"Look," Electra insisted, "this is the mother of all cat shows. Every recognized breed will be represented, even curly coated Rexes. And there's a costume show; that ought to be newsworthy."
"Cats in clothes? That's silly; Electra, and probably the Humane Society would have a thing or two to say about it."
"Not a meow. These breeders are fanatics about cat care. They wouldn't do anything harmful. In fact, it's quite the other way around."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh--" Electra reclaimed the fiyer to stare at the obligatory facts of date, time and place. "My friend Cleo Kilpatrick, who raises Manx, says the Fancy Feline Club that's sponsoring this show has gotten some odd phone calls."
"Odd catcalls? Sounds like an ill-tempered audience. What kind of odd calls can a cat club get?"
"Peop le calling up and . . . hissing, or maybe it's real snakes. They can't tell."
"Someone is calling up a cat club and putting agitated snakes on the line?"
"Fascinating, isn't it? I thought you'd be intrigued."
"Intrigued! Why on earth would you want to involve me with these loonies?"
"Several of my friends are Fancy Feliners and they don't take these calls lightly. Lots of folks hate cats, for some reason, and these purebred cats are worth a lot of money. The cat people are real worried."
For answer, Temple dug again in her tote bag. She fi nally pulled out a slim case, from which she deftly extracted a pale m auve card with her medium-long fi ngernails, which today were varnished a tasteful seashell pink.
"Read my card. I t s ays 'Temple Barr, P.R.'--not 'P.I .' "
Electra shrugged generous shoulders even more generously shrouded in a howling Hawaiian jungle print. "Maybe it's not a bad idea to broaden your job description, the way you keep running into murders."
"You sound like Matt."
"Speaking of Mr. Devine, l saw you two playing out by the pool----"
"Working out, Matt's teaching me the fundamentals of self-defense. ' '
"How are you two getting along?"
"You're the one who sho uld be the P.I., Electra, Just fine, me student, he teacher. He taught me how to turn my wrist to break a handgrip and tried to talk me into thinking about how to push an attacker's eyes out."
"Yuck!" Electra's gray eyes, the only neutral thing about her, narrowed to revulsed slits. "That nice man knows ugly things like that?"
"Apparently we nice women should, too, if we're going to be safe on city streets. How about it? l promised Lindy I'd go over to Paradise and see the revamped Kitty City Club. Wanta go with me?"
Electra waved the pink sheet. "Trade-sies?"
T emple groaned. "Oh, all right. I 'll contact the cat people; I feel like I'm in a forties' horror movie already. Call me an old-fashioned girl, but I hate going to a stripper joint alone."
"Whatsa matter?" Electra chuckled as she locked her dou ble doors and stuffed the pink flyer into Temple's tote.
"Afraid you'll get mistaken for one of the acts?" Temple rolled her eyes. "Not likely. I'm afraid I'll get taken for having unnatural inclinations."
By then they had reached the elevator. Electra pushed the mother-of-pearl button. With a weary wheeze, the elderly car came creaking upward. Both women faced forward, contemplating the noises.
"I think making crank calls to a cat club is weirder than women going to a strip club," Electra said fi nally.
"Nowadays," Temple said, sasha ying into the wood paneled car fi rst, "probably."
Broad daylight made no bones about the purpose of the building at Paradise and Twain: "Strip joint" was written all over it in the rude graffiti that covered the boxy, windowless, stucco exterior. An u nlit neon sign loomed over the fl at roof like scaffolding abandoned by da Vinci and ceded to Peter Maxx.
"New name," Electra noted, impressed.
"New female management," Temple said. "'Les Girls.' I like it, much classier than 'Kitty City.'"
"I can't imagine why that greasy Ike Wetzel agreed to sell after all his shenanigans to blackmail his old dancers and control the strippers' contest."
Temple glanced at Electra. In broad daylight there was no overlooking the silver hair worn in a modifi ed Mohawk and streaked with stripes of royal blue to match the surreal palm leaves in her muumuu pattern.
"I doubt old Ike had much to say about it," Temple admitted. "The stripper murders brought up so much bad old business in his personal and professional life that Lindy was fi nally able to buy him out before someone drove him out. Let's go see what wonders worker-ownership can do for a strip club."
"'Whatever," Electra said, "it takes major money to run a place like this, however humble-looking. l don't see how a bunch of strippers managed it."
"Consort ium, Electra, consortium of ecdy siasts," Temple corrected her in airy tones as they strolled into this showcase of female fl esh. "You'll never make a P.R. person without the politically correct spin."
Dark as Hades, Still, Cold as an archangel's breathes . Still, Loud as a den of drummers, s till.
Temple and Electra stopped at the chill dark inside the door, waiting for their eves and their body temperature to adjust. Their ears were another matter. Rock music blared at concert pitch.
Temple leaned close to Electra. "Do you think it's a tad less loud?" she shrieked .
Electra nodded her two-toned head, her sliver streaks painted a glowing lavender by the ultraviolet lights above the stage.
A cocktail waitress--pert, blond and attired in something unbelievably brief and interesting, even to other women, merely from a technical point of view, like "How does she get into it without dislocating anything essential?" and "Can yo u wash it in a teacup, really?" -- ankled near enough to be perceived in the perpetual twilight.
According to the movement of her mouth, she was asking, "Drinks?"
"Lindy," Temple both mouthed and screamed back, hop ing that was not the name of something new and trendy and alcoholic, like a Lindy Hop, Or a Lite beer, maybe?
A pert blond nod and the two women were following a mostly unveiled rear to the front of the establishment.
Me n, alone and in twos and threes sat scattered at the tables. Now was the pre - noon hour, a predictable dead zone in the stripper business. Lethargic girls gyrated at poles distributed atop the bar, fanning themselves with their ghostly Seven- Year-Itch skirts (literal knockoffs of Marilyn Monroe's white, circle-skirted, halter-top dress immortalized in the hot updraft of a sidewalk grating and the camera's icy, ogling eye) . They left less to the imagina tion than Monroe had managed to do.
At a side table, Lindy Lukas was waiting wrapped in a cigarette fog. Strip palaces and their habitues were not wor ried about such wimpish concerns as secondhand smoke.
"Sit down," Lindy panto m imed with proprietary gestures of both hand and mouth. She lifted a glass afl oat with urine-colored liquid. Both Temple and Electra shook their head.
Lindy stood, smiled , and beckoned them across the fl oor, past the raised stage where a woman wearing a scant collec tion of glitter-dusted rubber bands was writhing to the shrill promise of "She Works Hard for the Money."
In moments they had ducked through a curtained door way----not the o ne used by performers to enter-- and were abl e to shut a door behind it and fi nd themselves in the plain- jane women's john: two cubicles and a sink.
"Ooh," Electra said, now that conversation was possible despite the bass t hump-thump-thump beyond the graffiti-deco rated door. "That costume on stage looks as if it would hurt!"
"It doesn't if you're in shape," Lindy said cheerfully.
She herself was retired from stripping and had gone hap pily to overweight and jogging suits adorned with outrageous say ings. Today's was "Get It Up Before I t Gets Up and Leaves."
Her dyed hair was as matte-black as the drugstore eyeliner choking her eyes into smoky slits. The cigarette rode her fi ngers like a favorite rin g, fogging her voice with world weary harshness. But her hazel eyes brimm ed with excite ment.
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p; "Wait'll you see what we've done in the dressing room," she told them. "Don't ask any questions; just look."
She fl ourished another door open. Temple prepared her self for the long, dispirited all ey of facing mirrors, furniture - less space, concrete fl oor studded with cigarette butts, and battered lockers at one end.
"Oh. This is nice." Elec tra edged over the green indoor outdoor carpet like a pleasantly surprised realtor, "Very cozy. '
"Look." Lindy waved her cigarette hand at one wall, a magician drawing smoke away from an illusion.
A sign-in board had blanks for each performer's name and hours. Another board held an array of combination locks for the lockers, unheard of in the stripping business, where privacy was a bad joke from beginning to end. A third board, labeled "Miscellany," held tacked-up plastic baggies fi lled with safety pins, Band-Aids, tampons, sample perfume vials, dark makeup for tan marks, light makeup for bruises, nail fi les, run-stop-- everything the improperly attired stripper might need in a pinch.
"Neat." Temple studied the array, hunting ideas for her own travel kit-cum- tote bag. Then she looked down the once-naked facing count ertops flanked by mirrors. Light weight metal folding chairs painted in rainbow colors lined up along both sides, like would-be perches for Walt Disney butterfl ies.
"It could be any chorus girls' dressing room," Temple said in amazement, remembering the bus-station rest-room air that had haunted this dressing room the last time she'd seen it, when it was as if the women who used it were not worth a mom ent's convenience. No food stamps littered the floor like unused bus transfers. No dreary, gray functional pall draped everything like a spider web.
Lindy's beaming smile could only be called maternal. "You're right. Classy, Ike would have--" She glanced nervously at Electra's venerable silver hair.
"You remember 'Moll Philanders' from the Over-Sexty Divisi on of the contest," Temple said, "Black leather and the silver Hesketh Vampire ."
"--shit a brick. " Lindy, though shocked, suddenly relaxed. studying the now-demure Electra. "Hey, that was some bitchin' number you did with that motorcycle."
"Thank you, dear," Electra said modestly. "Not everybody has to go undercover by uncovering, but I managed. This is very homey."
"Yeah, thanks." Lindy whirled back to Temple. "Oh, and did you notice the Midnight Louie shrine?"
"Louie? A shrine? He would be pleased. What do you mean?"
"Well, he nabbed the strangler, didn't he, with his own personal claws? We hav e only one unlocked locker, and it's all his."
She pointed. One of the repainted lockers--royal blue--stood ajar, its bottom lined in turquoise crushed velvet, the kind usually found on overstuffed sofas in seedy furniture stores near downtown bus stations.
Lindy bent to pull out two bowls from under the locker, then gesture with a nicotine pointer to the locker's top shelf. "A variety of food in case he shows up."
Temple trotted over on her high heels to eve the stacked cans with suspicion. "He really should be eating Free-to-be-Feline exclusively."
Lindy shrugged and straightened up with an impressive joint creak. "Let the poor dude live a little."
"But I don't understand, Why the royal treatment for Louie?"
"How do you think he nailed the Goliath killer? He was here that day; he must have spotted the perp then."
"What day?"
"The day you , that prissy protester and I came over here to see what a real club looked like Afterward, one of the girls said she found a black cat slammed into one of the lockers. She let him out. He must have been stalking his suspect."
"I thought I saw a big black cat skedaddling as we left that day, but I figured Louie couldn't be way over here . . . though he does like chorus girls' dressing rooms, I hear."
"Anyway, we figured giving a locker to you would be kind of silly, and you wouldn't much care for the association, so we decided on the cat instead. And we like the company."
"He comes to visit?"
"Sure." Lindy tapped the top shelf. "This is primo cat crap; Doris got it with her food stamps."
Temple let her eyes roll. She could see the headline now:
"Destitute Stripper Lives on Cat Food." Thus do tabloid rumors begin. And meanwhile, Louie was living it up in every dressing room in town. She turned to Electra.
"You should have seen this room before."
"Not nice, huh?"
Temple and Lindy nodded in grim tandem.
"Well, it's real cheery now," Electra pronounced. "Makes me want to roll the old H esketh Vampire out of the shed and tune up 'Wild Thing.' "
"Hey," said Lindy, "you can do your act in my place anytime."
Electra managed a polite simper of demur, but she looked more pleased with herself than a woman of well over sixty should in a strip joint.
"So it's your entire place now?" Temple asked, "Me and the other girls--and our silent partners."
"Silent partners? They're not--"
"Nothing shady," Lindy said quickly. "Think we'd screw it up now after fi nally gettin g a club to run by ourselves? No way, Mae West! We found some guys with a little money and a lot of time to invest. They should be here by now. Come on, I want you to meet them."
Temple dragged the Plexiglas high heels of her black patent-leather Stuart Weitzman's as she followed Lindy and Electra back into the boo m-box atmosphere beyond the ladies' john. She didn't want to meet the sort of men who back strip clubs, and certainly not while she was wearing patent leather shoes! Much as she supported these women taking some control over their lives---and livelihoods--she still suffered qualms of political correctness at the whole idea of strippers. She had glimpsed too much of the life's ugly underbelly of use and abuse during the stripper contest and the preceding murders to like it. Love the stripper, hate the strip.
Oh, joy. The piped-in music was momentarily mute. Quiet was an assault of another sort, that made the stripped-down, functional architecture of raised horseshoe stage and bar, tables and chairs, seem perverse, especially the brass fi remen's poles shining here and there like something Faye Wray should be chained to.
A group of men sat at one of the big tables up front, right by the stage lip and overhead lights and sunken fans aimed to blow up hair and skirts--what there was of them.
Temple was shocked to recognize one of the men.
"Eightball?" She was even more shocked by how her voice rang out in the uncommon stillness.
"Eightball!" Electra roared with affection, descending on the slight old guy like a Hesketh Vampire, all silver and blue and raucous and revv ed up.
"How you been?" Electra asked, embracing him heartily.
"Hey, Wild Blue how goes the cloud chase?"
Another old gent nodded, and from where she hung back, Temple could still see how he got his nickname. Somehow he'd stolen Paul Newman's eves, and maybe even Paul wasn't the gritty youngster he used to be in old movies.
The introductions were a fl urry that left Temple aware of tan, seamed faces, of thin or absent-without-leave hair, of ears even bigger than Ross Perot's, of shy smiles and gnarled hands that gripped hers with surprising strength.
The names rolled by li ke a vaudeville cast: Eightball O'Rourke. Wild Blue Pike. Spuds Lonnigan-----really! Pitchblende O'Hara, Cranky Ferguson. Another name came up. The Glory Hole Gang.
"Yeah," said Wild Blue, sitti ng, as they all did, after drag ging chairs over for Temple, Electra and Lindy. Gentlemen of the Old School. "We run that ghost town out on Ninety-five, Glory Hole. We're the Glory Hole Gang ."
"You were a private detective," Temple accused Eightball O 'Rourke.
"Still am," he said. "And we still are a Glory Hole Gang.
See, we accidentally made off with some old silver dollars a fter W.W. Two, and then we lost 'em--it's a long story. Someone found 'em a couple years ago. We ended up ex onerated--a big word for a bunch of old guys--and our ghost town turned out to be a lucrative tourist attraction. We had a little jingle in our pockets to invest, and Lord knows, w
e spent enough lonely decades in the desert to appreciate an oh-ay -sis of civilization like this."
Here they all chuckled in concert, while Temple tried to fi gure out what a "consortiu m" of battered and fiercely inde pendent strippers had in common with a band of outlaws elderly enough to be their grandfathers. Maybe it was no e arthly use for each other, and in that absence of malice laid safety and a well of regrets lost beyond retrieving.
"You," Temple said suddenly. "I've seen you before."
She was not addressing private-eye Eightball O'Rourke, whom she certainly had met--and employed--during the ABA murder and cat-snatching escapade.
The small man of fi fty-something slid his straw fedora with the snappy madras-plaid hatband across the tabletop as if it were a shell in a street game before 'fessing up. "It wasn't here at Kitty City, where all these old guys play Walter Mitty."
"I kno w where it wasn't," Temple said, "but where was it? The Circle Ritz! You were feeding Midnight Louie pas trami!"
"Sure, I've been known to feed the kitty, at poker tables all over this city."
"Don't play coy with me. You're the one who brought news of Crawford Buchanan's heart attack. He's not one of the silent partners, is he?"
"W hat's with silence? Crawford wanted in. I just told him confl ict of interest's a sin."
Temple eased back in her cha ir. "I'm glad somebody's willing to point out the straight and narrow to Buchanan. The club columnist for the Las Vegas Scoop has no business having a fi nancial interest in any club." She eyed the man with a last suspicion. "Aren't you Crawford's bookie, and isn't your name Cosanostra or something?"
"Bookie I am, and that's no slam. But pardon me, Ma'arn, it's Nostradamus ," he answered with a small bow, "Glad to meet again the famous Circle Ritz's unsung shamus."
"You mean Midnight Louie, no doubt. After all, he's already got one 'sh rine' in his honor."
"To the contrary, my dear Miss Barr, Louie's not half the sleuth you are."
Cat on a Blue Monday Page 3
