Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

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, we 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."

"Charming, " Electra directed a high-beam smile at the courtly bookie.

A motion behind the gla ss walls of the dj's booth indi cated that the blessed silence was about to be cursed with cacophony again. Temple slapped her hands on the table.

"Nice meeting you all, but l must head back to the famous Ci rcle Ritz." She eyed Electra. "I 've got to call a woman about a cat show. Coming?"

"You toddle on without me, dear." Electra's silver-starred nails made like c omets as they waved her away. "I 'll, uh, stick around with the guys for a while."