Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple didn’t wear ankle bracelets. Then she felt the velvet brush. She looked down. Midnight Louie, of course, putting one sleek black velvet foot ahead of the other at a pace that had matched the two women’s.

  “Something I picked up in a dark alley some time,” Temple said, stopped and shrugging.

  “Hope it didn’t require medication,” Katt said. “Nemo is interested in your services?”

  “He likes my pedigree.” Temple cocked an eyebrow.

  Katt Zydeco stopped her catwalk advance and shrugged in her turn. “If you’re good enough for Nemo, you’re good enough for me.”

  “Hey,” Punch said. “What just happened here? We okayed Nemo hiring this little clueless redheaded dame and her cat and her grandmother? Or what?”

  Temple flashed one of her cards at him. “Looks like it. Expect to see a lot more of us as the Lust ‘n’ Lace empire expands. We are the total package when it comes to viral social media expansion.”

  Punch’s jaw remained dropped at hearing Temple’s jargon, as if hit by a heavyweight. Temple turned Electra around and they left.

  She hoped Midnight Louie had followed suit and left with them (but she didn’t look back because it would ruin their exit), so Punch would really be confused.

  She was sure Louie’s chronic curiosity would not allow him to leave such a mysterious building unexplored.

  9

  Girls Club

  “Well, Electra,” Temple said on returning to the Circle Ritz lobby, “I guess we’re back in the strip club business.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We need to pay Les Girls a visit.”

  “Why would we want to visit a strip club,” Electra asked glumly, “when we’ll soon have a new one so conveniently located in our backyard?”

  “We’re visiting Lindy Lukas.”

  “Lindy Lukas? I don’t know—oh, yeah, the ex-stripper. We met her during the G-string murder case, when I made my stripping debut on Max’s Hesketh Vampire motorcycle.”

  “I think the motorcycle stripped more than you did on that occasion, Electra.” Temple’s smile grew sad. “I have one of the stripper’s extra pair of black-cat design spikes, but I’ve never worn them. It’s hard to walk in a murder victim’s shoes.”

  “No kidding, but why are we seeing Lindy?”

  “I’m guessing if Katt Zydeco was a stripper, Lindy would know her.”

  “That’s right. Lindy is head of WHOOPE, the professional strippers organization. What did it stand for again?”

  “It was an unforgettably labored group acronym. Not my work. Let’s see. We Have an Organization Of Professional Ecdysiasts.”

  “Ecdysiasts describes snakes shedding their skins, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Electra said. “From what you learned at the stripping contest, some of them are from abusive backgrounds. They’re hardly snakes.”

  “And some of them are savvy self-employed businesswomen. You can’t stereotype them, so let’s see what Lindy knows about the new game in town.”

  Visiting a strip club in Las Vegas meant mingling with a crowd, even in the middle of the afternoon.

  Neon sandwiched Les Girls inside and out. Its several stages fostered a sense of intimacy over the space of a football field of skimpily clad flesh. Acts were mostly aimed at men, but women and couples populated the milling audience.

  The Frenchified name invoked Les Miz, the nickname of the smash musical made from Victor Hugo’s downer novel Les Miserables, “Les” being the French for “the”. “The Girls” were the consortium of strippers and ex-strippers who owned it.

  When Temple asked to see Lindy, she and Electra were escorted to the office by a tanned hunk wearing only a black satin posing pouch and bow tie. They skirted what looked like a Roman orgy scene featuring rock-hard pecs both female and male. Temple found women’s naked breast implants, all equally round and hard, as sexy as pink rubber duckies, but she wasn’t a man. She was also a 32A, so might be prejudiced.

  “It’s so plastic,” Electra commented. “Having something like this attracting crowds and parking and noise twenty-four-seven would drive out my tenants and kill my wedding clientele. The battle’s lost.”

  “Hang in there,” Temple said, regretting the expression at once, given their escort.

  Lindy’s office reeked of twice the cigarette smoke in the performing area outside, but when the door shut, the raunchy music and din died.

  “Hey.” Lindy rose from behind her huge, paper-covered desk. “It’s the gals from the stripper contest, Miss Nancy Drew, Jr., and Ms. Motorcycle Mama. Is that killer cat of yours still smokin’ and tokin’? Miss…Tempe as in Arizona, isn’t it?”

  “Temple as in Acropolis. No, Midnight Louie never inhales anything but his food, as long as it isn’t Free-to-Be Feline.”

  “Say, my Chauncey loves that Free-to-Be stuff, but he’s just a ‘found’ cat, nothing Fancy Feasty.”

  “The best kind, like Louie.”

  “Have a seat, if you can shovel ’em off.”

  They followed her advice, heaping more papers on the desk.

  “I see,” Temple said, “you have a desktop computer. Haven’t you gone paperless yet?”

  “No,” said Lindy, “and I haven’t quit smoking yet either.”

  Temple had judged Lindy as a plain speaker from the first time she met her, which was why they’d come here. Lindy’s T-shirt and jeans covered a buxom frame that hinted at a previous life as a Nature’s Best hourglass figure, back when she was performing stripper.

  Whatever she had been then, she liked total absence of artifice now. Her frankly dyed hair was a dull dead black. No plastic surgery had touched an unmade-up face puckered at the lips and eyes from a merciless nicotine habit. Las Vegas was the capital of “Smoking Allowed”.

  Lindy lit a thin Virginia Slim cigarette, and spun her office chair so she could put her feet in well-worn, no-name brand sneakers atop it. No more spikes for her. “I assume I can do something for you?”

  Electra shared Temple’s confidence in Lindy. She pored out her woes about the traitorous ex-husband and the imminent degrading of her livelihood property.

  Lindy’s already crumpled features squinched farther with thought. “So you want to know about the possible new owners? I can tell you about the so-called managers. Punch Adcock was a minor heavyweight boxer, born William Adcock. Didn’t throw enough fights to keep going, so he did some muscle work for loan sharks, bookies, any surviving mob elements in town. I know about him because he hassled some of my girls, and I had to hire my own muscle to teach him to play nice around my place of business.”

  “Ooh,” said Electra, looking at Temple. “That doesn’t look good for getting nice new neighbors.”

  “What about Katt Zydeco?” Temple asked Lindy.

  “Long-time stripper. Knows the biz. Has an R-rated dominatrix website. Lucrative at the right venue. More upscale than my joint.”

  “Whips and chains are ‘upscale’?” Electra asked.

  Lindy nodded and so did Temple. “Powerful men,” Lindy said, “crave to relieve the pressure by being helpless at the orders and whip-hands of a dominant woman. Most of it is strictly ordered role playing.”

  “And after they pay a pretty penny they go back to their offices and underpay all their women workers.” Temple snorted. “Poor guys. Fifty shades of freaked out.”

  “Vegas draws a lot of macho-challenged men with money,” Lindy pointed out.

  Temple nodded. “The brief, shining moment when all Vegas went family friendly in the nineties is forgotten history. Now, all the major hotels offer topless swimming pools, and Vegas hotel-clubs like the Cosmopolitan aggressively market ‘Just the right amount of wrong’, a campaign that started out with implied crush videos, the worst kind of porn.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” Electra said, “what is that?”

  “If you don’t know, Electra, you don’t want to know. Let’s just say I hope PE
TA got on their tails for that ad.”

  Temple frowned. No doubt Punch and Katt were an unsavory couple. If they were just the managers, who were the owners? She asked Lindy for a guess on that.

  “Anything goes in Vegas,” Lindy said, “so you could be dealing with a huge multi-hotel corporation, or, if you’re really unlucky, some remnant of the mob cutting itself in for a piece of the action.”

  Electra was even more discouraged by the forces leveled against her business. “The Mob. I thought it was just a tourist attraction these days.”

  “‘If it plays in Vegas, it stays in Vegas,’” Lindy said on a dragon’s breath of exhaled smoke and cynicism.

  When Temple and Electra got up to leave, Lindy, cigarette in hand, ushered them through the crowded bars and performance areas that were as deliberately confusing as any major hotel casino layout. Vegas had built labyrinths long before home furnishings giant IKEA did it, designed so you could never leave (like at the Hotel California of song), and so you just kept spending money.

  “Wait.” Temple stopped dead, frowning toward a line of men lined up before one stage to push bills down the strippers’ G-strings.

  “What?” Electra asked.

  “One of those guys looks familiar.” Temple frowned with distaste.

  Lindy laughed. “Of course you think you recognize someone. Every guy in Vegas ends up feeding slot machines and pushing bills under G-strings like they were clotheslines.”

  “Not the men we know,” Electra said.

  Lindy rolled her eyes with doubt. “Which guy is it?”

  Temple strained to follow the figure through a crowd mostly taller than she was. “The skinny but slumped one wearing low-slung jeans and a soul patch and gimme cap. A scruffy thirty-something.”

  “I’ve seen about fifty guys like him just this week,” Lindy said. “Definitely a resident, not a tourist. Dollar-bill-only guy, killing time on an electrician’s or plumber’s lunch hour.”

  Electra was indignant. “You wouldn’t know someone like that, Temple.”

  “I just had a memory flash, a weird sense of familiarity, but I can’t say from where or when. On the other hand, Las Vegas is my beat. I get around town a lot, and must see some people in passing more than once.”

  “That guy sounds like someone you’d never want to see again.” Electra wrinkled her nose. “I’m so depressed to think that losers like him infest Vegas, and will be congregating in my neighborhood once that strip club gets going.”

  Temple put her arm through Electra’s as they left Les Girls and were brought to a standstill by the bright light of day outside the club’s eternal interior dark, all glitter and grind.

  They paused as their eyes adjusted.

  “We need to know if the buyers have mob connections,” Temple said. “When we sic the Fontana brothers on them, the boys will know who the current players are. That kind of iffy backing could jinx any deal. So cheer up!” Temple shook Electra’s forearm playfully. “I don’t want you worrying while Matt and I are out of town, all right?”

  “I wish you weren’t leaving right now.” Electra sounded truly forlorn.

  Temple realized her landlady’s upbeat, funky image and personality obscured the fact that she was an aging woman alone in a rapidly changing world. And her livelihood might become a casualty any minute.

  Temple tightened her grip on Electra’s arm with an encouraging squeeze. “Matt and I will only be gone one night and two days, Electra.”

  “I wish Max still lived at the Circle Ritz.”

  Temple felt stunned. Surely Electra knew the place couldn’t hold both of Temple’s…well, lovers, at once.

  “You have the Fontana Brothers to keep watch over you,” Temple said, only then realizing they had recently “adopted” the Circle Ritz as a hangout. Because…they saw what Temple hadn’t realized until today.

  “I’ve let Nicky and Van know we’ll be gone for a short while,” Temple said. And maybe forever if Matt’s Chicago job came through. “This trip is only two days, Electra. A lightning raid on the relatives. What can go wrong in forty-eight hours?”

  10

  Off-Strip Joint

  “I gotta talk to some people,” Woodrow Wetherly had said that morning. “You better come to my place around nine thirty tonight and drive with me. That fancy car of yours can go in my garage instead of my beater. It just screams Steal Me. What were you thinking?”

  “It was a gift.”

  “From who? Your worst enemy?”

  Woody huffed and puffed to open the rickety garage door with a hand-hold at the bottom. Matt rushed to take over the job, overwhelmed by the scent of gas and oil. Wetherly’s place didn’t say much for the retirement pensions in law enforcement. Matt wondered what Molina would get.

  Apparently the aging Dodge’s air-conditioning didn’t work, because Woody lowered the windows. As darkness crept over the western Spring Mountains, Woody steered them through the tangle of settled Las Vegas valley real estate where Interstate highway 93-95 intersected Highway 15, called the Spaghetti Bowl. These were tangled, dimming streets far from the bright lights and glitter of the Strip’s artificial neon sunburst.

  Just as the Manhattan theater scene supported Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway venues, Las Vegas had its Off-Strip and Off-Off Strip drinking establishments.

  By the time you got to Off-Off, the bars would be more accurately described as dives.

  Matt had explored these places when he’d first come to Vegas searching for his no-good stepfather, Cliff Effinger. This time he was looking for old cops and old crooks who might belly up to the same bars together even though they were presumably out of the game. This time, he’d come prepared to fade into the foreground.

  He’d visited one of Temple’s beloved vintage shops to nab banged-up jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt topped with a plaid long-sleeved work shirt. He even messed up his altar-boy smooth blond hair with some drugstore gel goop, teased into a point at the top. The effect was still too tidy, but would have to do.

  Tired swirls of neon lettering indicated the bars among the lingerie, tattoo, head shops and Vegas T-shirt emporiums in these shabby, one-story strip shopping areas.

  Tired girls and women anchored darker street corners, one leg cocked to rest a hooker high-heel against the wall. Matt saw the sheen of their neon-tinted eye-whites as their gazes followed him. Some shifted their weight onto two feet, ready to approach him through the open car window, but he didn’t look, didn’t stare, just gazed listlessly ahead like a hopeless drunk out of beer money.

  LUCKY STARS the nearest neon sign announced in a meteor shower of gold, green and blue stars. Cars and motorcycles kept lurching company in the front parking strip, but Woody found an empty, if tight, slot for his ponderous old Dodge sedan.

  “Here we are, Mr. Midnight. Slots and jukebox in the front, pool table and hookers in the back. Tabletop nudie entertainment, everywhere.”

  Woody nudged Matt through the door first. Matt’s pushing palm encountered a stickiness that could be any unclean bodily fluid he’d care to imagine. He wiped his hand on the jeans. They’d be in the Circle Ritz Dumpster tomorrow.

  Smoke haze was even thicker here than in the Strip casinos. Wetherly bulled through broad-shouldered guys wearing biker leather and jeans jackets to a large, empty corner booth. The old man sat with a fervent oomph, then pushed himself grunting along the curved vinyl seat until he sat in the center, back to the wall.

  A jerk of his head had Matt sliding in beside him.

  The cigarette smoke and pot fumes made Matt’s vision blur, but he could see both sides of the oval bar and most of the room on either side.

  “You have an in with the maître d’?” he asked Woody.

  An elbow jabbed Matt’s side, the one with the bullet wound, and Woody wheezed out a pained breath. “That’s a good one. Yeah, Mr. Midnight, I have an in with the maître d’. Been coming here fifty-five years. You could say I’m married to the j
oint.”

  “Have you ever been?” Matt asked.

  “I’ve been a lot of things. What?”

  “Married, I mean.”

  “Oh, hell. I don’t remember. I do remember some wedding chapel, so I was either a justice of the peace, a bridegroom, or Elvis assisting at a ceremony. You never been married.” He leaned forward with a piercing look.

  “Not yet,” Matt said.

  “Bet you got a girlfriend who would be shocked, shocked, if she knew you were here.”

  “I won’t take that bet.” Matt glanced at surrounding bar tops to glimpse a lot of luridly lit topless and maybe bottomless flesh, but the array of lights, particularly black light that turned skin an eerie spoiled skim milk purple-white, was so exotic it dampened the impression of wall-to-wall nudity. Oddly, half of the customers were favoring drinks over ogling.

  “Boilermakers.”

  “Huh?” Matt said, startled, but as he looked back, he saw Wetherly was addressing a waitress, topless, who’d appeared at their table, and whose mascara looked older than she was.

  “How many, sir?” she asked, holding up her pad with newbie importance and obscuring her personal scenery.

  “Two.” Wetherly raised stubby fingers.

  Matt tried not to react. Topless waitresses and boilermakers were not his socializing style. And mixing beer and booze seemed redundant.

  Wetherly waggled the fingers. “Each.”

  Matt tried not to choke. He needed a clear head, so he had to be either a slow or sloppy drinker tonight.

  “This is how you do it.” The old guy leaned close, the stale cigar breath coming through teeth riper than a rotten fish head. “Bull your way in. Establish a presence. Then wait.”

  “For what?”

  “You look like you came right off the set of The Bachelor. I will stop calling you ‘kid’, but guys in here won’t. Clean-cut, that’s a gutsy thing to be in this part of town. They’ll want to settle their curiosity, but then maybe we can satisfy some of yours about Cliffie Effinger. You gotta give a little to get something.”