Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

If Las Vegas shows were overly glitzy behemoths featuring casts of dozens and stage effects that mimicked natural catastrophes almost as well as a Spielberg flick, the underbelly that supported such overweight extravaganzas ran even deeper, wider, longer.

That meant a creepy underworld of dim-lit halls lined with fluttering ghosts of a zillion costume changes. Of crowded chorus dressing rooms haunted by disembodied heads in Marie Antoinette–high wigs and moving bits of glitter everywhere, even when the rooms were empty. Of high heels hitting jackhammer hard on concrete and echoing into eternity, as Temple’s were now.

This was no brightly lit yellow brick road, but she did have her Toto on board. A small black form was trotting ahead of her. Not fluffy, but sleek. Not canine, but feline.

She ought to have known.

“Louie!”

For a moment, she wondered if Max could shape shift. Because Louie had certainly been dogging her footsteps lately, as if subbing for her missing significant other.

Temple winced mentally. Did a woman who smooched a close neighbor still have the right to a significant other?

Another guard could be seen on duty a long way down the hall. Standing at attention, his beer gut leading the way. Louie was not to be seen, but the hems of some gowns on a nearby rack were fluttering suspiciously.

Temple reported to Guard Two.

“Need to see your driver’s license too.”

“My driver’s license?”

“Rules.”

Temple sighed and dug it out of her tote bag. Finally. The guard then rifled through the bag while she worked to pry the license from behind a permanently sticky clear plastic window with her still too-long pageant fingernails.

“Sharp,” he commented.

“A fingernail file.”

“Have to hold it.”

“I’d get through the Cloaked Conjurer’s crocodile-tough costume with a fingernail file?”

“Orders.”

“Why don’t I just go to McCarren and go through airport security there, then come back here?”

He sniffed. Allergies. “Patience, little girl.”

That was better than the usual “little lady”?

“What’s this?” He held up her little motorized instant flosser.

“A birth control device.” She was kidding.

He dropped it back in the bag like a hot potato. “So, okay. You can go in now. You can collect the nail file on the way out.”

At that moment Temple felt the softest tease of motion at her ankles. She resolved not to look down.

“Thanks, Sir.”

And she turned toward the next tunnel of gray hallway, nothing visible ahead but various closed doors and the convenient ranks of costume racks.

The greasepaint in her blood made her inhale deeply. No matter how fancy the theater or amphitheater, below stage it was the same bare, functional, fascinating, weirdly enchanting wonderland.

She was off to see the Conjuror.

His dressing room soon became obvious. The single star had a peephole in the middle. Talk about paranoia!

Temple knocked, realizing that both peephole and star were positioned for a man who wore elevated platform boots and reached close to seven awesome feet onstage. He’d probably be unable to see her.

Apparently, the guard had called ahead for a deep voice asked, “Miss Barr?”

“Here!” Temple piped up, waving her fingers before the peephole.

The door opened a crack, while she was inspected. Then it widened just enough to admit her.

On the other side stood not the Cloaked Conjuror, but a man who embodied the description “bruiser.” All this for little her. Imagine if somebody suspicious had come calling unannounced. . . .

A figure bigger and broader than the silent doorman was sitting on a squarish couch at one side of the room. The dressing table and mirror, directly across from the door, were not only unoccupied but looked oddly vacant.

Then Temple realized what she was missing: the clutter of tins of greasepaint and powder, of tubes of makeup. Because CC wore a voice-altering masking headpiece, he didn’t need to touch up a thing. The mirror was useless, except for reflecting the beefy bodyguard now backed up against the door as if holding off a horde of Huns.

“Sit down,” CC’s weirdly altered voice, rather like Darth Vader on cough drops, said. “Randy Wordsworth said you needed to interview me for PR reasons.”

Temple did as invited, feeling like a bug on a log alongside a large, leathery, tiger-faced toad.

“We need to defuse the publicity on the . . . unfortunate death,” she began. “If the exhibition got the reputation of being jinxed—”

“It’d bring the crowds out in droves.”

“Maybe, but the art museum is already nervous about the risks of showing such rare works in a Las Vegas hotel. Showing them over some poor man’s dead body is even worse.”

“You think I don’t care? I do. Believe me. Few know this, but I lost a crewman during TitaniCon. Up on the catwalk. Fell to the floor sixty feet below. Dead. Wearing a costume much like mine. You think the museum is spooked? You haven’t walked in my shoes, Miss Barr.”

Temple eyed the footwear in question. Possibly a size thirteen, built up like a Klingon’s seven-league futuristic boots.

“I don’t think walking in your shoes would be possible for me,” she said. “Sleeping in them, maybe.”

The large head with its narrow eye slits had to move far to eyeball Temple’s size five Via Spigas. CC laughed, an operatic sound that combined both basso and tenor.

“Sleep indeed. Let’s just say I don’t like the coincidence of two men working the flies on an act of mine dying for it.”

“When do you actually go up there?”

“Later in the act. My female assistant goes on first. She’s a midget like you, no bigger than a mayfly, and she does this ballet-acrobatic routine, like a silvery cocoon spinning and lifting and lowering. Very classy. Then she bursts out of her chrysalis waving filmy wings of fabric.”

“I know. I saw the tape. Her act reminds me of Loïe Fuller.”

“Louie who?”

Temple smiled. “A pioneering modern dancer at the end of the nineteenth century who wielded incredible lengths of white silky wings.”

“Everything recycles.”

Temple was thinking that Beauty and the Beast was one of the more enduring fables to recycle, from French seventeenth-century fabulist Charles Perrault to Walt Disney. And that’s what an act comprising the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La would be. Beauty and Beast. How clever. How marketable.

She recalled, with a pang, that once Max had kidded her about joining his act. She was no acrobat or illusionist, but she understood the innate showmanship of it, petite little her, supernaturally strong and elegant him: fairy girl and superhero.

“And then, of course,” CC added in his commanding faux voice, “there are the cats. Now that Siegfried and Roy are tragically removed from the scene, mine is the last act to feature big cats, and one very small one.”

So, the amazingly agile performing Siamese that Shangri-La had worked with at the Opium Den would be appearing here as well! How had these two far-removed performers ever hooked up?

Temple asked CC that question in much more elegant terms.

“She hit on me, in the professional sense. Showed up at my . . . home with an offer I couldn’t refuse. Amazing woman. I notice small-statured women are particularly insistent. And Shang had her Asian background to both overcome and assert.”

Temple flashed for a second on half of Molina’s prize homicide team of Alch and Su: detective Merry Su. Teeny, wiry, implacable. Given the historic low regard for women in her culture, from exposing girl babies to the lethal elements in the bad old days to aborting them in the bad new days, those Chinese women who went West and thrived were veritable Dragon Ladies.