Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Break Dancing

Darned if the brothel “break room” didn’t resemble any small business cafeteria, if it was for a funky, loosely run operation.

Matt took in the Formica-topped vintage dinette sets scattered over the vinyl tile floor. Their chrome legs and trim were age-dulled, but their cheerful seat covers in maroon, purple, yellow, and red plastic resembled a field of large, gaudy mushrooms.

A big white refrigerator was the elephant in the room, dwarfing a roomy microwave on an adjacent wheeled cart. A similar cart hosted a small TV. If small Lucite trays holding fingernail files, polish, and glue, lip gloss and mascara wands weren’t lying on the tables, Matt would have felt as at home as in a convent kitchen.

But the Age of Innocence was past, and this kind of communal living had nothing churchly about it.

Matt’s impression of the resident courtesans had been that they all looked alike. This open call interview session Temple had dreamed up for him would force him to discover differences and, perhaps, suspects.

It was likely one of their own, after all, who lay murdered upstairs. He shivered, more because Miss Kitty had kicked up the air-conditioning when it was obvious they’d be stuck out here with the body for a few hours. But that was like trying to stop the Red Sea from parting with an air machine.

“Howdy, Mr. Midnight. My name is Angela. We’re coming in alphabetically, so you get the heavenly body first.”

Angela paused in the doorway in typical temptress pose, one arm up along the frame, the other hand on her hip. At least she wore something, a sheer peignoir over a corset with garter straps and thong panties. Matt would never get what was hot about such outfits. Must be hangovers from Victorian repression. Analyzing that kept him from ogling Angela’s celestial form, which did look slim and firm and shiny in a Barbie doll sort of way he found a little too perfect.

“You know me?” Matt asked as she swaggered over on her four-inch spikes, jerked open the refrigerator door and regarded the contents long enough to give him a good rear view.

She finally found a can of some new-wave high-energy drink and joined him in sitting at the gray Formica-topped table.

“I never thought you’d be a customer out here at the Sapphire Slipper,” Angela said.

“I’m not. I was hijacked. We town guys all were.”

“I looove your voice on the radio. It’d be a real kick to hear it whispering in my ear some night. Tables turned.”

He ignored her come-on. “So you’ve actually heard my program?”

“We all have, honey, coming down from a night’s work in here. Unwinding. Gettin’ down. Who do you think we tune in to? Mr. Mellow Midnight.”

He knew he had long-haul truckers and night casino staff in his invisible audience, but he’d never dreamed whole brothels of shady ladies would tune in. “You close at midnight, then?” he asked, surprised.

“That’s our hours, noon to midnight. It’s a long drive back to anywhere from here, and even good-time guys and hookers gotta sleep sometimes.”

He eyed the hall off the kitchen. “Those are your quarters?”

“Yup. You wanta see?”

Matt thought it might be illuminating. “Yeah. Do all the . . . places have this arrangement? The guest bedrooms up front and fancy, and a, like, dorm for the residents in back?”

She stood and leaned over him, as her lips enunciated the words only inches from his. “No, my Midnight Man. Some of the lower-end places have the girls work out of their living quarters. In a way, it’s more convenient.”

But this was more convenient for a murderer, to kill on what amounted to a stage set, far from where the residents actually slept.

Matt stood. “My curiosity is purely academic.”

“Yeah, sure.” She smiled enticingly over her filmy blue shoulder as she led him down the dim, plain hall. She reminded him of the huge plaster figure atop the Blue Mermaid Motel, a knowing creature in her element, relishing that he was out of his.

It took five minutes to figure out the courtesan’s quarters were as bare and practical as a convent. How unnerving that women consecrated to no sex and women living on nothing but sex ending up in such spare, unsensual circumstances.

He saw single beds without head or footboards, cheap motel dressers bought by multiples with matching bedside tables. Blinds on windows. Everything institutional, although stuffed animals lined up against the plain beige walls and the dresser tops here were littered with gaudy rhinestones and garters, not the simple string of rosary beads and a small photo of the old folks at home. There were no photos of anyone but these women, taken at formally happy moments, in a line in the parlor, laughing in the break room. They were family.

Nuns, of course, were an old and dying breed. These women were a breed as old as prehistory probably, and not dying out at all.

“Knowing the layout of the place will help put the murder in perspective,” Matt commented as they returned to the main room.