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.
"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.