Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  There is one additional sense to the sight, sound, touch, smell and taste Miss Louise is relying on, and it is not that vaunted sixth sense that our breed are often credited with. It is a sense that must be aged, if not pickled. It is called "common sense," and there is nothing common about the way I use it.

  So I follow in the shadows, hearing a worker or two comment on my darling daughter's passage. Luckily, none of them is a perverted cat-hater, so she makes her way unmolested to the dock where the vanquished galley is rising slowly from the dead depths thanks to the services of an automated winch. The technology here is so up-to-date that nothing human is hanging around to watch the Good Barge Bathyscope come afloat again save us two cats.

  Miss Louise does not turn when I slip from the shadows to sit beside her.

  "This is more interesting than the show out front," she comments. "That rat I smell is even ranker back here."

  I nose the air several times, until my white whiskers wave like semaphores. I inhale the scents of stale water, chlorine, grease, wet wood, spent fireworks, human sweat... and fresh kill.

  Fresh kill is barely detectable, except to the natural-born predator's nostrils. I may be semiretired when it comes to slaying for my supper, but old instincts never die. Miss Louise is revoltingly right. The resurrected barge has brought up something dead.

  There it sits, unattended, barely riding out of the water more than eight feet at the prow.

  Miss Louise trots around the side to board it.

  I eye the jump and decide to supervise from the dock. Someone needs to play lookout anyway.

  She looks like the cow jumping over the moon as her form is silhouetted briefly against an aureole of light as she leaps aboard. I watch her lithe bounds from oar to oar. She moves like the daughter of a Mexican jumping bean, showy but not subtle.

  Luckily, the area remains deserted. I watch her make like a wire-walker as, foot crossing before each foot, she minces out over the prow.

  Sure enough, the figurehead is not only mum, but swathed with gauze like a mummy. Not just painted gauze, real gauze. I know this because Miss Louise reclines at the prow's very tip, then catapults over the edge.

  I shut my ears, my ears flattened back, waiting for the flying water-drops that betoken her imminent midnight dip in the mighty Nile of the Strip.

  I hear a muted growl of annoyance, and peek.

  Miss Louise is dangling from the mummy's head like a mouse from an alleycat's jaws, her sharp little shivs clinging to mere gauze.

  Her tail works wildly, trying to compensate for her unbalanced position.

  But, sure enough, the gauze is giving, ripping away, stripping off the mummy's anonymous face.

  I squinch my eyes half closed. I do not like to see the dead violated, especially if the dead in question is maybe a couple of grand old in years. Is there no respect for age anywhere? Even if this is just a mock mummy, I expect the unseen face to be the usual freeze-dried skeletal mess that plays so well on TV late shows. Cannot an old dude even be allowed to rot in peace, If not rest in peace?

  But I am wrong.

  There is plenty of flesh on the face so slowly being revealed by the weight of Miss Midnight Louise's hanging form. Fresh flesh. Fresh kill.

  Miss Louise claws upward to avoid losing her grip and swags down more of the material. I glimpse open eyes, like cueballs with black leeches on them.

  Speaking of black leeches, that is what Miss Louise herself looks like dangling from the deceased.

  Finally, even one of the lazy-faire workers around here wakes up enough to spot her swinging like a bell from the prow of the barge.

  "Hey!" he shouts originally. "Get off that prop."

  I do not see an airplane propeller anywhere in the vicinity (although if you would wind up Miss Louise and swing her by the tail she might resemble one), but she evidently decides that she has done her duty in attracting human attention to the obvious scene of a crime.

  She climbs the poor dead dude's face like he was chopped liver and scrambles over the prow-top to repeat her tap dance down the oars and to the dock.

  Without a word, we act as one and dash back into the shadow of some shed.

  Meanwhile, yon worker shambles over like the man with the hoe in the famous painting.

  He stops where I had sat to observe the unveiling, and stares long and hard at the prow and the tawdry figurehead.

  "Mummy," he mutters, but he is not calling for his maternal parent. "We didn't have no mummy up front. It was an Egyptian mermaid. With great boobs." He edges toward where the dock meets water, and looks harder.

  I was not aware of such a thing as an Egyptian mermaid, although, judging from the figurehead fronting Cleopatra's Barge Restaurant at Caesars Palace, great boobs appear to have been a classical human theme. That asp must have had a field day.

  Anyway, yon slow-witted witness suddenly straightens and hollers. "Hey! Guys! There's this stiff on the prow. Get over here!"

  A stiff on the skiff. Finally, the light dawns. Louise and I eye each other in the dusk of our cover. Are we going to make a night of it and see what happens next? You bet your best sarcophagus!

  Chapter 14

  Bedtime Max

  "Bedtime snack?" he asked.

  "Hmm?"

  Temple struggled awake, still worrying about intact contact lenses.

  `"Sweet and sour sauce. Try some."

  "Chinese? In the middle of the night? What time is it?"

  "You need your energy."

  "My energy is history."

  "But not for long."

  The sweet and sour was not on the pointed ends of a pair of chopsticks, but on a tongue.

  "Oh, Max."

  "What?"

  "What . . . what."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Who knows. You're impossible."

  "I'm a magician."

  "Former magician."

  "Retired magician."

  "This is retired?"

  "You're not very retiring, I know. In fact, you seem wide awake now."

  "No thanks to you."

  "Thanks."

  "You're welcome."

  He was.

  Chapter 15

  The Unkindest Cut

  "I made it through Christmas," the raspy voice on the phone complained at 2:45 in the morning,

  "and it was a jingle -bell bust. Why should I hang on any longer?"

  "Because you made it through Christmas. Now you can make it through New Year's."

  "Aw, just shoot me now, Brother John. I got no money, no friends, no one who cares. What am I supposed to do, drag through one holiday after another? Next you'll be telling me to live for President's Day."

  "You're the one who's attaching your survival to holidays.

  What did you expect from Christmas?"

  "I don't know. Some kind of . . . high, I suppose. A lucky run at the craps table. A handout from some big winner. I came here because I thought Las Vegas was always up, you know? And I'm still down."

  "Time of year and location don't have the most to do with highs and lows. You do."

  The caller sighed. He spoke in the slow, flat liner tones of the chronically depressed. Matt didn't think he was suicidal, but he was certainly toying with the possibility.

  "You need a helping hand, but not a handout," Matt told him. "Maybe some short-term medication. I can refer you--"

  "Refer me, schmer me."

  But the man finally took down the information.

  "Call right now," Matt said.

  "It's too late."

  "Nope, not in any sense of the phrase. Call, and someone will get right back to you.

  Someone will even keep you company until you can get in for an appointment tomorrow."

  "Appointments to make life worth living. It's a crock."

  "But you'll call?"

  "Yeah. Thanks. I guess."

  Matt hung up, shaking his head.

  Bennie in the adjoining cubicle scuffed his chair back to
see Matt.

  "Another happy, dancing holiday depressive, huh? Jeez, I hate pulling these holiday shifts.

  Everybody who calls is so down. But you seem okay, buddy. You seem more than mellow."

  "I thought I was always mellow."

  "Uh-huh. Quiet, but not mellow. You are new-minted mellow, dude. So what's happening?"

  It was almost three a.m., when Matt finished his shift. Bennie had another three hours to go, until dawn's early light. They were alone.

  Matt shrugged, then smiled. "I took care of some old family business. Took my own advice and confronted and buried the past, or at least some of it."

  "So that's why you took off over the holiday. What did you do New Year's, then, more family business?"

  "Uh, no. Just. . . fun. I had a date."

  "A date! Fun's okay too. Oooh, I bet Sheila will be sorry to hear that."

  "Why should she be?"

  "She's interested in you."

  Matt shook his head.

  "Hey, yeah, man. Listen. Old Bennie knows these things. So tell me about your New Year's date."

  "Not much to tell." Matt found himself unwilling to get into a roll call about Temple, their relationship. "Yet."

  "Oh-ho!" Bennie wiggled his bushy eyebrows and made hand signals like a baseball pitcher that Matt couldn't decipher, except they implied a male camaraderie.

  He realized his "yet," meant to indicate that the outing hadn't resolved the relationship, had been interpreted as a prediction of lascivious things to come, of scoring. He hated to disillusion Bennie, but if anyone in his and Temple's relationship this far had cherished hopes of scoring it was more likely Temple. Matt himself was still experiencing fear of flying.

  The line rang, too late, given Matt's shift, for him to pick up.

  Bennie scooted his chair back into his phone cockpit.

  "See you another night, amigo."

  Matt grabbed his sheepskin jacket from the battered wooden coat rack by the door--all the office furniture was donated--and pushed the glass door open into the Las Vegas dark.

  Here, away from the Strip, you'd never know you were standing in Neon City, Nevada. He shrugged the jacket on while rounding the building corner for the side parking lot. The night was cool but hardly cold. His fingers prodded the jacket pockets for his gloves.

  The parked Hesketh Vampire leaned into a Mercurochrome pool of streetlight, looking like a motorcycle from an Edward Hopper nightscape painting. Matt rounded the lime-green trunk of Bennie's ancient Volkswagen, digging for the key in his pants pocket.

  "At least that's not yours."

  The low voice was close enough to make him freeze. Low in tone and intensity, but contralto.

  Matt turned to find a lithe dark figure moving into his orbit, eclipsing his view of the Vampire. It reminded him of a martial arts movie ninja, as much a part of the night as a black alley cat.

  Matt remained alert, but not alarmed.

  "I haven't got much money."

  The figure shrugged, its back to the light, a silhouette that blocked but didn't threaten.

  "The engine on that cycle takes more babying than it's worth, even for a joy ride," he added.

  Silhouetted elbows lifted as fists rested on hips.

  "This is no joy ride," the voice said, but he recognized his accoster more by the posture.

  "I suppose you want a reward," he answered. "Thanks to you, I found my man."

  "Thanks to you so did the police."

  "Not what you wanted?"

  "Not what I wanted."

  "It's a little late to worry about it."

  "For me maybe. Not for you."

  She stepped closer. The woman who called herself Kitty was wearing black denim jeans and jacket and what looked like combat boots.

  "I'm disappointed in you."

  "You sound like a homeroom teacher. Look. You told me where I could find Effinger. What happened afterwards was my business."

  Her head shook slowly. "It was always my business. I just thought you'd take care of it--him--

  for me."

  " Take care of?' I did, I took him to the cops. He was wanted for questioning. What else did you think I would do with him?"

  "You said that it was family business. You said that you might kill him."

  "Yeah. I was angry enough to wonder about that. But I didn't. I was fine. In control. Grabbed the sorry sucker by the nape of his greasy jacket and trundled him off to the police. Maybe I got him a little wet first; he needed cooling off. But I didn't."

  Her silence made him feel like a truant inventing excuses.

  "It's not like you wanted me to really kill him . . . Did you?"

  "You said it was Family business," she accused.

  "Oh, my God. You thought I was a hit man?"

  More silence.

  "Do I look like a hit man?"

  "That's why I took you for a hit man. You think they run around looking like Joe Pesci nowadays? They look like junior accountants."

  "Me, kill someone for money? Good God, woman, until less than a year ago I was a priest."

  Silence. She moved closer, but also more aslant to him. Oblique, she was, like a rattlesnake.

  Now he was alert, and alarmed, thinking defensively, countering her slight adjustments in position.

  "Priests can kill," her husky voice answered at last. It wasn't husky like Temple's, a funny, foggy-bottom edge that showed up now and then, it was tension-husky. Dead serious.

  She came closer, and he didn't dare back away, back down.

  "I knew one priest," she said, "that killed five people."

  "I'm sorry you knew such a bad priest."

  She came closer, her boot soles scraping across the parking lot grit.

  "I've slept with six priests."

  "I don't do confessions anymore."

  "Sacrament of Reconcilation," she corrected him.

  "You seem to be more up-to-date on it than I am. I said I'm an ex-priest, but the vast majority of priests I knew were faithful to their promises. All their promises."

  "Six priests, and an Islamic imam. And a few dozen other good men."

  "I don't do confessions. Unless you want to call me in there. There I'm paid to listen to whatever . . . confessions, fantasies."

  "It's not your fault."

  "Thanks."

  "I should have known better, seen better. You seemed pretty cold."

  "Just. . . careful."

  "I bet you are pretty cold, living in a dream world all those years. You were never among killers, or fornicators or pedophiles, only the good and the true, isn't that right?"

  "It's impossible to see into every soul."

  "Especially your own."

  "I wouldn't like to see into yours."

  She stepped back, angry. "If you were a good priest, you'd have to. Were you a good priest?"

  He'd been asked that before, by whom? Not Temple. She didn't know or care about that, only what kind of human being you were.

  I was a mostly honest priest."

  "Didn't screw women, children or domestic pets?"

  "You're so mocking, but you're mocking yourself, not me."

  "You are such an innocent, too innocent to live."

  "It sounds like you know someone who could take care of that."

  "Would you fight? For your innocent life?"

  He nodded.

  "For the right to be tainted?"

  "For the right to be human."

  "And I am not human."

  "You're not acting much like it."

  Closer again, a threatening closeness, not intimacy, unless in-timacy is hate-driven seduction.

  "How am I acting, former Father? You tell me."

  "Like an angry teenager. Cynical and hate-filled."

  "Teenager! You son of a--"

  Her rage was a wave cold as ice water. He braced for it to break upon him in some physical form.

  But she contained it, and half-circled him again, pacing as if caged.

 
; Matt considered brushing past Kitty, but he didn't like to expose his back to her. He had diagnosed her too well. If she was as volatile as an angry adolescent, she could be as impulsive and violent too.

  "You've never met anyone like me." Like a hostile teenager, she demanded tribute to her uniqueness, her self-centered ego.

  "Likely not. The Light and the Dark are extremes and most people live among the shades of gray."

  "I'm not gray."

  "No. But the world really isn't as dark as you see it. If you sat inside and listened on the hotline for an hour or two, you'd see. The people who call are troubled, but they're trying to find the way to the Light and dealing with the Dark in themselves."

  "You deal with the Dark in me, and you'll be dealing with the real world. You need to taste the real world, see it for what it is, feel it. You need to feel failure."

  Her hand came up fast as a striking snake. She slapped his face, hard and open-handed, the way women in old movies slapped sneering men who questioned their sexual virtue. It was as if he had questioned her essential badness.

  He couldn't resist catching her wrist as it passed. The bones were thin and hard and he held them so she couldn't twist out of his grip without hurting herself.

  "What are you?" Her anger outclassed his, even gave him a sense of wonder.

  What made a person, a woman, so truly eager to embrace evil? One man's death, other men's falls from grace.

  The moment he touched her, the violence between them shifted. Her attitude, physical and mental, changed. She stepped closer, her free hand curling into the lapel of his open jacket,

  "You want me?" she asked. The voice was a throaty croon. "Is that your weakness, ex-priest?"

  He had to let her go, even if it left him defenseless. "No. But I almost want to hurt you back."

  "So that's your dark side, Father. War, not love. Thanks for the information. You've just killed your first man tonight.

  She stepped closer again, the final approach, so he could feel her body heat radiating against the chill air.