Unknown - Cat_In_A_Hot_Pink_Pursuit

That new-penny look always bothered Temple when she glimpsed the place. It was rather like Burt Reynolds during his cosmetic face-peel stage: so shiny and smooth that it gave you the creeps.

It especially gave Temple the creeps. Las Vegas was the kind of high-profile place where new scandals and sensations constantly made yesterday’s atrocity fade into prehistory. Yet she’d learned the horrific history of this house when she’d first come to town two years ago. And a good PR person never forgets.

Over the past twenty or so years, the house had been a white elephant, huge and impossible to reinvent. It had been a Halloween spook-show place for a while. A theme restaurant. (Middle-Eastern, with the Disneyesque Neuschwanstein castle towers appropriately repainted as minarets.) A funeral home. That was the weirdest and last incarnation. And lately, it had stood perilously empty, inviting vandals, until it had been turned into the set for a presumably hot reality TV show.

The first time it had made media news, it had just been another sprawling tribute to big money and minuscule taste.

Temple was one up on the other contestants.

As a media person, she’d heard of the bizarre tragedy that had made this place the house that no one wanted to own. The builder had been Arthur Dickson, a reclusive techno-geek who’d wired it for every media known to man at the time and filled it with high-tech toys and Elvis trivia. He’d gotten married here to a former showgirl and mother of a young daughter, who reportedly topped him by six inches… . Of course, the marriage disintegrated in a haze of vindictive heat over sex and money. During the trial separation, the wife and stepdaughter got the house.

It ended with a big shootout one night. When it was over, the stepdaughter was seriously maimed, caught in the crossfire; the showgirl-wife had been shot in the shoulder, her male friend had been killed, and the husband had vanished.

Since then, no one had seen Arthur Dickson, the man who’d bought and rebuilt this mansion in tribute to Elvis. He was presumed dead. A second cousin had later brought suit charging that his body had been spirited away, because after seven years his estate had reverted to the wife and he had been declared dead.

So Temple approached this house with the notion that it had best served its history when it had been a funeral parlor, not the set for a frivolous TV program.

The doorbell pealed out “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.”

It reminded Temple that Dickson had been an Elvis nut. The place boasted a grotto outside the pool fit for a mass burial. But Graceland it was not. This house had apurely Las Vegas mystique, from the copper-domed four-story towers along the sprawling façade to the rumored wine cellar vault in the bowels of an unusual Las Vegas real estate feature, a basement.

Temple edged into the entry hall, not knowing what to expect but ready for anything.

At least Xoe Chloe was.

Chapter 17

Mr. Chaperon

Imagine the Taj Mahal with a copper roof and a six-car garage and you have a pretty good idea of what the Arthur Dickson house looks like.

As my Miss Temple in her new outré garb vanishes inside, its white stucco walls shimmer in the midday Las Vegas sunlight like a whited sepulcher. Wait! I have a more topical simile. It shimmers like those Da Vinci dental veneers you see on the queen of TV makeover shows, The Swan. I bet old Leonardo himself is rolling over in his sarcophagus in Italy to hear how his name is being bandied about in everybody’s upscale mouth these days. Fame is one thing; foolishness is another.

Speaking of foolishness a wee bit closer to home, it is more than somewhat clear to me that if my Miss Temple is not acting her age, I need to be on the scene from the get-go to keep her little masquerade from turning dangerous.

So I enter the place with the film crew, who are obligingly loaded with so many long aluminum equipment boxes that a crocodile could slink in at their ankles and they’d never notice.

Make that one svelte black puddytat, and not even Tweety Bird would notice little moi.

I cannot imagine how my expedition has escaped the notice of my nosy partner in crime solving, Miss Midnight Louise, my wannabe daughter, but so far I am solo on this case and relishing the peace and quiet. This joint is so grandiose that it is easy for me to slip around wherever I feel like it. The floors are all marble or wood but my tootsies come stocking shod when I want them to. I skate over the shiny surfaces like a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of someone’s eye.

I overhear one of the tech guys joking that the place is supposed to be haunted by an Elvis imitator’s ghost.

Better and better. Elvis and I have a noncompetition agreement when it comes to haunting. And any untoward noise I might make is likely to be taken for an unearthly phenomenon.

I check out the kitchen first, because … oh, just because. Without Miss Louise on my tail demanding explanations for my every move, I am free to do as I please.

Wow. This place is huge. You could hold basketball games in the kitchen, which has three huge stainless-steel Sub-Zero fridges big enough to stash a limousine’s worth of bodies. Basketball-player-size bodies.

With the black granite countertops and black marble floors, this is not the kind of kitchen that tolerates the errant crumb. I see that I will have to do some creative cadging to provide my own meals during my stay here.

I eyeball the back yard, which has all the comforts of your average five-star health club … pools, spas, airconditioned exercise pavilions, distant athletic courts, none of them the sort of facility I would care to spend a minute in. Amazing how humans have to force themselves to physical action when my kind knows that sleeping twenty hours a day is the key to a healthy lifestyle.

In fact, I stretch out in the sun for a few minutes and someone coos and the next thing I know a camera is framing my lissome figure in its single eye.

“He must come with the property,” a camerawoman says. “This place is so big and bland, it’ll be nice to have a little animal interest to focus on.”

“When we are not close up and personal on all these teen sluts,” a guy answers.

‘They are not sluts. This is a very life-affirming program,” she says indignantly.

Like most indignation, it is lost on her hearer, a cameraman with a world-weary attitude.

“These reality shows are just a new network twist on T and A. You do remember T and A programming? And I do not mean Transit Authority. Back in the eighties. Jiggle shows. About the only life-affirming activity around here will be all those Ts and As getting exercised to within an inch of their lives and being uplifted into prime shape. Looks like your new pal the cat could use a little time on the treadmill, and maybe a shave and a haircut.”

I honor the crass slob with a hiss and a glare.

“See. He heard you! Animals are amazingly sensitive to human emotions.”

“That was not a human emotion. That was a professional opinion.”

A reeking boot swings at my mug. The smell almost knocks me over, though the boot never even grazed a whisker. Humans have no idea how overwhelming ground-level odors are.

“Watch your sneaky step, kitty. If you try to steal ascene and get in the way of my camera, you will be shredded cabbage.”

I do not deign to tell him I have kung fu moves that would make Jackie Chan look like he was standing still and whistling Dixie.

Let them underestimate you.

The woman coos at me and stands guard, arms folded, until the creep takes his hand-held camera and leaves.

“Poor fellah,” she says, bending down to pat my head. “Dick really lives up to his name. He’s a good cameraman but pretty pathetic in the public relations department.”