Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

“I’ve got the radio-station schedule,” Temple said. “Lindy’ll meet you here forty-five minutes before the shows.” She dug in her tote bag. “Here are some blank cassettes. See if you can get the station to run a tape while you’re on. You can cab it to the stations from here. Keep the receipts and I’ll reimburse you. Okay?”

“Everything’s okay except Lindy meeting me here,” Ruth said. “I’ve had it with the holier-than-thou set. I’ll meet her inside, maybe stick around and watch the goings-on. Learn something that way.”

“You mean that sanctimonious guy is beginning to make strippers look sane and sensible?”

“Hardly.” Ruth leaned her sign against the building. “I’m the only WOE member in Las Vegas,” she said sheepishly. “It’s hard being a protest movement of one. I like your idea of duking it out over the airwaves instead of in the streets. Say, you look a little wobbly.”

Temple felt Ruth’s supporting hand on her elbow and realized that she was feeling dizzy and exhausted. In unspoken agreement, the two women sat on the small retaining wall that bordered an azalea bed.

“I am a little beat,” Temple admitted. “And—don’t spread it around—but there’s been another murder. In the ballroom. The police are there now.”

“Another? Not a stripper again?”

Temple nodded. “I even met her—just last night. Living proof of your theory that strippers were often abused as children. Some kids like that never develop the self-esteem to stop being someone’s victim. Katharine was a battered woman, but she seemed ready to split from the guy. I think this contest was her ticket out—out of the relationship, out of stripping for a living. She had this gag stripping service going—well, it’s a start!” Temple added when Ruth looked dubious. “Now she’s dead.”

Ruth shook her head. “Who could be doing it?”

“I thought you might give me a clue.”

“First off, there’s the guy who beat her. Maybe he figured out she was leaving. Abusers usually freak when they lose their victims.”

“But what about Dorothy Horvath, Monday’s victim? Katharine’s guy wouldn’t need to kill her, too,”

“Do you know anything about her?”

“Only that she had a gorgeous face and won the Rhinestone G-string two years ago. Katharine had a great body. I saw her work out. She was fantastically limber. She used this cat persona and she was grace incarnate.”

“Sounds like somebody didn’t like the competition.” Temple nodded, then glanced at the pacing man with the crudely lettered sign. “Or maybe somebody thought those women were damned anyway, and might as well be dead.”

Ruth shuddered in the hot shade of the copper canopy.

“God, I’d hate to be a religious fanatic. I hold some pretty firm opinions, but I loathe thinking someone could kill a human being for a political or religious position.”

“They’ve been doing it for millennia.” Temple stood. “Good luck on the talk shows. I’ve got to get back. Lieutenant Molina wants to question me.”

Ruth’s eyebrows lifted over the top of her sunglass frames. “Are you under suspicion?”

“Only of being a nuisance,” Temple answered, flogging her weary body back into the hotel’s icy air-conditioning.

20

The Sweet Smell of Success

M y dear mama, now departed, although perhaps not dead, always used to say that I took after my father. In truth, I believe that she herself wished to take after my father, but he was nowhere to be found.

Suffice it to say that somewhere there is a handsome, black-coated dude who knows how to live the good life of fish, females and serenade. I often picture the old guy basking upon some yacht, preferably a salmon or a tuna trawler, the sun glinting off his distinguished graying muzzle, seeing the world and wondering once in a while about how his spitting image is faring in landlocked Las Vegas.

He would have a dog to know that his long-ago offspring is slinking about the shadows of the Goliath Hotel trying to catch a whiff of a dead woman disguised as a pussycat.

There is method to my madness, if not much redeeming social value. For the fact is the late, lamented lady by now is a stiff and about to be given the bum’s rush in a giant-size plastic baggie.

My olfactory mission is not based on mere morbidity, although my kind has been known to show a certain attachment to the aromas of dead fish, birds and mice.

No, it is not the scent of death that draws me, but a memory that teases at the edge of my awareness. It began when I examined the first victim of what has become a habit rather than an isolated tragedy.

I smelled something then that was so elusive, yet familiar, that I must satisfy my curiosity. Does this second dead little doll bear the same scent? It is not that I have never inhaled the fragrance of a human before, dead or alive. I will never forget the musty odor of the deceased ABA dude, which I took for bookish mildew.

Likewise, the scent of these done-for little dolls suits their circumstances: it is light, sweet and feminine, and I have encountered it before. Perfume it is not. This is more subtle. How maddening to possess a first-class sniffer and not be able to determine the exact bouquet that tickles my nostrils, if not my memory!

This is why, despite a half-dozen flunkies of officialdom bustling around the body, I lurk literally under their busy, oblivious feet, awaiting my opportunity. Some accuse my kind of sneakiness, but it is survival instincts that direct me to be discreet The moment will arrive when a morgue attendant will turn aside, or a comment will distract their joint attention. Then I will dash in for the kill—or the diagnosis in this case.

Yet they are many, and no one leaves the body for a moment.

The fatal bag is produced, and I quiver in my boots. My sniffer is a world-class apparatus, but polyvinylchloride is one substance it cannot penetrate with any degree of accuracy.

At that moment, I hear the tread of large flat feet. A voice directs the assembled crew's attention to the body's former position, and the unearthly glow upon the noxious carpet that outlines the area.

For a few precious moments, little Miss Kitty is as unattended as a wallflower at the high school prom.

I seize the opportunity and run with it—run, in fact, toward her immobile body. My whiskers twitch with recognition. An insinuating scent wends its way to my flared nostrils. Miss Kitty has been branded with the same odor as her predecessor in death.

I pussyfoot out of sight, and hunker down under a banquet table swathed in white, floor-length linen. Beyond me, a crew of men bags the lady, and lifts her onto a cold metal gurney. She feels nothing, but my whiskers twitch in indignation.

I will not rest until I have traced this fatal scent to its origin. The killer.

Somewhere, on some forgotten swell of sea and salmon, the old dude would lift his venerable snout to the wind, and be proud of me.

21

A Walk on the Wild Side

T he palace guardwas loath to let Temple enter the ballroom again until she used the password of Molina’s name and rank. She doubted these private cops much feared the regular force, but they wanted them out of their territory as fast as possible.

Despite Molina’s grumblings, the crime scene was clearing. Nothing remained of the body but a faint powdery luminescence on the carpeting—fairy dust from a Tinker Bell whom no one had cared about enough to clap for.