Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Well, these are fighting words, but I do not know where to begin. So I decide to build my case. It does not take much, simply calling a few witnesses who are already hanging about the place.

  I could say I just put my lips together and whistled, but the fact is we hep cats are never much good at the wolf whistle game. It takes a certain canine swagger to pull off.

  So instead I merow to the ether and hope that a thing with feathers will answer my call.

  I am answered in spades: one turtledove, two French hens, three Budgerigars, four calling birds, five cockatiels, etcetera, ad nauseam. You would not think so many feathered friends inhabited the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel, but then you would not think, would you? Best to leave that to experts, like myself.

  I call my first witness. Literally.

  “Did you see a tall young lady on stilted heels pausing by the balcony?” I inquire.

  “Tweet.”

  “Please repeat that response in English for the jury.”

  My jury is a twelve-part-harmony team of various feathered friends.

  “Yes. Pretty bird,” says Blues Brother on cue.

  I flash a triumphant glance at Miss Midnight Louise.

  “So the phrase, ‘Pretty bird,’ is pretty common to the avian world,” I follow up like the sharp legal wit I am.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Bird-biter,” the little ’keet answers.

  I pace impressively before it. “So it was indeed a bird that called Miss Vassar to her death?”

  “No, sir,” says the ’keet.

  “What do you mean, ‘No, sir’?”

  He fluffs his feathers and bites his toenails and works on various unmentionable portions of his underlayment, and then he sings again.

  “It was a cat, sir. A feline person of the pet persuasion. I saw it.”

  “A cat, sir?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Would you repeat that for the jury?”

  “Indeed, sir, repeating is my business, my only business.”

  By now I have gone farther than any defense attorney would, save for O. J. Simpson. If only there were a dog in the case to lay all the blame upon. Kato, my Akita friend, wherefore art thou?

  “What cat?” I demand.

  “Pale-colored, with a little dark feathering. Very attractive for a fur-body. Seated. Upon the balcony. The human lady in question was on her cell phone, but then she noticed the balancing act occurring not five feet away from her. She was most distressed.”

  “How distressed?”

  “She abruptly terminated her conversation, ‘Pretty bird,’ and reached out to extract the cat from the railing. Well, you sir, being a cat, can understand how unfortunate that misguided good Samaritan gesture was.”

  I say nothing, for to do so is to incriminate my breed and my brethren of the court. And mostly myself.

  “Pretty bird,” mourns Blues Brother. “She reached so far and then farther. The fickle feline jumped down to the floor. The poor human female leaned over the railing and fell down to the glass ceiling far below. Pretty bird. Bye-bye.”

  I stand astounded. And corrected. No one killed the little doll known as Vassar except her own soft heart.

  She died trying to rescue one of my kind, albeit a pampered, perfumed kind.

  Joan of Arc indeed. The name Hyacinth comes to mind.

  At least Mr. Matt is set free by my kind’s obligation.

  This was an accidental death. The only Kitty involved was the unknown feline fatale balanced on the balcony.

  Ah, my anonymous Juliet, how fatal thou art.

  Chapter 44

  Wake

  Matt thought he must be dreaming, but he had thought that a lot lately.

  There came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping…not on his or Poe’s chamber door, but on the glass of the French doors to Matt’s patio.

  He ignored it as an audible hallucination.

  He was three stories up. His patio was a pathetic thing compared to the other units’ outdoor areas. It remained as he had found it: furnished by one dusty white plastic lawn chair. Temple’s patio was a whimsical mini-Disneyland of potted plants and creative seating. His was a wasteland. His private garden was miles away at the Ethel M chocolate factory, filled with sere, thorny cacti.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  There wasn’t even a tall tree nearby to scratch a branch over his door glass. The venerable palm in the parking lot ended by just tickling the underside of his balcony.

  He supposed Midnight Louie could have leaped up to his balcony from the palm tree, but Midnight Louie would never knock, or scratch, or mew for entry. Matt didn’t know much about cats, but that much he knew about Midnight Louie.

  So…nothing was there. Nobody was there.

  There was barely anybody here, Matt thought, still reeling from the past few days’ events.

  Rap, rap, rap.

  Matt rose from his red-suede vintage sofa and moved to the balcony patio. The absence of curtains made his figure the well-lit star on an obscure stage, he knew, while the anonymous tapper on the patio remained in the dark, invisible.

  He wasn’t afraid of the invisible, so he jerked one of his French doors wide open, daring cutthroats, sneak thieves, and random murderers to have at him.

  In the soft Mercurochrome glow from the parking-lot lamp, he spied a black form balanced impeccably on the narrow wrought-iron railing…not Midnight Louie, but Midnight Max.

  Matt regarded his visitor, reflecting for the first time that Max reminded him of Flambeau, the master thief in a Father Brown story, those genteel literary exercises in crime, punishment, and Roman Catholic theology by G. K. Chesterton.

  Balanced like a mime-acrobat on the railing, Kinsella waved his current calling card: the tall black-labeled bottle of amber liquid with which he had apparently leaned forward to rap on the glass.

  Despite the skill of such a trick, Matt recognized that the bottle was whiskey and that Kinsella had already been drinking from it.

  “Top of the evening to ye,” Kinsella greeted him in a stage brogue. “Mind if I come in?”

  Matt did mind, but he was too curious to refuse. Before he could nod, the magician had untangled himself from the iron railing and vaulted into the living room in one liquid motion.

  “To what do I owe—?” Matt asked, omitting the phrase that usually followed those words: the pleasure of your company.

  Max Kinsella evoked many feelings in Matt, but companionability was not one of them.

  Kinsella didn’t answer directly. Did he ever? Matt wondered.

  Instead he held the bottle up to the central ceiling fixture. The glass was such a dark brown that almost no light penetrated it.

  “This,” Kinsella announced, “is the finest Irish whiskey in the world, Bushmill’s Millennium at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the Irish distill the finest whiskeys in the world. The word ‘whiskey’ is Gaelic in origin, did you know that?”

  “Yes. It means ‘water of life.’ The Irish also have the finest addiction to alcohol in the world.”

  “Ah. Not a tad of the Auld Sod in your soul.”

  “Polish-American.”

  “So you’re a beer man.”

  “I don’t drink much of anything.”

  Kinsella shrugged, quirked an eyebrow, and flourished the bottle in one fluid gesture.

  He set the bottle down firmly on one of Matt’s discount-store cube tables. “I suggest you owe yourself a sip of Heaven now.”

  “Heaven isn’t to be found in a bottle; more often Hell is.”

  “True, and I’m generally abstemious. A man in my line of work can’t afford smudged senses.”

  “Are you referring to magic or spying?”

  “Either. Both. However, this is an occasion, and I suggest you join me in an uncharacteristic elbow-bend. Where are your glasses?”

  “Kitchen,” Matt said, bemused.

  Kinsella was not drunk, as he had feared, but he was in a strange, forced, bitter mood.


  He was now peering into Matt’s cupboards and apparently displeased by what he saw.

  “Not a lead crystal glass in the place. You can’t set up housekeeping without a pair of glasses worthy of the occasional drink of kings. Well, these gas-station jelly jars will have to do.”

  “I don’t have any such thing.” Matt moved to defend his possessions.

  Max had whisked two short thick glasses from the cupboard to the counter. Now he was rattling in the refrigerator in search of ice.

  “Not a sliver, not a cube. ’Tis more fitting that we take it neat, anyway.”

  “Why should I drink with you?”

  “It’s better than drinking alone?” Kinsella paused to reflect. “You can’t have me doing that, can you? Besides, we have something to celebrate.”

  “You don’t seem in a very celebratory mood to me.”

  “We Irish are deceptive. We laugh when you think we should weep, and weep when you think we should laugh.”

  Matt took the glass Kinsella handed him, holding two inches of amber liquid as richly colored as precious topaz, the expensive, genuine article, not the cheap yellow citrine or smoky quartz that was passed off for it. He could already inhale the rich, sharp scent of aged whiskey.

  Suddenly, he did wish for crystal glasses. Life needed its rituals and its ritual vessels.

  By now Matt was ready for a drink. He lifted the glass and took a swallow: hot, burning in his throat like bile, yet strangely soothing.

  “Is anybody ever allowed to sit on this?” Kinsella was still holding his glass, saving it, and staring at the long red sofa.

  “It’s a Vladimir Kagan.”

  “Here’s to Vladimir.” Kinsella lifted the lowly glass and drank.

  “You can sit on it,” Matt said. “I sit on it all the time.”

  “Designer sofa, rare whiskey, barware by Martha Steward,” Max enumerated.

  Matt sat in front of the cube table Kinsella had not claimed, realizing that the magician had purposefully mispronounced Martha’s last name, not liquorfully.

  The play on words reminded Matt of Martha from the New Testament: that bustling, somehow frantic female fussing so compulsive that even Christ had urged her to slow down and smell the roses. Comparing domestic diva Martha Stewart to her New Testament namesake made for an interesting take on America’s Queen of Clean and Possibly Mean. Were successful women always assumed to be shrews? Or did success make shrews of us all? Matt wouldn’t know. He sipped more whiskey. It tasted stronger than swallowed perfume would smell, and he didn’t much like either.

  Kinsella was lounging in a corner of the Kagan as no one else who had ever sat on it had dared to do, including himself. For all its provenance and rarity, it was a demanding, stylish seating piece and wasn’t the least bit comfortable. Like Kinsella himself.

  “You look to the Kagan born,” Matt admitted.

  Kinsella chuckled. “We’re both magicians, in our way. Our game is not to make you feel comfortable, but challenged, uneasy. Do I make you feel uneasy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not all the time? Shame on me.”

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?”

  “It’s not an honor. It’s a…bloody wake.”

  “I still don’t get why you’re here.”

  “This is a wake, after all,” Kinsella noted. “For that you need a priest.”

  “So you think an ex-priest will do in a pinch.”

  “Why not? An ex-Irishman will do.”

  “So whose wake is it?” Matt was half afraid his bitter visitor would produce Vassar’s name.

  “All of ours?” Kinsella sat forward, cradling the whiskey glass in his hands. “She’s…gone. Dead. Our Martha Stewart of the soul, giving us no rest, rearranging our priorities, redecorating our psychoscapes. To Kathleen.” He raised his glass. “To Kitty the Cutter. To our survival on the occasion of her death. I often thought she would kill me, but I never dreamed…she would die.”

  “An eternal enemy offers a certain stability,” Matt said, slowly, amazed by how true his words were only as he articulated them. “Why else is there the Devil?”

  “You should know. You’re thinking of Cliff Effinger.”

  “No. I didn’t cause his death. At least I hope not. I mean, not specifically, but by looking for him, I might have attracted the wrong sort of attention to him.”

  “Devine! Effinger attracted the wrong sort of attention to himself! He was a royal loser. A royal pain in the ass to everyone who encountered him. You were his stepson. You had certainly felt the back of his hand. Don’t go all goody-goody on me and tell me you regret his death.”

  “I do. You know what he said to me once, here, in Las Vegas, when we met again as adults? He said his abusive ways in my childhood home had done me a favor. He claimed he had taught me what the world was really like. I think it was like that for him, as a child, and he really did believe that was the way to rear a kid, to know how hard and cold the world can be.”

  “So did you learn anything?”

  “From coldness and hardness, no. But maybe from him, finally. Not what he wanted me to know. I found that inside he was small and afraid still, trying to be the big, rough person he thought it took to survive in this world.”

  “He was a loser.”

  “So was Jesus Christ.”

  “Spare me! Next you’ll be asking mercy for Kathleen O’Connor.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “You won’t admit you’re relieved she’s dead?”

  “Yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But you won’t admit you’re sorry she’s dead. That’s what this is all about.”

  “Me? Sorry?”

  “She’s been in your life longer than any person you know. Longer than your dead cousin. Longer than Temple.”

  “What do you know of me and who’s been in my life?”

  “Only bits and pieces. But Kathleen, Kitty, was your demon longer than she was mine. Granted, she dug in her heels and really hounded me, but it was all misplaced obsession. I was a substitute for you, for the young you she had known years ago in northern Ireland.”

  “I’m glad she’s dead.” Kinsella lifted both his glass and his eyes in a defiant toast.

  “It’s your right. I can’t argue with it.”

  “You’re not glad.”

  Matt considered. In his worst moments he had imagined killing her to save others, but that was fantasy. The reality was that he felt relieved that Kitty wasn’t here to drive him to the end of his wits and his integrity. But anyone’s death as the price of his deliverance? No.

  “Christ died to save our souls,” Kinsella said. “Would you wish that death undone?”

  “That was different, preordained.”

  “And wasn’t her death preordained? She must have harbored a secret death wish, pushing people to their limits, maybe hoping someone, sometime, would have the guts to kill her for it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “So God did it for us.”

  “It’s too easy to attribute things to God, miracles or revenge.”

  “Still…. A toast to God, for justice literally above and beyond the call of duty.”

  “I don’t think God requires toasts.”

  “Don’t underestimate Him. He gets them in mass every day.”

  “That’s blasphemy.”

  “That’s what they said of Jesus. ‘He blasphemes.’ ”

  “Irreverence then. And comparing yourself to Our Lord is more of it. Don’t argue the Testament with me.”

  “Why not? What would we argue about? Temple?”

  “You’re trying to pick a fight with me. Why?”

  “I’m not.” Kinsella put his glass down next to the bottle. “I’m trying to talk to you instead of tap-dancing out an unwanted conversation, which is our usual routine. We have a lot in common. Too much probably, but the one thing we really have in common from this moment on is
Kathleen O’Connor’s death. I’m not as happy about it as I should be, and you’re not as relieved as you should be. Aren’t you drinking?”

  “Sure. We Poles are as prone to depression as the Irish anyday. Our homeland has been trampled under by centuries of invaders, we’ve been forced into exile and immigration, and beyond that, we’re the butt of Pollack jokes. At least Irish humor is always warm beneath the barbs.”

  “I’ll give you that.” Kinsella touched glass rims with Matt. “Pollack jokes are meaner than Irish jokes. It’s damned unfair.”

  Matt let the whiskey that was likely older than himself trickle down his throat. He was surprised that Kinsella would concede anything to him, even something as trivial as the denigrating ethnic humor sweepstakes, when Kinsella surprised him even more.

  “Speaking of which, I don’t usually revert to ethnic stereotype,” he said, eyeing the bottle.

  “And you don’t usually come looking me up.”

  “No. This case seems to call for it. I have, after all, a confession to make. I think I killed Kathleen.”

  Chapter 45

  Cherchez La Femme

  So I hear this tapping as of someone gently rapping on my…chamber pot, not my chamber door!

  I open my snoozing eyes. I am resting in Miss Temple’s office, where I can get some peace and quiet of a night instead of enduring constant tossing and turning in the bed, my dear roommate’s specialty of late.

  My litter box is only a few feet away, and someone is clawing the heck out of it.

  No one is privileged to use Midnight Louie’s privy but Midnight Louie!

  I am up and hissing like a radiator in an instant.

  “Mine!” I yowl, advancing on the equally instant high heels of my fighting shivs.

  “Relax,” comes an all-too-familiar drawl. “It is a long walk over from the Crystal Phoenix and I needed a pit stop. It is all in the family, right?”

  “If you are speaking of a professional family—”

  “Any other relationship involving you would be unspeakable,” Miss Midnight Louise responds.