Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Like we would build a theme park based on the Troubles,” Liam said, looking around at the shaking heads of his compadres. “Crazy. Americans are crazy, man.”

  “We are,” Max said with a crooked grin. He was crazy for sure, volunteering to act as a buffer between the IRA has-beens and Kathleen.

  The lead interrogator turned back to Kathleen. “So this man died and all the IRA money is lost in Las Vegas? You expect me to believe that?”

  “Vegas got famous on people losing money there,” Kathleen quipped.

  The man behind her suddenly lifted up the back legs of her chair and slammed them down, jolting her.

  “This is serious, woman,” Flanagan said. “If we don’t like your answers, we’ll stop askin’ questions and just take you out and shoot you as a traitor.”

  “You wouldn’t do that to a woman,” Max objected, shocked.

  Kathleen ran a hand through her shaken locks and rounded on him with disbelief.

  “Oh, Max Kinsella, you’re still as naive as you were fresh out of American high school. They already have. Look up on your phone Jean McConville, widowed mother of ten, quite an accomplishment by the age of thirty-seven. Accused of spying for the British, she was abducted, shot in the back of the head execution style, and secretly buried. Only in the same year as your sainted film, Philomena came out, twenty fourteen, was a seventy-seven-year-old man arrested for the crime. Women who worked with the IRA knew her story by heart. And all of us approved.”

  Kathleen turned her head to look every man in the room in the eye. “Say here, this is me, that you’ve known since I was a girl. I was always for Ireland and the IRA. I raised millions for you in the Americas.”

  “And lost a couple million more,” Flanagan muttered. “Yeah, you had the gift of partin’ men from their money for the cause, but I’ve always suspected what you were doin’ off there alone in Boston or São Paulo or Santiago, say. I told the brothers, you can’t trust a whoring wacko.”

  In the silence, Max watched Kathleen’s face. For the first time he saw color suffuse it, a flush that painted a measle-scape of color on her cheeks, like blotchy rouge.

  Her knuckles as white as baroque pearls, her hands tightened on the chair’s wooden arms, as if they were bound there, and Max worried they soon would be.

  Kathleen would not go quietly.

  “And who among ye held back and refused such tainted money? Who ran off to Confession or asked the priest to baptize the thirty pieces of tainted silver? How were my methods worse than to go secretly begging for pence to the good Catholic parishes of Chicago and Boston and St. Paul while I was being showered with pounds from the bad and the beautiful of Miami and New Orleans and Palm Springs and Rio and, yes, Santiago. But no, all along you didn’t approve of the way I got it. What a stinking kegful of hypocrites! You’re worse than pedophile priests murmuring rosaries while abusing altar boys.”

  Max held his breath.

  Some element of the men’s long silence suggested guilt.

  “What we think of your bedding habits is not the point, Kathleen,” Liam said. “The trouble is we have no reason to believe you’re not a thief who’s held back the last fruits of her recruiting. Who has cheated the widows and orphans. ’Tis maybe natural you’d want a retirement allotment, now that your assets are aging, but we can’t let you cheat us. We couldn’t let that happen before the peace, nor after it. Either tell us where that fabulous horde is, or you’ll go to your grave with the secret.”

  She set her jaw and stared straight ahead, silent.

  She was too proud to tell them she didn’t know.

  Max kicked himself again. “She doesn’t know.”

  “If we wanted to hear from you, Yank, we’d have told you so.”

  “Listen. She did screw up. She’d been searching for me for years and finally found me in Las Vegas. She’s been bedeviling the hell out of me and mine there ever since. I didn’t ask to be the object of her obsession, but a stalker doesn’t have time to mastermind a delicate smuggling operation.”

  “You sound like a fellow who could.”

  Max shrugged. “I’m a magician by trade, a secret agent by circumstance. Las Vegas is one of the surveillance capitols of the world. Better than Dubai, perhaps. It’s not easy to hide, or move, or remove, money and guns there.”

  “Guns?” Liam was startled.

  “Yes, and guns.”

  “So,” he narrowed his eyes. “Who do you think that treasure trove should go to?”

  “The money to the IRA for those widows and orphans, if you mean that.”

  “We do. What about the guns?”

  Max shrugged. “To someone responsible, or be destroyed.”

  “Like the resistance?

  “Depends which resistance.”

  “The Kurds?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Good.” Liam picked up his glass and walked to the bar. He hoisted the virtually untouched pint and handed it to Max, then touched the rolled glass lips in a toast. “You get us that money.” He looked back to Kathleen. “We’ll keep Mata Hari here on ice, so you’re not distracted by a stalker. If you fail, she pays the price.”

  “No!” Kathleen sprang up, but strong hands pushed back down onto the chair. “He hates me! He doesn’t know anything about what you call the ‘hoard’, I won’t have my life depending on a turncoat to the IRA since the day I met him.”

  “Oh, you two have a tangled history, don’t you?” Flanagan smirked. “Be interestin’ to see what he does, won’t it, Kathleen? Will he walk away again and leave you angry and alone?”

  She started cursing in Gaelic.

  Max’s cool tones and stage projection overrode her. “I may have some serious personal business for a couple days after I get back to Vegas, but then I promise to search for and claim that undelivered IRA cash hoard. Can I go now?” Max asked.

  Liam stepped back and spread his hands. “You know where to find us. As we know where to find you.”

  Max downed the beer, picked up Garry’s urn, and left.

  He paused outside the closed pub door to let the cold sweat shiver down his spine. He’d be interested to see what he did, too.

  The last verse of the “The Minstrel Boy”, added by an optimistic American after the Civil War, sounded in his mind has it had on the car CD system, from memory. It seemed written for Sean, for Garry, and even for Kathleen. Surely Ireland had always had its minstrel girls.

  The Minstrel Boy will return we pray

  When we hear the news we all will cheer it,

  The minstrel boy will return one day,

  Torn perhaps in body, not in spirit.

  Then may he play on his harp in peace,

  In a world such as heaven intended,

  For all the bitterness of man must cease,

  And ev’ry battle must be ended.

  41

  Face Off

  Temple was not going through the building’s front double doors…to end up in the dark with a flashlight, staring up at the huge, dirt-crusted chandelier that had served as a hanging tree for a man she’d seen alive, if only briefly. She remembered seeing Louie sniffing around the rear.

  She skittered past the deserted-looking RV that served as an office and around to the back. She found a shabby door with some boards kicked out. Vagrants might have used the basement for shelter. The door to the outside had been caved in at one side.

  She leaned against the building to strip off her heels and replace them with the foldable slippers she always carried in her tote bag. In doing so, she found a forgotten asset, the tiny, high-intensity flashlight on her keychain. So she stored the bulky Hardy Boys version in the tote, fished out the petite version and twisted it on. Better to make a smaller target.

  The door opened on a small landing between rickety steps going up into the dark and sturdier ones going down. The air felt dry and had no particular smell, unlike damp, moldy Midwestern basements.

  She glimpsed the black cat she’d ended up
tailing dashing down the battered two-by-eight-board stair with the ease and energy of a creature who can climb a tree with Velcro-strong talons. This was starting to feel very White Rabbit, only with a Black Cat.

  And maybe the cat was running with the verve of having been down here before, Temple thought.

  “Louie,” Temple called softly, teetering on the first wooden steps to the basement.

  If Temple suffered from any one irrational fear, it would be claustrophobia rather than agoraphobia. She’d choose to be the cheese standing alone at the end of the nursery rhyme over the Ritz cracker crammed into a roll inside a wax wrapper and then sealed into a box.

  She’d expected the basement to be a wide open space—dark, yes, but empty to its concrete block walls. What a decent Midwestern basement should be.

  However the basement’s exposed walls looked carved out of natural sandstone and caliche, a cement-hard soil compacted by the presence of lime. And the space wasn’t as cavernous as she’d expected. Concrete block cubicles lined the outer walls, solid versions of the antique-mall display areas above, only closed in to the ceiling and locked with metal doors.

  There must have been—well, count the doors on one side: twenty or so of them. Probably a storage unit for each of the upstairs sales booths in their heyday.

  And the floor…it too was hard caliche, but the large central section had wooden floorboards, as if there’d been an interior room of some kind once. The condition screamed “long-abandoned”. Broken-up concrete patches along some parts of the cubicle walls looked ripped up by a jackhammer, as if the Property Brothers crew from HGTV home network had passed through to bust up the old, but never came back to install the new and finish the makeover.

  Hmm. She wondered about putting a funky fifties hippie nightclub down here, with poetry readings and candles in wine bottles. A scraping sound outside the flashlight’s small beam made Temple sweep the edges of the area with pinpoints of light. No rats, no snakes. No cat either.

  Great. She was hallucinating cats now. At least her soft slippers made her as silent as one.

  Or maybe not. Her flashlight picked out a shadowy form. Midnight Louie pawing at a dark corner, nose to the ground, intent.

  Cats only do that when there was something only they see, a crawling bug, maybe. Temple shivered. Vegas had lots of those. Scorpions, centipedes. Temple’s toes curled in her slippers to avoid even the thought of stepping on creepy-crawlies.

  “Louie! Don’t bite anything that can possibly bite you back. Get away…” But Mr. Curious had to spot, sniff, paw, taste-test anything new that came into the condo, from a magazine to a centipede. And, if he could, take it apart. He could chew the metal off the top of lead pencils and then bat the extracted graphite rod around. She’d have to pursue him to recover the unsafe object.

  No fast moves to be made here. The floor was deeply chipped away in places. She could sprain an ankle if she didn’t watch out. She recalled the classic catchphrase from Jaws, “You need a bigger boat.” She was pretty sure a Great White shark wasn’t lurking on land, but she knew she needed her bigger flashlight. And maybe a Fontana brother or two.

  “Louie! I’m not going to leave you alone down here. It’s dangerous. Now, git. Go on!” She rushed him with a patter of steps going forward.

  He wasn’t fooled. This place was full of smells and nooks and crannies only he could detect and diagnose and dissect. He was like a mad scientist loose in a nasty, decrepit, dangerous playground.

  “Louie, no!” she shouted. “Now quit that and get out.” She flicked the flashlight fast toward the back stairs, wishing it was a red LED light no cat could resist, although Louie had gotten bored with an incorporeal toy that disappeared pretty fast.

  Oh, boy. At times like these, when she was too committed to back out without going slowly, she wished she had a dog who would come when called.

  Temple began to retreat. “Louie,” she implored. She felt her flimsy flat-heel hit a hole and flailed to keep her balance. The tiny metal flashlight slipped out of her hand. Somewhere in the dimness a small metallic clink announced where it had fallen.

  “Drat it!” No, that sounded too much like “rat”. She shuffled a couple feet forward until she felt it and bent to retrieve it. Turning, she saw the steps had blackened and so had the door beyond them. Night had truly fallen.

  She opened her mouth to call Louie…but heard a distant creak. Maybe from the far stairway. Temple found that sinister. If it had been caused by a footstep, had that stepper paused to listen?

  Perhaps a passerby hearing her admonitions to Louie?

  Someone who had come from vandalizing the Lovers’ Knot front entrance again?

  The unknown person who’d hung Jay Edgar Dyson.

  Katt Zydeco, who was really a comics’ super-villainess. Oops. She’d been watching too much Gotham on TV.

  No, she was not going to yell or make noise again, not until she was safely out of here.

  Something lifted her skirt edge. A mental Eek!

  Then she felt a brush of velvet fur behind her knee. Louie! His erect tail was always getting fresh with her legs when she wore a skirt, as he moved back and forth around her ankles.

  Great. He could trip her and she’d lie here unfound until global warming would have caused the Pacific to rise and swamp California and the Mojave desert…and a Great White shark would be found flailing in the tide and someone in the boat following would say, “You need a bigger flashlight.”

  Temple shook off her imaginative rerun of Jaws.

  She took an unsteady step forward. A phantom tail brush saluted her other leg. She moved in hopes she could bend down and capture Louie, but another step brought only another unseen brush on her other leg.

  Cats may not be able to see in the dark, but they do much better than a redhead with light-sensitive skin and blue-gray eyes. Temple knew. Carefully keeping her weight on a back foot before she slowly transferred it to a new step forward, she followed Louie’s weaving path ahead of her.

  Until her slippered toe stubbed something large and hard, in a totally creepy way. Ouch!

  Was there now another abandoned dead body in Electra’s inherited building?

  The flashlight revealed a corpse, all right, a dead body of metal with a long narrow nose of shark-like saw-teeth. Why was she seeing sharks when she abhorred the species being demonized on “Shark Week” on cable TV? She recalled a PBS special that showed a sawshark, and then remembered something very insentient, something linked forever in the public mind with the word “massacre”. A chainsaw. What was a chainsaw doing in a basement storage area? And a really nasty scissors-looking tool big enough to have pulled some real sharks’ teeth?

  She stepped carefully around the hardware and over the rough floor to examine one of the steel-doored storage units. Someone at some time had wanted to keep something very much under wraps in this building.

  The flashlight revealed the door’s big steel combination lock hooked over a thick latch…and showed the lock’s curved neck had been cut through and was barely dangling from the latch. The flashlight beam glinted off the cut marks. They were the bright gleaming silver of new metal, unexposed to air and oxidation. She got out the big flashlight and illuminated the nearest door locks. All either had dangling cut locks, or broken locks lying on the floor below.

  This damage was fresh, it was systematic, and the fact that all the doors had been breeched meant that the searcher or searchers had not found what was being sought. Temple parked the big flashlight in her tote bag again and used both hands to pull a door missing the lock entirely open enough to thrust her hand holding the tiny flashlight through.

  She jumped. Huge metallic boxes taller than she stood in ranks like soldiers, light glinting off their steel silhouettes. The space seemed occupied by the mechanistic Borg from the Star Trek franchise. The “resistance is futile” aliens.

  Temple backed away and was pulling out the big flashlight for a better view when she heard something from far
above her, what would be a second story or attic in a house. A faint squeaking noise. Or, a desolate meow? Thumps, footsteps and maybe worse followed. Louie! She had seen Louie, only now he’d apparently gone up the back stairs. Why?

  Another meow came from above, this time a puma’s caterwaul, a long fierce growl changing into a wildcat scream, followed by a desperate feminine shriek. Electra! Then a man grunted and cursed.

  Temple’s imagination went wild. Following the big flashlight’s broad beam, she backtracked to the stairs, then climbed the two flights of rickety steps to the top floor. Luckily, she weighed little and her flat slippers took her up the steps like a mountain goat.

  She finally stepped onto the second story at the back of the building, switching to the tiny flashlight to be less noticeable, pointing it down to the floor, squinting down the hall between the abandoned antique mall cubicles, toward a black knot of figures gathered under the grotesque chandelier maybe two hundred feet away. The guttural buzz of lowered and threatening voices drifted back to her. And one higher, pleading voice. Oh, Electra!

  She started forward, crazy, but she couldn’t ignore the danger to Electra and Louie. Besides, reinforcements were coming.

  As she walked on silent slipper soles, she detected motion on her left and froze, taking out Hardy Boys flashlight as a weapon. It didn’t look like plastic at first glance.

  About halfway to the figures ahead surrounding a light as if circling a campfire, she saw a dark, sitting cat, licking its paw.

  Louie, that relaxed?

  Then she squinted harder and saw…the dark color was brown, not black This was Ingram! That was what…who…she’d felt grazing her calves and giving her goose bumps as she’d left the Thrill ‘n’ Quill. What would draw an ensconced, only-indoor cat like Ingram this far from home?

  Ingram leveled a bored yellow gaze at her and switched to grooming his other paw. What! All she had on her side was this couch potato bookshop pussycat, who had probably only used its claws to work out an errant knot behind its ears?