Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Light off to the side somewhere and cupboards all around, all he could see as he lay there.

  The cupboards with their medical supplies.

  No. Kitchen cupboards. What the heck--?

  "Get up slowly, man. Let me help."

  Bennie spun Matt's legs off the smooth surface while the other man pushed his back upright.

  A terrible tearing sensation in his side took his breath away.

  "Julio says no pulling those muscles for two, maybe three days. Nada. Not at all. So watch when you sit down and get up, lie down and get up."

  Matt nodded instead of speaking. Bennie translated instructions that seemed more practical than medical: take ibuprofen for pain, keep the wound clean, the tapes tight; avoid physical strain. If it breaks open or becomes red and infected, plan to see an establishment doctor. The man kept only two of the crumpled twenties Matt thrust at him.

  Bennie helped him out to the tiny Volkswagen, Matt regarding the act of getting in as one of the more demanding of his life.

  "Sorry," Bennie said. "Seat don't go no further back. Maybe we should hit an emergency room, after all, huh?"

  "Don't you trust that doctor?"

  Bennie hovered over Matt. Car engines tuned to a deliberate growl prowled the distance like roaring lions. Dawn leaked like skim milk through the stunted desert trees.

  "Listen. He's an illegal. Has been for thirty years. Never learned the English, never had to. He tends people who can't go to regular clinics. He takes you down from highs, patches you up when you've been stuck, he even used to fix the girls when their periods wouldn't come."

  "An abortionist? That old man was an abortionist?"

  "Not any more. Now there's clinics for that, even if you have to pass the protesters to get there. What's the matter? You sure ain't been in 'Nam, man. There ain't no political correctness in foxholes, or in gook tunnels."

  "The same guys who called them 'gooks' would call you 'wet-back.' "

  "Yeah." Bennie had come around to pretzel himself behind the Bug's steering wheel. He grinned at Matt under the faint moon-glow of the dome light. "But we're winning this war.

  Come the millennium, we wetbacks are gonna outnumber you all in a lot of places."

  Matt shook his head, too tired to answer. "What about blood loss?"

  "Doc says you lost some, yeah, so take it easy. I'll call you in sick. Told Leon you were mugged, but all he has to know is you were beat up. I'll get you home as fast as Chiquita here can take you."

  "Chiquita, huh?"

  "The belle of the barrio." Bennie jerked the shift into gear and the car leaped forward like the bug it resembled, a hard-shelled lit-tie booger with no grace.

  "So. I'll take you home, but I hope there's someone there to look after you."

  Matt received this hint in silence. He now had reason to understand Temple's reluctance to report her assault. He couldn't rely on her, and Electra was just an extension of Temple.

  For a moment the bitter aloneness was more cutting than the pain. Then he remembered something--someone--else.

  "I'll tell you where to go. It's not too far."

  "Hey, Matt. Distance don't matter to me. I just wanta make sure you're okay. I'm a counselor, remember? Can't leave a client in the lurch."

  Matt grimaced as the car did just that: lurched around a corner. Every little motion (and the bug didn't have any subtle moves) seemed like teeth tearing at his flesh.

  That damn woman, Kitty with claws. Why him? Why this? He shook himself alert. Time to worry about that later. Now he had to guide Bennie, and get ready to explain himself when they got where they were going.

  The street was dark, and street lights in this neighborhood seemed placed to aid predators more than victims anyway.

  "Our Lady of Guadalupe." Bennie nodded behind the wheel. "I use-ta live near here. Go to church here."

  "This is the convent. They're not expecting me."

  Bennie's well-worn face added new wrinkles of concern. "We crashin' on a set of nuns at, um--he squinted at the uselessly tiny dashboard clock--five a.m.?"

  "Who's more likely to be up for early mass, huh? Can you . . . see me in?"

  "Hey, I don't surrender you to just anyone, compadre."

  The friendly form of address both reassured Matt and made him aware of how ironic the

  "padre" part of it was. Here he was, fresh from the healing hands of an ex-abortionist, wounded by a wild woman, about to throw himself on the mercy of a group of elderly nuns.

  "You feelin' kinda green, Matt? Wouldn't blame you. Been a bad night."

  "Then it's got to be a better morning." Matt grunted as Bennie worked to extract him from the Beetle's passenger seat. What about the motorcycle? Who could he trust to rescue it? No one. It would just have to survive--or not--on its own.

  They made it to the door, Matt nearing collapse.

  When Bennie rang the bell, they heard its interior echo, but no one came for a long time.

  "In this neighborhood, man," Bennie began.

  Matt shook his head. They would answer or not. Meanwhile, what else was there to do, but wait?

  But a couple minutes later the big wooden door creaked, then opened a slit. A flashlight probed the predawn dusk and their faces. Then the door swung wide.

  "Father Matt!" exclaimed the smallest of the three of them: insomniac Sister Mary Margaret, she of the deaf ear, even to the obscene phone caller. But there was nothing wrong with her eyes, even if her memory was anchored in long, long ago.

  "Matthias!" said Sister Mary Seraphina, shocked and angry.

  The third woman he had not met.

  "Father Matt," repeated Bennie Cordova, beginning to sound both confused and illuminated.

  "I need a place to rest," Matt said.

  "He's been cut to shit," Bennie put in, not trusting the two negotiating parties to cut to the chase in any decent amount of time. "Mugging at the hot-line parking lot."

  "You need a doctor," Sister Seraphina said even as they all swept back before the wide-open door.

  "Saw one," Matt managed to say. "Just can't make it home."

  "My dear boy, you have."

  Chapter 19

  When a Body Meets a Body, Part II

  January Second dawns bright with the kind of chill that sits well on a martini glass.

  I am making my way home from a murder scene that has turned into a long walk down the Las Vegas Strip past scenes of my past triumphs both personal and professional. There is a time in a dude's life when he has to question why he is finally wending his way home, sleepless, at some abominably cheerful hour of the morning like ten a.m., when all others have risen gladly, breakfasted cheerily and headed off to decent, daytime occupations.

  If twilight is the Children's Hour, the late morning is the Rascal's Hour. It belongs to the debauched of the world, the all-night gambler and rambler, the person who has reason to wonder who has been sleeping in his or her bed because he or she certainly has not been there.

  I keep my natural sunglasses slitted against the bilious morning rays and swagger into the parking lot of the Circle Ritz, planning to make a discreet entrance at the rear. Perhaps Miss Temple has even missed me.

  This thought so cheers me that I lash my pace to a medium slink. The lot is usually deserted at this in-between hour: residents gone for the day, and visitors not yet come.

  So as I slither around the shed used for housing Miss Electra Lark's Hesketh Vampire motorcycle (now ridden routinely by Mr. Matt Devine), I am shocked to stride snout-first into a dawdling pair of human legs and feet clad in black slacks and tennis shoes.

  Imagine my surprise to find that it is my very own roommate. Though she is usually clad in ladylike skirts and shoes of an ambitious nature in the heel department, today she looks like a nightcrawler: rumpled, disheveled and disreputable.

  I cannot believe my eyes, and neither can she.

  "Louie! Where have you been all night? You look awful."

  As if I were not wont to roam of an evenin
g! She is the one who is supposed to stay put and be waiting when I return from my nightly business. And a little more perkiness would be in order too.

  "Come on," she says, "let us hurry inside. I am hungry enough to eat hors d'ouevres. Or maybe even Free-to-be-Feline."

  This threat to my ever overflowing bowl of dried spaghnum moss (or whatever it is) is no skin off my pads, but I fall into step with her, aware of exotic new scents radiating from her person. This reminds me of the strange scent Midnight Louise detected at the Oasis barge. She let me sample some on her paw before we parted company in the wee hours.

  I notice that Miss Temple is practically tiptoeing. I never have to worry about making undue noise when I come and go, but I can see that she is not eager to be spotted in her casual getup looking as if she were up to something not casual at all in the past few hours.

  Surely she cannot have discovered her own dead body?

  She opens the side door into the building and we ankle inside, discreet as cockroaches.

  The lobby is shining and empty. Miss Temple sighs her relief and scuttles to the elevator to push the Up button.

  "No Electra," she is muttering while she fidgets before the closed elevator doors. "No Electra, please! No awkward questions. Just a quick fade into my own little home, sweet home."

  I do not know what unseen force she is addressing. It cannot be Bast; as far as I know, Miss Temple Barr has no cat-headed goddesses in her personal pantheon, unless she has converted recently.

  We are standing there, her impatiently, myself with my usual air of unshakable calm, when the front door whooshes open and shuts with a decided thump.

  Miss Temple gives a little scream, and I am so startled by her nervous behavior, that I arch my back and hiss at the intruder.

  Who, it turns out, is not an intruder in the ordinary sense, in that he lives here, but who certainly seems to be the last person on earth Miss Temple Barr wished to see, to judge by the winding-cloth pallor of the skin between her freckles.

  Speaking of pallor, Mr. Matt Devine is setting some records of his own in that department.

  He has always been a modestly attired and behaving person, but now he seems to have faded to a shadow of his former modest self. His clothes are wrinkled and disheveled, as if he had slept in them (which, come to think of it, is the exact condition of Miss Temple's garments), and he moves with great delicacy, as if unsure that the marble floor beneath us might remain solid.

  His jacket is carried over one arm, which is crooked before his midsection.

  "Matt!"

  It is hard to tell if Miss Temple is more shocked by his appearance than his ... er, appearance on the scene.

  "Temple!"

  It is hard to tell whether Mr. Matt is more shocked by Miss Temple's appearance than her presence here and now.

  No one calls my name. That is what happens when you are vertically challenged. You are invisible. I sit down and lap my coat into order, having been so recently reminded of the importance of neat outer garments.

  "Are you just . . . getting home?" Miss Temple blurts out a question she would probably kill another person for asking her.

  "Ah, yes. There was an emergency at the hotline. I had to stay on, overtime."

  "Oh. Suicide or something?"

  He winces visibly. "Something like that. But you--?"

  "Ah, still so tired from my trip. I overslept and ran out to get... a New York newspaper, got used to reading it, but they were all out."

  Mr. Matt Devine frowns. "You shouldn't be going out alone like that, not after what happened. I thought I saw a black car pulling out of the back. You-know-who could be lurking."

  "I'm fine."

  He frowns more deeply. "Don't you need a . . . that big purse when you go out?"

  "Not for a run to the convenience store. Just a few dollar bills in my pocket."

  Mr. Matt Devine studies her outfit, which even I can tell is a clingy black two-piece affair with not much evidence of pockets.

  Meanwhile, she is staring rather fixedly at a dull brown stain on his crumpled sheepskin jacket.

  Neither one, it is clear, believes the other's explanation of their atypical presence in this time and place and atypical condition. But they are so busy trying to fool one another that they hardly notice where their own stories go wrong.

  What this means and what it will lead to, I have not a clue. But I can tell you this: my Miss Temple is the more inventive liar in a pinch, if that is any sort of recommendation.

  Chapter 20

  Postmortem Post-it

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina studied the waterlogged scrawl through the clear plastic bag that contained it.

  "Traces of adhesive on the upper edge. Probably a Post-it note," Detective Alch said.

  "We're lucky to get anything off this scrap."

  "He used a ballpoint. A felt-tip wouldn't even have left an impression. But you can see the hardest strokes retained some ink. Good thing the Good Ship Suicide never goes underwater more than ten minutes a performance."

  "Good thing the crew noticed something extra bound to the figurehead in the dark."

  "Some fighting cats on the dock drew the crew's attention to the prow of the boat. Barge.

  Whatever."

  Molina kept her face deadpan, but it wasn't easy. Those damn cats. Every Las Vegas homicide cop needed a couple of fairy godmother cats, right? She squinted her eyes at the smudged writing in a dead man's messy hand.

  Six little words. The lab interpretation suggested: "deadhead at Circus rich." And something

  "on Hyacinth."

  "We figure it was a tip-off to some easy mark at Circus Circus," Alch added. "From every indication, the dead man was a petty criminal. Just the type to be scamming some big spender."

  Molina only nodded. She didn't agree, but she had inside in-formation. Cat magic. Who would she hit on first? That was the question.

  Maybe Matt Devine. He was the most vulnerable, the least guarded, the most intrinsically honest. Knowing that made her job easier, and his life harder. Too bad. For a cop, a conscience is a terrible thing to waste.

  Chapter 21

  Viewing Time

  Matt was collapsed on his single bed, in his mostly empty bedroom, the small portable television blaring some impossible talk show featuring sluts, cross-dressing motorcyclists and other American family stereotypes. All it needed was a Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol surprise appearance.

  The wound throbbed and burned. The tape around his ribs itched and pulled. His head felt spacey. When the phone rang he jumped as if they'd just pumped the juice into him in some prison execution chamber.

  Getting up took a while. He knew the phone would stop ringing just as the greatest effort had been expended. But it didn't stop. He got it on the seventh ring.

  "Yes?"

  "Lieutenant Molina. I need you downtown right away."

  "What? Listen. I can't possibly come."

  "Why not?"

  "The, uh, motorcycle's on the blink. I don't have transportation."

  "How were you going to get to work tonight?"

  "Cab, I guess."

  "Then take a cab downtown. Or I can send a car to pick you up."

  "That. . . urgent?"

  "More than urgent."

  "It'll take me forty-five minutes to an hour."

  "Fine."

  His heart was pounding as if considering arrest. Arrest. You never would have known from her tone of voice, or conversation, that they knew each other.

  Clipped and to the point.

  Just when he didn't need this. Just when he had some guilty knowledge to conceal. Matt considered several unpriestly expletives and settled on one.

  **********************

  An hour and fifteen minutes later he was deposited before the blond curved slab that passed for Las Vegas' entry into the Stonehenge sweepstakes.

  The cab driver sped away to other fares; no hop was long in Las Vegas, so cabbies had to settle for quantity rathe
r than quality. And the occasional winner's tip.

  Matt walked across the street and into the concrete courtyard. The glass-fronted reception area reflected him and he studied the image like an egoist.

  The jacket had brushed clean. He had shaved, combed and slapped some color into his face.

  He was walking almost normally.

  Halfway through the door, he wondered why he needed to keep Kitty and her bizarre attack such a secret. Matt stopped in mid-step. He couldn't explain his instinctive reticence, but he suddenly knew it was the same motive that made Temple try to go through a gala evening out with a half-smashed face.

  Matt blew out a regretful breath, and regretted the gesture as his rib cage contracted, stretching tape and taped skin.

  He signed in at the front desk. Molina was called, and an officer came down to escort him up in the cramped elevator.

  Molina sat at her desk in her tunnel of an office. When she invited him to sit on one of the meagerly upholstered side chairs he eased down slowly, as if thinking the move over, as if puzzled by her summons and moving in four-four time.

  Which he was.

  She looked up, her extraordinary blue eyes flat and cold. "Effinger's dead."

  "Dead?"

  She watched him.

  He didn't have to feign slow motion now. "Recently?"

  "Last night."

  "Killed?"

  "Where were you, say, around eleven-thirty?

  Matt's head reeled. "At my job. At ConTact. You don't think--?"

  "At this stage in an investigation, you're right. I don't think. I gather. And, from what you say, what you ask, I gather that your stepfather's death is a surprise."

  "Hell, yes!"

  She smiled at his expletive. That's when he knew that everything he'd done so far had played into her police officer's scenario.

  "How did he die?"

  Molina's face was surveying her desktop and its accumulation of papers and photographs.