The lady was asleep at the time, and far be it from me to present myself in a less noble light.
Yet misfortune did enter the scene of Love’s Young Dream. First came the perplexing human pantomime. After calming Yvette, if not myself, I amble over to the wall, loft atop a conveniently close chair seat and cautiously sniff as much of the suspended lady as I can reach. Until my nose for news has registered its impression, I believe nothing of what I see, and even less of what I hear.
Once satisfied that the poor little doll is dead and in no need of further attentions, I return mine to the contents of the pink carrier. No sooner have the Divine Yvette and I settled down for some romantic trans-mesh smooching, when I hear a sneaky step in the hall.
The newcomer is none other than the miserable dude with whom I tangled a time or two at the ABA. Naturally, he does not look down, so he fails to notice Yvette and myself—mostly myself, for Yvette is as well-veiled as a novice in a convent in her carrier, and I am hard to miss unless you are not looking for me, which this Puke-cannon person is definitely not doing.
“Glinda—” he calls softly. “It’s Crawford. The others said you never went upstairs. I know you stayed behind because you wanted a private rendezvous. Glinda—”
Hearing him makes me want to reconsider my romantic notions, permanently.
And is this guy blind, or what? First he pokes his nose into the hanging costumes. Then he sniffs out the various makeup containers that litter the countertop, although he is massively deficient in the sniffer, like all of his breed. Even a perfumed Pomeranian would have noticed by now the distinctive odor of death in the room.
But Crawfish Puke-cannon, may his tribe get rabies, bumbles through looking—not high and low, where he would at least spy the dangling damsel on the far wall, or yours truly huddled beneath the counter—but right in front of his prying nose, which instead is investigating one of the absent stripper's canvas bags.
I hiss a disgusted warning, but he is too deaf to hear it over the grind of the air-conditioning system. He pauses to taste a fingerful of frosting he scoops from a lurid wreck of cake on the counter, then moves on. He has almost reached the wall before he notices the suspended bare legs. Had Miss Temple Barr stumbled onto this murder scene, she would have fixed on those magenta satin spikes from the doorway, and have followed them up to their logical conclusion, or, rather, the dead woman's conclusion.
Now Puke-cannon’s basset-hound brown eyes are widening to display their bloodshot whites, as unappetizing a sight as squid-eyeball sushi. He looks up, and up, and up to the dead dancer's sad, tilted face. He whitens, stumbles backward into a series of chairs, which he pushes aside. Then, right by me he pauses and turns.
One last look at the far wall and its macabre decoration, and he is out of there faster than an Irish Setter on No Doz.
Then things commence to get hectic. In no time flat, a couple of brave souls peek in to verify the Puke-cannon claims. They retreat. I am forced to bid my Lost One a long goodbye (which has certain compensations).
I no sooner desert the dressing room for a bird’s-eye view atop a costume cabinet in the hall than I hear the hysterical approach of little pink feet: the extremities of the Divine One’s so-called owner (a convention my kind accepts only to lull human companions into the proper state of ignorance as to who really has the upper mitt in such arrangements).
Miss Savannah Ashleigh proceeds to wail in the hall and demand that someone enter the dressing room and extract “her Darling" from the awful place. Cooler heads point out that the police will want to see the scene untouched.
She does not care, Miss Ashleigh declares, pacing back and forth, what the police want to see. Her Darling must not be subjected to such stress. She clutches her throat, a gesture I find tasteless given the likely means of the deceased's death, but then I also find Miss Savannah Ashleigh is untalented enough to give even tastelessness a bad name.
At length another old friend from the ABA strides onto the scene. I could jump down on her head from here, and contemplate that, considering the bad time Lieutenant C. R. Molina saw fit to give the delightful Miss Temple Barr in that instance.
Instead I eavesdrop, yawning. The sound of yammering, excited humans is hard on the ears. Eventually I drop into a meditative state, repeating a soothing mantra, tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah” (Carp is a personal favorite of mine, but its short, sharp name does not lend itself to musing upon.) With such a password to psychic peace, I could snooze at a dogfight, and often have.
I stay only long enough to see the Divine Yvette borne from the room at the hands of Lieutenant Molina herself.
“The carrier has to stay until our technicians are done with it,” she tells Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who is draping her right shoulder with Yvette’s languid length and making much over her. (Meanwhile, Yvette is making blue-green goo-goo eyes at me atop the cabinet.)
“Oh, thank you, Lieutenant,” babbles Miss Savannah. “See how the Poor Baby is purring with joy at reuniting with Momsy! Please tell me what you think happened to My Darling in that awful room. We will be in the private dressing room next door.”
Once Yvette is safe in the silicone bosom of her family, I see no point in sticking around like a used Band-Aid. No one will listen to me even if I should deign to offer my eyewitness testimony. I will be taken no more seriously than Miss Savannah Ashleigh, which is a dreadful state of affairs.
I retreat like the shadow I so much resemble and repair to the Circle Ritz to think things over. One thing needs no thinking: the Divine Yvette is still too close for comfort to the murder scene, and likely, to the murderer, as yet unknown.
This is why a day later I find myself in another dressing room occupied by little dolls in the business of dressing down. I have long made a habit of visiting the chorus girls’ backstage digs to pick up a nugget of good gossip (much tastier and more nourishing than this Free-to-Be-Feline stuff, believe me), get some strokes and lots of female admiration with no strings attached.
My favorite hangout is the Crystal Phoenix, but I have graced similar scenes in such establishments as Bally’s, the Flamingo, the Sands, Dunes, et cetera. I avoid the Mirage on principle, despite its many piscatorial attractions, including a shark tank. Some heavy muscle of the feline variety prowls that turf. These individuals wear black and white prison-striped suits, which is appropriate: their kind has often been kept behind bars, for good reason. They all answer to the name of "Tiger,” being associates of Siegfried and Roy, the magicians, and outweigh me by several hundred pounds.
I may be feisty, but I am not witless.
However, in all my rambles, which include the Lust ’n’ Lace downtown, I have never touched pad to the dressing room of Kitty City, for reasons other than the odiously inaccurate name of said establishment. Besides not having a single specimen of the advertised sort inside, Kitty City's little stripper dolls are always rushing from one club to another and have little time for exchanging pleasantries with a dude of my sort. Plus they live on Mars bars and diet soda, a regimen only slightly less appealing than Free-to-Be-Foolish.