Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

“He?” Temple repeated.

The hand tightened painfully on Temple’s wrist bone. “The man! A man. Any man. Is he out there?”

Temple shook her head. “No one was around but me. And a cat.”

Relief allowed the woman’s hunched shoulders to drop two inches, but she kept her face and body pressed to the wall. One hand still covered her eyes, as if to keep them from seeing something horrible.

“Hey,” Temple said gently, “I sometimes look pretty awful in the mornings, but I’m really not a scary person. Come on out. It’s just us two down here, honest.”

The woman laughed tentatively, peeking at Temple through spread fingers, like a child. “You’re not... with the show.”

“I’m doing public relations for it.”

“Why are you down here?”

“I came to check out the murder scene,” Temple admitted sheepishly, her eyes flicking to the far wall. “I’m congenitally curious.”

“Oh.” The woman sighed instead of sobbed this time and turned around to put her back to the wall.

She may have been tiny, Temple noticed, but she had a dynamite hourglass figure. Her vivid coloring suggested the Hispanic, or Italian.

“What’s your name?” Temple asked.

The woman’s long dark lashes fanned up and down behind her hand as she studied Temple’s linen suit, tote bag, high heels and, finally, her face.

“K-Katharine,” she said in a subdued, shy tone.

“All right, Katharine, why don’t you come out of there? Those ruffle sequins must scratch! I’ll prove that there’s no one here but me.”

Katharine edged out like a child from a closet, a bizarre image when combined with her seminaked, fully female form.

“Those are downright awesome shoes,” Temple said with sincere admiration. “I’ve got a cat with big green eyes almost as bright as those rhinestones.”

“Thanks.” Katharine turned one foot so Temple could admire the shoes fully—see how cleverly the shape mimicked a cat stretching. The high heel was its hindquarters raised in the air, the sole its ground-touching belly. The toe formed its extended front legs. A twining ankle strap mocked a tail.

“Darling outfit!" Temple pronounced. “Did you think that up yourself?”

Katharine nodded solemnly. “You’re sure no one’s out there anymore?”

“Swear to God on Ginger Rogers’s dancing shoes. Did”—Temple eyed the far wall, the suggestively empty hook.—“did remembering the murder scare you? Were you suddenly afraid that the murderer might still be around?”

Katharine shook her head of naturally wavy dark hair, as lush as Counselor Troi’s Cretanesque hairpiece on the new Star Trek spin-off. Temple wasn’t often jealous, but this tiny, ultra-zorchy woman made her feel a pang. In junior high she would have traded all of her record-setting Girl Scout cookie sales for some blatant sex appeal like this any day. It wasn’t fair: this brunette bombshell wasn’t even tall.

“I didn’t even remember that—the murder,” Katharine was saying. “It happened so fast, but then it always does.”

“What? What happened?” Temple demanded a bit impatiently.

Katharine’s shoulders twitched hopelessly, then she lowered her hand from her face.

“Oh, my God.” Temple saw reddened eyes of Swiss-chocolate brown, tear-smeared mascara, those Daddy Longlegs lashes, and natural, too! It had taken her a few more seconds to notice the subtle swelling of Katharine’s cheekbones, the bruises beginning to congeal around her lovely eyes.

“Someone hit you! The man you were asking about. Who?”

Katharine shrugged. “Don’t do no good to say. It’s done. It did what he wanted. I—I can’t compete, not looking like this.”

“You don't know how you look—it’s not so bad....” Brown eyes turned bitter black. “I know how I will look, like a three-D sunset by competition Saturday. He knows how it'll look, too. Like shit. Knows just how much to hit, and how hard.”

“Ice! I'll get some from the machine down the hall—I saw it yesterday! We’ll put ice on your face. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

Temple sprinted away, grabbing her clutch purse from the tote and clawing out quarters in transit. The soft-drink machine stood only twenty-five feet away. She congratulated herself on remembering it while waiting for a paper cup to pop down, lopsided. She straightened the cup just before a mother lode of crushed ice crashed into it, then jerked it away, letting the clear liquid Sprite dribble down the drain.

Katharine was sitting at the counter staring disconsolately into the mirror when Temple returned. “Ice won’t do no good—what’s your name, anyway?”

“Temple. Here, I’ll wrap the ice in this towel.” She snatched a clean but rouge-stained one from the counter-top. “Hold that there.”

“Thanks,” her patient said. “Still won’t help the color.”

“Makeup.”

“You gotta look perfect for the judges. They’ll see.” Temple hated hearing that anything was hopeless. She had a feeling that Katharine had been told that everything was hopeless for as long as she could remember. Temple’s eyes roamed the dressing room, looking for inspiration. The cloaks—no, Katharine needed to hide her face, not her body. Hardly her body, that was the whole point. But... her face was not.

Temple pointed at the cat-faced shoe at their feet. “Cat cloak!” Katharine looked puzzled, rightfully. Temple’s inspiration came so fast she stumbled over the words. “Mask. You’ll make a cat mask to match the shoes!” Brown eyes opened wide, then winced half-shut again. “Yeah. I could do that—maybe.”

“Sure you can! Then how your face looks won’t matter. What’s your routine, the music?”

“ ‘Batman.’ Only I play Catwoman.”

“Perfect! It’ll be even better than before. Trust me.” Katharine, dazed into docility, nodded while clasping the homemade ice bag over one eye.

“Will he... come back?” Temple asked next.

“No. He’d figure this took care of it.”

“Why did he do it?”

She shrugged. “He likes to. And I’m gonna leave him. Soon. I got my own business, my card—” She patted around for a purse, then sank back into the chair in chagrin. “No room for cards on this costume. Upstairs in my purse. He wanted to talk, he said, alone, so we came down here. Anyway, I have this private stripping service, for parties, you know? Good clean fun. Gags. Go-go grandmas, guys in clown costumes, whatever fits the occasion. I win this contest and get the prize money, even if I don’t, I’m outa stripping myself. But a win would help my business. Grin ’n’ Bare It. That’s the name of my business, spelled ‘b-a-r-e.’ Cute, huh? I got four people working for me part time. We do singing telegrams, ‘birthday suit’ strips, lots of things. Pm not just... a dumb stripper, you know. I’m an entrepreneur.”

“Sounds great.” Temple had noticed how Katharine’s spine had straightened as she began talking about her business. “If you need a PR person, here’s one of my cards.” She squatted to dig through her tote bag.

Katharine’s hand on her arm made her pause. The expression in her one visible brown eye was serious, a curious mixture of supplication and defiance. “I wasn’t crying ’cuz it hurt, you know. Only ’cuz it ruined my chances.”

“I... know.”

Temple tried not to think how a woman had learned to take pride in not crying when it hurt.

16

Crime and Punishment

S obered by Katharine’ssad predicament, Temple bustled out the back of the Goliath to the guest parking garage. Eager as she had been to get home and type up her radio schedules for Lindy and Ruth, the image of Katharine’s battered face haunted her. In the elevator up to the ramp’s fourth floor, that face seemed to float on the stainless-steel door, a distorted reflection of herself.