Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

She decided to do Hollywood chic out of the Beatnik fifties--a huge white shirt (discreetly touched with eighties rhinestones, like fallen crumbs) cinch-belted over black leggings. For shoes... she bent to dig among the pairs impaled on a chrome rack . . . something Savannah.

Aha! A pair of vintage high-heeled mesh sandals with flamingo-pink feathers on the toes ... just the thing! This would subtly (or not-so-subtly) combine her current two assignments: supervising Louie's film-world debut and running interference for Domingo's flamingo fandango.

A pair of thin black-enamel hoop earrings completed the Arlene Dahl look. "Bet you don't even remember Arlene Dahl, dahling," she told Louie as she scooped up her favorite black-patent tote bag, grabbed her car keys from the inside-cupboard hook in the kitchen and headed out with about seven minutes to spare. "Neither do I."

Arriving too early for a Hollywood bash was haute gauche, she was sure.

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

The Oasis's fabled towers looked flat and faded in the daylight, but the giant pair of entry elephants stood at attention, one foot and two tusks each raised in welcome.

Sabu the elephant valet pulled his tasteful brocade turban firmly over his ears as he bent to squirm into the Storm and whisk it away. Temple felt the car at least deserved valet parking on such an occasion, and she didn't think that she or the flamingo shoes could take a long walk from the parking garage.

It was already a long walk inside the Oasis to the elevators.

Like all Las Vegas PR people, Temple had attended an occasional high-profile press party.

She had been among crowds invited to hobnob with the newest semi-fading star to make a long Las Vegas engagement part of an attractive retirement package. Amazing how you almost never ran into the guest of honor at those wingdings.

This was the first time she had been personally invited by the host of honor, and she didn't know quite what to expect. Darren Cooke didn't want her flackery skills, but what Savannah Ashleigh dismissed as her "Nancy Drew" proclivities. Temple was a teensy bit impressed that Cooke would take her seriously, and apparently he was in serious trouble. She wondered if she had a right to step in.

The elevators were glass bullets, Hyatt-style, but fashioned like bejeweled Indian caskets. As her car rocketed smoothly up to the penthouse region, Temple was able to watch the lobby of greenery and temple ruins, exotic live birds and curtains of waterfalls slip past.

The hall she entered was plain in comparison, although eastern fretwork shadowed the walls of many doors. Doors were fewer and farther between on these elevated levels than on the steerage floors below, which packed in tourists like desk keys.

A door announcing itself as THE TAJ MAHAL SUITE bore the right number. Temple looked for a bell before she knocked, and found a gong affixed to the wall, with a mallet attached by a rawhide string.

A modest rap produced a deep, mellow call. . . and no answer at the door. She could hear nothing through it, either the result of the Oasis's superior construction or evidence that she had gotten the date, time or room number wrong (or all three).

Oh, great. Temple hit the gong again, harder.

The door parted, then paused. A subdued clink and chatter leaked through the inch-wide opening. Then a hand with very long, very thick fingernails painted Passion Fruit Purple undulated through.

Oh golly, Miss Germaine Monteil! She had forgotten that the fashionable set these days was wearing weird-colored nail enamels; her fingernails were a discreet flamingo tint. How remiss.

The door widened and Savannah Ashleigh's face peered out.

"Oh, it's you. Dare wanted me to see who it was." With that she shut the door.

With that, Temple reopened the door and stepped in, ready to dip her flamingo polis h in Ashleigh blood, which was probably purple to match her nails.

Since the one person in the room Temple knew had vanished, she edged along the room's fringes until she got her bearings. There was a good deal of gel- and mousse-mussed hair going in all directions and a lot of heavy metal masquerading as jewelry on both sexes. Actually, Temple realized that she should think in terms of all sexes, as in he, she and it. For besides the apparent hetero- and homosexuals present, another rara avis pecked around the premises, the anorexic, androgynous figures Temple saw in fashion magazines, either boys in makeup or muscular girls in tattoos.

The older set, of course, was much more conventional and therefore much less interesting.

Some men actually wore blazers, in such succulent desert tones as melon and sage green, with open-necked yellow shirts. Some of the past-forty women sported diamond jewelry instead of the usual toolbox accouterments.

Then Temple spotted an old friend she recognized from many a press party and made for that spot like a camel in need of an oasis at the Oasis.

The buffet table. Here the scene and activity and dramatis personae were old pals. Plates, paper napkins, platters full of . . . European crackers and beady black caviar, lox and olives, layered extravaganzas of tomatoes and capers and sour cream and chutney, everything that would look absolutely awful if it dropped on a Big White Shirt.

Temple didn't care for caviar (too fishy) or chutney (too sweet-tart) or dry-cleaning bills, so she poured herself a ginger ale and nibbled crackers and waited to figure out what she was doing here.

As she studied the room, which was much like Domingo's suite down the Strip: large, furnished with bland Hotel Ritz, walled with windows that showed only the blue-pink distance unless you went right up to them and looked down, she realized that the host was missing.

Temple eyed the other guests again. No one was better at barging in and making herself at home than a PR woman, but these people were grouped into tight twosomes, like sets of Ken and Barbie. Savannah Ashleigh was negotiating an intense tete-a-tete with a partially shaved guy in his mid-twenties who wore jeans and a spruce leather jacket with no shirt under it.

Just then someone sidled up to Temple.

"I'm Mr. Cooke's personal assistant. I don't believe we've met."

The tone implied accosting a gate-crasher. The speaker was all of twenty-five herself, a tall, willowy young woman with artificially wine-red hair wearing a strapless spandex tube dress with a safety-pin dog collar. One multi-pierced ear dangled a cascade of silver charms to her collarbone. Yet despite the theatrical getup, she seemed all business.

"I certainly would have remembered," Temple said with her most charming smile. "I confess I'm new to the Sunday-brunch set. Mr. Cooke invited me only yesterday at Gangster's."

Two tiny frown lines defaced the pale complexion. "He never mentioned you."

"How can you be sure? You don't know my name."

"He tells me everything," she began, with an odd combination of stridency and uncertainty,

"but he's been on the phone in the master bedroom for, oh, minutes and minutes."

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt anything if I waited until he came out."

"Only . . . you don't know anyone here."

"Only ... Savannah Ashleigh. And I see she's lost in conversation with that yummy young mugging victim in Claude Montana leather."

The girl jerked her messily teased red poll in that direction. "That's Mosh Spiegel, the famous dirt biker."

Temple had never heard of any famous dirt bikers, unless you counted Evel Kneivel.

"Well, I'm Temple Barr, and I'm here at Mr. Cooke's request. I'll just have to entertain myself while I wait for him, unless you want to entertain me until he comes out."

"Uh, I have things to do." A long, bony hand with gnawed fingernails waved toward the buffet. "Eat something, or... whatever."