Cat In An Aqua Storm

Molina and Herrera had paused by the metal framework and stood looking down, like mourners at a grave, speaking quietly in Spanish. The language’s musical cadence seemed to soften death’s implicit ugliness. Temple eased closer, her heels muted by the garish carpeting. She couldn’t see... the body, only flexed lace-stocking-clad legs lying together, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s, as if their owner had fallen under the onslaught of sudden disaster, had never known what hit her, maybe. An emerald green spark winked at Temple in the dim light.

The shoes!

She brushed past the obscuring bulk of Señor Herrera to see.

“Oh... no.”

Molina looked up. “You know her?”

Temple studied the fallen form, dancer-graceful even in death. She recognized the black cat mask she had suggested, even if she couldn’t fully see the face.

“Know her? Not by any name other than Katharine. I saw her in the dressing room yesterday afternoon, before... my own mishap.”

“This was no mishap,” Molina reminded her.

“Couldn’t she have fallen?” Temple asked hopefully. “Especially with the mask—” She stopped, realizing that her brilliant show-saving suggestion might have been fatal.

Molina pointed to the neck, which was obscured by a narrow black muffler, and squatted beside the body. “Did you see her in costume yesterday?”

Temple nodded.

“Was that part of it?”

“No. Her neck was bare, like most of the rest of her. The only new item is the mask. She must have made it and come back later to practice with it in private.”

Temple pulled out her glasses and put them on before leaning over the corpse. Poor Katharine, so hopeful again, so fatally doomed to lose.... “Wait! That thing around her neck—it’s not a scarf. It’s a tail!”

“Torn from the rear of her costume?” Molina asked.

“Probably. I saw her working out her Catwoman act on the grid early yesterday, but she didn’t have it on when I saw her in the dressing room. It was this clever tail, like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. Some tiny remote control made it entwine and twitch.”

“Then there’d be a wire.” Molina studied the busy carpet pattern for a moment before her pencil darted out like a yellow snake and lifted a tiny curling wire from the floor.

She rose slowly, almost painfully. “Another stripper killed with a piece of her own costume, Interesting M.O.” Molina turned to Herrera. “Gracias, Señor.”

Her encouraging smile faded as she looked past him to Temple, the light laugh lines vanishing at the edges of her icy blue eyes. “And I’ll want to know everything you know about the victim. Stick around until I finish setting up the investigation and get these hotel people off my back.”

Molina turned and headed for the others, leaving Ternple and Señor Herrera to contemplate the body, a study in the sleek black of her brief costume and the pale, luminescent white of her artistically revealed skin. The mask had worked splendidly, Temple saw, though she found the addition of black lipstick sinister rather than sensual.

Only yesterday Katharine had experienced hopes and hurts. Sometime after their dressing-room talk she had made the mask and come back to try it in her act. She was going on with the show. Now it would go on without her. So would her kids. So would “he,” the man who had needed to hit her. Temple would have something incriminating, at least, to tell Molina.

Hipolito Herrera knew none of that. He knew only what he saw: youth and death entwined into one sad, bizarre figure.

“Muy linda," he murmured, shaking his head. “Muy triste.”

Temple didn’t have to speak Spanish to translate those universal sentiments. “Very pretty,” she agreed. “Very, very sad.”

Molina had bigger fish than Temple to grill. While Temple waited for her turn at interrogation, she asked Lisa to plug a phone into a ballroom jack, then settled near one wall with two chairs—one for a makeshift desktop—and the directory from her tote bag. Before she’d left the condo that morning, she had scribbled down the numbers of any callbacks on her answering machine. Until every last possible TV or radio show is scheduled or scratched off the list, a PR person never rests. Neither pain, nor unexpected blows, nor dark of night, et cetera.

Her return calls went smoothly, although everybody commented that she sounded tired today. Temple didn’t bother explaining that her jaw wasn’t willing to open as much as usual, which made her usually free-flowing words ooze out like molasses.