The Mojave Desert is not my favorite perfumery, not like a New York New York Hotel delicatessen, say. But I will take Ma Nature over manmade smells any day.
When I edge into the open to explore, I quickly discover that Temple Bar is not the place I used to know.
Oh, the marina and café are still there, and so are the rambling wooden verandas of Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant and bar. But the shoreline boats are bobbing a couple football-field lengths from where they did when last I saw them, and there is a long rambling bridge from the highway to Three O’Clock Louie’s. Over dry desert!
What the hell—? Oh. Three O’Clock’s does not even look operational. Good news for the café next door scarfing up all the business. Bad news for my esteemed sire of the same name. Butch claimed my dear old dad had sent for me, but maybe his license has expired by now too. Sudden accidental death is not unknown to our kind.
With these dire thoughts, I start padding over the wooden bridge toward the deserted restaurant. I suppose in these hard times many eating establishments have faded away like old soldiers, but I am getting worried about the old dudes who founded and ran this place. Collectively, they were once known as the Glory Hole Gang, and they had “retired” to one of Nevada’s innumerable ghost towns before being persuaded back into what passes for civilized society these days.
Come to think of it, I have not heard any fresh reports of Jersey Joe Jackson’s ectoplasm showing up in the Crystal Phoenix Ghost Suite either. I will have to get Midnight Louise on that as soon as I get back.
Meanwhile, I have arrived at the restaurant proper, once on the lapping waters of Lake Mead and now as high and dry as an old hippie on weed. The building is shuttered and obviously empty.
So who was around to feed Three O’Clock enough to keep fur and claw together, so he could survive to send Butch for me? Certainly not Eightball O’Rourke, sometimes Vegas PI. Nor his old-time cohorts, Wild Blue Pike, Pitchblende O’Hara, Cranky Ferguson, and Spuds Lonnigan.
I cannot believe all these old guys have just vanished, but they would be living on cactus-spine toothpicks (ouch!) and sand had they remained here. I gaze with damp eyes under the veranda tables where I once was wont to lounge, snagging fallen slivers of chicken. Crab. Lobster.
Alas, poor Arthropod, I knew him, shook pincers with him once. Or her. It is hard to discern the fine points with critters that low on the evolutionary scale. You could say we had only a passing acquaintance, but you are what you eat.
I wander to the end of the line, the deck-cum-pier where boats used to anchor and gilt-scaled carp practically walked on water to cadge bread crumbs and popcorn from tourists.
What a fishing hole this was! I imagine how Three O’Clock would hang over the deck rim, batting at a flashing fin. Of course, the old boy was too aged and well fed to hook anything.
If I bend over the wooden edge now and let my imagination out to play, fill the sere sand with sparkling blue water, I can even see Three O’Clock’s white-whiskered black face, the mirror image of mine, reflected back.
How could no one have notified me the old fishing hole was gone? And now maybe my old man has vanished for good.
Then my imagined reflection smacks me one in the kisser.
“Do not gawk, boy!” an irascible voice orders. “You will give away my position. I did not get you all the way out here to find myself scooped up by do-gooders hustling me off to the Big House.”
Ah … “Three O’Clock? Is it really you? This place is a ghost town.”
“It is your daddy, all right, lad,” he says, digging in his brittle claws and scrabbling up over the decking to join me on the dried wooden slats. “If you had shown one whisker of concern for your forebear, you would have known the lakeside food and drink biz was taking a dive with the Lake Mead water level. You would have come out here to do an elder check.”
“Speaking of ‘elder,’ where are the old dudes who ran the place?”
“Skedaddled, with the carp and tourists. Even a lot of those boats next door have been foreclosed on.”
“The Glory Hole Gang did not take you along when they left?”
“I elected to hide out and keep my hard-won territory, such as it no longer is.”
“The Strip is not exactly jumping with joy juice anymore, either,” I point out, “but it is better pickings than a marooned empty restaurant. I am sure I could fix you up with one of the Circle Ritz residents.”
I frown in deep thought. I do not want the old man on top of me and my doings, and the only sucker-inhabited cat-free unit I can think of on the spot is Mr. Matt’s. Given the impending human cohabitation, I do not want a resident parent at my age and state of independence.
“No, no, no!” Three O’Clock is hissing mad. “I am not ready to steal some gullible human’s rocking chair and place in the sun. I hear you have expanded your operation.”
“My oper—Oh, you mean Midnight Investigations, Inc.”
“You can always use an extra quartet of paws and pair of ears, I am sure, son.”
“Look, Three O’Clock, as it happens, ‘family’ business is a lot on my mind right now, but I already have a junior partner. I am not looking for a senior partner.”
“Well, I am not looking for a dead body, but I happen to have found one. I would not expect charity or for you to take on an aging relative out of the supposed kindness of your heart. I have brought my own case with me, and it is Murder One.”
“Murder One?”
“And a dandy,” he says, running a tattered claw through his snow-white whiskers. “Reeks with possibilities.”
“Where?”
“Here, of course.”
“Here?” I look around. “Deadwood does not count, Dad.”
He snorts.
“And those tourists next door look about as lively as any tourists do lately.”
His eyes are not the vivid emerald green I possess, but a watered-down version. Still, they flash in the sunlight.
“Care to trot those pampered Vegas Strip tootsies of yours over the dead lake bed? Your old man still can show you a thing or two.”
I feel a frisson of interest. It is true that the retreating lake waters might have revealed a sunken treasure. Heck, a fully intact B-29 bomber has rested at the bottom of Lake Mead since an early scientific flight measuring sunspots dropped it there in 1948.
I doubt the lowered water level has given up the ghost that much, but who knows what baubles may have fallen overboard from the thousands of boating expeditions the lake has hosted? Rich dames? Big-time winners wearing gold baubles and bling?
Finders keepers has always been a favorite modus operandi of me and mine.
I shake the dust off my back and follow the old guy’s scrawny tail into the pebble-strewn desert that ruled the roost around here until Hoover Dam made the mighty Colorado River into an artificial lake.
Now the water has dried up like the worldwide credit system, a matter of ecology mirroring economy.
I do not know what I expected to see. Maybe carp corpses glittering with solid gold scales. A few diamond rings that slipped from careless hands into the deep blue waters would be rewarding, but it looks as if the metal detectors have already scoured the surface, given the sand is burnished in circles as if a wax buffer had been over it.
So all I see is cracked yellow sand harder than stone and the same old, same old that spells M-o-j-a-v-e Desert. This once-submerged dirt is decorated by patches of burnt brown grass and a few scuzzy green areas, maybe moss where some moisture might have gathered. Beyond it the ringing low hills show a wide beige watermark I’ve heard called the lake’s “bathtub ring.” Mostly, the dry land is parched, marked only by the island of an abandoned rowboat trailing a desiccated fuse of rope and some small rocklike hummocks.