Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

"Brother John" meant that Matt was perhaps closer to him than the man's intimate family, or at least knew more about his worries and weaknesses, even if he didn't particularly understand them.

"What's the problem tonight?"

"Tonight. Making it sound like I have problems every night. Well, I don't, Brother John. I don't need to call you like a whining puppy trying not to pee-pee on the rug. You're lucky I justify your job. First some little nobody treats me like I was the worst turd on the eighteenth floor.

Then this old squeeze of mine gets huffy. Then my wife calls wondering why she couldn't reach me last night. Listen, I didn't have a wife longer than she's been alive! I don't answer to nobody!

Especially not you."

"No, you don't." Matt kept his voice calm, his manner cool in reverse proportion to his caller's heat. His own heart was racing with recognition. If "some little nobody" was quite literally Temple, the caller must be Darren Cooke, the man she had rejected earlier today. Matt wasn't supposed to know who he was talking to. That broke the rules, changed the balance, and maybe bothered him more than it betrayed the caller. He needed distance, to fight fire with its opposite element, ice.

"Is there anything I can do for you? You could call one of those three psychiatrists'

answering services, leave a message."

"I don't want to leave a message! I don't want to be passed on like a dirty shirt. You sound high and mighty tonight. Tired of talking to me, are you, Brother John? Some brother! Haven't you ever had it up to here with women? You can't satisfy them, and when you do, they all come around wanting to be the only one. Even your own little kid. I wish I had a son. I'd teach him how to avoid the bad raps and the traps. We'd be buddies."

Matt hesitated. He could hear the grind of escalating anger and depression, which always made a dangerous triumvirate with alcohol. Yet to suggest that Cooke ... his caller stop drinking would only infuriate him more.

"I thought I was your buddy," Matt said soothingly, mirroring the man's own insecurity.

"Hey, you are! Don't think for a minute because I bad-mouth you a little we're not pals. I'm just an ordinary guy like you. Except... I'm famous. So I have to act famous, act like some big wheel. I stop the act--and I crash, career and all. The act is all part of my act now, get it? I just had a rotten day, is all. And--"

The line was suddenly silent. Matt sucked in his breath. Something was happening on the other end that he couldn't visualize. He didn't like it. The man was in a dangerous mood, to himself, and maybe to somebody else.

Then he heard sounds again. A glass set down hard on a tabletop, the last brittle slosh of melting ice cubes. Motion. A man in motion ... using a portable phone, that was it.

"Somebody's here," he sang out in a tone of slightly drunken playfulness. "Eleven-thirty.

Must be the maid coming to get laid. Let's look through the peephole, huh, Brother John?"

The phone sounded like it was underwater as the caller disengaged to view his visitor.

"Say, this could turn out okay. Sorry, BJ, but I'm gonna have to hang up now. I don't go for threesomes. Thanks for the listen. Talk to you sometime . . . Hel-lo, baby! Just what the doctor ordered. Come on in--"

Matt heard a bolt click, heard the warm, strong voice at full, confident power.

The line choked off right there, as if the lights had gone out on a play in midscene. Matt knew that, somewhere in the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, a woman was walking into a man's room for what used to be called "immoral purposes" an eon ago.

Was she a friend? A former lover? The woman who'd spurned him earlier coming back? A call girl some buddy of his had sent to cheer up his friend? Any or all of those scenarios were perfectly possible in Las Vegas, and in this man's busy, empty life.

Matt felt cheated again, like an alcoholic's AA call-buddy who has to hear him fall off the wagon. He felt used, more used than that unseen woman would feel probably. Presumably she knew, or knew of, this guy. Knew what to expect. He had never claimed to be a one-woman man, not even to Matt.

They were just one of hundreds of couples. It was a terribly common interaction, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, rarely ever for love.

Matt shook his head as he disconnected.

"Lose him?" Bennie wanted to know from the adjacent booth.

"Yeah. Lost him."

Chapter 17

Hats Off to Homicide

After her semi-sexy, stressful and ultimately frustrating weekend, Temple fled back to the normal world of flamingos as fine art.

Domingo's minions had shown up, a trendy ragtag bunch of earnest young snobs-to-be enjoying a brief adolescent rebellion before moving into the ranks of the twenty-first century's top museum curators. No wonder modern art was in retrograde.

The entire project gave Temple the feeling of a student-assisted archeological dig on some remote foreign soil that hid the architectural bones of a vanished but mighty civilization.

Except that Las Vegas wasn't very vanished and the mighty civilization to be unearthed was whatever flavor-of-the -month seeped out of the developers' bag of theme attractions.

The last thing Friday, Temple had paved the way for the first of Domingo's flamingo flings: the site of the former Sands Hotel and Casino, a fifties icon recently razed because it simply couldn't keep up with the neighbors, like the Luxor's King Tut, Leo the MGM Grand Lion, the New York City skyline and other Nouveau Flash installations on the Strip. The old, softer romantic fantasies were literally falling one by one to the laser-edged hype of the New School of Stripography. Restaurant names told the story of Las Vegas development themes as succinctly and sourly as news headlines: good-bye, Sands Hotel and your old-style exotic Shangri-La and Xanadu restaurants, hello Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. Harley-Davidson on!

For now, the former Sands square footage was only a construction trench from which a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar, six-thousand-room behemoth would shortly rise, like the movie monster Mothra leaving its unsuspected cocoon. Temple had suggested that a showy ring of rubbernecking flamingo-spectators would add an air of anticipation to the project. Domingo had liked the idea so much he now thought it had been his.

Thus developers and Domingo were as one in their emerging ecstasy. The construction project would make history as the first local site to sprout its plague of flamingos. Domingo had a massive, flat canvas of desert scrub to impale with imported lawn ornaments, emigres from a Massachusetts plastics company.

Even the modest origin of the inexpensive decorative birds made a statement, in Temple's opinion. She had done her homework. Half a million of the molded pink birds sold every year, dotting the landscape from the Canadian border to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, at only nine ninety-five a pair. You couldn't get two of anything for just nine ninety-five anymore, not even dish towels!

Once Domingo's dream was giving media people nightmares, Temple had plans to import members of the Society for the Preservation of the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, as well as the flamingo manufacturer's flamboyant artist, whose signature is captured in molded plastic on every pink flamingo body: a guy named Don Featherstone, of all things. Despite a classical-art background, Featherstone managed to compete with his birds for popular attention, his wife and he having dressed exactly alike each and every day for twenty years. Perhaps marketing the flamingos in pairs was catching. Nor was Domingo the first on the conceptual-art scene to seize onto flamingos as a metaphor for what have you: a Maryland woman rearranges and attires thirty-four lawn flamingos every week, attracting a crowd of regular gawkers.