Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

The Frenchified name invoked Les Miz , the nickname of the smash musical made from Victor Hugo’s downer novel Les Miserables , “Les” being the French for “the”. “The Girls” were the consortium of strippers and ex-strippers who owned it.

When Temple asked to see Lindy, she and Electra were escorted to the office by a tanned hunk wearing only a black satin posing pouch and bow tie. They skirted what looked like a Roman orgy scene featuring rock-hard pecs both female and male. Temple found women’s naked breast implants, all equally round and hard, as sexy as pink rubber duckies, but she wasn’t a man. She was also a 32A, so might be prejudiced.

“It’s so plastic,” Electra commented. “Having something like this attracting crowds and parking and noise twenty-four-seven would drive out my tenants and kill my wedding clientele. The battle’s lost.”

“Hang in there,” Temple said, regretting the expression at once, given their escort.

Lindy’s office reeked of twice the cigarette smoke in the performing area outside, but when the door shut, the raunchy music and din died.

“Hey.” Lindy rose from behind her huge, paper-covered desk. “It’s the gals from the stripper contest, Miss Nancy Drew, Jr., and Ms. Motorcycle Mama. Is that killer cat of yours still smokin’ and tokin’? Miss…Tempe as in Arizona, isn’t it?”

“Temple as in Acropolis. No, Midnight Louie never inhales anything but his food, as long as it isn’t Free-to-Be Feline.”

“Say, my Chauncey loves that Free-to-Be stuff, but he’s just a ‘found’ cat, nothing Fancy Feasty.”

“The best kind, like Louie.”

“Have a seat, if you can shovel ’em off.”

They followed her advice, heaping more papers on the desk.

“I see,” Temple said, “you have a desktop computer. Haven’t you gone paperless yet?”

“No,” said Lindy, “and I haven’t quit smoking yet either.”

Temple had judged Lindy as a plain speaker from the first time she met her, which was why they’d come here. Lindy’s T-shirt and jeans covered a buxom frame that hinted at a previous life as a Nature’s Best hourglass figure, back when she was performing stripper.

Whatever she had been then, she liked total absence of artifice now. Her frankly dyed hair was a dull dead black. No plastic surgery had touched an unmade-up face puckered at the lips and eyes from a merciless nicotine habit. Las Vegas was the capital of “Smoking Allowed”.

Lindy lit a thin Virginia Slim cigarette, and spun her office chair so she could put her feet in well-worn, no-name brand sneakers atop it. No more spikes for her. “I assume I can do something for you?”

Electra shared Temple’s confidence in Lindy. She pored out her woes about the traitorous ex-husband and the imminent degrading of her livelihood property.

Lindy’s already crumpled features squinched farther with thought. “So you want to know about the possible new owners? I can tell you about the so-called managers. Punch Adcock was a minor heavyweight boxer, born William Adcock. Didn’t throw enough fights to keep going, so he did some muscle work for loan sharks, bookies, any surviving mob elements in town. I know about him because he hassled some of my girls, and I had to hire my own muscle to teach him to play nice around my place of business.”

“ Ooh ,” said Electra, looking at Temple. “That doesn’t look good for getting nice new neighbors.”

“What about Katt Zydeco?” Temple asked Lindy.

“Long-time stripper. Knows the biz. Has an R-rated dominatrix website. Lucrative at the right venue. More upscale than my joint.”

“Whips and chains are ‘upscale’?” Electra asked.

Lindy nodded and so did Temple. “Powerful men,” Lindy said, “crave to relieve the pressure by being helpless at the orders and whip-hands of a dominant woman. Most of it is strictly ordered role playing.”

“And after they pay a pretty penny they go back to their offices and underpay all their women workers.” Temple snorted. “Poor guys. Fifty shades of freaked out.”

“Vegas draws a lot of macho-challenged men with money,” Lindy pointed out.

Temple nodded. “The brief, shining moment when all Vegas went family friendly in the nineties is forgotten history. Now, all the major hotels offer topless swimming pools, and Vegas hotel-clubs like the Cosmopolitan aggressively market ‘Just the right amount of wrong’, a campaign that started out with implied crush videos, the worst kind of porn.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Electra said, “what is that?”

“If you don’t know, Electra, you don’t want to know. Let’s just say I hope PETA got on their tails for that ad.”

Temple frowned. No doubt Punch and Katt were an unsavory couple. If they were just the managers, who were the owners? She asked Lindy for a guess on that.

“Anything goes in Vegas,” Lindy said, “so you could be dealing with a huge multi-hotel corporation, or, if you’re really unlucky, some remnant of the mob cutting itself in for a piece of the action.”

Electra was even more discouraged by the forces leveled against her business. “The Mob. I thought it was just a tourist attraction these days.”

“‘If it plays in Vegas, it stays in Vegas,’” Lindy said on a dragon’s breath of exhaled smoke and cynicism.

When Temple and Electra got up to leave, Lindy, cigarette in hand, ushered them through the crowded bars and performance areas that were as deliberately confusing as any major hotel casino layout. Vegas had built labyrinths long before home furnishings giant IKEA did it, designed so you could never leave (like at the Hotel California of song), and so you just kept spending money.

“Wait.” Temple stopped dead, frowning toward a line of men lined up before one stage to push bills down the strippers’ G-strings.

“What?” Electra asked.

“One of those guys looks familiar.” Temple frowned with distaste.

Lindy laughed. “Of course you think you recognize someone. Every guy in Vegas ends up feeding slot machines and pushing bills under G-strings like they were clotheslines.”

“Not the men we know,” Electra said.

Lindy rolled her eyes with doubt. “Which guy is it?”

Temple strained to follow the figure through a crowd mostly taller than she was. “The skinny but slumped one wearing low-slung jeans and a soul patch and gimme cap. A scruffy thirty-something.”

“I’ve seen about fifty guys like him just this week,” Lindy said. “Definitely a resident, not a tourist. Dollar-bill-only guy, killing time on an electrician’s or plumber’s lunch hour.”

Electra was indignant. “You wouldn’t know someone like that, Temple.”

“I just had a memory flash, a weird sense of familiarity, but I can’t say from where or when. On the other hand, Las Vegas is my beat. I get around town a lot, and must see some people in passing more than once.”

“That guy sounds like someone you’d never want to see again.” Electra wrinkled her nose. “I’m so depressed to think that losers like him infest Vegas, and will be congregating in my neighborhood once that strip club gets going.”

Temple put her arm through Electra’s as they left Les Girls and were brought to a standstill by the bright light of day outside the club’s eternal interior dark, all glitter and grind.

They paused as their eyes adjusted.

“We need to know if the buyers have mob connections,” Temple said. “When we sic the Fontana brothers on them, the boys will know who the current players are. That kind of iffy backing could jinx any deal. So cheer up!” Temple shook Electra’s forearm playfully. “I don’t want you worrying while Matt and I are out of town, all right?”