Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  What a miserable kettle of carp this is!

  I hear it all with my own two ears, which have been fanning this way and that to catch every tidbit of meaning that was passed out over the appetizing image of Miss Kitty the Cutter O'Connor. She is certainly an object lesson on the fact that a beautiful visage can hide a shrunken soul. I am also thinking of the svelte but treacherous Hyacinth. No doubt she will be as vengeful as Miss Kitty when she realizes that she has forever lost the sensual services of the only feline sleuth in Las Vegas who is licensed to thrill without any untoward aftereffects, like kitty litters.

  And now I learn that I too may be an object of enmity. Well, at least I have had a good longtime to study the image of my stalker.

  I must admit that I was impressed by Mr. Matt Devine's calm and cogent summary of the facts. Someone must make Mr. Max Kinsella wake up and smell the chloroform. He was so busy trying to escape his immediate past that he overlooked the distant. I would be inclined to look with even more disfavor on his reentry into my darling Miss Temple's life, except that I must admit I owe him for springing me from my fate before I was sent away into a life of enforced fun

  ... I mean, sensual servitude.

  Of course, everyone present, in fearing for Miss Temple's safety, has overlooked my own humble contributions to this state in the past. Although I myself am now apparently a marked dude, I have often walked hackles to hindquarters with danger, and it will take more than a little doll with a barbering degree from Sweeney Todd to scare the starch out of Midnight Louie.

  So I settle down into my haunches to keep an eagle eye on my little doll as she consoles Mr.

  Max for the sins of his past by encouraging more of the same sort of excess in his future.

  Perhaps my vigilance will make the lovebirds nervous, but that is just too darn bad.

  Wait until Mr. Max discovers my plans for nighttime guard duty over Miss Temple.

  Chapter 52

  Dust

  When Matt came out of the sporting goods superstore, a group of teenagers was clustered around the Hesketh Vampire like pimples around a zit.

  He felt a bit possessive, but they looked like ordinary clean-cut kids nowadays: booted leather-jacketed, hung with Goth jewelry, even the boys wearing chipped nail enamel in Oxidized Oxblood, little rings glinting off enough visible parts to encourage unhealthy speculation about invisible parts.

  Three guys and two girls, oddly like a cadre of vampires themselves.

  "Cool 'cycle, man," the biggest guy said in a tone half-threat and half- admiration.

  "Thanks." Matt had been zipping something into the nylon photo bag he had bought inside and now he slung the strap crossways over his chest.

  "What kind is it?" a girl asked. The braces she wore seemed more a high-tech accessory of the wasted look than a cosmetic appliance payed for through the teeth by hopeful middle-class parents.

  "A Hesketh Vampire."

  "A vamp," the girl breathed in awe. "They really call it that?"

  "Well, it's no Harley," a boy said in a down-putting tone. It doesn't pay to impress chicks.

  Mr. Big, though, seemed impressed. "I never heard of a Hesketh anything."

  "It's British made. Not very many. Probably not as reliable as a Harley."

  They nodded seriously. Harley was it.

  "What's this silly chicken doing on the front?" the second girl asked, tracing the outline with her chartreuse-enameled fingernail.

  Again Matt felt a stab of protective unease. Didn't like strange fingernails scraping the gleaming finish. Having things that other people envied was a pain in the neck.

  He moved to the 'cycle and pulled the helmet off his arm where it hung. "That's the Hesketh trademark."

  "A funky chicken?"

  "What can I say? They're British. Besides, when you've got a product that screams like a banshee when it gets up to speed, you need to have a sense of humor about it."

  "Really?" One of the guys looked ready to desert the sacred camp of Harley.

  Matt nodded. "Why do you think they call it a vampire?"

  By now he was taking back the machine, strapping on his helmet, drawing on gloves and curling them around the handles, straddling it, ready to kick back the stand.

  They pulled away, reluctantly.

  The key turned. The motor answered the twist of the handles. Matt was cruising away, leaving them surrounding the empty place where the vampire had been.

  In his side mirrors, he saw them shrink, still watching.

  A couple of the boys had eyed the photo bag, noticing the weight that sagged the black nylon. Sporting goods stores sold firearms.

  Matt didn't like to think those kids might mean him harm, but it was lucky they hadn't messed with him. If they'd known what he was really carrying, they'd have thought he was as much a vampire as his motorcycle.

  And sometimes it was an advantage to be mistaken for a monster.

  *******************

  The winter had been dry. A fine dust flared up from the highway and flayed the tinted Plexiglas visor. Traffic was light once he left Las Vegas proper.

  Midday, heading nowhere. The minute you deserted the extravagant architecture of the Strip and passed the low monotonous rooflines of the suburbs, you were scribing a course across a sand painting desert, all muted sage greens, sand beige and ferrous reds. Scrub, sand and stone. All of it in the process of being ground away by sun and wind and sudden floods in the washes. All slowly turning to dust.

  Farther north, the land grew ruddier near the Valley of Fire. The Vampire droned along the ruler of the road, bored by the level, straight route.

  Matt was bored by it too, but he didn't know where he was going and figured the boredom would tell him when, and where, to stop.

  He thought about the letter that had arrived that morning from up north, addressed in a loopy, adolescent hand.

  Krys. Keeping up with the unattainable older cousin, a traditional outlet for girls on the cusp of womanhood.

  A strip of photos from a mall machine had fallen out. Four for .. . how much was it these days? A lot more than it had been when he was young. Younger.

  He smiled, though only the desert could see him. Krys's hyperactive prose style, all exclamations and i's dotted with small neat circles. The family was okaying an art major, but she had to go to Loyola, not some California university.

  --

  And I took Aunt Mira to the mall the other day. She wanted to see the place where you bought her the blouse for Christmas.

  Really was shocked at how expensive everything was, but I explained that was inflation. She is so funny and shy. Never drives to the mall. That's nothing! I told her next time we go, we take her car and she drives. I mean, I sweated blood to get my driver's license, for God's sake, she shouldn't just forget that sort of thing. Anyway, I kept telling her about this place in the mall.

  Really cool. Great haircuts. She was major not into it, but I got her in for a color rinse and trim at least. So we took pictures afterward. What do you think? I hope you're doing well. Loads of XXXXXXs. Krys.

  --

  Matt shook his head. Of the four photos, three were of Krys playing vamp for the camera.

  The fourth was of his mother, her hair shorter, brighter, bounder, wearing the earrings he had also given her for Christmas. She looked ten years younger. She almost looked happy.

  Sic transit Effinger.

  Okay. The memory had set the mood, so Matt turned the motorcycle off the highway and let it jolt a few feet into the desert.

  The kickstand sunk hard into the sand before it gripped. Cars whooshed by on the nearby highway, but not many and not often.

  Matt unzipped the nylon bag at his hip and lifted out the heavy, smooth bronze weight of the mortuary vase.

  Effinger on the gilt half-shell. Boiled down to a few ounces of dust and ash. The eighty percent liquid we all are, burned out from here to eternity.

  Desiccated, like the desert. Dry, like old bones. Cold, like d
ead embers. His to do with as he would.

  Keep it? No. Even the ashes of a loved one would make an awkward keepsake. Half shrine, half white elephant.

  Matt had wondered what it would be like to hold Effinger in one hand. To feel the outer weight of the container, and the weightlessness of not-being within.

  He had often stood over a coffin propped upon its support mechanism over the open grave and intoned the sonorous Biblical line made for ministers, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." That ancient formula had always made him think, had always seemed new and poignantly specific for each departed soul he had ceremoniously wished godspeed.

  And now, Cliff Effinger. A man mourned by no one. A man survived by himself, and his mother. A man ultimately impotent in his anger and the anger he turned on others.

  To the end of bitterness, to the lightness of ashes, to the pittance of mineral and bone we all are.

  Matt pulled the stopper from the bottle, let the genie of death out.

  A thin gray veil blew onto the desert air, lifted, swirled, dispersed in a heartbeat. So many years, eddying away. So much weight and hatred, lofting like butterflies in passage.

  Some motes would crash into the swift walls of windshield swimming down the highway.

  Some would rise hawk like to hunt the upper currents until they snagged on an outcropping.

  Some fell to earth, for the scorpions and lizards to scuttle through.

  Gone. The past. The pain. Gone. Ready for the future. The power and the glory. The pain.

  Nothing much changed, except how you felt about it.

  And that, as the poet said, is all the difference.

  Tailpiece

  Midnight Louie Admits to Nothing

  I suppose I am lucky that the officials present at my rescue were more concerned about crimes against humans, such as kidnapping, than crimes against cats.

  A close inspection of my condition that night might have revealed that I was still under the influence of an illegal substance, aka Panama Purple.

  You can bet that I will not forget the treacherous Hyacinth and her even more sneaky mistress, Shangri-La. And I would be willing to bet that they will not forget me and mine, more's the pity.

  Anyway, despite the usual danger and deception, I would think the human dramatis personae would be pretty pleased with themselves after this adventure. Mr. Matt Devine has seen the last of his evil stepfather, and somebody other than himself has done the dirty deed and removed the oaf from the planet. Miss Temple Barr has seen the two thugs who assaulted her a few cases back in custody and under arrest for drug-running as well as suspicion of murdering the late unlamented Cliff Effinger. Lieutenant C. R. Molina has seen the Mystifying Max face-to-face and even has pinned him down (almost literally) for a long-desired, albeit brief, interrogation. And Mr. Max Kinsella has seen fit to play hero of the hour, using his magical skills to uncover a shipment of illegal drugs and a couple of unwilling drug users: myself and Miss Temple Barr.

  There is ample cause for celebration at this juncture, and the delicious scent of more mysteries to be solved as recent events resolve even more.

  So why is everybody so glum and acting like nobody has what he or she wishes?

  Call it the human condition.

  You certainly cannot call it the feline condition. My kind is known to be much easier to please.

  But I suppose my human companions are suffering from what I would describe as a surfeit of Free-to-be-Feline. The exotic dressing on the top does not seem sufficient to disguise the inadequate sustenance underneath.

  What do these humans want? Spoon-fed cod-liver oil?

  Hmmm. Miss Temple has never tried that on my Free-to-be-Feline. I must find a way to drop a few hints....

  Very best fishes,

  Midnight Louie, Esq.

  P.S. You can reach Midnight Louie on the Internet at: http://www.catwriter.com/cdouglas To subscribe to Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter or for information on Louie's T-shirt, write: PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163.

  Carole Nelson Douglas Admits to Confabulation

  A reader who has lived in Las Vegas for thirty years wrote to compliment my accurate description of local landmarks.

  It's nice to take a bow, but I don't live in Las Vegas; I only visit there (and not as often as I'd like). Also, although I try to describe the environment accurately, I have an easy out around the edges. From the very first, in penning Louie's Las Vegas adventures, I've added fictional structures that are my very own to embroider as much as my heart desires.

  Las Vegas, from the founding of Bugsy Siegel's first Flamingo Hotel, has always celebrated making something out of nothing, so it's the perfect setting for fiction.

  The Circle Ritz condominium/apartment building, for instance, is an actual building, all right, but imported from Corpus Christi, Texas. I saw it in the mid-eighties and became instantly enamored of its round exterior, which created pie-shaped rooms, and its light-warping arched ceilings. Although built as a coastline pied-a-terre for Corpus Christi's wealthy families, its perfectly preserved fifties decor struck me as perfect for Temple's Las Vegas pad. Another Las-Vegas-dwelling reader recently volunteered that she knows many such buildings in the city.

  I invented the Goliath Hotel (Vegas's biggest and most vulgar hotel) and its antithesis, the Crystal Phoenix (Vegas's most tasteful hostelry), over a decade ago for the first series of Midnight Louie novels, now out of print. The idea was to avoid lawsuits by existing hotels on the subjective matter of taste, and also to take Las Vegas to even more extremes than it then seemed capable of.

  But since my first visit in 1985, the expanding Strip has overreached even my imagination: the Goliath lobby's "Love Moat" has been echoed several times as new "Goliath Hotels" have sprung up.

  Another artifact that brings reader queries is the Hesketh Vampire motorcycle that has belonged to the Mystifying Max, Electra Lark, and now is in the custody of that uneasy rider, Matt Devine.

  Bikers have written to ask if it's real. The Harley clubs know nothing about it. Oh yes, Virgil and Virginia, it's real right down to the surly crowned chicken logo on the sleek silver fairing (the front hooding).

  This is one case where constructing a character allowed authorial ignorance and the reality of research to fuse. A reference book on V-twin motorcycles covered the field from 1903 to 1985. I browsed through the pinup pictures of these alien machines, looking for one that had Max Kinsella's fingerprints all over it .

  Besides gravitating to the sinister model name, trust me to find the only bike in the book that looked like it was speeding while standing still. The Hesketh Vampire was only made from 1980-84, and custom-made for each purchaser. This Rolls-Royce of a gentleman's motorcycle looks like a sterling-silver lightning bolt; its sleek fairing was designed in a wind tunnel. The engine's thick metal walls can take ten reborings; which amounts to a life of millions of miles.

  And the primary drive does indeed howl. A virtually immortal motorcycle named Vampire: one fact no fiction writer could resist.

  Luckily, the real world overflows with just such juicy and obscure facts, along with many much more common permutations on the human (and feline) personality. So the imaginative blend of fact and fiction is an ever-renewable resource.