Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

Temple was huffing and puffing by the time she emerged in the service hall, another reality that ruffled the temper that went with her red hair. She wasn't used to climbing stairs.

Then who should be awaiting her but a brace of Fontana brothers?

Temple blew damp bangs off her slightly clammy forehead. And Crawford said the mob was dead in this town. Who did he think these boys were, the sales reps for 31 Flavors?

"Miss Barr," the first Fontana brother said with a friendly smile.

''Ralph?" she asked.

As he shook his dark head, she saw the golden glint of an earring. This must be the reason why Ralph considered a bloodletting for his earlobe. Big Brother had already done it.

''Emilio. Not to worry. We get mistaken for each other, don't we, Rico?"

He eyed his swarthy clone in a pale suit, who nodded. No earring. In response to Temple's inquiring look, Brother Number Two jabbed the Southwest-colored silk tie making like Monet's water lilies on his chest. "Rico. Van said to see if you needed any help.''

"What kind of help would I need?"

Brother eyed brother. "I do not know," Emilio finally confessed to her, ''but we are here to provide it, whatever it is."

Temple sighed. These Doberman dandies would not be called off until they had performed what they saw to be their duty.

''Actually, I haven't seen much of the gaming area. I'm relatively new to Las Vegas; all these craps and baccarat rules confuse me. Maybe I could use a crash course."

"Say no more." Rico held up a palm with the aplomb and authority of a grade-school crossing guard who was dressed by Nino Cerutti. "Emilio and I are experts at games of chance."

"We are also tops at escorting babes in Toyland," Emilio added.

"I believe you mean 'babes in the woods,' " Temple said.

"Whatever." Rico shrugged. "Babes is babes."

"I am not that kind of a babe," she said firmly. "I am a self-supporting professional."

The boys' eyes widened like windows. Temple realized that they had taken her too literally, or not literally enough. Either way, she was getting a headache.

"Show me everything from the slot machines to the craps table. I need to start at square one."

"Hey," Rico admonished her, adjusting the knot on his tie. "There is nothing in the least square about you, Miss Barr."

It was a square knot, of course.

**************

Temple had to say one thing for the Fontana brothers. They were generous to a fault, spending deeply of their own pockets to demonstrate the hazards of slot machines, video poker, blackjack, craps and other forms of gambling.

Temple had never paid much attention to the inferno of noise and humanity that eddied in the casino areas. Sure, she had shoved a few nickels into the odd slot. That was about all she ever got out of it: a few nickels and a slot where the odds were never even.

She was pleased to see Fontana, Inc., strike out at the slots as rapidly as she had.

"Sucker City,'' Emilio confided. "If you're gonna play the chrome-armed bandit, at least do the quarter and dollar slots. They pay off better."

She watched Rico lose two hundred and forty dollars at blackjack in two minutes. She could have bought a really radical pair of Weitzmans for that money. She watched Emilio do

'something at the craps table--lots of somethings--but he didn't win there, either. And these guys were experts.

The brothers reluctantly drew away from the action to explain the arcana to her.

"The lead player actually plays," she said, "and the other people bet for or against him?"

"Right."

"So they put their chips on certain places and sometimes they win, sometimes they don't . . .

but there's no pattern to it, no sense. Everybody's excited, but I can't tell for the life of me why or for what--"

The brothers looked properly sympathetic, and were about to explain the whole tedious set of inexplicable rules one more time.

Then the crowd around the craps table oohed and aahed as the dice rolled and they all leaped back screaming at the sound of a thud so strong it seemed to rock the immediate area.

Maybe the dice were hot, but even the ceiling was giving off puffs like smoke. A woman began a shrill screaming that just kept going and going up and down the scale of distress.

Temple could see why: the craps table was an utter mess. You couldn't tell whose chips were on what. Temple couldn't begin to figure out who had won or lost, because of the man's body lying there, covering everything, limbs splayed to the table's four corners.

People were backing away, even as her intrepid Mario Brothers--uh, Fontana brothers--

were pushing close to the table, along with a couple of armed guards in burgundy uniforms who had materialized from nowhere.

Someone was calling her "folks," and telling her to clear the floor. There had been an accident and they needed room.

The people behind Temple drew back lawfully, but the immoveable object before her was just a private security man, after all, and she was small enough to duck under his arm. She was a legitimate hotel employee, a public relations person, and she had a pressing need to know....

She pressed forward when everyone else ebbed back.

The brothers weren't at all surprised when she burrowed between them for a good look at the craps table.

"It's pretty hard to see the action right now,'' Rico apologized, "with this stiff lying all over it."

Temple consulted the brothers' intent, suave young faces. "Doberman" wasn't half wrong.

"Are you sure he's . . . dead?" she asked.

Emilio nodded mournfully. "We'll never know how the dice landed now."

The man who fell from the ceiling lay there, mum, not moving, not giving away a thing, not even the action.

Temple concluded that craps was not her game.

Chapter 15

Oddball Witness

"You witnessed the victim's plunge onto the table, too, Ma'am?"

Temple looked up at the homicide lieutenant, dazed.

Not Molina. He was not Molina. She couldn't believe her luck. Too bad she didn't care for gambling. Today would be her lucky one.

Lieutenant Hector Ferraro not only was not as tall as Molina, he was also balding--definitely not Molina's personal grooming problem. Ferraro's coloring was as dark as hers, however, and his attitude as unforthcoming. Must be something in the water coolers at Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. Temple thought.

"Yes, Lieutenant," she made herself answer, after realizing she had been thinking too much and saying too little. ''We all saw him fall."

"You and the. . . um, brothers Fontana?" The officer's stubby pencil tip jerked toward an urbane clot of custom tailoring a few feet away. The Fontana Brothers smiled as smoothly as a juggling act. Emilio even waved.

"That's right."

"They say you're a freelance public relations person." Lieutenant Ferraro sounded as if he didn't quite believe that, but not believing people and things was part of his job. "What were you doing with the brothers?" The way he posed the question, he could have been asking Temple why she had been caught cold in the company of a cadre of cockroaches.

"They were instructing me on the fine points of craps."

"Learn anything?" he quirked out of the side of his mouth,

"Zilch. That poor man came crashing down before I could figure odds from evens. How did he . . . die?"

"Not from the fall, that's for sure. You know what's up there?"

"Eye in the Sky," Temple replied promptly, eager to show her mastery of some Las Vegas facts of life, if not of gambling. Realizing she sounded like her former TV newswoman incarnation, she modified her statement. "Not a traffic helicopter, but the surveillance equipment every casino stashes above its gaming areas." She leaned around the lieutenant's awesome stomach paunch--as taut as a wind-filled sail in its pristine white broadcloth--to eye the evidence. "Isn't that a . . . hole in the victim's temple?"