Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

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 inserted 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?