Just such an attitude, I remind them testily, has led to much grief for the great sleuths of history, from Sherlock Holmes up to my personal favorite, Seymour Katz, the Peoria P.I. whose exploits in Undercover Agent magazine I have followed since I was a kit.
Where, I ask them next, has the intruder been intruding about the house?
After an unclear chorus of replies, I get the gist: upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
I decide to investigate the same turf and so I trot upstairs first. Naturally, the crime scene is a mess. It has been tainted by Lieutenant Molina's scene-team, which has laid a trail of unnatural chemical substances over everything. Then a convention of handy helpers has been through, among whom I recognize the subtle scent of my own little doll, which is music to my nose, unless she happens to be confusing a crime scene, which she is.
I trot down the fatal stairs, observant for any telltale traces. I see nothing but the expected cat hair gathering into dust bunnies here and there.
Finally, on the first floor again, I am struck by something one of the witnesses said. "Downstairs," I repeat in a contemplative monotone. "Is this downstairs, or is there more below?"
The Great White finds this question too obvious to answer, but a half-grown black-and-white with a freckle on his pink nose steps forward to say that a further set of steps beckons beyond the kitchen.
There I go, to find a painted wooden door handily ajar.
They are not allowed down there, the cream cautions in a quivery voice. The Great White sneers and says that doesn't mean that some of them have not been down there plenty.
I am not fond of basements. They are dark, damp, spider webbed, crammed with old, forgotten junk, and usually escape proof. Luckily, they are rare in Las Vegas, except in the older houses, of which this is one.
It occurs to me that others may have overlooked the basement, too. If people are searching the house, whether honestly or clandestinely, it behooves me to do so as well. I growl a warning to the others to remain upstairs, no matter what happens, and I trot down the dark stairs.
Ugh. Painted wooden treads, with those nasty black-rubber safety covers tacked on. Nothing says "dirty, dank, possibly haunted basement" to me like that shifty stairway to the lower depths.
My eyes adjust slowly to the eternal twilight here. Contrary to legend, my kind's sight is not keenest in the dark. My ears and super-sensitive whiskers serve me better. I hear a clink and a scrape in the farthest, darkest corner.
I slink in that direction, waiting for my fabled night vision to adjust and let me detect a scintilla of difference between darkness and shadow. Apparently my fabled night vision is waiting for another legend, the Robert E. Lee.
Before I reach the corner, I hear a single, grinding step.
A full moon of light beams into my bedazzled pupils, which slit tighter than the eye of a needle unreceptive to camels and rich men like the late, great Aristotle Onassis. Even as my vision adapts to the blinding glare, a pair of dark, shapeless human mitts looms toward me, bearing something white like a wadded up, wet diaper.
"A black cat! Perfect for the church door on Friday," intones a voice more distant than the announcer in a bus station. I see nothing but my approaching doom in the form of a wet, white cloud.
The revolting material is slapped across my kisser. At first I think I smell Pampers, but the odor is heavier. I struggle, claws boxing the air. I snag something--cloth, and then I am swaddled like an infant in a tough outer fabric that my flailing limbs tear at but cannot escape.
As I involuntarily slip into Lull-a-bye Land, I recognize the means of my capture: the storied cloth soaked in sleep-inducing chloroform that P.I. Katz is always encountering--and the equally fabled, and feared, burlap bag. Could it be that Louie is going for a Midnight swim?
Chapter 33
The Fur Flies
Temple, still despondent and now feeling guilty, in addition, entered her foyer without enjoying the usual glow her smart accommodations gave her.
Worse, Caviar had acted agitated from the moment Temple had returned from Matt's apartment, as if the cat knew that her fate--not to mention her reproductive future--had been decided.
She had been pacing the living room when Temple had peeked in, and she'd resisted all attempts to be picked up and calmed, despite her earlier docile behavior. Now she was yowling, regarding Temple with piercing owl-gold eyes and regaling her with even more piercing cries.
Temple just couldn't ship her off to the vet's, but she had to isolate her in case Louie returned. She wrestled Louie's cat carrier from the front storage closet, then struggled to push Caviar inside, feeling like a monster. Caviar complained in a soprano shriek en route, and even more loudly once locked inside.
Temple showered Caviar with soothing chirrups as she left the carrier in the kitchen, feeling like she was waving a cheery toodle-oo to Sidney Carton on the way to the guillotine.
Temple frowned. The cat's reversal of behavior was most odd, almost as if she were . . . well, upset about something. Had Louie come home?
In a lather of guilt and urgency, Temple began to search the premises. Perhaps now that Caviar was corralled, Midnight Louie would deign to show himself. She looked under the bed, in the darkest reaches of the bedroom closet, behind the bathroom doors, atop the office bookcases, under the desk, behind the green plant, on the dining-chair seats in one corner of the living room. No Louie anywhere.
Finally, she went back into the kitchen and opened every cupboard. The only track of a cat she found was an overturned Finny Frosties box. Caviar's yowls reached operatic heights. Glumly, Temple righted it and turned back to the room.
Her eyes fixed on the feeding bowls as her mind mused on the tale of two kitties: Caviar's Free-to-be-Feline was nibbled down to the bowl's bare bottom. Louie's was . . . what was Louie's? Temple certainly couldn't see the untouched mound of food beneath the newspaper tented over it.
She snatched up the newsprint like a magician expecting to reveal . . . missing Free-to-be-Feline, proving Louie had been here, and even recanted. All was forgiven, he was just hiding--
The Free-to-be-Feline rose to its customary heights. But, Temple realized, that didn't prove that Louie had not been here. Unless the newspaper. . . .
She looked at the open pages and saw for the first time the fine print of the Classified Ads section. Was this a mute message from Louie? For instance, was it opened to the "Pets" section, implying that he was off in search of a new home?
No, the top page was the first page of the Classified section. All that was on it were strange self-help group and service ads that sounded vaguely illegal--such as for piercing parlors--and, of course, the obituaries.
Of course, Temple skimmed the entries, horrified to read of a thirty-six-year-old man who had succumbed to a heart attack and a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had perished from an unspecified long illness. Good thing that she didn't peruse these things daily. It was a lot less safe out there than one realized.
Yup. Blandina Tyler had an entry, sans photograph, a scant two-inch listing of name, address, birthplace, former occupation--nurse--date and place of funeral: 10:00 a.m. Friday at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Suggested charities: Our Lady o{ Guadalupe and the Humane Society.
What did this obituary say, if it had been left as a message, which was ridiculous, because Louie couldn't read, no matter how smart he was. Yet Caviar had been so agitated . . . and now she was strangely silent. Temple glanced at the carrier to see a sober feline face following her every move with unblinking intensity. The words came into her mind as if seeded there by some supernatural agency and now bursting into full, logical bloom: Blandina Tyler. Funeral. Tomorrow. At the church so conveniently close to Blandina's own door, just down the street. Address.
Temple folded the paper. This was silly. She just had a feeling, and it had nothing to do with finding the Free-to-be-Feline under an Obituary section, as if the absent cat had meant to imply the stuff should be buried. Louie still co
uldn't read, not even to make a macabre joke. Yet only a cat could have batted the paper so neatly over the bowl. Caviar? Temple eyed the eerily quiet carrier again. Really, she couldn't read either.
Temple decided to check on the Tyler cats anyway. Peggy had given her a key. What good was a key if she couldn't use it?
First, Temple investigated her tote bag to make sure the Tyler house key was there--it was. She grabbed the big brass ring of her own keys, moved along the apartment's French doors to make sure they were latched, and went into the guest bathroom to be certain that Louie's high transom window was open so he could get in if--when--he came back.
Satisfied that the apartment was both secure against human invaders and still offered sufficient feline access, Temple went out the front door and locked it behind her.
If anyone saw her at the Tyler house and questioned her presence, she would say she was worried about the cats, plural. Mostly though, she was worried about the cat, singular. Very singular.
Temple had not counted on how creepy a house in which a person had died could look at night in a seedy neighborhood.
She stood beside the parked Storm, its cheerful aqua color now a flat charcoal gray under the faintly coral glow of the distant sodium iodide streetlights.
She knew that only cats moved in the dark, empty house in front of her, yet she remained reluctant to enter.
No rectangles of light checker boarded the convent next door. Its windows at the side and rear were obscured by tall oleander bushes, except for Sister Mary Monica's second story observation post, and she was probably abed by nine.
Temple jingled her huge key ring for the companionship of its familiar chime, then regretted the noise. Although she could claim that she was concerned about the cats, she couldn't explain her presence here in any really rational way.
The odds of Louie being inside, no matter how widely he got around, were nil. And this house had been the focus of unsettling phone calls and prowlers. However much Blandina
Tyler's elderly and lonely imagination may have amplified these incidents, someone of ill will lurked at the edges of the events that had brought both Temple Barr and Matt Devine to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Matt would consider her a bit looney if he knew she was standing here planning to enter a deserted house on the evidence of a disarranged newspaper and her own instincts.
Temple hitched up the tote-bag straps, straightened her shoulders and started up the walk. What did she have to lose? Still, she kept her weight on the balls of her feet, so her snappy red high heels wouldn't slap the sidewalk and alert someone who would question her right to be here--or alert someone else, who had no right to be here either.
Out of nowhere, the dark loomed up and ambushed her with a crushing sense of personal peril. A fist of fear squeezed her heart, making her pause to heed its wild pounding. The cooler night air chilled the goose bumps of sweat that had blossomed all over her body. She was alone in the dark in front of a house where someone had died a possibly premeditated, violent death. Suddenly the empty street and its distant lamps reminded her of a deserted parking ramp.
She dared not turn back to the curb to verify that her car stood there, alone, that she was not once again in that dangerous parking ramp, that two men were not even now behind her waiting to pounce and pound. . . .
No safety beckoned ahead, only the mute, dark house. The exterior entry light had long since burned out. She forced herself to walk to the doorway, every loud footstep a declaration of defiance. She couldn't let her recent beating turn her into a mouse. Temple's key scraped at the lock mechanism for many seconds, making surreptitious noises that she figured would attract at least a brace of Dobermans. On the other hand, a dog attack would be something different.
Nothing moved but a warm tease of breeze through the bushes. Sweat prickled Temple's scalp, and her heart still hammered.
Then the lock snicked and the door opened.
She slipped inside and quickly closed the door behind her to mask her presence, and to commit herself to the deeper dark before her. She stood there listening to the silence and the inner thunder of her circulatory system, then envisioned the day-lit house in her mind and groped for the light switch beside the door.
Evidently Peggy, or Sister Seraphina, had lowered the air conditioning now that only cats were in residence. The interior air was lukewarm, and thicker than ever with the smell of fur, fishy food and litter boxes.
Temple heard a thump deep within the house. A stirring cat, alerted to her presence, perhaps. She fumbled over the rough interior stucco wall for the switch and finally touched the plate's smooth, plastic surface.
Flick. Nothing.
That had happened somewhere else recently. Where? Ah, in Electra's entry hall.
Maybe this entry-hall light had burned out, too.
Temple kept her palm against the rough wall and moved forward by baby steps, wary of the many rag rugs waiting to trip the visitor in dark or daylight.
Her foot kicked something soft that scrabbled away. Not a rug, a sleeping cat.
" Sorry, kitty," she whispered.
Immediately her active imagination painted a room full of mortally insulted cats, schooling in the dark to wash over her until she tripped and fell among them. Then they would swarm her, their barbed tongues preparing the way for hundreds of feral, piranha-like teeth.
In the dark, even pussycats took on a sinister presence, especially if they were unseen.
Some light did penetrate the rooms as her eyes adjusted, but the dim, vaguely recognizable forms she saw only confused her more. Was that the edge of the refrigerator glimpsed through the dining-room archway--or the archway itself?
She tottered into the living room, leaving the safety of the perimeter. Her foot kicked something again, something heavy and inanimate that lay unmoving and didn't roll away when gently prodded. A dead cat?
Temple bent like a blind woman to pat the lump at her feet, not knowing what she would find, what she would touch.
A rag rug rolled into a cat-sized mass. She sighed and pushed it out of her way, starting at a shrill, hollow sound. Oh, an empty tinfoil roaster pan, driven over the hard floor by the moved rug.
Maybe the cats did need more food; maybe that was the inexplicable instinct that had brought her here: a psychic cat chorus chanting for Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.
She edged into what she hoped was the kitchen, her arms nailing ahead of her, although it was her high-heeled feet that were in the most imminent danger of encountering obstacles.
Cats must have eeled away from her in the well-populated dark. She never felt another brush with anything animate or inanimate. When her shoes hit the kitchen's ceramic tiles, her tension eased. Surely a light would work in here, at Commissary Central. Peggy must come over for an evening feeding. She would instantly miss a burned-out light. Now, where was the switch?
Temple cruised the room's perimeter, moving her feet in a soft shuffle now and then accented by the ting of a kicked tinfoil pan. Step, step, step, kick. Step, step, step, kick.
Her first circuit was hard on her shins and revealed no light switch at the expected level. Was the central overhead light operated by a dangling cord? Temple couldn't remember that either. Amazing what you don't look at in an unfamiliar house.
So she shuffled her way to the presumed middle of the room and began swinging her right arm to and fro above her head, trolling for any dangling strings. Of course she could be too short to reach it, and her hand might be missing it by inches.
Frustrated, she edged around the room's perimeter again, checking under cupboards, behind the countertop microwave oven and the breadbox, which both smelled strongly of tuna fish.
Inspired, she clasped the refrigerator, working her way around the predictable bulk for the wall behind it that she remembered. Halfway around the behemoth, she became aware of something that told her it didn't matter if she found a light switch or not, something that chilled her blood.
The refrigerator d
id not vibrate with a low, throaty hum, although it could be temporarily at the off cycle. Still, every working refrigerator she knew exuded a clammy exterior chill. This one was as warm as hour-old dishwater. Her questioning hand found the handle, slightly sticky with--sniff--halibut halitosis, and cracked the door, her eyes reflexively squinting shut against the expected glare of the interior refrigerator light.
Nothing. When she finished her shuffle at the hoped-for wall behind it and patted her hand up and down in the dark, she was not even mildly exhilarated to finally find a light switch under her fingers. The button stood at attention: up in the "On" position, but no light prevailed. Electrically speaking, the house was dead.
Temple clutched her tote bag to her side for company fully loaded, it was almost that big--and thought. Had the electric company jumped the gun and turned off the service? Had Miss Tyler's bill payments been delayed by her death and her power turned off? What about the cats? When had the power gone out? After Peggy Wilhelm's last feeding, but Temple wasn't sure when Peggy made her nighttime visits. Obviously, before it got as late and dark as this. Peggy would not want to be caught in a deserted house too late. Smart woman.
Well, Temple would just have to feel her way back to the front door and consult with Sister Seraphina next door on what to do now that the house was without power. Or she could feel her way forward in the opposite direction, deeper into the house, where she now heard scuffling sounds that didn't sound like cats. Noises that sounded like feet, moving in the distance.
Sure.
Blandina Tyler was worried about her cats and had come back to take care of them.
Sure.
Temple tried to ignore the anxiety that sent prickles rushing down her arms, the numb disbelief reaching out to paralyze her mind.
Cat on a Blue Monday Page 27