Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Vince.” Janice nodded satisfaction as she squinted her eyes at the sketch pad. “Wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark pizza parlor.”

Matt, who’d hardly glimpsed the results of the last ten minutes of rapid-fire exchanges, leaned close to see as Rick’s hand swept the twenty under Matt’s fingertips into his custody.

A blast of resumed music made Matt’s heartbeat stop, then start again with great, galloping thuds. But it wasn’t the music that unnerved him. Even done up as Marlon Brando on Prozac, Max Kinsella was recognizable to anyone who had reason to know and fear, or maybe even love him.

Thank God he was here with Janice, and not Temple.

“Think I’ve got it?” Janice said, shouted over the music, smiling. She leaned back to rub her neck.

Someone else leaned in to see the finished sketch.

“Wow. You’re good,” she oozed at Janice. “I don’t see this guy here, though.”

“Have you ever?” Matt felt obliged to ask, though he was trying to ignore the woman’s presence.

From what he could tell, all the while trying not to see any better, she was attired in iridescent strings. A quartet of strips, and where they went, or didn’t, he did not want to go, or know.

“Seen him?” Her face was bare naked too, but easier to take. Her full lower lip—collagen-enhanced?—swelled with doubt. “Don’t think so. You ever seen me?” she asked provocatively.

Matt shook his head, glad Janice was supporting him with the same gesture.

“I’m the star attraction.” She pointed toward the stage where the sleepwalking Marilyn wannabe was easing her halter-style straps off one shoulder, then the other. Even Matt knew this wasn’t very seductive. “Aren’t I the star, Rick?”

“Sure are, Redd.”

Matt was glad of an excuse to look at her hair, a dramatic magenta-mahogany color found only in a chemist’s lab. The color was nothing like Temple’s natural coppery crimson mop. If the color was surreal, the way it was looped and piled on top of her head was even more artificial. At least, Matt thought, she had a greater mass of hair on her head than clothes on her entire body.

A long-nailed hand curled over his shoulder. “You’re new here.”

Janice was watching from what had become the sidelines with a distinctly chilly Mr. Spock distance. This was his show, and his problem.

“I intend to stay that way,” Matt said. “New here.”

“Aw, too bad. I was going to let you buy me a drink. I don’t have to go on for a half hour. Onstage, that is.”

She twined herself and her strings around him, in the process almost pushing Janice off the neighboring barstool.

Matt had never felt more embarrassed and less in the presence of a near occasion of sin. This B-movie seduction scene was so hokey it should be shown to the troops to turn them off, except he had a feeling not much would turn off troops.

He tried to pry off her invasive hands.

“What’s your lady friend doing,” she demanded, clinging more, “taking notes?” She looked over her shoulder at Janice.

Matt found a wave of relief turning into a churn of guilt.

“You need some ideas, honey?” the lady known as Redd said.

“I’m a staff artist for the National Enquirer,” Janice answered coolly. “We’re doing a piece on The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas. Mind if I sketch you?”

“Yes. I do.” Redd straightened. Her face was already painted as perfectly as Janice could ever do it: pencil-arched dark brows, bowed scarlet mouth, eyes so deeply shadowed their own color was neutralized by the shimmering smoky claret aura around them.

Redd’s taloned hand struck out to capture the sketch pad, so swiftly that both Matt and Janice jumped, but did nothing. “This is no stripper.” She eyed the portrait of Vince with an odd expression, part repulsion, part a hunger Matt couldn’t name.

Janice reclaimed the pad just as swiftly. “I said The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas, not just women strippers.”

Redd’s darkened eyes smoldered.

Matt smelled something really tacky brewing, like a catfight. He stood up, grabbed Redd’s arm. “I thought you wanted me to buy you a drink?”

She whipped around to face him, eyes as feral as her mouth frozen in a half snarl.

“You ready to pony up?”

He shrugged. Anything to save the day, or night.

Rick spoke for the first time, like a member of an audience who suddenly finds his voice. “What’ll it be, Reddy?”

“My usual.” She undulated onto the empty stool next to Matt. He was glad to serve as a barrier between the two women.

Redd, or Reddy, threw a sultry smile at Rick. “A Bloody Mary.”

Matt watched Rick mix the tomato juice and vodka over copious ice cubes, then stake the glass with a limp stalk of celery. He assumed the liquor content was about as limp, and as limp as the ten-dollar bill Rick extracted from his fingers. No change was forthcoming.

“So,” said Redd, growing on him like kudzu, “you new in town?”

“Sure.”

“You want to be sure to catch my act. In about twenty minutes. I’m the headliner.”

He nodded noncommittally. He hoped he and Janice would be gone in ten.