Stuart Kaminsky: Show Business is Murder

“When I’m performing in a museum it’s art, when I’m in an Off-Broadway theater it’s show business. What more can I say.”

“What is it here in Vegas?”

She slipped into the snug red and black cat suit, zipping it up the front, and pulled up the hood to cover her hair. Then she slipped her feet into the shiny black boots and picked up the black gloves and blindfold for later. She pressed the button to arm the apartment’s security system and replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you come along tonight and decide for yourself?”

COVERING HER COSTUMEwith a long cape, she talked about performance art as she led him downstairs. “It only dates back to the 1970s, really. It was an outgrowth of the so-called happenings during the sixties, when I was still a child. These usually were collaborative efforts involving a company of performers in a non-structured theater piece. Members of the audience were invited to take part, and there was often a good deal of nudity involved. In the mid-seventies some individuals or smaller groups began to appear on stage. A few became quite well-known in places like New York and San Francisco. I remember a woman who daubed herself with paint and rolled around nude on a canvas. She even sold some of the resulting paintings. I believe there’s a man in New York today who sits on a ladder eating the Wall Street Journal. He’s also been known to crawl through the Bowery wearing a business suit. There’s usually an implied message of some sort in performance art.”

“What is the message in your piece?”

She gave a little shrug. “Chance. One writer viewed me as a personification of Lady Luck.”

At the car she suggested he follow along in his vehicle. “It’s not far.”

Ten minutes later Wanda pulled into the parking garage at one of the older hotels, just over the city line. Rick followed along as she led the way through the lobby to a private meeting room that had been converted for use as a bar and casino. A tall man with a mustache was waiting for her at the door. “Hello, Wanda. How are you feeling tonight? Black or red?”

She laughed, handing him her cape. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Who’s this?” he asked, indicating the reporter.

“Rick Dodson from the Vegas Weekly . Rick, meet Judd Franklyn. This is his operation.”

The two men shook hands. “Doing a little story about us?”

“Well, about Miss Cirrus.”

Franklyn slipped his arm around the young man’s shoulders. “Sure, you can tell what she does. But call it a performance. Don’t mention the betting aspect. I don’t want the Gaming Commission after me.”

“All right,” Dodson agreed.

“Between ourselves, they know what goes on, but we can’t be too blatant about it. We don’t run ads. We depend on word-of-mouth.”

“I understand.”

Judd Franklyn looked Wanda up and down. “You’re in great shape, girl. Go out and do your stuff.”

“Nobody’s called me a girl in twenty years.” She slipped on the black gloves and followed him to the platform, still carrying the blindfold. The hood was in place over her hair and neck. The clinging cat suit was basic black, but with red lightning bolts that gave her the appearance of some sort of comic book superhero. Miss Roulette, perhaps.

The platform indeed was a huge roulette wheel, its diameter almost equal to a boxing ring. Close to a hundred players were crowded around it. Wanda stepped over the numbered slots to a small turntable at the center of the wheel. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Judd Franklyn announced, “it is my honor to present the famed performance artist Miss Wanda Cirrus as the human roulette ball. She will blindfold herself, and while the wheel spins clockwise her little turntable will move in the opposite direction. She will roll off the turntable and reach her hands into one of the numbered slots. You have one minute to place your bets.”

Wanda smiled at them and pulled the padded blindfold over her eyes. Then she crouched down, linking her hands around her knees, and waited. Almost at once the turntable began to move. She knew the wheel itself would be spinning, too. After several seconds, when she started to grow dizzy, she pitched forward off the turntable. As she hit the padded wheel itself her two hands shot out blindly, clasped together, and found one of the numbered slots.

“Twenty-nine black!” Judd Franklyn called out.

As the wheel slowed its spin Wanda pulled the blindfold from her eyes. “It is fate,” she told them with a graceful bow. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Dodson was waiting for her in awed amazement. “How often do you perform?”

She gave him a smile as she pulled back the hood from her head. “Every fifteen minutes from nine till midnight, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. The wheel action doesn’t stop, of course. When I‘m not on they use a white volleyball.”

“That’s unbelievable! Is this the wildest thing you ever did?”

Wanda shrugged. “Once at a performance art festival in Boston I stayed curled up in a birdcage the entire day. And I crawled naked down a tube filled with glop. It was supposed to depict my birth. When I turned forty I decided it was time I kept my clothes on.” Remembering when she changed into her costume, she amended, “At least some of them.” She wondered why she was telling him these things that she’d never told anyone else.

“Is this sort of work profitable?”

Wanda shrugged. “I make a living. Off-Broadway I get a percentage of the gross. They work it a bit differently here, but it still depends on the business my performance brings in.”

He watched her for the next hour, every fifteen minutes, as she rolled in a ball off the revolving turntable and stretched out her hands to blindly find one of the slots. Seven red, one red, twenty-two black, eighteen red.

“Thanks for your help,” he told her as he left.

“I’ll watch for your article. If you need anything else, give me a call.”

The rest of the night was routine. Thirty red, double zero, two black, seventeen black, another seven red, thirty-six red, eleven black, twenty-one red. Thirteen performances in all, nine to midnight. Five black, seven red, and the double-zero. Seven odd, five even. Only one repeat. She liked to keep track of the numbers and colors, seeking a pattern that didn’t exist. The big betting always came at midnight, her final performance, when Franklyn raised the limit from five hundred to five thousand.

She performed again on Friday night, and this time after her ten o’clock appearance one of the bettors who was having a good night wanted to buy her a drink. “No thanks,” she told him. “I get dizzy enough doing this routine thirteen times a night.”

“How about after you knock off at midnight?”

She looked him over more closely. He was probably in his early forties, about her age, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Sam Dole. I’m here often. You maybe noticed me in the crowd.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, wondering what he wanted. Maybe he just liked the way the black and red cat suit fitted her body.

“So how about that drink?”

“Why not? It’s Friday.”

“I’ll meet you in the parking garage right after midnight.”

“What’s wrong with the bar here?” she asked.

“They probably don’t like you drinking with the customers.”

She thought about that and decided Judd Franklyn might find cause for complaint. “OK, the parking garage it is.”

The next number she hit was a zero.

BY TEN AFTERtwelve she was out of the hotel, walking toward her car in the garage. Her hood was down and her costume covered by the cloak. She wasn’t looking for Sam Dole but she knew he’d be around.