Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Are you talking about the control channel for the summer flash floods?” Temple asked.

“Something to do with planes or TV stations, I guess. I didn’t know floods flashed,” she added with a calendar girl pose and a wiggle followed by a giggle.

“I didn’t know Las Vegas had ‘retainer basins,’” Temple said dryly.

“That does sound very dentist-office-y.”

“There are fields near control channels called ‘retention basins.’”

“Why don’t you settle all this confusion and hike back and look over the area?” Savannah eyed Temple’s rope-fiber wedgies. “Your casual shoes can take it. I’d sink to my Nicole Miller ankle straps in sand if I left the street or sidewalk.”

Savannah finished presenting her case by cocking a hip and pointing a toe to display a boney ankle and super-high-heeled sandal.

“You might have mentioned,” Temple said, “that the terrain was rough for a city lot.”

Savannah shrugged, her gesture making the head of her purse pet pop up from the outside pocket again like a prairie dog masquerading as a cat burglar.

“I figured a PI could cope.”

“I’m in PR,” Temple said.

“We’ll wait here,” the woman went on, “while you inspect the death scene. Then we can go inside and you can meet Violet. Captain Jack just loves to play with the cats.”

Temple could well imagine. Meanwhile, she followed a slightly worn path of sandy dirt through the aggressively overgrown brush, shorter plants whipping her bare ankles. Who wore hose in Vegas except chorus girls and cocktail waitresses in overly air-conditioned hotel-casinos?

Cowboy boots would have been the proper footwear for this expedition, but Temple’s sole pair was aqua-and-silver flamed leather, and not born to be scuffed.

Temple glimpsed stucco walls as beige as the sandy soil to her right from time to time. Quite a bit of house did indeed lurk in this wilderness. And when she broke through the last, bristly, face-whipping stand of brush, she gazed, like Balboa on the Pacific, on a vast, empty scene, in this case waterless.

A concrete-lined gash in the terrain was Savannah’s “control tower,” otherwise known as a water channel. Next to it lay what most people would take for an empty lot, the retention field used to soak up excess floodwaters.

Anyone who’d lived in Vegas even a very few years, as Temple had, looked on these vast and careful constructions with a small shudder. When the skies clouded over and thronged with storm clouds, their water broke in a cascade so concentrated that desert washes and in-town artificial washes like the control channel filled to their brims then overflowed to swamp roads and even highways, sweeping away vehicles and people in an irresistible eddy of terror and death.

This was the cusp of summer, and the floods came from July to September, but, according to Savannah, a man had died here in the dry belly of the flood-protection system.

It’d be easy to fall into a control channel, hit one’s head fatally hard, and not be found for days. It’d also be easier to push someone into a control channel, counting on no one finding him or her for days. And if the body remained undiscovered long enough, a sudden flood could sweep it away miles down the system.

Temple made her way back to the so-called “front yard,” savvy enough now to avoid the worst tangles, but her lower legs and forearms still looked like she’d been boxing a lynx.

“Tsk,” Savannah said, when Temple finally broke clear into the broken-down front yard. “Those scratches are so unattractive. And your skin, especially that pale kind, tends to never heal deep down. That kind of damage is cumulative, you know, even if you wear sunscreen.”

Temple regarded Savannah’s golden spray-on tan. No doubt the airbrushing had a high SPF rate and protected Her Delicateness from deterioration.

“You could have warned me I’d be roughing it.”

“I didn’t think,” Savannah said. “That’s not my job. That’s your job. What do you think, now that you’ve viewed the scene?”

“You haven’t seen it?”

“Lord, no. I’d never risk my manicure or my skin or my best heels in that wilderness. The police said Pedro had probably been chasing one of Violet’s critters that had gotten loose and fell into the control pit or whatever it is. Violet had reported people lurking around her house at night, but the police discounted that, too. Said it was just all this wild, scratchy stuff brushing on her screens and window glass.”

Temple was starting to itch all over. Maybe it was sand fleas or cat fleas.

This did not seem like an auspicious beginning for a Las Vegas PI.

Where were the night and the neon and the surly pit bosses and sleek and shady casino go-to guys?

Where was her Veronica Lake peekaboo long blond hair and gold lamé trench coat with the impossibly cinched waist and the front hip pocket with the revolver bulge? Where was the glitz and glamour?

Chapter 9

What a Lousy Lot

I pity poor Miss Temple.

I really do.

When she trots gamely off to view the site of the suspicious death, I am finally able to shrug off the black canvas tote bag Miss Temple keeps behind the Miata’s front seats for hauling heavy books in the trunk.

Across the street I can hear Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s steel-tipped stilettos sticking in the sun-warmed asphalt as she paces. They make a monster-movie sucking sound as she pulls them out. Say what you will of Miss Savannah Ashleigh, but that woman has calves of steel.

I poke Miss Midnight Louise, who had caught up with me this morning only as I was hustling my tail section into the Miata to accompany Miss Temple on a very important date: her first assignment as a paid PI.

“Hop in,” I had told the more-than-somewhat-bedraggled and red-eyed Midnight Louise. “We are going to examine a death site.”

“Big deal,” she mutters. “If you are into death sites, there are more surrounding the average Las Vegas household than in any Strip hotel.”

“Vermin and crawling prey do not count,” I say. “Please, do as I say. Hunker down and keep it shut. It is broad daylight now, and our dramatically dark coloring is no longer an advantage.”

Thus it is that we broil together in the Vegas pre-noonday sun, which bakes down through our black canvas cabana roof and onto our solid black coats.

This is why desert-dwelling people wear white.

Cats do not pant often, but we do then, dedicated sleuths that Midnight Investigations, Inc., is. Are? Never mind. Thus, we have not had a chance to confer during the bouncy, “road feel” trip. People have odd tastes, and my Miss Temple likes to rip and roar in her small red car.

Being the larger, manlier member of the firm, I have risen to shrug off our canvas curtain first.

“Vito’s Vegetarian Pizza car was a far smoother and cooler ride,” Louise comments, while unbending her eyebrow hairs with dampened swipes of her mitts. “But I do have news from Chez Max that is as hot as a pizza-box warmer.”

“Amaze me.”

“He had an unexpected visitor soon after Miss Temple left.”

“Not the ghost of Garry Randolph?”

“No. It was someone with a key to the place and the chutzpah to use it.”

“Well?”

Miss Louise pauses to slap back her mangled vibrissae. My “whiskers,” as humans call them, are snowy white, a distinguished and unusual marking for an otherwise solid-black dude. Louise’s are just plain black, but daddy longlegs–fine and out-flung.

“Well?” I demand again. My curiosity is about to give me heatstroke, and she knows it.

“Mister—” she begins.

“A guy. Okay. Then Mister Max did not call the nearest private dancer as soon as he hit town.”