Molina was not impressed. The men opened the double doors, and she brushed past, Dindorf and Temple in her wake.
The ballroom looked like the morning after New Year’s Eve. Scattered chairs and equipment stood in place, but without a throng of people at work, the vast area was a deserted set lacking all vitality.
Not quite deserted. Temple followed the two detectives toward the pool of spotlights where a few forlorn figures stood.
No one was talking, which lent a furtive, almost funereal air to their presence. Temple couldn’t decide whether the people looked sad, or guilty, or a bit of both.
Molina began announcing their party’s names and ranks while still twenty feet away—Molina’s and Dindorfs, not Temple’s. This omission made her the uneasy object of quick, surreptitious glances. The others could be speculating whether she was a mystery expert on murder, or a chief suspect.
The identity of the welcoming committee became quickly clear. Arthur Hencell, WASPish head of hotel security. Lisa Osgood, a hyperactive young blond woman who handled hotel special events. Hipolito Herrera, the pudgy middle-aged maintenance man who had found the body when opening up the ballroom for the day.
“Where are the people who expected to work in here today?” Molina asked.
“The Caravanserai Lounge,” Lisa Osgood answered nervously. “We’re, uh... storing them there until the police let them back in here. How long—?”
“Hours, maybe not until tomorrow. I’d find another place to practice” was Molina’s encouraging answer.
“You’re not sending any black-and-whites?” Hencell’s question edged dangerously close to an order graced at the last moment with an interrogation mark.
“Don’t worry. The coroner’s ambulance and the M.E. will use the back entrance. Nothing awkward will be wheeled through the casino, only the usual money carts.”
Temple folded her lips to keep from smiling at the security chief’s livid face as he suffered Molina’s sardonic reply.
Molina turned to the maintenance man with more warmth than she had shown the higher-ups. “What time did you—” Her question broke off suddenly, for no reason Temple could discern. And then, “¿A qué hora descubrió el cuerpo?” Molina asked in Spanish that flowed into one long phrase.
“A las nueve.” The man’s face, his entire body, relaxed as he began an outpouring of Spanish, his hands and arms gesturing.
Molina nodded, and pulled out her notebook.
“Nine o’clock,” he repeated laboriously in English at the end of his spiel.
His last hand wave directed Temple’s attention to the metal skeleton of jungle-gym-like scaffolding that stood near the raised stage.
Something lay crumpled over the low bar nearest the floor. Temple’s shiver started at her tailbone and worked its way up her spine to her scalp. Falling over Chester Royal at the ABA had been a macabre accident. She hadn’t known the man was dead until it was too late to get hysterical about the fact.
This was the first dead body she had approached with the same cold certainty as the police. She didn’t like the feeling, the sense that this investigation was about a collection of facts and circumstances rather than the tragic end of a personality, of a specific human being’s hopes.
“Ven conmigo, Señor.” Molina’s head-jerk indicated only the maintenance man. Dindorf, his own notebook in hand, closed in on the other two hotel personnel.
Torn, Temple decided to follow Molina despite the language barrier. She needed to understand what murderous force was stalking the event she was responsible for. You couldn’t do PR in an information vacuum.
Molina and Herrera had paused by the metal framework and stood looking down, like mourners at a grave, speaking quietly in Spanish. The language’s musical cadence seemed to soften death’s implicit ugliness. Temple eased closer, her heels muted by the garish carpeting. She couldn’t see... the body, only flexed lace-stocking-clad legs lying together, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s, as if their owner had fallen under the onslaught of sudden disaster, had never known what hit her, maybe. An emerald green spark winked at Temple in the dim light.
The shoes!
She brushed past the obscuring bulk of Señor Herrera to see.
“Oh... no.”
Molina looked up. “You know her?”
Temple studied the fallen form, dancer-graceful even in death. She recognized the black cat mask she had suggested, even if she couldn’t fully see the face.
“Know her? Not by any name other than Katharine. I saw her in the dressing room yesterday afternoon, before... my own mishap.”
“This was no mishap,” Molina reminded her.
“Couldn’t she have fallen?” Temple asked hopefully. “Especially with the mask—” She stopped, realizing that her brilliant show-saving suggestion might have been fatal.
Molina pointed to the neck, which was obscured by a narrow black muffler, and squatted beside the body. “Did you see her in costume yesterday?”
Temple nodded.
“Was that part of it?”
“No. Her neck was bare, like most of the rest of her. The only new item is the mask. She must have made it and come back later to practice with it in private.”
Temple pulled out her glasses and put them on before leaning over the corpse. Poor Katharine, so hopeful again, so fatally doomed to lose.... “Wait! That thing around her neck—it’s not a scarf. It’s a tail!”
“Torn from the rear of her costume?” Molina asked.
“Probably. I saw her working out her Catwoman act on the grid early yesterday, but she didn’t have it on when I saw her in the dressing room. It was this clever tail, like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. Some tiny remote control made it entwine and twitch.”
“Then there’d be a wire.” Molina studied the busy carpet pattern for a moment before her pencil darted out like a yellow snake and lifted a tiny curling wire from the floor.
She rose slowly, almost painfully. “Another stripper killed with a piece of her own costume, Interesting M.O.” Molina turned to Herrera. “Gracias, Señor.”
Her encouraging smile faded as she looked past him to Temple, the light laugh lines vanishing at the edges of her icy blue eyes. “And I’ll want to know everything you know about the victim. Stick around until I finish setting up the investigation and get these hotel people off my back.”
Molina turned and headed for the others, leaving Ternple and Señor Herrera to contemplate the body, a study in the sleek black of her brief costume and the pale, luminescent white of her artistically revealed skin. The mask had worked splendidly, Temple saw, though she found the addition of black lipstick sinister rather than sensual.
Only yesterday Katharine had experienced hopes and hurts. Sometime after their dressing-room talk she had made the mask and come back to try it in her act. She was going on with the show. Now it would go on without her. So would her kids. So would “he,” the man who had needed to hit her. Temple would have something incriminating, at least, to tell Molina.
Hipolito Herrera knew none of that. He knew only what he saw: youth and death entwined into one sad, bizarre figure.
“Muy linda," he murmured, shaking his head. “Muy triste.”
Temple didn’t have to speak Spanish to translate those universal sentiments. “Very pretty,” she agreed. “Very, very sad.”
Molina had bigger fish than Temple to grill. While Temple waited for her turn at interrogation, she asked Lisa to plug a phone into a ballroom jack, then settled near one wall with two chairs—one for a makeshift desktop—and the directory from her tote bag. Before she’d left the condo that morning, she had scribbled down the numbers of any callbacks on her answering machine. Until every last possible TV or radio show is scheduled or scratched off the list, a PR person never rests. Neither pain, nor unexpected blows, nor dark of night, et cetera.