Cat In An Aqua Storm

“Piffle. You think anyone would give me trouble in that biker babe outfit? When did you do your last thing last night and call?”

“Nine-thirty. I was a little tired.”

“Heavens to Boadicea, dearie! I wasn’t done gossiping until midnight. Want to come up for some whole-wheat pancakes and tofu?”

“Yeah!” Temple’s enthusiasm expressed a hunger for the forthcoming information, not the menu. “I’ll be there as soon as I’m dressed.”

“Don’t bother to dress for breakfast.” Electra chuckled. “After a few hours in the Goliath dressing rooms and at Kitty City, clothes seem downright unnatural.”

Getting into them had struck Temple as unnatural lately, she told herself after she hung up and jumped out of bed. She was slightly cheered to find her right shoulder loose enough to wiggle into a pullover top.

Louie awaited in the kitchen. He lay on the black-and-white tiles making like a grinless Cheshire cat: parts of him faded into the black and stood out against the white. At his length and width, he sprawled over several tiles.

“How about some almost-fresh tuna on your Free-to-Be-Feline?” Temple scraped the last of the can’s contents atop yesterday’s allotment of dry food.

The cat leaned his nose nearer to sniff, but did not deign to rise.

“Louie, you need a better diet at your age! The vet is going to think you’re an incorrigible case.”

Taking her own nutrition lecture to heart, Temple swallowed her regular regimen of bullet-sized vitamin pills with a glass of tomato juice before snatching today’s fire-engine-scarlet patent-leather tote bag from the sofa and racing up to Electra’s penthouse apartment, her heart going pitty-pat. She was not only about to get inside information on the competition from a source she could trust, she would finally see the inside of Electra’s place. Even Max had never broached this holy of holies.

The elevator was particularly cranky that morning, clanking up the three floors. It disgorged her with a final, miffed metallic squeal. Temple walked the few steps to Electra’s set of double doors and rang the mother-of-pearl doorbell. Craftsmen still used touches like that in the fifties.

The heavy wooden double doors muted a mellow echo of her own doorbell, but in a moment one swept open.

The day’s muumuu was yellow and violet, splashed with tasteful streaks of lime green and turquoise. It flowed, a Technicolor wave of polished cotton, from Electra’s neck to her bare toes.

“Come in!” the landlady ordered. “Don’t you look snappy today! Let’s see.”

“Thanks.” Temple had coordinated her red-and-white knit sailor top with a short navy pleated skirt and white, navy and red Charles Jourdan pumps. Her outfit could give Molina a lesson in how to wear navy-blue. She spun decorously, until the pleats fanned out.

“Lovely. So normal, after what I’ve seen lately. I decided breakfast on the patio would be nice. It’s still shady.” Electra took Temple’s wrist to lead her through the mirrored vertical blinds that lined the entry hall, creating a fun-house effect.

In a room beyond, Temple stared at the blond fifties television cabinet she had glimpsed once before. Atop it still stood a huge, green glass globe on a tarnished brass base, whose design represented either colliding Studebakers or copulating elephants, Temple couldn’t decide which.

Even as Temple followed Electra into the next room, she was aware of drawn-blind dimness, of massive shadowy pieces of period furniture—several sofas, for instance—and the evasive scent of eucalyptus.

A genteel thump in a farther room made her stop, resisting Electra’s firm pull. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Electra said.

“But I thought—” A movement brushed along the baseboard edging the parquet floors. Then the bottom fringe on a buxom forties sofa undulated like a hula skirt. “Electra, do you have pets?”

“You cannot own an animal,” Electra replied haughtily.

“Pests, then?”

“What kind of a landlady do you think I am?”

“Then ghosts?” Temple suggested in exasperation.

“I’m afraid not. Not that I haven’t tried. Séances have been held up here in the penthouse since the building was erected in 1953.”

“That’s fascinating. I’d like to—” Temple was jerked through an open French door into the rude shock of daylight.

This high, on the fifth floor, the low-lying clutter of Las Vegas vanished as if it had never been. Only the tall towers of hotels probed the sky as the desert’s faded rose, gold, azure and green bled toward the horizon like running watercolors. The mountains, hazy blue in their serene distance from the hot, yellow-white hurly-burly of the city, kept company with frothy clouds tinted with the exact flattering shade of a baby pink spotlight.

The view was the least of it. The entire rooftop was upholstered in green—covered with potted topiary trees, beds of plump-leaved succulents and cacti with textures as weird and varied as anything on earth.

“Hurry,” Electra said, “you don’t want your pancakes to get cold.”