Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

"Can you paddle?" I ask.

"I do not swim."

"Can you spread your toes and move your feet up and down?"

"Spread my toes? Louie, please! I only do so for the most intimate grooming rituals."

"Get intimate and get grooming, or you will drown like an unwanted kitten," I growl.

"I was never an unwanted kitten! I am the product of decades of the finest and most precise breeding techniques--"

I haul a mitt out of the water and smack her in the kisser. Sometimes dames require a firm hand, particularly when they are hysterical, or on a genealogy kick.

Turning my head (and inadvertently the Divine Yvette's unconscious one) I do the hardest thing I have ever done. I spot Miss Temple's fiery red hair in the crowd by the cameras, and I run for all my might away from her. I am running in water, you understand, toes spread, so what I am doing is swimming.

The Divine Yvette is a terrible burden. My jaws are frozen with strain. But I cannot let loose of her. My long, luxuriant tail has become a liability that could pull us both under. I struggle on, my head never high enough above the waves to see the shoreline for which I aim.

I can see the volcano, though, coughing up its bloody fire and rock, reflected in the water all around me.

I am swimming through icy fire, every limb aching with effort, my mind numbed by cold, even the Divine Yvette a mere memory. If I live through this, I will kill that Maurice!

Still, in my benumbed brain I hear an encouraging refrain: "Come on, Louie! Come on, boy!"

You would think I were Lassie.

The thought of being mistaken for a dog is so repellent that my flailing legs find new strength. I feel more light hitting the top of my head as the surrounding water seems punctured by stars.

In another moment human legs are splashing into the water around me. Yvette and I are lifted, her neck still clenched in my teeth, out of the water.

Miss Temple's face hangs over mine. "He is alive!"

A camera flashes beyond her, and all I can think is, I am still wearing that damn Hawaiian shirt.

This mishap could kill my career.

Chapter 26

Matt's Off Night

Walking the Strip resembles being lost on a carnival midway. Like a moving sidewalk, the Strip gives the impression that the people are standing still while the earth moves beneath them. No matter how long Matt kept walking, he felt he would never reach the end.

It reminded him of Sartre's brilliant play, No Exit, and its rather cynical line that "Hell is other people."

Even when pedestrians deserted the sidewalk for a long trek toward the dazzling entrance facade of a major hotel-casino, Matt suspected that they soon recycled back onto the Strip's implacable length and unquenchable brightness.

Somewhere in this milling mass of Thursday-night humanity, Cliff Efftnger might be stepping on and off the merry-go-round like everyone else.

Matt studied the passing parade, mentally reminding himself of the facial features of the man he was looking for. He found it hard not to be distracted by the fascinating variety of fellow strollers.

Tourists, of course, made up the bulk of the walkers, their clothes casual despite the cooler night air. Walking is the economy class's favored mode of transportation. Those who can afford to taxi up and down the Strip do so.

Did that mean Cliff Effinger, seen on foot, was pinching pennies? Or hiding his loot from various scams? That was the trouble with supposition: every conclusion generated another legitimate possibility.

Matt saw fallen trashy magazines littering the sidewalk edges. Waiting men jammed fistfuls of the pulp paper at passersby. Never at women, only men, and never at a man alone.

Crushed underfoot, revealing photographs offered private dancers and total fulfillment.

Matt wondered whose grown-up little girls and boys these nakedly seductive people were, and what kind of people those parents were.

Not so easy to dismiss the seamier side of life nowadays, when the villain wasn't that easy-to-blame old devil Sin so much as dysfunctional family cycles. What fun was there in stoning someone who had to be analyzed unto the fifth generation backward in time?

Did Cliff Effinger have a grim family history to excuse his pathetic bullying? Was he more to be pitied than condemned? Matt felt his fists ball in his jacket pockets. No. Some people were just bad. Evil. In the power of that old devil Sin.

He veered onto the long, curving sweep of sidewalk that approached the mega hotel rising in the distance at an oblique, coy angle. The straightaway was for King Car, the contraption that had first made Las Vegas a feasible resort for Hollywoodites three hundred miles away.

Who would have suspected that the hoi polloi, not Hollywood, would make this desert gambling oasis rich? Even a lowlife like Cliff Effinger had come here to make his fortune.

Long walks were a form of meditation. Once inside a casino, meditation was not an option.

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

Noise and light bloomed around Matt like a migraine headache as he pushed through the darkened entry doors. The slot-machine jingle sounded like Christmas, but the spirit of Las Vegas' eternal gambling season was receiving, not giving. People, machinelike themselves, sat before clanking, gear-spinning mechanisms that spit back the occasional coin like bad change.

When Matt removed his gloveless right hand from his pocket, his palm was damp. But the plastic-laminated sketch of Cliff Effinger was impervious now to heat and moisture, preserved.

Matt wondered who to approach. Was he expected to tip for attention? If so, he'd be broke within days. Once more he mentally rehearsed his story. Lying, or even bending the truth, still took a lot of rehearsal. He was the opposite of a con man, he wanted to sell the truth even when he knew there would be no takers.

"Excuse me."

The waitress wore something shiny and slithery and scanty, but her face beneath the cheap, harsh makeup was even bleaker.

"Yeah, hon?" Bright tone, the better to cadge tips.

"I'm looking for someone. You might have seen him." Matt flashed the sketch in the insufficient light that was always bright but as tremulous as a firefly.

"Somebody cared enough to do a portrait," she commented. "Relative of yours?"

"My ... brother."

"You're a lot younger than he is, hon. A lot cuter too." Her blackened lashes lowered to the sketch, her comment a fact, not a flirtation.

"My mother ... married twice."

Her eyes rolled. "Mine too. And believe me, number two was no improvement. Hey! At least they married." She frowned at the shiny plastic. "That cowboy type is rare these days. They're up in Colorado now, all the Stetson boys. This guy looks a lotta years behind the times."

"He did . . . drop out of sight."

"Maybe. I mighta seen him, oh, couple months ago. Not a regular, though. Want a drink?"

She tilted her round glass-laden tray to him.

"Isn't that somebody else's?"

She shrugged. "I can get 'em another one of whatever you take where that came from.

They're all free in the gaming area. You look like you could stand some warming up. It's cold out there on the Strip tonight. Stay here and run the slots a while. I come by regularly."

Matt shook his head, closing his fingers over Effinger's too-good likeness. Should he ask someone else? Maybe.

The waitress had minced away on her Temple-like high heels. She was old for the outfit, and probably knew it. It was cold out there on the Strip.

Matt wandered away from the clattering slot machines into the blackjack and craps areas.

He couldn't envision Effinger playing baccarat. The dealers watched the cards, the cameras hidden in the ceiling above watched the dealers and the players and the pit bosses kept an eagle eye on everybody.