Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

Temple retreated to the DOS prompt, then turned computer and screen off. The last, small luminescent letters vanished.

The same could not be said of the string of bright, pulsating question marks on the screen of Temple's mind.

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

Eightball O'Rourke's neighborhood was as shabby as ever.

Temple glanced back at her aqua Storm poised at the curb like a brilliant blue butterfly that had just landed. She hated to leave it unattended, that shiny bluebird of happiness in this neighborhood of rusted-out heaps of trouble.

She paused at the front door, then pushed the scabrous bell. Its surface was rough with coats of over painted green enamel.

While she waited she studied the peeling paint patterns of the front forest-green screen door. Then she rang again.

Should have phoned first, she told herself, but she hadn't even known where she was going when she left the Circle Ritz.

A third ring was equally unable to stir the low stucco house with its gravel roof. The swamp cooler at its core grunted mechanically from the so-called peak of the shallow roof.

The door was shaded by scrawny eaves-high bushes too insect-eaten to declare a type.

Temple waited, shifting from one tennis shoe to the other, watching little red ants dance a conga line up the cracked sidewalk to her feet.

The big wooden front door creaked, then gaped open.

Eightball stood there in his undershirt, blinking.

''Should have phoned first," he said. ''I been working late, sleeping days. I'll get me a shirt."

He vanished, leaving Temple to pull open the rickety screen door and edge inside.

The house broadcast the same musty smell of her last visit, the deep-down halitosis of an old house. Eightball appeared, buttoning a short-sleeved polyester shirt of indeterminate color.

Temple followed him down dim halls, through shadowy rooms into the same sparse office with the billiard-table-size desk and narrow band of windows under the ceiling.

He flicked on an overhead light and sat at the desk. "So what's up?"

Temple sat on the lumpy green leather chair, escapee from some fifties-vintage office--or dump--and tried to come up with a reasonable explanation of why she was there. "I visited Three O'Clock Louie's the other day." Eightball nodded, fussing to fasten the second-to-the-top button on his shirt. It was pale green.

Undershirt, Temple thought. Who wore undershirts anymore, especially in a hot spot like Las Vegas? And this wasn't even your Sears Catalog model with the short sleeves and v-neck, but a tank-type sleeveless undershirt that smacked of pre-Clark Cable and It Happened Last Night innocence. That was Eightball and the Glory Hole Gang, all right--1930's kind of guys in a nineties world hung up on Calvin Klein's Obsession instead of old standbys like undershirts and B.O.

Maybe, she thought, Crawford Buchanan wore pale yellow undershirts to match his cowardly streak.

"What did you think of it?" Eightball asked. He lit a cigar that looked like a Doberman turd with gangrene.

Temple restrained herself from fanning away the smoke; the smell was more lethal anyway.

"Think of what? Oh, the restaurant! Interesting. Not a bad name. Needs a lot of work."

Eightball nodded at each of her inane comments.

Temple edged forward on the chair. ''It has a lot of possibilities. Especially . . . well, if I--you guys--drew on your Glory ' Hole background."

He squinted as he exhaled a storm-blue thunderhead of smoke. ''You mean ... tie it in with the ghost town concession?"

"Thematically, yes. Let's face it. You fellows are enough local color for a megacity like Los Angeles, much less Las Vegas. Just the name of the place: 'Three O'Clock Louie's.' It reeks of speakeasies and jazz, bathtub vodka and guys with shoulder holsters and cigarette holders, dolls with garters and I gats."

"Bathtub gin."

"Did I say something else? Sorry, I'm . . . distracted."

"We were all just kids during Prohibition," Eightball said doubtfully.

"Sure, but you were there. And wasn't Jersey Joe Jackson there too?"

"That skunk." Eightball was so agitated that he stubbed out his cigar in the tray-size olive-green glass ashtray on his desk:

Temple thanked whatever gods may be.

"Skunks can be ver-ry colorful," she pointed out with singsong significance.

''If you like black-and-white, as in prison stripes."

Temple beamed. "See what I mean? Convicts in stripes. You fellows are soooo colorful.

About Jersey Joe Jackson--"

"He's dead, and we ain't."

"So much the better. We can ... er, exploit his, ah, colorful legend without treading on any living toes."

"We?"

"Well, think about it. Wasn't Jersey Joe an original member of the Glory Hole Gang?"

"Yeah, sure . . . but not for long."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, he ran off with half the silver dollars we lifted off the train in that heist. Then he hid them around town--and Vegas was mostly brush and bobtail in the forties--in all his private little hidey-holes."

"Didn't you Glory Hole guys bury what was left in the Mojave, so successfully that even you couldn't find the cache for forty years?"

"Yeah, but that was because the terrain shifted. Desert will I do that, you know. Skitter around on you like a sidewinder rattler in a windstorm. Wind, gully-washers, they all scrape the.'

face off the desert floor, the way time erodes people's faces. Look at mine. Can you even imagine what I looked like at your age, girlie?"

Temple shook her head.

Where did it come from, the seaming and searing? The eyes sinking like burned-out suns and the ears and nose growing wild. She thought of the sand-eaten features of the real sphinx and shivered a little at the notion of the cosmetically enhanced one at the Luxor. Behind Eightball's wizened visage, she glimpsed a muscular, wiry young fellow tanned the color of Corinthian leather in a white undershirt, sweating in a shipyard somewhere, working for Uncle Sam.

"The thing is," she said, 'We're interested in your age. Your Age. A time when watches ticked and ladies' nylon stockings had seams and we all had a kinder, gentler view of everything. When even shady ladies were classy and guys could shave with straight-edge razors and wear hats.

Fedoras. That's the ticket. That's the ambiance. That's . . . jazz."

"I don't get it? Why are you spouting this stuff to me?"

"Because I want to pick your brain, Eightball. I want to bring back the Glory-Hole days. Out on Lake Mead at Temple Bar. Here in town, at the Crystal Phoenix." And I want to bring a boys'

band to River City. Right here. Do you buy that tuba? How about a French horn? A PR person is always one dance step removed from a conman. Buy the sizzle, not the steak; the shining brass band, not the song; the surface cha-cha-cha, not the underlying instinct. The song-and-dance woman, not the amateur detective. . . .

"You've got some scheme--" he began, sounding uncertain.

''Not a scheme ... a theme! For the Phoenix, for Temple Bar and Three O'Clock Louie's, even for the Glory Hole Ghost Town. And the link is . . . Jersey Joe Jackson."

"A guy who gave sewer rats a bad name when he was alive!"

"But he's dead now. We can use him with impunity. As he used you, as he made you poor fellows parboil in nowhere while he lived it up at the . . . what was the Phoenix called in the old days, before Nicky and Van revived it?"

"The Joshua Tree," Eightball said with venom. "A common, stingy kind of cactus with big ideas and lots of stingers."

"Joshua Tree." Temple shook her head in distaste. "If he named the place, he didn't have much flair."

"Jersey Joe didn't have flair, he had nerve. That's what ended up on top in those days. Like Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo. Nerve. We were kids. Spuds, Wild Blue, Encyclopedia and the rest. We were schmoes."