Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Matt shook his head. His callers didn't often leave a bad taste at the back of his mouth. He seldom felt that they were hopeless cases. And he never believed that they deserved their own misery. This man did, he thought with a flare of rare anger. Wasting ConTact's literally precious time, tying up the line when someone truly troubled--and deservingly humble--might have needed to call in.

  "Deservingly humble." Matt replayed that phrase in his mind. His own education and experience, steeped in the Beatitudes from the Mount, argued that the meek had a place on the earth, if not over it. Many religions emphasized self-effacement to the point of self-abasement.

  That wasn't any healthier than a rampaging ego that seduced and subdued every other person around it. Self-serving people were hard to like, in Matt's book of flaws, but they still needed help even when they were stomping your own self-esteem as flat as road kill.

  He knew that. Already the sting of personal betrayal, a form of superego, was fading.

  He also knew that the Voice would call again, and ask for him. Only him. Always him. Even from long distance.

  Chapter 2

  Strange Birds of Paradise

  "Nine hundred thousand plastic flamingos?"

  Temple Ban wasn't sure of her own name, couldn't be certain she hadn't been transported into an alien universe. She couldn't believe her ears, and she was sure most people wouldn't believe their eyes if they ever saw nine hundred thousand pink plastic flamingos in one humongous flock.

  But that's what Bud Dubbs was talking about, right here in his staid but cramped office at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. And the flamingos, nearly a million strong, would blanket the Little Town That Could, if international conceptual- artist Domingo had his way.

  "Well," she said faintly, " 'Domingo's flamingos' has a certain ring to it. I can't believe the board has okayed this flamingo-wrapping scheme."

  "The man is a recognized genius," Bud said, "at publicity, if nothing else. He wanted to cover Hoover Dam, but I convinced him it was too remote to receive the proper media attention."

  "So he's going to smother the Strip in flamingos? That'll stop traffic all right."

  "He's agreed not to install conceptual artworks anywhere they might impede vehic ular or foot traffic. This will be an improvised installation, his first. He will tour the area, get inspired and then . . . put out flamingos."

  "Bud! I can't believe all the Strip enterprises would approve this flaky idea."

  "Well, they haven't. That's where you come in."

  "Me?"

  "We need a freelancer to temporarily assist Domingo. Follow him around. If he settles on a site, try to clear it with the necessary honchos. If they say no, break it gently to Domingo. If they say yes, see that the installation doesn't impede business."

  "You want a diplomat, hostage negotiator and baby-sitter all in one!"

  "Exactly. With all the different clients you handle you're used to the sticky field situations that could come up--"

  "Like murder of the conceptual artist in question! Come to think of it, plastic flamingos could serve as headstones in the Truly Tacky Graveyard."

  "You have to suspend judgment. Domingo has been hailed the world over for altering the way we look at our landscapes. He's the man who hung a green-and-red spaghetti curtain from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He concocted the world's largest horizontal chocolate milk shake from one end of the Brooklyn Bridge to the other and got the mayor of New York to suspend traffic for twenty-four hours while it was set up, displayed and eaten. Or drunk. Or slurped."

  "What was the message of that: New York sucks?"

  "I know it's nuts. Sure the guy's a banana. But he has Time magazine photo spreads , Paris-Match features, you name it. When Domingo does, the world looks."

  "Not every enterprise in Vegas needs or wants publicity nowadays. In fact, some are downright surly about cooperating on even self-serving projects, not to mention more mainstream ones. The job you're proposing I handle is like being one unpopped kernel of corn in a forest fire."

  "We'll pay you well"

  "Hmm. What do you know about Domingo that I don't?"

  Bud handed a gold foil-embossed, glossy black folder across the paper canyons of his desk.

  "Money," Temple diagnosed with a puritan sniff. "This guy must waste tons of money."

  "But he has it to waste. People and institutions underwrite his projects. Artsy people. Eyeball those press releases."

  Temple scanned letterheads listing a wealth of East and West Coast arts groups. It seemed the middle of the country was much more middle-of-the-road about Domingo's conceptual creations. But then there were all his European stunts... er, installations .. . and all the eminent museums arrayed behind the artistic angler.

  Color photos showed a white-shirted Domingo directing several of his mammoth enterprises: a flotilla of fifty thousand French horns on the Seine, for instance. The project illustrated the subtle musical tension of moving water, one critic said, making a strong plea for the ecological rights of the planet, per se.

  "What about the ecological rights of Las Vegas?" Temple demanded. "We're already considered the Capital of Crass. A million flamingos aren't going to improve our image any. It's a large-scale joke on the entire town, don't you see? It allows the intelligentsia to poke fun at sacred cows, with Las Vegas as the silly old bossy vain enough to be conned into looking like a worse parody of itself than it already is."

  Bud shrugged his shirted shoulders, which were nowhere near as broad as Domingo's.

  "That's the point, Temple. Who can spoof a laughing stock? Domingo can't hurt us, and if he is so blooming artsy, no one can say that Las Vegas didn't have the sophistication to snicker at itself."

  " Some in Las Vegas. Other quarters will definitely not be laughing. This could be dangerous, Bud."

  "To you? Or Domingo?"

  "To both of us, and to about one million plastic flamingos. One million--can anyone even make that many?"

  "They're extremely popular all over South America and Mexico, I understand."

  "How much?" Temple asked, unmollified.

  Bud wrote a figure on a notepad and passed it to her.

  She nodded. Flamingos were beautiful birds, actually. "That's per day. For how many days?"

  Bud Dubbs smiled at her angelically. "As long as it takes to paint the town flamingo pink."

  ******************

  Temple had not been satisfied with the information level and extent of press kits when she was a television news reporter, and she wasn't satisfied now.

  As soon as she left the Convention Center parking lot, she pointed her Geo Storm's aqua nose toward the city library.

  By computer or by fiche, she would learn all there was to know about this so-called artist, even whether Domingo was his last, first or an assumed name.

  The trail led to the periodicals area, where she skimmed glossy art magazines she seldom saw. Inside she found more photos of the artist, who resembled the offspring of a weight lifter and an orchestra conductor. His arms were always elevated in big gestures, waving, directing.

  Dozens of Domingo's faceless, nameless minions darted around arranging parachute silk or six-story-long strings of spaghetti or twenty miles of dry-cleaner bags over hill and dale and under bridges and around revered monuments and locations.

  Only one Domingo project had been stridently rejected: a scheme to wrap the Black Hills of South Dakota with ant farms. Not only did Native Americans object, but insect-rights people feared that ants would die by the billions before the project was completed. That was the point, Domingo had protested. A parable of genocide. Weren't these red ants, after all?

  "Loony," Temple said aloud.

  "Shhhh!" hissed a pasty-faced wimp who was poring over a biker magazine. This was the Las Vegas library, after all.

  Loony, she repeated to herself, reading that Domingo (no one knew whether it was his first, last or simply latest name, and he wouldn't tell) traveled with his fem
ale manager (read mistress between the lines). She leaned close to the photograph to study what would probably be her biggest problem, the Other Woman. She suspected that Verina (no last name, either) would naturally consider herself as the only go-between Domingo should ever require.

  The woman was tall, thin and dark, just like Snow White's wicked, witchy stepmother, a chic, handsome forty-something who broadcast a Duchess of Windsor air of imperious command.

  Suddenly Bud Dubbs's princely salary didn't look so royal. Did Temple really need this project, with all the other assignments she had to handle? Temple nodded to herself. Yes, to keep her bank balance from bouncing gently now and then. Freelance work was feast or famine.

  Better to put the pedal to the metal whenever possible than to coast for a while and end up out of gas and stranded.

  ****************

  From the library, Temple headed for the Las Vegas Strip. The sun shone bright on all the glassy hotel facades and unlit featured-attraction signs, but the distant mountains wore their autumnal pales. The air offered the ineffable crispness of November.

  Seasonal change in the desert is subtle, which makes it all the more welcome. Now that Halloween was over, along with the disturbing events at the haunted house, nothing but happy holidays loomed, Temple mused: Thanksgiving and Christmas. Temple toyed with the idea of going somewhere else for one of them, like home to Minnesota, or even to New York to visit Aunt Kit. But then what would poor Max do, marooned as he was in the twilight zone of the rogue undercover operative? Or poor Matt, above ground but enjoying it no more than a groundhog who had emerged six weeks too early on February 2.

  Groundhog Day. Now there was an unhappy holiday, if you could consider it one. An almost-certain decree of six more weeks of winter, laid on the head of some hapless little mammal subjected to an annual grilling under hot television lights. Not that six more weeks of any kind of weather mattered in Las Vegas, which was mostly fair and sunny, with a long, hot salsa-strength summer guaranteed.

  Temple took a left off the Strip to Paradise, where the town's latest hot-cha-cha spot had hung its neon shingle.

  To declare anyplace the latest hot spot was always dangerous; so many new attractions were springing up daily. Temple slowed the Storm to cruise past her destination.

  Still, you couldn't go wrong naming Gangster's the waning year's newest diversion. Temple eyed the string of indecently stretched black limousines that always underlined the entry canopy.

  Lest the uninitiated mistook the pervasive limos for a funeral-home fleet, the club's entry had been designed to banish that notion. Polished black marble, as slick as the elongated Cadillacs, faced the building front, along with neon-lit glass blocks in Art Deco designs. Through the etched-glass blocks the lurid lights flickered as shadows flitted behind them. The murky shadow-play implied action of the dangerous, sensual sort: dancing, gaming, fighting, mating.

  Le Jazz Hot and Forties Swing drifted through the open double doors as clients were ushered inside by broad-shouldered men in sinister fedoras who wore pastel ties against dark shirts and suits.

  The upper level of the building was shaped into a fedora and gun barrel, both cocked, with veiled red lights visible as squinting eyes in the eaves' eternal penumbra.

  In high-rise Las Vegas Strip terms, the building looked as low and sleek and darkly intimate as the shadowed cars, but that was deceptive. Temple knew it also housed a modest, six hundred-room hotel, a four-thousand-seat theater, a giant gaming casino that was "raided"

  nightly by fake feds, a vintage movie theater that even played newsreels, a museum filled with gats and getaway cars from the gangland days of old, and up-to-date shopping centers in flanking wings: Gents and G-Men on the left, with the Moll Mall on the right. (Some women, when shopping, presumably behaved like Mau-Mau insurrectionists.) In the area of parking space, though, Gangster's was hardly the bee's knees. Temple drove around to the side lot, which--unlike most Las Vegas car parks--charged a fee.

  "Wish you had a courtesy lot," Temple grumbled as she took a chit from the cheeky attendant. "I'm just here to pick up a friend."

  "Jeez, lady, keep your garters on. You get a free pull at the Electric Chair million-dollar bonanza slot inside." He spoke with a Brooklyn accent, provoking Temple to wonder how many aspiring actors were finding work at Las Vegas theme attractions these days.

  She hustled inside, checking her watch. Six o'clock. She was supposed to have retrieved Midnight Louie from his day's labors at five-thirty.

  The doorman was a brute in a navy pin-striped suit, his lapel adorned with a pink carnation.

  Temple scurried into the marble -floored lobby, meant to echo to the click of women's high heels and the softer snick of men's patent-leather evening shoes.

  Her Manolo Blahnik snakeskin pumps provided the proper click, but most of the tourists milling about inside wore tennis shoes that scuffed the mirror-polished floors.

  Temple passed the uniformed hat-check girl and the page boy, zoomed past the Hush Money and Speakeasy restaurants and through the casino to descend to the theater.

  The placard inside echoed the bigger, brighter sign outside:

  DARREN COOKE, LIVE AND IN PERSON, STARRING IN MAKING LAS VEGAS

  Temple paused to evaluate the dramatic black-and-white photo of Cooke. The photographer had mastered the harsh, five-o'clock-shadow lighting that had dominated film-studio portraits in Hollywood's pre-Technicolor days.

  Cooke was a man of many talents. Comic, film actor, cabaret performer. He looked as lethal as Sam Spade in his angled fedora and wide lapels, his profile a deep, hawkish shadow behind him. He could have been John Garfield or James Cagney, those macho masters of menace in a dozen gangland sagas. At first glance he was Tyrone Power-handsome except ... his looks just missed leading man, which was why his format was the spoof, the takeoff, the almost-serious impression that turns on itself to go for laughs instead of thrills and chills.

  It weren't as if Cooke had Crosby's ears or Hope's nose. Nothing so obvious. But like Steve Martin or Jim Carrey, he seemed more natural mocking himself. Now he was featured in a revue mocking Las Vegas' mobster roots.

  "They're rehoising, lady." A thug, also obviously from Brooklyn via Central Casting, paused in cruising the casino aisle to eye her suspiciously as she hesitated before the theater.

  "That's okay, bud. I'm here to pick up one of the cast members ." Quite literally "pick up."

  "I guess you can go in, but keep it shut."

  Temple wondered whether he meant her mouth or her mind. She ducked past the entrance curtain (nice touch) and down the slanted aisle toward the only lights and action in the theater, the stage with its cast of dozens milling about.

  Nothing onstage held anything but a passing interest for her. She headed for a line of bored and downcast people slouching in the first row, fencing in two bored and downcast cats.

  "Is Louie done?" Temple bent to ask the director in a whisper. Maybe Louie could get her guest passes to the show, now that he was a card-carrying member of the animal performer's union.

  Kyle Conrad was an acidic man in his forties, whom she suspected of secretly hating cats.

  "Apparently," he said. "Mr. Comedy King onstage has called for so many reruns that they haven't even gotten to the 'Viva Las Vegas' number on whose coattails we're supposed to ride."

  "Don't you mean cattails?" put in one of the commercial stylists, a bouncy twenty-something woman named Marcy Givens.

  Temple was amazed. "But this is your second day on the set. You mean you haven't even gotten a chance yet to block out the scenario?"

  "We're a charity operation," Kyle said. "Charity operations sit around on their cans day in and day out."

  "But then ..." Temple was shocked. "Poor Louie's been confined to that awful carrier all day for nothing."

  Temple brushed past the stalled crew members to crouch beside the carrier in question. A pair of resentful green eyes stared out from the dark interior.

  "Lou
ie!"

  "He's had the three required bathroom breaks." Sharon Hammerlitz, the animal trainer, a jeans-clad woman with an aggressive blond buzz-cut, had followed her. "But he doesn't much care for cat litter."

  Temple pinched the door mechanism open and thrust in a hand.

  "He growled when I did that," Marcy noted.

  "Maybe you had cat litter on your hands." Temple scratched Louie's velvety chin and was rewarded with a basso purr.

  From onstage came the inevitable aural chaos of rehearsal: people outshouting each other, set pieces scraping into place and properties in motion clattering.

  One voice overrode it all. "Okay, people! We finally got the Big Daddies sketch right. Let's break for today. Well start with the chorus number tomorrow."

  A big chorus of groans came in unison. "Awwww."

  "They're all in costume for it now, Darren," a flunky's timorous voice explained.

  "Change back. What's the big deal, people? I've got two-dozen changes in a two-hour show. You don't hear me moanin' and groanin'. This is what you get the big bucks for, so hustle the bustles back to the dressing rooms. Everybody'll be fresher in the morning anyway."

  "As the chicken said to the egg, The yolks won't be any fresher,' " someone threw out in parting.

  Nobody laughed.

  The tramp of departing feet accompanied by low grumbles indicated that the chorus was in retreat. In the first row, another grumbler added, "These cats won't be fresh in the morning after sitting around for two days."

  "They'll be fresh for acting up," the trainer added more loudly. "And they're amateurs on top of it."

  "Who's an amateur?" an indignant new voice demanded.

  Temple knew that voice and didn't want to. She straightened as a willowy platinum blond woman came stalking down the aisle on heels so high they wobbled.