Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 37

Midnight Discovery

''Everything's fine," said the Luxor Hotel, adjusting the blue and gold horizontally-striped headdress of the Sphinx that fronted her gold leather bustier. In fact, this Sphinx had and unusually prominent set of cheekbones.

The Luxor bent to straighten the seams on her net tights-- a glittery string of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

''Except it's hot as hell down here," complained the MGM Grand, tossing the spangle-tangled blond mane that streamed over her bare shoulders. Her bustier was warm and fuzzy and a perfect likeness of Leo the Lion's blunt-featured feline face, except that he too had awesomely pronounced cheekbones.

"We are going to have to tap like hell to keep our balance on that puny ring-of-Saturn ramp around the UFQ," the Treasure Island added in turn.

Perhaps she should have been called the Treasure Chest, for her bustier ranneth over with golden pieces of eight spilling from a brass-bound box unto the ninth power.

Temple had to admit that the night shift at the Lace 'n' Lust had perfect figures for her Living Hotels tableau. Modest proportions would not have adapted so hilariously to the overblown images of Las Vegas' latest hostelries-cum-theme parks.

The amateur chorus girls in their battered silver-painted tap shoes and sequined body suits gathered around to ooh and aah the Strip Hotels and their stripper impersonators, who each wore twenty-some pounds of folderol.

"You look fantastic." Temple told them all, meaning it.

Beyond the milling performers, the huge silver bulk of the grounded UFO glimmered matte-silver in the under stage dimness.

Two dozen local print and electronic reporters paced in more prosaic outfits. The men portraying gangsters wore brown zoot suits with neon-colored shirts and white ties; the G-men wore gray suits with pinstripes so exaggerated that they resembled convict stripes.

''Oh, and wow!"

Temple turned to regard the array of Elvis imitators.

Never before had she seen so much white satin Spandex, so many nickel-size rhinestones, so many glitz-ridden belts wide enough to be mistaken for wrestling trophies or even freeway on-ramps.

Temple gazed rapturously at sideburns as long, black and fuzzy as tarantula legs, at slicked-back pompadours and sweat-stained scarves, at rings even bigger than Liberace's collection of pinkie pianos, at boots that looked like they were cut from the concho-studded hide of a country-western singing cow that consented to chew only a rhinestone cud.

"Cosmic," she sighed with the satisfaction of an artist who has attained a particularly elusive vision.

"Danny wanted us to surprise you," the Luxor said with a pout. She fiddled with the battery-powered azure laser-beam atop her pyramid headdress, which gave her the look of a blue-light special at a K-Mart store. "He'll be so upset that you peeked."

The MGM Grand nodded soberly, almost unseating her own towering headdress--the operative initials seven inches high surmounting the keyboard of a glossy black piano--a grand piano, naturally.

''Danny wouldn't want you down here now." She absently patted Leo's nose, which covered her belly button, but not much else. ''You might miss our grand entrance."

"I just wanted to ensure that nothing is going wrong," Temple said.

"It isn't," an Elvis growled. "God, this elastic pajama-suit is stifling, and so is the stuffing."

"That stuffing is you, Mitch," a svelter Elvis, but not by much, suggested. He tugged at the ten-inch-wide rhinestoned belt girding his loins. "You can bet that I will stick to writing obituaries from now on, instead of reversing them."

"You look adorable, every one!" Temple reassured the nervous Elvii, hard-boiled newsmen all who would writhe at her choice of adjectives.

Half the humor of a Gridiron show was seeing newspeople and public personalities forced to play against type. And most of the men sweating in the costumes required by Temple's skit had made the casual condescending comments they made to all women who were small, young and decent-looking.

Temple pinched a fleshy cheek that happened to belong to a cigar-smoking assistant news editor of the Review Journal who had once called her "dollie."

"Just too cute for words," she enunciated in her treadiest tones. "You'll be a bi-i-ig hit."

"True. Now you shoo." The Treasure Island had gyrated as close as she could with the model Spanish galleons afloat on each shoulder. "We'll whip these amateurs into getting their cues right." The assorted men shivered in delight. "Danny's walkie-talkie signal for the crew to board should come in a few moments. Next the dancers take their positions on the ramp. Then we hotels hop aboard for showtime and we all twinkle and do our thing in four-four time."

Temple nodded, grateful for the professional presence of the Lace 'n' Lust ladies for the first--and last--time. This was a complicated production number. The performers would need all their wits about them to cram twenty-some people inside the UFO on cue and get another two dozen hoofing around the outside as the stage elevator slowly levitated the silver saucer.

She was just being a mother hen, Temple told herself, clicking off on her Weitzman heels that were almost glittery enough to whisk her away to another world. No, she recalled, the ruby-red slippers were supposed to take Dorothy home, and Temple had no intention of clicking her heels three times to end up in Minnesota . . . and miss the pleasure of viewing her big production number.

The halls were deserted. Below-stage was often like that when a major show was unfolding upstairs. The cast was either up on stage, in the wings waiting to go on, or huddled around the UFO waiting for the final number. The agape dressing room doors made this a hall of mirrors in which Temple glimpsed her passing figure--a slender silver flash, hardly recognizable as she trotted past. Didn't want to miss the skit's beginning, and poor Matt must be wondering by now what ladies' room she had disappeared into. ...

"Louie!"

She stopped on the double dimes of her skinny metal-tipped high heels.

Sure enough. The big black cat was lying in the middle of the broad hall, so perfectly still and centered that he seemed an illusion.

"Louie?"

Temple found herself tip-toeing closer. How odd! First Midnight Louie virtually leaves home.

Then he shows up like a poster cat for the Mystifying Max.

"I'm taking you home tonight," she resolved aloud. "You can stay put in my office until the show is over. And if dealing with you makes me miss my big number--"

The cat stood, stretched, yawned wide enough to show every shark-white tooth in his cherry-pink gums . . . and ambled to a rack of costumes along the wall.

"Oh no, you don't."

Temple scrambled to intercept the cat before he vanished into a curtain of clothes, her steel heels practically striking sparks from the concrete.

Too late. Just his tail showed beneath a froth of feathers and bejeweled hems. Temple bent to capture it and felt a furry plume elude her grasping hand.

"Louie! No games. I'm late for a very important date. I'm leaving a Very Important Date sitting alone like coagulating chili. Get out of there!"

Of course he didn't. And of course Temple had to bend down in a bead-encrusted dress not designed for bending, then thrust her head among the powder and mothball and deodorant-saturated costumes to feel frantically for what had become a Cheshire Cat, without the visible grin. She didn't feel much like grinning either, except in frustration.

''I could kill you," she threatened, hearing a few precious beads clattering to concrete and feeling her silver pantyhose stretching beyond even the endurance of Spandex-blend.

And of course she didn't find him, couldn't feel him and had to go down on her knees, which would make her pantyhose bag if it hadn't already burst. Then she had to crawl on all fours, banging her knees on the rack's low metal support pipes and getting her hands filthy with God-knows-what floor fungus and her hair churned into a Raggedy-Ann mop and--the final indignity--inhaling a faceful of--spit and sputter--stage-dusting feathers.

And still no cat.

Temple was angry now. She back-pedaled out of the costume patch on hands and knees, hoisted herself upright by grabbing the rack's vertical pipe, then braced her precariously shod feet to wrench the entire rack away from the wall.

Ooof!

It didn't move. Temple glanced down. The frame was bolted to the floor. She stared, aghast.

The entire point of costume racks was that they be mobile. They all had wheels. Who would bolt one to the floor?

Very well. She would expose Louie in another way.

Temple positioned herself at the rack's middle, then reached out and jerked the heavy, hanging costumes to either side. Louie should be easily visible cowering against the naked wall.

Uh . . . what wall?

Temple stared at an oblong of black. It was not a cat. There was no cat in view. Louie had pulled a Max and utterly vanished. So had the wall, the concrete block wall painted a pale, pukey color.

Temple stared at the matte black rectangle she had revealed. It looked like a mirror-backing spray-painted on the wall. Maybe the mirror was on the other side. Maybe she should go through and find out.

She stretched out a hand, surprised to see a rhinestone bangle sparkling on her wrist. That's right. That hand was supposed to be applauding a Gridiron dinner show, right now!

Her hand passed through the mirror backing into the dark. She saw no reflection, not of her silver self, not of a glint of green from a black cat's eyes.

Temple's shoes scrapped concrete as she stepped over the rack frame to edge into the wall.

Alice had followed a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole. What would happen if Temple followed a black cat into a black hole? What if it was a hellhole?

But Louie had never led her ashtray before. Her groping hands found a metal frame inset into the thickness of the concrete blocks. This opening wasn't a hole, then, but something built into the structure of the building.

''Louie," she whispered.

The small sound echoed.

Wherever she was, it was big enough to throw her own words back at her.

Oh, Louie. What had he quite literally got into now? She couldn't see just leaving him here.

Nor could she see, period.

Temple sighed.

The space mocked her with a faint hiss.

Turning, she saw a slit of light where she had drawn the clothing aside. Her eyes were adjusting now, and the area was revealing limits, a thin trickle of light glinted off walls.

The suspicion of light seemed to thicken and solidify farther on.

This was it, Temple suddenly knew all the way to her arched insteps. This was why the basement plans were missing! Her groping hand touched a wall as her fingertips traced a familiar surface of concrete blocks held together by depressed lines of mortar. Her heels sank into some sandy surface broadcasting, an earthy perfume.

This was the underbelly of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson's place as he had meant it to be, and as he had meant it to be forgotten.

Visions of silver dollars danced in her head. Who knew what was down here? Who knew what wealth lurked in this hidden labyrinth? Midnight Louie did.

Temple squinted at an apparent movement near the floor where light so soft that it whispered seeped in. The moving thing could be Midnight Louie. It could be the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Or it could be the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson.

She edged deeper into the darkness, her mind churning with great expectations, with notions of a lost past heritage shaping a profitable future.

One thing she was sure of, one way or another: Midnight Louie had hit pay dirt.