“Don’t hurt him!” Temple warned.
“Me, hurt him? Have you seen the size of the claws on this kitty-cat?”
“Yoo-hoo!” came a yodel from the apartment building’s back door. Electra Lark—or rather the Day-Glo muumuu she wore—soon followed it. She was one of the last living women in America to holler “yoo-hoo” and wear muumuus, separately or simultaneously.
“Either of you play the organ?” The landlady stood panting before them, her hair a picturesque postpunk patchwork of lime-Jell-O green, old-lady lavender and fire-engine red.
Temple just shook her head. Matt looked too dazed to shake anything, which was a real shame in Temple’s opinion.
Electra Lark was checking a California Raisin watch on her chubby wrist. “Euphonia’s home sick and I’ve got to do a can’t-wait wedding at seven-thirty. earlier? It won’t seem legal without a march.”
“I play—a little,” said Matt. He was standing with his hands in his khaki pants pockets, looking adorably diffident.
“Really, Matt? You can play the organ?” Electra vibrated with relief. “Why didn’t you say so? I can give you a deal on the rent if you can back up Euphonia. She has four kids.” Electra rolled her eyes. “Emergencies are built in.”
“I only play by ear, and I don’t know Lohengrin,” he warned.
“Not to worry.” Electra’s amethyst crystal ear cuffs flashed as she drew Matt’s tanned, gilt-haired arm through her freckled, plump one. “Just so it sounds solemn and churchlike.”
Temple watched them stroll around the circular building, envying women of a certain age—say sixty-something—who could commit certain liberties with men of a certain attractiveness without anybody thinking anything of it.
Then she kicked herself—figuratively. (The Weitzmans were far too pointed for literal admonishment.) What was she doing—more to the point, thinking?
Here one man had left her flat and friendless in Vegas just three months ago; why’d she care if Prince Charming himself moved into the next apartment? Sure, Matt seemed friendly and low-key, but Max Kinsella had seemed a lot of things, also—including too serious about her to leave without warning. Max, who’d coaxed her out of the best PR job—position—she’d ever had, the Guthrie, for heaven’s sake. Three days and she’d jilted common sense to follow him to Vegas like a Pacific-bound lemming deflected to Sand Central. Max had found the Circle Ritz and charmed Electra into giving them a corner unit. He’d even charmed Temple into envisioning a someday-ceremony in the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel.... That had been Max, an unlucky charm from first to last.
Resurrecting the memories of their intemperate romance and Max’s cool departure always pureed Temple’s emotions; Temple had been considered sensible until Max. If her Guthrie compatriots could see her now, flacking hither and yon, too ashamed to crawl back to the city she’d forsaken, too stubborn to give up on Vegas and herself just because a man had stranded her there.
Temple concentrated on the pool area’s deserted serenity, on putting the past back where it belonged. The Lover’s Knot Wedding Chapel was a long block off the Strip’s twenty-four-hour hullabaloo, but the Circle Ritz gardens, set back from the fevered honky-tonk action, were peaceful and secret.
Temple picked up the cat carrier and went indoors, where a vintage air conditioner kept the lobby temperature a steady 74 degrees during the long, torrid summer. Curiosity overcame her at the elevator doors. She left the case there to dash through the breezeway to the Lover’s Knot, trying not to let her staccato heels disrupt the wedding in progress.
The tiny chapel exploded with flowers (mostly recycled from Sam’s Funeral Home on Charleston Boulevard; Sam was either an ex- or a would-be beau of Electra’s). The happy but hurried couple stood poised in the trellised archway. Ranks of hatted heads filled the pews, but they covered brains of discarded pantyhose and Poly-fil, for Electra had fashioned this soft-sculpture congregation one figure at a time with her own talented fingers.
Dwarfing the little Lowery organ on one sideline, Matt Devine sat in his emerald-green shirt and khaki pants, looking like a PGA pro dragooned into musical servitude. Electra’s muumuu was concealed by a rusty black graduation robe that gave her a properly clerical look. She nodded once and smugly to the waiting Matt.
The organ huffed into life. Temple listened, first curious, then surprised. Music, marchlike and softly sensuous, swelled into the cathedral-ceilinged chamber. The couple advanced with the traditional nervous stutter of measured paces. Hat brims on the gathered mannequins seemed to nod in approval.
Temple blinked. It had been a rough day. She’d found a dead body, earned a long-distance record for carrying the world’s heaviest cat, met a devastating new tenant of the male persuasion just when she was terminally down on the opposite sex, and now she was melting to the spell of a wedding march she’d never heard before. In a minute, she’d be hallucinating the “congregation” humming along in chorus.
She got the hallelujah out of there.
“Okay, kitty,” Temple told the cat on the last leg of her journey. “This is a very special place. It’s round, see, the whole building. What we have here is my front door— shhhh; just a minute while I find my keys!—solid coffered mahogany. They don’t waste wood like this anymore. Not since the fifties. This was some ritzy place until it hit the skids in the seventies and Electra came along to gentrify it. Now you get to call it home in the nineties.”
The door hushed reluctantly open on solid brass hinges; it was that heavy. Temple lugged the carrier over the threshold. Then she was inside, and any of her Minneapolis friends who might have wondered why Temple stayed on in Las Vegas when Max vamoosed would know.
“Nice, huh? I’ll let you out, you look around, and then we eat.”
This agenda apparently suited the cat. He emerged cautiously from the carrier, putting one massive paw before the other as precisely as a chorus girl at the Tropicana.
To the left was the odd wedge-shaped kitchen, but after one long whisker-quivering sniff, the cat turned toward the living room, padding silently across the walnut parquet floor.
Temple loved her place, with or without Max. Its decor was a concoction of imagination and serendipity rather than of money and time. The major rooms were pie-shaped wedges widening to curved exterior windows. Vaulted white plaster ceilings seemed to ripple like sand dunes to meet the walls, generating a soft, aquatic play of light. No wonder Electra was a bit mystical after living here for almost twenty years.
The black cat was not interested in mystical or aquatic unless a tasty finned morsel was involved. He headed for the French doors, paws braced on the struts, to size up the triangular garden patio beyond the living room.
“No outside,” she told him, setting her apartment thermostat a bit lower for the evening. “That reminds me; I’d better round up a roaster pan or something. Yeah, that’s the bathroom, my bathroom, so don’t get any ideas.”
The cat was poking his jet-black nose behind the toilet. He stretched like a ladder against the inch-square tiles of the bathroom walls, reaching for the lone, small window. “Too high for even you, smarty!”
He agreed, for shortly he was in her bedroom, inspecting her piles of clothes—“So I’m untidy; so what. We’re not married or anything.” He leaped atop the California king-size bed to recline in the exact middle—“Off! If you’re lucky you’ll get a pillow in the corner. That’s what I tell all my male sleepovers.”
His paw edged the louvered closet doors open to reveal a treasure trove of shoe soles. “Sniffing? No monkey business! I’ll get you the proper facilities in a few minutes.” The cat stretched up the inside of a closet door, his extended forelegs playfully patting a poster taped to the door.
“Yeah, you got it, bud. My dirty little secret. You are looking at one of the last remaining vestiges of ‘The Mystifying Max’ in Vegas. Right, worth a good long yawn. What a bore. So predictable of a magician to just vanish, for heaven’s sake.”
Temple regarded
her memento. The Mystifying Max had a look both puckish and lethal, hair so black you’d expect to find it in your stocking on Christmas morning and strong, bony, clever hands. He wore a navy turtleneck and a “now you see it, now you don’t” expression, which pretty much summed up their relationship.
She picked up the cat, an intemperate decision. He still weighed a ton. But his eyes were almost as green as The Mystifying Max’s.
“I hope you’re not two of kind,” she murmured into his thick ruff, “and aren’t gonna run out on me, too. You I need. Somehow, some way, you’re gonna defuse this murder thing at the ABA for me; I know it.”
The cat, for all his bulk, remained complacently cradled in Temple’s arms, although his green eyes were roaming the Dairy Queen ceiling as if searching for a way out.
Temple tightened her grip. “Don’t you do that to me! Don’t you dare!”
5
The Fall Guy
Oh, the personal complications that result from the simple if somewhat unprecedented impulse to do a good deed in a naughty world.
I refer to my subterfuge of allowing someone else to stumble over the body while in pursuit of yours truly. I had not anticipated having to put up with the inconvenience of my own capture. Nor would it be lost on any of my intimate acquaintances that a canvas book bag, however sturdy, is less than sufficient to contain a dude of my fighting weight should I require egress.
Yet it is my last wish at the scene of the crime to create a scene of another kind, so I go quietly into that good, navy-blue-canvas night.
The portable cell is another matter. Even as clever an operator as myself knows that those steel bars latch on the outside. My particular prison is formed from nubbly plastic in an ugly shade of beige that resembles certain commercial cat foods of my very passing acquaintance. It does not do a thing for my coloring, not to mention a physique that was never meant to be crammed into a cell designed for the wimpy common housecat.
I take all this in relatively decent grace. The Master Plan calls for my swift and discreet removal from any connection—mental or physical—with the corpus delicti. As even schemes of mice and men oft gang a-gummy, to paraphrase the Scottish poet, so does Midnight Louie’s.
For one thing, I do not count on landing in the custody of a feisty doll like Miss Temple Barr. During my day in stir at the convention center she keeps me close by most of the time. (Who can blame her? She is not an undiscriminating little doll.)
This permits me to hear more than rests easily on my abnormally sharp ears. Although I have revealed the dastardly deed without establishing myself as a suspect, I had not expected my self-preservation tactic to make a sweet-and-tart little dish like this Temple doll the fall girl, so to speak.
It becomes clear, as the voices of ABA and convention center policy growl outside my polyurethane prison walls, that Miss Temple Barr is in worse trouble than myself, her job being that of burying bodies rather than tripping over them.
Although she reacts with enough fighting spirit to see her through a midnight free-for-all behind a mud-wrestling palace, my responsibility in this matter is all too clear: on my honor as a gentleman I am obliged to extract one little doll from one big mess that she would not be in—were it not for her unfortunate attraction to my fleeing form.
My strongest hand is to keep my cards glued to the chest, sit tight and play dumb. This is where the indignity comes in: I must allow myself to be treated like a domestic pet.
So I submit to being dragged from my cell in the most interesting garden behind the intriguing Circle Ritz without making a run for it. This joint, however unusual, is not up to the standards of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. Any fool who knows Midnight Louie would anticipate my normal game plan upon release from stir: up a palm tree, down to a rooftop and outa there.
However, I restrain myself and it is a good thing. I have always been a superb inside dude, if I say so myself, and it is when I am wafted by elevator to Miss Temple Barr's charming Pied-à-terre, otherwise known as a crash pad, that I get the skinny on her situation.
She is worried; this is obvious when she thinks herself alone and unobserved. (Some of my best pals have said that I ought to go into this psychoanalyzing game. I have a talent for listening to people’s troubles—and I even have the whiskers for the job.)
Anyway, this little doll chirrups to herself and me as she goes about her nightly domestic duties, which include an outing to the Quik Pik for a bag of concrete makings and an aluminum roaster pan.
The last occasion I see a bag of that size and likely contents, Guido Calzone is preparing a pair of permanent booties and a quick trip to the bottom of Lake Mead for “Noodles” Venucci. As for the roaster pan, certain large fowls of my acquaintance have not fared well in such a vicinity.
Even worse than my speculations is in store, as I discover late in the night, but first the most important revelation. I find it on the inside of Miss Temple Barr’s closet door, always a significant location. People tend to stash their dope, as well as outgrown clothes and dreams, in closets. I am partial to such areas myself, mainly because they are cozy, dark and quiet, qualities not often to be found in the same place at one time in a town like Las Vegas.
Anyway, there it is, a poster of this commanding dude resembling a cross between Count Dracula and Tom Cruise. I have not encountered such a piercing stare since I went eye to eye with an ailurophobic pit bull. This particular poster boy has black hair. I have always found the ladies to be especially partial to dudes having black hair, with which I am especially well equipped. It is obvious that my undeniable attractions have led Miss Temple Barr astray, and not for the first time.
I explore my new base of operations while she snoozes in the bedroom. Not a bad pad; I discover several choice corners that are not really corners, more like angles. This appeals to my sense of humor, not to mention self-defense. And the patio outside the living room windows is on the second floor, making it a handy perch for tidbits of an avian nature.
Yes, Midnight Louie could do all right in this joint, and nowhere do I sniff the trail of a yammering human creature who is wet behind the ears and in other more unmentionable places and does not have the inbred good manners or sense to shut up and use its tongue for basic hygiene.
My own natural demands, I admit, compel me to explore the roaster pan, which Miss Temple has wisely tucked behind the guest bathroom door. This is a cheesy aluminum affair—talk about “Tin Pan Alley”—full up with the worst excuse for sand that I have ever seen—dusty, coarse nuggets of no earthly value whatsoever. When I give them an exploratory paw, a cloud of dust clogs my sinuses and cakes my freshly groomed top coat.
I am even more chagrined when I realize for what purpose this pathetic dish of gravel is intended. I am, however, a good citizen and no litterbug except when forced to it, so I avail myself of the opportunity to mark my new digs.
Later, I slip into the bedroom (I am very good at this sort of maneuver also, and have always been an “upstairs man”) and allow my little doll the honor of a warm body to curl up next to. This is not an unpleasant arrangement, especially when she wakes up and makes little manipulations with my ears, my favorite egregious zone. I cannot keep the ladies off me, to tell the truth, and have never been so crude as to complain about this turn of events.
But then, all of a sudden-like, Miss Temple Barr sits bolt upright, as if she has just taken a stroll down Nightmare Alley.
“Oh, kitty!” she says.
I cringe, which is hard to detect in the dark. No one calls me “kitty” except tourists; even though some twenty million of them mill around per year, I see as little of them as possible. Miss Temple Barr is not fully house-trained as yet, so I forgive her gaffe.
“Oh, kitty,” she coos again, like I say. "What a brilliant idea! You are going to help me defuse this murder thing!"
Now she is talking!
Of course I will make every effort to solve the foul deed so that my little doll’s job is no longer in jeopardy. I
am relieved that she has tumbled so quickly to my unique value, even if it took a dream to do it. I return posthaste to my beauty sleep.
I know I will need my rest because I have a feeling (I am also a tad psychic, did I mention this?) that we are going to have a big day tomorrow.
6
Authors on Parade
The afternoon edition of the Saturday Las Vegas Review-Journal lay scattered on Temple’s desk, its second front— the first page of section two—faceup.
Also faceup was a photograph of the black alley cat, checked deerstalker cap tilted over one ear; magnifying glass cradled between his midnight paws.
The headline on the boxed feature read:
CONVENTION CENTER’S CRIME-FINDING CAT KEEPS MUM ON HIS OWN MYSTERIOUS PAST
An above-head kicker announced, A bookish sort, in 18-point italic type.
The local PR office staff had crowded around the first issues of the newspaper when they arrived just past noon—Bud Dubbs, Temple, the secretaries, everyone but Crawford Buchanan. Even the cat was present, although contained in the cat carrier and, in deference to the headline writer’s veracity, keeping mum.
“Fast work.” Dubbs, in shirtsleeves, stood cradling his elbows. He regarded the feature story with bemused fondness. “Don’t know how you managed it, Temple. This human—or inhuman—interest angle virtually wipes out the shock of the murder.”
“I know,” Temple purred. She had an earthy, flexible voice that reflected the emotions of the moment. “Smug” would not have been too strong a word to describe her present mood. “Betsy Cohen’s their top feature writer,” Temple added. “I just hoped she dug cats. But don’t forget our feline star. He was an angel; didn’t even try to eat the deerstalker. It does work, doesn’t it? Now the murder is a footnote to the cat story, and I love the way Betsy portrays this furry fellow as an undercover literary type lapping up ambiance at the ABA.”
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