I particularly like the chefs’ hats. They are as big and puffy as giant souffles and are just the thing to duck and take cover under. The ritzier the establishment the kitchen serves, the more likelihood of errant chefs’ hats.
In fact, Louise and I are inching along under two of the same when she smothers a squeak of outrage. It seems a runaway lobster has pinched her tail.
We are in a protected corner of the kitchen, crouched between a huge trash can and a stainless steel steam table. I am not averse to a little lobster now and then, but this is not a little lobster and it is in a distressingly lively condition.
It is all I can do to pry its bony claws off my partner’s posterior. I consider asking it a question or two, but after studying those beady little eyes on their creepy stalks I decide that the creature’s brain is as little and creepy as the rest of it, and prod Louise on. Pinching an inch really gets her moving now.
We dash under the steam table and make our way to the constantly swinging door to the dining room. Getting through this aperture is like dashing through the blades of a fan set on high. And then there are the flying feet that dominate the space for the few seconds the door is open.
“Talk about Scylla and Charybdis,” I mutter.
“Friends of yours?” Miss Louise asks.
There is no use explaining a classical education to a classless street cat, so I tell her to follow me when ready and hitch a ride on a pair of thick-soled sneakers. I take it on the chin a few times, but the busy waiter mistakes my hide for some floor flotsam unworthy of glancing at, so I am soon concealed under a tray stand in the restaurant proper.
I watch the swinging door. Nothing but footwear comes through.
Is it possible that Midnight Louise does not have the nerve her old man—I mean, her senior partner—was born with?
While one part of me is feeling smug, the other part is feeling disappointed. I hate to be torn between two emotions. In fact, I hate emotion. It is the enemy of the effective operative.
While I am dueling my own mind, something large falls past my vision to the floor. It is Midnight Louise!
“How did you get out here?” I ask. “I had my eyes on the door the whole time.”
“Maybe so, Pop, but you probably had them glued to the floor. I opted for the over-the-pole route.”
“Huh?”
“Why walk when you can fly? They had some sort of fluffy dessert the size of a Himalayan chocolate-point under this nice shiny stainless steel dome. I ditched the dessert and took its place. Baked Alaska, they called it. Apparently it was rare and expensive, but I cannot see why. It was mostly air. Though it was chilly.”
Miss Midnight Louise gives a theatrical little shudder. “And the waiter did not find you a bit heavy for one of these airy desserts?”
“Of course, and I wanted him to. All I had to do was wiggle a bit after we were safely through the door. He dropped the platter and its dome faster than you can say `Baked Alaska,’ and I was away and out of sight before you could say ‘Bananas Foster.’ “
“I would never say any of those obnoxious phrases. ‘Bananas Foster’ sounds like he should have been in partnership with Bugsy Siegel. Let us leave this high-priced dessert haven and head for the parts of the joint where we can pick up some scuttlebutt.”
Louise pauses only to lick a bit of Alaska snow from her formerly jet-black whiskers. Then she joins me in a game of hide-and-seek through the restaurant and out into the vast noisy area of the Goliath casinos.
Here everybody’s eye is on the cards or the dice or the spinning cherries. As long as we do not work at attractingattention, we can go as unnoticed as a pair of deuces next to the makings of a royal flush.
I sit under an unoccupied slot machine stool to gaze at the ersatz heaven above, a neon night sky that overarches the gaming area like a stained-glass ceiling.
“That is where the little doll landed,” I tell Louise. “It is a false ceiling. We need to get up there and check it out.” Louise makes a face.
“You would look pretty funny if your whiskers froze in that position,” I tell her.
“You mean that we will have to get ‘down’ there, Pop. That means taking an elevator up. We are not exactly routine riders.”
“Tut tut. Nothing is routine in Las Vegas. Follow me.”
I dart and dash my way around the floor until I spy an elevator. This is tough, as it is disguised as a pagan temple door, the Goliath’s decorative theme being biblical. The floor is a piece of cake, though, maybe even Baked Alaska. Las Vegas hotels know better than most that bright, busy carpet designs will hide a lot of spills for a long time. Maybe the killer, if there is one, thought that a lot of neon would hide a high-class call girl’s body.
Anyway, Louise and I blend into the carpet’s black background fronting the Mardi Gras of carnival colors and no one so much as spots us.
I dive behind the convenient cylinder of sand meant for dousing cigarettes. It is right next to the elevator door. Louise has to make do with sheltering under a potted palm.
A few people come and go, taking the elevator. I wait. I want a crowd. Finally a knot of tourists toting Aladdin DESERT PASSAGE shopping bags ankles along and I ankle right after them through the open elevator doors. Those extended claws I hear ripping carpet behind me are Midnight Louise’s dainty little shivs.
She gets with the program faster than she did on her acceleration, though, and hops into a shopping bag. The owner glares at the man beside her, as if he had brushed her precious bag.
I am not exactly shopping bag material, but I snag a bit of ribbon from a package another tourist is toting and push my head through it. The man who was glared at looks down, ready to pass on the courtesy. There I sit as tame as a toy poodle, a collar of fuchsia ribbon adding luster to the muscled dignity of my neck.
His lip pulls back as if to snarl, but he would look silly behaving so doggishly toward a pet pussycat, so he clears his throat instead.
The laden ladies debark on floor six and so do we.
Louise has wriggled out of the bag as the women were fighting their way forward to the doors, so we both dart around the corner to take cover in the refreshment bay next to the elevators, where the ice machine is gurgling as if it was terminally ill. I imagine all ice machines in Vegas must be ready to give up the ghost from overuse.
When the coast is clear (okay, there is no coast anywhere near Las Vegas; this is just an expression we hard-boiled dudes like to use), Louise and I loft to the wooden railing of the balcony overlooking the neon sky now three floors or so below us.
We would gasp if we could. Even from here we can see the CRIME SCENE Do NOT CROSS tape twined above a particularly purple patch of neon below. The lurid yellow with its black lettering does not look in the least like the jewel-tone spirit of neon lighting. No sirree, bobcat!
“Hmmm,” Miss Louise observes, and she is not purring. “I detect a certain reflective quality from below. I say it only looks like a fragile web of neon tubing. I say there’s a solid surface down there. What else would they affix that crime scene tape to?”
With that she flips over the edge, digging her built-in pitons into the wooden rail-cap. Dangling, she winks. “See you down below, Pop.” And the chit lets go.
I nearly swallow my canines.
And then I nearly barf them back up when I see she has made a perfect four-point landing on the wooden railing a floor below.
She repeats the maneuver and is yet another floor below me.
Well! I cannot allow a mere junior partner to out-acrobat me! Even if I outweigh her two times over.
Not for me those agile twists and turns. I shut my eyes and jump. Luckily, I land on the railing below. It is a perfect four-point landing: my set of two front shivs and my two front teeth. I am hanging by a pair of canines, so there is nothing to do but let go and repeat the trick a floor lower.