Cat in a White Tie and Tails

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “It’s not a bad idea,” she said, stunned to hear herself sound so calm. “Instead of reading Mariah the riot act on her American Idol dreams, I’ll let her pursue them. Within limits.” Fierce again. “She … met you at the reality TV teen competition. I’ll let you, will suggest, you’ll work with her on her … aspirations. Within limits.”

  “Okay.” He was smiling at her, she didn’t understand why, after all the empty years, but it made him look handsome and even kind. “Can I ask—within limits—if you’ll stand up and sing with the band tonight? Just a casual number. They’ve been glancing our way every sixty seconds. They miss you.”

  She gave them another regretful glance. So much had been expendable in her life.

  “And Carmen,” he said as she rose. “I’d suggest you start working up that oldie, ‘Begin the Beguine.’ That would get this place on the map.”

  “And me?”

  “On YouTube for sure.”

  He laughed as she made a face and walked toward the guys in the band.

  They were grinning like idiots and she had missed them and the music so much, she could scream. She guessed she’d sing instead.

  Chapter 23

  The Second Coming

  Planning a triumphal return is where I excel, particularly when it is my own.

  I have no doubt that consternation must be running amok, particularly on my Miss Temple’s part, when the residents and visitors to the apartment in Pulaski Park discover I am not merely hiding out in an insanely clever spot no human could discern with the naked eye or nose, but that I am totally gone … kit, caboodle, and carrier.

  Knowing what dismay my kidnappers caused my nearest and dearest led me to annihilate them without mercy and to literally “nail” them. Street smarts now have led me into the proper neighborhood. Finding the exact address is no problem, since I am an … ahem … eidetic-savant.

  Now, if Miss Midnight Louise were here, she would jump on that assertion, as well as my back. No, I did not mean “idiot-savant.” That is a human stunted on all sorts of everyday knowledge but a genius in one particular area, usually music or mathematics. This eidetic-savant just never forgets a thing, especially my own scent and trail.

  Anyone who knows me also knows that I do not much do mathematics past the number of fighting shivs on each foot. As for music, my nocturnal jazz riffs are as well known among the furred contingent of cultural cognoscenti as are the classic stylings of the singer known as Carmen at Vegas’s Blue Dahlia nightclub. Let us just say that crime-solving and caterwauling make good partners.

  Meanwhile, I am marooned in Chicago, on the outside looking in.

  My next trick is to enter this alien apartment building and get to the appropriate floor.

  Were I in Las Vegas, I could accomplish my surprise return in a minute flat, since the round and layered Circle Ritz building is a piece of cake to scale and infiltrate. Here, not so much. I stroll around the brick exterior. The rear Dumpsters are not appetizing as a stepping-off place for a second-story assault. I have nothing against Dumpsters. They are to be admired for daily serving the homeless as well as the discriminating customer in search of a rare tidbit accidentally consigned to the scrap heap.

  However, this is Chicago, folks. Here you find a trend to corned beef and cabbage, baked beans and bacon, sausage and dumplings, and other odiferous, gassy foods.

  I am maybe the returning prodigal son; however, I do not really want the fatted calf, but only 99 percent lean. I decide that the velvet glove rather than the hooded claw is needed for the last leg of my epic journey.

  So I groom my always elegant formal black suit to satin perfection, tame my prone-to-be-bushy eyebrows and whiskers with a patina of saliva, and go to sit patiently by the front entrance. This place is not high-hat enough to have a doorman, so I am looking for a female of the species. They have an inborn soft spot for dudes of my sort.

  Luckily, in Chicago, a lot of them live in apartments.

  “Well, well. You are a sleek, handsome fellah.”

  When will men learn the lure of meticulous grooming? Too late. I am happy to fill the gap. Also, big tip here: The ladies adore soft furry ankle rubs. If you cannot afford to bestow faux fur-lined boots on your Chicago ladylove, grow a mustache and use fabric softener on it.

  My figure-eight moves around this particular lady’s calves escort her to the elevator doors, never impeding her footsteps.

  “Did you get left out of your home somehow? You are in far too fine condition to be a stray.”

  Yes, frequent fishing expeditions in the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, marathons down the Las Vegas Strip avoiding overbuilt guard dogs, bouts of rappelling down the handy palm tree at the Circle Ritz. All this is fine “conditioning.”

  I slip through the open elevator door with her. Her finger pauses over a floor button high above my head. “But where do you belong? I do not know every pet owner in the building.”

  Hmm. I will have to come up with a Stupid Pet Trick to communicate with a stranger. What would David Letterman do … or applaud? I turn around. Once. Twice. Then sit and cock my head like Fido.

  “Two? Floor two?”

  I circle again, twice more.

  “Four.”

  Two more circles add up to …

  “Six? Oh, pussycat, I must get off at five. I cannot send you up all alone in the elevator car. Who knows what might happen to you?”

  Not boredom in just one floor.

  I have imparted my message. I hold my place and sit tight. She will either send me on to floor six, or not.

  Her forefinger hits a button and I wait to see what she has decided. Which floor she has selected is a mystery to me. If she insists on bringing me to her own place, I will do the gigolo bit, dine enthusiastically, pretend to be perfectly enamored, and sneak out first thing in the morning never to be seen again.

  “Here we are. Floor six. I hope you were not simply annoyed by vermin when you kept turning around.”

  I step out without commenting on that slur and sniff along the hallway until I have reached the right door. How do I know it is the right door? I always leave a hint of mint on every exit wherever I am likely to be locked in. We of the superior breed may not be as finely tuned for following scent trails as the ordinary dog, say, but we are adept at leaving our extraordinarily individual colognes on surfaces.

  My new escort pauses to shake her head, then knock.

  I wait. I know the small round fish-eye hole in the door will allow inspection of my companion. She strikes me as the ideal pickup: a totally respectable lady of a certain age.

  The door opens.

  “Is this yours?” my companion asks.

  It takes a moment for Miss Krys to interpret the woman’s hand gesture and look down.

  Her eyes and mouth both make cute O’s of surprise.

  Her head turns over her shoulder as she broadcasts to those within. “Call off the dogs and the police. That damn cat is back from the dead.”

  I am not displeased by my dramatic introduction, but I am sure that poor lady at the door has been badly shaken.

  Chapter 24

  A Tale Untold

  Temple had never before had a full-house audience for eating crow in her career as a public relations specialist.

  She did now. Matt and his mother were seated at the small kitchen table, rapt with unspent tension. First the Effinger revelations, then this. Louie had lofted atop the kitchen counter to suddenly lick at a twitchy shoulder blade when he wasn’t staring implacably at Temple.

  His long tail dangled over the counter side, swinging back and forth, untouched by anything but his grooming tongue when he occasionally swung it up as if to reassure that it was all there, every last black hair.

  Temple clutched the old-fashioned kitchen wall-phone receiver in both hands, backpedaling while her audience eavesdropped on a desperate monologue.

  “No, it was not a kidnapping. Well, technically, yes. I mean, no! No, it was not a ‘catnapping.’ The
cat is back and is fine. A neighbor lady returned him. It was a prank call. Not mine to the police! The call to us about the cat being kidnapped was a prank call.

  “Yes, ‘malicious mischief’ would describe the incident.” Temple nodded and sent a relieved glance at her audience.

  “Is the cat … licensed, by the way? Ah, not here. He’s visiting from out of town. What kind of cat visits? He’s, ah, he’s worked as a commercial cat. TV commercials. Yes, you could say he is valuable and that is why I, we, were so concerned. Yes, I do understand that legally a pet is considered property and can only be worth a small amount of money. Oh. I might get something in civil court.

  “But that’s not necessary now, Officer. He’s back and all right.

  “No, sir, there’s no way to identify what kids may have called. They were older kids. They sounded very serious. We’re all mostly visitors here, and we’re most impressed by the Chicago PD’s sharp response to small cases as well as large ones. I’m sorry we’ve been a bother, but this is Chicago. I’m sure another call for a crime—or three—in progress has already come in that is right on the dispatched officer’s way.

  “Oh.”

  Temple eyed the others and nodded, gratefully, at the phone. “Thank you. No, he’s not the yellow-striped one. No, not the fancy fluffy white one. Black hair, green eyes, as my first call mentioned.”

  Temple finally hung up and stared back at Louie. “We’re off the hook with the cops, but how’d you escape the crooks?”

  Louie wasn’t talking. He jumped off the counter, flourishing his untampered-with tail behind him.

  “Not a hair out of place,” Matt commented. “We might succumb to mass apoplexy but Midnight Louie rocks on.”

  That made his mother laugh ruefully. “I hope his opinion of Chicago after this incident doesn’t change your mind about considering moving back.”

  Temple rejoined them at the table, which was covered with old papers of no apparent value from the fireproof file box.

  “Where’s Krys been since Louie got back?” she asked.

  “In her room.” Mira watched Matt rise, retrieve the wine bottle Krys had gone out to buy the previous night, and take the dry glasses from the dish drainer. He handed them around, filled again.

  Mira shrugged. “Krys is always on some ‘device’ or other, cruising the Internet, working on her Web site. She’s a mature girl in some ways and in some ways—”

  “Not,” Temple said. She sipped from her wineglass. “I suppose we’ll never know what happened to Louie, or his carrier.”

  “Adios, carrier,” Matt said with a toasting gesture. “Small loss, unlike Louie. I wonder if it’s a good idea to call the police off. Those phone threats meant business.”

  “It’s especially disturbing that the creeps knew we and Louie were here,” Temple agreed. “There must be something explosive in these papers.”

  “That would be silly.” Mira flicked her nails at the yellowed array of paper. “Except for the first manila folder with official documents in it—Cliff’s grade school report cards, high school graduation certificate, and driver’s test results, things his late mother must have kept, poor woman—it’s all tax returns, as I feared.”

  “What about the high school yearbook?” Temple flipped through the worn booklet, attracted to the vintage hair and clothes on the cover. Dorky. Compared to now, teens dressed like forty-year-olds.

  Yellowed newspaper clippings thrust between the pages memorialized meaningless athletic games and the usual horrific teen-driver car crash that seemed to plague every graduating class, even today.

  Matt pulled the book toward him. “Somebody who died, maybe? Could that have been significant to Effinger?” He pulled out a couple tattered pages covered with crude doodles and cartoons.

  “That’s nothing extreme,” Temple noted. “Just the usual superhero comic sketches along with endless outlines of cars guys in my high school class drew. What did you draw?” she asked Matt.

  “I don’t know. Jet planes and angel wings.”

  “Escape,” his mother said, pretty perceptively.

  Mira was threatening to get teary, so Temple jumped in with a comment. “Technological and spiritual. That’s our media guy, Mr. Midnight.” She shuffled through the high school yearbook again. “These sketches aren’t bad. Captain Marvel fighting off the octopus is pretty anatomically correct. I mean muscle-wise.”

  “Why would Captain Marvel fight off an octopus? That would be Aquaman.”

  Temple was amused to see Matt grabbing the page and turning it his way to study the raw pencil sketches. She exchanged a knowing “boys will be boys” look with Mira.

  Matt was frowning even more once he had the sketch right side up.

  “This is … this is traced. It’s a copy of that classical sculpture in the Vatican collection.”

  Mira was astounded to the point of laughter. “Clifford? Drawing a classical sculpture in high school? Matt, maybe he was just a regular boy once, but he got caught up in the gangs once he got out. He concentrated on dressing sharp and getting jobs he could hang out on street corners to do.”

  “You married him graduation summer,” Matt reminded her, and himself. “Maybe you saw the boy who drew.”

  “I was one of ‘those girls’ who graduated with whispers, not hope and celebration. Clifford didn’t seem so bad at first. No one else would have me.”

  Temple looked down, finding her fingers smoothing the slick cover of the old yearbook. The same whispers haunted her high school graduating class. This girl. That condition. And then she vanished. It never ended. Odd about the Vatican preserving all those old Greek and Roman statues, most naked and anatomically correct, and all revived in the age of Michelangelo. Comic book supermen were modeled on those muscular ancient gods and heroes.…

  Temple grabbed the sketch Matt was regarding with an expression half puzzled and half repulsed.

  “I know what statue you’re thinking of,” she told him. “It was the man who angered the gods and they sent a sea serpent to kill him and his sons. It’s an amazing evocation of sheer human struggle and agony … and it’s also—wait for it—very similar to the man fighting a serpent constellation that was just in the news recently.”

  “Serpent. Constellation?” Mira was confused. “Isn’t Constellation a jet plane name, like those you drew when you were a kid, Matt?”

  “Not in this case,” Temple said. “I mean the constellations of stars in the sky the ancient Greeks named, just as they sculpted the ‘man versus sea monster’ statue. Matt.” She eyed him in triumph. “This is not the star map, but the full, founding image of the constellation called Ophiuchus.”

  “Oh-fee-you-cuss?” Mira was seriously confused. “Or ‘Oh, fie! You cuss?’”

  “The accent is on the ‘you’ part,” Matt said. “And nobody cusses.”

  “It’s ancient Greek,” Temple explained.

  “It certainly is to me.” Mira’s smile was bemused.

  Temple spelled it out for her. “Just think of it rhyming with ‘mucous.’”

  “I’d rather not. You kids.” Mira was chuckling now. “Krys, and now you two. I think the younger generations speak in code.”

  “This may have been used as a code by some very bad people,” Temple said. “Ophiucus is the lost thirteenth sign of the zodiac that a secret society in Las Vegas called the Synth took for its signature. Matt’s tracking Cliff Effinger to Vegas might have kicked off a sequence of crimes tied to the conspiracy of magicians and … other worse elements.”

  “The mob?” Mira asked.

  “Those two catnappers sure were.” Temple was also thinking of the international terrorists Max had been tangling with half his life.

  “Whatever is going on,” Matt said, “Effinger must have salted away something in these memorabilia that will shake Las Vegas to its criminal roots.”

  “Clifford was still using me,” Mira said, furious and showing it. “That ends here and now.”

  Krys came
charging in from the depths of the apartment … the two hundred private square feet of it otherwise known as her bedroom.

  “Squee!” she shouted. “People! Where’s that so not-Manx cat? I’m gonna make him a YouTube star.”

  “You don’t like him,” Temple pointed out. “Or me.”

  “That’s before I saw the local TV news hot flash on the Internet. That is so cool what he did. A major piece of pussycat performance art. And the centerpiece is that totally shallow materialistic icon, the leopard-pattern purse-pet bag! All the scene lacks is a stiletto heel, so if you’ll leave one behind, Tempie dear, I’ll immortalize it in 3-D.”

  Temple rose, trying not to overturn her kitchen chair. “If I leave it behind, it’ll be implanted in someone’s shallow, competitive irreverent rear end.”

  “Tush,” Krys said. “All’s forgiven. You rock. You all have to come into my room and get a load of Five News footage.”

  Temple opened her laptop on the kitchen table. “Show us right here and now.”

  “O-kay.” Krys commandeered Temple’s seat and moved the laptop cursor to a browser, then a news page. Listed along the right side were the local items.

  She clicked on one reading CHICAGO HOODS NAILED AND JAILED and clicked the video arrow to show a slow pan of a warehouse that looked as if a Die Hard movie had been filmed there just last week.

  A voice-over told the tale.

  “Police alerted to gang activity zeroed in on an abandoned warehouse on the south side today, finding two long-wanted criminals bagged and snagged in a trap of crating materials studded with rusted carpenter nails, apparent victims of assault via nail-gun, something new for the mayhem crowd.

  “Benny ‘the Viper’ Bennedetto and Waldo ‘the Weasel’ Walker were found unconscious and suffering from numerous ‘packaging’ wounds in a scene of chaos. Abandoned in the middle of the mess was what police describe as a ‘high-end cat carrier.’ The conclusion? These would-be mobsters must have been trying to round up rats and got caught in their own trap. Call Paris Hilton’s abused designer bag rehab center. The petty crooks come free for the taking.”