Cat In An Aqua Storm

Good question, Temple thought. Was the child Gypsy secretly eager to perform for her molesting father? Did she crave his attention and arousal despite herself? Is that why she stripped, to tease the other men in her audience who could see and not touch? Or did she want revenge, to taunt their father with the fact that she was now a woman with a sexuality he could no longer control? Did she want to show that she had dragged the unknowing June into her own need for exhibitionism that his sickness had caused?

“What will he see?” Temple asked, echoing June.

“What we are,” Gypsy said. “What we became. What he did to us. And that he can’t do it anymore.”

“Us,” June repeated. “You said it was just you.”

Gypsy sighed. “It was never just me, Junie. It was all of us. It’s what our father did to all of us.”

“Maybe we won’t make the Saturday finals,” June suggested almost hopefully.

“We always do,” Gypsy answered.

Our Father, Temple concluded, was definitely not in Heaven. Nor would he be, if he came to the competition Saturday night.

23

Nursery Crimes

It wasa good thing Temple was not a Supreme Court Justice.

She had advised the Gold Dust Twins to see a counselor together, and then consider family counseling. Not a judgment of Solomon that cleaved to the heart of the matter, but a waffling, trendy modem way to deal with a form of human grief as old as Sophocles and Oedipus. She had then left.

“I thought you were headed home an hour ago.”

At the words, Temple came to a dead, guilty halt while skirting the Goliath’s Caravanserai Lounge on the way out. Molina’s voice was right behind her, the law’s long arm apparently had at last extended its reach beyond the ballroom.

She turned. “Ah, I needed a drink first.”

“You’d have been better off if you’d actually had one,” Molina noted sourly. “Don’t you know when to quit?”

“I was just leaving now. Honest.”

“Good. Rest assured that I will call you,” Molina added with sweet sarcasm, “in case there are any major breaks in the case that you should know about. Now get outa here.”

Temple hated to turn tail, but her energy was at its end. A chorus of aches and pains from her eyebrows to her knees had reached fever pitch.

Still, she felt like an AWOL from the French Foreign Legion as she dragged herself and her heavy tote bag through the clustered tables. Besides, the ambience had choked her. The color and confusion of readying a show made her homesick for the theater. She hated it when frailties kept her from the thick of things. Imagine how many clues were floating around this mob, just waiting for an agile intelligence to pick them up....

The sound of intense voices broke into her reverie. Two women stood at the cocktail tables that had been drafted as the competition’s field desk while the ballroom was unavailable. One of the women was Lindy, scanning a sheet of paper and smoking up a storm. A second woman, whose black iridescent hair matched her iridescent black-leather motorcycle jacket, was giving her the hard sell.

“—just blew into town,” the woman, who looked quite ordinary to Temple among this crowd, was saying. She hadn’t removed her sunglasses. Temple wondered if she had any unsightly bruises to hide.

“It’s awfully late to enter,” Lindy objected.

“Any rules against it?”

“Not exactly—”

“Not exactly means no. When can I get into the rehearsal room?”

“That depends on the police.”

“Say, hotel security is getting awful tight.”

“It’s not that,” Lindy said, saying no more.

Temple trudged past the pair, amazed by contestants who would stop at nothing and even pay for the privilege of baring their bottoms. The bizarre conversation followed her like faint and argumentative rap music.

“Your stage pretty strong?” the new contestant was asking.

“You don’t weigh that much, honey.”

“Thanks, but it’s not me. It’s my bike.”

“You use a bike in your act? I suppose that’s encouraging to over-sixty types.”

“Not that kind of bike,” was the contemptuous answer. “Mine’s a real bike. Weighs a thousand pounds.”

“A... motorcycle?”

Not only Lindy was incredulous. Temple, almost out of earshot, stopped cold. She turned slowly to study the over-the-hill Hell’s Angel.

“Listen,” Lindy was telling her, “we’ve had grand pianos and baby elephants on our stages. I think we can handle one overweight motorcycle.”

“Okay. There’s my money. Count me in.” The motorcycle moll moved on.

Temple backtracked, catching Lindy about to slip the entrant’s sheet into a red manila folder. “Who was that masked woman?”

“The one in the sunglasses? I don’t know. Never heard of or saw her before. That’s not odd. She’s in the Over-Sexty division.”

“What did she put down on her form?”

Lindy pouted in concentration. “This has gotta be only her stage name. That’s all we require.”

“Which is—?”

“ ‘Moll Philanders.’ I don’t get it.”

“I do! Any address?” Temple twisted to read it upside down. Then she cased the cocktail area, looking for a figure that reminded her of Elton John in drag.