“Great!” The happy customer delicately stabbed her four-inch spikes through certain openings in the fabric like someone doing a Highland fling. The stretchy fabric was pulled up into snug place, becoming a teeny tiny thong on the bottom half and a random arrangement of straps on the top that could take a passing swipe at covering her nipples. Sort of.
“How do you know where all that’s supposed to go?” Temple asked. “And doesn’t it…chafe?”
“Oh, it’s not on long enough to do much of anything. And it goes where I say it goes. How much did you want?”
Temple had been coached, but the ridiculous price stuck in her craw. “Forty-five dollars.”
“Fine.” The woman’s nails rifled a lime-green sequined bag big enough for a cell phone and some paper money to pull out a fifty-dollar bill. “Keep the change. I really just love this.”
She writhed into various poses in the mirror, working the straps off her shoulders, down her stomach. Every move was judged through narrow, dispassionate eyes.
“You’ve got some sexy fabrics there,” she told Temple.
“Thanks. You’ve got some sexy moves.”
“You ever stripped?”
“Ah…I’m too short for it. I’m told.” This was the only time in her life Temple had been pleased to be found wanting in height.
“Oh, don’t listen to anyone else. You could build a real exotic act around being so little. You know, china doll, or Catholic school girl. That’s always a popular one. The guys go wild over those little plaid uniform skirts.”
“Oh, really. Why do you think that is?”
“Grade school repression, silly! When you work up an act, you gotta think: what would a horny twelve-year-old find sexy?”
“That young?”
“Oh, they can be sixty or seventy and still think like that. Generally, they like the illusion of really, really innocent or really, really naughty. So what’s your sister’s name?”
“Ah…oh, my sister.” Desperate. “C-Carmen.”
“Carmen? That doesn’t exactly go with Tess.”
“Theresa,” Temple said.
“My real name’s Monica Mary, and now I get it. Theresa and Carmen. You girls could do a sister act, you know, a real nun thing. Go over big.”
“Not with the Vatican, I think.”
“I got news for you. They don’t come here.”
“Anyway, if you like our stuff, I’ll be around for a while.”
“How come you’re not afraid of the Stripper Killer?”
“Ick, is that what they’re calling him?”
“That’s what we’re calling him. So you’re not afraid.”
“I am, but I need the money more than…Carmen. What do you think? Are any of the clubs a bigger target? Am I safer here? What about when I should leave? I hear that poor Cher Smith was attacked at two A.M. Maybe if I made sure I was out of the clubs by one A.M. —”
“Hey, two A.M.’s a good time. It’s when we kind of shift off, although here in Vegas you can go all night.”
“You mean that a lot of you leave around two A.M. Wouldn’t the parking lot be crowded then?”
“It’s not like we run in packs. We’re all pretty much loners. It gets intense in the dressing room, but what we like about the life is we can come and go when we please. A lot of us get picked up, you know? We don’t have to worry about parking lot prowlers when a Hell’s Angel on a Harley shows up to carry us home.”
Swing low, sweet chariot. Temple nodded, thinking she’d rather take her chances in public with the Stripper Killer than have a Hell’s Angel in her private life.
The door to the dressing room banged against the wall. Two women came caroming in with the speed and impact of bowling balls, toting tiny purses and huge gym bags.
“Monique! That’s absolutely adorable, girl!” screeched the black woman with blond hair.
Monica Mary, aka Monique, stretched and preened in her silver lamé slingshot.
“Where did you get it?” demanded the white woman with the long, jet-black Afro.
Obviously, exotic was in. Guess they didn’t call it exotic dancing for nothing, since that was a sound-alike for erotic.
Monique’s daggerlike nail pointed at Temple’s hoop of overpriced Spandex.
By the time Temple departed, her hoop was lighter and her wallet was fatter.
She had glimpsed the girly backstage atmosphere at strip clubs before. It always made her feel sad, the sooo high school element of girls having a good time experimenting with makeup and clothes. Only these girls were here to take off the clothes. Once they’d been cheerleaders and prom queens, or maybe not either. That was another route to the black lights that cast an ultraviolet purple haze that made whites look lurid on cheesy stages in every major city and minor hamlet across this land.
This backstage interaction was the oddly innocent side of the industry, and it struck Temple as more real than all the calculated moves and pouty faces under the spotlight. It was a female support group, only most of their support seemed to come from ultra-narrow spandex. A band of spandex is comin’ after me…comin’ for to carry me home. Only it wasn’t a band of angels that had carried Cher Smith home.
Girls just want to have a good time, but some of them never learned a liberated way to have it.
Temple checked her watch before diving through the door that led to the major sound-system assault in the club area. Just past midnight. Matt Devine would be taking his first call of the night at WCOO’s Midnight Hour. To watch the two P.M. “shift change,” Temple would have to kill some time and she didn’t want to spend it backstage slinging spandex suspender sets. She sells spandex suspenders at the strip show. No thanks. Let sister Carmen handle that part. Carmen. Why had her subconscious been unable to dredge up any name but that one? Weird.
In the performance area, Temple managed to climb onto a bar stool and sat facing the club, her ring of costumes covering her lap like a folded coat.
“Drink?” the bartender hinted behind her.
Nothing was free in a strip club, especially not a barstool.
Temple dug out a ten-dollar bill and asked for a margarita. That ought to buy her about half an hour.
“Sell any?” he asked when he plunked the pale, snot-colored drink in front of her. She would bet that there was about as much tequila and lime in the glass as there was Carmen in her Northern European soul. Nada.
Sell any? Temple was fleetingly tempted to take umbrage, but then she remembered the rainbow of glitzy fabrics on her lap.
“Yeah, several. I thought I’d watch some of the girls’ acts. Get more ideas for outfits.”
“You do whatever you like,” he said, “as long as you feed the kitty or you feed the bartender.”
Temple glanced stageward. A lone girl was striding across it to a drumbeat, squatting every now and then to wrap her fingers around some moonstruck guy’s neck and let his fingers jam paper money down the skimpy pocket of her Tess-sold thong. Temple presumed that was “feeding the kitty.”
She sipped the pallid margarita. It tasted more of lemon water than anything else.
The stripping profession is a lifestyle choice, she reminded herself. Who was she to judge? According to Molina, Temple was in an intimate relationship with a suspected murderer, and Molina ought to know, having been in an exploitive relationship with another murder suspect.
Speak of the devil.
Temple gazed across the huge room with anxious recognition. Wasn’t that him? Rafi Nadir? Standing in the first row of tables, watching the woman onstage. He nodded as she passed. She winked back.
So he was indeed a genuine habitué of these places. A bouncer, Max had said. A man who liked to hang around naked ladies, who wallowed in the loud, sleazy atmosphere.