Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Temple leaned against the concrete blocks and panted. Running in this heavy, theatrical getup did her composure no good. At least she hadn't damaged the "real" costumes. She eyed a frothy row of still-swaying sequins, pearls and feathers from the Phoenix's nightly revue. The pageant people, of which she was now one, were transients, mere borrowers of this space and these facilities. Interfering with the true show people would be a professional discourtesy.

Righting herself and the rack, her glance was caught by something underneath it that twinkled. She couldn't have stumbled upon another entrance to the underground tunnels, because those were all sealed. What she saw was a shoe, no doubt.

A shoe in fact. It lay toppled. Only the sole was visible, as smooth and untouched as fresh-laid linoleum. But a tiny rim of glitter visible around the toe beckoned like a tinfoil smile, and Temple found herself smiling back. Some people smiled at babies. She smiled at shoes. So sue her!

Oh, what the heck! She could at least see what it looked liked. That was her eternal quest, after all.

She sank into airy layers of her costume's velvet and brocade skirts, then crouched by the rack and bent forward despite the strict disinclination of her corset. She finally managed, with a few grunts, to touch her fingertips to the shoe.

The difficulty made her all the more set on seeing the hidden shoe. That rim of glitz looked mighty like solid silver-white rhinestones. Wouldn't it be wild if this was it? The shoe! Maybe a show-girl (shoegirl?) wore it onstage nightly.

By inching the sole closer with her fingernails, Temple was finally able to pinch her fingers on the toe and work the shoe close enough to pick up.

Except it was... a boot. And what a boot! She stared, stunned, like a Cinderella with an absolute klutz for a fairy godmother.

Oh, it was a fancy boot: inlaid flame-patterns of silver leather, with rhinestones scattered hither and thither like glitzy exclamation points. Though flashy enough to be a women's boot--it was like a size . . .

Bigfoot. And all the rhinestones did glitter, but most were big and clunky. In a word, crude. Sorry, fairy godmother, you aren't klutzy, but your taste in boots sure as shootin' is! Of course showgirls, being almost six feet tall, usually wear fairly large-size shoes. Maybe this was an escapee from a Western routine. Rhinestone Clementine. The old California folk song ran through Temple's mind, with new words. In a basement, in a ho-tel, excavaaaating for a crime, toiled a miner, old-bootfinder and her name was Ne'er-on-time. Light she was and like a fairy, but her boots were number nine. Big old bootsies, for giant tootsies, not the shoes she'd hoped to find.

Temple stood up, painfully, the big, bad boot in hand, and puzzled. Here she was, hunting the prize designer pumps and here she had found--instead--a crude rhinestone boot that Trigger wouldn't wear on a bad mane day. Surely this ghastly thing had a mate! She couldn't bear to bend over again, so she tried to sweep the long costumes up from the floor with her slipper-clad foot. All right, she kicked the hems into a froth. No other boot lay revealed under the rack. Yippee cayaaaa! This was a lonesome boot.

So a boot had been forgotten under the costume rack. Discarded, or deliberately ditched? Why?

Temple was expected on-stage right now for some serious hunk-hugging. What to do? She tapped the boot's virgin sole against one palm, undecided. Why was it unworn and abandoned? She would have to contemplate that mystery later.

She bolted back down the empty hallway, back to the two-mirror cubicle she shared with the sullen Quincey. There she dumped the boot in her canvas totebag. She would worry about it later. Right now, she had more pressing matters, like two hundred and twenty pounds of bare, muscled serial hunk to contend with.

Fabrizio stood, wide-stanced, hands on hips (what big hands, what lean hips!), hair tossed back over his shoulders (what luxuriant hair, what broad shoulders!) facing the stage.

That was where his audience was, at the moment. The house seats were empty, but the stage teemed with testosterone and its most spectacular by-products. Thirty-three handsome heroes, restless as a wayward wind, wandered the risers, which squeaked for mercy under their conjoined weight.

Fontana brothers roved in a restless pack, all clad in tight black-denim jeans.

Danny Dove sat cross-legged on the stage floor like a power-mad elf, facing the models--frowning, pointing and projecting his voice to the wings.

"You. Three feet to the left. Not you with the three left feet! Come to think of it, don't move a muscle. We haven't got accident insurance. Just kidding, gang. And you in the tape-measure suspenders.

Down a riser, big boy, your head will be hitting the boom mike. Yes, Mr. Fontana the Fifth or whoever, edge that boyishly lean bod over just. . . a . . . tad."

Temple felt small and vulnerable as she huddled with the other two pose-down girls in the stage-left wings. She would have liked to stay there. Her two sister models were dallying with their costumes, jerking them down from the top and up from the bottom, exactly the opposite approach Temple was inclined to take.

Quincey was gowned as an Old West saloon girl. Whether she had a heart of gold was unclear, but her deck-of-cards bustier featured the jacks of hearts and diamonds front and provocatively centered.

Her knee-length red-satin skirt was edged in black marabou feathers, which she was hiking up to high heaven on one hip and fastening there with a safety pin.

"Don't you have any underwear on?" Temple asked, following the diamondback-rattlesnake pattern of Quincey's fishnet pantyhose all the way to ground zero.

"Of course not." Quincey's tone was pure teenage disdain. "You never know what will show during one of these things, Danny said. Would you want someone out there in the audience seeing your groady old underwear?"

"Well, it might be better than the alternative." Temple tugged at her receding dress shoulders again.

"Darn. This outfit will not stay put!"

"Your boobs are supposed to hold it up," Quincey explained, rolling heavily made-up eyes.

Oh, that's the problem." Temple regarded the gown's gaping neckline. "I don't have any."

"Sure you do. Just lean way forward into the dress, then stand up again."

Quincey demonstrated with limber enthusiasm, thus revealing the tiny tattoo of a bulldog smoking a cigar that had hitherto hidden coyly behind the jack of hearts. Her mild exercise had increased her bra size by at least a letter of the alphabet. Bras were the only subject where getting Cs was better than Bs or As.

Temple, impressed despite herself, bent over, nearly cutting off the circulation in her torso, and rose again. Quincey was right, the bodice felt tighter and--oh, my--much more of her had come out to look around.

"What keeps us from falling out of these getups during the action onstage?" she wondered next.

"Nothing," said the girl on her other side, a brunette named Lacey with authentically long, burnished hair. These were mere girls so slight and young that there was no point in calling them women and looking ridiculous. "This is exactly like a real cover shoot, you know: the more provocative the better."

Oh, my ripping bodice! Temple thought. I didn't sign on to be provocative, just to snoop.

"Luckily," Lacey added, "most of these guys are pretty good, and have their own, like, routines. We'll just get together and decide whether we go horizontal or vertical, like where we wrap our legs and arms and all that stuff. You know, consult before trying it."

Did she say, " consult before dying!"

"So you've done this before?" Temple said aloud.

"Naw, I talked to a girl who did it last year. She's running the bookstore this time."