Who would have ever guessed that Temple Barr would be grateful to Savannah Ashleigh for anything?
Not Temple Barr.
The annoying has-been actress who’d made Las Vegas her shaky second-career base seemed to embody everything that kept the female persona known as “bimbo” alive way too long into the twenty-first century.
Still, it was good to have a serious errand the morning after picking up what was left of Max.
After a fitful night with Midnight Louie in her California-king-size bed and a nervous morning wondering how Max had fared, Temple was glad to have something on her agenda.
She parked her Miata outside the Aloe Vera Drive address Savannah had given her, although no house was visible. She stared at a tangled web of mesquite trees and spiny desert shrubs and varieties of cacti, a desiccated jungle compared to the scruffy lawns and foundation-planting-bare neighboring house yards.
This was an older area, from the sixties, not maintained with watered Bermuda and landscaped plantings, as Max’s house had been and still was. Another oddity, Temple thought.
En route here she’d driven by really fast to eye Gandolph’s former home in daylight. The groomed yard looked as Twilight Zone–maintained as the interior house systems. No sign of Max, thank God. She would die if she were spotted “hovering.”
Another fading car engine alerted her to the Saturn Sky convertible that had just parked along the crumbling curb. The vehicle’s maker and model had been discontinued by the 2008 Great Recession, but the driver emerged in nineties glitz and glory, tall and thin and extreme, a blond Cher.
“Savannah,” Temple said in a bit of a daze. “That car color almost exactly matches your hair dye … uh, your hair.”
Savannah clicked over on four-inch-heeled mules, her designer jeans torn in all the right places. “Vegas Gold, baby.”
“Vegas Gold what?”
“The custom car color.”
“There’s a color named ‘Vegas Gold’?”
“Absolutely. It’s used to convey the golden glamour of the Strip lights, the glitz, and the gold to be won at the gaming tables. And now it conveys moi.” She turned back to claim the car with a possessive glance, just in case Temple hadn’t gotten the idea.
Temple was, admittedly, a bit gaga at the entire entourage of one, but mostly she was miffed that ditzy Savannah Ashleigh knew something about Las Vegas that she, Temple, the public-relations professional, had never heard of.
Vegas Gold. She wondered if Gangsters car service had a limo of that color.
Meanwhile, Savannah had dressed for her usual riveting entrance. She wore a tiny ruffle-ragged silk top that played peekaboo with sheer transparency, and carried a designer bag the size of an old-fashioned postman’s bag. From its side pouch peeked beady black eyes inset into a brown fur face mask. It would be easy to take Savannah Ashleigh’s current purse pet as a … joey kangaroo. Captain Jack proved that tiny lap dogs were passé, and cats had always had too much dignity to put up with being hauled around everywhere.
“This is your aunt’s residence?” Temple asked, getting out of her car and nodding to the desert scenery. “I don’t see a … house.”
“Oh, yeah. This is the place, Temple. The yard is a mess, but Violet likes it that way. Doesn’t want the neighbors peeping in her windows.”
Judging by the burglar bars on the other houses’ side windows, the feeling was mutual.
“Yvette and Solange live here now?” Temple asked, trying to picture the pampered Persians reclining behind this Sleeping Beauty hedge of thorny bushes and cacti.
“Yes, along with the strays Violet is always collecting. After that cat-food-commercial deal fell through, the Persian Girls just weren’t earning their keep. And those long, thick coats are soooo hard to maintain.”
Temple knew Louie would have a screaming fit if he ever heard the gorgeous shaded-silver and shaded-golden Persian sisters had been handed off so casually. He would give Savannah Ashleigh a brand-new face-lift … or reason for one, anyway.
“Besides,” the actress said, “I’ve had to kick up my heels to earn a living and keep Violet and her Animal Farm going. She’s become something of a recluse; doesn’t have my outgoing personality.”
“Thank goodness,” Temple murmured.
As Savannah’s pseudosympathetic simper turned into a glare, Temple added, “Thank goodness you can help out your aunt. Violet does seem to have some socializing … issues.”
“Our family grew up dirt poor in Alabama,” Savannah answered. “You know what that really means?”
Temple shook her head.
“Dirt was about all we had to eat.”
Temple took in a deep breath, about to say she was sorry, she’d had no idea, but Savannah had always had enough to say, if not to eat at one time, and she kept saying now.
“It did keep my figure scrupulously slender. That’s how Audrey Hepburn did it, you know, kept her slim figure.”
“I didn’t know,” Temple said.
Savannah leaned down to impart girl talk. “Starved in a basement as a child in World War Two Europe. Best thing that can happen to a girl if she wants a film career. You could stand to lose ten pounds, you know.”
Temple was momentarily in an altered state alien to her. She was speechless.
Not so Savannah.
“But you are going to marry that darling radio man, and once you’ve got that wedding ring on your finger, as well as that significant engagement ice, along with the ceremony that goes with it, you can be sure the new mister won’t mind a few extra pounds, or if he does—and they so often do, even when they themselves are as obese as Fatty Arbuckle—will find someone who has the discipline to lose them later.”
Speechless.
“Dis-sa-plin,” Savannah spelled it out. “You’re cute enough to pass now, but what will you be like after forty? Yes, forty! It is death, my dear, but Savannah Ashleigh is a death-defying act.”
She spread her stringy, skinny arms to better frame her foot-wide torso. The creature in her purse climbed to her shoulder, revealing a body as lean and long as its mistress, only furry.
“Is your aunt as fashionably … skeletal as you?”
“Oh, my, no. She’s just my mother’s youngest sister. There always has to be one who’ll let herself go. I don’t blame her. It takes ded-i-ca-tion to be beautiful and successful. Remember that.”
Temple was thinking it seemed to take more like dead-i-ca-tion to the point of anorexia nervosa.
“I’ll never forget it,” Temple swore, as fervently as if a courtroom bible were under her right palm. “You should explain about the dead … employee before I go inside the house, wherever it is, and actually meet … er, Violet.”
“Well, he up and died. Or rather, down and died. There is a concrete-lined ditchy thing behind Violet’s property. He was found at the bottom, dead as a stranded fish in Lake Mead. The empties found him.”
“The … empties?”
“You know, those good-looking young muscle guys who come with ambulances these days.”
“You mean EMTs—the emergency technicians. And some are women.”
“Everything is too, too technical these days, don’t you agree? I mean, they take away the ‘empty’ body in that ‘empty’ ambulance, isn’t that so?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Temple said. “So the only reason you and your aunt think her life is in danger is because her yardman was found dead. How did anyone spot his body?”
Again Savannah leaned in and down, lowering her voice as well as herself to broadcast in Temple’s ear, “Her neighbors all have bi-noc-u-lars, Violet tells me, and watch every little thing that goes on outside and inside her house.”
Which, Temple observed again, was invisible to the naked eye.
“Let’s go inside Violet’s house,” Temple suggested, scratching her neck. If there were this many pests outside, what would the inside be like?
“Don’t be nervous, dear girl.” Savannah also idly scratched her neck, but her fingers were wearing weapons. “You may just be a chubby, short, little overlookable thing, but I’ve heard people say you are a pistol at stumbling over crimes and criminals.”
Still Speechless on Aloe Vera Drive.
Temple followed in Savannah’s footsteps through the winding gravel and twisting carnivorous plantscape.
What do you know? A rounded, earth-toned stucco house lurked at the center of the lot, its style more Santa Fe than Vegas. Meanwhile, the clever masked face clung to the shoulder straps of Savannah’s overweight designer bag and regarded Temple with appallingly intelligent eyes.
“Where did the yardman die?” Temple asked, even more puzzled. There was nothing here that required a yardman to tend it, and no ditchy thing.
“Oh, out back by the control towers and the containment channel and the—what did they call it?—retainer basin.”
“Are you talking about the control channel for the summer flash floods?” Temple asked.
“Something to do with planes or TV stations, I guess. I didn’t know floods flashed,” she added with a calendar girl pose and a wiggle followed by a giggle.
“I didn’t know Las Vegas had ‘retainer basins,’” Temple said dryly.
“That does sound very dentist-office-y.”
“There are fields near control channels called ‘retention basins.’”
“Why don’t you settle all this confusion and hike back and look over the area?” Savannah eyed Temple’s rope-fiber wedgies. “Your casual shoes can take it. I’d sink to my Nicole Miller ankle straps in sand if I left the street or sidewalk.”
Savannah finished presenting her case by cocking a hip and pointing a toe to display a boney ankle and super-high-heeled sandal.
“You might have mentioned,” Temple said, “that the terrain was rough for a city lot.”
Savannah shrugged, her gesture making the head of her purse pet pop up from the outside pocket again like a prairie dog masquerading as a cat burglar.
“I figured a PI could cope.”
“I’m in PR,” Temple said.
“We’ll wait here,” the woman went on, “while you inspect the death scene. Then we can go inside and you can meet Violet. Captain Jack just loves to play with the cats.”
Temple could well imagine. Meanwhile, she followed a slightly worn path of sandy dirt through the aggressively overgrown brush, shorter plants whipping her bare ankles. Who wore hose in Vegas except chorus girls and cocktail waitresses in overly air-conditioned hotel-casinos?
Cowboy boots would have been the proper footwear for this expedition, but Temple’s sole pair was aqua-and-silver flamed leather, and not born to be scuffed.
Temple glimpsed stucco walls as beige as the sandy soil to her right from time to time. Quite a bit of house did indeed lurk in this wilderness. And when she broke through the last, bristly, face-whipping stand of brush, she gazed, like Balboa on the Pacific, on a vast, empty scene, in this case waterless.
A concrete-lined gash in the terrain was Savannah’s “control tower,” otherwise known as a water channel. Next to it lay what most people would take for an empty lot, the retention field used to soak up excess floodwaters.
Anyone who’d lived in Vegas even a very few years, as Temple had, looked on these vast and careful constructions with a small shudder. When the skies clouded over and thronged with storm clouds, their water broke in a cascade so concentrated that desert washes and in-town artificial washes like the control channel filled to their brims then overflowed to swamp roads and even highways, sweeping away vehicles and people in an irresistible eddy of terror and death.
This was the cusp of summer, and the floods came from July to September, but, according to Savannah, a man had died here in the dry belly of the flood-protection system.
It’d be easy to fall into a control channel, hit one’s head fatally hard, and not be found for days. It’d also be easier to push someone into a control channel, counting on no one finding him or her for days. And if the body remained undiscovered long enough, a sudden flood could sweep it away miles down the system.
Temple made her way back to the so-called “front yard,” savvy enough now to avoid the worst tangles, but her lower legs and forearms still looked like she’d been boxing a lynx.
“Tsk,” Savannah said, when Temple finally broke clear into the broken-down front yard. “Those scratches are so unattractive. And your skin, especially that pale kind, tends to never heal deep down. That kind of damage is cumulative, you know, even if you wear sunscreen.”
Temple regarded Savannah’s golden spray-on tan. No doubt the airbrushing had a high SPF rate and protected Her Delicateness from deterioration.
“You could have warned me I’d be roughing it.”
“I didn’t think,” Savannah said. “That’s not my job. That’s your job. What do you think, now that you’ve viewed the scene?”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“Lord, no. I’d never risk my manicure or my skin or my best heels in that wilderness. The police said Pedro had probably been chasing one of Violet’s critters that had gotten loose and fell into the control pit or whatever it is. Violet had reported people lurking around her house at night, but the police discounted that, too. Said it was just all this wild, scratchy stuff brushing on her screens and window glass.”
Temple was starting to itch all over. Maybe it was sand fleas or cat fleas.
This did not seem like an auspicious beginning for a Las Vegas PI.
Where were the night and the neon and the surly pit bosses and sleek and shady casino go-to guys?
Where was her Veronica Lake peekaboo long blond hair and gold lamé trench coat with the impossibly cinched waist and the front hip pocket with the revolver bulge? Where was the glitz and glamour?