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

"What's up?" Darcy asked, adjusting the ride of her rhinestone g-string.

Temple produced Exhibit A from behind her back. "This."

All four women glanced up, defying gravity and the double sets of long false eyelashes glued to their lash lines.

"Bitchin' boot." Trish, a big-boned blonde, swung an extra long leg over a wooden chair back, then flexed her knee and stamped her taps down hard on the seat while she adjusted a marabou garter.

Each dancer's fishnet hose bore the symbols of a different suite of playing cards: tiny red hearts for Darcy and diamonds for Midge, teeny black spades for Jo and clubs for Trish.

Jo, a statuesque redhead whose purple-mahogany locks made Temple's brighter curls seem garish, laughed as she applied a crys-tal earring that brushed her collarbone to her left earlobe.

"Temple, you cute thang. Your two feet could go in that big ol' boot and you'd still have room to swing a cat."

"Speaking of swinging cats," Temple said, "has anybody seen Midnight Louie around here lately?"

Darcy stepped back from her dressing table to reveal Himself sprawled on a red velvet pillow, one forepaw sweetly curled against his black velvet chest.

Someone had put a red satin bowtie around his neck, which he had managed to scratch off-center until it sat rakishly under one ear.

"Lord, he looks wounded ... or decorated!" Temple shook her head. "What's the big attraction for him down here?"

"Besides Trish's smoked oysters?" Darcy grinned, and then nodded at the boot. "So when is Big Tex coming to town?"

"That's what I'm here to ask. I found this stuffed under a costume rack in the hall and wondered if it was from a floorshow costume. I'm, um, sort of involved in the cover model pageant, and didn't want any of your essential costumes getting mixed up with theirs."

"Nice thought." Jo twanged the side elastic on her g-string. "But none of our costumes are exactly essential."

"Actually," Temple corrected, "they're the only essential things you're wearing. So, Nobody owns up to the boot."

"Let's give it a once-over," Darcy suggested. "It sure isn't ordinary streetwear."

They gathered around, their tap cleats ringing on the concrete dressing-room floor like horseshoes. Temple experienced a rare attack of claustrophobia as the showgirls closed in. With their heel-abetted height six feet-something, their plumed headdresses and the glitzy sway and clatter of their scanty harnessry, they reminded her of elegantly caparisoned circus steeds. She didn't know whether she felt more in danger of being crushed--or dazzled to death.

Since her Crystal Phoenix association had begun, she had often glimpsed these women from a distance, knew them by sight, had waved and smiled. Now, in their glamorous midst, they overwhelmed her as much as the equally large, bare and blatantly sexy male cover models. Why must erotic symbols always come in the Large, Economy Size, like the Wizard of Oz's false, inflated head? Great and powerful might seduce at a distance--and Temple was no subscriber to Dorothy, the meek and humble--but what was wrong with small and subtle?

"Nothing subtle about this-here boot." Jo took it from Temple to turn this way and that. "Talk about your Rhinestone Cowboy! Will you gander at these zit-size rhinestones caking the heel?"

"Gross!" Darcy's moan commented on both the rhinestones and Jo's inelegant comparison. "But this is all custom work, and that silver-leather flame design has been hand-applied. The tragedy is that someone paid major money for this pair, when it was a pair."

"Why did you think this gunboat might be ours?" Jo surrendered the boot with a wrinkled nose. "It's pretty big, but then so are you."

"Not that big." Trish peered down the boot's tall sides as if hunting hidden treasure. "No size stamped anywhere. Odd. But I'd call it a fourteen or fifteen, at least. Who's been hotfooting it through our corridors--Bigfoot?" She nodded authoritatively at Temple. "That there's a galoot's boot."

Temple sighed heavily. "I didn't want to hear that."

"Besides," Trish hefted her foot back onto the chair seat to display her size-ten silver pump. "All of us hoofers wear these regulation character shoes with two-inch Cuban heels and the Mary Jane straps. If we tried to tippety-tap onstage in those rhinestone galoshes, we'd break our necks. Check with the boys in the Incredible Hunk contest."

Temple watched them disperse to their makeup stations with a sense of relief. "You know about that?"

She hadn't expected them to notice. Showgirls were night creatures and birds of passage as well, with lives of their own far from the madding Las Vegas Strip. They did their grocery shopping at 3:00

A.M. and their nails at noon. They rarely had time or inclination to notice the gaudy male of the species Show Biz.

"Who could miss a convention of Conan the Barbarians?" Midge asked. "Especially when one of them gets knocked off so spectacularly. Died in the saddle, I heard."

"Not quite." Temple absently wrapped her arms around the boot and clutched it to her chest. It was less heavy that way. "He rode Native American-style. Bareback."

Trish shook her plumed head in mock mourning. "Dead so soon, half-naked on a naked horse."

"I knew him," Temple began.

"Oh, gosh! Sorry." Trish smiled an apology. "We get a little melodramatic down here."

"That's all right." Temple sat on an empty chair near the door, still clutching the boot like a stuffed toy. She rested her chin on the conveniently notched tops. "It's funny. I've been running all over town in search of a Cinderella shoe, and I end up with a glitzy, mystery cowboy boot on my own home turf."

"You want some great shoes, cheap?" Midge asked, enthusiastically spraying the only part of her hair that wasn't covered by a begemmed headpiece--her bangs. "Try the Shoes Galore Discount Emporium."

"Not just any shoes," Temple explained glumly. "The new Stuart Weitzman store in the Forum Shops at Caesars is offering a free pair of custom Austrian crystal-covered high heels to whoever can spot a similar shoe somewhere in Las Vegas."

"They used rhinestone shoes in the Tropicana show a few years ago. Like to blind the sun."

"Not rhinestones," Temple explained patiently. "Genuine Austrian crystals."

"What's the diff?"

"The same as between a jam jar and a brandy snifter. Crystal has more fire, and costs more."

"These shoes must be worth a fortune."

"To me, they would be. And the worst part is, he's on them." Temple pointed at Midnight Louie.

"Louie? He's always on shoes, on makeup tables, on g-strings--" Darcy laughed as she pulled a string of pearls from under Louie's red velvet pillow.

He batted lethargically as the pearls swung past, then yawned.

"It's nice to have him calling on us again," Darcy said.

"That's because Louie has a lady cat to visit on the premises."

"That little black one we see around all the time?"

"Heavens no." Temple was shocked. "Midnight Louise is his namesake. She's like his daughter.

Besides, she's fixed. Louie's ladyfriend is an out-of-towner who breezes in now and again."

"I bet he's been keeping 'midnight' hours," Midge speculated. "Now that he's back, we have to box our tap shoes again, or he'd gnaw their straps off."

Not even mention of Louie's past misdeeds could rouse Tern-pie from her vision of shoe-heaven lost. "Oh, I suppose it isn't Louie, in person, pictured on those prize pumps, but these shoes are sooo wonderful, and just made for me! Black-cat figures on each heel. For Halloween. I just know that's Louie."

"For you, it's Louie. For me, it's bad luck." Trish's shudder set her costume swaying in all the best places. "I'd never wear black cat shoes; everyone I'd walk in front of would panic. This is Las Vegas, children, where gamblers are so superstitious that they wear crossed suspenders."