Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

“Ven conmigo, Señor.” Molina’s head-jerk indicated only the maintenance man. Dindorf, his own notebook in hand, closed in on the other two hotel personnel.

Torn, Temple decided to follow Molina despite the language barrier. She needed to understand what murderous force was stalking the event she was responsible for. You couldn’t do PR in an information vacuum.

Molina and Herrera had paused by the metal framework and stood looking down, like mourners at a grave, speaking quietly in Spanish. The language’s musical cadence seemed to soften death’s implicit ugliness. Temple eased closer, her heels muted by the garish carpeting. She couldn’t see... the body, only flexed lace-stocking-clad legs lying together, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s, as if their owner had fallen under the onslaught of sudden disaster, had never known what hit her, maybe. An emerald green spark winked at Temple in the dim light.

The shoes!

She brushed past the obscuring bulk of Señor Herrera to see.

“Oh... no.”

Molina looked up. “You know her?”

Temple studied the fallen form, dancer-graceful even in death. She recognized the black cat mask she had suggested, even if she couldn’t fully see the face.

“Know her? Not by any name other than Katharine. I saw her in the dressing room yesterday afternoon, before... my own mishap.”

“This was no mishap,” Molina reminded her.

“Couldn’t she have fallen?” Temple asked hopefully. “Especially with the mask—” She stopped, realizing that her brilliant show-saving suggestion might have been fatal.

Molina pointed to the neck, which was obscured by a narrow black muffler, and squatted beside the body. “Did you see her in costume yesterday?”

Temple nodded.

“Was that part of it?”

“No. Her neck was bare, like most of the rest of her. The only new item is the mask. She must have made it and come back later to practice with it in private.”

Temple pulled out her glasses and put them on before leaning over the corpse. Poor Katharine, so hopeful again, so fatally doomed to lose.... “Wait! That thing around her neck—it’s not a scarf. It’s a tail!”

“Torn from the rear of her costume?” Molina asked.

“Probably. I saw her working out her Catwoman act on the grid early yesterday, but she didn’t have it on when I saw her in the dressing room. It was this clever tail, like the Cowardly Lion’s in Th e Wizard of Oz. Some tiny remote control made it entwine and twitch.”

“Then there’d be a wire.” Molina studied the busy carpet pattern for a moment before her pencil darted out like a yellow snake and lifted a tiny curling wire from the floor.

She rose slowly, almost painfully. “Another stripper killed with a piece of her own costume, Interesting M.O.” Molina turned to Herrera. “Gracias, Señor.”

Her encouraging smile faded as she looked past him to Temple, the light laugh lines vanishing at the edges of her icy blue eyes. “And I’ll want to know everything you know about the victim. Stick around until I finish setting up the investigation and get these hotel people off my back.”

Molina turned and headed for the others, leaving Ternple and Señor Herrera to contemplate the body, a study in the sleek black of her brief costume and the pale, luminescent white of her artistically revealed skin. The mask had worked splendidly, Temple saw, though she found the addition of black lipstick sinister rather than sensual.

Only yesterday Katharine had experienced hopes and hurts. Sometime after their dressing-room talk she had made the mask and come back to try it in her act. She was going on with the show. Now it would go on without her. So would her kids. So would “he,” the man who had needed to hit her. Temple would have something incriminating, at least, to tell Molina.

Hipolito Herrera knew none of that. He knew only what he saw: youth and death entwined into one sad, bizarre figure.

“Muy linda," he murmured, shaking his head. “Muy triste.”

Temple didn’t have to speak Spanish to translate those universal sentiments. “Very pretty,” she agreed. “Very, very sad.”

Molina had bigger fish than Temple to grill. While Temple waited for her turn at interrogation, she asked Lisa to plug a phone into a ballroom jack, then settled near one wall with two chairs—one for a makeshift desktop—and the directory from her tote bag. Before she’d left the condo that morning, she had scribbled down the numbers of any callbacks on her answering machine. Until every last possible TV or radio show is scheduled or scratched off the list, a PR person never rests. Neither pain, nor unexpected blows, nor dark of night, et cetera.

Her return calls went smoothly, although everybody commented that she sounded tired today. Temple didn’t bother explaining that her jaw wasn’t willing to open as much as usual, which made her usually free-flowing words ooze out like molasses.

By then the coroner’s crew had gathered around the body, along with police photographers and forensic technicians. Temple would have loved to have watched this procedure, but she had work to do. She again snagged Lisa from the anxious trio of hotel observers and got directions to an office with a typewriter, then slipped away without anyone but the watchdogs on the outer doors noticing. As soon as her clerical work was done, she headed right for the Caravanserai Lounge, a sprawling array of cocktail tables lit by Aladdin’s lamps under a chiffon ceiling tent strung with strips of fairy lights.

Midmorning attendance at the Caravanserai was usually light. Now every table was occupied by displaced dancers, most wearing workout clothes, a prominent few stripped down to performance shreds and earning passersby’s stares. Smoke hovered above the motley crew like the steel blue haze from a volley of fired guns.

In the thickest of it, she found Lindy.

“Hi,” Temple greeted her. “Here’s the schedule for the local talk shows. Think you can make it?”

“If the cops let me.” Lindy’s foot yanked a vacant chair away from the table. “Sit down. You look frazzled already.”

Temple used the copy of the schedule to fan away clouds of smoke. “No thanks. I have to get this copy to Ruth outside.”

Lindy’s laugh expired in the dry wheeze of a cigarette cough. “Sorry about the smokiness. Strippers are on the weed.”

“Just nicotine?”

“Isn’t that enough? Say, what’s going on? Why won’t they let us in the ballroom?”

“Plenty. You’ll find out soon enough. Just be prepared to get some questions about it at the radio stations.” Lindy’s tough face crinkled in sympathy. “Not another fatality? Jeez. A strip show’s supposed to liven people up, not lay them out.”

“I’d better not say anything,” Temple said, retreating before she started coughing herself. Her bruised ribs couldn’t take the stress.

She switched to her sunglasses before going outside—great camouflage for blue-gray eyes simultaneously shadowed by black, blue, and purple.

Ruth’s one-woman picket line had doubled. A reedy man with sparse hair on both head and upper lip and a couch-potato paunch now paced nearby. His sign read:

MEN WANT WIVES AND TOTS, NOT SEX AND FLESHPOTS.

They weren’t picketing together. They were arguing loudly, and drawing a crowd. Beyond them, the Goliath colossus scowled down with lofty pagan scorn.

“This is not a religious issue,” Ruth was saying. She jammed her slipping sunglasses against her nose. “It’s sociological and sexist.”

“Brazen women don’t have to be naked to offend the Lord,” the man returned, glaring pointedly at her.

Ruth looked about ready to conk his bald spot with her sign when Temple pulled her aside and broke up the act.