Cat In An Aqua Storm

By then the coroner’s crew had gathered around the body, along with police photographers and forensic technicians. Temple would have loved to have watched this procedure, but she had work to do. She again snagged Lisa from the anxious trio of hotel observers and got directions to an office with a typewriter, then slipped away without anyone but the watchdogs on the outer doors noticing. As soon as her clerical work was done, she headed right for the Caravanserai Lounge, a sprawling array of cocktail tables lit by Aladdin’s lamps under a chiffon ceiling tent strung with strips of fairy lights.

Midmorning attendance at the Caravanserai was usually light. Now every table was occupied by displaced dancers, most wearing workout clothes, a prominent few stripped down to performance shreds and earning passersby’s stares. Smoke hovered above the motley crew like the steel blue haze from a volley of fired guns.

In the thickest of it, she found Lindy.

“Hi,” Temple greeted her. “Here’s the schedule for the local talk shows. Think you can make it?”

“If the cops let me.” Lindy’s foot yanked a vacant chair away from the table. “Sit down. You look frazzled already.”

Temple used the copy of the schedule to fan away clouds of smoke. “No thanks. I have to get this copy to Ruth outside.”

Lindy’s laugh expired in the dry wheeze of a cigarette cough. “Sorry about the smokiness. Strippers are on the weed.”

“Just nicotine?”

“Isn’t that enough? Say, what’s going on? Why won’t they let us in the ballroom?”

“Plenty. You’ll find out soon enough. Just be prepared to get some questions about it at the radio stations.” Lindy’s tough face crinkled in sympathy. “Not another fatality? Jeez. A strip show’s supposed to liven people up, not lay them out.”

“I’d better not say anything,” Temple said, retreating before she started coughing herself. Her bruised ribs couldn’t take the stress.

She switched to her sunglasses before going outside—great camouflage for blue-gray eyes simultaneously shadowed by black, blue, and purple.

Ruth’s one-woman picket line had doubled. A reedy man with sparse hair on both head and upper lip and a couch-potato paunch now paced nearby. His sign read:

MEN WANT WIVES AND TOTS, NOT SEX AND FLESHPOTS.

They weren’t picketing together. They were arguing loudly, and drawing a crowd. Beyond them, the Goliath colossus scowled down with lofty pagan scorn.

“This is not a religious issue,” Ruth was saying. She jammed her slipping sunglasses against her nose. “It’s sociological and sexist.”

“Brazen women don’t have to be naked to offend the Lord,” the man returned, glaring pointedly at her.

Ruth looked about ready to conk his bald spot with her sign when Temple pulled her aside and broke up the act.

“I’ve got the radio-station schedule,” Temple said. “Lindy’ll meet you here forty-five minutes before the shows.” She dug in her tote bag. “Here are some blank cassettes. See if you can get the station to run a tape while you’re on. You can cab it to the stations from here. Keep the receipts and I’ll reimburse you. Okay?”

“Everything’s okay except Lindy meeting me here,” Ruth said. “I’ve had it with the holier-than-thou set. I’ll meet her inside, maybe stick around and watch the goings-on. Learn something that way.”

“You mean that sanctimonious guy is beginning to make strippers look sane and sensible?”

“Hardly.” Ruth leaned her sign against the building. “I’m the only WOE member in Las Vegas,” she said sheepishly. “It’s hard being a protest movement of one. I like your idea of duking it out over the airwaves instead of in the streets. Say, you look a little wobbly.”

Temple felt Ruth’s supporting hand on her elbow and realized that she was feeling dizzy and exhausted. In unspoken agreement, the two women sat on the small retaining wall that bordered an azalea bed.

“I am a little beat,” Temple admitted. “And—don’t spread it around—but there’s been another murder. In the ballroom. The police are there now.”

“Another? Not a stripper again?”

Temple nodded. “I even met her—just last night. Living proof of your theory that strippers were often abused as children. Some kids like that never develop the self-esteem to stop being someone’s victim. Katharine was a battered woman, but she seemed ready to split from the guy. I think this contest was her ticket out—out of the relationship, out of stripping for a living. She had this gag stripping service going—well, it’s a start!” Temple added when Ruth looked dubious. “Now she’s dead.”

Ruth shook her head. “Who could be doing it?”

“I thought you might give me a clue.”

“First off, there’s the guy who beat her. Maybe he figured out she was leaving. Abusers usually freak when they lose their victims.”

“But what about Dorothy Horvath, Monday’s victim? Katharine’s guy wouldn’t need to kill her, too,”

“Do you know anything about her?”