“How did you get into doing this?”
Wilma’s broad face frowned. A more down-home, ordinary woman you could not find. Her work-thickened fingers roved among the sleazy, shiny fabrics meant to showcase sleek thighs and taut tummies.
“I sewed for my daughters when they were in gymnastics,” Wilma said in a dreamy, reminiscent monotone. “Bright, sturdy costumes. I got used to working with stretchy material, which is tricky. These girls need the same.”
“Your girls must be grown now.”
Wilma nodded. “Grown. Gone. I still sew.”
“And you still have girls who need you.”
Wilma nodded again.
Above them, the remote drone of backstage chaos continued. Upstairs, Officer Choi was strutting her stuff as Kitty Cardozo for an audience that included a possible killer. Suddenly, Temple didn’t resent being removed from the scene of the police trap. She wasn’t a cop or a private dick. She was an onlooker, like Wilma, a temporary face on the fringe of this exotic lifestyle, though Wilma had made a habit of attaching herself to this milieu. These girls would never outgrow her. Their faces and names might change, but their needs never would.
“Why do they do it?” Temple asked, pulling a chair over. Its four feet screeched across the concrete, as if protesting the dislocation. She sat and squelched the sound.
“Do you have children?” Wilma asked out of the blue.
Temple shouldn’t have been taken aback by such a question, but she was. She hadn’t heard it in awhile. Max would have been great with children. On the other hand, in other ways, Max would have been terrible with children, because he was one himself yet, in a still, small, irresponsible corner of his soul.
“No,” she said. Such questions never required a complicated answer.
“Then you’ve never seen the amazing innocence of a young child close up. Never seen how... trusting kids are. How smiling, utterly loving, and attractive. My girls—all curls and tiny white teeth and laughing eyes. Gigglers. In love with the world. Maybe I was young and pretty like that, but I’ve long forgotten it. You see it in a child and you wonder what we’ve all forgotten. You envy them.”
Temple watched the woman’s work-worn face soften with memories. Years and wrinkles fell away. The straight strands of her unstyled gray hair seemed to curve and grow brown again. Was part of having children, Temple wondered, ending up lonely and nostalgic for them?
“I don’t know about that,” Temple admitted. Her most recent maternal instinct had been fretting over Midnight Louie’s feeding regimen and intermittent absences. “But I’ve seen photographs, school photos, in the paper of some poor kid who’s been abused to death, and I’m always amazed that a child living that kind of nightmare can still give the camera a dazzling, hopeful, trusting smile.”
“The world spits on that trust.” Wilma’s white-knuckled fist shook her G-string ring. Her hands were large, the knuckles coarse and swollen, Temple noticed. Sewing must hurt the arthritic joints. A rumpled clutter of G-strings fell back to the countertop. “All that lovely innocence, mangled by its makers. Poor girls. Poor girls. Don’t understand. Didn’t see themselves. And them, the corrupters, they blame the seductive power of innocence. Innocents, that’s what all these girls are”—Wilma looked bitterly around the dressing room, judging every tawdry detail in the makeup lights’ glare—“though they don’t believe it, though they’d laugh and say they know better now. Corrupted innocents.”
“Big words,” Temple said. Old-fashioned, hellfire preacher words. “Are your daughters... in the business?”
Wilma nodded, her neutral-colored eyes distant. “Somewhere.”
“You’ve lost touch?”
“Lost them, yes.”
“I’m sorry. Was it a bad marriage?”
“Worse than I knew. I thought he only hit me, that that’s all he did. I thought I could take it, that I had to take it. I was so scared, so sure I had to be doing something wrong to make him mad. I stayed as long as I could. Too long.”
“What happened to your daughters?”
Her bleak eyes deadened further. “I found out he’d been messing with them, all the time. They were terrified of him, too.”
“How old were they?”
“When I finally found out? Six.”
Temple’s indrawn breath whistled between her teeth at the awfulness of it. “Then you took the kids and left?” Wilma’s head shook almost imperceptibly. “Then I had a breakdown. Nobody talked about such things then. Incest only happened in the Bible. I was committed to an institution.”
“And the kids?”
“Stayed with him. He was the father, and the mother was-—incompetent, they said.” Wilma’s lips distorted into a crooked smile that reminded Temple of a controlled, silent scream. “I was pretty confused and upset. No one believed me. And the kids were too scared to tell. He’d seen to that.”
She looked at Temple, her eyes clearing. Her tone became more vibrant, almost as if she were snapping out of a trance. “Oh, say, hon, did you get banged up too?” A strong, twisted hand reached toward Temple’s cheek.
Temple found herself dodging the gesture, even as she was shocked by how rude that was. “I’m fine. Just a... dumb accident.”
Wilma’s sympathetic expression grew weary. “Yeah. Sure. But look, I got some terrific cover-up in my bag. You’d be surprised how many of these dancers, come in banged up from here to Sunday—legs, arms, faces. Try it.”
Temple took the small tube of makeup, which claimed that the contents would cover bums and birthmarks: She’d never used this heavy-duty stuff before, so she gingerly dabbed some at the edges of her eyes. In the mirror, the lurid coloration that had seeped through her usual cover-up vanished.
“You’re such a pretty girl,” Wilma said in the same, sad monotone. “You don’t need to take that. You don’t need to work here.”
“I’m not a battered woman,” Temple said swiftly. “I was mugged. And I can’t let a setback like this keep me from working. Here, can I buy this tube—?” She reached for the tote bag on the floor.
Wilma’s hand, hard and warm, caught her wrist and held it, before she could extract her clutch purse.
“You don’t have to pay. I never charge anybody for that stuff.”
“Thanks.”
“A girl like you, brought up right, you shouldn’t be here.”
“I won’t be, much longer.” Temple tugged her hand free, straightened in the chair, took in the eerie emptiness of the dressing room with the sound of onstage life coming in faint and fuzzy over the loudspeaker.
“How old are you?” Wilma asked suddenly.
“Twenty-eight,” Temple answered. An icy spasm clutched her stomach.
“Twenty-eight. A good age. Old enough to know better. Young enough to not feel yourself falling apart yet. When’s your birthday?”
“I’m a Gemini,” Temple said, stalling for time. Her mind was dancing like water on a hot griddle, sizzling with warning. Birthday talk seemed so sinister... No one had been a bit interested in birthdays lately, except her and the murderer. No—! Birthdays expressed Wilma’s motherly instincts. Temple wouldn’t even think this way if she hadn’t been so overstressed and overworked, seeing death in unlikely places, in innocent faces.
Wilma was nodding, taking out needle and thread to repair one of the G-strings, as she considered Gemini. “May-to-June. A nice time of year to be born. Not a bad time to get married, either, or to have children, or to die. You’re a June baby, though, right? Right in the heart of Gemini?”
“June,” Temple answered reluctantly.
“What date?”
“Why?”
Wilma’s sparse eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I do a little cake for my girls’ birthdays. It’s no problem. They dance it off. You youngsters could eat an elephant and still look like toothpicks, with all the prancing you do. And all to that awful, loud, repeating music.”