"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."