Matt nodded and stood.
"Don't you want your drink.'"
"Nope. Lost my taste for it."
"Don't worry. It's on the house."
Matt left, wishing he'd had a swig of something. A hundred dollars, when he could probably have bought the information for forty or fifty. Stupid move. Or . . . maybe smart. Maybe big enough to shake something loose from that guy. He'd decided to tell what he knew before someone came along and made him do it for free, hadn't he?
Matt inhaled the crisp night air, ignoring the lowlifes slouching at doors on either side of the Brass Rail. The Blue Mermaid. He roughly knew where it was. Downtown. Not far from the police department. Temple had told him all about it, raving about the huge plaster mermaid figure that had reared its sinuous curves over the motel since the thirties. Next thing he'd get for his living room would be a big blue mermaid to lounge on his huge red sofa. Right.
Tacky place, he thought next. She hadn't said a lot, but he'd read that between the spurts of her enthusiasm for the blue mermaid figure, for the wacky artist Domingo and his million flamingos. The place had stunk, even if it had an artsy mermaid for a hat.
Matt walked down the side street to the Goliath lot, where he had parked the Vampire in a halfway point between light and darkness. He remembered standing outside the Araby Motel at the Strip's opposite end near McCarran Airport not many months ago, watching a door that Cliff Effinger might exit, or enter. Guard duty had put him into a kind of temporal trance that night. He couldn't say how long he had stood there, or if he'd slept standing up, like a horse, or had dreamed, like a dope fiend. The past and its buried emotions always took him by the throat like a watchdog and choked until he couldn't tell real from false, present from past, right from wrong.
What would he do when he finally found Effinger?
He had no idea. He had never even stopped to wonder what Effinger would do when he saw Matt again.
Chapter 13
Auditions Can Be Murder
Temple would never have thought it possible for the huge conference room at Colby, Janos and Renaldi to look crowded, but today it did. Five new faces sat around the large oval table, and one of them was feline.
And the tension level felt even higher, perhaps because "the client" was present.
Actually, the four new humans present were from Allpetco, but the advertising agency personnel referred to them in singular form as "The Client." Temple found that as absurd as referring to the Marx Brothers en masse as "The Comic."
The client was officially the company itself, so Temple supposed it made sense, but the frequently used phrase kept reminding her of the John Grisham book and movie. She kept looking over her shoulder for rogue lawyers.
"The client wants to watch you and the other candidates do their stuff on camera/ Kendall had said the moment Temple reported to her office, dress bag; tote bag and bagged Midnight home hanging off different parts of her person
"The client? I didn't realize we'd have an audience."
"Now that you've had a day to get used to the surroundings, everyone should be relaxed. The client makes the decision, we just present the possibilities. Want me to hang that dress bag on my door?"
"What would we do without backs of doors?" Temple had wondered as her bag vanished onto a hook behind the open door.
So now Temple again made a dramatic entrance to the conference room, Midnight Louie in his purple sack fastened to her chest like some protective life vest.
By now she had affixed names and faces to the agency people. It was easy once you understood the family, and ethnic trees. Colbys were medium in every respect--height, coloring, vocal tones. Placid, happy, humming WASPs like Kendall, despite her Italian last name, for Temple had discovered in the agency brochure that Kendall was Brent Colby's daughter.
Janoses were intensely brown in coloring and choleric in temperament, Middle European to the toes of their sensibly sturdy wing-tip shoes. Renaldis were either as tall and elegant as Respighi pines or, conversely, as round and black as olives, both species intense in a deceptively laid-back way.
Stereotypes didn't hold across all members of a particular family, but they helped Temple grasp the essential character of each of the three "tribes" she must deal with.
"The Client." Now that was no neat familial or ethnic union. The Client was one man and three women. She had no idea what position these four had with the company. She hoped someone would explain that to her before the day had much advanced, but no one seemed inclined to, although introductions had been made, too hastily to take root. In the meantime, Temple would do as she had always done when meeting new people: assume that they were fair-minded, intelligent and friendly until they proved themselves otherwise.
Temple the TV news reporter had used that basic technique with everyone from multimillionaires to homeless transients, man or woman, adult or child. Cynical reporters--and she had discovered that not only was the stereotype true, but that there were far too many of them for the good of truly unbiased reporting because cynicism cuts both ways--ended up not respecting certain stories and certain people. They also ended up getting lousy stories, and missing many good ones that way.
Call her a cockeyed optimist, but Temple had learned early that overestimating yourself and underestimating other people was the worst mistake you could make in professional matters. Or personal ones.
Her musings stopped. Midnight Louie's whole body had stiffened against her. This feline alarm was as startling as a dog's sudden bark. If Louie had been a dog, heaven forbid, he would have been a pointer at that moment.
Temple followed the direction of his glassy, fixed gaze, and saw that everyone in the room (except her, of course, who had been insight-gathering) was staring in the same direction. Was something wrong?
She steeled herself to view the usual dead body. What was new? Death by staple gun, perhaps, this time. Caffeine poisoning. Nicotine fit. This was New York. What she saw instead was a new furry face in the room.
This animal was indeed remarkable. A beautiful dark-blond Persian cat sat full-length on the table, like a demure, fluffy sphinx, her long golden forelegs casually crossed.
Her earth-toned coat was a melange of dark, foxy red-gold down the back and incredibly full tail, then caramel on the long, flowing sides. Cream frosted her dainty chin and luxuriant bib. Her green eyes gleamed mossy, like agates in an old-gold frame, and her nose was the same rich brick-red as the paler twin's: Yvette.
One was sun, the other moon.
And Midnight Louie was mooning at the sun!
Temple shook his carrier, trying to break the golden cat's spell. No such luck. Louie wasn't the only one struck to stone. No one spoke, or stirred, for at least a full minute.
"Magnificent," Brent Colby, Jr., declared, reaching out his Rolex-banded wrist to stroke the creature's head as if touching a golden object.
"Fabulous doming." One of the women from the foursome known as "The Client"
Spoke with a hush in her voice.
Temple had heard that expression before about purebred Persians. What the heck was doming, besides a furry forehead? And who cared anyway? Louie didn't need doming; he had brains and initiative. Or he had used to have them. Temple twisted her neck around, trying to catch Louie's bright emerald eye. No use. He was as transfixed as the rest of them.
"This is very good," a low voice commented into her left ear.
Temple turned on Kendall, suppressing a snarl.
"What's good?" Temple asked with resentful stage-mother vehemence. "That gilded lily taking the spotlight from Louie?"
"She's golden. He's black. Maurice, if you recall, is yellow-striped."