Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Her lips are red, and her hands are tipped in scarlet-enameled mandarin nails a full four inches long.

  Shangri-La. An ambiguous name. Not Chinese, not Japanese. Not Siamese, any more than Hyacinth is.

  "A black cat," the lady magician declares, regarding me with pleasure. "And still alive, despite intruding. Hyacinth, you must introduce me to your new friend."

  Hyacinth screams and leaps toward Shangri-La.

  I expect to hear chiffon rent, at least. But Hyacinth has landed feather-soft on the woman's shoulder, and rubs her face against the ruddy cheekbone as if confiding a secret.

  Shangri-La strides to her dressing table, scratching Hyacinth's chin with her truly awesome shivs.

  "You naughty kitten!" she chides. "You have been playing in my paint boxes again. Mei!" she calls.

  A young woman in black satin pajamas bustles in from the hall beyond, as if she had been waiting there, or had been summoned like a demon.

  "My makeup." Shangri-La gestures theatrically with her shiv-heavy fingers.

  The woman bows and scrapes along the floor, retrieving Hyacinth's playthings.

  "Up here, cat!" Shangri-La's endless nails tap the dressing table top.

  I leap in a bound that lands me amid the clutter without disarranging anything.

  "More agile than you look." The painted face smiles at me. "Hyacinth is not usually so tolerant." Her shivs scratch me behind the ears until I purr despite myself.

  She nods. "A good show tonight. And another to do. Hyacinth, if you must entertain friends, make sure they are gone by eleven."

  Hyacinth listens sagely, her incredibly narrow head almost nodding.

  It is as if I see the lithe Hyacinth in a funhouse mirror; her entire figure is a distortion, as the extreme leanness of human fashion models elevates malnutrition into a virtue.

  I do not like these lean and hungry ladies from the East. I do not like their screeching voices and imperious manners and lethal shivs. If this is the Hyacinth referred to in Effinger's pocket, she might even be a trained assassin. What is the difference between nails dipped in curare and the digitalis concentration of hyacinth oil?

  I may be looking at a murderer, and it is not human: it is purely, inescapably feline.

  Hyacinth regards me with slitted eyes, both horizontally without, and vertically within, and purrs. In her content at my successful introduction to her mistress, her painted nails contract. In and out.

  In and out.

  Chapter 31

  Nigh Noon

  At high noon the next day, Temple's phone rang.

  She wasn't surprised that Lieutenant C. R. Molina was on the line's other end, requesting an audience.

  Actually Lieutenant C. R. Molina was demanding an interrogation.

  "Here? In half an hour? Sure. I appreciate curb service."

  Temple hardly knew what to do with herself while preparing for a visit from the local constabulary. She took a white -glove stroll through her rooms. (Actually, she darted through, picking up newspapers and straightening gewgaws.)

  She decided she needed a pizza for lunch. She decided her nails needed doing, but there was no time. She concluded that it would be easier to get her story straight, if only she knew what part of it she needed to embroider: the part where she had no alibi for Effinger's death because she was sleeping with Max at the time (and she certainly couldn't admit that to Molina), or the part where Max had no alibi for Effinger's death because he was sleeping with her at the time (but she was awake and Max was not necessarily there at the time).

  Temple was a wee bit nervous. Ordinarily, Molina couldn't do that to her. But ordinarily Temple's future did not turn on sleeping with Max (whose very presence and location in Las Vegas were sacred trusts for her) and being able to prove it.

  Even the doorbell sounded paranoid instead of mellow when Molina punched it. Temple just knew Molina punched it. She was the type to abuse even a vintage doorbell. A doorbell that was probably older than Molina was. Bully!

  In this state of anthropomorphic snit on behalf of her doorbell, Temple opened her door.

  She had forgotten how bloody tall the lady lieutenant was, or how thick and uncompromising her eyebrows were.

  Molina entered without invitation, but only advanced eight steps into the room before turning on Temple.

  "Where are your glasses?"

  "I've switched to contact lenses. Sorry. Is that a crime or misdemeanor?"

  "Neither. You just look different. Why didn't you wear contacts before?"

  "Simple. My eyes were too sensitive to handle all those chemical baths. But I guess they've come up with new formulas. They're working so far."

  Molina stalked into the living room. What else could she do in those clunky-heeled oxfords so popular now?

  "You know Effinger is dead, of course."

  "Of course." Temple sat down, but Molina didn't.

  "Can you account for your whereabouts around midnight the night of January one?"

  "New Year's Day night?"

  "Right."

  "Ah, yes and no."

  "Yes first."

  "I was here asleep in my condominium."

  "The no?"

  "I was here solo."

  "No witnesses."

  "Sadly, no."

  "Midnight Louie?"

  "Out on errands of a peculiarly repellent nature."

  Molina's midnight-margarita eyes narrowed to catlike slits, it seemed. "You speak truer than you know."

  "What do you mean?"

  Molina only smiled, meanly, as she circled the love seat. "Where's Midnight Louie now?"

  "I don't know. He does come and go. I have to ask: why do you associate me with Effinger?

  Or his death?"

  "I don't do it; he did."

  "Effinger? How? He said something before he died?"

  "Now that's interesting. What would he have to say about you at any time?"

  "I don't know. But you said he implicated me."

  "Not personally." Molina smiled. It was not a reassuring expression. "I must say that coming here to see you personally was an inspired idea. I ran into your landlady in the lobby."

  "Electra."

  "The very one. She was happy to see me."

  "Oh?"

  "She was delighted that you had decided to report your assault in the Circle Ritz parking lot."

  Temple fell suddenly silent.

  "She was happy that the evil stepfather wouldn't be allowed to get away with it. I'd say he wasn't."

  "It wasn't much of an assault. Most of the damage came from getting away."

  "Then you weren't too disabled to get out and about New Year's Day night."

  "But I wasn't out and about. I was. . . home."

  Molina smiled too tolerantly to indicate belief. "Assault aside, a note in his pocket implicated you."

  "A note? To me?"

  "Not precisely."

  "Could you tell me, precisely?"

  "No."

  "Could you at least tell me how Mr. Effinger died?"

  "Mr. Effinger. I imagine that's a new one for him, even dead. His death was bizarre, to say the least."

  "I read the item in the newspaper."

  "He was... affixed to the prow of the fatal barge and was submerged with it."

  "So he drowned?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "He was already dead, of course, before the barge descended."

  "Not necessarily."

  Temple considered the options. "I don't look like someone who could 'affix' a grown man to the prow of a barge."

  "You could have had an assistant, or vice versa."

  "You don't really believe that."

  "All I know for a fact is that the deceased carried a reference to you in his pants pocket. And now I learn, not from you, that he had assaulted you recently. And I know that you have friends very capable of teaching him a lesson."

  "What was on the note? My name and phone number?"

  Molina shoo
k her head.

  "Then what?"

  "I can't say. I can only ask if you still insist that you were nowhere near the Oasis dock that night."

  "I swear to God, I wasn't there."

  Molina nodded, finished, if not satisfied. She headed for the door. There she paused for a parting shot.

  "Then why was your cat, Midnight Louie, on the scene?"

  Temple was speechless.

  "Accompanied by the Crystal Phoenix mascot, one Midnight Louise."

  "I. . . I'm not responsible for where cats go, or when."

  Molina left. Leaving Temple to ponder her earlier question: where was Midnight Louie now?

  Chapter 32

  Checkmatt

  Matt thought nothing of answering his doorbell, even though it seldom rang, perhaps because it was always either Electra or Temple, and he had just seen Temple, so it had to be Electra.

  He couldn't have been more surprised if it had been Kitty O'Connor.

  "Just a few questions," Molina said, walking in uninvited, and looking around even more uninvited. "My, my."

  She stopped in the foyer to survey his new living room suite.

  Matt eyed it past her shoulder and admitted to being impressed. The fifties sofa snaked through the room like a red upholstered highway, islands of lamp and table to either side.

  An especially effective touch was the black cat sprawled on the sofa end.

  "Who's your decorator?"

  "Mr. or Ms. Goodwill. With a little push from Temple."

  "And the cat is on loan to add to the ambiance?"

  "I didn't think 'ambiance' was in your vocabulary, Lieutenant."

  "Every time I visit the Circle Ritz, I add new words to my vocabulary. Like genius loci."

  "You've got me there. And it's even in my native Latin."

  Molina nodded at the cat. "You know the literal meaning: a local deity; you just don't recognize the avatar. What's he doing here?"

  "Louie? What does any cat do anywhere? He's been showing up lately; so often that I've taken to leaving the bathroom window open, like Temple does."

  "From her house to your house." Molina flashed him a bolt from her medicinal-strength baby blues. "Wonder what cat snit is driving him from his former home, sweet home? Maybe a territorial dispute?"

  "With a man rather than a mouse, you think?" Matt shrugged, even though it pulled like a steam burn on his taped bandage. "None of my business."

  "Mine, though." Molina grinned. "And you're my business too. My official business."

  She pulled a narrow reporter's notebook from her jacket pocket, along with a pen. "Don't worry. I'm not going to sit on that thing with Midnight Louie. But you can."

  Matt did.

  "Bienvenido," she announced ominously. "Nice name. Welcoming name. Nice fellow. A little anxious about the fuzz. Sixties reflex. Tends to say more than he has to."

  "He did verify that I was hard at work from seven to three?"

  "Oh, yes. You are a sterling worker." She flashed him a smile. "I would expect no less. Just as Bennie Cordova is a sterling wit-ness.

  Matt shifted on the sofa. It was an unyielding architectural form, elegant but unforgiving. He tended to slump when sitting on it, and that didn't help his taped-together wound.

  "So what did Bennie say?"

  "Way too much. One of those watched pots that starts out impossibly slow to come to a boil, but then bubbles over and over and over when it gets there."

  "I know Bennie."

  "Then you know what he told me, all in the effort of clearing you of possibly being anywhere else not only around midnight but well into the next day."

  Matt sighed.

  "Why didn't you tell me in my office?"

  "What?"

  "The assault. Why didn't you report it to the police the next day? Why didn't you get to an emergency room that night, or a private physician the next day? Why suffer in silence, other than you've had the training for it?"

  Matt laced his fingers together and studied them, the secular form of prayer.

  "It's not anybody's business."

  "With Clifton Effinger dead, it is."

  "Clifton. I'd forgotten that was his full name."

  "Clifton."

  "Obviously, I couldn't have had anything to do with it."

  "Still, you turn up wounded at around the same time the Effinger killing went down."

  "Then it if as murder. You're not fully candid with me, either."

  "I don't have to be."

  "Look, this was a private--"

  "Private what? No attack is private. If it was just a mugging, why not race to the ER, run to file a police report, list the missing money?"

  "Nothing was missing, except my blood."

  "So you frightened the mugger off before he got anything?"

  Matt was tempted to agree, but he always had trouble lying to Molina. Maybe she reminded him of the younger Sister Mary Seraphina.

  "Martial Arts Matt to the self-defense?"

  She was actually teasing him, which made him feel even guiltier.

  "No, I didn't do a damn thing to defend myself. I didn't even know I'd been hit until afterward."

  "Ah." Molina sat down, notebook on her trousered knees. "That's why the big secret. Plain old macho mania. You didn't want to admit you'd been sucker-punched."

  Matt remained silent. There was a lot more he didn't want to admit.

  "So now you're stonewalling: nothing happened. Nothing the police need to know about.

  Sounds familiar. You're starting to develop unpleasant habits from associating with Miss Barr, such as keeping things from the police."

  Matt resisted the impulse to lift his hand to guard his side from her probing. "It's not something you easily tell even your confessor."

  "So what's a mugging? I get unlikely confessions all the time."

  His slow sigh of surrender pulled each of the tapes taut, like tiny thorns. Remember me, you bastard.

  "If you want to call it macho anything, I guess it might support your theory if I tell you the mugger was a woman."

  "A woman? Knifed you? Street person?"

  Matt laughed. "Like Elle MacPherson is a street person."

  Molina frowned, but not at what Matt expected her to react to. "How do you know who Elle MacPherson is?"

  "Got a TV. Got a remote control. Sometimes don't get the news turned off fast enough to avoid A Current Affair."

  "It's hard to keep 'em down in the rectory, once they've seen MTV. So. Your mugger was a chic street person. I can see you might be a bit chagrined to report a female mugger. Big, strong martial arts expert like you. So that's it. You swear that this incident had nothing to do with the Effinger death?"

  "You'd make a good confessor. What do I get for withholding the facts? Six Hail Marys and an Our Father?"

  "You get off the hook."

  "Put me back on."

  She had been stuffing the notebook and pen back into her side pocket, but now she stopped. "What?"

  "I can't swear it had nothing to do with Effinger. It had a lot to do with him. I just don't know what."

  "Speak," she barked, as if addressing a particularly intelligent dog.

  So Matt told her of Kitty O'Connor's miraculous appearance by the Circle Ritz pool ten days ago, with a location for him to begin looking for Effinger.

  "You felt from the beginning she was challenging you?"

  "It was as if we were talking on two different planes, or from two different planets maybe.

  Like she wouldn't give me the info on Effinger unless I passed some test of hers. So I let her see my anger, I. . . played it like she wanted it. Maybe meaner than I was."

  Molina nodded.

  "Then, when she came back--it was like I had betrayed her, her expectations. I asked if she had mistaken me for a hit man, and when I told her that I hardly would kill anyone, that I had been a priest until recently . . . she reviled priests. Called them murderers and fornicators. She said I was like that too, that I'd
just killed my first man tonight. And then she cut me. I told the truth. I didn't feel it, didn't understand it, any of it, until she was gone."

  Molina had stopped taking notes, and was sitting rapt, spell-bound. "Fascinating." Matt doubted that she often slowed to a complete stop over the mystery of anybody's behavior.

  "What a psycho."

  "Is that what she is? I kind of took her for a demon of some kind, maybe just a minor one, but she sure raked me over the coals."

  "How?"

  "She was so taunting ... so personally taunting. As if she thought she knew me. This is a woman who would have respected me if I was a killer, but loathed me for having been a priest."

  "How did she taunt you?"

  Matt hesitated. The details were deeply disturbing. He would never tell Temple. Molina was far less on his side, but she had been reared Catholic; she knew the ambiance. She knew the lingo. She would understand the implications.

  "She mocked me. Mocked everything that's sacred to me. Knew just how to do it."

  Molina considered the implications. She wasn't stupid. "So she didn't mock your manhood--

  "

  He wasn't going to confess.

  She inhaled the insight like pure oxygen. "--but your priesthood."

  Trust Molina to understand that they were, and were not, the same thing.

  "And then she stuck you." She frowned. "Let's see."

  He lifted the shirt and pulled away the already loosened tapes, feeling exposed far more than skin-deep.

  Molina was as clinical as any battlefield medic. "Straight edge. Not deep, but deep enough.

  Long, but not that long. Just about right." She looked away as he dropped the sweater back over the wound like a curtain.

  "You, my friend, have been the victim of a hate crime. I can pursue that."

  "The weirdest thing was, she kissed me while she did it. It was a kind of farewell."