Elaine Bloodhorn, world-weary, over-rouged, but still sweet and still soulful, felt a sudden rush of vertigo as she sashayed across the cramped stage of Thirteenth Street’s notorious “Silver Slipper” dance bar. “God, this is ridiculous,” she muttered. Sopha, her vixenish “pas de deux” partner, grabbed her back from the lip of the stage in a panic. The band, oddly enough (because Sid the tin-horn trumpeter was sober enough to perform this evening) was stumbling through “Ring of Burning Fire.”
Sopha felt Elaine’s forehead and that’s exactly the way it felt– like burning fire! “H-huuh, huh, what’cha mumbling, Big Little Sister, I don’t get it.”
“Ulp, I–I ah, don’t feel too swift,” gasped Elaine, as the trumpet refrain seemed to flare in her right ear like the Bells of Hell.
“Yeah,” and Sopha danced her buddy off stage right, away from those blinding footlights. Elaine was racking her swoozled brain, wondering, “Just what was in that damn cheese sandwich?” Somehow she managed to gather her faded salmon windbreaker around her superstructure and pick her way haltingly to the Astoria a block away. As if a mirage in Elaine’s befogged vision, there was Billy Luck to carry her upstairs and lay her gently onto the squeaky old iron bed.
“You look wiped out, Elaine,” Billy murmured, almost in shock. She, in turn, saw a hillbilly Adonis, her one true rescuer from this dawdry honky-tonk underworld. Billy knelt beside the lady, feeling a surge of aching affection, even though he and Elaine had not experienced the true “Wild Thing” action, as it was regarded down here on the Strip.
Billy gripped Elaine’s left wrist, feeling for her pulse. It seemed the heart rhythm had grown very faint. He pushed out the corrugated-metal covered door to Room 204 and bellowed uncontrollably, “CHOLO!! Get up here! Elaine’s doing poorly—”
Cholo burst thru the dim corridor, but another more robust figure seized Billy and slammed him against the moldy plaster wall. “William Luck, address unknown? Welcome, bastard! Sergeant Phil Carlisle, Metro Police!!”
Meanwhile, behind the “Silver Slipper,” Jed Harris and the grizzled doorman slapped five and exchanged a filthy roll of ten-dollar bills. Butch, the doorman, jabbed Harris sharply in the side.
“Word from Marsh is, bro, you woulda made a better payday had you exed out his wife Skipper, instead of jest SKEERING the broad!! Do ya savvy?”
Harris groaned as only a lost soul could. “So where’s Elaine, then. ”
Butch laughed grimly. “She in a baad way. And they takin’ Billy Luck down on suspicion…”
Harris tugged at his dusty broad brim pimp skimmer. “Sheeet…”
(To be continued)
