Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “It was an unforgettable moment, Kathleen, and still is.” He opened the box to show two-karat diamond ear studs dangling emerald green shamrocks.

  She gasped. “You swore to Liam.”

  “Ninety-nine-point-five percent true. I had to save something out for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For what you suffered. ‘Her eyes, they shone like the diamonds…’”

  “‘You’d think she was queen of the land,” she continued. “And her hair hung over her shoulders, tied up with a black velvet band.’ That’s how you always thought of me?”

  “How could I not? You were a woman. I was a clumsy kid. I’m not a poor man, even with a burnt-down house, Kathleen. What do you want? Could you be a memoirist, a historian of the Magdalene asylums? Write your own Philomena? Join the Magdalene protesters trying to reunite severed mothers and children? An artist? I could send you to the Sorbonne. To any university.”

  “To psychiatrists?”

  “Only if you wanted to frustrate them. Anyway, I ‘liberated’ something else.” He produced a second black-velvet box, this one holding a pendant, a small but magnificent emerald teardrop edged by pavé diamonds.

  “For your daughter Iris. From you.”

  She folded her hands at her breastbone, as amazed as any sixteen-year-old prom queen.

  “Thank you for this, and for this.” She looked around the grand, gilded restaurant and out onto glittering Paris. “Will you keep an eye on my daughter?”

  “Of course. I found her. Iris will do fine, Kathleen. You did the right thing.”

  “Perhaps the only right thing in my life. I know you can manage to give my daughter my gift without letting her know it’s from me.”

  “You’re still young, and beautiful. You can have a life not caged by the past.”

  “You make me see there is only one thing that sets my heart and soul aflame, that has ever done so. Sadly, it is no longer you. I was that far successful in banishing my first obsession. I need to look elsewhere for a reason to live. So you’re right. My hatred needs a new home. And it isn’t Paris. And your self-hatred?”

  Max shook his head, regretful. “What a terrible twist of fate that the few, possibly redemptive moments of our lives were so quickly followed by the worst years.”

  “Hmm.” Her eyes gazed into some bottomless sinkhole he’d never seen. “No. I’ll never be normal. When hatred is the only thing keeping you alive and in one entire piece for so long, happiness seems like torture.

  “The nuns hated our ruinous beauty, my mother’s and mine,” she mused. “That crazy cat did me a favor by marking my cheek. I feel I can no longer tart myself out for a cause gone by. So I’m a lost cause who needs another to pursue.”

  “Then,” Max said, “I have someone I want you to meet. But first, a last, just dessert?”

  She decided swiftly on chocolate.

  39

  Past Acts

  Once they were bowed out of the Paris Ritz by an elderly doorman who might possibly have done the same for Princess Diana and the owner’s beloved late son, Dodi—although the hotel had been massively renovated since then—Max took Kathleen’s left arm and steered her away from the brightly lit tourist areas.

  As in all major world cities, the distance between dazzling affluence and exclusivity was as thin as the gap between a five-star restaurant and the Dumpster behind its back entrance.

  Max sensed the excitement in Kathleen’s rigid frame as he pulled them down a narrow, filthy-smelling street to a tiny European Car with No Name.

  Once inside, he handed her a black hoodie and donned a black leather jacket over his fine suit coat.

  “I would have preferred a motorcycle,” she said.

  “Too unprotected. We’re going into a No Go zone.”

  “Like Belfast was during the Troubles.”

  He nodded. “The French authorities do not want us going there and the residents do not want us going there.”

  “Defying both sides. I love it!”

  “No swagger until we’ve found our connection.”

  She was gazing out the small windows. “Drug connection?”

  As the streets narrowed, the stench of food and raw sewage deepened. Max’s moving gaze flicked on idling teenage punks and drug dealers watching them pass with the eyes of starving wolves.

  He twisted in the cramped driver’s seat to pull the Beretta 92 FS pushed into the back of his belt out and into a side jacket pocket, feeling like a slumming Fontana brother.

  Kathleen was scanning from left to right. “Men in skirts and women in head scarves. Oh, my. Reminds me of the priests and nuns in the Magdalene asylums.”

  Max ignored her. He had to spot a specific mid-rise building that had an open market in front. Under a striped awning, a mélange of scents and people and various languages roiled.

  “Men in robes and caps, women in black, like me,” Kathleen commented. “One with a white tote bag over her shrouded shoulder. Shades of Temple Barr. Excuse me, Temple Devine. Bet she loves that surname.”

  “Not much. She still works under her maiden name.”

  “Strange to view the world from an eye-slit in the fabric covering your head and face and neck, like a wimpy balaclava, or…a nun’s wimple and veil among those orders who still wear habits.”

  Max sighed. “Speaking of that, put on this Hijab before you exit the car. The world is different, and the same.”

  He jerked the car to a stop near a brass monger’s tables, and hustled Kathleen out of the car. Wearing the expensive flats he bought her and the long black gown and long-sleeved top with hoodie, which he jerked down over her scarf-covered head, she passed for a Burqa-clad woman.

  Inside the carpet-hung doorway were dim, shawl-covered lights and another woman swathed in the ISIS-required full-face black Niqab to reveal only her hands and eyes.

  Max nodded to the woman and indicated Kathleen. “Rebecca.”

  Kathleen flashed him an accusing glance. That was the name the Magdalene nuns had forced upon her when young.

  “Sidra,” Max said, “this is the woman I told you about.”

  “Her skin is pale, she is green-eyed, obviously a Westerner.”

  “She’s a master of disguise, a skilled undercover agent, strong and clever,” he said.

  In acknowledgment, Sidra’s lids closed over her beautiful black-brown eyes, framed by midnight-black kohl. “Woman from Ireland rebellion,” she said, her English words thick and halting. “We need teachers for English, for girls. Brave teachers.”

  Kathleen’s dark brows frowned. “I am not a teacher.”

  Max answered, “If you can’t feel anything but hatred, what about feeling useful?”

  She cocked her head. “Is that why you brought me here? To teach children whose language I’d have to learn? Who’s the teacher? Why do they need an experienced agent in the schoolroom?”

  Sidra followed their interchange. “I was student who would be a teacher in my time.” She dropped the lower part of her Hijab. “I was lucky. The acid missed my eyes.”

  Kathleen stared expressionlessly at the ruin of the woman’s cheeks, nose, lips, and neck, melted to the bone. No wonder her speech was altered.

  She turned on Max, the shocked, savage, betrayed look she’d been deprived of doing for seventeen years. “You’ve brought me here against my will, deceived me.”

  In answer, he clipped out the familiar ISIS/ISUL “religious” credo: women as chattel, cattle, slaves. Sex slaves, from prepubescent girls to unbelievers’ mothers, wives and daughters. Mothers of young girls spared long enough that their daughters would mature to become eight-year-old concubines and their sons turned into slaughtering machines.

  “Your old cause is settled, Kathleen,” he told her, “but you’re needed in a new one.”

  Kathleen stroked her smooth pale cheek with the almost invisible pale scars. “I’ll go with you,” she told the woman, “but I am not merely a teacher of girls. I will be a teacher of men.�
�

  “They already have their schools.”

  “Mine would be different.”

  Sidra reinstalled her veil, looking at Max.

  Kathleen interrupted any answer he would give. “I have an ear for languages. I can change my eye and skin color. I am a chameleon.”

  The beautiful eyes held a question.

  Kathleen realized the comparison was unfamiliar. “Like a lizard whose scales turn color to blend into its background. These men like to bomb, torture, destroy, enslave, and behead. I wonder if there is something they would very much not like to have beheaded?”

  The woman’s eyes widened, then narrowed.

  Kathleen continued. “What’s good for the…she-goat, is even worse for the goat. An American saying. It would certainly put a crimp in recruitment.”

  The woman nodded. “You mean, we could…?”

  “We always could, we just didn’t. Us.” She pounded her breast bone with a fist. “No more enslaved sisters and mothers and daughters.”

  Kathleen eyed Max and said under her breath. “I won’t bother telling her that I hate men.”

  Sidra nodded. “Once we are in Afghanistan, we will pass unnoticed unless they wish to beat us for being seen on the streets. I envy Western women. They are so…inventive.”

  “I’ll leave you then,” Max said. “Remember, Sidra. She is small but fierce.”

  Kathleen put a clutching hand on his arm. “You’ve always had a nerve on you, Max Kinsella.” She lowered her face veil. “And so have I.”

  He watched the black-shrouded women leave the tented room to blend into the Parisian night. Black-shrouded ghosts, indistinguishable.

  “Her eyes they shone like the diamonds,

  You’d think she was queen of the land,

  Only alternate closing lyrics resonated in his mind.

  And her hair flowed back from her shoulders,

  unbound underneath a black linen band.

  40

  Midnight Louie Rings Out the Old…

  Alone at last.

  As soon as my Miss Temple and her Mr. Matt have made their evening visit to console me on my temporary solo stint at the Circle Ritz and moved on to view the reconstruction above (I am secretly looking forward to stairs and a double balcony), I rush to the zebra-stripe carrier that has been left behind as my presumed sleeping quarters.

  I duck my head into the open end, under the hated zippered top, and put my right foot in, my left foot in, and shake it all about in this hokey cat pokey.

  As I had hoped, an errand-boy Fontana brother had brought the carrier “home” and done the same usual, tidy job as they would do on a Gangsters limo returning from a jaunt if a customer had left a nail file or a diamond ring behind.

  My probing shivs snag something old that makes me blue, leftover from the wedding. I drag it into the concentrated illumination of a nightlight.

  I have found a black velvet band.

  I pull on the elastic break-away section until I view the white formal bow-tie that has survived two weddings.

  Now that my role as Ring Bearer has been exposed to the entire viewing public by a weasel of a man who has been a thorn in my Miss Temple’s side and other assorted places, I need to wash my mitts of the whole miserable, humiliating situation with a ritual of my own.

  If I must wear costume bits in the future commercials, at least I will be well paid for it. These two Ring Bearer gigs for Mr. Matt’s mother and now my new united roommates must be the last of their kind. The end.

  I pick up the collar with a snarl of repulsion on my lips, crush it under my foot, and use my head to stretch it open enough to don.

  Then I begin my long journey under cover of night to dispose of this unwanted souvenir for good.

  Of course I am caught at the very outset by a hanger-on from Ma Barker’s cat pack as I trot through the parking lot and into the shelter of the oleander hedge.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Midnight?” pipes a small, wee voice.

  “None of your business.” I look down at what would be a dust bunny if it was inside. “What are you doing here alone? You are too young to be out without your mommy.”

  He takes offence, hisses more like a teapot than a snake, and produces a darling spiky little halo of yellow-orange baby fur. Bast spare me!

  “I am four-and-a-half-months and twelve days old.”

  “Too young,” I growl. “You need to eat your Free-to-be-Feline and grow up to be big and strong like me.”

  “That stuff is rank. I see you drag Free-to-Be-Feline out to the clowder, but I never see you eat it.”

  “Because I gobbled so much of it when I was your age.” (And did not know better.)

  I try to pass him, but he has those kitten reflexes, and bobs and dodges when I do.

  “Look, Kit. I am on important business. Dangerous business. Life-threatening business.”

  “Goodie. I want to be your—”

  I give him the mild brush-off with a side-bump. “Be my what?”

  “Apprentice.”

  Now there is a dirty word if I ever heard one.

  I nose him back into the light of the parking lot with a few gruff growls. “Look at you. Scrawny as a starving rat. What do they call that coat color?” I survey a mash-up of white paws and yellow and orange stripes and tufts sticking out any which way.

  “Ma Barker calls me her little pumpkin.”

  “That is not an effective street name if you want to get out and about in the neighborhood and survive the bullies.”

  “What would be better?”

  “I am not a walking Name-the-Baby book.”

  He sits down and hangs his head.

  “Okay, fuzz-bottom. I got a better name. Punky. Why did you hang around when Ma put the kittlings to bed back at the police substation?”

  His round kitten eyes, too muddy to tell their final color, narrow. “The substation is a low-level crime-fighting operation. I saw all the housebreaker and Fontana brothers action around this place and figured you would soon be beginning a new undercover assignment.”

  “Undercover assignment?”

  “Under the cover of that sissy zebra-stripe carrier. I see they import you to crime scenes in that.”

  I like this kit. “Yeah, well, I had to go along with that low-profile approach to save a lot of people.”

  By “crime scene”, I am not sure whether he means my formerly exclusive roommate’s faux wedding-cum-armed robbery or her real-this-time wedding. In either case I witnessed me, myself, and I becoming a third wheel as well as a much put-upon Ring Bearer.

  Okay, I did stage manage a masterful musical distraction at the first “wedding”, and got revenge on Crawford Buchanan by exposing the pusillanimous wedding crasher at the second once-in-a-lifetime event.

  (And it had better be, because I will not don the Collar of Shame again.)

  I shudder to recall the many photos and videos taken of me wearing my formal white tie, and Buchanan’s snarky references in his gossip column to my “cushy midsection, slightly askew whiskers, need of a manicure and a rubdown with a lint-remover”.

  While I seethe doing a fast rewind down memory lane, Punky’s sharp little shivs are prodding my shoulder.

  “Crime-fighting, that is what I want to learn about, Mr. Midnight. I was best in my litter at fly-catching, bug-biting, and free-style cactus-climbing.”

  “Climbing, huh?”

  The kit dances around me, feinting with his tiny claws.

  “It is going to be a long, confusing walk in the dark,” I warn, “unless I can catch us a ride.”

  “Motor Vehicles of Death?” Punky nods. “Usually they catch us, I am told.”

  “An urban legend. It goes two ways with MVDs,” I tell him. “Always a hard call for our kind. Black is beautiful, but invisible on dark streets. White is a flag for sadists who, sadly, go for road kill. Your coat color is almost fluorescent, which makes you a target. Life is hard, but death is harder, Punky.”

  “I wi
ll be all right. You know your way around.”

  “That I do. Can you tote this fancy neckpiece while I look for a quick ride?”

  “Sure.” He sits upright as I paw the thing off my neck and lower the white bow-tie around his. He takes a deep breath so his upright posture does not sink.

  So I now have an unwanted tail. Can Bast make things any harder for me? I am pretty sure she can.

  “A C-A-B,” Punky asks, after we roll out of the backseat of one in perfect low-profile harmony with the feet of a somewhat smashed couple from Kankakee and onto the Las Vegas Strip. “What do those initials stand for?”

  “Could Annihilate Babies,” I snap.

  “Ouch! Mr. Midnight, are you mad at me?”

  “Better give me the ball and chain again,” I say. “First, hang on to it real tight.”

  Punky braces his tiny feet and squeezes his eyes shut as I pull the elastic part taut and do a powerful head-duck and neck roll to suspend the black velvet collar and its abhorred attachment again around my neck.

  “That white bow tie is very George Clooney on you,” Punky says.

  I am momentarily flattered. “What do you know about George Clooney and his taste in ties?”

  “I saw him getting out of a limo once.”

  “You do get around for your age. Look. We are heading into stormy waters, lad. Best you follow and observe.”

  I take stock of the journey.

  Once upon a time Las Vegas Boulevard was not known as “the Strip”, but it was always wide. Now, with centerline boulevards and hotel-casino properties reaching for or renting space out right to the curbs, it is one big digesting-anaconda of a parking jam.

  Everything designed to be seen from a majestic distance, like the Luxor’s pyramid and Sphinx and even Leo the Lion at the MGM-Grand, are now crowded and seem kitschy, gigantic, gift shop gewgaws.

  In one sense, that makes it easier for lower, in terms of stature, forms of life to mingle with the foot traffic unseen, and harder. I herd Punky through.