Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 23

Louie of the Lake

What could a woman with a weak ankle, frazzled from an interrogation by two homicide detectives and an FBI agent, better wish to carry her home than a silent, gentle glide on a magic carpet? Swing low, sweet chariot.

But this was Las Vegas and Temple was in the custodial care of Fontana, Inc.

Once Ralph had stopped the black, low-slung and decidedly unsweet Dodge Viper in front of the Circle Ritz--no one was present today to witness this exotic landing--Temple remained seated and experimentally tugged a tooth to see if they were still anchored.

The teeth were secure, which was more than could be said for the alignment of her vertebrae.

When Ralph came around the car to carry her in, she made no objection. Besides, her voice had probably developed a stutter in the forty seconds flat the Viper had permitted to elapse between the Crystal Phoenix, a mile away, and the Circle Ritz.

"Cool digs." Ralph grinned at the lavish neon of the Lover's Knot Wedding Chapel beaming purple and pink good cheer down on the Strip.

He turned to cast a last possessive glance upon the lethally spotless Viper, shining like fresh hot tar in the sunlight. He aimed a small remote device, at its darkly mirrored surface, then blipped on the security system. Apparently the car was community property of the bachelor Fontana brothers, allotted where needed. Apparently, Temple's welfare and whereabouts was a matter of swift concern for them all.

Somehow she was not comforted, being in the mood to brood about her assailed skit; her assailed self, her perhaps-glimpse of a Max clone, and her current, ignominious state of physical dependency.

Ralph shouldered the lobby door open and braced it with one Italian loafer toe as he turned to edge Temple through without any rude brushes with the doorjamb.

The Circle Ritz's always tepid air-conditioning greeted them like a tropical zephyr, humid, and half-hearted. The door hushed shut to banish the traffic hiss-and-squeak reverberating from the ever-busy Strip.

Temple sighed.

Ralph smiled with the knowledge of a job well done.

In the dim, black-marble paved and lined lobby, someone cleared his throat.

A figure stepped from the interior shadow before either one could react.

''Sorry to intrude on such utter solitude, but I have come, I fear, to beg a most receptive ear."

Ralph was not amused. 'This bum must have a speech impediment. He doesn't make sense.

Is he trying to rip off my earring?"

"He makes perfect sense," Temple dared to disagree. "Nostradamus is no robber, he's a bookie."

"Same difference," Ralph growled, lowering Temple to the floor in preparation for battle.

She braced a hand on the cool marble facing the elevator and attempted to put weight on her bad ankle. It declined to buckle, so she stepped slightly ahead of Ralph to keep him from charging Nostradamus in defense of his treasured earbob.

"I take it that you came to see me, not Ralph Fontana."

The bookie doffed his hat, a sweat-stained straw number pungent with nostalgia, especially in its pleated paisley band.

"Sure fine to see you on your feet again," he said. "It's glad I am that we could meet again. I hope to lure you to Temple Bar, to see a friend who's under par. Spuds Lonnigan has opened a new bar, and he could use some clever PR."

"Spuds" Temple tasted the name, which was familiar in a warped sort of way. Time-warped, probably. ''You mean one of the geezers in the Glory Hole Gang?"

Nostradamus's face screwed up in disapproval despite the lurking presence of Ralph Fontana. ''Geezerdom, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Someday even youngsters like you will find themselves . . . older."

"True. I feel it already. I just meant ... well, what does Spuds want? To talk to me?"

"If you could repair to where his place is, you two could discuss some nice biz."

Ralph, still playing bodyguard, toyed with the pewter hacksaw dangling from his left lobe.

"Sounds fishy to me," he told Temple.

Nostradamus turned to him with ready politeness. "Indeed, young sir, you have hit it on the nose. The landing at Temple Bar teems with those."

"Fish," Temple translated promptly for Ralph's benefit. "I've heard about this new . . .

restaurant. Jill Diamond's grandfather Eightball O'Rourke is an associate of this Spuds Lonnigan."

"That don't cut any gray poupon with me," Ralph insisted.

"Carp," Nostradamus explained. "Carp swimming ashore in a golden greeting." He turned to Temple with a bow. "Shall we say two tomorrow for this meeting?"

"I may not yet be able to drive--"

"A car will conduct you to this dive."

"Dive?" Ralph frowned, then turned to Temple and laid down the law like an overprotective husband. ''You're not going who knows-where to God-knows-what alone, today or tomorrow."

'' 'Dive' is just an expression," Temple said hastily, "and it rhymed."

Nostradamus shrugged apologetically, but said nothing.

Temple mused on the mental effort it must take to improvise rhymes day in and day out.

One would think figuring odds for bettors would be taxing enough. A master of both math and meter; Nostradamus was indeed a Renaissance bookie.

Ralph might have made more objections, having settled as deeply as a Method actor into the role of grim guardian, but just then the Viper shrieked from the street outside.

Ralph was barreling across the lobby and through the door, reaching into his flapping suitcoat, before Nostradamus could come up with a rhyming couplet.

Temple hobbled after, Nostradamus taking her elbow, for all the good that gesture did her.

Outside they found Electra Lark, her hands lifted so sky high that her muumuu had hiked up well beyond the dimples in her knees. Given the landlady's Technicolor dress and her lime and pink sprayed hair, it wasn't hard to notice that her face was Liquid-Paper white.

Maybe the source of Electra's shock was the shiny black Beretta that matched the screaming Viper so nicely. The semiautomatic fit Ralph Fontana's fine Italian hand like a steel gauntlet and was pointed straight at the turquoise bird-of-paradise on Electra's muumuu.

"I was only . . . petting the fender," Electra said in a gush, "when the dang thing started yammering. I barely touched it."

"Better be the truth." Ralph bolstered his firearm and settled his jacket into smooth lines again. "Better not have a fingerprint on it. That's a fresh, hand wash-job, lady. This baby's been buffed by genuine shimmy cloth."

Temple refrained from telling Ralph that chamois was pronounced "shammy," not like something a topless dancer does.

As Ralph came around the hood to examine the street side fender, Electra, hands still raised on high, edged around the car's rear until she stood on the sidewalk with Temple and Nostradamus.

"I barely brushed it," she complained again.

Ralph silenced the alarm system with a punch on the remote control, then bent deeply over the fender for a close inspection.

"The alarm is set on super-sensitive," he muttered with satisfaction. ''Look wrong at this baby and you're siren-meat. This is Fontana brother property. Look, and lust, but don't touch."

Electra examined the speaker and made a face that Ralph was too intent to see.

''Well, excuse me for window-shopping." She turned to Temple, finally lowering her limbs.

Armfuls of garish titanium bracelets jangled from forearms to wrists like the rings of Saturn coming in for a landing. "You okay, dear?" She eyed Nostradamus with more mother-hen suspicion.

Temple nodded, weary of such high doses of solicitude. "Nostradamus came here to discuss business, and Ralph drove me home from the Phoenix. I admit that I could use a little peace and quiet, though."

"You shall have it." Electra appropriated Temple's elbow to guide her back inside. "We shall all have it when the nasty man with the noisy car departs."

Ralph, squinting into the dazzling, dark mirror of the Viper's sun-warmed fender, heard nothing.

Nostradamus topped his balding head with the straw fedora and tipped its brim to the two women vanishing into the Circle Ritz. He looked well satisfied.

****************

Temple was waiting--feet wisely shod in tennis shoes, tote bag loaded for bear over her left shoulder--in the Circle Ritz lobby less than twenty-four hours later.

In the interval, she had taken a long, hot bath, followed by a long, cold application of ice to her ankle while she read her way through one-twenty-second of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale.

Temple kept an always-mean-to-read-someday shelf of eclectic books, most of which she never got to. Helprin's lyrical yet epic fairy tale bewildered but bewitched her, and totally made her forget Fontana brothers, police officers and Crawford Buchanan, which was a sizable achievement.

In the morning she cut her toenails, another always-mean-to-get-to chore, did her nails, and read the paper with Midnight Louie.

Reading the paper with Midnight Louie meant that she opened a section wide in preparation to concentrating on a story. Then Louie walked across the paper and her lap. He finally settled in a large, lumpish mass on her thighs, the paper betwixt them, so that he was comfy and she could not read, move, or even breathe. She could not, in fact, do anything but stroke his glossy, Viper-black fur until he purred like a hive of bees.

When her legs were asleep to the hip and the paper was crushed beyond legibility, Louie would yawn, stretch, rise and go elsewhere. Often his farewell leap would leave a prick of braced hind claws in her thighs as he vaulted away. Sometimes, Temple thought, a cat was not unlike a live-in lover who left suddenly.

Despite Louie, or perhaps because of his inadvertent numbness therapy. Temple's ankle felt almost normal in the morning. The swelling was down, and by noon she was itching to return to the scene of the crime. Maybe this mysterious car that was to waft her to Temple Bar wouldn't show up, she thought hopefully as she buckled on her oversize watch.

Once a watch was on her wrist, she was ready to simmer, cook, parboil and rock and roll.

She was no longer chilling out at home, she was primed to do business.

So she paced, despite her ankle, waiting to go down to the lobby. There she would consult some old guy about a Lake Mead restaurant at an obscure site that coincidentally bore her name, minus a terminal "r."

When she rode down in the rickety elevator, every clack and clank seemed to chide her for deserting the action at the Crystal Phoenix. Why had she agreed to this bizarre side trip, other than the fact that a freelance PR person always can use another client and she had been eager to disarm Ralph, the human Doberman, who seemed ready to rend the flesh of any harmless being who crossed her path?

But maybe Ralph was right, Temple thought in the deserted lobby. She was about to ride--

with a stranger--to meet a strange man somewhere she had never been, on business she wasn't sure of. Maybe the police were right, too, heaven forbid. Maybe she was dangerous to somebody. Maybe that somebody would stop at nothing to stop her. Nostradamus could be an innocent shill, thinking he was acting for this Spuds Lonnigan. It could all be a--famous phrase from detective stories--a set-up, with her as the patsy. Well, she didn't play the patsy for anyone.

A cranky car engine idled outside. A heavy-metal door slammed. A shadowed figure was framed by the doorway, the blazing afternoon sunlight etching only a shapeless silhouette.

Temple braced her feet and clutched her tote to her torso, six pounds of shoulder-numbing sandbag.

The door whooshed open, admitting a shaft of heat that sliced the Circle Ritz's tepid coolness like a warm knife dissecting a stick of butter.

Temple cursed herself for being too trusting.

"Hi," said the newcomer's familiar, desert twang. "I'm your chauffeur to Temple Bar."

Temple baby stepped over the sleek marble floor until she was close enough to see features.

"Jill? Jill Diamond?"

"Yup. I'll run you out and back. A drive in the desert will be fun. Hope you don't mind a ragtop."

Boy, did Temple feel silly. Jill Diamond was almost smaller than she was.

And the vehicle that waited at the curb was almost smaller than the Storm, but not quite.

Jill's unlikely set of wheels was an ancient Jeep, painted a baby-blue that sand and sun had buffed by to a muted, matte finish like a beloved pair of time-faded blue jeans.

Temple climbed gingerly into the rough-and-ready vehicle. The seat was about as upholstered as a rock. Jill did equally rough-and-ready things with the stick shift, and the Jeep jolted into motion. Temple felt rather like someone riding a baby-blue bucking bronco. She jammed sunglasses onto her nose and dug for the sun-screen in her tote bag as the Jeep sputtered onto the Strip, then onto the highway.

Wind rushed by as if late for somewhere. Talk seemed too much trouble. Beside Temple, Jill's braids whipped behind her like pennants, while she squinted into the distance without benefit of such sissy accessories as sunglasses, aiming the Jeep for the farthest wrinkle of the horizon.

Steel-gray highway, blue sky and sage-green land streaked by. Mauvish mountains ringed the horizon like the jagged edge of tomorrow, a distant barrier to keep the pinball of the Jeep from shooting right off the map into Maybesville.

Temple laughed suddenly.

Leaping lizards, but a change of scenery . . . and locomotion . . . was exhilarating.

***************

"Sorry the ride was so rough," Jill said when she finally jerked the Jeep to a stop before a ramshackle wooden building on the shore of blindingly blue Lake Mead.

"No problem. Not much out here, is there?"

"You visit Lake Mead much?"

"Not really. It's . . . well, for tourists."

After dismounting the Jeep--that's how Temple thought of it, for the step-up was higher than she was used to--they ambled to the water's edge.

Without the engineering feat of Hoover Dam only miles away, none of this lucent water would lie here, as rich as lapis lazuli against the red-rock roughness of the surrounding land.

The lake glimmered in the sunlight, a hundred-carat sapphire set in an unforgiving rocky rim of desert landscape.

"It's almost unearthly," Temple commented.

Jill smiled. ''You're not the first to think so. Remember the scene in Planet of the Apes when the astronauts' capsule crash-landed in water? That footage was shot here. This place could pass for another planet, if you look at it right."

Temple turned to her. ''You don't seem--"

"Like a late-night lounge singer's wife? Nope. I grew up on this desert. I only went into town to play poker--professionally. What are you smiling at? The idea of a woman poker player?''

Temple shook her head. Jill was sure touchy on the subject. "No. I'm smiling at the idea of calling Las Vegas 'town,' as if it was someplace you went to buy feed for the stock."

"You can," Jill said seriously, wrinkling her turned-up nose. "Heck, you can even buy the stock there. Las Vegas is a lot of things, but to me, it's just a gaudy belly-button in what really matters. This land all around here, and what's on it, what time and tradition stamped into it."

Temple turned back to the building of unpainted boards. Despite its sand-blasted look, it now had a mystique, thanks to Jill's insight. ''What was this?"

"Oh, some boathouse/roadhouse long ago. Crazy as a bar and grill out here looks, I think Spud''s onto something. The boys have plans for this area, maybe even a paddlewheel gambling boat on the Nevada side of the lake and a water park, all in the weathered-wood ghost-town look . . . natural, you know?"

Temple smiled again, this time at the Las Vegas idea of "natural." Such effects invariably took unnatural amounts of time and money.

"I know what you're saying," she said finally. "I'm creating a similar theme-scheme for the Crystal Phoenix."

"That's why I thought you could help Spuds out. He's a hell of a cook, let me tell you. And my grandfather's old bunch, they spent too long alone on the desert. It's time for them to get into the mainstream."

"Eightball has certainly gone mainstream, and then some. Doesn't it worry you, a man his age playing private investigator?"

"Hell, yes! It worries me, and I spent my younger years worrying about these old coots while they were fussing about me. But them doing nothing worries me more. They're like lifers, you know, in prison, whose sentence just got commuted. It's a new world, so they might as well live in it."

'' The boys,' " Temple repeated ironically.

Jill nodded seriously. ''They are that. Come on and meet Spuds."

Jill's boot heels dug into the soft sand as the pair edged around the sprawling building to the lakeshore side. The weathered wood was a soft, ashen gray. Temple noted with favor, and a broad deck edged all four sides, a perfect site for al fresco dining.

Up front, a crude hand lettered sign over the door announced 'Three O'Clock Louie's."

Smaller printing beneath promised "Around-the-clock fun and food for the entire family."

From inside came, not the aroma of food or the chatter and laughter of fun, but the sound of hell-bent hammering interspersed with the occasional curse.

Jill doffed her cowboy hat and sprang up the shallow steps to the deck. "Hey, fellas, cut your cussing. There's a lady present. Not me, gents, but the lady who shares the name of this landing.

Miss Temple Barr herself."

Temple was not pleased to have to live up to that introduction, especially in tennis shoes.

She soft-footed it over the wood planking and inside Three O'Clock Louie's.

Bare light bulbs draped the perimeter of a cavernous room filled with sawhorses, lumber, table saws and older men working away like the Seven Dwarves.

'This is what you call starting from scratch," said one, wiping a sawdust-covered hand on his baggy jeans, then coming to shake Temple's. "That's the way I cook, and that's the way I cook up a restaurant. From scratch."

"It does take a lot of scratch," put in another fellow.

They all stopped what they .were doing to ogle Temple, which was most unsettling. She had met them briefly at "Les Girls" strip club, where they also had a financial interest, but she had not had time to put faces and names together.

Now, here she was again, confronted en masse with a pack of males, trying to tell one from the other. Besides jeans, they all wore kerchiefs around their necks or foreheads, and suspenders, but some were portly, others lean. Some bald, some still hairy.

She recalled shards of the local legends about the Glory Hole Gang, who were a PR person's dream in a golden oldie package: how these senior citizen fugitives, then mere whippersnappers, had hijacked a shipment of silver dollars before World War II and buried the loot in the desert. How they could no longer find Lost Camel Rock that marked the buried treasure. How they hid out for decades at a ghost town called Glory Hole, with Eightball's granddaughter, Jill, growing up there. How Jill learned to be a crack poker player and supported the entourage when she was old enough by playing professionally in Las Vegas. How the lost silver dollars were found by some curious tourists, but the statute of limitations had run out on the old boys' heist by then, so they went scot-free after their long exile in the desert. How they turned Glory Hole into a tourist attraction and now were rich enough to expand their empire in other directions. Such as an eatery at Temple Bar.

All this flashed through Temple's mind in the wink of a butterfly's eye. History was fine, but her immediate problem, as with the brothers Fontana, was how to tell the Glory Hole Gang apart.

''You must be Spuds," she began, addressing the fellow who was still wringing her hand.

''Smart as a whipsnake, Jilly," he commented. "No wonder she catches all those murderers red-handed." He turned to Temple again. "I'm mighty pleased a big-time operator like you would bother with my little down-home restaurant. It's nothing fancy." '

"That's good," Temple decreed, stepping over strewn two-by-fours to get an impression of the place's size. "It's called 'atmosphere.' "

"Oh, we got atmosphere," another fellow said. "At our age, that's all we got, 'cept arthuritis.

Pitchblende O'Hara, at your disposal."

"Don't use that word. Pitchblende," put in yet another man. "Spuds plans to install a big, stainless steel maw of a disposal.

" You don't want to go down it by accident"

"Pitchblende," Temple said. "What a colorful nickname!"

"Mining term, ma'am. We all used to do a bit of prospecting when we was younger." He shyly ducked his bald head. "Pitchblende is uranium ore--dark, brownish black stuff, the way my hair used to be."

"When you used to have hair," guffawed a fourth man, whose own snow-white shock emphasized Lake Mead-blue eyes.

''Wild Blue Pike!" Temple guessed. At least this Glory Holer matched his name.

''So they've called me since Adam's apple was a pippin. I like to fly a bit when the weather's good."

"Yeah," Spuds suggested with long-time raillery. "Pilot that table-saw a little more, brother, and the work'll get done faster."

His words sent everybody back to their appointed tasks, which, as far as Temple could see, involved making as much noise as possible to little effect.

Spuds stuck a gnawed yellow pencil behind his ear and escorted the two women to the front porch, away from the racket.

"Jilly says you got your hands full at the Crystal Phoenix," he told Temple when all three were gawking politely at the lake, trying not to be distracted by the hammering, yammering, sawing and off-key whistling drifting from inside the building behind them. "But if you get inspired about any ways to promote this little enterprise of mine, I'd be much obliged. And we Glory Hole Boys pay well."

"Nothing much is out here," Temple said, gazing at the lovely view. "Getting people to come here will be a trick. I like the name, though--not yours, the restaurant's. It's folksy but implies life after dark. How did you ever come up with it?"

"Simple." Spud's grin showed off impeccably bright false teeth. "I did what all clever entrepreneurs do: I borrowed it."

"Oh, dear." Temple prepared herself to explain the facts of commercial life. "Not from anything copyrighted or trade-marked, I hope."

"Not unless you call me a copy-cat." He pointed to a corner of the deck.

A large solid-black cat sat there, doing his nails.

Actually it was grooming its feet, toes spread, teeth pulling at the fine hairs between the pads. Temple had seen Midnight Louie do that a dozen times, and she was seeing it now.

''Louie! How did you get all the way out here?*'

The cat looked up, revealing his trademarked green eyes. He twitched a full set of whisker-white barbs, lifted his hindquarters from the planking, then sank into a belly-down stretch.

"How did my cat get out here?" Temple asked someone who would answer this time, namely Spuds Lonnigan.

"That's your cat? I don't see how that could be. This animal belonged to a war buddy of mine, who gave up the fishing business in Puget Sound and retired to Fiji. He wanted a good home on American soil for his old seagoing mascot, but near water. So I was elected. This here's Three O'Clock Louie."

''Are you sure." Temple demanded. "He's the spitting image of my cat. Midnight Louie."

"Old Wayne came through and handed him over not six weeks ago. Must be one of those Koppelgang situations."

"Doppelganger," Temple corrected absently.

The huge black cat had risen and was ambling over to inspect the visitors.

"What does he eat?"

"Every one of these dang goldfish they planted in the lake to entertain the tourists. I can't keep him away from 'em, not even with my best cooking. 'Course, Wayne did run a salmon trawler, so I guess this old boy's used to some pretty fancy fillets of fish."

By now the cat in question was rubbing itself against Temple's calves as if they were old friends, purring like a motor-boat.

"It certainly does like you," Jill noted. "I see what you mean about a resemblance to Midnight Louie, but this must be a different cat."

"You know Louie?"

"Sure. From the Phoenix."

Temple squatted down to scratch the animal's chin. The green eyes slitted, just like Louie's, but close up his muzzle looked dipped in milk.

''No, it can't be Louie, The muzzle is grizzled."

"Just like us," Spuds said, chuckling as he ran a palm over the pale stubble dotting his jaw.

"Been working day and night on this barn, no time to shave."

"Never had much time for it in the desert, either," Jill added fondly.

"Don't have ladies calling often. Think you can do something for me and Three O'Clock Louie, Miss Temple?"

"Sure. We can hatch some plans later, when the renovations are done. In the meantime, I think I better get back to the Crystal Phoenix, pronto."

"Why the hurry?" Jill asked, sounding anxious. "There's plenty to discuss here."

Temple suddenly saw through Jill like she was plate glass. This expedition to Temple Bar had been planned to distract Temple Barr herself from the ugly business at the Phoenix. But it hadn't worked; seeing Three O'Clock Louie in the flesh and fur had fixed that.

"I've got to get back and make sure Midnight Louie is in carp heaven and all's right with the world, for one thing."

"And for another?" Jill pressed her.

"For another, I better defend my skit from the forces of law and order, evil and Crawford Buchanan."

At her feet. Three O'Clock Louie seconded her announcement with a piercing meow of approval.