Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Left my camouflage clothes at home. It’ll be all right. At this point, the security should be mostly to keep the animals in, rather than humans out.

  “You seem to have scouted this place before,” Temple observed as she slowed the car to a jolting stop on the rough road.

  “No, but the data in Kirby’s files was fairly specific, at least about the perimeter of this place. Van Burkleo is one of those quasi-legal operators every law enforcement unit—state police, DEA, INS, Initials R Us, ad nauseam—would love to catch with his fingers in some illegal cookie jar.”

  Temple said nothing more. Max was sending her into a serious danger zone. Either he honestly trusted her instincts or the umbrella of the Crystal Phoenix and the Fontana family was a larger, stronger defense than she realized. She was a little slow on the uptake, but half a lifetime of surviving on animal instincts had made Max a master at weighing danger.

  Animal instincts. Number one was self-preservation. Temple had better dial hers up to maximum.

  Max had told her to drive until she couldn’t, so she continued along the road more cautiously than usual, in other words, slowly.

  Thickets of scrub clustered on the flat land, obscuring what lay beyond. What lay beyond was rougher terrain, crisscrossed by dry washes that could fill up with water breathtakingly fast in a hard Nevada rain, which came seldom but devastatingly.

  A lot of washes were damp in their rocky bottoms, despite a long lack of rain. She began to suspect that these washes could be filled mechanically to put off trespassers. Some moat!

  Finally, a gate set into piled rocks loomed ahead like a minimountain. An iron fence extended in either direction as far as the eye could see. Must have cost as much as a Strip hotel-casino wet area, and almost nobody would see this. Except for Max’s assumed high rollers. A modest sign read Rancho Exotica. She did a double-take when she read it, because the first time through she’d seen: Rancho Erotica. Las Vegas conditioning at work.

  When she stopped at the gate, she noticed a speaker and camera set into the raw, red stone.

  It squawked at her, so she squawked back after getting out of the car to get her mouth close enough to the speaker. The high-mounted camera recorded her most unflattering angle: from above she looked like a red-headed mop with no body.

  “Temple Barr from the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. Mr. Van Burkleo’s office is expecting me.”

  A voice so distorted it was genderless instructed her to proceed when the gates opened.

  She tramped back into the car, irritated at being too short to lean out its open window and submit to this inspection with dignity.

  The high, barred gates retracted into their red stone mountains with the slick mechanical ease of ancient tomb booby-traps springing on the wary hero of an Indiana Jones movie.

  Another long drive—what was out on the perimeter all those miles back for Max to scout?—finally rewarded her with the sight of a low stone compound built along the base of the mountain.

  The road took her to the center of a sprawling construction stabbed with walls of glass and redwood. A wooden door wide and high enough to befit a cathedral provided a focal point.

  There the asphalt ended like a thermometer in a fat pool of parking lot-cum-turnaround.

  Temple parked and got out of the car, wondering if she looked as dusty as its once-mirror-black surface.

  She took off her sunglasses. The surrounding scene lost the vivid color the tinted lenses intensified. To the naked eye, the building seemed like a Bauhaus version of a ’50s ranch-style motel: self-consciously low, long, and modern, a rugged man-made slash underlining the majesty of the mountain behind it.

  The big doors entered the cathedral-ceiling main structure at the building’s center. Call it Chapel Central. Temple headed for them.

  By the time she got there, a normal-size door at the side of the impressive entrance had opened. A tall, slim woman stood waiting in it.

  Tall, slim women always made Temple feel like a truant reporting to a principal, but definitely not p-r-i-n-c-i-p-a-l as in “pal.”

  Feeling as fraudulent as a delinquent seventh grader, Temple stomped to the low-profile door on her high-profile wedgies and gave her name and rank again.

  In like a safe-cracker’s lock pick.

  In and face-to-face with a tiger.

  Foot-to-paw, rather.

  The quarry-tile floor before her was covered with the splayed hide of a magnificent Indian tiger, only its glassy-eyed head rising in repellant 3-D from the flatness of its glorious skin.

  Max had mentioned moneyed scofflaws who would break the rules of God and man, but he hadn’t warned her she was about to deal with people who needed to walk on wild animals to feel tall.

  She shot a searing glance at Miss Tall and Slim, who was pausing casually on one flattened foreleg of the tiger.

  After having so recently seen the magnificent live beasts prowling and lounging at the Animal Oasis, this scene was like going from a kindergarten slide show to a porno flick.

  Luckily, the contrast rendered Temple speechless, or she would have blown her cover.

  “I’ll take you to Mr. Van Burkleo’s den,” the supermodel said. “If you’ll follow me—” She moved on without looking back, expecting compliance.

  Temple followed, but she walked around the animal skin.

  It was a long walk. Like all rich men’s residences, this one required a floor plan to get around in.

  It was nice to walk this far indoors in Las Vegas without passing slot machines for once, though.

  To take her mind off the tiger rug, she studied Miss T & S’s tasteful sand-colored linen suit, which she accessorized with brown alligator pumps made from a hide so real that Temple expected the heels to start snapping at her if she got too close. Temple thought items like that were banned in Boston, and Austin, and all parts of the U.S.

  But she wasn’t current on what wildlife products were banned as imports. Maybe even the poor tiger rug was permitted.

  But not permissible in her world. Imagine poor Louie hunted down for his hide and then slapped down on a cold terra-cotta tiled floor for eternity! Well, for a long time, anyway.

  Temple’s thoughts churned as she huffed and she puffed her way after Ms. T & S in her alligator shoes. Of course, Temple wore leather shoes, but that was a byproduct of cows that would have been killed anyway and she supposed she would have to reevaluate her whole footwear code shortly. Also fast food.

  At least the Midnight Louie Austrian crystal shoes exploited no living thing. Except who had glued the crystals on? Oh, dear. Even Dorothy could hardly click her ruby slipper heels in good conscience nowadays if she really thought where everything came from. Temple supposed even Wicked Witches of the West had some rights….

  Speaking of which…

  “Wait in here,” the tall sylph announced in a tone so flat she sounded put upon by being forced to speak again. “Mr. Van Burkleo will be with you shortly.”

  “Thank you,” Temple said, not mentioning that everyone was with her “shortly.” She marched into the “den” and stopped abruptly just past the threshold.

  The place was a jungle of stuffed animal life.

  It was as if every animal she had seen live and glorious just an hour ago was now represented in its dead and stuffed state on every wall and floor of the massive room.

  Amidst such a profusion of glassy-eyed accusation high and low any humans in the scene seemed pathetically lost, dwarfed by the dead beasts that surrounded them.

  “Is there anything that you’d like?” her attenuated guide asked in a tone that devoutly hoped not.

  Temple was a born redhead, and born to be contrary.

  “Why, yes. I could use a little information.”

  “Information?” Repeated with distaste, like a dirty word.

  “Yes.” Wasn’t that what the nameless secret agent had wanted in The Prisoner, the cult ’60s television show? She felt a bit like his renegade spy character, suddenly in
serted into a strange environment, not knowing what was what, who was who.

  “Information,” Temple repeated, with gusto. “I usually deal with much more mundane events than big game hunting.”

  “You must be new with the Crystal Phoenix,” the woman suggested, not cordially.

  “New at this position. Temple Barr.” She extended her hand. Forcing people to shake hands was one way to break down even an icy reserve.

  “Courtney Fisher.” The woman surrendered a long, thin, pale hand.

  Temple pumped away like young Helen Keller at the family watering trough learning the word “wat-er.” “So nice to meet you, Courtney. How long have you worked for Mr. Van Burkleo?”

  Temple made no move to sit down, no move indeed, to release the limp mackerel (white and cold) in her custody.

  “Two years. If you’d care to take a seat—”

  Temple was not about to be unloaded that easily. “Gee, thanks, but I sit all day at my job. And this room is so fascinating. Look at all those animal eyes…it’s almost like they’re watching us. Of course, they can’t. They’re only glass, aren’t they? Not real.”

  Courtney glanced around with an expression of new distaste.

  While the woman looked at the surrounding gazes with new eyes, Temple studied her more carefully. Older than she first appeared. Perhaps thirty-eight. Skin wrinkling and tightening at the edges of her eyes and jaw like a pantyhose mask. A lion’s-head ring. A gold charm bracelet full of lions and tigers and bears and giraffes and kangaroos and cheetahs, worth a lot more than a secretary earned if it was eighteen-karat gold, as Temple suspected. Another gold animal charm at her neck. A snake and something else, thin and geometric unlike the sculptural animals, a shape that looked vaguely mystical and somehow familiar.

  Everything about her smelled of money. Did even secretaries here bring down the big bucks? Temple remembered that this place was probably a killing ground, and winced at the aptness of her metaphor.

  She glanced at the lofty deer and antelope and mountain goat heads bearing trees of antlers. They brought down the big bucks here, all right.

  “It must be fascinating to work for Mr. Van Burkleo. Do you shoot yourself?” Oops. She meant, do you shoot, yourself? In person.

  Somehow it came out sounding as if Ms. Fisher should shoot herself, preferably in the foot.

  The woman captured her lean wrist bone in the loose circle of the fingers of her other hand. “Shoot? No. Dusty, hot work. I prefer to stay under air-conditioning.”

  “I can’t disagree,” Temple said. “It really can get like darkest Africa out there. In the spring, summer, and fall, anyway. I guess Las Vegas has two climates: burning zone and some bad weather now and again, which is when it rains or gets below eighty degrees.”

  Courtney showed impeccable teeth. “Is there any refreshment you’d like? Soft or hard?”

  “Dr Pepper,” Temple suggested, assuming that would be a pain to get. She intended to study the room by herself.

  Courtney did looked pained. “I’ll see what I can do. Mr. Van Burkleo will be in as soon as he’s finished with some international calls.”

  “Of course. We contacted him on very short notice. It’s so kind of him to see me.”

  Courtney’s composure cracked for an instant. Apparently “kind” was not an adjective that suited Mr. Van Burkleo.

  She stalked out of the room like a gangly giraffe. For the first time Temple thought there might be some superiority in lack of height.

  Once alone, Temple considered snooping, but it was hard to think about doing it under so many observing eyes. Talk about the “Eye in the Sky!” Las Vegas casino spy cameras had nothing on this phalanx of overhead animal heads. Temple was beginning to feel guilty just for being alive and able to move in their frozen presence.

  I didn’t do it! she wanted to shout, like some guy on his way to the death chamber in a ’30s gangster movie. I’m not the one who killed you all. But she had a feeling that protest would ring as true in this room as Jimmy Cagney’s had on celluloid.

  Social attitudes had killed these magnificent beasts, not need.

  And everyone in a society was guilty of those attitudes, one way or another, even if it was just taking them for granted.

  Then a corner vignette caught her eye. A wall-mounted giraffe neck and head maybe, gosh, twelve feet long tilted down toward the floor. Giraffes really had such sweet faces…. Temple froze to realize that a baby giraffe stood on the floor and was stretching its slim, long neck up toward the “mother’s” face.

  They hadn’t shot and stuffed a baby giraffe, had they?

  It must be a fake baby giraffe, which was tasteless enough. Temple tiptoed over to check out the faux fur. It looked like authentic hide to her.

  The baby stood taller than she and its big shiny glass eyes seemed almost to move as she stared at it in horror. Shooting a baby anything, and then setting up this Disneyesque mother-and-child vignette…

  Dazed by disbelief, Temple tiptoed around a few other animal skin rugs, trying not to notice species. Zebra, she thought. Lovely, lithe zebra. Well, the hunters would say there were too many of them, or once had been, or would be if they weren’t “harvested,” as if living things could be harvested like onions or tomatoes. Which could be considered living things too, by some. What a slippery slope ethical consumption was!

  She started at the sight of a huge gray elephant’s foot…just a wastebasket by the massive wooden desk.

  She tried to imagine someone cutting off her foot, hollowing it out, and keeping it to hold crumpled papers and broken rubber bands.

  And where were the other three feet? At whose desk sides? In what attics and storerooms, antique shops? Imagine the places they’d been, far from the dusty and lush ground trod by the huge creatures when living.

  There had been 100 million wild elephants in Africa once, she’d read recently. And now there were twenty.

  Temple turned, looking for somewhere to sit before she got dizzy.

  Well.

  Not the velvet-upholstered horn chair…or the zebra-hide director’s chair. Maybe that ordinary black armchair…eek! Leather. How would she like to see her parents used as upholstery?

  No wonder animal rightists got a tad agitated. Once you started thinking about how people used and abused animals, and animal “products,” once you realized the human race was now launched into cloning and genetically designing animals to serve its every need or whimsy…

  Temple turned as she heard the double doors into this chamber of horrors open.

  A man stood framed by them, wearing a khaki jacket and pants bristling with pockets.

  He was stockier than a stuffed laundry bag, his head sun-reddened between the spiderweb of thin gray hair strands still left to him. Huge freckles spread over his face and tops of his hands like fat rings in soup. Three large warts only emphasized his blunt, wind-burned features.

  Beauty and the Beast had been given a cruel new twist, for the beauty was in the taxidermist’s remnants of the animal kingdom, and the beast was the one puny man in their midst.

  Oh, he wasn’t so puny physically. In fact, Temple might ordinarily be intimidated, ever so slightly, by such a huge, hearty, and callous specimen of Homo sapiens.

  But, buttressed by the wise artificial eyes of noble creatures from water buffalo to lion and tiger and bear to deer and the elephant foot standing at truncated attention as a wastebasket beside his massive mahogany desk…

  Well, Temple had never been in the presence of a serial killer before.

  Get the goods on this guy, she heard herself thinking, and let Max take him down.

  She felt like just another bit of insignificant prey…and then like a tiger-in-disguise herself. Hidden by the jungle, moving silent and swift. Ready to pounce…

  “Miss Barr, is it?”

  He came forward, held out a callused hand (from holding an elephant rifle, no doubt), and shook hers in a relatively relaxed manner. “And how can I help the Crysta
l Phoenix today?”

  All right, PR Woman, do your Clark Kent imitation. Or maybe Lois Lane.

  “It’s so kind of you to see me on such short notice, Mr. Van Burkleo. We’re in a bit of a pickle at the Phoenix with our animal exhibit.”

  “I thought you were doing a petting zoo.”

  “We are, and we have a consultant handling that. But…at the last minute the owners—”

  “The Fontanas.”

  Temple didn’t correct him. The owner of the Crystal Phoenix was Nicky Fontana, singular. And Nicky had nothing to do with his family’s mob background. But mentioning such a shocking desertion of his roots wouldn’t serve Temple here.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “Such a nice family to work for.”

  Van Burkleo’s sandy, hairy eyebrows raised. She didn’t look like a mob soldier.

  “We are not unaware,” she went on, “that our best clients would very much like access to the services you provide. And we thought you might be willing to advise in our acquisition of one or two more…thrilling exhibits for our renovated areas.”

  “Have a seat.”

  She nearly threw up. The “seat” he indicated was that literal monstrosity, a Victorian chair constructed solely of deer horns upholstered in crimson velvet.

  Temple arranged herself on it like Queen Victoria greeting a foreign dignitary (though her feet, even in three-inch-high wedge heels, didn’t quite touch the floor).

  “What an interesting…zoo you have here,” she observed.

  “A few of my personal trophies.”

  “Then you are a big-game hunter yourself.”

  He bowed.

  “You have been to Africa many times?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “But the best specimens were not bagged there.”

  Temple managed to look genuinely mystified.

  “This,” said Van Burkleo, “is what your Crystal Phoenix clients will be able to track, shoot, and bring home from here.”

  She nodded, slowly, absorbing the enormity.

  In the desert outside of Las Vegas, if you paid enough, you could slaughter an endangered species and have it shipped home on ice for the taxidermist. But how?

  “Surely there are laws—?”