Bursting through the exit doors, he was taken aback by the usual bustle of milling gamblers in the casino beyond. He had gotten used to the theater's programmed give-and-take of show-and-clap.
Temple was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise him, but Lieutenant Molina was, which did.
He approached her. ''Where's Temple?"
Molina kept her voice and her eyebrows level. ''Isn't that your job?"
"Is something going on? Where's Frank?"
"Frank." Her tone did not imply a question, but Matt knew he better explain.
"We ... ah, used to know each other. In school."
Molina looked intrigued, but lifted the large, forties-style evening bag she carried, a large, encrusted envelope that bristled with gilt metallic curls and leaves until it more resembled a weapon than an accessory.
"I'm here as a civilian, honest. This is not my bailiwick."
"Then there is something going on!''
Molina tossed her head impatiently. Before she could say more, Van von Rhine and Nicky Fontana came rushing over, both attired as formally as he and Temple. Matt had noticed them slipping in and out of their seats at the very back of the house like nervous hosts double-checking arrangements every five minutes.
''What happened?" Nicky demanded in his turn, and much more impolitely than Matt. ''All the undercover cops took off down the Strip like Godzilla was after them. Are we on our own here, or what?"
Molina glanced cautioningly toward Matt, then shook her head. Her short, thick hair swung back to reveal heavy vintage earrings that gleamed like brass knuckles at each ear. Matt was willing to bet that industrial-strength clips and not fragile posts held those earrings on.
"It's a wash," she admitted. "They were wrong. There's a heist on tonight, all right, but not here. The Goliath just got hit. Eight hockey-masked men in the back room."
"All the cash?" Van asked, her face ashen.
"Reports are sketchy, but they supposedly hauled it out on the collection carts."
"But the Phoenix is okay?" Nicky asked.
Molina nodded. "The Phoenix is fine. All the pre-show hanky-panky here must have been a diversion to make us think that this casino was about to get robbed. Slick," she admitted. "Well, at least we had heavy personnel committed here, and the Goliath is just down the Strip. Believe me, they'll never get away with it. That much money is much too cumbersome to move out fast.
I suggest we leave the work to the people who are on duty and go back and enjoy the show. I don't want to miss Miss Barr's supposedly scintillating final act." She turned to Matt. "Maybe she skipped out early because it's a bomb."
He frowned to find his fingertips poised on the plastic dial of his watch as delicately as a waterbug's legs. Ten minutes. Temple had been gone for ten minutes, and the countdown for her skit's big moment had begun. Where was she and why hadn't she come back?
Molina had taken her own advice along with Nicky and Van. Matt glimpsed the trio's backs as the dark theater doors hushed shut on them and a faint burst of laughter.
Nothing was going to happen at the Crystal Phoenix but the Gridiron. Maybe something bad had been expected, but that impression was part of a ruse. Here, everything was hunky dory.
Matt had that on good authority. Police authority.
Why was he worried?
Maybe because it was too quiet at the Phoenix and everything was a little too normal to believe. He was beginning, he realized, to think like Temple.
He was acting like an amateur sleuth.
Chapter 37
Midnight Discovery
''Everything's fine," said the Luxor Hotel, adjusting the blue and gold horizontally-striped headdress of the Sphinx that fronted her gold leather bustier. In fact, this Sphinx had and unusually prominent set of cheekbones.
The Luxor bent to straighten the seams on her net tights-- a glittery string of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
''Except it's hot as hell down here," complained the MGM Grand, tossing the spangle-tangled blond mane that streamed over her bare shoulders. Her bustier was warm and fuzzy and a perfect likeness of Leo the Lion's blunt-featured feline face, except that he too had awesomely pronounced cheekbones.
"We are going to have to tap like hell to keep our balance on that puny ring-of-Saturn ramp around the UFQ," the Treasure Island added in turn.
Perhaps she should have been called the Treasure Chest, for her bustier ranneth over with golden pieces of eight spilling from a brass-bound box unto the ninth power.
Temple had to admit that the night shift at the Lace 'n' Lust had perfect figures for her Living Hotels tableau. Modest proportions would not have adapted so hilariously to the overblown images of Las Vegas' latest hostelries-cum-theme parks.
The amateur chorus girls in their battered silver-painted tap shoes and sequined body suits gathered around to ooh and aah the Strip Hotels and their stripper impersonators, who each wore twenty-some pounds of folderol.
"You look fantastic." Temple told them all, meaning it.
Beyond the milling performers, the huge silver bulk of the grounded UFO glimmered matte-silver in the under stage dimness.
Two dozen local print and electronic reporters paced in more prosaic outfits. The men portraying gangsters wore brown zoot suits with neon-colored shirts and white ties; the G-men wore gray suits with pinstripes so exaggerated that they resembled convict stripes.
''Oh, and wow!"
Temple turned to regard the array of Elvis imitators.
Never before had she seen so much white satin Spandex, so many nickel-size rhinestones, so many glitz-ridden belts wide enough to be mistaken for wrestling trophies or even freeway on-ramps.
Temple gazed rapturously at sideburns as long, black and fuzzy as tarantula legs, at slicked-back pompadours and sweat-stained scarves, at rings even bigger than Liberace's collection of pinkie pianos, at boots that looked like they were cut from the concho-studded hide of a country-western singing cow that consented to chew only a rhinestone cud.
"Cosmic," she sighed with the satisfaction of an artist who has attained a particularly elusive vision.
"Danny wanted us to surprise you," the Luxor said with a pout. She fiddled with the battery-powered azure laser-beam atop her pyramid headdress, which gave her the look of a blue-light special at a K-Mart store. "He'll be so upset that you peeked."
The MGM Grand nodded soberly, almost unseating her own towering headdress--the operative initials seven inches high surmounting the keyboard of a glossy black piano--a grand piano, naturally.
''Danny wouldn't want you down here now." She absently patted Leo's nose, which covered her belly button, but not much else. ''You might miss our grand entrance."
"I just wanted to ensure that nothing is going wrong," Temple said.
"It isn't," an Elvis growled. "God, this elastic pajama-suit is stifling, and so is the stuffing."
"That stuffing is you, Mitch," a svelter Elvis, but not by much, suggested. He tugged at the ten-inch-wide rhinestoned belt girding his loins. "You can bet that I will stick to writing obituaries from now on, instead of reversing them."
"You look adorable, every one!" Temple reassured the nervous Elvii, hard-boiled newsmen all who would writhe at her choice of adjectives.
Half the humor of a Gridiron show was seeing newspeople and public personalities forced to play against type. And most of the men sweating in the costumes required by Temple's skit had made the casual condescending comments they made to all women who were small, young and decent-looking.
Temple pinched a fleshy cheek that happened to belong to a cigar-smoking assistant news editor of the Review Journal who had once called her "dollie."
"Just too cute for words," she enunciated in her treadiest tones. "You'll be a bi-i-ig hit."