“I’m afraid I borrowed your cat carrier for Baker. Maeveleen, the bookstore owner, gave me one of hers, so we three are outa here in a limo to McCarran and a plane to—don’t ask me where; it’s hush-hush. Gotta go. See you at the next ABA in Vegas!”
Emily backed up and barged out the doors as Lorna and Temple braced them open.
“Forget the carrier,” Temple shouted at Emily’s back, as she raced for the white limo hugging the curb. Corporate kitties traveled in style. She glanced at Midnight Louie, who had trotted over to nose Baker and Taylor through their carrier grilles. “I don’t need it anymore.” She dropped her voice. “But what about your five thousand dollars!”
Baker’s and Taylor’s carriers were disappearing into the limo’s back seat on disembodied hands. Emily Adcock dived in after them, pausing only to flash Temple an ecstatic smile. “Don’t worry! The company will reimburse me—or the librarians will raise the money. I don’t even care. I’m just so happy to have them back. ’Bye.”
The remaining ex-suspects trickled out the chapel doors into the glaring midday heat.
Lanyard Hunter donned dark glasses and drew Lorna Fennick’s arm through his. “This has been an eventful ABA, thanks partly to you, Temple. I’ll have to dedicate a book to you.”
“I’ve enjoyed working with you,” Lorna said with a farewell handshake. “Sort of. I’ve got to get out of town, too.”
They ambled away, renewing old acquaintanceship and maybe more. Mavis Davis came out last, her unshielded eyes puckering against the sunlight. She looked ten years older.
“I—” She fell silent, gazing miserably down the Strip where the others were vanishing into a haze of heat and shimmering signage.
“When did you change your name to Mavis?” Temple asked quietly.
The nervous eyes fixed on her face at last. “Why... you know that, too?
Temple smiled. “Maeve Gilhooley was an impossible name for a book jacket. Even a newcomer to publishing like you knew that. Besides, you wanted to escape the past. I imagine you went by your foster family surname for so long that ‘your’ name didn’t seem yours, so why not use another? That’s why you wouldn’t take a pseudonym when Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce asked you to. Mavis Davis already was one. And Mavis is Celtic, too, as in the old Scottish song, ‘I have heard the mavis singing.’ Like your brother, you kept your original identity in some way. Guess writing ability ran in the family.”
“I didn’t know the truth about my mother’s death, or even that I had a father—or all those brothers and sisters. Imagine!” Mavis smiled, but sudden tears filled her eyes. “The scandal shattered the family, which was poor to begin with. Eoin, like the other older boys, left home to earn money. Us younger ones were parceled out quietly to other families. You could do that without official interference in those days. Eoin has told me that Da was never himself after Ma died. He drifted, drank. Eoin sent what money he could. He never forgot, never forgave. Of course, I was too young to remember the trial and the troubles.”
“Eoin told you all this? When?”
She reached up to remove the sad mantilla. “Eoin came to me only two days ago. It was like one of the thrillers we wrote that I never really believed—a long-overdue reunion, sins of the past, revenge. He’d deliberately begun working for Pennyroyal Press to wait for his chance. He had kept track of me through the years, of all of us, though he never contacted us—”
“That’s one way he betrayed himself,” Temple put in.
Mavis frowned. “By keeping track of us kids?”
“I overheard him tell Lieutenant Molina that you were from Kankakee. But how did he know? Later, it hit me. That information wasn’t in your author bio. That’s when I figured out there must be a hidden connection between you and Owen Tharp.”
“Poor Eoin. He may be a murderer, but he didn’t tell me sooner about our relationship because he didn’t want the rest of us to suffer for his crime if he were caught, though he thought he’d go free. He was newly furious about how... Mr. Royal was treating his sister. When he told me everything, when I saw how I’d been lied to all my life—denied my own mother’s memory, kept from knowing my father and family, and from believing in myself—when I realized that Chester Royal had managed to ruin my life twice... well, it made me angry, too, so I did what Eoin wanted. He was my brother.”
“All you had to do was play dumb and pick up the ransom money, though?”
She nodded. “I’ll send the money to Emily Adcock.”
Temple grinned. “Pseudonymously, I hope.”
“You mean—?”
“No one needs to know. Why do you think I kept my mouth shut? You didn’t do anything wrong except abet a relative in a catnapping; that’s hardly Murder One. You’re finally free of Chester Royal. Certainly you’ve paid in advance for any wrong you might have done, simply by working with the old ogre all those years. Just go home and write that Big Book.”
“I won’t abandon Eoin now that I’ve found him. Our mother’s death marked the older ones, and I can’t blame them. Sometimes, Miss Barr, ignorance is bliss. I’m glad I didn’t know what Chester Royal was earlier. I might have done what Eoin did.”
“I doubt it.” Temple bent to pick up Midnight Louie. “Oof, what an armful.”
Mavis daubed at her eyes with a lacy comer of mantilla. “Thank you. Goodbye, and thank you.”
Temple watched Mavis Davis join the migration up the Strip, her back straighter than Temple had ever seen it. Most of them would be racing back to hotels and into airport limos. They’d soon forget the Las Vegas ABA.
Meanwhile, guess who was stuck here? She turned and lugged the cat inside.
Electra was flitting among her fiber people, removing their mourning garb.
“That was more exciting than a wedding any day,” she said. “I thought that lieutenant would never get here. Not very grateful, if you ask me. And those publishing people! I had no idea they were such a kinky bunch. ’Course, when you consider what goes on in some books nowadays.... I bet you’re glad this ABA job is over and you can concentrate on normal clients, like the mud-wrestling federation.”
“I’m going back to the apartment, Electra. I’m ready to collapse, and Louie wants his lunch.”
“Fine, fine.” A matronly dummy lost her swath of veiling and her wig in one sweeping gesture.
Tired, Temple ambled through the breezeway, the cat at her heels. The tepid halls were deserted. She felt she moved in warm Jell-O, like a dreamer wading farther and farther away from the shoreline of reality.
When the elevator stopped on her floor, Louie paused midway in the door to consider his next move.
“In or out, you lug? Make up your mind.”
He finally deigned to amble along the arc of the building’s central hallway. When Temple reached the long shadowy passage that led to her door, she stopped.
Matt Devine, now. in civvies, was leaning against the wall, with what looked like frosty margaritas in both hands.
“Thought you could use a refresher after the show. That was quite an ordeal.”
Temple perked right up. “Great idea, thanks. Say, what was that slow-tempo funeral march you played at the beginning of the memorial?”
He grinned. “Curiosity will be your downfall. How do you know it wasn’t Mozart?”
“It wasn’t.”
Matt sighed, and studied the contents of his glass. “ ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale.’ Procol Harum.”
“One of my favorite songs! Really?”
Matt nodded, then pointed to the business card Temple had put into her nameplate slot. “I saw this when I was installing your chain lock. I think it’s wrong.”
She stared at her card as he handed her a hand-chilling glass. “I don’t see anything wrong with it.”
Matt’s glass clicked against hers. “It should read ‘Temple Barr, P.I.’ ”
She liked the sentiment, and the compliment, and especially the source, but she said modestly, “No, not really. Never again. I s
olemnly swear.” She was actually contemplating matters more intimate than detection.
Midnight Louie, ignored at their feet, didn’t believe a word of it. He indolently stretched his forelegs all the way up to the doorknob and gave it a royal whack.
26
Louie’s Last Meow
No one is happier than yours truly that this ABA thing is over. For one thing, I no longer have to worry about being nabbed on a homicide charge. Although I sport a couple fistfuls of switchblades, few even in this town would confuse any one of them for a knitting needle.
I have also reached a satisfactory arrangement with Miss Temple Barr on my domestic accommodations. She now leaves the guest bathroom window open just enough so that I can shimmy in and out of an evening.
At first I am afraid that Baker and Taylor’s close call in the city pound will encourage her to curtail my, ah, movements. But she lightens up once the wrong-doer is caught—and even more once Mr. Matt Devine makes a friendly overture—and I have no trouble swaying her to my way of thinking.
So I am out and about these days and even stroll up the
Strip to the Crystal Phoenix, where I am made much of, seeing as how even a little of Midnight Louie goes a long way.
I am doing fine, but I am not too sure about my pal Ingram. His muzzle turns a shade lighter in one day, I swear. The close call with Baker and Taylor preys upon his mind. He is not one to share his territory. His person, Miss Maeveleen Pearl, has severely undermined Ingram's confidence in her good taste and sense. He is often to be found curled upon those noxious tomes known as self-help books, such titles as People Who Love Pets Who Love Their Creature Comforts and When Good Things Happen to Bad Dogs.
“Uncivil accents, Louie,” Ingram rails when I come around for a stoopside chat. “No decent ears to speak of. Called me ‘laddie.’ In my own place!”
I can see the whites of his eyes.
It does not help that Miss Temple Barr, in one of the diplomatic gestures she is known for, has bestowed Baker and Taylor—the shills—on Miss Maeveleen Pearl, whose whimsy it is to arrange their floppy bodies in various spots throughout the Thrill ’n' Quill. Ingram is never sure where they will turn up next, perhaps in his very own bed.
Desist, I tell him, after hearing these complaints for the nth time. It is no use telling him that discussions in stir with the live Baker and Taylor on their abductor’s apparent gender—as well as the Scottish name Ian, and its kinship to the Gaelic Eoin and the Welsh Owen—enabled me to nail the ABA murderer.
Some might marvel that I, in my usual toothsome way, should emphasize as a clue the very word that is the culprit’s long-forgotten baptismal name.
The likes of Electra Lark would attribute my mystical moxie to previous lives (a viable theory, if you ask me), the deep spiritual powers of my kind going back to the time of the Pharaohs, or plain old feline intuition.
The fact is, I cannot masticate an entire title, leaving just Owen Tharp's byline, in the time I have available.
Also, too often the attempts of my species to communicate are dismissed as outright destructiveness. Call it a game of subconscious charades. By removing the other letters to leave an odd-looking remnant, "--E O---IN,” I created a memorable impression on Miss Temple Barr and produced what the literati might call a homophone of the murderer’s current moniker, or a halfway homophone, anyway. (This homophone is not a communications device for dudes of a specific sexual persuasion but is a fancy word to say that Owen and Eoin sound the same but are spelled differently.) Let the method fit the madness, in this case, the chaos of the ABA and all things literary.
To sum up, as Miss Temple Barr is most fond of doing, what the hell—it worked, did it not? Thanks to my usual blend of physical heroics and intellectual discernment.
Speaking of discernment, Lieutenant Molina, useful at last, has since checked the pound casualty list and found the name signed by the person who deposited B and T on the sadly substandard premises. “Gil Hooley.” Owen Tharp was playing word games to the last. And so the last nail is pounded into that coffin. I only regret that it is not one of my own.
Having settled my most pressing affairs and seen that all is right with the world, mostly, I can proceed to entertain myself in my customary fashion. I troll for carp in the pond behind the Crystal Phoenix, an enterprise all the more enjoyable for the necessity of avoiding the hotel chef’s roving meat cleaver. (Chef Song is a great fancier of carp, like myself, but after that there is a splitting of the ways, you might say.) My various lady friends require attentions of a censored nature. I have hopes of impressing them with my exploits, but true to past history, I do not get proper credit in the matter of solving the Royal murder. (That is always the case with us sleuths, from Sherlock Holmes on.)
It is lonely, dangerous and unsung work (not to mention unpaid), which is why I take the precaution of writing my own memoirs. Though I am a bit long in the fang I have no intention of going quietly, even if it is true that I wax more contemplative of late as I lounge about my retirement condo in Miss Temple Barr’s absence. She is out on the town with Matt Devine, hopefully gliding on the Goliath Hotel’s infamous Love Moat. Above me comes a gentle thump now and then from Miss Electra Lark's penthouse, which I notice often during Miss Temple Barr's absences—either our esteemed landlady has poltergeists or she is entertaining gentleman callers of an athletic persuasion.
Speaking of which; I spend many happy hours recalling ladyloves I have courted, rivals I have scratched off the map (so to speak) and my widespread, numerous and thankfully-ignorant-of-my-existence offspring.
Which brings to mind the rumor I heard when I finally caught up with Sassafras, who is strictly an old acquaintance these days. Street talk is that starlet Savannah Ashleigh has come so far down in the world since she made "Surfer Samurai” that she has slunk into Vegas to make a cheapie flick about a stripper and will show her stuff in the buff at the Lace 'n' Lust downtown. I could not care less about the state of either Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s film career or her unveiled epidermis, neither of which has ever struck me as having promise. Skin has never been my style. But when Miss Savannah Ashleigh previously visited Vegas, she stayed at the Crystal Phoenix and was accompanied by the sweetest platinum doll I have ever laid hopes on—the Divine Yvette, a petite aristocratic number up to her mascara in silver chinchilla fur. I definitely would strain my stride to see more of this little doll and her big blue-green peepers, not to mention her little pink nose and other more discreet parts of her anatomy. I will have to look in at the Lace ’n' Lust at the first opportunity.
It is on such a trip down memory lane that I inadvertently stir and depress the On button on the television’s remote control mechanism. Thus my ears are blessed with an extremely racy exchange from the daytime drama Lays of Our Lives. Or perhaps I mishear the title.
My ears are not what they used to be, and then again, I am often told I was born with a back-alley mentality.
Tailpiece
Midnight Louie Bites the Hand that Feeds Him
I am not often invited to address a captive audience, unless it is lunch. So how can I resist finishing off the foregoing literary exercise by unmasking its so-called author? At least the subtitle got it right: “A Midnight Louie Mystery.”
There is no mystery about this novel. I say straight off that this Douglas dame owes it all to me. I teach her everything she knows, and then some. Her father was a Pacific Northwest salmon fisherman, so she had one thing going for her from the first. And I am pleased to add some genuine class to her act through this sort of telepathy that we have had since Moses was knee-high to a Munchkin.
We first met during her sixteen-year stint as a pencil- pusher for the local rag in St. Paul, Minnesota. That was the seventies, when she was a mod young thing and I was ... ah, in my usual prime. I caught her eye right off—it took three inches of tiny type to list my many attractions in the classified “Pets” column. From the start she saw that I was meant for bigger things than ending up
as a birdcage liner, so she called to check out my vital statistics: eighteen taut-muscled pounds, catnip-green eyes, raven-black hair and lots of it; a well-manicured four-on-the-floor and fully equipped from the factory.
Naturally, she does this big story on me, and I end up on a Minnesota farm, doing time with the moo concession. Meanwhile, my partner in crime-to-come is finding journalism confining, since little dolls are not considered promotional material in that racket, where little has changed since The Front Page days.
So this Douglas doll writes these twenty-three novels all by herself. I sneak a peek during a pretend-snooze on her bookshelves and find she writes about history, mystery, fantasy and science fiction, and even romance. That is okay by me. Louie’s I’amours are legendary. (I often get myself into risqué positions. I love danger.)
Happily, those of the feline persuasion make frequent guest appearances in her fiction, like that snaggletoothed Felabba in Six of Swords and her Sword and Circlet trilogy. (A Samoyed dog named Rambeau gets the leading furred role in her new Taliswoman fantasy trilogy: I am all for equal rights and animal rights et cetera, but am glad she is back on track with my solo gig in these here mystery books. It is my exploits on mean streets that will really bring in the Bacos around here, if you ask me.)
As for this author doll, what is to say? She leads a dull life compared to mine. She now hangs out in Fort Worth with the same husband, Sam the "D” (as in Douglas), she’s had since they met acting in some play in St. Paul. He is an artist who makes unique acrylic kaleidoscopes. Ho-hum. If I want to see something colorful running around in a circle, I would prefer a spray-painted punk gerbil. This writing doll also collects dainty vintage clothes, which are not good for anything but running my nails through, at which point she gets hysterical for some reason.
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