"I like your brand, bud. Grant's always been good enough for me. Don't know this geezer's name, and I couldn't tell you if he's right-or left-handed, but I do happen to know where he hangs out. Signed an IOU right at this bar on the back of a Blue Mermaid Motel rate card. I'd know that piss-ant ugly shade of aqua-blue anywhere."
"When was this?"
The bartender eased both Grants off the slick bar into some out-of-sight cache. "Couple nights ago. Better hurry. People who pay less well than you have been lookin' for him too."
"What do you mean 'pay less well'?"
"I mean their money is all in their knuckles, knocking on your door. You pay, they stop. They don't ask after guys like this, they tell you to spill your own guts before they do it for you."
"Did you tell them what you told me.'"
"They didn't ask hard enough yet, but they'll get there."
Matt nodded and stood.
"Don't you want your drink.'"
"Nope. Lost my taste for it."
"Don't worry. It's on the house."
Matt left, wishing he'd had a swig of something. A hundred dollars, when he could probably have bought the information for forty or fifty. Stupid move. Or . . . maybe smart. Maybe big enough to shake something loose from that guy. He'd decided to tell what he knew before someone came along and made him do it for free, hadn't he?
Matt inhaled the crisp night air, ignoring the lowlifes slouching at doors on either side of the Brass Rail. The Blue Mermaid. He roughly knew where it was. Downtown. Not far from the police department. Temple had told him all about it, raving about the huge plaster mermaid figure that had reared its sinuous curves over the motel since the thirties. Next thing he'd get for his living room would be a big blue mermaid to lounge on his huge red sofa. Right.
Tacky place, he thought next. She hadn't said a lot, but he'd read that between the spurts of her enthusiasm for the blue mermaid figure, for the wacky artist Domingo and his million flamingos. The place had stunk, even if it had an artsy mermaid for a hat.
Matt walked down the side street to the Goliath lot, where he had parked the Vampire in a halfway point between light and darkness. He remembered standing outside the Araby Motel at the Strip's opposite end near McCarran Airport not many months ago, watching a door that Cliff Effinger might exit, or enter. Guard duty had put him into a kind of temporal trance that night. He couldn't say how long he had stood there, or if he'd slept standing up, like a horse, or had dreamed, like a dope fiend. The past and its buried emotions always took him by the throat like a watchdog and choked until he couldn't tell real from false, present from past, right from wrong.
What would he do when he finally found Effinger?
He had no idea. He had never even stopped to wonder what Effinger would do when he saw Matt again.
Chapter 13
Auditions Can Be Murder
Temple would never have thought it possible for the huge conference room at Colby, Janos and Renaldi to look crowded, but today it did. Five new faces sat around the large oval table, and one of them was feline.
And the tension level felt even higher, perhaps because "the client" was present.
Actually, the four new humans present were from Allpetco, but the advertising agency personnel referred to them in singular form as "The Client." Temple found that as absurd as referring to the Marx Brothers en masse as "The Comic."
The client was officially the company itself, so Temple supposed it made sense, but the frequently used phrase kept reminding her of the John Grisham book and movie. She kept looking over her shoulder for rogue lawyers.
"The client wants to watch you and the other candidates do their stuff on camera/ Kendall had said the moment Temple reported to her office, dress bag; tote bag and bagged Midnight home hanging off different parts of her person
"The client? I didn't realize we'd have an audience."
"Now that you've had a day to get used to the surroundings, everyone should be relaxed. The client makes the decision, we just present the possibilities. Want me to hang that dress bag on my door?"
"What would we do without backs of doors?" Temple had wondered as her bag vanished onto a hook behind the open door.
So now Temple again made a dramatic entrance to the conference room, Midnight Louie in his purple sack fastened to her chest like some protective life vest.
By now she had affixed names and faces to the agency people. It was easy once you understood the family, and ethnic trees. Colbys were medium in every respect--height, coloring, vocal tones. Placid, happy, humming WASPs like Kendall, despite her Italian last name, for Temple had discovered in the agency brochure that Kendall was Brent Colby's daughter.
Janoses were intensely brown in coloring and choleric in temperament, Middle European to the toes of their sensibly sturdy wing-tip shoes. Renaldis were either as tall and elegant as Respighi pines or, conversely, as round and black as olives, both species intense in a deceptively laid-back way.
Stereotypes didn't hold across all members of a particular family, but they helped Temple grasp the essential character of each of the three "tribes" she must deal with.
"The Client." Now that was no neat familial or ethnic union. The Client was one man and three women. She had no idea what position these four had with the company. She hoped someone would explain that to her before the day had much advanced, but no one seemed inclined to, although introductions had been made, too hastily to take root. In the meantime, Temple would do as she had always done when meeting new people: assume that they were fair-minded, intelligent and friendly until they proved themselves otherwise.
Temple the TV news reporter had used that basic technique with everyone from multimillionaires to homeless transients, man or woman, adult or child. Cynical reporters--and she had discovered that not only was the stereotype true, but that there were far too many of them for the good of truly unbiased reporting because cynicism cuts both ways--ended up not respecting certain stories and certain people. They also ended up getting lousy stories, and missing many good ones that way.
Call her a cockeyed optimist, but Temple had learned early that overestimating yourself and underestimating other people was the worst mistake you could make in professional matters. Or personal ones.
Her musings stopped. Midnight Louie's whole body had stiffened against her. This feline alarm was as startling as a dog's sudden bark. If Louie had been a dog, heaven forbid, he would have been a pointer at that moment.
Temple followed the direction of his glassy, fixed gaze, and saw that everyone in the room (except her, of course, who had been insight-gathering) was staring in the same direction. Was something wrong?
She steeled herself to view the usual dead body. What was new? Death by staple gun, perhaps, this time. Caffeine poisoning. Nicotine fit. This was New York. What she saw instead was a new furry face in the room.
This animal was indeed remarkable. A beautiful dark-blond Persian cat sat full-length on the table, like a demure, fluffy sphinx, her long golden forelegs casually crossed.
Her earth-toned coat was a melange of dark, foxy red-gold down the back and incredibly full tail, then caramel on the long, flowing sides. Cream frosted her dainty chin and luxuriant bib. Her green eyes gleamed mossy, like agates in an old-gold frame, and her nose was the same rich brick-red as the paler twin's: Yvette.
One was sun, the other moon.
And Midnight Louie was mooning at the sun!
Temple shook his carrier, trying to break the golden cat's spell. No such luck. Louie wasn't the only one struck to stone. No one spoke, or stirred, for at least a full minute.
"Magnificent," Brent Colby, Jr., declared, reaching out his Rolex-banded wrist to stroke the creature's head as if touching a golden object.
"Fabulous doming." One of the women from the foursome known as "The Client"
Spoke with a hush in her voice.
Temple had heard that expression before about purebred Persians. What the heck was doming, besides a furry
forehead? And who cared anyway? Louie didn't need doming; he had brains and initiative. Or he had used to have them. Temple twisted her neck around, trying to catch Louie's bright emerald eye. No use. He was as transfixed as the rest of them.
"This is very good," a low voice commented into her left ear.
Temple turned on Kendall, suppressing a snarl.
"What's good?" Temple asked with resentful stage-mother vehemence. "That gilded lily taking the spotlight from Louie?"
"She's golden. He's black. Maurice, if you recall, is yellow-striped."
It took half a minute for Temple's old television instincts to kick in. "Maurice too closely matches the color of this one. Louie doesn't."
Kendall nodded, never dislodging a scissor-snipped strand of her Fifty-seventh Street haircut.
And then Savannah Ashleigh clip-clopped over on her platform heels. "Isn't she divine? Solange is Yvette's sister."
Temple wasn't going to put up with misrepresentation. "How can she be? Aren't purebreds supposed to all be the same color and have the same markings, give or take minor variations? Yvette is a shaded silver Persian. And this is... a horse of quite a different color, though the darker markings are the same."
Savannah sighed dramatically, doing much to reinforce Dr. Mendel's shoring-up and -out operations on her bust. "I don't understand it myself. Something to do with genetics. But I think Solange is a missing link. A throwback. A recess of Jean." Savannah frowned at her last expression. "I don't know what Jean has to do with it. Maybe she was an important breeder who took frequent time-outs."
The moment Savannah had begun speaking in her pneumatic voice, overemphasizing her esses until she sounded like an oversexed air hose, everyone's attention had reverted to Solange.
The woman from Allpetco rolled her eyes at Savannah's interpretation of "recessive gene," but went on talking as if she had never been interrupted.
"I'm by no means an 'important breeder' like Jean, yet I do know that the shaded silver Persian is basically a white cat with brown tabby markings: black tipping the hairs. Of course, early shaded-silver litters threw up some kittens with brown tabby coloring. Those poor 'throwbacks' were brushed off and sold as pets. Eventually, some breeders recognized that, once in a harvest moon, an anomaly shines through human concerns about controlling color and breeding true, and deserves its own spotlight. Thus you have shaded golden Persians like Solange. Some people breed them exclusively, and now we all recognize that it is truly impossible to say which is the lovelier shaded Persian, the silver or the gold. It's not uncommon for silver litters to produce golden siblings. Although"--here she frowned--"it is exceedingly odd for a shaded silver like Yvette to produce what are essentially 'red,' which can be yellow or orange, tabby kittens."
Savannah stirred. "Are you saying that the lousy Maurice can't be the father of Yvette's babies? Oh. It must be a virgin birth, then. This changes everything. This means good tabloid coverage. Yvette is redeemed!"
"I'm afraid not. Before I'd buy spontaneous regeneration, I would suspect a tarnish spot on the mother, which would mean that Yvette is actually a shaded tortoiseshell."
"Yvette? My sterling silver sweetums?" Savannah waxed highly indignant again. "A tortie? Look at her! A symphony in platinum. There is nothing red about her but her little red nose and tongue."
The woman smiled tolerantly. "To carry the red strain, she would only need two red hairs somewhere, anywhere, on her body. Perhaps between a toe--"
Savannah shrieked. The notion of Yvette secreting unauthorized foreign-colored hair was too unspeakable to address further.
Besides, advertising agency personnel had no interest splitting cat hairs and paternity issues.
"Getting back to practicalities," young Andrew Janos interjected. "This blond cat. . . er, red cat. . . er, sister Solange, she has no performing experience, though?"
"No," Savannah admitted, still pouting at the latest assault on her darling Yvette's reputation.
"And we know," said a young adwoman in a navy Anne Klein II suit, "that Yvette and Midnight Louie work together like . . . sugar and spice, sweet and sour, cream and Kahlua." She seemed ready to go on forever, oxymoronically speaking.
"It's too early for lunch," Kendall interjected with smooth good humor, "but you must he hungry already. Maybe we should see how the boy-cats react to this girl-cat. Has Maurice met Solange?"
"Only a hissing acquaintance," Savannah put in cattily.
"I see," said Kendall, well pleased by Maurice's ill manners. "Shall we let Louie take a good look at her?"
She supported the weight of his carrier while Temple loosened her bonds and shrugged out of the contraption. All eyes were on her and Louie. She felt like Houdini performing an escape.
Only ... as she let Kendall hold the carrier and loosened the neck drawstring to give Louie a little more freedom of movement... he took a lot more freedom of movement. .. by leaping to the ground, leaving the bag behind as Kendall's tightened grip helped him squeeze out like a large boneless black furry lump of Silly Putty . . . and then Louie bounded over the sleek industrial carpeting while women squealed and brave men frowned and ordered: "Stop him!"
But no one did, because he was atop the conference table and nose-to-nose with the Divine Solange before Temple could race after and corral him before he did something foolish.
Louie bent his head to touch noses with Solange, then he paced toward her rear as they sniffed tails. He returned again to touch his matte-black nose to her deep dull-red one. Solange's whiskers, black and spidery, mingled with Louie's striking white facial vibrissae.
It didn't take an advertising genius to see that this was kitty chemistry at first sight.
A plaintive mew issued from the pink canvas carrier that everyone had forgotten about on the floor. Temple, having stopped at the table edge to let nature take its course, cast the carrier a sympathetic glance
"This is great," the senior male member of The Client said, nodding sagely. "Film it."
So Andrew Janos picked up his camcorder and filmed.
Another mew emerged from the pink carrier, but this time not even Temple noticed.
If only, Temple thought about four hours later, sitting in the dark around the conference table, they had confined the day's filming to Louie and Solange.
But, no, they had to reshoot Temple and Savannah, various cats in hand, in endless mock interviews. After this orgy of amateur filming (and interviewing, in Temple's opinion), invisible minions were sent for trays of coffee-to-go in giant Styrofoam cups and two pizzas that arrived cold and congealing. Not even Louie, connoisseur of alley bonanzas, would touch the cold circles of oven-curled pepperoni sausage floating pools of hardened grease like miniature terracotta birdbaths filled with frozen ice water.
Besides, Temple was too nervous to eat by now, and one more cup of black, syrupy coffee would have her on the ceiling.
Before her queasy eyes, the film ran, paused, retracked, fast-forwarded and moved frame by frame at the request of various experts in the room: the agency creative directors, the agency senior members, the agency young turks, the agency gofers... The Client's lead member, The Client's one-minded female triumvirate who always disagreed with the lead member . . . Maurice's handler the animal-behavior expert, Savannah Ashleigh the actress, whose bubbly monologue pointing out her own strong points often continued into Temple's segments, where she found only flaws.
Temple no longer felt very civil. She had noticed when she held him on camera that Louie's claws, both fore and aft, were slightly extended at all times by the later sessions. In fact, Savannah Ashleigh had complained of this long and loudly during her last tandem "interview" with Louie, and had writhed in her chair in considerable pain apparently ... or under the misconception that the writhing human female form can sell cat food.
Now if Solange had writhed . . . but Solange was a lady to her gilded rocs. Poor Yvette seemed listless and diminished her few times on camera--what ragged-out new mother could compete w
ith that corona of sun-bright fur shining in the Spotlights?
Maurice was brought out, but, next to Solange's sable-blond aurora borealis, his American short-hair yellow stripes looked like a cheap suit bought in Times Square.
Louie was gracious to both ladies of the feline persuasion, a lamb when with Temple, and a lion when with Savannah. But he never crossed the line to out-and-out misbehavior.
Although Savannah accused him during one film session of "leaking" on her best Ultrasuede skirt, no spot could be found, even by the agency art director, who examined it thoroughly. The group conclusion was that the warmth of Louie's considerable weight had felt like a "leak" to her.
Temple feared that Savannah's running critique of Temple's failings had struck home and mentally agonized over how to compensate for them:
Savannah's Slams-----------Temple's Fixes
Toothpick legs---------------Calf-Length skirts
Bony Ankles------------------Boots
Squints at camera----------Glasses (no, contact lenses)
A Midwestern accent------A French accent
Red Hair----------------------A blond wig
Speaks too fast-------------A molasses mouthwash
Waves hands too much---Handcuffs
Of course, by the time Temple had actually corrected all the supposed flaws Savannah had mentioned, she would be unrecognizable and quite literally unspeakable.
The replay session ended with actual film of the recent Las Vegas commercials done at Gangster's casino and surrounding attractions. Temple was not in these segments, so could settle down to watch Louie's shenanigans with unselfconscious pleasure. Among the chorus line of pastel zoot-suited gangsters in lime-green and flamingo-pink fedoras, his nimble black form stood out like a flea on a tie-dyed cat. He certainly could cavort down onstage stairways faster than Marilyn Miller at full tap, swim harder than a sinking hamster on an exercise wheel in the Mirage's volcano pool, and leap over Gangster's thirties-vintage car seats with a single bound, she thought proudly.
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