Chapter 13

Timothy Lawler sat with the chief of the local vice squad.

"I've gotten sheaves of letters about that lesbian bar, Ed. The place is notorious. And the name! The Tanned Hide," he said with disgust.

Chief Edward Huskey smiled. "They got some tough babes in that place, all right. It's all decked out like a man's leather bar, with saddles and belts and all. God help any man who walks in that little den."

"But you have women detectives," Tim said quietly.

He watched the slow comprehension dawn on the chiefs face. Ed Huskey owed him several favors, and he had plenty of interesting information on the vice chief. He knew that Huskey was in his debt; Tim was a member of the City Council and had a good deal to say about appropriations for the police department-and raises for the personnel.

"The people around here are fed up with this sort of thing," Tim went on. In his mind he saw a landslide victory for himself in the forthcoming legislative elections. He already had the headline written:

LAWLER LANDSLIDE LEVELS LUST PANDERERS

Chief Huskey stroked his chin. "I don't know how we would stand legally. The state statute reads: unnatural intercourse. That's all it says. That technically refers to sodomy and bestiality. Only a male can commit intercourse."

"True," said Tim. "But intercourse can be interpreted to mean a completed sex act-going all the way, in other words. Lesbians go all the way, in their fashion, don't they? I think we could test the law on that basis. If we win, fine. If we don't still fine, because the climate of public opinion around here now is such that the law could be changed to read more specifically."

He saw himself in the state legislature, introducing the new bill. Any non-procreative sexual act....He frowned. That might be inclusive of married couples who depended on the pill. He altered the wording: Any sexual act between two people of the same sex. Yes, that was better.

"Who's your best-looking hen cop?" he asked Huskey.

The chief grinned. "Barbara Quentin, who else?

But she'll have a stroke when I tell her what she's going to have to do. She's all-woman all right. One hundred percent."

The next day, one-hundred-percent-all-woman Miss Quentin sat in the office with the two men. The air was thick with a sultry perfume that was distinctly Arabic or Turkish. Her nails were batter called talons, being over an inch long. She was possibly the city's best decoy. Much of her work entailed sitting alone in movies waiting for a man to sit down beside her so she could arrest him. She was thirty-six, unmarried, and lived with her widowed father, the retired chief of the vice squad, whom she adored. Entrapment ran in the family.

"Every time I think of a woman just touching me I could just die!" she exclaimed. "Lesbians make me physically ill. I just can't understand why any woman would want to be a lesbian." She shivered and wrinkled her nose.

"Well, you'd better take some sedative before you go to The Tanned Hide," Tim said, shaking his head.

Det. Quentin straightened her lace cuffs and rattled her bangled bracelets, all six of them. "I just really don't know what women do together. It's always puzzled me. Why would a woman want to go to bed with a woman when she can go to bed with a man?" she mused.

"Bunch of goddamn degenerates," Tim said darkly. "This country's going to go the way of the Roman Empire if things don't change. All these rotten apples...."

Huskey spoke up. "A woman is built for a man-"

Tim snapped his fingers. "That's it! That's how we could skirt the wording of the law. A dildo! If somebody could be caught using a dildo, that would be intercourse, pure and simple."

"I would die if a woman came near me with a dildo-"

"It wouldn't have to be you, Babs," Huskey said. "If you witnessed it, that would be enough."

She turned to him. "But I thought you said I'd have to let somebody do something to me!"

"Whichever way we can work it. Well just have to play it by ear."

"Ugh! What do they do with their ears?" She rolled her eyes at the ceiling and shook her head.

Huskey crossed his legs, looked down at them for a second, then uncrossed them. "Okay, here's the plan. Babs, you'll go there as a customer. You'll pretend to be a femme."

"Well, I should hope so," she interrupted. "I'm not cutting my hair for anything."

"And wear a dress and heels," Tim put in.

"I never wear anything else. I don't own a single pantsuit. I just don't feel right in them."

As she listened to the briefing, she absentmindedly ran her forefinger over her eyebrow. It seemed, Tim thought, to be a habit, the way some people pull at an ear lobe. Suddenly she looked at her finger and saw the brow-makeup smeared on it. She opened her purse and began rooting for something. She took out her revolver, her badge, and finally found her compact.

After she had repaired the damage, she planted her hands firmly in her lap, but it wasn't long before she started to fidget again. She fingered the jacket of her suit, running her hand up and down its unbuttoned edge. When Tim looked at her once again, she was poking her finger absent-mindedly in and out of a buttonhole.