio schedule so far, or... since she was here anyway, she could check out the dressing room again. Alone. She headed for the back stairs, her mind manufacturing ways to justify her nosiness if anyone—say Lieutenant Molina—caught her snooping.

She figured that the police had been over the dressing room with a forensic fine-tooth comb by now. She should have the place to herself, and, without Lindy present, something about the murder scene that nagged at her might become clear.

Her heels clattered in four-four time down the concrete stairs. No one had seen her, proving that the murderer hadn’t needed to be clever, just lucky. The Goliath was a massive beast of a hotel whose functional underbelly was often deserted if you knew when to explore it.

In the nondescript corridor narrowed by racks of muslin-covered costumes Temple tried to muffle her ringing footsteps. Just because the place was deserted was no reason to announce herself to ghosts.

One ghost haunted a different dressing room. She paused, then pushed open a door she had entered many times before.

A glamorous wardrobe of glittering gowns occupied the costume niche where Max’s deliberately subdued performance clothes had hung not many months before. Either a female impersonator occupied the room now, or some glamour-puss songstress.

Temple advanced to the mirror, saw herself looking perfectly respectable and as guilty as any trespasser. Cosmetics spewed across the glass-topped Formica counter, and none of these makeup bulbs showed the tattletale gray of burnout.

She almost expected to glance down and find Max looking back at her in the mirror. Funny how you conversed with a person’s image when he was using a mirror, as if he really were on the other side of it... already. Was that where Max had gone? Behind the illusion of his own image?

Temple eyed the distinctly female cosmetics, an odd combination of expensive Borghese eyeshadows and inexpensive Maybelline products. Although the room’s fixtures and furniture remained the same, it had been essentially transformed somehow. The magician had changed it into something else by making himself disappear. It held memories that smelled faintly stale.

Temple shook her head, at the room and at herself. She was about to back out, feeling like an intruder who had stumbled onto a stage set for a play she wasn’t in.

Then her mirror’s-eye view spotted something odd atop the wicker sofa on the opposite wall. How often had she perched on its chintz upholstered arm after a show, waiting for Max’s makeup to come off, ready to keep him company until he came down from the exuberant high of performing? Stop it ! she ordered herself, and walked over to the sofa to inspect the anomaly.

A pink gym bag. That fit the overfeminine, slightly junky touches in the room. The mesh side insets, Temple thought, must help air out soggy exercise wear.

Something moved behind that pastel barrier.

She jumped back, her heart beating, the heavy tote bag swinging hard into her hip, once, twice.

“Ow.”

The contents of the bag echoed her complaint. Only its cry of protest sounded more like “Wow.”

How had she forgotten the unforgettably feminine feline darling? Certainly she hadn’t paid much attention to the cat carrier at the time. Temple crouched down until the mesh was on eye level and peered inward. Two gleaming round eyes gazed back. Long spidery silver hairs brushed the mesh.

“Aren’t you the natural beauty! Of course. Yvette. Savannah Ashleigh’s pampered baby cat.” She could see the same unreadable silvery script embroidered across the bag’s top. As Temple’s forefinger scratched the mesh, Yvette’s delicate pink nose outlined in flattering black tilted to sniff it.

“Well. I hope your mistress comes back soon. We don’t want you all alone down here witnessing any more murders—like mine!”

Temple stood, aware of the deserted dressing rooms surrounding her, of the recent, nearby violent death lingering with a kind of half-life. Even if Max’s strong personality had left no aura in this room, perhaps the dead dancer’s brutal passing had managed to haunt the entire area.

Temple hurried out of the dressing room, embarrassed by the thought of explaining her presence to a suddenly returned Savannah Ashleigh. She wouldn’t even want to explain it to herself.

Down the hall, the door to the murder scene stood ajar. Temple halted, even though she knew that doors are always ajar in deserted dressing rooms. The last thing weary, absconding performers want to deal with is closing doors behind them.

Still, she tiptoed closer, managing to keep her reverberating heels just off the floor. She eased inside without having to push the door further open. The cloak-shrouded end wall caught her eye instantly. Had the victim been posed there deliberately, she wondered, like dead meat on a hook? Cruel and crude, but then so was using the woman’s own prize G-string for a hangman’s noose.

Was there a message in the manner of death, the place of death? Temple thought so. Maybe if she stood very still and emptied her mind, an intuition would creep in.

A strangled whimper ruined her concentration.

Temple’s eyes jerked from the wall of gaudy cloaks to the opposing rows of mirrors and chairs that lined the dressing room. Empty. She turned. Only lockers stood behind her, pushed up against the wall with some of the doors sprung, the shiny gray enamel paint chipped off like cheap fingernail polish.

No one could hide in a locker. Not a murderer then. Not even a figment of her imagination now.

Yet, she had heard a noise, very near. She wasn’t hallucinating. Temple looked around again, methodically: along the ceiling line, down the row of chairs. Last, she examined the hanging costumes—from the fuchsia turkey-feather numbers jammed together at the far end to the equally imaginative exotica imported by the visiting strippers, and the truly tasteless high heels and boots lined up under them.

A muffled hiccough. The last gown on the left, a scarlet-sequined bodice with a ruffled Flamenco skirt, trembled.

Temple looked down again, below the froth of glamorous hems. This time she spied a jazzy satin pair of spike heels with a rhinestone-framed cat face on the toe. They were inhabited by real feet and legs.

She strode over and pushed back the scarlet costume. The hanger screeched against the rod like a scalded cat, making Temple jump along with her discovery.

A petite, dark-haired woman huddled against the wall, hands over her face, shivering, as well she might in her black spangled T-back bikini bottom and strapless bra.

“Pm sorry,” Temple apologized. Nothing was more embarrassing, for both parties, than finding a stranger crying.

The woman shook her head, too distraught to speak.

“Is there anything I can do—?” Expecting a negative answer to that inanely ineffective question, Temple retreated, prepared to tiptoe out again.

A hand left the face and then seized her wrist. “Is he still out there?” the woman asked. Her voice was strangely low and hoarse for such a small woman, choked with emotion and something else. Fear.