“Nothing much here,” he commented.
“Sometime nothing much says a lot.” Zazu was looming behind him, in the room without making a sound.
Despite, or because of that, he used a tissue from the plain discount-store box on the bedside table to open drawers, gawk in the closet.
“Bathroom’s down the hall. We don’t get private accommodations, not even for tending our privates.”
This woman didn’t sugarcoat things. “It’s a public business, isn’t it? Not many secrets.”
“No secrets. Or . . . almost none.”
“You know one? Or two?”
“Maybe. I don’t tell.”
“Not even if it would help find Madonnah’s killer? I found her, you know. Tried to breathe life back into her. Too late.”
“Y’all’s not even supposed to be here!”
“That’s true.”
“Why’d she die when y’all came here when you weren’t supposed to be here?”
“You’re saying it’s our fault?”
“I’m saying you had a part in it, and you can’t get outta that.”
A bitter taste burned in his mouth. The saliva of a dead woman he couldn’t raise. The salt of an accusation he couldn’t lay to rest that rang both false and true.
Zazu was the last of the good-time girls he had to interview, and she had been a heller.
But she left him alone in the dead woman’s bedroom.
Matt looked around again, carefully. Women’s bedrooms weren’t his area of expertise. Another big box of tissue with aloe and vitamin E sat on the dresser. He pulled several free and stuffed them in his side jacket pockets.
This wing was fairly new, but it had a makeshift look. The closet had sliding doors, one mirrored. He used a tissue to ease it open, trying not to regard his own full-length image as it glided past. Picture yourself here. He could see the Sapphire Slipper Web page come-on now. No.
But come on, he wasn’t snooping on his own behalf. No scruples needed.
The farther half of the closet was full of stacked cardboard boxes, probably house supplies, storage. The wooden clothes pole held mismatched empty wire hangers, some colored, some white, most the bronze color favored by dry cleaners.
A few T-shirts and dresses and skirts hung there. It was the faceless Styrofoam heads on the shelf above that entranced him. Wig stands. Marilyn Monroe blond, Cleopatra black, rainbow-streaked, long, short. He wasn’t familiar with the singer Madonna’s various chameleon “looks,” but he did realize that these wild wigs would make a good shtick for a hooker. And a natural disguise.
He’d read that a prostitute’s greatest fear was seeing her own father walk through the door, maybe an indication of how much she feared the father figure, or how much he may have abused her. This woman had been determined not to be found, no matter who walked through the door, and apparently her wig trick had worked, until tonight.
Matt bent to pull her luggage out into the room. A medium-sized hardcase one, probably for the wigs, and a couple of backpacks. All were scuffed and scratched. He guessed she traveled by bus rather than air. The luggage tags held empty forms, never filled in.
They were empty, not even a stray gum wrapper left inside.
At the dresser, the drawers stuck in the dry air and came out only when jerked, and then they opened crooked. He dropped the tissues back in his pocket and lifted her personal lingerie. Plain cotton, with what Temple called camisole tops instead of bras. The large plastic makeup bag on the dresser top was marked inside with red and black lines, as if it had been lashed. But it was just the unintended strokes of lip liner and eyeliner pencils, all in bold colors: scarlet, black, blue.
As his tissue-holding fingers riffled through, he noticed that everything was well used, not new, the exteriors smeared, not neat and clean like Temple’s. These were working tools, not playthings.
A tall bottle of lotion next to the tissue box must be makeup remover.
This time Matt stared at himself in the mirror above the dresser. Here was where Madonnah saw herself bare, and, he’d bet, no one else did.
He went to the door. It had one of those center-knob lock buttons, so she could have privacy. He grabbed a couple of tissues from his pocket and turned the lock.
Back at the dresser, he found her working clothes in the second drawer. Black and baby blue corsets with garters and marabou feather edgings. Stockings ranging from nurse white to sheer black to fishnet to sheer with lavish tattoos printed on them and even rhinestones. He counted. There were six fishnet ones; even pairs, none missing. Filmy thises and thats. A box of tangled jewelry, mostly black and glittery or rhinestones or lengths of pearls.
The bottom drawer held spike heels, all four inches tall, exaggerated, in shiny patent leather, white or black or sliver or red. All the heel tips were worn, and they were tumbled together. The soles looked remarkably clean. Never worn outdoors.
Her purse was in that bottom drawer too, under the shoes.
Matt pulled it out and put it on the dresser top.
It was an inexpensive black microfiber shoulder bag. It had an outside zipper, an inside zipper on that flap, an exterior three-quarter zipper that revealed credit card slots and a driver’s license window and pen-holding nooses, all at easy, organized access.
Every slot was empty, except one. The driver’s license was from Indiana. The photo of a youngish woman with brown hair and bangs reminded him of the mousiest wig on the shelf. Obviously what she wore when traveling.
There was another zippered compartment at the back of the lining It was empty except for a penny and a few crumbs of something long since inedible.
He pushed his fingers behind each empty credit card slot. Nothing.
But this was a purse of a thousand compartments. He was sure that had she flown with it, airport security would have missed a couple of places in this bag of tricks.
He found another zipper inside the outer inner face of the bag.
There! His half a gum wrapper! And on the plain back, a phone number jotted down in faded pencil. It looked like something even the owner had forgotten.
So he committed it to memory, not knowing where the area code was from.
He dropped the purse back into place in the bottom drawer and pushed it shut with his borrowed tissues.
As he stood and looked around a last time, he couldn’t help thinking the room was so devoid of personality and effects that it resembled a simple convent bedroom for postulants who had left all worldly goods behind. The late Madonnah, had her wigs been headdresses and her clothes habits, reminded him more of a nun than a courtesan.
Matt pulled a couple fresh tissues from his pocket and unlocked and opened the door. He felt confident he’d left as little trace on the room as she ever had.
Louie’s Imps
As soon as my Miss Temple has finished with that old gang of ours I head to the Midnight Inc. Investigations rendezvous spot, the upstairs hallway.
The presence of a dead body and a live Fontana brother on watch discourages all but the stout of heart from venturing up here.
Luckily, my breed is expected to venture where no man has gone before, or will go again, so I duck into a doorway niche to another bedroom and wait for my troops to reassemble.
Ma Barker is either still in the murder room and needed a distraction to dart out again, or she had departed before the Fontana brother called to the downstairs family powwow had returned to his post.
Her I am not worried about. In either case she will think of something, and act on it.
Nor do I worry about Miss Midnight Louise. I know she has been soaking up every bit of gossip, every inadvertent verbal slipup, every guilty whiff of sweat from the assigned bridesmaids below.
Besides her well-honed street smarts from her life among the homeless, she has a personal aversion to dames who are overde-pendent on the regard and support of the male of the species, any species. So I can count on her to not take any of these Fontana squeezes at face value, and know that if she has run across a hot clue she will follow it on her own.