Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “That was brutal.”

  “She’s a tenacious young woman. I needed to be brutal. Then I installed you in that Swiss clinic at great expense and manipulation and set about trying to trace Kathleen O’Connor. The Kathleen O’Connor from twenty years ago in Northern Ireland.”

  “Kathleen O’Connor. The name means nothing.”

  Garry’s now mustache-less face grimaced. “‘Kitty the Cutter’ is what your ex-girlfriend named her.”

  “And what is the ex-girlfriend’s name?”

  “Temple. Temple Barr.”

  Max winced to remember kissing Revienne’s temple and feeling an odd tenderness, a moment of fugitive memory.

  “Oh, God. Why didn’t I remember that there was someone?”

  “You’d decided to let her go, Max. Another man loves her, one she became attracted to when you disappeared before, for almost a year. You knew it was too dangerous to associate with her when we were making inroads, finally, on uncovering the Synth.”

  “The . . . sinth? Is that some Star Wars thing?”

  Garry chuckled sadly. “So odd how you remember all the minutiae of our crazy modern world and nothing significant to your current situation and life. The Synth is a presumed international cadre of spies and magicians. That’s a very natural mating of interests, as you and I prove. We’re going to the airport, but we have a small private jet at our disposal, so we don’t risk exposure. I’ve got the proper forged passports. The flight will be long.”

  “My duffle bag—” He wasn’t used to baggage and had dropped it at the scene.

  “The musically inclined Hans scooped it up while we were tussling before pulling the car away. It’s on the front seat. Any weapons in it?”

  “Just clothes and grooming items.”

  “Apparently not a razor,” Gandolph commented dryly.

  “Don’t you like my Pirates of the Caribbean look? It took a very expensive electric razor to cultivate this unkempt appearance.”

  “The question is, did Dr. Schneider appreciate it?”

  Max grew thoughtful. “I don’t suppose I care at the moment. How could I forget the ‘love of my life’?”

  “Hopefully, or sadly, you may not forever. Meanwhile, we’re on the trail of the woman who ruined your life.”

  “To extract justice?”

  “She’s dead too.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “Closure,” Garry said.

  Closure.

  Maybe it took a memory to see any point in that, Max thought.

  Dancing in the Dark

  At night the underwater lights in the Circle Ritz backyard pool made the aquamarine rectangle gleam like a glimpse into Atlantis.

  Temple sat in the temperate night air, on a lounge chair, watching Matt do his laps.

  “Now I know what the expression ‘bronze god’ means,” she commented dreamily. “Will that spray-on tan fade fast?”

  He lifted his wet head from the water, his blond hair silvered in the moonlight.

  “I sure hope so. Why do you think I’m swimming in chlorine? I want to wash that dance show out of my hair and off my epidermis.”

  “Why? You won.”

  He dived and resurfaced at the edge near her chair, crossing his bronzed arms on the edge to hold himself up.

  “Yeah, and the show raised $180,000 for the kids’ cancer fund, so it was worth the hassle, although not the attempts on my life. And that doesn’t include being mobbed by tween girls from thirteen to ninety-three after the final show.”

  “It was great that Glory B. won the women’s vote. She was so grateful. You could see her maturing on the spot. What a wonderful moment. All the contenders won something—self-confidence, renewal, fresh job opportunities.”

  “Fresh commercial temptations.”

  “So your perfectly highlighted blond head hasn’t been turned?”

  “Lord, they want me to do spray-tan TV ads.”

  “You’d make more money for good causes, including a house fund maybe.”

  “Not spray-tan anything. I’ll let my agent handle it. Tony knows my bottom line is human dignity, even though I’ve played fast and loose with it lately. At least my dance gig exposed and stopped one very sick man from harming more people. I never dreamed my radio advice could get someone killed.”

  “Your advice didn’t kill her. Her husband did.”

  “He was insanely bitter about so much. He’d fit the Barbie Doll Killer’s stalker profile.”

  “Hank Buck was a local problem. I think Molina got a lead on that Barbie doll case during this dance show stalking. She has to win that one. Her kid’s bedroom was targeted with one of the mutilated dolls.”

  “Now that she knows her homegrown stalker isn’t Max.” Matt tilted his head to watch Temple. “You must be pleased about that. You always told Molina he wasn’t the villain she thought.”

  “Yeah. I wish Max knew she was coming around to reason about him. If there’s a Max out there to know anything.”

  “You think he’s . . . dead?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Oh, Mr. Radio Shrink! You are so not going to trick me into missing Max mode! Not now, when I want to go over the Temple tango moves as soon as you get out of that water, dry off, and dance me back to our lovely pied-à-terre.”

  He laughed and let the flat of his hand hit an arc of sparkling water toward her chair. “You don’t like to swim.”

  “Not in pools. Along the turquoise Riviera . . . that’s different.”

  “You’re an expensive little sea nymph.”

  “Darn right.” She sighed. “Rafi really wants a relationship with Mariah. He’s got a head start. I hope her mother will cooperate.”

  “This injury has broken down her resistance to reality. Like Kitty the Cutter’s slash did mine.”

  “Really? That was . . . liberating?”

  “It’s liberating to confront that some people want to hurt you, for no reason you can see, and you don’t have to hurt back. ‘Hurt’ was too much a part of my so-called nuclear and extended family in Chicago. We don’t have to keep up the tradition.”

  “We’re supposed to head north and meet your family and mine someday soon.”

  “Someday soon. You don’t want to come into the water with me? It’s as silken and warm as unchilled wine.” He lifted a hand. “Come on.”

  “I’m dressed.”

  “Clothes dry.”

  “My hair.”

  “Is perfect, dry or wet.”

  “I paddle like a springer spaniel.”

  “I’m a merman from shining, sunken Atlantis. I’ll hold you up, and you’ll breathe underwater.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Don’t breathe underwater. But come with me.”

  His hand pushed closer.

  Temple sighed, stood, kicked off her slides, and went to squat by the pool’s edge. “You are a very metaphysical guy, you know that?”

  He grasped her hand and pulled her down. “Shut your eyes and think two stars to the right and straight on till morning.”

  He pulled her forward into the alien element. The water was tepid and as silken as he said. She sank in it until her chin broke water and he buoyed her up. She gasped with surprise at the buoyancy, the way cares seemed to float up from her like bubbles.

  “Take a deep breath,” he said, “and don’t breathe after that.”

  They sank down together to Atlantis, kissing until she saw its gleaming turquoise towers behind her eyelids. Her hair swirled like seaweed. They were no place on earth. It felt heavenly.

  No Good Dude Goes Unpunished

  “. . . and the food is vershtunken.”

  I am sitting in the parking lot of the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, an elegant five-story fifties’ doughnut of a building wrapped in black marble, listening to my jet-black dam unleash a flood of invective about my home, sweet home.

  I mean the word dam not as a water barrie
r or a swear word—cat heaven forbid!—but as the word that indicates the alma mater of myself, Miss Ma Barker.

  I hasten to ease her aggravation. “Free-to-Be-Feline is highly regarded as an earth-sensitive, digestatory product, literally green, which you must admit is all the politically correct rage these days,” I say, not believing a word of it.

  I am known to loathe the stuff by one and all, save my devoted roommate, Miss Temple Barr. Clever as she is, she has never tumbled to the fact that her favorite feline health food is—not to put too fine a point on it—“vershtunken.”

  Meanwhile, Ma Barker, a pretty testy old dame who commands a feral colony, rants on.

  “I led my loyal entourage all the way down from north Las Vegas to this so-called Promised Land to hand them bowlfuls of dried, army-green rabbit turds? Served in sterile plastic? Not so much as a fresh, grease-soaked fast-food wrapper for a napkin? Even the do-gooder brigade of homeless cat-trappers and ball-snappers did better by us than you, son.”

  “They mean well!” I cry. That was ever the best, though weak, defense for ignorant humanity. “I, ah, find Free-to-Be-Feline in my own personal food bowls daily.”

  I nimbly dodge admitting to actually eating it.

  “You have gone over to the Dark Side, son. I understand. Mere security is a powerful lure.”

  “Hey! I provide security, I do not crave it.”

  “Whatever, I have been scouting the neighborhood and have found a more amenable location.”

  “The Circle Ritz is a very good address!”

  “That may be, but I have never been an uptown girl, except geographically. Look at us, son. We are marked by the Tipped Ear. We have been trapped, ’napped, and lopped off at the ear and in other, more personal, external and internal places. The world knows us for a neutered colony, but we are not about to give up our rep as a mad, bad street gang.”

  “I know that, Ma. Getting free vittles is not a sign of defeat.”

  “I do not object to the free vittles, just the quality at your pad here. I have found a better free lunch.”

  “Yeah?” If I am dubious, it is because I am well aware how little the feral elements of our breed are welcomed anywhere.

  “Yeah. I am talking juicy, greasy burgers. I am talking long, lank, salty fries. I am talking the dregs of thick, creamy milkshakes. I am talking doughnuts.”

  “Doughnuts! That is the worst of empty calorie foods. No carnivore worth its fangs would sink them into a glazed doughnut.”

  “That is where you are so wrong, son. Follow me.”

  She pushes up onto her venerable limbs and stalks off, her knife-sharp shoulder blades parting the steamy Vegas daylight like shark fins.

  I have busted my derriere getting Ma and her gang to a safe house. How annoying that she spurns it. Those of our breed are masters of spurning, however, and food is the prime example of what we can achieve in that direction.

  Speaking of directions, Ma Barker is heading northeast of the Circle Ritz, cross-country. She is a cagey mitt-to-mitt fighter and even vanquished a raccoon, a feat for one of her advanced years. Still, I do not trust her alone in new territory.

  We finally halt in some weeds near a low, undistinguished-looking brick building. The spunky, funky Circle Ritz it is not.

  Call it one-story bland.

  However, my nose sniffs old, cold oil that has dripped from cars and . . . fast food. The place has a manly aura, and I am ever in favor of that.

  I spot a lot of cars at rest, otherwise known as parked. They are also marked.

  “This is it?” I ask. “The site you have chosen over my own premises?”

  “Right.” Ma Barker’s still-skinned nose lifts to inhale stale oil and dead fish and overcooked cow.

  “Are you crazy, Ma? This is the southeast substation of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. They have a no-tolerance policy toward gangs. They will sweep up your posse and cart them off to stir and the so-called ‘shelter’ death chambers faster than you can hiss Free-to-Be Feline.”

  “You think so, sonny? Look, my lead agent has made first contact.”

  I look, and I have to admit my old lady is a pretty canny strategist.

  None other than Gimpy, the gangly adolescent three-legged victim of a car accident, is hopping around the station’s back door, mewing piteously. I hate to see our kind stoop to begging for what we should be given, but the cruel breaks of life on the street have made Gimpy into an orphan out of a Charles the Dickins tome.

  A bicycle officer in summer Bermuda shorts uniform is leaning down to share some double cheeseburger with little Gimpy.

  “She is female and an easy touch,” I hiss to Ma Barker. “No way will the male cops let your gang set up shop here.”

  Another officer steps out the door, the burly sort just the right size to kick an inconvenient cat out of the way.

  “Poor little bastard,” he says. “Ear is nicked, so he has had his balls cut off too. I got some take-out Chinese shrimp he might go for.” He ducks back in and soon returns with Gimpy’s fish course.

  “Somebody underwrote getting that leg surgically removed,” Miss Bicycle Officer, heretofore IDed as Miss BO, says. Hey, it is hot in this town!

  “He must have been in horrid shape to need it removed,” she goes on, staring into the surrounding brush. “There must be a colony around here. The trap, neuter, and release programs say it is better to keep them on the streets until all the clodder members die out.”

  “Clodder?” the guy asks, “like in cluttered?”

  “Naw, it is the official name for a community of stray cats.”

  “Huh.” The guy squats carefully beside Greedy Gut, aka Gimpy. He chuckles. “Look at the little fellah eat. He must still be putting on muscle.”

  In his dreams!

  Meanwhile, Ma Barker is massaging me with her mitt, shivs out. “That clodder talk was our cue, Louie. Time to take a bow. We can hang back like we are bashful, and you lower one ear so they do not see you have two whole ones.”

  I gaze at Ma’s face with the rakish ear at half-mast. I thought a raccoon or another cat had taken a chunk out of it, but now I see that the missing piece has been nipped off in a nice straight line.

  Nobody nips the ear off Midnight Louie!

  I growl and would retreat, except that Ma has her claws in me right where it could do some damage to my perfectly functional male member and satellites.

  I too am politically correct in the failure-to-reproduce department, but my neutering was accomplished internally, with a human procedure called a vasectomy. That is my license to thrill in this town. I cannot strew unwanted litters anywhere, although I can distribute my personal favors hither and yon as I please.

  Trouble is, my lack of littering capability does not show, and I could be whisked away and stripped of my will to love, by mistake. What a tragedy!

  So when Ma Barker wants me to step forward into a lineup of two, I am hesitant.

  “Move it, lad!” She whacks me in the rear, all four shivs at full extension.

  We bound as one into the limelight, the bright open sunshine of a Las Vegas spring day.

  “There is a couple more!” BO cries, delighted at my quandary.

  Officer Shrimp Combo goes from a squat to a looming position. “Yeah. A couple more members of the Off-Strip Clodders, right? One pretty tough-looking gang.”

  “Oh, those poor cats. They look so ragged and hungry.”

  I beg your pardon, ma’am! I am sleek, well-fed, and well able to see to it that I remain so. Ma may be a bit ragged from her fight-to-the-death with the raccoon, but I am as smooth as George Clooney in a black dinner jacket for the Oscars.

  “Come on, kitties.”

  I have not fallen for that con game since I was six weeks old, but Ma Barker inches forward, doing a pretty good imitation of Gimpy’s pathetic gait.

  Officer Shrimp Combo is galvanized into action. “I better see what other tidbits the crew has. That is one skinny old raggedy cat.”r />
  Ma Barker looks over her sharp-boned shoulder to shoot me a triumphant wink with one still half-swollen-shut green peeper.

  I shake my head and disappear back into the scratchy brush.

  How could any self-respecting feline give up the moderne comforts of the Circle Ritz under my protection to put her gang’s lot in with a bunch of beat cops?

  She gets up and lurches back to the bushes and me for a farewell.

  “This is a superior setup for us. We are used to fast food, in fact, we prefer it. So you can continue running your fancy P.I. firm from the fancy-schmancy Circle Ritz, and we street cats will hang with the street cops. I am sure we will be able to pick up a lot of hot tips for you about nefarious goings-on, and we can help these folks in beige keep crime down. Now that we are all fixed, we need a hobby.”

  It is considered bad form among all species to talk back to one’s mother and I am speechless anyway.

  I nod and slink off, returning home to a bowl full of Free-to-Be-Feline. I must summon all my energy to perform the daily scam job that gets my Miss Temple to slather edible little nothings on top of that noxious base so a guy can eat.

  Somehow, I fear that the feral crew I hoped to help has helped themselves to the better cuisine. Life is not fair.

  Midnight Louie

  Mulls Many Matters

  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful parent.

  I know, I know. That line was originally aimed at ungrateful offspring.

  But these relationships work both ways and I am both amazed and peeved that my grand plan to relocate Ma Barker’s gang to the Circle Ritz has ended in a mass desertion.

  Not that I am merely taking this personally. I am also deeply concerned that the whole clodder will now be subsisting on the worst of junk food fresh from the fast-food joints. Every day. Greasy burgers and fries. Chicken wings. Barbequed beef. All those treats that help our law enforcement personnel beef up for the job.