Could Mavis Davis really have smitten down Chester Royal? She was a sturdy-looking woman. A nurse would know how to manhandle large, inert bodies—and Chester Royal had been small-statured. Like Owen Tharp. No wonder they got along! Was Royal as controlling of Hunter as he was of Mavis Davis? Was it because she was a woman; or did Royal keep all his authors terminally insecure?
Temple had seen stage directors like that: men (and they always were; few women directed even nowadays) who used their entree to the artistic ego to twist it, to find and manipulate the self-doubting child that lurks in every adult. Such men were vicious egotists who claimed credit for their victims’ talent even while bending it past the breaking point.
No passion was more terrible than that of an artist who has given all and been betrayed. Temple had seen normally rational theater people ready to kill a klutzy critic for an undeserved insensitive review—could writers be any less intolerant of meddling with their words?
Temple shivered in her hot, limp sheets, under the lazy breeze of the ceiling fan’s Plexiglas blades. It clicked ever so slightly as it turned, sounding like the snap of distantly chewed gum.
The night was warm—Temple tried to keep utility bills down by running the air conditioner on “tepid” after the sun went down—and somehow sexy. God, but she missed Max sometimes! He’d left enough of his things behind to haunt Temple: a foot-wide swath of his clothes now huddled in the dark against the closet’s most inaccessible wall. In the linen closet, a box of magician’s implements—handcuffs, trick boxes and lurid chiffon scarves—gathered dust and would convince any stranger who stumbled across it that Temple favored kinky sexual practices. Speaking of which, Temple hadn’t yet had the heart to sweep the Vangelis CD’s off the bedroom shelves—Max had liked to make long, lingering love to those slow, swelling organlike chords....
Molina’s questions had evoked a new, terrifying scenario today. Max was gone because he was dead? No. Not Max. He was definitely not a victim—of anything, including too nice a conscience. Whatever Molina thought, Temple’s ego was not so in need of soothing that it would console her to know that Max had left—had left her—because he literally couldn’t come back.
That led Temple into her favorite bedtime fantasy. Max coming back. What Max would say, how he could possibly explain—and if anyone could, Max could. What Temple would say. What Max would do. What Temple would do. Oh, holy... Shalimar!
Lord. She’d forgotten the cat box, such as it was, in the bathroom. Had to get rid of that. In the morning. Which should soon be here. Great, another night down the tubes.
And then—what? A sound. A... soft, rasping sound. At her window. Noticing too much might get dangerous. The latches in this place were a joke. Nobody’d been worried about personal security in the fifties; besides, Superman—the comfortable old George Reeves rerun one—could always fly to the black-and-white TV rescue.
She listened. Silence. And then that determined brush, a motion repeated again and again. Deliberately. Against the shell of Temple’s apartment. Brush, brush, brush. No trees or branches lay against the windows or walls. Las Vegas had zip for trees or bushes unless they were expensively watered, and Electra could only afford to nurse the greenery around the pool.
Temple’s bare feet touched the bedroom floor. The wood parquet did nothing to cool their burning soles. She moved softly through the familiar demidark, wishing for a weapon, wishing for Max, who’d always been a two-edged sword.
In the living room, the handsome rank of French doors leading to the patio looked like nothing but glass and frame and flimsy struts. Had she even locked the doors for the night? Sometimes she felt so safe, she forgot.
Brush, brush, brush.
Stop.
Nothing.
She had moved. She had been heard.
Her breathing resumed. She could hear her lungs expanding. Brush, brush, brush. Too regular to be inanimate.
Maybe it was Max. Coming back. Be just like him, a surreptitious entry in the night. Surprise.
Brush, brush, brush.
Temple plucked an Art Deco-style ceramic peacock from an end table. The tail would make quite a bludgeon. She hushed toward the doors, feeling naked in her thin T-shirt, feeling cold in the warm, still room.
Brush, brush, brush.
The patio was terra incognita, a distorted landscape of folding chair and prickly pear. The sound was just outside the third door.
Temple edged nearer. She had to see.
A bit of shadow broke off from the night. She had to know. An insane—inane?—need to know.
The shadow stretched up, up, up, lengthened itself against the fragile, breakable glass. It reached the knob, a lever-type French latch. The latch vibrated to a blow. Temple lifted her plaster peacock.
The shadow yawned. Moonlight reflected from a diamond shape of tiny white shark’s teeth.
“Louie!”
Temple unlatched her patio door. The shadow fell lazily inward and commenced to scrub its furred sides on her calves.
10
A Little Night Music
You hear it here first.
I am free to come and go. And if anything is free, I take full advantage of it. I am not born and bred in Las Vegas for nothing.
As fond as I am of Mr. Nicky Fontana and his lithesome wife, Miss Van von Rhine, they are prone to understatement under stress. I have been free to come and go since I was a pup, figuratively speaking, and my dear mama batted my face and nudged me in the direction of the refuse containers behind The Sands.
Lest you think my dear mama was lacking in maternal sentiment, you should know that I was one of seven and we all got the heave-ho early in life. That is because our dear mama was something of a femme fatale and had no access to population control devices in those days when I was born.
So I have been slipping in and out of where I should and should definitely not be since I was knee-high to a police dog—and the police dog none the wiser.
Miss Temple Barr's delicate French-style latch is kit’s play to me, especially with the door unlocked and a terracotta pot to stand on. Speaking of which—kids, that is, in the human form, not the goat edition—that is why I show up here again.
In the long, jostling ride back to the Crystal Phoenix in Mr. Nicky Fontana’s custom-painted Corvette convertible, I am held in close communion with my two friends. It dawns on me that despite the scent of desert rose upon the Las Vegas breeze, Miss Van von Rhine’s ever-present aura of Opium and Mr. Nicky Fontana’s devotion to Russian Leather, a distinct odor of Essence de Diaper Pail yet pervades this formerly loving (to me) couple.
Anyone who might think that some soft spot in my ticker has led me back to Miss Temple Barr in her hour of need should keep in mind that Midnight Louie is a fall guy for neither man nor woman, and nothing human. ¿Comprende?
I simply see that my previous carte blanche run at the Crystal Phoenix must yet be shared with that abominable yowling, crawling intruder, and this is not to be tolerated. I require persons about me with the same level of intelligence, not to mention manual dexterity.
There can be no attempt to dissuade me with any argument that the Abomination “will grow up.” It is well documented with such creatures that this "growing up” takes an insufferable amount of time—not to mention money. I may have nine lives, but I am advanced enough along my longevity graph to avoid wasting any of them in fruitless endeavors.