Double Shot

yesterday,” she went on, “and at the lunch you did.”

At the Roundhouse, she’d been wearing a black designer suit; her hair had been swept up in a tight chignon. She’d been seated at the table with the jokesters who’d brought their own booze. Next to Lana had been that wide-shouldered, tan guy with the bodybuilder physique, the one who’d offered to juggle glasses. What had she called him? Dannyboy. I also remembered Dannyboy’s long, brown-blond hair that fanned out around his unattractively ruddy face and gave him the look of a hungry lion. Lana, Dannyboy, and the liquor drinkers had been only a few tables away from John Richard and Sandee.

“It was a nice event,” Lana said, but her voice was hesitant.

“But?” I prompted. Behind me, a gaggle of guys was protesting and telling me to hurry it up.

Lana glanced at the rowdy fellows and lowered her voice. “I guess I was surprised to hear Ted Vikarios give a speech, since he and Albert Kerr had that big falling-out all those years ago.”

“ ‘That big falling-out’?” I repeated, before the crowd jostled one of the guys into my side.

“Come visit us at our table!” Marla offered, tugging me into the club’s interior.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted to Marla over the pulse of rock music. “I was just about to find out something!”

“You were just about to get trampled!” Marla replied as she pulled me down a dark hallway past a cloakroom.

I said, “Lana must have thought highly of the Jerk if she referred to him as Dr. Korman! Maybe she fixed him up with Sandee.”

Marla raised an eyebrow at me. “More likely our ex came here. Water seeking its own level, that kind of thing. Let’s sit down at one of these little tables.”

The club’s spacious interior encompassed six black-mirrored, raised hexagonal platforms. On top of each mirrored surface, a naked-except-for-a-thong young woman danced. Well, you couldn’t really call it dancing. It was more like stepping-in-place-while-wiggling-hips-and-boobs.

And what boobs they were. I wondered how they’d phrased their requests to their surgeons. Maybe using fruit analogies? I’ve got tangerines now, but could you give me oranges? Grapefruit? And melons! The dancers were shaking everything from cantaloupes to pumpkins. I would have sworn a red-haired woman in front of us had asked for honeydews. I didn’t know if docs would ever be able to bestow watermelons, but science was always advancing.

Around each of the black-mirrored mini-stages, men sat watching the naked lady in front of them. Electrified chandeliers flashed red, blue, green, and yellow along with the beat of the music. There was a bar on the far side of the space, plus a sprinkling of small tables ringing the place. We sat at one of these. After watching the goings-on for a bit, I noticed that the men seated around the large mirrored tables were expected, at regular intervals, to put a greenback into each dancer’s proffered thong. Then the dancer dropped the greenback into a small hole in the center of the black table.

“There was a young woman who graduated from Elk Park Prep a few years back,” Marla leaned over to tell me. “Her parents were strict—fundamentalists, I think. The girl turned eighteen two days after graduation. She announced, ‘Forget it, I’m not going to college, I’m gonna be a dancer.’ She works here.”

“These girls are all so young!” I exclaimed.

“What did you expect?” Marla asked. “Forty-year-olds?”

“I don’t know what I expected,” I said, suddenly dizzy.

I had not expected to see a group of young women—only a couple of whom looked a day over twenty-five— parading in front of men who appeared to be between forty-five and sixty, with the preponderance of them in their fifties. Uh-oh, now they were doing something new. When they weren’t doing the half wiggle, the dancers leaned their ponderous breasts over first one, then another of the faces of the men sitting around the tables. The men were expected to come up with more bucks for the boobs-in-the-face routine. But how they could breathe in that narrow space, much less rummage for their wallets? It would be like trying to do a nighttime sail through the Strait of Magellan.

We looked for Sandee but couldn’t spot her. At the nearest table, the red-haired woman-with-the-honeydews was dancing in a more animated way than the other strippers, who looked as if they might be on drugs. A ruby-red light focused on the redhead, revealing that she was a bit older than her compatriots. The light made her hair glow almost purple, and also highlighted what I thought was a desperate look in her eyes. Each bill she received made her gyrate even faster. When her shift was over, she stepped down and approached us.

“Uh, what’s happening?” I asked Marla as Big Red made a beeline for our table.

“I don’t know,” Marla replied, “but I hope she puts on a bra before she gets here. This table won’t support both of those.”

Thankfully, the red-haired lady did put something on, a black wrap shift that she fluffed out and tied before arriving beside us.

“Ladies?” she said. “May I sit? I’m Ruby Drake. I think we have something in common.” As I opened my mouth in protest, she said, “I knew your ex-husband, John Richard Korman.”

“Ruby Drake,” Marla repeated. She frowned, as if trying to remember something. “You were his fifty-second girlfriend.”

“I was never Korman’s girlfriend,” Ruby Drake replied, her tone icy. “Far from it. In fact—”

Before Ruby could finish, Lana sashayed over to our table and interrupted her. “Ruby, you’ve got some men asking for you on the far side of the room.” Lana pointed a lacquered nail at one of the Rainbow’s dark corners, and Ruby slunk away.

“Dammit to hell,” I said under my breath. “We try to find stuff out here, and all we get is interrupted. Don’t folks come here to relax?”

“I don’t know,” Marla replied as she waggled her fingers at one of the platforms. “But check it out. There’s Sandee.”

Sandee Blue was wriggling seductively at one of the far mirrored tables. Through the cloud of cigarette smoke, I could make out a substantial crowd of men gawking at her. And what was she covered with, shortening? Her skin had a bright sheen, and I wondered if she’d learned that trick from her Elvis-impersonating boyfriend. A neat trick, if it was true.

“Why would John Richard,” I asked Marla, “who could have any wealthy tennis-playing socialite he wanted, go for a young stripper who has no money, no brains, and a pair of breasts that could be mistaken for Crenshaw melons?”

“The Crenshaws, silly.”

“But look at those guys ogling her. Don’t you suppose the Jerk got jealous of all the male attention Sandee received?”

“Nah,” Marla muttered. “It probably turned him on. C’mon. While we’re waiting, let’s eat. Gotta warn you, though, I doubt people come here for the buffet.”

“Sort of like buying porn magazines for the articles.”

Ten minutes later, I was trying to cut a fatty piece of what had been labeled “Prime Rib au Jus.” Marla had ordered us each two glasses of dry sherry, which the waitress had never heard of. Not wanting to cause a scene— for once—Marla settled for five-dollar soft drinks, which we sipped as we watched Sandee fling herself around. Finally, still wearing the high heels that were de rigueur for the dancers, she reached into the hole in the middle of the table, gathered up her cash, and stepped into a black shift similar to Ruby’s. Sandee wobbled down a set of steps beside the hexagonal table, but was stopped at the bottom by a short, bald, acne-faced young man who whispered in her ear. Whatever he said to her, it made her giggle, which made all the other parts of her jiggle. The man whispered some more. Sandee acted attentive, then nodded. She finally saw us waving to her and took her leave of the bald fellow.

“Hi-yi,” Sandee said when she arrived at our table. “I didn’t expect to see you two here.” She looked over her shoulder, scanning the club.

Marla said, “The golf shop sent us over. They said you found higher-paying work elsewhere.”

Sandee flinched. “Well, uh, John Richard told me to say I worked there. You know, in case people asked? He thought it would look better, you know, with him sponsoring the golf tournament. Anyway, I hated that shop! Who would buy those sucky old-lady clothes?” She shuddered as her eyes flicked around the club again.