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.
So, in a sense, Temple was beginning to catch flamingo fever. Nature writers grew tongue-tied trying to describe thousands of the Greater and Lesser Flamingos of Africa settling on the salt flats like a mobile sunset. Mere plastic could not dim their inborn shrimp-pink luster.
Flamingos en masse, and especially in plastic--accessible and indivisible to ail--really did have something to say. Further, Domingo was convinced that the visual statement of a flamingo infestation in Las Vegas, with its many social and psychological connotations, was far too rich a subject and effect to be ignored by anybody who was anybody, such as art critics, who were mostly nobodies outside the pages of their slick host magazines, anyway.
And, of course, the tabloids--print and electronic--would have a flamingo field day.
****************
"There is no middle ground," Domingo announced to his followers as they stood like explorers stunned silent by the equatorial sun as well as the blazing noonday emptiness of the land they surveyed.
The vast vacant lot did resemble a bland, sand-blond blot amid the bright and lurid fantasy constructions of the Strip. "No middle anymore. Only top and bottom. Developed nation and Third World. Rich and poor. Wise and foolish. Cadillac and Kia. Gaming palace and plastic flamingo. Keep this in mind as you plant your subversive symbols."
Domingo had studied the site over the weekend and drawn an elaborate master plan, a kind of Da Vinci cartoon for the major amassings of the flamingo flocks around the perimeter of the great empty hole from which Mothra would arise, girder by girder, glass wall by glass wall, laser-light by laser-light.
In honor of the day's desert-expedition atmosphere, Temple had worn closed-toe canvas wedgies, a khaki suit (Bermuda shorts and safari jacket) and a hat against the noonday sun and any mad dogs and Englishmen who might take exception to her exceptionally red hair. It wasn't a pith helmet, since she didn't own one, but it was a sporty brimmed affair, also khaki, that looked quite at home on a blasted Las Vegas lot.
"Very nice," said Domingo when he saw her. He snapped his fingers and his photographer groupie, a tall, stork-thin young man who was already turning pink in the warm November sunlight, came rushing over, clanking the cameras slung around his long white neck.
"We will have a picture of me directing the team, with Miss Barr beside me." He raised his voice to a stentorian shout: "People, gather round for documentary photos. And you, keep those camcorders running at all times. I wish every aspect of the installation recorded."
Domingo then proceeded to wave his arms as he indicated the master plan, while Temple nodded sagely in her savage-sun hat. The kids mopped their sweat banded brows or tossed their braided and ponytailed heads, looking like nothing so much as a herd of coltish wild horses dressed by Esprit.
When they went to work, though, it was in an industrious flock. Three-foot-tall pink flamingos positively flew off of flatbed trucks and hit the sandy soil in tens and twenties, like so many oversize and gaudy thumbtacks.
Temple had timed her arrival near the lunch break, so they soon transformed into a scratched, sweaty, dusty crew of fairly androgynous boys and girls gathered around the food They sat where they could: on parked vehicle hoods, a large and friendly rock that could keep their posteriors from the fire ants, on a couple of beat-up aluminum lawn chairs, on their haunches on the insect-infested ground.