Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 17

Hats Off to Homicide

After her semi-sexy, stressful and ultimately frustrating weekend, Temple fled back to the normal world of flamingos as fine art.

Domingo's minions had shown up, a trendy ragtag bunch of earnest young snobs-to-be enjoying a brief adolescent rebellion before moving into the ranks of the twenty-first century's top museum curators. No wonder modern art was in retrograde.

The entire project gave Temple the feeling of a student-assisted archeological dig on some remote foreign soil that hid the architectural bones of a vanished but mighty civilization.

Except that Las Vegas wasn't very vanished and the mighty civilization to be unearthed was whatever flavor-of-the -month seeped out of the developers' bag of theme attractions.

The last thing Friday, Temple had paved the way for the first of Domingo's flamingo flings: the site of the former Sands Hotel and Casino, a fifties icon recently razed because it simply couldn't keep up with the neighbors, like the Luxor's King Tut, Leo the MGM Grand Lion, the New York City skyline and other Nouveau Flash installations on the Strip. The old, softer romantic fantasies were literally falling one by one to the laser-edged hype of the New School of Stripography. Restaurant names told the story of Las Vegas development themes as succinctly and sourly as news headlines: good-bye, Sands Hotel and your old-style exotic Shangri-La and Xanadu restaurants, hello Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. Harley-Davidson on!

For now, the former Sands square footage was only a construction trench from which a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar, six-thousand-room behemoth would shortly rise, like the movie monster Mothra leaving its unsuspected cocoon. Temple had suggested that a showy ring of rubbernecking flamingo-spectators would add an air of anticipation to the project. Domingo had liked the idea so much he now thought it had been his.

Thus developers and Domingo were as one in their emerging ecstasy. The construction project would make history as the first local site to sprout its plague of flamingos. Domingo had a massive, flat canvas of desert scrub to impale with imported lawn ornaments, emigres from a Massachusetts plastics company.

Even the modest origin of the inexpensive decorative birds made a statement, in Temple's opinion. She had done her homework. Half a million of the molded pink birds sold every year, dotting the landscape from the Canadian border to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, at only nine ninety-five a pair. You couldn't get two of anything for just nine ninety-five anymore, not even dish towels!

Once Domingo's dream was giving media people nightmares, Temple had plans to import members of the Society for the Preservation of the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, as well as the flamingo manufacturer's flamboyant artist, whose signature is captured in molded plastic on every pink flamingo body: a guy named Don Featherstone, of all things. Despite a classical-art background, Featherstone managed to compete with his birds for popular attention, his wife and he having dressed exactly alike each and every day for twenty years. Perhaps marketing the flamingos in pairs was catching. Nor was Domingo the first on the conceptual-art scene to seize onto flamingos as a metaphor for what have you: a Maryland woman rearranges and attires thirty-four lawn flamingos every week, attracting a crowd of regular gawkers.

So, in a sense, Temple was beginning to catch flamingo fever. Nature writers grew tongue-tied trying to describe thousands of the Greater and Lesser Flamingos of Africa settling on the salt flats like a mobile sunset. Mere plastic could not dim their inborn shrimp-pink luster.

Flamingos en masse, and especially in plastic--accessible and indivisible to ail--really did have something to say. Further, Domingo was convinced that the visual statement of a flamingo infestation in Las Vegas, with its many social and psychological connotations, was far too rich a subject and effect to be ignored by anybody who was anybody, such as art critics, who were mostly nobodies outside the pages of their slick host magazines, anyway.

And, of course, the tabloids--print and electronic--would have a flamingo field day.

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

"There is no middle ground," Domingo announced to his followers as they stood like explorers stunned silent by the equatorial sun as well as the blazing noonday emptiness of the land they surveyed.

The vast vacant lot did resemble a bland, sand-blond blot amid the bright and lurid fantasy constructions of the Strip. "No middle anymore. Only top and bottom. Developed nation and Third World. Rich and poor. Wise and foolish. Cadillac and Kia. Gaming palace and plastic flamingo. Keep this in mind as you plant your subversive symbols."

Domingo had studied the site over the weekend and drawn an elaborate master plan, a kind of Da Vinci cartoon for the major amassings of the flamingo flocks around the perimeter of the great empty hole from which Mothra would arise, girder by girder, glass wall by glass wall, laser-light by laser-light.

In honor of the day's desert-expedition atmosphere, Temple had worn closed-toe canvas wedgies, a khaki suit (Bermuda shorts and safari jacket) and a hat against the noonday sun and any mad dogs and Englishmen who might take exception to her exceptionally red hair. It wasn't a pith helmet, since she didn't own one, but it was a sporty brimmed affair, also khaki, that looked quite at home on a blasted Las Vegas lot.

"Very nice," said Domingo when he saw her. He snapped his fingers and his photographer groupie, a tall, stork-thin young man who was already turning pink in the warm November sunlight, came rushing over, clanking the cameras slung around his long white neck.

"We will have a picture of me directing the team, with Miss Barr beside me." He raised his voice to a stentorian shout: "People, gather round for documentary photos. And you, keep those camcorders running at all times. I wish every aspect of the installation recorded."

Domingo then proceeded to wave his arms as he indicated the master plan, while Temple nodded sagely in her savage-sun hat. The kids mopped their sweat banded brows or tossed their braided and ponytailed heads, looking like nothing so much as a herd of coltish wild horses dressed by Esprit.

When they went to work, though, it was in an industrious flock. Three-foot-tall pink flamingos positively flew off of flatbed trucks and hit the sandy soil in tens and twenties, like so many oversize and gaudy thumbtacks.

Temple had timed her arrival near the lunch break, so they soon transformed into a scratched, sweaty, dusty crew of fairly androgynous boys and girls gathered around the food They sat where they could: on parked vehicle hoods, a large and friendly rock that could keep their posteriors from the fire ants, on a couple of beat-up aluminum lawn chairs, on their haunches on the insect-infested ground.

"This is the best time of year to do this. Cooler." She had grabbed any old sandwich from the van and joined them in munching. Nothing united strangers like a common appetite, which was the behavioral fact behind everything from sports fans to twelve-step recovery programs.

They nodded, chewing, as Temple found a dusty but unoccupied fender and tried to hop up on it.

"Let me take that," another fender-sitter offered, relieving her of the wrapped sandwich so she could use both hands to boost herself up, as always. How humiliating!

Once installed, she drummed her soft heels against the truck's side like everyone else and munched without comment. Behind her Kmart sunglasses (she was always losing them), she summed the crew up in the thoroughly wicked detail she could exercise when no one else could see her eyes.

"What do you do for Domingo?"

Temple couldn't quite tell where the question had come from, given a scraggly circle of fourteen or so workers, but she noticed sly smiles and heard snickers as she looked over the group.

"You could call me a scout," she said finally. "I'm a Las Vegas PR freelancer, so I've been designated to ask potential flamingo beneficiaries for permission to adorn their frontage."

"Beneficiaries!" The snorted word came from a lanky guy wearing the expedition uniform: loose T-shirt and shorts, sports socks and expensive tennis shoes. "That's putting whipped cream on a rotten banana. The only entity one of these shebangs benefits is Domingo International."

More sniggers erupted among the burps as the crew downed soft drinks and beer.

Apparently Domingo's loyal followers expected him to have liaisons with any and every woman around.

"Really," she said. "An embarrassment of flamingos is great publicity for a coming attraction like this." She waved at the bare lot, large sign and cyclone fence that hailed forthcoming megaconstruction in Las Vegas. "But the established hotels can be ... unimpressed."

"Unimpressed? By Domingo? Shame on them!" The speaker was a sharp'nosed and mushy*

chinned woman, so tanned that the freckles blended on her arms and face.

Temple tilted her head to better catch the bitter under taste to the words. "How come you guys work for Domingo? It's hot, hard labor, and I bet you don't get paid much."

The lanky guy looked up from tearing into his Subway sandwich, w hich shed lettuce curls onto the barren ground.

"A season in hell with Domingo and French horns or spaghetti or flamingos looks good on our resumes. He's a worldwide figure and his stuff gets lots of media. We're all under- or post grad art students, and could use a little sex appeal on our vitae."

"So Domingo plays the part of professor on a field expedition?"

The silence that greeted this summation told Temple a lot. Exchanged glances told her more.

Domingo was a necessary evil in the face of the advantages of having worked for Domingo.

"Domingo doesn't teach; he uses."

The young woman who said that was poured into cutoff jeans and a tank top, and not to either garment's advantage. She was downing slices of pizza fast enough to add another fifty pounds to the overweight that crammed the clothes, but her angry black eyes were incisive.

"Bren-da!" The girl beside her didn't give the admonishment much energy.

This one was Domingo-meat if Temple had ever seen it: smooth gilded hair pulled back into a clip, California tan, pastel shorts and shirt that made her look cool as iced sherbet in Hades.

"You guys love to speculate about the Maestro's love life," Baywatch Blondie went on, "but he's really most interested in putting his energy into the project. Did you really look at what he came up with for this site? It'll be awesome. Some people have nothing to do when they're on a break but sit around and gossip."

Temple's lifted interrogatory eyebrow was wasted be hind her oversize shades. (She would never wear those icky little round frames, no matter how fashionable; they made her look like a twelve-year-old.) So she led the class forward to the next topic.

"I guess you workers get something out of it."

"Screwed," came from her left, another female voice.

Waves of uneasy laughter rippled the circle.

Temple studied the guy who had accused Domingo of using them. Despite his T-shirt's tenting graces, his adolescent overweight teetered on obesity. Thick glasses and a seriously wracked complexion didn't help.

The girl who had put the word "screwed" on the table was slim, earnest, and also bespectacled, though hers were the fashionable small round metal ones Temple abhorred. She looked and sounded like a woman scorned. If so, no wonder Domingo had dumped her; the wonder was that he had been interested in her in the first place. Or had he been? Young infatuations often steamroller older cautionary urges.

"Don't you guys like Domingo?" she asked as innocently as a thirty-year-old among twenty-somethings can manage.

The freckled woman sighed. "He's okay. A little full of himself, but that's his job."

"Self-appointed job," the lanky guy put in.

When he got up, the others also rose. Temple saw her prey slipping away, so she finished her ... ugh, had she really been eating a tongue sandwich? Luckily, her question-and-answer session had distracted her from such essentials as . . . taste and texture. Yuck.

"What about you?" The slender girl in round glasses stood before her, dusty arms crossed.

"What about me?"

"Are you this big fan of Domingo's, or just a hired hand, or a soon-to-be mistress or what?"

"Since none of the specifics above apply, I guess I'm just an 'or what.' "

The girl's tennis shoe kicked rock-hard sand. "Better watch out what you ask around here.

Domingo always picks a 'project girl' He hasn't had one for this flamingo thing yet."

"No doubt the elegant Verina--"

A frown, deep enough to bury BBs in, wrinkled her brown brow. "He's never shown up with some la-di-da female like that before."

"Yes, it's so unfair with these foreign females coming in all fresh and dolled up when you installers are filthy and tired and hot," Temple said demurely.

"You mean we might be jealous? Well, some of us, maybe. And especially the guys who had an eye on the girl Domingo picks."

"Does this 'project girl' always go along with her new status?"

"Oh, no. Then there's hell to pay. Domingo gets in a bummer mood. And some of the girls are actually miffed to be considered second choices. Can you believe that?"

Gazing into the defensive eyes, Temple definitely could.

The girl bit her lip and looked around. The others had dispersed back to their forest of pink legs and necks. She spoke again, more softly.

"We have this pool going, the group. On who will be Domingo's Clingo for the project. You know, his squeeze. Some of the guys are pissed that nobody's emerged as a clear favorite yet.

That's why they were asking about you."

"I'm a candidate? I am honored. But Verina has a headlock on him for now, alas."

"Don't be too sure. He really likes younger women, and you're much closer to us than she is."

"I am a younger woman? Bless you, my child!"

"Well, like ... you can't be more than . .. twenty-five, right?"

Temple took a deep breath. "I'm afraid I can. Try . . . thirty."

The girl's sunburned nose wrinkled. "Gross! Then our pool still has a ghost of a chance. I'll tell the others."

Off she hustled, as fast as her clumsy hiking shoes would take her, to report far and wide that Temple was thirty.

Temple remained seated on the warm fender, kicking the tire with her rubber-soled shoes and thinking.

Successful middle-aged men tended toward two prime hobbies: golf and girls. Was Domingo just an artistic CEO on the rampage? Did being an artist instill no respect for other persons, for the human soul, for restraint from sexual games?

Apparently not. Remember Picasso. Temple jumped down, automatically flexing her knees to disperse the shock. Every small hop down was a giant step for one of her height, or lack of it, rather.

She dusted her palms off as she considered who looked like the biggest gambler in the group. No contest: the shrimpy chain-smoking guy who had boldly accessorized his baggy gray shorts with a Hawaiian shirt. Shades of Max, quite literally.

"Hi."

He looked up from planting a spike-footed flamingo in the sand. A soggy unfiltered cigarette clung to the saliva slick on his bottom lip.

"Yeah?"

"Say I want to join the project-girl pool?"

"Can't. You're in the running."

"Suppose I told you that the girl in glasses running around to everybody is telling them that she found out I'm thirty."

He glanced around. "Amanda." Sweat trickled past the rolled bandanna on his forehead.

"Hey, babe, you don't look that bad to me."

"I'm too tall for you," Temple said, her voice even steelier than her eyes, which no one could see because of the dark glasses. Pity. This was a Molina-class look.

"Yeah?" He glanced up, then thrust another flamingo into the ground. "I guess you're right."

"So . . . uh--"

"Jeff."

"So, Jeff, who are the leading contenders?"

"Amanda for one."

"But didn't she--?"

"Don't let her disgusted act fool you. She's disgusted that she might not make it. This is her third year on safari with the Great White Hunter. She's out of grad school next spring and out of the running."

"And?"

He nodded to the blonde, naturally. "Steph would be the guys' lead choice, but Domingo doesn't like blondes."

"Doesn't like blondes? What kind of kinky cradle-robber is he?"

"Doesn't like blondes, and hasn't had a redhead for a while. That's why we put an outsider into our pool. Then there's that Ice Age ice-chick, Verina. Who would have thought he'd show up with that Vampira babe?"

"Maybe he's outgrowing the Lost Boys and Girls."

"Naw." Another flamingo bit the dust. "So you wanna toss five bucks in the pot? Pick your front-runner. You could even bet on yourself. The competition does get, shall I say, hot?" He eyed her as if having produced a terribly suave come-on.

"I'd have to know more about the full field of candidates. Maybe later."

"Later it'll all be over but the celebrating. Domingo doesn't usually wait this long." Jeff looked up at her again. "Speaking of long, I kinda go for tall women."

"Do I know a great one, and I bet she'd really go for you!" With handcuffs and an unlawful-gaming charge, Temple added to herself.

Temple departed with a friendly, but not too friendly, wave.

So Domingo was a Dirty Old Ma n. She felt vaguely disappointed, but didn't let that stop her active mind from churning.

Why, then, was Domingo breaking tradition? Why was he snubbing the panting project girls, making the jealous project boys nervous, putting Temple in the running for a race she didn't want to enter? Temple had assumed that a woman like Verina was the typical Famous Artist's accessory, but she was decidedly past forty. Poor thing! Why was she here, and why had Domingo broken a long, proud tradition of girl-chasing? Didn't he know his natives would be getting restless at his uncharacteristic hesitation?

Didn't he care?

And, if so, why not?

The man himself was currently the center of a squall of flamingos on the move, so Temple went over to rubberneck.

Some local-news cameras also homed in on the flutter. Temple saw why Domingo was always making like a traffic cop with his arms. He was always being photographed on-site, by still and motion cameras.

Either way, he came off as a central figure in his white hero's shirt, full of energy and command.

She seemed to be his designated right-hand woman today. Perhaps it was only because he approved of the safari outfit, or because she made him look bigger since she was so (sigh) small, or... Temple didn't want to think about the deep discussions of Sunday afternoon, but it was all too clear that, like many powerful men, Domingo had eyes for any available female, including her, as the crew had speculated.

She was not the only one ruminating in that direction it turned out. As the day wore on, the flamingos propagated like a rash and even the young gung ho groupies wore out.

A shadow fell over Temple. She looked up to see Verina, bearing bottles of Evian water from the refreshment van. (Domingo's operation was used to on-site hardship in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, Las Vegas was considered to be equally absent of civilities like bottled water.)

"Wonderful!" Domingo wiped his fevered brow with a shirtsleeve and accepted a bottle.

The cameras zoomed in. Action that wasn't a pink blur.

"It's so hot," Verina complained. "And in November."

"Las Vegas cools down at night," Temple pointed out, "but by day the temperature can reach the eighties, even in the winter months. Besides, black attracts heat." She eyed Verina's twill designer bell-bottom pants and belly button-showing top, a long-sleeved, shrunken-midriff jacket. Socko in Elle, but a heat sink on the Strip.

Verina glanced at Domingo, handing Temple an Evian bottle, then patted delicately at her forehead. "The sun is so hot on my hair, I'm burning up. I had no idea." She lowered her voice, so only Temple could hear her. "And skin cancer runs in my family."

"Oh, gosh. You really shouldn't be out here, then."

Verina again eyed Domingo, who was flapping his wings like a living model for one of his flamingos. "He expects me to be here."

"Maybe you could wait in the refreshment van."

"It's so hot." Verina's husky voice was almost a child's whine.

Her dark eyes fastened on Temple as if suddenly seeing a savior. "But your hat would shelter me from the rays."

"Well, ah ..." Redheads weren't exactly made for overexposure to the sun, which is why Temple had worn the hat, knowing there would be no shade. She was more worried about contracting freckles than skin cancer, but she supposed she should be more worried about the latter than the former.

"If you could lend it to me, just for the afternoon--"

"Sure." Temple wasn't about to argue with a family history of skin cancer.

She handed over the hat and watched it waft to the top of Verina's elegant form, where it sat quite handsomely, being a charming if casual hat, after all.

Verina sidled off, following Domingo, cameras en train.

"Jeesh!" came a male explosion from behind Temple. "What an operator."

"Huh?" Temple turned to face a freckle-faced cameraman from a local TV channel. She thought that his name was Sean.

"You and that hat were getting too much attention for her taste, from her boss and from the cameramen. Why'd you hand it over?"

"Who can argue with skin cancer?"

"Say, you and I are bigger candidates for that than that spoiled broad. Just make sure you get it back."

Temple frowned through her sunglasses. Cameramen and photographers always saw the bigger picture, quite literally.

"Thanks for pointing it out. I guess I missed the obvious."

"She's gonna be on the cutting-room floor in my footage, after that ploy." Sean winked and moved on, focusing on flamingos.

The sun beat down on Temple's red-hot head while she considered kicking herself with a rubber-soled wedgie toe. Once again some slick out-of-towner had suckered her, this time a femme fatale. Why should a Woman Who Has Everything--a towering, thin, fashion-magazine body with the properly sexy androgynous look, a famous boyfriend, the latest designer wardrobe--have to scam a twelve-dollar hat off a working woman who has more to worry about than being the center of attention?

Maybe because all that Everything added up to Nothing.

Temple didn't move, but she stepped back mentally, like a cameraman, to pan the entire scene. She tended to immerse herself in her assignments, to get lost in the hype and the hullabaloo, and that made for myopia. Domingo's workers scurried like ants bearing trophies from the Flamingo Hilton chorus line. Domingo ranged ahead of the installation, like a scout, ignoring the sun, moving with a kind of Mediterranean passion; Zorba the Greek translated into a man for all nations. Verina, she of the ambiguous name and gender, followed along like an elegant black stork, picking her way among the squat, gaudy plastic birds, all pose and no purpose.

The famous always attracted hangers-on, but did they have to become addicted to them?

Was there anybody who became a household name who didn't divorce a spouse, drop old friends, who actually despised the hollow trappings of fame, the easy decadence of getting everything free, from groupies to drugs?

Maybe Einstein. Maybe. Maybe Mother Teresa. She remembered a shallow, callow girl she'd met at a Women In Communications, Associated, meeting a while back. She'd chattered on about how she knew it was a sexist world, but that she had to use it while she was young and slim. She'd boasted of the red-devil satin catsuit cut up and down to here she'd worn to some national convention, and how a gray eminence, an author whose work Temple respected, had flirted with her and pulled her cattail at a cocktail party. And Temple had thought, did either of them really need to do that? Did she need to be Somebody so much she had to become a Playboy Bunny for old men? Did he so need to feel potent, despite all he had achieved, that he could be flattered by a vacant girl in search of big names to tease with her firm, unreachable anatomy? Was it all so unreachable, after all?

Temple shook her hatless head in the noonday sun. Knowing Matt had made her into a Hamlet of modern mores, ever-ready to question the small seductions of everyday life she used to take for granted. What was just being playful, and what was being manipulative? Look at the games Darren Cooke played, pulling the little red devil's tail at every opportunity! Maybe one day some little red devil--or some little red devil's big bad boyfriend--would pull the plug on ole Darren's serial seduction act. Maybe he was flirting with death, not just decadence. Maybe that was the real thrill of the chase for him, the endless pas-de-deux with self-destruction. She still couldn't answer her basic question. When it came to socio-sexual maneuverings, what was inoffensive fun and what was a very nasty habit on the way to becoming harmful to the health and happiness of all concerned?

She knew one thing. The greater anyone's fame and fortune, the nastier, and more lethal, everyday seduction became. From hats, maybe, to homicide.