cat in a crimson haze

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  ''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 st
ory 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!

  Chapter 2

  More Blessed Beast and Children

  Even though it was Saturday morning, the playground thronged with milling, laughing, squealing children.

  Temple also studied an awesomely interwoven melange of scampering, barking, quacking, braying, howling animals.

  Obviously, animals were an attraction kids adored, but she couldn't picture this melee on the elegantly landscaped grounds of the Crystal Phoenix. She didn't even know what she was doing here, except that the whole thing was her idea.

  "Lemonade?" Sister St. Rose of Lima chirped beside her, holding up a Big-Gulp-size paper cup.

  While Temple hesitated, the diminutive nun quickly added, "It's on the household."

  "I think you mean 'on the house,' Sister," Temple said, taking the beverage.

  "Whatever." Sister St. Rose's elderly eyes softened behind the magnifying lenses of her plastic-framed spectacles. "Oh, how nice to see the parish presenting such a fine face to the world after that awful business with poor Miss Tyler.''

  "This mob scene certainly does resemble a casting call for Noah's Ark," Temple admitted, surveying the panorama she had stage-managed down to the last detail, including the refreshments. About to sip her lemonade, she regarded Sister St. Rose of Lima sharply, "Oh . . .

  you haven't been doctoring the beverages again--?"

  "Goodness, no! This is not an emergency. Besides, the bishop's brandy is almost all gone from the last time."

  "I don't doubt it." Temple's nostalgic smile vanished with a sip of tart lemonade.

  ''Anyway, at fifty cents a glass, we couldn't afford it," Sister St. Rose added a trifle sadly.

  ''How's business at the lemonade stand?" Temple glanced at the long white tablecloth that hid a trio of pushed-together card tables.

  Stainless-steel urns with spigots alternated with signs reading Lemon-Aid Our Lady of Guadalupe. A ragged line of people crowded the tables, eager for cool liquid refreshment.

  Temple blew a breath upwards to lift her bangs from her forehead. She sometimes thought the whole town was a mirage glimpsed through a shimmering force field of heat. Even in late September, Las Vegas simmered with desert heat, which accounted for the indelicate bouquet of animal stew hanging over the playground.

  . "Rose!" The nun's twin came bustling up, wearing the same serviceable pastel cotton blouse and skirt, except on second glance Sister Seraphina O'Donnell was taller, wider, slightly younger and much spryer. "Would you take over my spot at the lemonade table? Channel Twelve has come to film a feature," she added rapturously enough to be announcing a sighting of Tom Cruise--or, in her own hierarchy of heavenly treats, the angel Gabriel. Temple didn't detect much difference between the two mythical beings.

  "That's wonderful. Sister," Temple said, proud of how quickly she'd mastered the native form of address around Our Lady of Guadalupe. Not bad for a fallen-away Unitarian who hadn't been inside a church of any denomination in years.

  "And it's your doing, dear."

  Temple let only two people in the world call her ''dear." One was her energetically outgoing landlady, Electra Lark; the other was Sister Seraphina. Both were over sixty and both were candidates for She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed t-shirts, though neither would ever don such a homely item, for quite different reasons.

  Sister Seraphina turned to survey the bustling playground, pushing her slipping trifocals against the bridge of her nose. "Combining an animal blessing ceremony with a giveaway of Miss Tyler's cats was so ingenious. But I'm glad you talked the Humane Society into handling the placement of the cats."

  Temple glanced at another rank of cloth-covered card tables, this one staffed by volunteers from the local-animal welfare' group.

  "That's a cardinal rule of public relations. Sister. Kill two birds with one stone whenever you can."

  ''I doubt the Humane Society people would approve that expression in this instance, or any other, but it is apt. We not only publicize the parish fund drive, but find homes for the late Miss Tyler's excess of cats."

  "We hope," Temple answered cautiously. "Finding homes for dozens of cats is no sure thing."

  She panned the scene again, as critical as any old-time director. Leaping lizards! But bless you, she thought at second glance from a safe distance, approving the Technicolor-bright two-foot-long iguana perched on a pre-teen boy's shoulder. Her publicity-conscious eye also dwelled fondly on the picture-perfect, pig-tailed seven-year-old girl with a pet goat, and an ancient Hispanic woman carrying a truly magnificent rooster with splash of black-taffeta tail feathers worthy of a chorus girl at Bally's.

  All creatures great and small, feathered and scaled, furred and coated--and their fond owners old and young--made first-class grist for the ever-grinding mill of the media cameras.

  Who could resist animals and kids--at least from a distance?

  And then the drama. . . . Temple studied Father Rafael Hernandez in his long black cassock with the shorter lacy white over thing. (Temple knew there was a name for this garment; she would have to ask Sister Seraphina what it was.)

  Two adorable eleven-year-old altar boys, similarly smocked, clung to his side as he moved from group to group, a silver-haired shepherd blessing the helpless beasts to ward off illness and mischance.

  ''What a mob. I supposed you're responsible," a voice announced above Temple's right shoulder. ''You have a parade permit for this?"

  Temple snapped her head around and found what she expected: Lieutenant C.R. Molina of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, loitering with intent.

  "Are you serious?" Temple demanded.

  Molina shrugged. "Unfortunately not. Can't you tell I'm off duty?"

  Temple took in an oversized denim shirt studded with the occasional rhinestone, jeans and--my turquoise tootsies! -- beaded moccasins on Molina's size-nine feet. How lucky that Temple herself had paired her quiet khaki culottes with a red-and-white top and her Plexiglas-heeled, red grosgrain-ribbon-trimmed Stuart Weitzman heels. If Molina was putting on the dog, she didn't want to be caught looking like one.

  "Supporting the parish fund drive?" Temple asked, knowing Lieutenant Molina lived in the neighborhood.

  Molina nodded over her semi-sparkling shoulder at the long table without the lemonade.

  "Supporting the Humane Society. I'm getting a couple of Miss Tyler's cats."

  " You like cats?"

  "I don't have much choice," Molina said wryly.

  Temple couldn't imagine the towering homicide officer doing anything against her will, so she squinted toward the animal adoption table. A pair of half-grown tiger stripes meowed in a w
ire cage while an attendant filled out forms. She spotted a young girl in blue jeans and L.A.

  Gear sneakers fidgeting before the cage just as Molina called, "Mariah! Got a minute?"

  Mariah. Temple straightened as this genuine mythical beast--hard-nosed Lieutenant Molina's pre-teen daughter-- ambled over with a docility sure to vanish utterly in a couple of years when the hormones kicked in.

  Meeting a mini-Molina did nothing to make Temple feel adult and superior. At ten or eleven, Mariah matched Temple's height (five-feet-flat) and outweighed her by a good twenty pounds.

  Temple faced a chubby youngster with grave dark eyes nothing like Lieutenant Molina's spooky electric-blue ones. And braces were in the cards, Temple remembered. She winced for this awkward almost-adolescent whose mother was a local cop and who faced at least four years and a likely attack of ego-erasing acne before any signs of a silk purse would emerge from beneath the rough-cut, lumpy denim. Given the kid's plain-clothes mother's femininity quotient, Mariah didn't have much of a role model for turning from cabbage moth into Monarch.

  But Mariah Molina wasn't Temple's problem, thank God.

  ''You're the cat-lover?" she asked the girl.

  Mariah nodded shyly. No smile. Probably hiding the braces-doomed teeth.

  "And a fan of gerbils and hamsters, which she already has too many of," Molina added with patience that was either maternal or paternal. With Molina, it was hard to tell when the authoritarian cop was speaking or when the woman was, if ever.

  Father Hernandez and his entourage were edging toward the trio just in time to break an uneasy silence.

  "I'd better get the cats ready for their official baptizing," Molina murmured, moving toward the completed paperwork and the cage.

  "You can't baptize cats," Mariah remarked with a dubious giggle, her widening eyes half-tempted to take her mother literally even as she watched Temple for agreement.

  Temple would have liked to have bent down to reassure the child, but there wasn't a height difference, dang it.