“You bring cakes for each one’s birthday?”
Wilma nodded. “Homemade. My last was a Lady Baltimore. Nobody makes Lady Baltimore cakes anymore, but nothing’s too good for my girls.”
“I noticed some half-eaten cake in this dressing room earlier in the week.”
Wilma gave another complacent, grandmother-sewing kind of nod. “That was my Lady Baltimore, what was left of it. They gobble it up like little pigs.”
“Then you... know their birthdays?”
“Course I do. Couldn’t make the cakes otherwise. When is yours, dear? I’ll make you a Red Devil’s Food, haven’t made one of those for ages. When’s your birthday?”
“June,” Temple temporized, “and not for a days and days. Wilma, what do you think about the killings?”
“Terrible,” the woman said. “Terrible things. What was done to my girls was terrible.”
Temple had a feeling that Wilma was not talking about the murders, but about the wrongs that preceded them. “Then you knew Glinda and Kitty, and the twins?”
“I know all my girls,” she said.
“Did you know that Glinda and Kitty had abusive men in their lives, and that one of the twins was molested by her father?”
“Only one?” Wilma’s face slackened with shock. “Only one twin? No, it must be that only one admitted it, and the other denied it. Denial is very common in such cases.” Wilma sounded like a parrot mouthing the party line dispensed in some shrink’s office, but then, she ought to know that routine, Temple thought.
“That’s true,” Temple agreed. “How sad that those women won't be here to perform tomorrow. And they all celebrated birthdays so recently.”
I remember doing cakes for them, but were their birthdays that recent?”
Temple ticked off the dates on her fingers. “Dorothy/Glinda was March. Kitty was April. And the twins were June—Gemini like me. Isn’t that odd?”
Wilma shrugged and tied off a knot. She picked up a polished chrome sewing shears to cut the thread. “Everybody has to be born sometime.”
“But isn’t it odd that the victims’ birthdays are almost in sequence through the calendar: March, April, June. Except that May is missing.”
Wilma paused to think. “No, it’s not.”
“It’s not? You mean that there’s another victim nobody knows about?”
Wilma pursed her lips. “You had to know the girls. You had to be around to listen. Gypsy and June. Everybody knew they were stage names. Everybody figured they referred to those famous strippers, Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister June Havoc.”
“They didn’t?”
“Yes, they did, except that June was June’s real given name to begin with. You see?”
Passing laughter reverberated in the hall for a moment as a last gaggle of strippers rushed upstairs. Wilma rose and drew the dressing room door shut on the sound.
Temple’s mouth opened and her hands clenched. “I don’t see anything,” she admitted.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this.” Wilma resumed her chair but set her sewing things aside. “They hated it themselves, and tried to forget it. Sometimes twins are funny about things. June and her sister were born a few minutes apart.”
Temple nodded. “On June 1, 1967.”
“No.” Wilma was definite. “I heard it from their own lips. June was born on June 1, 1967. At twelve-thirteen a.m.”
“And—omigod. Gypsy was born earlier, the night of May 31st, and christened... May!”
Wilma smiled fondly. “They hated all the school jokes about ‘May’ and ‘June.’ I think they even hated being separated by as much as midnight. Those girls were so close. It would have been cruel to kill one and leave the other.”
An ugly thought trespassed in Temple’s mind. “Just as it was the height of cruelty to abuse one, and not the other! Gypsy was right. Her father had victimized only her to intensify his manipulation of the girls. And she’s the one who changed her name, May, because she had come to loathe the man who called her by her birth-name only to violate her.”
Wilma’s face wore a prudish expression. “I wouldn’t know about that, except that Gypsy was set on inviting their father to the competition. I wonder if he knows they’re... gone? I wonder if he’ll find out when he comes?”
“More to the point, would he even care?”
“No. If he cared about anything other than his sick needs, he wouldn’t have done what he did, hurt his girls beyond fixing. You can break human beings, but you can’t mend them. You can’t baste them together again. Nobody takes care of the broken ones. I gave the twins their cake June 1st. May yearned to be June. Maybe she wanted to share her sister’s innocent memories. Now they won’t have to remember anything ugly.”
“So May 31, 1967, had to have been a Wednesday,” Temple mused, drawing her forefinger through the glittery line of opalescent powder that Wilma sold and that Dorothy, Kitty, June and Gypsy had used. All gone now, dust from a dead butterfly’s wing. Beautiful, fragile fairy dust, like Tinker Bell’s. Temple had seen that sheen somewhere else... on a powder puff. Savannah Ashleigh had used the same stuff on Yvette. And had bought it from the same source. And Midnight Louie—
“Gracious!”
Wilma’s exclamation made Temple jump. The woman was squeezing her fingertip until it reddened. She had pierced her finger with a needle.
“Have you got a kerchief?” Wilma asked.
“I’ll look.” Temple, confused, her heart pounding, trying to think when all that came into her mind was the unthinkable, lifted the tote to the countertop and slapped its contents to the Formica piece by piece until she delved deep enough to find out.
Her clutch purse with its cargo of cash, credit cards and driver’s license was the first item out, then her bulging day arranger and address book, then her cosmetic bag, then...
Wilma had picked up the clutch purse and unsnapped the flap. .Temple was about to protest this incursion on her most valuables. Then she remembered the little plastic window inside that displayed her driver’s license.
Wilma was smiling and nodding at that very item.
The license, Temple recalled, listed her address, her number, and her DOB, as police shorthand put it. Date of Birth.
Stricken, she stopped rummaging through her belongings to state at Wilma. Opalescent dust, even on a powder puff meant for a pampered pussums. Oh, Louie, that wasn’t a fuzzy “mouse” you dragged home for the heck of it, but a vital clue! The murderer had left a trail in powder. Temple’s renegade forefinger drew an exclamation point in the glittery dust that had decorated four dead bodies and one cat.
She knew who the murderer was. Unfortunately, the murderer knew exactly who she was now, and that she knew.
Wilma set Temple’s clutch purse aside to snap open the huge silver ring to release a spandex G-string. She was a beefy woman with strong hands and a mission. Temple realized that she had just made her hit list.
31
. . .Saves Nine
“I really need to check what's going on upstairs.” Temple got up to step past Wilma.
The woman rose like a double-knit wall and blocked her path. Temple glanced down at Wilma’s black slacks. Her thighs strained the fabric. Big rough hands closed on Temple’s fragile wrist bones.
“You forgot your purse,” Wilma said.
“It’s fine down here. You watch it.”
Temple tried to move but found herself frozen by an unmoved, an unmoving, an unmovable counterforce. She looked into Wilma’s expressionless face, meaning to argue, and saw inarguable purpose.
“No one will hit you again.” The woman’s promise was as vehement as a threat. “No man will abuse you. You won’t have to sell yourself on the stage because of what they did to you.”
“I’m not a stripper! I’m a public relations specialist. I haven’t been abused, only mugged. Wilma, please—”