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  Prologue

  Lionized Louie

  I want one thing on the record, straight off.

  Millions have seen a television commercial with a giant, metal-gilded, Art Deco lion-dude striding across the sand-choked Las Vegas scenery. When he stretches out, he hunkers down to become a high-tech Sphinx of sorts. In a touch of computer-graphics magic, the new MGM

  Grand Hotel and Theme Park fans out from his hindquarters like a green-glass peacock's tail.

  Put down this: I am not impressed.

  There is only one major pussycat in this town, and the name is Midnight Louie.

  Even now I can glimpse the kitchen bulletin board, where my PR-conscious roommate has posted my Iatest newspaper likeness.

  This one is nothing to phone home about: I look like something the dog dragged in. Ears flattened and eyes at half-mast, I am being menaced by what looks like a UFO, but is actually a clear plastic breathing apparatus. This photograph commemorates the moment when I was supposedly rescued from the clutches of the cat crucifier of my last adventure. The fireman flourishing the plastic mask is allegedly administering life-saving oxygen to my air-starved puss after I was given a chloroform muffler and tied into a burlap bag.

  In this instance, a picture is not worth a thousand words; it is not even worth a three-day gig at the bottom of a finch cage.

  Suffice it to say that I engineered my own escape from the burlap bag. I was even ready to direct an all-feline uprising to save Miss Temple Barr from a premature toasting, when the clumsy firemen interfered. I no more needed oxygen than a fish needs an air hose, but the redundant firemen had to do something to look good in the media. I am not a victim of anything in that snapshot except an ill-conceived photo opportunity.

  At present, however, even a prime-time pussums believes in observing the signs of the times. I can read the hieroglyphics on the wall: this televised muscle-bound feline escapee from Virtual Reality City is indeed a poster boy for the Times They Are A-Changing.

  Not only has the MGM Grand Hotel resurrected itself far from the ashes of its former location on the Strip (now Bally's), but it has roared back with 5005 rooms, the most in ail the world. Sharing the MGM's hot new scenery are the new Luxor and Treasure Island hotels. Guess what? Las Vegas--the capital of crass ... the headquarters of chutzpah . . . the nerve center of the salacious--has sold out.

  The name of the game in this toddling town nowadays is two words that would stop a stripper cold In mid-grind. It might even chill a bookie's soul right where he carries it, in his back pocket with the rest of the cash.

  The catch phrase of the day is Family Values.

  Call me cynical, but it is my observation that Family Values never come into play with so much enthusiasm as when the bottom line is at stake. And the bottom line in Vegas these days is no longer the thin, white tan-streak left by a thong bikini.

  The bottom line is that gambling has become a national sport. Las Vegas is no longer the champion Sin City that it used to be. Nowadays you have your Atlantic City, you have your state lotteries. You also have your Native American version of surround-the-cavalry and take-your-revenge-in-chips, previously known as Reservation Bingo. All these legalized forms of gambling now affect more states than once spangled on the Confederate flag. My home town, the Mecca of the Mojave, must now hustle more than its bustle to draw the same crowds of yore; it must appeal to a whole new wholesome clientele.

  What can I say? Las Vegas--the shining-star of the glitz parade--has gone Brady Bunch. It is enough to make a home-grown dude sniffle into his Snapple juice.

  Luckily, I touch almost nothing but water these days, or else I would not believe my eyes.

  There is much to decry in this town, and I usually have not wasted my breath doing it. An invasion of decency hardly seems worth the bother. I have my own troubles. One floor above me abides a jet-black babe who goes by the name of "Caviar." Her street name Is Midnight Louise, and only I know what that means.

  Luckily, she has not yet figured out my own moniker, or I would be lunch meat. I must confess that I fear this feisty, featherweight lady more than any three-story lion-dude outfitted in skin-tight gold lame.

  Yet another floor above this Caviar doll lurks the golden-haired Karma, a creature of reclusive habits who also enjoys baiting Midnight Louie. Was ever a dude so beset?

  To add offense to injury, my resident little doll. Miss Temple Barr, has been absent from home of late, tending to public relations business.

  Does no one care that this town is going to heaven in a handbasket? Does no one care that Midnight Louie has personal problems of a perplexing nature? Does no one care that the eighties economy of fun, frivolity and foolishness has crashed in the Sober Nineties? That changing times are ringing in hype, tripe and gripe?

  The answer, of course, is a resounding nyet.

  In the silence of one lone whisker waving, I lay my kisser upon my folded mitts and snooze.

  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 po
int 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 lo
t 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.''