cat in a crimson haze

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  "Probably." Temple cracked open her purse and snapped the tickets down, like aces in the hole, above each of their plates. "Doesn't mean it will. In fact, Crawford not being here guarantees that nothing bad can happen, Crawford himself being the worst thing that could happen."

  "Your logic leaves a lot to be desired."

  "Thank you. Now. Have you ever seen a Gridiron show before? Of course not. I should warn you. Situations and dialogue can get a tad naughty."

  "I see."

  "Oh, nothing as crude and rude as years ago when the Gridiron was a men-only show."

  She picked up the white program brochure at her place setting. "Too bad they had already printed C.B.'s name as show chairman. All he did was make extra work for everybody else."

  Matt studied the inside of his brochure: dinner menu on the left and satirical bill of fare on the right, skit by skit. Writers were listed without indicating which skit they wrote. Lo, Crawford Buchanan's name led all the rest--not that there were many, just Temple-and two others.

  Murmuring voices were filling the house with a buzz of anticipation. Waiters that remarkably resembled Matt in dress and demeanor darted about the languid scene like penguin-fish, taking drink orders.

  "Won't it be hard to eat and applaud at the same time?*' he wondered aloud, as two other couples settled into their banquette from the left.

  "The show won't start until desert is cleared," Temple said. "No scraping forks to interfere.

  Except for the celebrity cameos, the cast is amateur, most of them newsies. Their fragile stage presence would shatter if they had-to fight a filet mignon for the audience's attention."

  As the one person present with the least to lose, being neither the perpetrator nor the subject of a Gridiron skit, Matt settled back to enjoy dinner and the panorama of the audience.

  He had to admire the waiters' deft ballet. Once the preset salads were eaten, the glass plates were floated away and a dinner plate of fish fillet, steamed squash, peppers and broiled, tomatoes was presented to each diner.

  Temple eyed the generous whitefish fillet, then glanced at the goldfish pirouetting in their glass globe. "What a pity Louie isn't here. He would adore the ambiance. I don't understand it.

  He's been hanging around the Crystal Phoenix all week and now--just when things get interesting--he's gone."

  "What interests a cat differs from what intrigues a human being," Matt noted, squeezing a lemon slice onto his entree.

  The during-dinner chatter increased in noise level as the liquor flowed and the waiters whisked. Dessert was a black-and-white slice of chocolate-and-cream-cheese pie. Temple tried to pass her portion to Matt, claiming pre-show nerves and a diet.

  "This is rich enough to have its own secret bank account in Switzerland," she complained.

  "No wonder the Swiss are famous for chocolate. No?"

  She watched a trifle wistfully as the waiter wafted away her untouched dessert plate.

  At last every table was cleared except for wine and low-ball glasses. Temple nursed a white wine spritzer and Matt had called for coffee. By this hour he had usually had consumed two cups from ConTact's huge communal pot.

  Orchestration swelled from the stage lip, hushing chattering voices and clinking glasses. A show-tune medley blared with brass. Matt leaned forward to view the orchestra and saw none.

  Then heads hairy and bald began elevating into view, baton and bows waving, brass blasting.

  "The whole orchestra pit is an elevator," Temple bent near to explain in a stage whisper.

  Matt nodded. He remembered her saying the Peacock Theater's stage had all the latest equipment. He wondered if she knew because she had researched the hotel, or because the Mystifying Max might have performed here once.

  The thought was unsettling. He concentrated instead on Temple's fretting about the missing Midnight Louie. Caviar had been AWOL a lot lately, too.

  Could the cats' absent ways be related?

  No. Cats walked alone, according to Kipling, and liked to wander. Matt momentarily envied their freedom. He would rather be with Caviar and Midnight Louie, wherever they were, than sitting here in rented formalwear about to see an elaborate but mainly amateur show.

  Besides, he thought, running a finger under the newly irritating starched white cotton at his neck, with all these people in the theater, he was getting fairly hot under the collar.

  Chapter 35

  Midnight Louie's Icecapade

  No doubt in some obscure scholarly circle a debate rages as to whether cat whiskers are susceptible to freezing.

  I realize that this subject is abstruse in the extreme, but it so happens that I am in a unique position to present empirical data.

  When I leaped into the back of the meat truck, it was my theory that refrigerated goods would be swiftly sent on their rounds, to avoid rotting in the hot sun. Apparently I underestimated the need for speed, what with modern refrigeration techniques.

  The truck I have selected soon grinds into gear and rattles over what passes for road around Lake Mead. Not long after that it hits a smooth satin ribbon of asphalt and slips into high gear. I curl tightly into myself, husbanding enough warmth to generate a puddle of melted frost. Some, like that flaky Karma, would call it an aura. Others, like that hypercritical Caviar, would call it something far worse and more earthy, but I know the exact effect that produced this phenomenon. My own body heat is fighting the encroaching chill of the Big Sleep.

  Above me, large and frozen-stiff pieces of dead meat swing to the rhythm of the road. I am keenly aware that my present condition, alive and sneezing, Is the exception to the rule around here. So I am most relieved when the truck stops after a few minutes and a good deal of gear-screeching.

  I wait, my frozen joints instructed to bound toward the slightest slice of light through the vehicle doors.

  No dice. Just Louie on ice.

  I do not get it. Is this truck parked for the night, or what? Do they leave all this prime pork just hanging around? The hour can only be three or four o'clock in the afternoon. This meat should be on its way to all the restaurants in town. How has my usually infallible knowledge of human habits failed me?

  More important, how long will it take for Midnight Louie to become frozen fillet of feline?

  At last the truck body shudders as one of the beefy (excuse the expression) driver bounds into the seat up front. The motor vibrates to life, which massages my chronic shivers into something resembling apoplexy.

  Then the vehicle jerks forward and we are moving again. But not me, personally. No, I believe that I am fast-frozen to the truck bed. Somehow the thought of Caviar taking the scenic route through north Lake Mead is no longer so amusing.

  I am wondering if I will be preserved long enough to be thawed in a kinder, gentler century when something lances needlelike into the swollen pupils of my eyes. Perhaps I am being cloned for posterity.

  No, my frozen orbs slowly contract. Light!

  I leap, employing the memory of motion to propel me in one splendid vault to the door. I scream, as several body hairs adhere to the semi-frozen slush in which I was lying.

  Two hammy hands clutch me in midair. I glimpse the stupefied faces of the drivers and smell their beery breaths.

  Stopping at a low dive on the job, the cads! Somehow I manage to spring my icy claws from their stiff sheaths and give them both a parting pat on the cheek.

  Now they are howling, but I have touched pad to ground. My stiff muscles and joints go through the motions I remember so well until they melt at the instant contact of warmth and sunshine.

  I am halfway down an alley and I still hear the drivers arguing whether I am a skunk or a bear cub. Either guess stinks, but I am not about to linger and educate these clods to the scents of the animal kingdom, not when I smell like a loin of lamb ready for barbecuing.

  Once I am moderately thawed, and my sprint for freedom has assured that, I take my bearings, then head toward the Crystal Phoenix. Even my chilled tail tingle
s at the prospect of once again saving my favorite hotel from the forces of evil--and all by myself, without that nosy Caviar on the scene.

  Some ends are worth the means, even if it was my personal end at risk.

  *************************

  In a hop, skip and crouch, I am inside the hotel and following my instincts. These lead me directly to the basement.

  Some people may think I have an unfortunate fondness for basements. True, I did end up bagged in the basement during my most recent adventure. Yet that was merely a minor basement in an old house, suitably creepy and damp but not worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.

  It was also in a basement that I last rendezvoused with the Divine Yvette, that silver sweetheart of a Persian who guards my heart with her little lacquered toenails. In that same Goliath basement I pounced on the Stripper Killer, thus saving my other little doll. Miss Temple Barr, from a fate almost as bad as death. Miss Temple Barr's little lacquered toenails are not too tacky, either, and I speak from experience, or at least close observation.

  At any rate, if some deviltry is afoot on cloven hooves tonight, I suspect it will stem from the below-stage area while the hundreds of innocent humans in the house above gaze rapt upon the refined onstage shenanigans. I have never seen a Gridiron show, but I am certain that any event in which Miss Temple Barr is involved must be the model of good taste and innocent fun.

  Perhaps that is why I hear the faint roar of hearty laughter from above.

  What I also hear from above is the stampede of elephant feet. I duck under a corridor costume rack just in time to avoid sixteen pairs of silver-dyed character shoes tippety-tapping down the stairs at a terrifying clip. Worse is the chorus of high-pitched squeals and laughter from the amateur chorines that accompany the shoes. One might almost wish for the banister to break again.

  I slink farther down the hall, looking for the right scent and wrong sight. If something besides the Busby Berkeley Retirement Home Follies is afoot, I will know It when I see or smell it.

  Indeed, I pick up the whiff of dirt, an interesting substance to find inside the sealed environs of the hotel, where dust is public enemy number one. This is fresh dirt I smell, not the usual sandy stuff up top I so often mistake for the miserable contents of Miss Temple's thankfully untouched bathroom litter box. This dirt is not decomposed of desiccated, stale, almost odorless grains. No, it is prime stuff, rich as Colombian coffee with earthy odors. In fact, it is giving me ideas I am in no position to act upon, and I realize that I have gone some time without. . . going.

  Oh, well, the experience-hardened operative is not one to dawdle for sanitary reasons. I follow the sniff, bringing all my senses and my formidable experience to bear on the trail.

  It leads me past dressing rooms humming with between-act panic attacks. I ignore clouds of talcum powder and the sickening reek of underarm deodorant, which seldom works. Will these humans never learn? Smell is good. Smell is free. Smell surrounds the ape family.

  My nose is so close to the ground--concrete in this case-- that I walk forehead-first into an iron garment frame. I am knocked back on my tall. Perhaps I pass out for a moment, for when my senses focus again, I am seeing double.

  Well, not exactly double. What I am seeing is what should not be there, and what should not be there is what I am seeing, capiche? Perhaps not.

  Let me put it this way. I am a large enough dude that my collision with the rack has jarred the unit and knocked some costumes askew. I can now see a portion of the wall behind it. Now the walls in the underbelly of a major entertainment facility are fairly predictable things: concrete blocks enameled an uninspiring shade of tan or pale green.

  But this garment rack stands before a darkened door. Not only darkened, but smelling like Juan Valdez and all his bags of rich Colombian coffee and his donkey and its accumulated mementos of meals past are gathered there.

  Naturally, I slink under the swinging skirts of the rack and into the fragrant dark. It will surprise no one with any nose at all that I am not in some accidentally concealed dressing-room, but an earthen cellar. Do I smell a rat? Oh, yes! Several.

  My claws curl into raw dirt as I glide through the dark. My nose leads me deeper, until I know this is no secret chamber but a tunnel. All that is lacking is the drip of water on some stagnant rock trying to become a stalactite in a thousand years or so, and that is just as well.

  Given the state of my bladder, the dripping of any liquid on rock would be Chinese water torture.

  Drafts of clammy air riffle my fur. I find myself following them, and thus bearing right, then left, then right again. By now even my superb sense of special placement, otherwise known as direction, is confused. I know only that I traverse some vast, curving network of unsuspected subterranean channels. After the first flush of discovery, however, I find the dark and the damp somewhat boring. I fondly envision the amateur performers singing and dancing their heart- and ham-strings out under the dry, bright beam of the spotlights far above.

  No doubt Miss Temple Barr is thoroughly enjoying herself as I belly-crawl through the bowels of the Crystal Phoenix, pushing my poor, quick-thawed body to its limits. . . .

  I pause. Another entity shares my darkness.

  How I can say this? I do not know what it is, only that every hair still left on my spine has stiffened.

  Rats I can handle. A chorus line of rats ... would be more difficult.

  I twitch my whiskers. I circle in the blackness, knowing my cover is perfect. I see nothing.

  And then a light comes wobbling from the distance, a feeble, focused light, like the beam of a flashlight. That spells one thing: homo sapiens. I am not exactly afraid of a run-in with any sample of the species, even to the twelfth power, but I also wish to keep my anonymity.

  I debate possible moves as the distant light bobbles closer. By its oncoming brightness I make out another hunched form on the Opposite side of the tunnel. Or call it a Chunnel. It Is big enough, and stinky enough.

  Speaking of big and stinky, I cannot yet make out the species of my roommate, save that it is four-legged, smaller than myself and almost as dark.

  The nearing light strikes a spark from its narrowed eyes: pure, venomous green.

  For a-blinding instant we are both caught in the unwanted glare.

  I stare into the gilded eyes of Caviar.

  Then we rocket out of there, dodging the light like vampires avoiding a dagger of sunlight.

  "Hey," grunts some yahoo down the tunnel. "I think there's rats down here. You never said nothing about rats."

  ****************

  Caviar is boxing her ears with a damp paw as if she would like to be boxing my finer points, such as my face.

  We are recovering ourselves outside the tunnel entrance and crouch under the swaying costumes.

  "Some dirty trick," she comments.

  "How did you get off the bus and back this fast?"

  "Did the sunstroke routine at the first stop. Some tourist In a Rent-a-Rustbucket took pity on me and drove me back to Las Vegas. I ditched her at the first gas station, while she was inside buying me Perrier water and some beef jerky." "You are a most ungrateful date."

  "And you are so typical of your type, what can I say? Just what I expected. Devious, cowardly--"

  "What do you mean 'cowardly? I wanted to spare you the danger."

  "You never told me who you really were, Fatso." "I did not deem you ready for such a revelation."

  "Right. Who is protecting whom? Okay. As to this. What's the scam, Sam?"

  "Now that you know my real name," I say with great dignity, "you might as well use it."

  "Okay. No more hooey, Louie. What's up?" I examine the dirt underneath my toenails. "I am not quite sure yet--"

  "Then what is our next move, so you can be sure?" "We have to investigate the tunnels systematically." "What are we supposed to do, leave a trail of yarn?" "Well, for starters--" I rise and peer down the opening that we have exited. "No one is coming this way. I suggest that the
action is farther down the tunnels. I should go back and investigate. You wait here in case the authorities need to be called."

  "You think they would pay me any mind?" "It can be done." I stand and use the advantage of my great height to pontificate. "I have found methods."

  "All right," she says, switching her tail. She gives me a sideways glance that I do not like. "Go back and be a hero. I will stay here and keep watch for any suspicious behavior." "Fine," I say, wishing I had a moment to myself. I will just have to make do with the dirt down the tunnel.

  "Stay put, and there will be nothing to worry about."

  "That is not encouraging," Caviar says, rolling her eyes. She settles onto her haunches like a good little girl, though. I do not for a moment believe that she will still be there when I return from my explorations. I suspect she wishes to make explorations of her own. "Bye-bye, Daddio."

  Chapter 36

  Offstage Acts

  The huge stage curtain, panels of alternating emerald and turquoise velvet, drew back and the first skit was underway.

  Matt watched with some wonderment. The cast numbered at least forty. Despite the lavish professional surroundings, these were indeed skits. Tap-dancing choruses might fade in and out, but the dialogue was mainly snappy repartee about local projects, failures and personalities, with a few digs hurled at national figures.

  Matt hadn't lived in Las Vegas long enough, or paid close enough attention, to understand every gag. From the serial guffaws surrounding him, most of the audience did. Sometimes they even applauded a well-aimed line. During such pauses in the onstage action. Temple often leaned close to whisper, 'That was mine," against the neighboring din.

  Matt applauded when the audience did, but was beginning to wonder why all the pomp and circumstance and men in cummerbunds for what could have been a pleasant show in a high school gymnasium. Then he remembered that Crawford Buchanan was responsible for most of it, and that Temple thought poorly of his qualifications for the job. Still, the audience seemed delighted by spoofs of its power and glory and goof ups. Matt suspected that these people would have applauded a Three Stooges version of this show, just as long as their names were mentioned, no matter the context.