Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

A shadow fell over Temple. She looked up to see Verina, bearing bottles of Evian water from the refreshment van. (Domingo's operation was used to on-site hardship in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, Las Vegas was considered to be equally absent of civilities like bottled water.)

"Wonderful!" Domingo wiped his fevered brow with a shirtsleeve and accepted a bottle.

The cameras zoomed in. Action that wasn't a pink blur.

"It's so hot," Verina complained. "And in November."

"Las Vegas cools down at night," Temple pointed out, "but by day the temperature can reach the eighties, even in the winter months. Besides, black attracts heat." She eyed Verina's twill designer bell-bottom pants and belly button-showing top, a long-sleeved, shrunken-midriff jacket. Socko in Elle , but a heat sink on the Strip.

Verina glanced at Domingo, handing Temple an Evian bottle, then patted delicately at her forehead. "The sun is so hot on my hair, I'm burning up. I had no idea." She lowered her voice, so only Temple could hear her. "And skin cancer runs in my family."

"Oh, gosh. You really shouldn't be out here, then."

Verina again eyed Domingo, who was flapping his wings like a living model for one of his flamingos. "He expects me to be here."

"Maybe you could wait in the refreshment van."

"It's so hot." Verina's husky voice was almost a child's whine.

Her dark eyes fastened on Temple as if suddenly seeing a savior. "But your hat would shelter me from the rays."

"Well, ah ..." Redheads weren't exactly made for overexposure to the sun, which is why Temple had worn the hat, knowing there would be no shade. She was more worried about contracting freckles than skin cancer, but she supposed she should be more worried about the latter than the former.

"If you could lend it to me, just for the afternoon--"

"Sure." Temple wasn't about to argue with a family history of skin cancer.

She handed over the hat and watched it waft to the top of Verina's elegant form, where it sat quite handsomely, being a charming if casual hat, after all.

Verina sidled off, following Domingo, cameras en train.

"Jeesh!" came a male explosion from behind Temple. "What an operator."

"Huh?" Temple turned to face a freckle-faced cameraman from a local TV channel. She thought that his name was Sean.

"You and that hat were getting too much attention for her taste, from her boss and from the cameramen. Why'd you hand it over?"

"Who can argue with skin cancer?"

"Say, you and I are bigger candidates for that than that spoiled broad. Just make sure you get it back."

Temple frowned through her sunglasses. Cameramen and photographers always saw the bigger picture, quite literally.

"Thanks for pointing it out. I guess I missed the obvious."

"She's gonna be on the cutting-room floor in my footage, after that ploy." Sean winked and moved on, focusing on flamingos.

The sun beat down on Temple's red-hot head while she considered kicking herself with a rubber-soled wedgie toe. Once again some slick out-of-towner had suckered her, this time a femme fatale. Why should a Woman Who Has Everything--a towering, thin, fashion-magazine body with the properly sexy androgynous look, a famous boyfriend, the latest designer wardrobe--have to scam a twelve-dollar hat off a working woman who has more to worry about than being the center of attention?

Maybe because all that Everything added up to Nothing.

Temple didn't move, but she stepped back mentally, like a cameraman, to pan the entire scene. She tended to immerse herself in her assignments, to get lost in the hype and the hullabaloo, and that made for myopia. Domingo's workers scurried like ants bearing trophies from the Flamingo Hilton chorus line. Domingo ranged ahead of the installation, like a scout, ignoring the sun, moving with a kind of Mediterranean passion; Zorba the Greek translated into a man for all nations. Verina, she of the ambiguous name and gender, followed along like an elegant black stork, picking her way among the squat, gaudy plastic birds, all pose and no purpose.

The famous always attracted hangers-on, but did they have to become addicted to them?

Was there anybody who became a household name who didn't divorce a spouse, drop old friends, who actually despised the hollow trappings of fame, the easy decadence of getting everything free, from groupies to drugs?

Maybe Einstein. Maybe. Maybe Mother Teresa. She remembered a shallow, callow girl she'd met at a Women In Communications, Associated, meeting a while back. She'd chattered on about how she knew it was a sexist world, but that she had to use it while she was young and slim. She'd boasted of the red-devil satin catsuit cut up and down to here she'd worn to some national convention, and how a gray eminence, an author whose work Temple respected, had flirted with her and pulled her cattail at a cocktail party. And Temple had thought, did either of them really need to do that? Did she need to be Somebody so much she had to become a Playboy Bunny for old men? Did he so need to feel potent, despite all he had achieved, that he could be flattered by a vacant girl in search of big names to tease with her firm, unreachable anatomy? Was it all so unreachable, after all?

Temple shook her hatless head in the noonday sun. Knowing Matt had made her into a Hamlet of modern mores, ever-ready to question the small seductions of everyday life she used to take for granted. What was just being playful, and what was being manipulative? Look at the games Darren Cooke played, pulling the little red devil's tail at every opportunity! Maybe one day some little red devil--or some little red devil's big bad boyfriend--would pull the plug on ole Darren's serial seduction act. Maybe he was flirting with death, not just decadence. Maybe that was the real thrill of the chase for him, the endless pas-de-deux with self-destruction. She still couldn't answer her basic question. When it came to socio-sexual maneuverings, what was inoffensive fun and what was a very nasty habit on the way to becoming harmful to the health and happiness of all concerned?

She knew one thing. The greater anyone's fame and fortune, the nastier, and more lethal, everyday seduction became. From hats, maybe, to homicide.

Chapter 18

Dead Time

At 4 PM. Temple returned home from the flamingo installation hot, irritated and hatless.

When she'd been ready to leave the site from sheer exhaustion, she had politely suggested to Verina that her hat should go with her.

No dice, and that was unusual in a town like Vegas.

Verina, downcast, alluded again to her skin cancer "situation." Temple didn't feel up to wresting a lifesaving possession from the top of a rival's head. Besides, she couldn't reach the top of Verina's head without making a fool of herself.

Since she didn't want to leave the empty lot wearing a fool's cap and bells, she simply left her hat and hoped for the best. Perhaps Verina would tire of the charade and return it to her tomorrow. No, not tomorrow; that was Midnight Louie's location- shooting day. Between flamingo overpopulation and cat commercials and hat thieves, Temple was feeling pretty put upon.

"Louie!" she said on unlocking her front door and finding the cat sprawled on her sofa, looking like a dog waiting to welcome her.

She bent back to the hall floor to retrieve the two newspapers awaiting her attention, the evening Sun and the morning Review-Journal Then she shut and locked her door, plucked a can of Diet Dr Pepper from the fridge on the way to the living room and plopped down beside Louie.

He reciprocated her attention by stretching his long black front legs to touch her thigh, and began kneading his nails in a fond--if somewhat hazardous to her pantyhose--gesture of cat satisfaction.