Cat In An Aqua Storm

Once satisfied that the poor little doll is dead and in no need of further attentions, I return mine to the contents of the pink carrier. No sooner have the Divine Yvette and I settled down for some romantic trans-mesh smooching, when I hear a sneaky step in the hall.

The newcomer is none other than the miserable dude with whom I tangled a time or two at the ABA. Naturally, he does not look down, so he fails to notice Yvette and myself—mostly myself, for Yvette is as well-veiled as a novice in a convent in her carrier, and I am hard to miss unless you are not looking for me, which this Puke-cannon person is definitely not doing.

“Glinda—” he calls softly. “It’s Crawford. The others said you never went upstairs. I know you stayed behind because you wanted a private rendezvous. Glinda—”

Hearing him makes me want to reconsider my romantic notions, permanently.

And is this guy blind, or what? First he pokes his nose into the hanging costumes. Then he sniffs out the various makeup containers that litter the countertop, although he is massively deficient in the sniffer, like all of his breed. Even a perfumed Pomeranian would have noticed by now the distinctive odor of death in the room.

But Crawfish Puke-cannon, may his tribe get rabies, bumbles through looking—not high and low, where he would at least spy the dangling damsel on the far wall, or yours truly huddled beneath the counter—but right in front of his prying nose, which instead is investigating one of the absent stripper's canvas bags.

I hiss a disgusted warning, but he is too deaf to hear it over the grind of the air-conditioning system. He pauses to taste a fingerful of frosting he scoops from a lurid wreck of cake on the counter, then moves on. He has almost reached the wall before he notices the suspended bare legs. Had Miss Temple Barr stumbled onto this murder scene, she would have fixed on those magenta satin spikes from the doorway, and have followed them up to their logical conclusion, or, rather, the dead woman's conclusion.

Now Puke-cannon’s basset-hound brown eyes are widening to display their bloodshot whites, as unappetizing a sight as squid-eyeball sushi. He looks up, and up, and up to the dead dancer's sad, tilted face. He whitens, stumbles backward into a series of chairs, which he pushes aside. Then, right by me he pauses and turns.

One last look at the far wall and its macabre decoration, and he is out of there faster than an Irish Setter on No Doz.