Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 1

Bless the Beast and Children

''How old is--?" Temple stared at the bald, bouncing, burbling infant, desperately seeking a safe synonym for ''it.'

And failing.

She would have to commit.

Suicide.

"He/she?" she uttered in a rush.

"Cinnamon is five months." Van von Rhine, the no-nonsense manager of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, spoke with maternal fondness.

"Cinnamon," Temple repeated, dazed. "You can call her. . . Cinny for short."

Temple winced at her own small talk, but hoped that she at least had the gender right. These days, given naming trends for both sexes, one could not be certain. Such uncertainty was no way to impress the boss. The potential boss.

Luckily, fond maternal doting was deaf as well as--apparently--blind.

''Isn't she adorable, if I do say so myself?" Van, a petite pastel blonde who was nevertheless the terror of hotel staff everywhere, and at the Crystal Phoenix in particular, hefted Cinnamon to her shoulder for a back-pat and a burp. ''Nicky wanted to call her 'Nicole,' but I convinced him that French names are too trendy nowadays. Men are so vain."

While Van von Rhine frowned at her husband's natural inclination to give his first child a name that echoed his, Temple recalled a rumor that "Van" was short for "Vanilla." That would make little Cinnamon a chip off the maternal spice rack. Men weren't the only blindly vain ones.

"How's Louie?" Van asked in the tone of one giving equal time to a guest's nearest and dearest.

"Huh?" Temple was seldom flummoxed by sudden subject changes, but pretending to admire babies turned her usually astute brains to, er, pabulum. A PR person loathed nothing more than something she knew nada about.

"Oh, would you like to hold her?" Van von Rhine's tone now indicated that she had been seriously and socially derelict.

"Ah, no thanks. Louie? Oh, you mean the cat!"

"Yes." Van's Madonna like smile matched her bland blond serenity. Princess Grace was not dead but resurrected in time for the evening news. "But Louie would not like being referred to as 'the cat.' There is nothing generic about Midnight Louie."

Yessir, that's my baby. Temple's brain insisted on drumming. "Louie's . . .fine. I'm sorry he wandered away from the Crystal Phoenix--"

Van nodded to a lurking teenaged nanny who quickly removed Cinnamon before Baby burped Gerber's split-pea soup on Mother's immaculate champagne-pale Versace suit shoulder.

Talk about Exorcist V.

"We miss him," she said simply.

"I do, too, now and then," Temple chimed in before catching herself. "I mean, he does come and go as he pleases."

Van von Rhine nodded. "Louie is his own fur person. Nicky finally convinced me that there was no point in trying to keep a rolling stone. I'm amazed that Louie deigns to reside with you on a semi-permanent basis."

"Free-to-be-Feline," Temple confided.

"I beg your pardon?" Van von Rhine's pale eyebrows elevated like polite ghostly caterpillars

''Louie would never leave his Free-to-be-Feline," Temple explained with laudable confidence, ''especially now that I dish shrimp Creole over it. Lots of shrimp. Cans of it. It's good for him; the Free-to-be-Feline, not necessarily the shrimp."

"I see." With Cinnamon whisked away, Van's voice indicated boredom with feeding formulas. She sighed. "As for your presence today, Nicky insists it is high time for a hotel makeover. I suppose he's right, given the appallingly short attention-span of the American public. In Europe, hotels pride themselves on their immutability, not on an annual facelift."

Temple remembered the lightly tanned Italian Romeo who had accompanied his wife to the convention center office to reclaim Louie weeks before, luckily to no good effect. Louie, borne away in a silver Corvette, had returned alone and on foot, and that was the end of his unofficial residence at the Crystal Phoenix. Temple wondered why, then sniffed a lingering scent of infant on the air--part Johnson & Johnson's powder, part Pampers, part pea. Perhaps Louie was even more allergic to something besides unadulterated Free-to-be-Feline.

"Wasn't the Crystal Phoenix completely redesigned only a couple years ago?" Temple asked.

"Exactly my point." Van von Rhine, baby and beast dispensed with, resumed her executive manner by folding pale, manicured hands on her sleek, glass-topped desk. "Las Vegas is changing before our eyes. Miss Barr. When Nicky and I introduced the remodeled Crystal Phoenix, 'class,' elan, what-you-will was a novelty in Las Vegas. Now . . . well, I can't say the town has grown sophisticated, but the marketing emphasis has changed. One must keep up with modern times. The Crystal Phoenix is not about to desert the 'classy' image that has set it apart, but we also must bow to modern economic pressures. We must offer a Family Plan."

Temple nodded seriously. She had never fallen in love with Las Vegas, although she had always rather admired its unpretentiously wacky instincts. But the feisty, money-grubbing town that Bugsy Siegel had imagined in the forties, that had exploded in the fifties, expanded in the sixties, frolicked in the seventies and splurged in the eighties had foundered in the nineties.

Las Vegas needed more than a face-lift to compete with Disney World and dial-a-lottery. It had to showcase more than babes, betting and blinking lights; more even than computerized slot machines and the occasional dose of class. It had to dispense family entertainment.

"Gentleman Johnny Diamond, our ballad singer," Van went, on, "was always behind--and therefore has come out ahead of--his time. The hotel decor, which I supervised, is refined to the max."

Temple winced at the last word of the last expression, for personal reasons.

"Our floor show," Van said with prim satisfaction, "was always more reminiscent of the Lido in Paris than the Lace 'n' Lust downtown. But I admit that the Crystal Phoenix lacks the proletarian approach. We must reposition ourselves to attract the full-value, family customers that Las Vegas seeks nowadays. Can you devise a program for us, Miss Barr, that converts 'class'

into 'family class?' "

''What a challenge," Temple responded to buy time. "Perhaps I should inspect the operation first."

"Excellent idea." Van von Rhine's trim fingernail, buffed to a rosy sheen, pressed a call button on her desk.

Instantly, a young man knocked on the door and entered the office. "You rang? Your slave is absent and I was passing by, so I thought I'd answer and see what was shakin'."

"Ralph," Van said, looking none too pleased, "Miss Barr needs a tour of the hotel. Is Nicky around?"

"Nicky is always around."

Ralph's lazy grin struck Temple as familiar, not only for its easy intimacy, but for its current shape and form.

Ralph was not an apt name for a suavely swarthy guy in his late twenties wearing a Nino Cerutti ice-cream suit guaranteed to melt female hearts at fifty paces. Temple would have taken him for the lounge singer, Johnny Diamond, had Van von Rhine not called him ''Ralph."

"In other words," Van said, frowning, ''Nicky's nowhere to be found when he's needed. I'm afraid that you'll have to escort Miss Barr yourself."

Ralph shrugged exquisitely padded shoulders. "No problem." His introductory glance was flattering to Temple, who had recently passed the landmark of thirty, and was therefore likely an "older woman" to him.

"One of Nicky's brothers," Van von Rhine added dryly. "I think you'll be safe."

"Really?" Temple's voice lilted with interest.

The Fontana brothers were infamous in Las.Vegas for their obscene number (nine or ten.

Temple recalled), their spiffy tailoring, and their latent mob tendencies. Nicky, of course, was the impeccably respectable businessman of the bunch with his purchase and restoration of the Crystal Phoenix and his marriage to Van, the daughter of a German hotel manager. The other Fontana boys were unwed, and apparently unemployed in any recognized legal occupation.

Temple had never met a Fontana brother in the flesh, besides Nicky, and found the species attractive but too overwhelming to take seriously.

Ralph managed to beat her to the office door without looking as if he had moved, and flourished it open. Normally, Temple hated gallant gestures, especially when performed in Cinemascope, but a Fontana brother was too much of a living legend to rebuke.

She sailed through on her conservatively tailored Evan Picone pumps, hoping that she sounded as brisk and businesslike as Van von Rhine at her most Teutonic. Landing a Strip hotel account was big-time, almost more than Temple liked to handle for a reasonably relaxed lifestyle.

Still, if she had to pick her favorite Vegas hostelry, it was the Crystal Phoenix. This was not simply for sentimental reasons: that it was, for instance. Midnight Louie's former headquarters, or that Max Kinsella had wined and dined her at the rooftop Fontana Lounge when announcing their joint purchase of the Circle Ritz condominium.

Temple frowned. Best not to let past disappointments shadow the present.

"Are you familiar with the hotel, Miss Barr?" Ralph inquired with a smile that was almost shy.

Perhaps the bachelor Fontana brothers were used to running in a pack.

"I know the public areas," Temple said, "but not the quirky little aspects every hotel has."

"Quirk is my specialty," Ralph promised, extending his hand like a tour guide, the better to display the gold oval of a Roman ring. A real Roman ring.

Where did the Fontana boys get their money? Not from their notorious uncle, Macho Mario Fontana, at least not publicly. Temple began to chafe at the notion of getting mixed up with shady company. The Crystal Phoenix, and Nicky and Van, had impeccable reputations, but the brothers did not. Of course. Temple's own record on shady associates wasn't triple A, thanks to Max (Mr. Interpol Pinup) Kinsella.

Ralph proved to be a decent guide. While he did not neglect such highlights as the water-garden lobby, the Ultra suede-covered gaming surfaces and the palm-dotted outdoor pool area, he did point out the quirky.

"The Midnight Louie memorial pond," he said -solemnly with crossed hands and bowed dark head near a stand of canna lilies.

Temple gazed into the shade-dappled pool, in which large, richly scaled fish schooled like angry piranha.

''Gorgeous goldfish!" Temple admitted.

''Chef Song's private stock. And don't let him catch you calling them goldfish. Or carp. My brother Armando called them carp in his hearing once, and almost lost his ears to a meat cleaver. The word is 'koi.' K-o-i, but you pronounce it like it had a 'w' in it. K-w-o-i."

"Kwoi," Temple repeated, amused by Ralph's careful explanation. She already knew the term, but decided not to tell him. "Why is it Louie's memorial garden? He isn't dead yet."

"Not for any lack of Chef Song's meat cleaver. That old black cat is too fast for him, despite his looks, and he takes a lot of look-sees at the koi in this pool, believe me." Temple did, and followed Ralph indoors again to meet Chef Song, and his staff and meat cleaver, in the hotel's pristine stainless-steel-equipped kitchen.

She also toured the cavernous basement from chorus girl dressing rooms, an area of apparently avid interest for Ralph, to the huge below-stage elevators that wafted sets and scenery up to the waiting audience above.

"This reminds me of my days at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis," she remarked in the echoing silence of the stage's underbelly. ''What's topside like?"

Ralph escorted her into a service elevator in a deserted area of the basement. Their first stop was the theater level, where Temple wandered onto the deserted stage under the cold, dead spotlights to eye the empty seats.

Ralph, apparently having no dramatic instincts, remained by the backstage light switch.

Temple hadn't been on a stage in . . . oh, years now. The theater's eternal, invisible magic lurked in the darkness, like the Mystifying Max about to launch an illusion at an unsuspecting audience. The wooden stage floor echoed the crisp snap of her high heels, throwing shards of the sound all the way to the back row.

Temple found a deserted theater both romantic and creepy, a beast of sleepy silence on the brink of breaking into screams and howls. In any theater, a sensitive ear could detect memory echoes of all the lines, action, drama that had ever taken place on its abandoned stage, and ever would. But this was a Las Vegas hotel stage; the action fated for it was as gaudy, gleeful and hokey as the more unrehearsed dramas playing nightly in the hotel gaming and bar areas.

Ralph blinked the backstage light off and on to signal his eagerness to move on, so Temple rejoined him without indulging the urge to recite Portia's ''quality of mercy" speech, which she still knew by heart from the high school play.

"Johnny Diamond has been the headliner here as long as I've been in Vegas," Temple said,

"but I've never seen his act."

Ralph rolled his eyes in grudging envy. ''That guy. What a voice. Always packs 'em in, Wednesday through Sunday nights.''

''You're dark two nights then, Monday and Tuesday?"

"Yeah. Except when some special group comes in for a one-night stand, like the Gridiron in a few weeks. Must be some sports thing."

"The Gridiron? That's going to be held here this year, really?" At Ralph's mystified nod, she couldn't help bragging a little. "The Gridiron's the local journalists' annual satirical review. I usually write skits for it, and take a role now and then, when dragooned into it. Lordy, is Gridiron time here again already? Funny, I haven't heard a call for scripts."

"You mean this Gridiron is just a bunch of local newspaper types writing stuff?" Ralph sounded deeply disappointed, "Why'd they rip off a sports name then? To fool people?"

"The Gridiron show satirizes politicians at the local and national level: movers and shakers and newsmakers. It's called a 'Gridiron' because its wit is supposed to skewer the local public personalities, put them on a gridiron until they feel the heat. All in good fun, of course."

"Like a roast of some movie star?"

"Roasted and toasted."

"All right! Speaking of hot times on stage, you should see this place when Johnny cracks out the vocal chords . . . women throwing themselves at him, along with their room numbers and other little personal items, what we would call--"

"Niceties?" Temple supplied diplomatically.

Ralph frowned at the obviously unfamiliar word. "No nighties, more like naughties. Johnny's as married as Queen Elizabeth, but they don't care. He's got his hair long like Michael Bolton now, and that really wows 'em. I been considering a pony tail myself. What do you think?"

Ralph turned to display a neat nape of patent-leather black hair.

"Um, it might interrupt your collar line."

"Yeah. And I don't know how you girls comb all that stuff back there, either." He glanced at Temple's halo of rambunctious red curls and frowned again. ''Maybe an earring."

She reached automatically to her naked lobe. Was she missing something?

"Not you. Me. Whatta you think?"

"I think the ring is enough."

He fanned his hand to regard his Roman beauty of a ring as well as display a manicure as subtle as Van von Rhine's. Temple edged her snagged forefinger nail behind her back. The only thing subtle about her home-made manicure was today's pink color: Ravished Rosebud.

''Yeah." Ralph was still meditating on his grooming. "This knuckle knick-knack is the genuine artifact, dug up along the Appian Way--not the phony Appian Way at Caesars Palace across the Strip, but the real thing. In Rome. It's a street, but like real old."

"Well. When in Rome, Mr. Fontana, we ought to take a tour."

"Right. The roofs next."

"I can hardly wait," she murmured, following him back to the service elevator.

The roof, fourteen floors up, featured the aforementioned Fontana Lounge, looking shabby.

By daylight, its lavish neon was a grid of dead, gray tubes you might see in a forties black-and-white mad scientist movie.

Ralph conducted Temple around the rooftop obstructions, holding her hand so she could navigate on the wobbly gravel.

"What's the big attraction up here?" she wondered.

Ralph's grin was wide. "Nicky and Van's penthouse."

"I don't think we should intrude--"

"Why not? They ain't here. See, this is the hot tub area. Spiffy, huh?"

"Very nice." Temple corrected herself internally. Very, very nice. She eyed the molded whirlpool bath surrounded by decking, chairs, carelessly tossed towels and shrubbery. What a great place to view the stars--or even more of a light show, the neon of nighttime Las Vegas.

Ralph had wandered over to a long wall of glass, pressing his face against it all the better to see inside.

Temple was feeling distinctly nervous. ''I don't think we should violate the Fontana's' privacy by slinking around here."

"What's to violate?" Ralph sounded indignant. 'They're not here, I told you. Besides, I'm a relative. You should see the bedroom. Ritzy. Even has a moon roof."

"A . . . moon roof, like in a car?"

"Right. Only bigger, and right over the bed. Slides back so you can see all the way to Serious, or whatever star is out there."

"Really, Mr. Fontana, I'd rather see the hotel's more public areas--"

Ralph Fontana suddenly lifted his hands and pushed his ears forward, like an elephant's. He stuck out his tongue and made rude noises.

Temple, speechless, decided that the Fontana family ran to insanity at great heights; Ralph laughed as he turned away from the window, smoothing the hair at his temples. ''Kid was crying. I fixed that. Surprised the pea-soup out of it. Say, that little oh-pear girl is some nice piece of fruit, isn't she? Van got her from England. Classy, just like the Crystal Phoenix."

Feeling like a peeping tomcat. Temple tiptoed to the window. Luckily, the au pair girl had her back to them, but the fussing infant propped over her shoulder was now grinning like a pumpkin.

"Let's skedaddle before we're arrested," Temple muttered, treading over the littered rooftop without a backward look.

Ralph Fontana soon caught up with her, but the tour was mostly over, except for a detour to the seventh floor. There Ralph escorted her with pride and fanfare to a door bearing the number 713.

"This is just a regular room," Temple noted.

"Hey, it's not regular at all. It's a suite," Ralph reported.

"So it's a suite. Lots of hotels have them."

"Not like this." Ralph flourished an old-fashioned pass key from his breast pocket.

Obviously, this was the tour's big moment. He unlocked the door and pushed it open, at the same time drawing Temple behind him as if to protect her from the contents.

What was this? An unauthorized drug raid on an unsuspecting guest?

Ralph edged into the inner dimness, then vanished.

In the hall. Temple wondered whose privacy he was violating now. She sincerely hoped it wasn't that of an ex-mob hitman who'd been residing here quietly under the federal witness protection program and who still considered an Uzi an appropriate retirement companion.

A crash came from inside the room. Ralph cursed so colorfully that Temple couldn't translate it. A light--but not much--clicked on.

''Come in," Ralph urged, still muttering under his breath.

Temple crossed the threshold and found her sharp heels sinking into rose-floral carpeting.

She was aware of too much green, clunky yet prissy furniture, and satin draperies teased into fantastic shapes. '

"The Ghost Suite," Ralph announced with pride of possession. "They haven't changed a doily in here since the forties."

Temple wrinkled her nose,

"All the original stuff. Funky, huh?" Ralph opened another door deeper into the dark.

"Here's the bedroom. Imagine. Jersey Joe Jackson slept here." His voice had sunk to reverential depth. "Was he an operator! Right up there with Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes. Died broke, though, but not really."

"I've heard about Jersey Joe Jackson," Temple said. "One of the local legends. But I didn't know he kept a suite in this hotel."

"This place was the Joshua Tree then. Man, that dude was into everything--real estate, gambling. Made a pile. Nobody could figure why he died so poor--until Johnny Diamond and the little lady he's now married to did some of their courting on these premises. Guess what they found in the inner spring of the mattress?"

"Inner peace?" Temple hazarded. She was getting really fed up with peeking into other people's bedrooms, probably because no one would want to peek in hers now that Midnight Louie was its sole masculine visitor.

"Nah." Ralph did not miss a beat. ''Silver dollars. The big round kind that would make a Kennedy half-dollar look like a BB. Big as ... yo-yos," he bragged. "They actually made money like that in the old days, and these were old coins, too, hijacked by the Glory Hole Gang in the forties and hidden away until Johnny and Jill jounced 'em loose a couple years ago."

"Not exactly a story fit for family consumption," Temple suggested.

"Huh? It's good enough for my family. Look, I got one of the coins as a lucky piece. We all got one."

Ralph pulled something from a slack pocket and sent it spinning toward the ceiling.

Temple watched the thin silver disc wobble its way down to Ralph's waiting hand like a UFO

on a leash and wondered why she kept getting such flaky clients.

Ralph slapped the coin to the top of his free hand and sneaked a peek, "Heads. My lucky day. Wanna bet?"

"I only bet on Kennedy half-dollars," Temple said with apt untruth. Those were about as rare nowadays as the Mystifying Max and a sane client.

Ralph gave another of his affable shrugs and showed her out the door.

"Whatta you think?" he asked in the dead-quiet tunnel of hallway leading back to the elevators. "Can you cook up a campaign to turn the Crystal Phoenix into a place that would appeal to kiddies?"

"Without adding a theme park that costs several million dollars? I don't know, but I'll think about it," she promised.

Ralph nodded sagely, insisted that she enter the elevator first, then faced forward into his sleek stainless steel reflection. He ignored her as they descended seven floors.

"Maybe I'll stick with the ring thing," he said at last.

"Good idea."

"In my nose."

Brother!