Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

"Louie!"

She stopped on the double dimes of her skinny metal-tipped high heels.

Sure enough. The big black cat was lying in the middle of the broad hall, so perfectly still and centered that he seemed an illusion.

"Louie?"

Temple found herself tip-toeing closer. How odd! First Midnight Louie virtually leaves home.

Then he shows up like a poster cat for the Mystifying Max.

"I'm taking you home tonight," she resolved aloud. "You can stay put in my office until the show is over. And if dealing with you makes me miss my big number--"

The cat stood, stretched, yawned wide enough to show every shark-white tooth in his cherry-pink gums . . . and ambled to a rack of costumes along the wall.

"Oh no, you don't."

Temple scrambled to intercept the cat before he vanished into a curtain of clothes, her steel heels practically striking sparks from the concrete.

Too late. Just his tail showed beneath a froth of feathers and bejeweled hems. Temple bent to capture it and felt a furry plume elude her grasping hand.

"Louie! No games. I'm late for a very important date. I'm leaving a Very Important Date sitting alone like coagulating chili. Get out of there!"

Of course he didn't. And of course Temple had to bend down in a bead-encrusted dress not designed for bending, then thrust her head among the powder and mothball and deodorant-saturated costumes to feel frantically for what had become a Cheshire Cat, without the visible grin. She didn't feel much like grinning either, except in frustration.

''I could kill you," she threatened, hearing a few precious beads clattering to concrete and feeling her silver pantyhose stretching beyond even the endurance of Spandex-blend.

And of course she didn't find him, couldn't feel him and had to go down on her knees, which would make her pantyhose bag if it hadn't already burst. Then she had to crawl on all fours, banging her knees on the rack's low metal support pipes and getting her hands filthy with God-knows-what floor fungus and her hair churned into a Raggedy-Ann mop and--the final indignity--inhaling a faceful of--spit and sputter--stage-dusting feathers.

And still no cat.

Temple was angry now. She back-pedaled out of the costume patch on hands and knees, hoisted herself upright by grabbing the rack's vertical pipe, then braced her precariously shod feet to wrench the entire rack away from the wall.

Ooof!

It didn't move. Temple glanced down. The frame was bolted to the floor. She stared, aghast.

The entire point of costume racks was that they be mobile. They all had wheels. Who would bolt one to the floor?

Very well. She would expose Louie in another way.

Temple positioned herself at the rack's middle, then reached out and jerked the heavy, hanging costumes to either side. Louie should be easily visible cowering against the naked wall.

Uh . . . what wall?

Temple stared at an oblong of black. It was not a cat. There was no cat in view. Louie had pulled a Max and utterly vanished. So had the wall, the concrete block wall painted a pale, pukey color.

Temple stared at the matte black rectangle she had revealed. It looked like a mirror-backing spray-painted on the wall. Maybe the mirror was on the other side. Maybe she should go through and find out.

She stretched out a hand, surprised to see a rhinestone bangle sparkling on her wrist. That's right. That hand was supposed to be applauding a Gridiron dinner show, right now!

Her hand passed through the mirror backing into the dark. She saw no reflection, not of her silver self, not of a glint of green from a black cat's eyes.

Temple's shoes scrapped concrete as she stepped over the rack frame to edge into the wall.

Alice had followed a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole. What would happen if Temple followed a black cat into a black hole? What if it was a hellhole?

But Louie had never led her ashtray before. Her groping hands found a metal frame inset into the thickness of the concrete blocks. This opening wasn't a hole, then, but something built into the structure of the building.

''Louie," she whispered.

The small sound echoed.

Wherever she was, it was big enough to throw her own words back at her.

Oh, Louie. What had he quite literally got into now? She couldn't see just leaving him here.

Nor could she see, period.

Temple sighed.

The space mocked her with a faint hiss.

Turning, she saw a slit of light where she had drawn the clothing aside. Her eyes were adjusting now, and the area was revealing limits, a thin trickle of light glinted off walls.

The suspicion of light seemed to thicken and solidify farther on.

This was it, Temple suddenly knew all the way to her arched insteps. This was why the basement plans were missing! Her groping hand touched a wall as her fingertips traced a familiar surface of concrete blocks held together by depressed lines of mortar. Her heels sank into some sandy surface broadcasting, an earthy perfume.

This was the underbelly of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson's place as he had meant it to be, and as he had meant it to be forgotten.

Visions of silver dollars danced in her head. Who knew what was down here? Who knew what wealth lurked in this hidden labyrinth? Midnight Louie did.

Temple squinted at an apparent movement near the floor where light so soft that it whispered seeped in. The moving thing could be Midnight Louie. It could be the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Or it could be the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson.

She edged deeper into the darkness, her mind churning with great expectations, with notions of a lost past heritage shaping a profitable future.

One thing she was sure of, one way or another: Midnight Louie had hit pay dirt.

Chapter 38

Track of the Cat

Matt lingered outside the Peacock Theater, not sure which sin was the greater: to risk missing Temple's skit, or to hunt for her as if she were a lost three-year-old incapable of taking care of herself.

Still, he knew how much that one production number meant to her. Why would she risk missing it?

While he debated, he noticed a dark-haired man who resembled a department-store floor-walker in a tuxedo eyeing him suspiciously across the crowded room.

Matt realized that standing still and thinking could be construed as bizarre behavior in a gambling casino. He hesitated for a last moment, torn between returning to the banquette, where Temple would expect to find him when she returned, or trying to find his way below-stage.

"Something wrong?''

Matt glanced at another dark-haired man in a tuxedo who had sidled up beside him, then looked for the first man. Still in place, and still watching Matt curiously.

In evening dress, the two men looked like twins, but now he understood. He turned to the stranger beside him.

"I was with Temple. I wondered where she'd gone."

The man frowned and cocked his head at his distant clone. The other man began walking over ... another who looked just like him came from the left and yet another deserted his post leaning against the cashier's cage to advance on Matt.

The sight of the converging sober men in formal dress might have been intimidating, except that Matt had recognized the species from his encounter with the owner of the Crystal Phoenix: Fraternitas Fontanas.

"Temple is missing?" the first man asked incredulously. He toyed with a gold cannon-shaped earring in his left ear. "Can't be, man. The alert here was a false alarm. The Phoenix was just a diversion. All the action is over at the Goliath." He sounded truly sorry about that. ''Now is no time for Miss Barr to flee. This place is safer than Al Capone's vault was from Geraldo Rivera."

The identically dressed brothers had circled Matt, giving him an unnerving impression of confronting a stranger's face in a funhouse chamber of mirrors.