HARD WOMEN

In this fourth adventure—a letdown after last year's smartly worked-out Hard Luck—Chicago freelancer Cat Marsala is putting together a TV documentary on prostitution and, in the process, offering her teeny apartment as a temporary haven for high-priced call-girl Sandra Love. Sandra skips out with $37.00 of Cat's pocket change, stokes up on cocaine—and gets herself murdered in a nearby alley. Whodunit? Cat suspects, first, a coke dealer, next a holier- than-thou alderman who, on the sly, owned an escort service, then a pair of vice cops—naive, young Gavin who dated Sandra, and hard- boiled Ross, who introduced Cat to her. After alerting her main suspect to Sandra's deep dark secret (she was HIV-positive), Cat finds herself trying to outrun her killer on slippery train tracks- -with predictably disastrous results for the perp. Nothing new or enlightening here, and the best dialogue—most of it cribbed from Shakespeare—comes from the mouth of Cat's pet parrot Long John.