“Still, the club makes the real money in liquor sales.”
“So does the restaurant.”
Temple eyed the mother. “How did your daughter grow up to do this?”
Mildred Bartles accepted a full and nonfoamy glass of beer expertly poured by her daughter before musing on the past. “Since she was a tiny thing Kelly was a bolt-lightning of energy. Begged for dance lessons. It wasn’t easy. Her father had run off. I was waitressing and no spring chicken—where do you think I got these varicose veins?”
She thrust out a foot in a canvas wedgie. Temple glimpsed swollen ankles and veins like angry red crayon marks. “Kelly was too cute and too smart to end up like her mom. She started as ring girl at wrestling matches when she was fifteen, then got a job waitressing at a topless club.”
“That’s how most of us break in,” Kelly said. “We see how the moves go. We also see how much better the tips are.”
“But you’re paid to cozy up to a lot of strange men.”
“So is Meryl Streep.”
“Some of those guys are pretty revolting.”
Kelly shrugged her handsome shoulders, flapping the ruffled gingham cherub wings that covered them. “Most of them are just lonely. Harmless. They pay for attention, and they get it. It’s a transaction. Damn few ever step over the line. They know what the girls are there for and how they make their money. It’s worth it to them to stuff a rolled-up fifty in my G-string, better than gambling with it. And we’re stars, girl, to them.”
Temple believed Kelly, but she wasn’t satisfied that the stripper’s life was that simple.
“What about Dorothy Horvath?”
“Who?” Both Bartles spoke in tandem.
“The woman who died Monday.”
“Oh, you mean Glinda.” Kelly nodded sadly. “We' almost all use stage names, and that was hers. Dorothy.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like her. Maybe that was the point.”
“She was getting away from her past then, remaking it?”
“Most of these girls,” Mildred said, leaning forward to prop both elbows on the tabletop, “have had bad breaks, that’s true. Some of it’s pretty sad. Fathers that were beaters, or worse. I didn’t let Kelly in for any of that. I could have remarried a time or two, but by then it was pretty plain that she was going to be a looker. I didn’t want no stepfather messing her up just because 1 was as desperate for a man, or a man with a job, as a dog for a bone. No, sir.”
“That’s admirable,” Temple said, meaning it. She didn’t need Ruth and her statistics to know that stepfathers or a live-in boyfriends often abused the children of another man, and that their mothers didn’t—couldn’t, wouldn’t—see it because of their own abused pasts, or their financial dependence or their fear of independence.
“So,” Temple summed up, “you’re your daughter’s big sister. You support her, travel with her—”
“Hey,” Kelly put in, interrupting a pull on her beer, “I support her. I told you the money was good.”
“I meant emotionally, not economically,” Temple clarified.
“We support each other,” Mildred put in, pushing back one of her strapping daughter’s errant little-girl curls. “Don’t we, sweetie?”
“That’s right,” Kelly said. “We’re a team.”
Mama Rose and Gypsy these two were not. Temple sensed an easygoing affection between them that would be the envy of many mothers and daughters in primly proper families, often hopelessly estranged themselves. This duo liked and needed each other, despite, or maybe because of, the daughter’s supposedly seamy line of work.
She eavesdropped on her own thoughts, then analyzed them. “Supposedly”? Was she getting converted to life on the wild side? She suddenly recalled her own mother’s horror when Temple had developed a yen for amateur theatricals in high school. The playhouses were invariably in “bad” neighborhoods and the other cast members, especially the males, were suspect from the first read-through until the cast party.
That might be an interesting angle for a newspaper feature... strippers’ moms. Yeah. Temple eyed the cocktail area, looking for more story sources.
Ike Wetzel held court at a round, slate-topped table amid a harem of female strippers. The waitress was circling to deliver another round of drinks, her skimpy veils floating around her metal bikini.
Temple couldn’t join that table, not even in her most professional capacity, without aligning herself with the harem, so she looked farther afield.
Four he-men in muscle T-shirts hunkered around a tiny cocktail table meant for the intimacy of two, long-neck beers rampant before them.
Temple supposed it was her duty to investigate the male side of the issue, but approached gingerly, wary of blazing pelvises. The guys seemed a lot more up front, excuse the expression, she told herself, about enjoying their notoriety.
She marched over the carpet and paused beside the gathered hunks. “Hi, guys. I wonder if you could answer some questions?”
“Anytime, pretty lady,” said one.
Another rose and lumbered over to a nearby table, politely asking if a vacant chair was taken. Even if it was, would anybody in their right mind say so?
He efficiently swept it under Temple’s derriere as she sat, and took his own chair again.
She tried to avoid nudging knees with anybody, but given the smallness of the table and the quantity of knees, not to mention their massiveness, that seemed impossible. Temple was used to feeling small among the rest of the population. With these guys, she felt like a fly in an elephant yard.
“You with Entertainment Tonight?” a man with Schwarzenegger muscles and crew cut asked.
“No. I’m doing public relations for the competition. If ET wants to do a competition segment, or if I can talk them into one, then maybe you guys’ll get lucky and meet Lisa Hartman. But probably not,” she warned. “She doesn’t do every segment in person.”
“Shucks. What’s your name?” asked another.
“Temple Barr.”
“Temple’s a neat name.”
“Would sound great onstage,” another put in.
“Any relation to Candy Barr?” teased the third, citing a famous stripper.
“Only in our apparent addiction to... chocolate. Really, if you guys wouldn’t mind talking about your work, I’d be able to put together a press release.”
“Yeah, let us do release the press!”
“All right!” the others agreed, slapping the heels of their hands together while Temple blinked at such enthusiastic physical force.
Maybe she had become subconsciously leery of big men since... no! She couldn’t get paranoid. For all their muscular presence, not one of these guys was more than twenty-four, and they all exuded a wholesome, careless energy that was rather engaging. If only they’d been around when the bad guys had decided to do a drum riff of “Night and Day” on her torso...
So she asked questions, they answered, and she soon could put names—stage names—to individuals rather than clones.
Kirk wore his hair wild-man-long. It brushed his well-developed shoulders and gave him a wicked, rock-star look. He would ride a motorcycle (probably a Hesketh Vampire, without a helmet), although a woman of any experience at all would realize that underneath he was a moody, Marlon Brando kind of guy. “You “know... sensitive.” Umm-hmm.
Stetson’s sun-streaked blond hair was long only in back. His tanned, muscled body radiated an outdoorsy, oil-rig-working, skin-cancer-defying, construction-crew kind of macho. The Last American He-man. Performing was putting him through pre-med.
The crew cut was Butch, of course. Butch was all man, and all muscle, and one day he hoped to be Mr. Universe. And maybe be in movies, like Arnold. Saint Arnold.
And Cheyenne, lean, rangy Cheyenne: dark-eyed, dark-haired, racially and sexually ambiguous, a dangerous trait in the Age of AIDS, but attractive, perhaps for that reason. Cheyenne was truly the strong, silent type, and finally admitted after repeated questions that he was an
actor, kind of. He had auditioned for a soap recently. Temple could picture him in seminaked, steamy close-ups, getting tons of fan mail from ladies who would never think beyond the obvious.
Finally, Temple got around to her eternal “Why?”
“The money’s great!” said Butch.
“And it’s fun,” Kirk added.
“The chicks are really into it. You should see ’em,” Stetson said. “Here at the competition doesn’t count. It’s an audience of your peers. You should come to a club and watch us.”
“Yeah,” said Temple, “the women perform solo, but you guys usually go onstage in a group. Why? Chicken?” It felt good to pass on Electra’s challenge. The question also loosened whatever inhibitions they had left.
“Naw,” Kirk said. “But it’s true that guys are a new wrinkle in the club game. We’re not supposed to package it and sling it around unless we’re gay.”
“Is that why you emphasize the muscles and the macho poses?” she asked.
Butch shook his virtually hairless head. “We’re body builders, first and foremost. That’s what you gotta understand. We’re used to performing at bodybuilding competitions in no more than a posing pouch. Stripping isn’t much different.”
“Except we get paid for it,” Stetson put in.
“Man, those tips...” Cheyenne’s smile was slow and sensual.
“You don’t feel it’s undignified—?”
“Hell, yes!” Kirk burst out. “But they don’t ask at the bank how dignified your money is. Besides, it’s a kick to watch women act like raving animals for a change.”
“They know it’s not real,” Temple pointed out.
“Yeah.” Kirk was definite. “It’s not real, and that’s okay. Too much of life is real.”
“Like the murder of those female strippers,” she suggested.
The young men’s faces grew sober for the first time.
“Bummer,” Kirk murmured.
Stetson shook his blond head. “It almost makes you feel guilty. We guys get all the hoopla and the good clean fun, and the girl strippers get the sick.”
“You think a psycho did it?” Temple asked.
“Who else?” Cheyenne asked angrily. “Look. We’re doing this and no one will think we’re trash because of it. But women—they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Maybe none of us said it, but it’s healthy to be up-front about your sexuality. But when they do it, women always get a bad rap.”
She was surprised by their angry-young-men passion, by their guilt on behalf of their own gender. “I was going to ask if stripping is exploitive.”
They nodded in concert.
“We exploit our audiences, you know?” Kirk said. “They exploit us. But we both know it.”
“We make money.” Stetson added. “We show off what we worked on, our bodies. We get to be somebody, not just some body. It’s the same for the women, except... a lot of them use stripping to work out deep identity and self-esteem problems. And when the men pant and pay, it’s not a harmless joke, like it is for us. It’s history. Some men can prey on women in nasty ways.”
Temple nodded. She liked these young men. Their work/art/identity was much more clear-cut than it was for the women. They were earthy, attractive, and they knew the score. They would be safe to fantasize about. And to not take seriously.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve helped.”
They couldn’t understand that they’d helped with more personal issues than understanding the urges to strip or make money.
“My card.” Cheyenne handed her a plain white two-and-a-half-by-three. Cheyenne, it read. And a phone number.
Everybody, she thought wearily as she walked away, is an entrepreneur.
22
Golden Girls and Boys . . .
She was “Barred” from the ballroom, so Temple headed, like a lemming toward her irresistible doom, for the part of a theater she knew, loved and understood the best. Offstage. The dressing rooms. Why was she kidding herself? The dressing room was the only murder scene accessible to her.
Something still nagged her, and tugged at her subconscious like an advertising ditty you can’t forget.
Downstairs, the hard-surfaced halls broadcast the same eerie sensation of desertion. Temple’s heel clicks echoed, duplicating the sound of her progress through the parking ramp. She had thought herself alone then, too.
Suddenly, unintelligible voices joined the echoes.
She paused, and heard arguing tones, even some hot words: “You’re not doing it!”
“I will!”
“Won’t.” The sounds came from the very dressing room she had wanted to visit alone, darn.
Behind her, other footsteps were charging down the stairs, although less noisily. Temple ducked through the nearest door and pulled it almost closed behind her—not all the way. That would make a betraying click. She had never suspected she was so good at subterfuge.
Her heart pounded as if following in her earlier footsteps while she waited behind the door, glancing around to make sure that her shelter was truly safe.
Her worst fears were realized when she spotted a pair of peacock green sparks glimmering from the shadows. She was not alone! Luckily, she had seen this phenomenon before. Temple’s retinas may not have reflected as spectacularly as these, but they did eventually adapt to the dimness.
She made out a sphinxlike piece of darkness that never lightened even when she could discern the glimmer of the mirror and the glitter of hanging costumes.
“Lou-ie!” she whispered. She tiptoed nearer.
One and the same. He lay like a sultan on the former Max’s erstwhile wicker loveseat, his tail flexed in a graceful curve. Another double green glint flashed. Temple came nearer, bent down, and strangled a groan as she recognized Louie’s sofa partner.
“Lou-ie! That’s Yvette. Savannah Ashleigh’s Yvette.”
Louie blinked gravely.
“What? Once is for yes. Twice is for no?” Her next question would have made the parent of an errant teenager proud. “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer, of course, and resumed grooming the pale cat’s ruff. The overbred little hussy lounged on her side, slitty aquamarine eyes indolent, a throaty purr rumbling just above the subliminal level.
“Lou-ie! You’re not fixed!”
He yawned and applied his tongue to his forepaw.
“I could get hit with a paternity suit. You don’t know Savannah Ashleigh. Out!”
She picked him up. Weighed a ton. Still. At the door she listened, looked and found all quiet. She yanked it open to set the big black cat down on his four, fat furry feet.
The skin on his spine twitched indignantly. Then he stalked away without a backward glance, tail erect and quirking just at the tip. Okay, Temple thought, we’ll see if you’re as good at getting out as you are at breaking and entering.
“All right, Juliet.” Temple turned back to the dressing room and sighed in exasperation. She swept the dainty Yvette off the loveseat. It was like lofting an ostrich plume, so insubstantial was the shaded silver pedigreed Persian compared to Midnight Louie. “You little minx. How did you get out of your carrier? And where’s your devoted Momsy when you need a chaperone?”
The carrier sat on the floor beside the sofa, unzipped. Temple prepared to whisk Yvette back inside and hope for the best. Maybe she was fixed. That made a lot of sense.
Yvette’s limp little body thrummed like a cello string. Temple couldn’t resist pressing her face against the frothy fur so like a silver fox’s. Yvette’s tongue felt like warm, wet Velcro as it licked the tip of her nose.
“All right, so you’re irresistible. I won’t take it out on Louie. But now back to your home-away-from-home. There.”
Temple felt like a jailer as she zipped up the carrier. How on earth had Louie got in here? More to the point, how had Yvette got out of her carrier? That was one mystery she was not inclined to investigate. Both perpetrators had a speech impediment.
She left as quietly as she could, heading toward the scene of the first crime. Within that room, voices still rose and fell, although much more softly now. Two. Female. Well, it was a women’s dressing room. Guess she could walk right in.
She announced her entry by pushing the ajar door open hard. Then she gave an indrawn shriek of alarm.
Two golden ghosts stood frozen face to face, shimmering in the glare of the makeup lights, as nude as classical statues except for gold lame G-strings. At least they were naked ladies, not laddies.
“Miss... Barr.” One spoke, and broke the spell. Temple followed Louie’s example when caught red-handed where she shouldn’t be, and blinked.
A gilt hand pounded its owner’s golden breastbone. “June.”
The other mirrored the gesture. “Gypsy.”
Temple almost pounded her chest, too, and responded, “Me, Jane.”
Instead, she sank onto a nearby ice-cream chair. “Golly, you startled me,” she said, realizing that by rights they should be accusing her of that.
“It’s the gold metallic paint,” the one on the left said. June. “We need to see what the light gels upstairs will do to it, especially with this opalescent glitter powder we’re mixing with it. Sometimes it can go green. First we have to wait for it to dry.”
“There’s only one way to put it on,” Gypsy added. “In the buff with a sponge.”
“You paint each other?” Temple asked.
“Only the back parts the other can’t reach,” Gypsy said. “Twins make it handy. And we have to leave a discreet spot blank. Otherwise our entire skins would be covered and we’d—what’s that word, June?”
“Asphyxiate.”
“We’d crack.”
“Ghastly, but the effect is phenomenal,” Temple said. “You look like duplicate Greek statues... even your hair is gold and glittery. I can leave—”
“Don’t!” June’s voice sounded a bit panicky. “Maybe you can settle an argument for us.”
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