The girl was lying quietly by the swimming pool, as if she’d been sunbathing all day and had forgotten to go inside when the sun went down. With her purple rhinestone tiara and spangled low cut bathing dress, she looked like a gaudy South American macaw that had drifted to earth in the courtyard of the Glass Slipper Hotel. This bird had laid down gently for a rest, with its knees drawn up and its head thrown back. But she wouldn’t be waking up from this sleep anytime soon.
I touched her body gently with my foot. She’d been strangled with a string of pearls seemingly taken from her costume…and pretty recently by the look of it. Marty McDonough, the hotel detective, had called me up about it an hour ago. “There’s a dame dead in the courtyard,” he’d said. “One of the water ballet girls from our floorshow show Rigadoo.”
I gathered he was hoping I’d spot something they needed to hide before the cops showed up so they could cover it up, but I pretended I didn’t know that. A guy’s got to make a living. So I just said, “Can you tell me a little more about the dame?”
Marty’s a big guy with a torso like a tank. His bones are so solid I could practically hear him shrug over the telephone. “I don’t know anything about her,” he said. “Not even her name yet. All those synchronized swimmers look alike. That’s the whole point of them.”
Of course it turned out she did have a name: Iris O’ Roarke. She’d grown up in the Central Valley, learning how to dance in the water at the local Y, then coming to Los Angeles like everyone else, with the dream of being discovered by one of the studios. In the meantime she was performing in the pool at the Glass Slipper every night, two shows an evening, at 8 and 11. The girls looked glamorous, but it was hard work being in Rigadoo. There’s a lot of skill in those intricate routines they do – hours of practice during the day in the hotel’s clover-shaped pools to learn the precisely choreographed routines, many laps swum in the interim to keep their legs – and other parts -- shapely, and countless breathing exercises, such as hanging upside down with their legs in a split, with weights made of gallon jugs of water tied to their ankles to make sure their heads stay under. All for $15 a show.
There were also costume fittings. The lady in charge of those was named Myrtle McBrady, and she was a real battle axe: short black hair, a jaw like Jake LaMotta, and a slightly obvious mustache. It was Myrtle’s responsibility to oversee the fitting and sewing of 16 water ballet outfits which changed color and style about once a month – no small task, given that each girl’s admittedly scanty bathing suit had to be beaded with thousands of hand-stitched spangles. According to the other girls, Myrtle was mean as hell. She would manhandle them into their costumes, often fondling their breasts as she jammed them into the tight brassieres, and if they didn’t fit that well, she didn’t care. They were shoddily made pieces of fabric, yet if anything went wrong, an important strap broke, or some beadwork fell off into the water, she would charge the girls money to her to fix it.
Iris didn’t take kindly to that kind of treatment though. Her Dad was chief of police back in Manteca and she knew extortion when she met it. The other day she’d lost the corsage that was affixed to that month’s costume, and when Myrtle demanded $20 to replace it, Iris threatened to take it up with management. She also refused to pay up – but she had to have that corsage for the next night’s performance, or else she’d get the sack.
That night Iris snuck back into the workshop to make one out of the special purple waterproof appliqué material that only Myrtle had charge of. Rummaging around in the dark, Iris discovered a number of parcels of neatly packed cocaine, hidden inside the bolts of shiny material. As she pulled back the curtain on the cupboard full of evidence, she heard a noise behind her. It was Myrtle herself, dressed only in a giant version of their water ballet outfits. Her bare legs looked like oil derricks encased in fishnet, and there was a suspicious bulge in the bathing suit bottom. Purple spangles covered the vast expanse of her chest, but there weren’t quite enough of them to cover its essential hairiness. All of a sudden, Iris realized what she should have known all along.
Before she could even scream, Myrtle had grabbed a nearby string of fake pearls and strangled Iris on the spot. Then she dragged her to the pool area to get the corpse away from the scene of the crime. But I figured that no one but a seamstress would have access to the murder weapon, and I pegged her as a ‘he’ the minute I saw him. After all, murder is my business.
That night at the Glass Slipper, the water ballerinas closed the gap where Iris should have been, and Rigadoo went on as scheduled.
Superb.
Hi Gina. Great project. Can I send you a story?