Cat In An Aqua Storm

“So the killer had to get close enough to paint them without their getting suspicious before it was too late?” Temple nodded, then bit her lip. “Unless... they’d been quarreling. Gypsy had invited their father to the competition without June’s knowledge. She claimed he had sexually abused her as a child, but June denied it.”

“Not uncommon. Denial is the backbone of the dysfunctional family.”

“But it would be weird, to abuse one twin daughter and not the other. Maybe the father told himself it didn’t count that way. Anyway, June was against Gypsy’s ‘statement.’ So one or the other of them could have painted her twin solid gold, waited for her to collapse, and finished painting herself completely then.”

Temple watched Matt absorb her somewhat confusing scenario.

“Murder-suicide. It’s possible.” Matt rubbed his chin, an unnecessary gesture. With his blond coloring, he’d never suffer from five-o'clock shadow. “Did you get the twins’ birth dates?”

“Why bother? Molina gave me the first two, but now my theory is impossible. Besides, Molina isn’t talking to me unless it’s an interrogation.”

“When has it been any different between you and Lieutenant Molina? In the meantime, why don’t you check on the birth dates you’ve already got?” '

“Is that therapy, counselor?”

“Common sense. Use what you have.”

“Right.” Temple stood, then checked her wristwatch. “I guess the public library is still open, dam it.”

“Why the library?”

“Who else has one of those perpetual calendars that shows what day of the week it was for the last one hundred years? Speaking of which, that’s about how old I feel. Have you seen Louie lately, by the way?”

Matt shook his head. “Not hide nor hair.”

Everybody was AWOL, Temple thought as she went upstairs. Electra was practically living at the Goliath. Temple had heard a distant vroom-vroom at about three p.m. that indicated the Hesketh Vampire was going through its paces onstage. Louie was almost always gone, as he had been ever since...

Temple turned the key and opened her mahogany door. Dead ahead on the slice of kitchen floor visible stood the banana split dish overflowing with brown-green pellets.

She marched over, picked it up and dumped the contents down the garbage disposal. They made a quite satisfactory racket getting ground up, she observed.

She next did what Matt had suggested. The library’s reference-desk personnel sounded harried, but easily found the needed calendar. Temple read the woman on the other end of the phone the dates: March 4, 1963, and April 22, 1958.

One was a Monday, and one was a Tuesday. In the right order.

Temple screamed and jumped up before the phone was fully hung up. No doubt the library staff was used to bettors calling from bars and other unstable inquirers.

She sat down again, sobered. Since when did women-hating, brutal serial killers of strippers docilely follow nursery rhymes?

She went to the bedroom to change, still mulling it over. Clothes lay everywhere—on the closet floor, near the bed.

Temple stiffened on the threshold. She had been so obsessed with the Goliath murders that she had almost forgotten her own peril. Had those two men come back and trashed her bedroom? Why hadn’t she learned how to lay grown men flat with one well-placed kick? Maybe those thugs weren’t just after Max. Maybe they had something to do with the Goliath murders...

She was already too deep into the condo to retreat from intruders who might be lurking at her back, and the phone was across the room. But why hadn’t they attacked her when she was calling the library from the living room? An abiding respect for public institutions?

Ridiculous.

And her clothes. Most of them had slipped off the hangers. She went over to inspect the damage, and picked up a red knit dress. The zipper was undone. What kind of room-tossing hoodlum stops to neatly undo the zippers? She looked around some more.

Oh, no! Her Hanae Mori green silk, crumpled again, on the floor! She whipped it aloft, unable to help admiring the fall of emerald silk folds. Another gaping zipper. Were these guys metal freaks, or what? Something had wafted to the floor when she lifted the dress.

She looked. A powder puff. The fluffy dressing-table kind. Pink. Ugh. She bent and picked it up. A diagonal white satin ribbon on the back bore the brand name in flowing script. Yvette. The puff part glimmered with opalescent flakes. A subtle whiff of Emeraude assaulted her nostrils.

Temple now knew what had inspired the name of the actress’s cat, but how had Savannah Ashleigh’s powder puff arrived at the Circle Ritz? On the wings of a dove?

29

Born to Be Child

“What areyou doing here?” Lieutenant C. R. Molina asked a trifle bitterly Friday morning. “There hasn’t been another murder.”