Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Scotty,” Max said. “Just call me Scotty.”

“As in ‘Beam me up’?” she asked through the smoke she breathed into a kind of holographic lace veil in front of her face.

“As in Hartford the Third.”

She raised wire-thin-plucked eyebrows.

She was exactly the kind of woman you expected to meet in a strip joint. Not a stripper, but some kind of hanger-on. Probably an ex-stripper. Her smoky contralto voice vibrated through a buxom, inverted-triangle frame. She wore a glitzy jogging suit that hid most of her skin. She had found his slumming Yuppie persona unusual enough to merit personal attention.

“I bet they don’t call you Scotty,” she said, eyes narrowed to filter out her own smog. “I bet they call you Scott.”

Max shrugged with what he hoped looked like embarrassment. He had lost the art of embarrassment a long time ago. As long as he looked like a babe in Toyland, women would talk to him. Strippers had a maternal streak, and when they talked, they bared more information about themselves than they did skin on stage.

She tapped her cigarette ash, as long as a mandarin’s fingernail, into one of those black plastic bar ashtrays with jagged edges to hold cigarettes. They look like dead roaches with legs in the air.

“I have a son about your age,” she said, surprising him. She looked like she’d been around, but not that old. “Name’s Lindy.”

“Your son’s?”

“Hell, no! Skip the ‘y’ endings, kid, after twenty. You’ll get taken a lot more seriously. My name’s Lindy.”

“Oh. Well, you certainly look like you know your way around this…scene.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“I just meant—” Max stirred the skinny striped plastic straw around in his water-and-hint-of-scotch. “I’m kinda here looking for someone.”

“Look, Scotty.” She was violating her own rule and leaned near to put her hand on his arm and her smoky, raspy voice in his ear. “You don’t belong here. Whatever you’re looking for, or looking to forget, go on to some hotel on the Strip.”

“Do you belong here?” he returned.

Her eyes widened with a touch of flattered youthfulness. “Oh, God. Sure I do. Not here, precisely. I’m just visiting the scene of the crime.” She glanced at the stage, nostalgically, even a bit coquettishly. “Used to dance up there myself.”

Max tried not to smile; he’d figured as much.

“But now I run my own club. Les Girls.”

That he hadn’t figured.

“No sense letting the guys get all the dough when we girls show all the go.”

He laughed, but made it apologetic.

She patted his arm. “Now, who you lookin’ for? Some girl you got a crush on?”

“No. Some guy who got a crush on some girl. A bouncer named Rafe. Something like that. This, uh, girl I met at one of the Strip hotels you were advising me to go back to, she said he’d been…stalking her, I guess.”

“And you’re going to put a stop to it, huh?”

“No.” He shrugged, apologetically again. “I thought I’d offer him some money to leave her alone.”

“You got it with you?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a fish out of the water, but I’m not shark bait.”

Lindy rolled her eyes, displaying bloodshot whites. “Young man.” She sighed again. “That girl isn’t worth getting your face pushed in for.”

“I can do some pushing back.”

“Maybe. Only guy I know who bounces, and he bounces around from club to club, is Rafi. Like Rafe. That sound right?”

Max nodded slowly. “Where would he be bounced to now?”

“Don’t know, hon. I heard he was quitting this racket. No loss, from what I also heard. You might check with my ex, Ike. He runs Kitty City. He’s the type who’d like Raf’s style.”

“And what is Raf’s style?”

Lindy made a fist and moved it toward Max’s face. “To the moon, Alice. To the moon.”

“That was all bluff,” Max objected. “Ralph Kramden never hit Alice.”

“Hey! You know The Honeymooners ? I thought only us old folks did.”

“Everything old is new again. Cable TV”

“Not everything. Watch yourself around Raf. That guy was always trying to get something back. Those kind are dangerous.”

“What was he trying to get back?”

“Money? A woman? Something.”

Max nodded. He didn’t see Molina as the kind of woman a man would auger into the ground for. Or over. Must have been money. Nadir seemed very hung up on money.

“Take care of yourself.” She patted his arm again, then bore down as she propelled her weight off the barstool and into the smoky, sound-soaked distance that makes such hot, sweaty, crowded places into a negative image of reality.

Max felt touched. Nobody had patted his arm since Miss Rosenblatt in fourth grade. The return to innocence was refreshing, especially in a strip club.

Miss Rosenblatt would have fainted dead away if she had seen Max walk into Kitty City. Luckily, a dead faint was probably all that she was up to nowadays, as she would be confined to coffin and only rolling over in her grave in protest.

Kitty City enjoyed being a strip club: dim, loud, crowded and filled with milling almost-naked girls. Several mirrored balls turned overhead, strafing the clientele with bullets of bright, glancing light.

Its clients took the mental barrage like a Fifth Avenue mob would take ticker tape during a parade, with festive disregard. The place had a Mardi Gras look and feel. The girls (strippers were always “girls” no matter their age) and the men mixed it up like old, bawdy friends. The clients were as loud and disorderly as the taped raunchy rock music, and seemed to enjoy competing with it. Even the deejay guy in the glassed-in soundproof booth seemed to be having a good time.

And…so did Rafi Nadir.

Max bellied up to another sopping-wet bar and ordered another watered-down drink as costly as a pound-can of R-12 Freon. He was glad this place was crammed with customers, and probably always was. People tended not to bother remembering faces in joints like this until they’d seen you for the ninth or tenth time.

Rafi Nadir was the center of a bouquet of centerfold girls, obviously a visiting ex-worker, not on the job.

He wore a loose white shirt with sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow over khaki pants. Something about his demeanor, the pale shirt, his dark, overblown good looks, the way he accepted the strippers’ attention as his due reminded Max of Libya’s Khadafy, one of the more sinister international figures, and that was going some these days.

Face it: to brush shoulders with Rafi Nadir was to loathe Rafi Nadir. He gave the word “lowlife” a new definition. No wonder Molina was having nightmares about this creep showing up in her life. No wonder she wanted him as far away from their daughter as a serial killer.

If Max managed to get enough on him for a murder rap, he’d be bailing Molina out of a pretty rough corner. She’d hate it, and he’d love it.

And Max was close. Nadir was out of control, not drunk, but high on some apparent good fortune. The twenties were diving into the surrounding G-strings like South Sea Islanders seeking pearls.

Men drunk on their own importance are only a half-step away from walking off a cliff. Max just had to watch Nadir, follow him, and he’d catch him deciding to force another stripper in a parking lot into early retirement…He might even be the one who had killed Gloria, Gandolph’s old assistant. No telling how many stripper murders they could wrap him up in.

While Max was weaving happy endings, just as he was ready for a fadeout on Cher’s smiling transparent face on high in the best black-and-white Hollywood tradition, he saw something unpleasant in the mirror.