Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“I watch. She was one lone sistah. She always watched others, but she not watch herself.” Zazu paused. They were in the demi-dark, only closed doors facing each other for another sixty feet. “I didn’t watch close enough.”

She resumed walking.

“I’m sorry.”

She stopped, stared at him like a cat from the dark. After a long pause, she resumed walking. “Maybe you is.”

He let out a breath.

“Maybe not,” she added.

Matt found her dead seriousness a relief from the forced whorehouse gaiety the other women broadcast. Here was someone who didn’t beat death off like an encroaching moth around a porch light.

“Her room.” Zazu stood in the hall while Matt opened the door—with his jacket bottom to avoid leaving prints on the knob, just in case; they were already all over upstairs—and stepped inside.

Light flared on, weak through the standard opaque glass dish that concealed a cheap one-bulb ceiling fixture. Zazu had reached inside to flip the wall switch. She must have been in here often enough to not worry about prints. These rooms looked like cells: stripped to essentials. Madonnah’s didn’t have even a framed photo, a goofy giveaway key ring of a Care Bear. A personal set of nail polish.

“Nothing much here,” he commented.

“Sometime nothing much says a lot.” Zazu was looming behind him, in the room without making a sound.

Despite, or because of that, he used a tissue from the plain discount-store box on the bedside table to open drawers, gawk in the closet.

“Bathroom’s down the hall. We don’t get private accommodations, not even for tending our privates.”

This woman didn’t sugarcoat things. “It’s a public business, isn’t it? Not many secrets.”

“No secrets. Or . . . almost none.”

“You know one? Or two?”

“Maybe. I don’t tell.”

“Not even if it would help find Madonnah’s killer? I found her, you know. Tried to breathe life back into her. Too late.”

“Y’all’s not even supposed to be here!”

“That’s true.”

“Why’d she die when y’all came here when you weren’t supposed to be here?”

“You’re saying it’s our fault?”

“I’m saying you had a part in it, and you can’t get outta that.”

A bitter taste burned in his mouth. The saliva of a dead woman he couldn’t raise. The salt of an accusation he couldn’t lay to rest that rang both false and true.

Zazu was the last of the good-time girls he had to interview, and she had been a heller.

But she left him alone in the dead woman’s bedroom.

Matt looked around again, carefully. Women’s bedrooms weren’t his area of expertise. Another big box of tissue with aloe and vitamin E sat on the dresser. He pulled several free and stuffed them in his side jacket pockets.

This wing was fairly new, but it had a makeshift look. The closet had sliding doors, one mirrored. He used a tissue to ease it open, trying not to regard his own full-length image as it glided past. Picture yourself here. He could see the Sapphire Slipper Web page come-on now. No.

But come on, he wasn’t snooping on his own behalf. No scruples needed.

The farther half of the closet was full of stacked cardboard boxes, probably house supplies, storage. The wooden clothes pole held mismatched empty wire hangers, some colored, some white, most the bronze color favored by dry cleaners.

A few T-shirts and dresses and skirts hung there. It was the faceless Styrofoam heads on the shelf above that entranced him. Wig stands. Marilyn Monroe blond, Cleopatra black, rainbow-streaked, long, short. He wasn’t familiar with the singer Madonna’s various chameleon “looks,” but he did realize that these wild wigs would make a good shtick for a hooker. And a natural disguise.

He’d read that a prostitute’s greatest fear was seeing her own father walk through the door, maybe an indication of how much she feared the father figure, or how much he may have abused her. This woman had been determined not to be found, no matter who walked through the door, and apparently her wig trick had worked, until tonight.

Matt bent to pull her luggage out into the room. A medium-sized hardcase one, probably for the wigs, and a couple of backpacks. All were scuffed and scratched. He guessed she traveled by bus rather than air. The luggage tags held empty forms, never filled in.

They were empty, not even a stray gum wrapper left inside.

At the dresser, the drawers stuck in the dry air and came out only when jerked, and then they opened crooked. He dropped the tissues back in his pocket and lifted her personal lingerie. Plain cotton, with what Temple called camisole tops instead of bras. The large plastic makeup bag on the dresser top was marked inside with red and black lines, as if it had been lashed. But it was just the unintended strokes of lip liner and eyeliner pencils, all in bold colors: scarlet, black, blue.

As his tissue-holding fingers riffled through, he noticed that everything was well used, not new, the exteriors smeared, not neat and clean like Temple’s. These were working tools, not playthings.

A tall bottle of lotion next to the tissue box must be makeup remover.