"Now, girls and boys, I need an elf, or maybe several, to bring me the booty under yonder tree, aye, my hearties?"
Temple blinked. The line had begun as if intoned in the biblical richness of John Huston being particularly hammy and had ended on a note of Long John Silver.
Amateur actors! She was surprised that a man as dignified and aristocratic as Brent Colby, Jr., had secreted so much ham under that French-bread baguette exterior of his.
She began to agree with his daughter Kendall that he was a remarkable man. Courageous enough to ignore the considerations of class and enter into business with men from blue- collar backgrounds: hard-working, bright men no doubt, but in the sixties, of which she realized she knew nothing, were such alliances that common? Maybe they were after the chasms in custom the Vietnam protests had created.
Hadn't a movie star whose image then wasn't much different from Savannah Ashleigh's now--Temple knew old movies, if nothing else--become a lightning rod for in-your-face Vietnam War protest? Jane Fonda, now a corporate wife.
Temple shook her head. She would need to read a lot of contemporary history books to understand the earliest of the three decades of her lifetime.
Meanwhile, the party went on without her, and Louie. Names were called, beguiling little elves handing out presents with childish self-importance--how nice that the kids were not just the getters, but the givers. Temple was jolted from her reverie only when her own name rang out. Shortly after, a waif in baggy red tights and a Rudolph the Reindeer jumper toddled up to offer her a package, after being directed all the way by helpful adults.
Temple opened the wrapping, aware of everybody watching for a few seconds ... Inside the signature-blue Tiffany box (that oddly insipid pale blue that verged on turquoise), she found a vermeil black-cat pin with emerald eyes.
She smiled a thank-you toward Santa on his homely throne. And saw something odd about his eyes behind a mask of good cheer and spirit-gum wrinkles, beneath cotton-batting eyebrows, eyes that held a nagging question in them that only she could answer . ..
What question could Brent Colby, Jr., have for her, a humble maybe-employee under consideration?
Another name was called, Savannah Ashleigh. Another tyke proffered a gift, another pin in the saccharine-blue box, age-old sign of elegance. Two cats, two sets of gemstone eyes winking topaz and aquamarine in the light.
And then, before the guests of honor could get their minds on current events, Santa was done. He sprang up, energy incarnate, red and white, larger than life, bluffer, heartier, to the fireplace.
"A Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"
Up Dancer, up Dasher! Up Donner and Blitzen and Louie and Vixen --.' The figure lifted stubby arms in the single spotlight, then vanished upward.
Spotlights brightened on the cardboard cutout of Santa and his eight reindeer atop the chimney, but they seemed what they were, cardboard, even Rudolph's rhythmically blinking nose.
For a moment, Temple knew the ache of a child who could no longer believe in Santa Claus, no matter what she held in her hand.
She looked around. Children were gazing up, to the pale sky of a whitewashed ceiling, believing in fairies, ready to clap for Tinkerbell. They expected Santa to emerge up top from the chimney and dash off behind his eight tiny reindeer.
The hearth spotlight dimmed and went out.
Above the cardboard Santa and sleigh and reindeer glowed an ever-increasing light.
"This," said Kendall's breathless voice beside Temple, "is when he appears at the chimney top, blends with the Santa in the sleigh, and then all the lights go out . . ."
But Santa never exited the chimney.
And the deer did not disappear in a triumphant flash of glitter strewn hooves.
And the children who had seen this before were silent as the night.
And the children who had not seen this before were puzzled, thinking something was missing.
And the adults who had seen this before were as still as death.
And the adults who had not seen this before were . . . worried.
Finally, before the lights had dimmed on the cardboard Santa in his cardboard sleigh drawn by his cardboard deer with one red-lit nose, something appeared at the chimney mouth.
This was no North Pole apparition, but a coal-black cat. Here he had stood before and here he stood now and yowled, long and loud, so that finally, someone ... everyone ... understood that something was very wrong.
And all the lights went out.
Chapter 16
Virgin Mary Blues
A baby-pink spotlight aimed a direct hit on the Blue Mermaid's tail fins, making her look more like a blue whale, or a '59 Cadillac.
The figure was huge, maybe twenty feet high. The Blue Mermaid had stylized curly yellow hair, and wore a strapless dress that resembled jersey more than scales. Matt recognized that it was exactly the shade of blue that George at the Gilded Lily had tried to describe.
Matt stared past the overblown figure into the starless night. Las Vegas outshone mere starlight. The sky showed no constellations, only a flat black velvet backdrop for the neon aurora borealis haloing the Strip.
He had recognized George's despised shade instantly: VMB. Virgin Mary Blue, a bright, cloying blue sweeter than denim and darker than baby blue. Mary, the Mother of God's, signature color, duplicated on millions of gilt-edged holy cards and thousands of plaster statues now relegated to church attics.
Sometime it shows up in strange places. An elderly devout Catholic usually of eastern European descent, will suddenly paint his entire house blue, or will slather VMB on the inside oi an upended claw-foot bathtub-shrine, place within a statue of the Virgin wearing VMB, and become the talk of the town.
Matt wondered what the paint-makers called the color.
This VMB blue, though, was chipped in places down to dirty white plaster. And if the Blue Mermaid was not a vamp in the modern style, like the bold women in assorted harnesses he'd recently seen pictured outside the sexually oriented businesses, she did remind him of Mae West. A larger-than-life female fertility idol, all dressed up with nowhere wet to go within four hundred miles, except Lake Mead.
Matt knew one thing: the man who painted this effigy sixty years ago had been Roman Catholic. Only Catholics like VMB, out of lifelong conditioning.
He passed the motel's vestigial front office, where a faint incandescent light gleamed and a scent of stale sweet-and-sour hung on like olfactory heartburn. He supposed he could ask after Effinger there, but what man who moved from casino to casino ahead of the jaw-breakers of the world would register under his own name?
And what if this man he held in his hand in a sketch he couldn't quite see in the dark, what if this man was only an Effinger look-alike? It happened. Maybe Effinger was really a-moldering in the grave, in whatever public three-by-six the city had dumped him. And, if not, which dead-end room here was his?
Matt stuck his hands, and the sketch, into the pockets of his faux sheepskin jacket and slowly toured the motel's interior U-shape. A sign by the office offered rooms by the day, the week or the month. That made the Blue Mermaid a next-door neighbor to a flophouse, one that bled the helpless, unwanted poor of enough money to pay for a far more decent rental unit in a better neighborhood. But they'd never be accepted there.
Few units had vehicles parked outside. Either the renters were out, or too broke for wheels in this mandatory-mobile society. The figured curtains in the quaint, narrow windows were all drawn as tight as their sagging folds would permit. Some were safety-pinned shut. Raucous voices rose as Matt passed, reaching that point of futility when they're too loud to understand. Once he whiffed the pungent sour breath of marijuana smoke. His shoe brushed something on the asphalt... a used hypodermic needle. Discarded condoms shone sickly pale among the blown-in refuse like stranded, dead jellyfish.