Cat In An Aqua Storm

Although the Goliath Hotel was one of Las Vegas’s many landmarks, she hadn’t visited it since Max had performed here. She strode briskly through the glittering carousel of copper-framed revolving doors. Their glass panels showed outsiders a mirrored face, but gave insiders a see-through view. The click of her heels on the marble floor sounded reassuringly confident, as it always did.

Unlike most hotels, Las Vegas hostelries feature discreetly hidden registration desks. What welcomes guests is not the bellman, but ringing ranks of slot machines and the chime of quarters washing down durable but greedy stainless-steel throats.

Temple blinked and took off her dark glasses while her eyes adjusted to the deliberately dim interior. Gambling Meccas cultivate an eternal three a.m. atmosphere, the better to lure visiting Goldilocks into trying to find the “just right” slot or craps table. “If you don’t succeed, try, try again” was truly the house motto.

She crossed the carpet—burgundy imprinted with camel-colored... er, camels—aware of massive chandeliers glimmering above her, of slot machines spitting out a silver lava of coins here and there for lucky players.

The dim and smoky cocktail area lay beyond the first circle of slot machines. Veiled waitresses shimmied among low divans and gilt camel-saddle cocktail tables. Beyond them tiny, gleaming fairy lights trimmed the bare trees that bordered the Goliath’s most infamous feature.

Temple paused beside it—a twenty-foot-wide waterway meandering through a cocktail lounge. At a velvet-roped landing, visitors could embark on an automated ride in miniature red-velvet-lined gondolas. For a few titillating seconds, the gondola route wound through an artificial cave with glow-in-the-dark stars dimpling a Styrofoam-rock ceiling. The attraction was called “The Love Moat.”

“Corny,” Temple pronounced under her breath with wistful disdain. Max had thought so, too. It hadn’t stopped either of them from embarking on a glide into the manufactured dark and a stolen kiss under cover of same.

She sighed and moved on, past a flight of plush-carpeted stairs kept off limits for now by showy red-velvet ropes—the entrance to the Sultan’s Palace Theater, where Max had performed. Finally she turned down a nondescript hallway, slipping with relief into the hotel’s functional areas. Her goal was the offices of Brad Mitchellson, head PR honcho.

The outer office sported the usual chaos: piles of printed matter occupied every flat surface, including vast portions of the floor and all chair seats.

“You here to see Brad?” the receptionist asked crisply. The only tip-off that this was Las Vegas were her false eyelashes and dagger-length faux fingernails.

Temple’s nod resulted in a quick buzz. Mitchellson soon burst through the ajar inner-office door like a warm puppy.

“Temple! Come in. Glad to have you working on this. Great of you to substitute on such short notice. We’re in a mess,” he finished, leading her into his only slightly less well-papered office. He whisked a stack of brochures from a chair seat so she could sit.

“By ‘mess’ do you mean the usual”—she gestured at the surroundings as she gratefully slung her tote bag to the floor—“or the killing?”

“Oh, God.” He sat.

Like most PR types, his personality was genial and attractive, but today his tie looked like it had never been decently knotted and his short brown razor-cut showed the rumpling of harried fingers. He gestured at the green squiggles on his personal-computer screen.

“Trying to outline a new strategy: Life After Death, so to speak. Here’s the week’s schedule.”

Temple took it, glad to have hard data in hand. “So Monday’s killing occurred well before the weekend competition?”

“Monday was the first day we had acts scheduled to come in, to start rehearsing and cueing the tech staff. We were starting to line up media exposure, too, ahead of time. Only we got more than we wanted.”

“But the choreographed PR isn’t needed until the weekend—Friday through Sunday?”

“Right. And we attracted a lot of early interest before Crawford Buchanan even got the job.”

“I can imagine,” Temple murmured, paging through eight-by-ten black-and-whites—a stunning array of the bare and the beautiful of both sexes. “Quite a variety of acts here.”

“This began as a female-only stripper’s get-together and contest, but times have changed. Now we have a modest men’s competition and some novelty categories, including Loving Couples, a thing named Over-Sexty, as we call it, even Bods of a Feather, to cover animal acts.”

Temple studied a photograph of an excessively long snake enhancing the anatomically impossible position of a female stripper. “Does the SPCA sanction that?”

Brad smiled as she flashed the photo, looking relaxed for the first time. “No problem. Our only protesters are the usual Holy Rollers and feminists. We welcome them. You know how calling something sin gets the press out in droves.”

“Indeedy. God's gift to the struggling PR person. What about the murder, Brad?”