Cat In An Aqua Storm

Temple lowered her head to examine the downcast darling. For all the fur, Yvette seemed petite. Temple found a calm but breathtakingly wistful face with round aqua eyes outlined in black mascara, and a rose-colored nose emphasized by the same natural accent line.

“She’s gorgeous!” Temple admitted with more sincerity than she had managed to muster for Savannah Ashleigh so far. “I have a jet black cat, but he’s just a stray.”

“Yvette has not a stray hair on her body. She is a purebred shaded silver Persian. Her full name is Diamond Bleu Moon Sirena Yvette.”

“Is she... adult? She’s so small.”

“Yvette is two,” Savannah said, “and she always travels with Momsy.”

“Louie—my cat—is much bigger. He weighs over nineteen pounds.”

“Yvette weighs six-point-eight pounds,” Savannah said with satisfaction, “She is not designed to be subjected to rude shocks. If I come across the miserable man who murdered that poor girl and apparently kicked my Darling Yvette, I will string him up myself. Personally.”

Savannah Ashleigh’s long fingernails convulsed on the darling Yvette’s coat, but luckily it was thick enough to buffer the owner from its mistress’s fury on her behalf.

“The police are sure the killer was a man, then?” Temple asked.

“Who else would kill a woman like that—hang her from her own G-string? Nasty sort of thing a man would do. And I know few women who would kick at a cat.”

“But Yvette was in her carrier. He might not have noticed what his foot hit—”

“Not have noticed? Her name is written plain to see right on the top. Y-v-e-t-t-e.”

Temple examined the writing in question, a tortured silver script that looked more like “Gavotte” to her. “He might have been in a hurry.”

“That is no excuse.” Savannah hoisted the limp feline in one hand and draped her into the carrier as if dropping a chiffon scarf into a drawer. “I see that I dare not leave my Darling out of my sight in a common dressing room. My private dressing room was not yet assigned, since the competition has booked the penthouse suite for me. Some of these hotel buffoons tried to hint that I didn’t require a downstairs dressing room! Idiots. A moment’s carelessness and look what happened. Yvette has not eaten her Free-to-Be-Feline since yesterday morning.”

“Oh, really,” said Temple, interested for the first time. “Have you tried putting some deli turkey over the top?”

“Not even Alaskan salmon will work, although I might have better results with Cajun shrimp. Yvette has a most piquant palette.”

“No kidding.” Temple leaned nearer for a consultation across the noxious moat of Emeraude. Feline eating habits—or the lack of them—drove human companions to desperate measures. “Have you ever thought of trying...”

11

The Naked and the Dead

Temple had learned in her TV reporting days that the best way to sniff out a new environment was to follow her nose for novelty. The born newshound’s tenacious curiosity often leads down offbeat byways that no one else would bother investigating. She'd snagged some of her best news stories that way. If she followed her instincts, she’d have a handle on the stripper competition by noon.

Not that Temple really wanted a handle on the dizzying array of activities erupting all over the ballroom. A rapid glance around showed a circus of firm flesh on the half shell, most wearing little more than a thong-style G-string... Samsons with bulging muscles and oiled tans and long hair tickling their shoulder blades... Delilahs with thin thighs and flat stomachs and breasts that were anything but flat. The current robust, hirsute view made the trendiest health-club exercise floor seem populated by dull and flaccid duds.

All of these beautiful people in motion were under-studying Narcissus, gazing raptly into perimeter mirrors as they stretched muscles and studied costumes under the overhead spotlights. Taken together, they seemed larger than life, not just because they all conveyed a kind of in-person, airbrushed comeliness, but because even most of the women were model-tall.

Temple felt like Pinocchio at the fair, an undersized stranger out of her depth and in danger of succumbing to something, even if it was only amazement. Her gaze inventoried the huge ballroom while she decided who to approach first: the Amazonian miss with Raggedy Ann red hair who was affixing helium-filled balloons to her skimpy bikini, or the apparently naked, tattooed muscleman emerging from the bottom half of a gorilla suit.

“Barr, is it?” a male voice behind her said, gruffly.

She turned, expecting Billy Goat himself in person. She was relieved to face one of the few fully clothed men in the room. However, a peach knit shirt under a Madras plaid sport jacket paired with black trousers was no advertisement for the post-Eden advantages of clothing. Once past the color clash, she saw a man in his thirties: good-looking in an aggressive, humorless blue-collar way.