Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Temple looked in that direction. Molina was bending over the desk, scribbling furiously.

“Right,” she was saying impatiently. “What time this morning? Right away.” She hung up the phone and barked something to a man at a farther desk. He jumped up, grabbing a khaki sport coat and some keys off a rack.

Molina was stuffing her kangaroo jacket pockets with the paper she’d written on, her pen and notebook. She glanced up at Temple watching her. “Did you drive here?”

“Yeah. I can do it—just.”

“You up to stopping by the Goliath?”

“I was planning on it. I’ve got business there.”

“So have I. Give me your car keys. I’ll have a uniform drive your vehicle over later. Let’s get going now.”

Temple complied and rose, teetering slightly on her heels. Maybe they were a bad idea today, but then again, they made a statement. “What’s happening, Lieutenant?” she asked.

Molina glanced over her shoulder at the other detective right behind her. “Another stripper’s been murdered. Now let’s go.”

The two officers didn’t wait for Temple to react, or wait for her, period.

She jammed her tote handles over her left shoulder and hurried after them, feeling like Dorothy tripping down the Yellow Brick Road in her flashy new shoes, on marching orders from a distinctly enigmatic Witch of the North. She didn’t relish encountering another Glinda at the Goliath.

Maybe Midnight Louie could play Toto.

Keeping up with the long-striding cops made Temple’s head ache anew. She was hardly aware of passing through the bowels of the downtown cop shop, which would have fascinated her on a less stressed occasion.

After huffing up three flights of stairs, the party ended up at a rooftop lot. The male detective, apparently junior to Molina, got the car, a white Ford Crown Victoria. Suited Molina’s autocratic style, Temple thought. Molina threw herself in the front passenger seat. Temple wrested the back door open and hopped— ow —in.

They were off.

“No siren?” Temple asked in the lengthening silence.

Molina twisted in the seat to regard her. “The victim is dead. Five minutes isn’t going to change anything. You have a thing for sirens, or what?”

Temple flushed and sat back in the seat. She resisted an urge to perch, imagining what unsavory passengers might have sat here before her—pimps, pushers, child molesters. But this was an unmarked car. Maybe only unmarked citizens rode in it.

“Temple Barr,” Molina explained to her partner. “Does freelance PR around town. Has a penchant for finding bodies.”’ She nodded over her shoulder at the driver. “Detective Sergeant Wayne Dindorf.”

That was it for introductions, and so far no explanation why Molina had invited—ordered?—Temple along.

“The body was found this morning at nine,” Molina droned from her notes for the sergeant’s benefit. “None of the performers had arrived yet—must be late risers—so no one’s identified it.” She checked her watch, and the car spurted forward as the driver registered her gesture.

Now, that was clout, Temple thought enviously. A mere flick of the wrist and some man puts the pedal to the metal.

Temple wondered how male coworkers got along with Molina, or how hard it had been for her to get her position and retain cordial authority over men who might have—or might have felt they ought to have—gotten the lieutenant’s job.

In the distance, the Goliath’s garish towers glittered like fresh powder snow streaked with gold dust and blood. Their car rolled up under the entrance canopy and paused, the sergeant flashing his badge at the sandaled parking valet who rushed over. The valet backed off, kilt flapping, and the car stayed right where it was.

The moment they got out of the car, they were off. Temple trotted along in the wake of two fast, determined, long-legged people. Who needed Louie to play Toto? She was Toto. Crowds parted as if at the behest of Moses.

Molina led them straight to the ballroom where the strippers would perform. Nervous hotel security men guarded the closed doors. Temple recognized them for what they were at once.

Hotel security men always wore street clothes and always looked like the Iranian secret police: grim, vigilant men with eyes like eagles’ and an implicit ability to do all kinds of unthinkably nasty things if necessary. If they didn’t look like that, welshing gamblers wouldn’t sell their next of kin to pay up in a hurry.

Molina was not impressed. The men opened the double doors, and she brushed past, Dindorf and Temple in her wake.

The ballroom looked like the morning after New Year’s Eve. Scattered chairs and equipment stood in place, but without a throng of people at work, the vast area was a deserted set lacking all vitality.

Not quite deserted. Temple followed the two detectives toward the pool of spotlights where a few forlorn figures stood.

No one was talking, which lent a furtive, almost funereal air to their presence. Temple couldn’t decide whether the people looked sad, or guilty, or a bit of both.

Molina began announcing their party’s names and ranks while still twenty feet away—Molina’s and Dindorfs, not Temple’s. This omission made her the uneasy object of quick, surreptitious glances. The others could be speculating whether she was a mystery expert on murder, or a chief suspect.

The identity of the welcoming committee became quickly clear. Arthur Hencell, WASPish head of hotel security. Lisa Osgood, a hyperactive young blond woman who handled hotel special events. Hipolito Herrera, the pudgy middle-aged maintenance man who had found the body when opening up the ballroom for the day.

“Where are the people who expected to work in here today?” Molina asked.

“The Caravanserai Lounge,” Lisa Osgood answered nervously. “We’re, uh... storing them there until the police let them back in here. How long—?”

“Hours, maybe not until tomorrow. I’d find another place to practice” was Molina’s encouraging answer.

“You’re not sending any black-and-whites?” Hencell’s question edged dangerously close to an order graced at the last moment with an interrogation mark.

“Don’t worry. The coroner’s ambulance and the M.E. will use the back entrance. Nothing awkward will be wheeled through the casino, only the usual money carts.”

Temple folded her lips to keep from smiling at the security chief’s livid face as he suffered Molina’s sardonic reply.

Molina turned to the maintenance man with more warmth than she had shown the higher-ups. “What time did you—” Her question broke off suddenly, for no reason Temple could discern. And then, “¿A qué hora descubrió el cuerpo ?” Molina asked in Spanish that flowed into one long phrase.

“A las nueve .” The man’s face, his entire body, relaxed as he began an outpouring of Spanish, his hands and arms gesturing.

Molina nodded, and pulled out her notebook.

“Nine o’clock,” he repeated laboriously in English at the end of his spiel.

His last hand wave directed Temple’s attention to the metal skeleton of jungle-gym-like scaffolding that stood near the raised stage.

Something lay crumpled over the low bar nearest the floor. Temple’s shiver started at her tailbone and worked its way up her spine to her scalp. Falling over Chester Royal at the ABA had been a macabre accident. She hadn’t known the man was dead until it was too late to get hysterical about the fact.

This was the first dead body she had approached with the same cold certainty as the police. She didn’t like the feeling, the sense that this investigation was about a collection of facts and circumstances rather than the tragic end of a personality, of a specific human being’s hopes.