Even as Temple followed Electra into the next room, she was aware of drawn-blind dimness, of massive shadowy pieces of period furniture—several sofas, for instance—and the evasive scent of eucalyptus.
A genteel thump in a farther room made her stop, resisting Electra’s firm pull. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Electra said.
“But I thought—” A movement brushed along the baseboard edging the parquet floors. Then the bottom fringe on a buxom forties sofa undulated like a hula skirt. “Electra, do you have pets?”
“You cannot own an animal,” Electra replied haughtily.
“Pests, then?”
“What kind of a landlady do you think I am?”
“Then ghosts?” Temple suggested in exasperation.
“I’m afraid not. Not that I haven’t tried. Séances have been held up here in the penthouse since the building was erected in 1953.”
“That’s fascinating. I’d like to—” Temple was jerked through an open French door into the rude shock of daylight.
This high, on the fifth floor, the low-lying clutter of Las Vegas vanished as if it had never been. Only the tall towers of hotels probed the sky as the desert’s faded rose, gold, azure and green bled toward the horizon like running watercolors. The mountains, hazy blue in their serene distance from the hot, yellow-white hurly-burly of the city, kept company with frothy clouds tinted with the exact flattering shade of a baby pink spotlight.
The view was the least of it. The entire rooftop was upholstered in green—covered with potted topiary trees, beds of plump-leaved succulents and cacti with textures as weird and varied as anything on earth.
“Hurry,” Electra said, “you don’t want your pancakes to get cold.”
Temple eyed the only table. A large circle of glass rested atop an abomination: a ring of chubby, gilded plaster Oriental figures with raised hands that were either modeled on Wu Fat in Hawaii Five-O reruns, or the big-bellied Oriental god of luck reproduced in an infinitude of cheap versions.
Atop these gaudy, somewhat ungainly gentlemen—floating on the glass like lily pads on water—were rainbow-colored carnival glass plates, cheap giveaways from days gone by, now dear.
Temple regarded stacks of plump brown pancakes centered on the wavy-rimmed plates. A dollop of white stuff resembling sour cream or Zymonal reposed beside them.
At least there was coffee. She took a sip from a steaming Porky Pig mug.
“Chicory,” Electra announced as she sat, watching Temple fight not to spit out her mouthful. “Now try your wheat cakes. If you must have something unhealthy, here’s a tub of no-cholesterol vegetable oil.”
Temple eyed this concession warily. As far as she was concerned, butter was butter. Pretenders weren’t much tastier than axle grease, but the heavy-textured pancakes needed something. She used her knife tip to scoop out a blob of the pale stuff.
The tofu beside her pancakes shook like Santa Claus’s belly as she smeared her cakes and dug in. Not half bad, if you chewed fast. Electra was dribbling something that resembled rat droppings atop her cakes.
“Raw bran,” she explained.
“Okay,” Temple said. “What about the raw facts? What did you find out at the Goliath?”
“Lots.” Electra tilted her head as she chewed a bite, toying with her shoulder-dusting earrings, a cornucopia of apples, cherries, bananas and pineapples so appropriate to the breakfast hour. “What do you want to know first?”
“About Dorothy Horvath. I actually met the second victim, and saw for myself that she had an abusive lover. But Dorothy was the first, and she’s still a mystery to me.”
“Dorothy—oh, you mean Glinda. Yeah, they all knew Glinda.” Electra pushed the half-dozen colorful wooden bangles ringing each arm up like sleeves as she braced her elbows on the cool glass tabletop and leaned forward to tell Temple all.
“A lot of these dancers live on a very simple level. They don’t worry about who’s gonna be president, or pollution in Mexico City, nothing global or political. Survival is their prime directive, as they say on Star Trek. The only higher education they got was in the College of Carnal Knowledge, and that too early. They figure the world handed them a raw deal, and they’re going to make the best of it. A lot of them pick bad boyfriends and make bad loans. A lot live from day to day, and blow any windfalls on froufrou for the stage, or lots of cheap civilian clothes, or drugs. Or on bad boyfriends again. A lot are what you’d call single mothers—not like Murphy Brown. They had kids when they were still kids themselves. If they’re working for anything besides the bright lights and a G-string full of tips, it’s to keep those kids from getting the same raw deal they got. But they still pick bad men—bikers, the big bad wolf kind, smooth-talking club owners who run their joints like a company store and bleed the girls by fining them flat. Abusers.”
“I get the picture,” Temple put in.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m putting them down. They’re doing their best with a bad deal. Poor Glinda—that face of hers was worth a million bucks, but the brain behind it wasn’t worth enough to make a local call at a pay phone. They say she acted like a ten-year-old. Never quite understood what happened to her—or why, or why it kept happening again and again. She could move on that stage like liquid lightning, but she was a patsy for any smooth operator with a rough reputation who came along. She was going to lose her kids to her first husband, an upright type whose contempt drove her into exotic dancing and who was using her work as a reason to get custody of the kids. Some of the dancers are fighters, some aren’t. Glinda wasn’t.”
“Maybe that was why she based her act on The Wizard of Oz. She wanted to be whisked away to a better world.”
“Or she wanted to go home to a place like Kansas that she never had. Sad story. Sad girl. Guess hubby has the kids for sure now.”
“What about him? Where does he live? Could he have—?”
Electra fanned her hands to stop Temple’s jackhammer questions. “I thought of that, too. Still stationed abroad after the Desert Storm call-up. And he was a shoo-in to get custody anyway, from what the other dancers told me. Glinda kept missing her court dates, so afraid the system wouldn’t help her that she made sure it didn’t.”
“It’s hard to understand self-esteem so low that it can be that self-destructive,” Temple said. Her fork skated a bit of pancake into the pile of tofu. “I can see it, from my one encounter with the kind of a world that sticks out a fist and strikes you down every time you move. Eventually, you’d stop moving.”
Electra patted Temple’s hand to the accompaniment of jangling bangles. “Glinda hoped, in that loony, kiddish way of hers, that winning another Rhinestone G-string would establish that she was an artist, an entertainer, that it would help her get her kids.
“That’s what I was trying to say, these dancers aren’t fools, but they fool themselves,” Electra went on. “They can use the business, or the business can use them. Some girls barely eighteen perform for ten grand a week at uptown clubs. They don’t have to take tips or talk to customers or touch them. They’re exotic dance queens like in the classy old burlesque days. Other girls the same age are bussed around from town to town and dump to dump, paid ten bucks a night and all the tips they can writhe out of men, no more than bar girls selling drinks with their bodies. The sleazy club owners fine them their tip money for so-called ‘infractions,’ and then fire them if they want to develop their careers by taking time off to be in a contest like this. Some club managers are little more than pimps, forcing green kids into dancing until they’re afraid they can’t do anything better. Then there are the seasoned ones, the hardheads. Nobody does them out of their pay, they come and they go of their free will, and essentially take the money and run. Most of them run back to stripping, though, because no other job they could get pays those kind of tips, or offers that kind of spotlight.”