Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

"What someone?"

"You know better than to ask that. A client."

"I'm glad to see that you abide by client confidentiality rules."

Eightball's crooked smile showed crooked teeth. "Yup, little lady, sometimes I abide by the rules, even when I'm itching not to."

He stood up. "Better cash out before anyone who knows me sees me with all these damn nickels."

"I'll help you carry them to the cashier," Temple volunteered.

"You're a real lady," Eightball said with a half-courtly tow.

"Whoopee," came a gleeful cackle from the slot machines opposite.

A white-haired woman wearing a mint-green knit pantsuit over a wildly overgrown blouse of violets turned to grin at them, her finger never leaving the button that rotated a greengrocer's rogues' gallery of renegade fruits. "Just imagine. Eight-ball O'Rourke busted down to playing the nickel slots. Wait'll I tell the Glory Hole Gang."

''Hester Polyester," he retorted with gusto, "if you squeeze out a peep about my activities today, I'll get a knitting needle and sew your lips shut so tight that you'll never shout 'Bingo!'

again."

The woman recycled some dead nickels from her till back into the machine's pitiless maw, never losing her rhythm: feed/ feed/feed . . . push . . . scrape/scrape/scrape . . . push.

"So you claim you're too hoity-toity for the nickel slots, are you? Guess you got a secret vice, O'Rourke. As for sewing up anybody's lips, you're so crooked you couldn't stitch a straight seam up a highway center line."

Hester Polyester was still cackling and cranking away as Temple and Eightball elbowed through the crowds to dump their booty of nickels at the marble-silled cashier's booth. Its brass grillwork made it look like a cross between a downtown bank's teller station and St. Peter's toll booth at the Pearly Gates. In a couple of minutes, Eightball was pocketing forty-three dollars in crisp bills.

They turned as one back to the casino floor. The craps table that had been the center of attention was indiscernible from the other tables in play, unless you knew exactly which one it was. And you could only tell that by looking up at the ceiling where a piece of bland cardboard filled in a jagged hole.

The Crystal Phoenix had little to worry about. Most gamblers never looked up, not even the ones who knew--or cared--about the Eye in the Sky.

Eightball shrugged without saying anything.

Carole Nelson Douglas

"I wish I knew who your client was." Temple said with a sigh. "I bet the police would love to know too."

"A client," Eightball said, with a particularly piercing look as if toothpicks in his eyeballs wouldn't get any more details out of him. "A client who's gonna be mighty disappointed to know his search has hit a dead end."

"He?"

"You're fast. Missy, but so are chuckwalla lizards. I don't tell them the time of day, neither."

His horny fingertips touched his fedora brim before he left, both a poorer and a richer man.

"Cliff Effinger." Temple breathed out the syllables with which Van had labeled the dead man, lost in a fog of speculation.

It was a nondescript name, which matched the unimposing corpse she had glimpsed. She reviewed her mental picture of the man: a loser in a short-sleeved shirt and corny polyester tie; middle-aged, slack-stomached, thin-haired. A time-tuckered face loosened by booze and late hours, maybe even by a recent fist fight. Some petty crook. Temple guessed. Possibly a smalltime loser who had lost too much. Who at the Circle Ritz was hunting such a man?

She was suddenly intensely curious about the identity of the man found dead above the Goliath casino floor. No one had ever breathed a name or an occupation to her. Drat. She almost wished Molina had this case so she could ask her, although Molina probably wouldn't reveal anything. Not until Temple had fed Molina some tidbit about Max, and Temple: was running on empty when it came to Max.

Temple stared at the craps table. People, mostly men, again leaned low over its depressed surface. They pleaded and cajoled the dice that rolled over the navy Ultrasuede cryptically marked in red. They begged for naturals and cursed "snake eyes."

Temple had viewed another kind of "snake eye" on that soft, seductive gaming surface. A bullet hole. She wondered if it had exited the other side, or lay imbedded in the dead tissue of a formerly live human brain.

Maybe the tacky man had possessed a good heart. Maybe he had a mother who had adored his every baby step; a toddler who had once called him ''Daddy;'' or just a dog who had come when called. Maybe he had once been a dapper, upright member of society who had lost it all long ago in Las Vegas.

Maybe.

Maybe Cliff Effinger was somebody someone would miss.

Maybe even Eightball's client.

Temple recalled her instant image of the man, and rather seriously doubted it. Fairy tales don't come true, and--if they do--they don't happen to you. Or to men who look like that.

Chapter 16

Homewrecker

Temple was working her way through an Ethel M vanilla cream, sucking the thick chocolate shell to the sweet dissolution of sugary memory, then letting the smooth filling melt on her tongue.

Yum. She seldom indulged her sweet tooth, poor deprived thing. The only time it got something other than complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables and nonfat yogurt was when she watched "Mystery" on PBS.

Tonight's installment featured Inspector Morse, a series that met her high dramatic standards, but mystified her in one way the script writers had never intended. She'd never seen a man so chronically attracted to women and so chronically incapable of doing anything productive about it. One would think that a sharp sleuth like Morse would know better by now than to bother.

Temple reached for the remote control peeking out from under Midnight Louie's front paw.

He liked to lounge atop the television schedule and hog the remote control, his claws moving in and out with contentment and possession.

Temple lifted the paw, avoided the claws and retrieved the device. Three presses of the proper button lifted the sound level to barely understandable. Why did Brit films always sound like they were recorded in a rain barrel during a thunderstorm? And the actors mumbled as if they were all chewing pinto-bean cuds. . . .

A noise elsewhere in the building obscured one of Morse's dour observations. Drat.

Morse's dour observations were generally important clues. Temple returned a second Ethel M

morsel to the box and leaned forward. She aimed the device at the television screen two-handed, as if holding a firearm, and shot the sound up two more rounds.

'Still garbled. "Dic-tion," she sternly ordered the TV screen, *'You British screen actors are too bloody porridge-mouthed--!"

Another loud thump erupted above. What was somebody doing? Moving furniture?

Hopefully, just moving out.

She frowned in concentration, but . . . oh, no! Morse and Lewis were doing a scene in Morse's bloody red Rolls Royce. Now the over amplified auto noise was drowning out the dialogue.

Crash.

Not on the screen. Above. Honestly. Temple stood up and aimed her remote control one last time, zapping Morse, Lewis and the vintage road hog to Airwave Heaven.

"This is just too much," she told Louie, who blinked in solemn agreement. "On a Thursday night, too. What are they doing up there? Working out on a punching bag? Skipping rope?

Bowling? I'm going to express my displeasure in clear, articulate Guthrie Theatre diction, and in person."

She glared once more at the now dead-gray television screen, nodded to Louie, snatched her key ring from her tote bag and headed for the door.

Righteous indignation is an excellent propellant. It pushed Temple to the stairwell and up one floor, still seething. It compelled her halfway down the circular hall--if there is any halfway point to an eternal ring-around-the-rosy. Her indignation fizzled only when she realized that she had no way to tell which unit was the noise polluter.