“Hmm,” says Tom. “We do not roam as much as we used to now that our numbers are being whisked away and returned all meek and meatball-less. But I wonder if you could be talking about the Dead Place?” He glances at the others.
Oh, great. Like I need to visit another Dead Place. “What is this joint?” I ask.
“I have smelled Big Cat there,” Snow Off-white mews. She rolls her yellow eyes. “Very Big Cat.”
“But nobody human goes there much,” Tiger adds. “That is why we explore sometimes. It is not far from here and there are trees to climb.”
“It is like a park,” Ma puts in. A lot of these street types do not even know what a park is.
I nod. “It would be a rich man’s estate, but no one would know.”
Whiskers tremble sagely all around. “That is it, then. The Dead Place. People do not like Dead Places. They stay away and then we can come out and play. Not even the aliens with the silver ships who abduct us go there.”
“I have been thinking of moving the colony there,” Tom admits, “but we grow weak and fewer, and many like the free food too much. We have gone soft.”
“Not very. Trust me,” I reassure them.
So I get the general location of the Dead Place, which I am happy to learn is in Las Vegas proper, if there is any district in Las Vegas you could call “proper.” I had enough treks into the desert during my last case to leave permanent sand calluses between my toes.
Then I bid the gang adieu. Ma escorts me to the edge of their territory.
“Imagine,” she muses with a trace of fondness, but very little. “The Grasshopper hangs with Big Cats.”
“You could come back with me. I am sure I can get you a cushy position at my pad, the Circle Ritz.”
For a moment her eyes soften.
I press on. “Air-conditioning. Sunspots. Security. Down comforters.”
She shakes her head. “They need me here. We are dying out, of course. That is the plan.”
I try one last ploy. “Ah, Dad has retired on Lake Mead. Runs the goldfish concession at this eatery they named after him, Three O’Clock Louie’s.”
“Your father is a restaurateur?”
“Sort of.”
She shakes her grizzled head. “I thought he had to follow the sea.”
“He followed it to a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest, but he came back here to retire.” I look at her edgeways. “Maybe he wanted to find us.”
“Three O’Clock! He always was a loner, that one. We had some good times, though. Nice to see you, boy.” She cuffs me one more time. “But do not come around again. I may not be here to save your ashcan.”
I gulp. I have not mentioned her maybe-granddaughter, Miss Midnight Louise. The maternal instinct is a hormonal thing with our breed: strong as steel when kits are coming and growing…gone with the wind once they have left the litter.
Still, her eyes are suspiciously shiny as I turn away and begin my long midnight stroll toward the Dead Place.
Dead Air Time
Matt Devine pulled off the huge foam-padded earphones.
This heavy-duty headset always reminded him of the “earmuffs” people wore at target-shooting ranges.
Some nights, wearing them, he felt like the target.
“Rough shift?” a woman’s voice asked.
For a moment he was disoriented. Without the strange, isolated intensity of a phone-line link to the whole, wide radio-listening world, the nearby unamplified sound of a normal human voice was surprising, even alarming. He’d thought he was alone.
Matt swiveled around on his stool. Had she —?
But it was only Letitia, the host who preceded him on WCOO’s nightly schedule of moody music and listener requests followed by his Mr. Midnight call-in shrink gig.
“Letitia. I didn’t know you’d stayed for my show.”
She lowered herself to the empty stool. This was quite a production, because there was well over three hundred pounds of Letitia to lower.
“I’m your producer, after all.” She folded her arms over her formidable chest and stared at him.
To the world of the airwaves she was her pseudonym, Ambrosia, the warm, maternal voice that teased mention of hurts and shy loves out of anonymous callers and then played the perfect song to celebrate or soothe. “You Light Up My Life,” “The Rose,” (Matt had to admit he liked the clean poetry of that one), that sort of thing. Most of the songs were soothers, and Ambrosia’s hokey therapy worked wonders. Matt, formerly a priest in a fairly formal religion, tended to distrust easily accessed emotions, but he couldn’t deny the magic Letitia/Ambrosia performed each night from seven to midnight.
Even her morbid obesity wasn’t unusual for a radio personality. Radio was the ideal medium for the less-than-medium attractive. Garrison Keillor wasn’t only a self-proclaimed “shy person,” but one of the homeliest men in the public eye since Abraham Lincoln. It had made him a star. On radio, and then in books. Not on TV.
Hefty size aside, Letitia was gorgeous and dressed like an MTV queen. Tonight she wore a pleated tangerine polyester pantsuit draped with a chest plate of African beads. The seriously chubby fingers braced on her knees were choked with high-carat solitaires of semiprecious gemstones. Silky smooth brown skin set off her eyes the way black velvet showcases diamonds, and they were meticulously made up with metallic swaths of shadow. Looking at her was like regarding a bird of paradise.
“You look gorgeous tonight,” Matt couldn’t stop himself from remarking, though he seldom felt comfortable complimenting a woman on looks alone.
“Thanks.” Her self-esteem preened visibly. “You look pretty good yourself.”
“It’s not anything I do,” he said, instantly uncomfortable.
She just shook her head. “I told you when I hired you that you were too pretty to be on radio, but that’s okay. They can hear it in your voice.”
“People can hear how I look?”
“They get an image. If you have a nice voice, it’s a nice image. Radio’s the only place I can be taken for a size six, honey!”
A rich rhumba of laughter emerged from the bright drum of her huge body. She cocked her gorgeous head with its decorated dread-locks to hear herself. “Then again, maybe not. Too much reverb for an anorexic.”
Matt couldn’t help smiling.
“Now that’s better, Mr. Moody Midnight. You keep smilin’. Remember, they hear it all in your voice. So what’s the matter?”
“You hear something in my voice?”
“I hear everything in your voice, baby. It’s nothing personal. It’s my job. I read voices. Yours has changed.”
“How?” He felt an irrational surge of defiance. If she could hear it, so could…anyone.
“Tighter, more cautious. Strained. If you were a singer I’d be worried. We got to get back that nice, easy open throat you were born with. So tell Ambrosia what’s the matter. Don’t think of me as your producer; think of me as that nice smooth-as-white chocolate voice on the radio.”
She shook with laughter then, picturing herself as white chocolate. In a way she was, thanks to radio. Ultraslim, no-calorie white chocolate.
Matt sighed, relieved to have nothing to hide behind right now. Letitia was indeed his producer. If she detected something strained in his performance, then it was her business. And…half the world confided in Ambrosia and felt better for it. Maybe he could share a bit of that magic too. God knew he had a lot to confide.
“So tell Mama.”
The admonition made Matt superimpose his mother’s image over the gaudy mountain of Letitia. Mira Zabinski was small, pale, constrained, lost like a pastel portrait by Degas against a lush Gauguin oil painting of the islands.
He felt a pang of disloyalty along with relief.
“When did you notice a change?” he asked.
She considered. “Around ’bout that time Elvis started calling you.”
“Letitia, it wasn’t Elvis —”
“Let me think it was Elvis. I
’d feel better thinking it was Elvis. A lot of people would. He’s kinda a patron saint for the dysfunctional, you know.”
“I know! I heard that loud and clear from the callers back then. So I started going wrong then?”
“Wrong? Nothing wrong with you, then or now.” She stood up. “Let’s go get some fruity drink some place. I’m buying.”
Matt knew then that it was serious. He was slower to rise. Half of him welcomed a chance to share the trouble he’d doled out piecemeal to the people he knew over the past few weeks, partly to protect them, mostly to protect himself.
Protecting yourself was constant, lonely, back-breaking work, and he was tired of it.
They paused at the door to turn off the lights. Their familiar studio landscape vanished like a stage set. After Matt’s “Midnight Hour” program, the station went to satellite feed until regular programming resumed in the early morning. Only a lone technician kept the sound of music flowing over the air waves.
The hall was dimly lit and the tiny reception room seemed larger without people in it. Beyond the glass door, the almost empty parking lot looked like a staging ground for a UFO movie.
It was one-thirty in the morning, but in Las Vegas the bars were open twenty-four/seven.
Matt opened the door for Letitia, then followed her into the lukewarm night.
They’d dawdled inside long enough that the small gaggle of fans who usually waited for Matt after his show had given up and gone home.
“No groupies,” Letitia commented.
“No groupies.” Matt sounded relieved even to himself.
“You don’t worry that your ratings might be slipping?”
“No, because if they were, I’d do what I did before I had ratings to slip.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. Whatever I have to do to pay the rent.”
A form came barreling toward them from Matt’s left side, from the shadow the building cast along its sides.
Matt barely had time to put his hands up before something as big as a German shepherd lunged at him. Hairy, too. Red hair.
While he was thinking Irish setter, the apparition’s weight pushed him slightly backward and swiped his mouth off-center with a sloppy kiss.
It was five-feet-something of overenthusiastic girl and only the red hair kept him from pushing her away like an encroaching poodle.
“I love your show! I can’t believe I did this! ’Bye.”
And she dashed off around the building, giggling.
Letitia nodded. “Kiss-and-run groupie. Not bad.”
Matt backhanded his mouth. “Where are their parents, anyway?”
“At home, wondering where their kids are, as usual.” She chuckled, a sound as rich as water in a mountain stream plunking notes from a scale of river rocks. “Lighten, man. You’ve got fans and they’re in the desired demographic. I don’t know why you gotta see life in shades of gray when it can be a Technicolor paradise like the merry old land of Oz.”
“You forget the wicked witch.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m not playing no ugly old thing with striped socks unless I get to keep the jazzy red shoes, bro. That’s what it’s all about. Life does not have to be a black-and-white film these days.”
Letitia stopped to stare at a vehicle under the greenish glare of a security light. “There. See what I mean? Where’s that kick-ass motorcycle of yours? Or that sweet shiny silver Volkswagen Bug that Elvis left for you? That just makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time, Elvis givin’ people VW Bugs, even if they have been redesigned. Poor Elvis never got a chance for a redesign. I know what you’re gonna say: ‘it wasn’t Elvis.’” She sing-songed along with Matt, nodding at his programed response. “But why you driving that white chocolate old Probe now? It isn’t even white chocolate. It’s just plain white, honey, and that ain’t you. Trust me.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be me.”
“Yeah, that’s soooo tough. Easy job, good money. Raking it in on the traveling chitchat circuit. I don’t get those gilt-edged national speaking invitations. Not yet. And I was here first. So what is it? Girl trouble?”
That question was so wildly off and so right on that Matt felt like Letitia did about Elvis’s postmortem taste in giveaway cars: he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
“Boy trouble?” she asked when he remained silent.
He saw that he’d at least have to commit to declaring a sexual preference. Before he could, his feet felt a faint, almost spectral thrum. They knew that subliminal vibration but his mind couldn’t name it.
“Damn it, Matt, my car’s in the garage, so we’re going to get in that Vanilla Ice car of yours and go someplace for a Bloody Mary and then you’re gonna drop me home —”
He was frowning into the distance, black and empty. “Yeah. Let’s get to the car.” He took her elbow, or what he figured to be her elbow, and tried to hurry her across the black asphalt sea of the parking lot.
That was like a fishing boat trying to tug the Queen Elizabeth into port in double time.
“What burr got up your nose?”
Not only his feet felt it. Now his knees were humming with it, all his joints, and he could finally hear that distant waspish drone, sweet and scary.
“Come on, Letitia!”
They didn’t make the car, of course.
Some things just overtake you, like hurricanes and tornados and very fast motorcycles.
It came spurting and bucking into the lot, as black and anonymous as the leather jumpsuited and helmeted figure that rode it. Zorro on wheels.
It came roaring toward them on a curving scythe like Death’s particular sheep’s crook, the dark side of the Good Shepherd. Matt cast a quick prayer at the nearest streetlight, a vigil light for the whole firmament and what might lie behind it.
He stopped moving and Letitia mirrored him.
“What’s going on? Who’s that speed demon?” she demanded. For the first time her deep, dark voice trembled like her flesh.
“That’s my problem.”
“Drugs? Somebody’s after you?”
“No drugs. Just after me.”
The black motorcycle, a Kawasaki model aptly called the Ninja, swung in a circle and tilted closer and closer until it ringed Matt and Letitia into an invisible circle of containment.
“It sure does stir up a lot of hot air,” Letitia complained as her tangerine outfit expanded to blowfish proportions.
The Ninja revved and came whooshing by, forcing them to back step.
Matt circled Letitia, keeping between the motorcycle and her.
“Hey, man,” she objected, “don’t play the hero. I can take that thing. Who’d you think’d be left standing after a head-to-headlight?”
Matt laughed, his tension easing. “You’re addicted to counseling, you know that?”
“It’s cheaper than a lot of things. Oh, that machine is snortin’ now. Here comes El Toro.”
The dark motorcycle charged, cutting it even closer than before.
Matt tensed to pounce as it passed. Motorcycles were powerful, fast, and maneuverable, but they rode a very fine line of balance. If he could tip that balance he might be dragged over the asphalt, but the bike might skid, tip.
He lunged as the heat and sound roared at them like a dragon’s breath. Grabbing at the handlebar jerked him off his feet, sent him rolling on the asphalt without the protection of biker leathers.
Khakis and a linen blazer kept the asphalt from breaking through and he was up as fast as he was down, but fifteen feet away from Letitia.
The Ninja cut a close, wobbly circle; its rider was forced to throttle down and drag a booted foot on the ground to stabilize the bike.
Then it revved again and drove straight ahead, between Matt and Letitia.
He tried to lunge and grab once more, but only ended up smacking the red taillight good-bye. Letitia huffed out a protest.
He glanced at her. Still upright. Still all right.
The vanishing bike’s driver lifted a right hand off the handlebars and flourished something long and dangling like a trophy, or a scalp.
Matt ran toward Letitia.
“My beads!” she was bellowing. “That bastard ripped off my tribal beads.”
“Are you all right? Your neck?”
“The world’s worst Indian burn.” Letitia removed her palm from her nape and examined it in the glare of the streetlight. No blood. “Now I really need that bleeding Bloody Mary. And you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
The place was called Buff Daddy’s and the clientele was all black.
Rap and hip-hop twitched off the sound system, the rapid-fire rhythms and lyrics as relentless as musical machine-gun fire.
Matt made his Polish-blond way in Letitia’s wake to the corner table she commandeered like a petty dictator. The speakers were far enough away that you could hear someone talk if the language was English.
A tall, pipe-cleaner-skinny waitress with an awesome arrangement of interwoven dreadlocks took their orders. Matt joined Letitia in a Bloody Mary, suddenly reminded of another wise woman of color and size, this one from the musical South Pacific.
Her tangerine false fingernails curled around the tall thick glass of tomato juice and vodka as soon as it arrived.
“This is a three B. M. night,” she announced. “Glad you’re driving me home.”
Matt noticed that her chocolate complexion had grayed to the color of cold cocoa. “Then one’s my limit,” he said.
“Didn’t plan on getting you drunk and compliant anyway,” she chuckled, drinking from a straw that rode alongside the usual celery stalk. She twiddled the celery like a swizzle stick and winked. “Good drink for dieters.”
Matt just shook his head.
“No use playing innocent. What you got after you? The mob? Some crazed Elvis nut?”
“Elvis. That’s what I thought the motorcyclist was at first. And a motorcycle did follow me one night…a motorcycle cop — maybe.” He shook his head again, wanting to clear away the biker roar he still heard, still felt. “After tonight, I have no doubts. It’s my stalker.”
Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Page 4