Cat In An Aqua Storm

Wilma’s sympathetic expression grew weary. “Yeah. Sure. But look, I got some terrific cover-up in my bag. You’d be surprised how many of these dancers, come in banged up from here to Sunday—legs, arms, faces. Try it.”

Temple took the small tube of makeup, which claimed that the contents would cover bums and birthmarks: She’d never used this heavy-duty stuff before, so she gingerly dabbed some at the edges of her eyes. In the mirror, the lurid coloration that had seeped through her usual cover-up vanished.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” Wilma said in the same, sad monotone. “You don’t need to take that. You don’t need to work here.”

“I’m not a battered woman,” Temple said swiftly. “I was mugged. And I can’t let a setback like this keep me from working. Here, can I buy this tube—?” She reached for the tote bag on the floor.

Wilma’s hand, hard and warm, caught her wrist and held it, before she could extract her clutch purse.

“You don’t have to pay. I never charge anybody for that stuff.”

“Thanks.”

“A girl like you, brought up right, you shouldn’t be here.”

“I won’t be, much longer.” Temple tugged her hand free, straightened in the chair, took in the eerie emptiness of the dressing room with the sound of onstage life coming in faint and fuzzy over the loudspeaker.

“How old are you?” Wilma asked suddenly.

“Twenty-eight,” Temple answered. An icy spasm clutched her stomach.

“Twenty-eight. A good age. Old enough to know better. Young enough to not feel yourself falling apart yet. When’s your birthday?”

“I’m a Gemini,” Temple said, stalling for time. Her mind was dancing like water on a hot griddle, sizzling with warning. Birthday talk seemed so sinister... No one had been a bit interested in birthdays lately, except her and the murderer. No—! Birthdays expressed Wilma’s motherly instincts. Temple wouldn’t even think this way if she hadn’t been so overstressed and overworked, seeing death in unlikely places, in innocent faces.

Wilma was nodding, taking out needle and thread to repair one of the G-strings, as she considered Gemini. “May-to-June. A nice time of year to be born. Not a bad time to get married, either, or to have children, or to die. You’re a June baby, though, right? Right in the heart of Gemini?”

“June,” Temple answered reluctantly.

“What date?”

“Why?”

Wilma’s sparse eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I do a little cake for my girls’ birthdays. It’s no problem. They dance it off. You youngsters could eat an elephant and still look like toothpicks, with all the prancing you do. And all to that awful, loud, repeating music.”

“You bring cakes for each one’s birthday?”

Wilma nodded. “Homemade. My last was a Lady Baltimore. Nobody makes Lady Baltimore cakes anymore, but nothing’s too good for my girls.”

“I noticed some half-eaten cake in this dressing room earlier in the week.”

Wilma gave another complacent, grandmother-sewing kind of nod. “That was my Lady Baltimore, what was left of it. They gobble it up like little pigs.”

“Then you... know their birthdays?”

“Course I do. Couldn’t make the cakes otherwise. When is yours, dear? I’ll make you a Red Devil’s Food, haven’t made one of those for ages. When’s your birthday?”

“June,” Temple temporized, “and not for a days and days. Wilma, what do you think about the killings?”

“Terrible,” the woman said. “Terrible things. What was done to my girls was terrible.”

Temple had a feeling that Wilma was not talking about the murders, but about the wrongs that preceded them. “Then you knew Glinda and Kitty, and the twins?”

“I know all my girls,” she said.

“Did you know that Glinda and Kitty had abusive men in their lives, and that one of the twins was molested by her father?”

“Only one?” Wilma’s face slackened with shock. “Only one twin? No, it must be that only one admitted it, and the other denied it. Denial is very common in such cases.” Wilma sounded like a parrot mouthing the party line dispensed in some shrink’s office, but then, she ought to know that routine, Temple thought.

“That’s true,” Temple agreed. “How sad that those women won't be here to perform tomorrow. And they all celebrated birthdays so recently.”

I remember doing cakes for them, but were their birthdays that recent?”

Temple ticked off the dates on her fingers. “Dorothy/Glinda was March. Kitty was April. And the twins were June—Gemini like me. Isn’t that odd?”

Wilma shrugged and tied off a knot. She picked up a polished chrome sewing shears to cut the thread. “Everybody has to be born sometime.”

“But isn’t it odd that the victims’ birthdays are almost in sequence through the calendar: March, April, June. Except that May is missing.”

Wilma paused to think. “No, it’s not.”

“It’s not? You mean that there’s another victim nobody knows about?”

Wilma pursed her lips. “You had to know the girls. You had to be around to listen. Gypsy and June. Everybody knew they were stage names. Everybody figured they referred to those famous strippers, Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister June Havoc.”

“They didn’t?”