Also, I am concerned about the welfare of my other little doll, Miss Temple Barr. It has not missed my astute observation--despite being aswamp in the trappings of stardom and its ensuing problems, such as fratricidal envy--that Miss Temple has been not only unusually busy, but rather blue lately.
For this I blame myself.
I have been neglecting her and her trivial concerns. In my rejoicing at the recent absence of the Mystifying Max, I have not considered that another individual might actually miss the Mr.
Question Mark. Although I spot traces of Mr. Matt Devine (namely a certain scent unmarked by any bad habits on the living-room loveseat--pardon me, sofa), I also scent that Miss Temple has been out and about in new terrains with new people. It can mean only that she is on a case, nose to the trail. Yet how can I help her out if I am chained to my cameras and my crew?
I decide to disrupt the proceedings in such a way that shooting will stop for a time, and the only possible path to this goal is one that involves a mishap to the Divine Yvette. If my darling should so much as crack a razor-sharp nail, her mistress will scream and carry on and remove DY
from the set to go off and pout and not come back for days. Well, maybe a day or so.
A day or so may be all Midnight Louie needs to discover Miss Temple's case secrets, ferret out the perpetrator, nail him or her and get Miss Temple onto more wholesome projects, such as seducing Mr. Matt Devine. (I am not crazy about his presence in my home, but he is far more palatable than the Mystifying Max. That guy is a real upstart, and no respecter of territories.) Today we are filming under the volcano.
I kid you--not!
The Divine Yvette has been wrapped in some sort of floral sarong, with a delicate lavender orchid behind one ear that really brings out the lilac tone in her shaded markings. I would not need a little grass shack in Hawaii to shack up with this doll; though, of course, I would not be so crass as to take advantage of a co-star.
Anyway, this volcano, the street side attraction at the Mirage, goes off on schedule like a baby with croup. Wham, bam, up shoot the flames, down pours the water into the lagoon below, where the Divine Yvette and I recline on a nest of leis.
Those flowers get sticky when crushed, and my weight is turning them into marzipan. So my coat is sticky, not to mention stinky, and even the Divine Yvette is showing the slightest bit of temperament.
"Get me out of this flower graveyard!" she yowls to all and sundry. "I do not like blossoms, only greenery and only when I can eat it. Louie, my love, help me! The scent is overpoweringly awful."
I am a wee bit surprised, as the scent in the Divine One's powder (not her selection, of course) is a bit strong for my sensitive sniffer, employed as it has been of late on murder scenes and such. Give me a reek of fresh blood and I can follow a trail anywhere!
The crew has devised this nasty tippy canoe I believe they call an outrigger, on which the Divine One and I are to float like Caesar and Cleopatra.
I am well aware that if there is one thing that will send the Divine Yvette and her mistress into a screaming fit that could pass for an operatic aria, it is if the Divine Yvette should Get Wet.
What kind of cad, you may ask, would get his ladylove wet, especially if that ladylove has a particular allergy to moist surfaces? A cad indeed. But I am torn between two females exceptionally dear to my heart: Miss Temple Barr, who needs my immediate assistance (for she will get nowhere without me, though she will not admit it), and the perfect pearl of Persian pulchritude, the Divine Yvette.
I can swim, having been introduced to water at a very early age, in a sack.
So I can ensure that the Divine Yvette is perfectly safe (as she is perfectly everything else), and even do the feline water rescue, which involves biting the back of her neck (yum-yum) and holding her afloat as I paddle us to shore.
By the way, I would not advise dudes of ordinary weight, strength and endurance to try this trick. I am specially trained at rescue attempts. (Some may remember my death-defying aquatic acrobatics during an escapade at the Treasure Island's ship-dueling attraction.) So there I sit when they plunk us two in the tippy canoe. (Did I not mention that I am wearing a Hawaiian shirt of most nauseating color and design, the kind Mr. Mystifying Max dons as a disguise--he says, but I think he likes them.)
Ye gods! First hats, then shirts. What will they hang upon this long-suffering hide next?
Three-piece suits? Do not give them any bright ideas.
Anyway, the DY and myself on our tippy canoe look like we are asail on a florist's funeral barge.
"I do not like water, Louie," the Divine Yvette admits in her most private purr. 'The Love Moat at the Goliath was all right because I knew the water was shallow and you were there, but this is a huge lagoon--"
"Hush, my silver seductress." (You have to use this smoochy language with dames to get their attention.) "I am here also. Nothing will happen."
That is when my toes feel the infringement of a liquid element. I wriggle them, thinking that they have gone asleep. The cold wet feeling moves up my lower limbs. No doubt the close, powdered presence of the Divine Yvette has turned the blood in my veins into water. Cold water.
I look down. It is dark despite the camera lights focused on our every move. Still, I see wavelets nipping at the edge of the Divine Yvette's sarong. I look out at the water on which our tippy canoe rides. Those waves are bigger, but of the same ilk.
Apparently, someone else has figured that this is a tippy canoe and has helped my plan along, quite inadvertently.
I look to the shore, crowded with camera crew, lights, the animal trainer with the evil Maurice in her arms.
In the night light his pale whiskers shine like ectoplasm. The artificial lights all around paint a fiendish expression on his vapid puss face.
Our vessel is much farther out in the lagoon than I had planned as the site of a sudden dip in the Deep. In fact, I sense great depths around us, perhaps even fiftee n feet.
I glance at the Divine Yvette.
"Can you swim?"
"Certainly not! That would involve dampening the hairs of my coat with other than the dry shampoo my mistress employs a groomer to use. I might get a ... "--sniff--"cold."
"You will get cold. Observe."
The Divine Yvette's perfectly round aquamarine orbs widen as they focus on the boat's bottom.
"Louie! That is water!"
"I am aware of what it is."
"And we are--oh, my dear mistress!--miles from shore."
"Only yards."
"Louie, you must get me out of this! Immediately!"
At last she has given me permission to do the unthinkable. I throw my full twenty pounds from one side of the tippy canoe to the other. In a moment the outrigger and bottom lift out of the lagoon.
The Divine Yvette emits a piercing cry, which is matched by a wail from shore.
"Louie!" my Miss Temple bellows, using all her lung power and wisely eschewing screaming,
"swim for the far shore."
I glance across the light-polished wavelets. Miss Temple is right. We are now closer to the far bank. With a last desperate lunge, I take the nape of the Divine Yvette's slender neck in my teeth and roll us both into the cold, wet, dark water.
Above us the tilted tippy canoe hangs for a moment like a shelter before crashing down on us.
I remember my daring dive from the flaming deck of the Treasure Island pirate ship. That scene flashes before my closed eyes as the Divine Yvette and I plunge deep into the lagoon. The Divine Yvette is a petite thing, but she has a lot of hair to absorb water. Now, I must reverse our swift downward, drowning descent and paddle us both to the surface.
I have never worked so hard in my life! My teeth are clenched in a death grip on the Divine Yvette's neck, in the hold her pedigreed mama used to cart her to and fro as a tiny kitten.
She is not so tiny now, nor am I. In this situation my fighting weight works against me. I can only windmill all four limbs, waiting for our freefall
through the water to reverse its pull and let us pop to the surface like a cork. Er, like a cork from the finest bottle of French champagne, in case the Divine Yvette recovers and asks me to refine my figures of speech. How can a dude who does not talk have figures of speech? You got me.
And right now the water's icy, dark hands are wringing the strength from my body. I flail, and finally am rewarded by a sudden waft upward. And upward and upward. And upward and upward. I wish I could see light, but all is dark, and I am no longer sure whether we are drifting upward or plunging down.
Even when my head breaks the water's surface and I see and hear a lion of a volcano shooting flames into the black Vegas sky, I cannot believe it. In a minute the Divine Yvette's head bobs up alongside me, her eyes squeezed so shut a crowbar couldn't open them.
"Can you paddle?" I ask.
"I do not swim."
"Can you spread your toes and move your feet up and down?"
"Spread my toes? Louie, please! I only do so for the most intimate grooming rituals."
"Get intimate and get grooming, or you will drown like an unwanted kitten," I growl.
"I was never an unwanted kitten! I am the product of decades of the finest and most precise breeding techniques--"
I haul a mitt out of the water and smack her in the kisser. Sometimes dames require a firm hand, particularly when they are hysterical, or on a genealogy kick.
Turning my head (and inadvertently the Divine Yvette's unconscious one) I do the hardest thing I have ever done. I spot Miss Temple's fiery red hair in the crowd by the cameras, and I run for all my might away from her. I am running in water, you understand, toes spread, so what I am doing is swimming.
The Divine Yvette is a terrible burden. My jaws are frozen with strain. But I cannot let loose of her. My long, luxuriant tail has become a liability that could pull us both under. I struggle on, my head never high enough above the waves to see the shoreline for which I aim.
I can see the volcano, though, coughing up its bloody fire and rock, reflected in the water all around me.
I am swimming through icy fire, every limb aching with effort, my mind numbed by cold, even the Divine Yvette a mere memory. If I live through this, I will kill that Maurice!
Still, in my benumbed brain I hear an encouraging refrain: "Come on, Louie! Come on, boy!"
You would think I were Lassie.
The thought of being mistaken for a dog is so repellent that my flailing legs find new strength. I feel more light hitting the top of my head as the surrounding water seems punctured by stars.
In another moment human legs are splashing into the water around me. Yvette and I are lifted, her neck still clenched in my teeth, out of the water.
Miss Temple's face hangs over mine. "He is alive!"
A camera flashes beyond her, and all I can think is, I am still wearing that damn Hawaiian shirt.
This mishap could kill my career.
Chapter 26
Matt's Off Night
Walking the Strip resembles being lost on a carnival midway. Like a moving sidewalk, the Strip gives the impression that the people are standing still while the earth moves beneath them. No matter how long Matt kept walking, he felt he would never reach the end.
It reminded him of Sartre's brilliant play, No Exit, and its rather cynical line that "Hell is other people."
Even when pedestrians deserted the sidewalk for a long trek toward the dazzling entrance facade of a major hotel-casino, Matt suspected that they soon recycled back onto the Strip's implacable length and unquenchable brightness.
Somewhere in this milling mass of Thursday-night humanity, Cliff Efftnger might be stepping on and off the merry-go-round like everyone else.
Matt studied the passing parade, mentally reminding himself of the facial features of the man he was looking for. He found it hard not to be distracted by the fascinating variety of fellow strollers.
Tourists, of course, made up the bulk of the walkers, their clothes casual despite the cooler night air. Walking is the economy class's favored mode of transportation. Those who can afford to taxi up and down the Strip do so.
Did that mean Cliff Effinger, seen on foot, was pinching pennies? Or hiding his loot from various scams? That was the trouble with supposition: every conclusion generated another legitimate possibility.
Matt saw fallen trashy magazines littering the sidewalk edges. Waiting men jammed fistfuls of the pulp paper at passersby. Never at women, only men, and never at a man alone.
Crushed underfoot, revealing photographs offered private dancers and total fulfillment.
Matt wondered whose grown-up little girls and boys these nakedly seductive people were, and what kind of people those parents were.
Not so easy to dismiss the seamier side of life nowadays, when the villain wasn't that easy-to-blame old devil Sin so much as dysfunctional family cycles. What fun was there in stoning someone who had to be analyzed unto the fifth generation backward in time?
Did Cliff Effinger have a grim family history to excuse his pathetic bullying? Was he more to be pitied than condemned? Matt felt his fists ball in his jacket pockets. No. Some people were just bad. Evil. In the power of that old devil Sin.
He veered onto the long, curving sweep of sidewalk that approached the mega hotel rising in the distance at an oblique, coy angle. The straightaway was for King Car, the contraption that had first made Las Vegas a feasible resort for Hollywoodites three hundred miles away.
Who would have suspected that the hoi polloi, not Hollywood, would make this desert gambling oasis rich? Even a lowlife like Cliff Effinger had come here to make his fortune.
Long walks were a form of meditation. Once inside a casino, meditation was not an option.
*****************
Noise and light bloomed around Matt like a migraine headache as he pushed through the darkened entry doors. The slot-machine jingle sounded like Christmas, but the spirit of Las Vegas' eternal gambling season was receiving, not giving. People, machinelike themselves, sat before clanking, gear-spinning mechanisms that spit back the occasional coin like bad change.
When Matt removed his gloveless right hand from his pocket, his palm was damp. But the plastic-laminated sketch of Cliff Effinger was impervious now to heat and moisture, preserved.
Matt wondered who to approach. Was he expected to tip for attention? If so, he'd be broke within days. Once more he mentally rehearsed his story. Lying, or even bending the truth, still took a lot of rehearsal. He was the opposite of a con man, he wanted to sell the truth even when he knew there would be no takers.
"Excuse me."
The waitress wore something shiny and slithery and scanty, but her face beneath the cheap, harsh makeup was even bleaker.
"Yeah, hon?" Bright tone, the better to cadge tips.
"I'm looking for someone. You might have seen him." Matt flashed the sketch in the insufficient light that was always bright but as tremulous as a firefly.
"Somebody cared enough to do a portrait," she commented. "Relative of yours?"
"My ... brother."
"You're a lot younger than he is, hon. A lot cuter too." Her blackened lashes lowered to the sketch, her comment a fact, not a flirtation.
"My mother ... married twice."
Her eyes rolled. "Mine too. And believe me, number two was no improvement. Hey! At least they married." She frowned at the shiny plastic. "That cowboy type is rare these days. They're up in Colorado now, all the Stetson boys. This guy looks a lotta years behind the times."
"He did . . . drop out of sight."
"Maybe. I mighta seen him, oh, couple months ago. Not a regular, though. Want a drink?"
She tilted her round glass-laden tray to him.
"Isn't that somebody else's?"
She shrugged. "I can get 'em another one of whatever you take where that came from.
They're all free in the gaming area. You look like you could stand some warming up. It's cold out there on the Strip tonight. Stay here and ru
n the slots a while. I come by regularly."
Matt shook his head, closing his fingers over Effinger's too-good likeness. Should he ask someone else? Maybe.
The waitress had minced away on her Temple-like high heels. She was old for the outfit, and probably knew it. It was cold out there on the Strip.
Matt wandered away from the clattering slot machines into the blackjack and craps areas.
He couldn't envision Effinger playing baccarat. The dealers watched the cards, the cameras hidden in the ceiling above watched the dealers and the players and the pit bosses kept an eagle eye on everybody.
He'd talked to one before and found him forthcoming. Older men, seasoned in smoke-filled rooms clinking with ice in glasses. Heavyset usually. The casino's authority figures, not unlike bishops. On a chessboard, he remembered, a bishop could move diagonally. In the church, the bishop's only option was up . . .
If he thought of these men as bishops, he would get on with them better. But no "Your Reverences," only an inner air of respect. Perhaps that's what the heads of crime families expected too.
*********************
"Excuse me. Has this man been in here recently?"
The man eyed Matt, ruling out cop and P.I. with expert speed. "Lost relative."
"Right."
"We get a lot of those. And they appreciate it if we don't mention it even if we did see 'em.
That's why cameras aren't allowed in the casino area."
"The reason isn't security?"
"Nah. Not our security, anyway. It's theirs." He gazed out on his rowdy flock with a shepherd's satisfaction. "Don't want the folks back in Pineapple Junction to see 'em."
"This guy's a gambler, all right." Matt weighed his forthcoming lies, wondering which false tack would be most effective. "We lost track of him, and now Mom's gonna die. She's all we got left. And there's... a lot of money involved."
"And you're lookin' for him? I would think you'd want the lost sheep to stay lost."
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