Oh contraire, grousers! It is actually a very thoughtful feline who has summoned you to this floor. I wait until a car opens that is crammed with people yet to disembark, for I seek the hotel’s top floor. Too bad the particular guest I seek is not top-drawer to match!
Of course, I must time my leap aboard to the second. Whilethey are all craning their necks looking left and right down the hall, I slip among their pant legs, trying not to brush my softly furred sides against any sensitive bare female gams. (Not for personal reasons, of course. Normally, I am only too happy to massage female gams. Here, however, I am trying to remain undercover as well as underfoot.) It is my good luck that only one highly intoxicated (a redundancy, I fear) gentleman remains aboard when we arrive at the top floor containing the suites.
I follow his lurching path out of the car onto purple plush carpet.
I was blending into the bellman’s dark pant legs four days ago when I heard him instructed to take Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s gaudy luggage cart to the Baccarat Suite.
Knowing the Crystal Phoenix layout from my days as house detective here, I leave the amiable sot playing with his room key card outside his quarters and speed to the address in question. And they say we cannot be trained!
Something also in question is whether Miss Savannah is in residence at the moment or not. Although the time is late, past my namesake hour, it would best serve my emergency plan for her to be making merry elsewhere right now.
I scratch softly low on the door.
In an instant I am answered by the snare-drum scritch of delicate pads on paint. Pads, plural. Both Ashleigh sisters are awake and ready to rock!
It is true that I and the Supine Yvette, formerly known as the Divine Yvette, are on the outs, but Solange is still in my little black book. Okay, my large black book.
I can stomach the snobby Supine Yvette if the Benign Solange is in the picture.
I hiss under the door that they need to unlock it.
They plead the deadlock and the safety chain.
I ask if they have a pipe access door in the bathroom.
After a few minutes, Solange reports that they do, but that Yvette’s tail has become caught in the opening.
Manx! If I had been installed in a penthouse suite, my first piece of business would have been checking the air-conditioning and plumbing systems for egress. A dude always needs a back door.
But what can you expect from Persians? They are not exactly designed for street smarts. On the other mitt, they are sublimely designed for other purposes.
Speaking of the Sublime Solange, she is hissing at me under the door that there is another interior door at two-jumps level in the bathroom.
I sit down and think. I always think better sitting down, without pressure on my footpads.
Of course, all Las Vegas knows the Crystal Phoenix as a very classy hotel. It was classy before the many new mega hotels made a conscious effort to spend millions on high-end art collections. In fact, the powers that be along the Strip (and there are a lot of them) are eager to disavow the place’s gangster history.
But you can’t keep a good hood down. Or a good ‘hood.
Rumor has it that one obscure room dating back to the Bugsy Siegel era can still be found at the Flamingo Hilton. Bugsy, of course, built the first Flamingo and began the dot on an empty map’s evolution into Billionaire’s Row.
And here at the Crystal Phoenix, room 711 is still decorated with the forties flair popular in the day of its founder, Jersey Joe Jackson. They say when he lost his fortune he lived on in that small suite. They say he still lives on there in the dust motes that take human shape from time to time.
Me, I like to use the place for siestas. The hotel never rents it. And I may have seen a ghost there while in the twilight state between dreaming and waking up.
Right now I’m daydreaming about how this hotel used to be the Joshua Tree when Jersey Joe founded it. How it sat deserted and ruined until Nicky Fontana came along with mondo millions of clean dough from his grandma’s pasta empire and remade the place with the help of an imported little hotel marketing doll named Van von Rhine.
Of course, since then the Phoenix has been redone inside and out, and added onto up, down, and sideways. But its functional core is the old Joshua Tree, with its then-fancy “futuristic” features.
One comes to mind just when I need it. I seem to recall that it has a central vacuum system for cleaning.
No. I am not contemplating sending the Ashleigh sisters down a central vacuum system. That would be cruel, although speedy. And it would really wreak havoc with their hairdos.
However, I also recall from my early prowls of the premises when I was house detective, the old Joshua Tree had a system of linen handling that involved that old-fashioned, low-tech approach of … laundry shoots.
Two jumps up. I guess that even the pampered Ashleigh sisters could manage that if motivated. One waiting to bat the hinged door open while the other leaps through; one to perch on the sink surround and open the door manually (mittually?) and leap through after the first has gone.
It will take acrobatics not usual to short-legged Persians. It will take cooperation between sisters of a different color. It will take massive persuasion from Midnight Louie, perhaps with a soupcon of disinformation.
But my dear associate’s life is at stake, and species loyalty is worth two tins of sardines and a catnip spray can, under the circumstances.
I need reinforcements below, pronto! (To quote the Fontana brothers.) Fire in the hatch! Even if it’s a pair of furious felines!
I instruct Solange on how to get her and Yvette launched. I tell them that they will land on Cloud Nine.
And then I race back to the elevators, leap to hit the down button, and hope for the best.
Chapter 55
Red Tide
Temple’s connections at the Crystal Phoenix got her easy and secret access to a passkey that allowed her to sneak back into the locked ballroom housing the Red Hat stores.
Nicky Fontana had not been crazy about her doing that, but she explained that she wanted to search the premises without anyone, including Van, knowing.
She told him a small but reasonable lie about smuggling via the shops that might explain Oleta’s death, if not the attempt on Elmore’s life. She didn’t want, she said, to embarrass the hotel and the Red Hat Sisterhood if her suspicions were wrong.
Nicky recognized that as a noble and necessary motive.
So she’d tucked her blond hair under a big red hat restingatop a red-knit turban and had donned huge gold circle earrings. This was not a Temple Barr look. It was more a mini-Carmen Miranda look.
That 1940s Latina entertainer had worn towers of fake fruit on her head. Temple had settled for red chiffon roses and ostrich feathers nestled in veiling. She also resorted to red running shoes in another effort at disguise. It had worked: the mirror told her she resembled a walking crimson mushroom with a very lavish cap.
Nobody glanced at her twice as she left the bathroom off the lobby and headed toward the ballroom areas. Red Hat ladies had been sweeping past en masse en route to the big dinner events at both the Phoenix and the neighboring Goliath. She was just a late-goer. While half the Red Hat Sisterhood attended a program and banquet in the Phoenix’s Crystal Court ballroom, the other half made merry at the Goliath Hotel across the Strip.
The Hatorium Emporium ballroom had doors on three sides, one set far down a dark hall abutting the hotel’s cavernous service and kitchen areas. Temple unlocked the padlock and chains with no witnesses. Any Marley’s Ghost clanking sounds she made were masked by the loud muffled sounds of stage announcements and laughter coming from the hotel’s huge central ballroom.
She knew better than to shut the slightly open door behind her. These things could make terrific thumps, as convention-goers who try to sneak out of boring presentations find out. She often wondered if that was meant to keep people inside.