Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Housekeeping is such a bore anyway, which is why it is better done by the female of the species. I note with disgust that my particular female of the species has carefully used her fluffy rear member to blur her distinctive footprints across the wood-plank flooring.

  I must follow in her footsteps, but more slowly, lacking the builtin feather duster, as my aft member is long, strong, and buzz-cut. See what I mean about females being suited for domestic tasks?

  After backing to the door and doctoring my trail with dust-busting swipes from my front mitts, I am able to nose another door open and survey a long hallway with the kind of railing that nasty Damien kid from the Omen films would love to push an unwary relative over.

  I am nobody’s unwary relative, not even Miss Louise’s, so I look sharp both ways before pulling the door almost shut behind me — I believe in rapid retreats — and tiptoeing down the long, thread-bare carpet that looks like something Queen Elizabeth tossed out at Windsor Castle. After the fire.

  Wherever my wandering waif has gone, it is somewhere in a decaying mansion filled with the ancient traces of — I sniff the air — rats, bats, and…cats!

  Somehow I do not believe that Miss Midnight Louise all by her lovely self in a few hours has accounted for the distinct attar of cats I sense in the air. Nor is that a lingering scent of days gone by, as is the essence of rat and bat.

  These are contemporary cats. Alarmingly current cats, and of a strange, potent, malodorous breed I have not encountered before, not even in my wide and long travels.

  That darn brat! She has rushed in where her elders would hesitate to tread, and now I have to get her out of trouble before anything drastic happens. I sniff again, though I am sadly lacking the specialized skills of even the smallest breed of dog. Ah! A waft of willfulness. An odor of the nunnery. A scent of superiority. Midnight Louie has his quarry and he will hunt her down.

  Easier vowed than done.

  I soon discover that the house is vast and rambling, a shadowed stucco labyrinth accessorized with enough black wrought-iron railings and lighting fixtures and hardware to supply the Spanish Inquisition for a couple hundred years.

  Corners that aren’t occupied by vintage magical artifacts are the property of empty suits of armor or such wall ornaments as fully loaded medieval cross-bows.

  While human occupation seems distinctly sparse, I scent enough passing cat tracks to make me think the place is haunted by unseen felines. Maybe Los Muertos are really Los Gatos Muertos.

  The hair rises on my hackles at that encouraging thought.

  Worse, with all the Big Cat spoor, I cannot detect the delicate trail of Midnight Louise. It had been a black day (excuse the expression from the senior partner of Midnight Inc.) when she had undergone the politically correct procedure: it had neutered her scent trail as well as her feminine nature. Not that Miss Midnight Louise had ever displayed much of a feminine sensibility, before or after her operation.

  I rest in the shadow of another of the empty-headed knightly guards and ponder what to do next. This joint must have as many rooms as a yuppie has flavors of exotic coffee to brew in the granite-kitchen-countertop Krups.

  I think like a crook.

  What would be the creepiest, most inaccessible, unsuspected part of this mausoleum where I could get up to nefarious doings uninterrupted?

  There is only one answer. Well, two. Either the attic or the basement.

  Now, basements are a rarity in Las Vegas. Hot climates don’t lend themselves to cramped, damp, clay-walled holes in the ground. Most homes here are built on concrete slabs. Residents know that there is nothing creepier under their toes than some flattened scorpions crushed during construction.

  Myself, I will take a dusty, dry old attic over a dank, dark basement any day,

  Which is why I suspect this joint is old enough, and was lavish enough in its heyday, to have supported such a nice, built-in set decoration as a basement. I mean, the place already is a perfect setting for a slasher movie.

  The only nice part about hunting for a basement is that the entrance is usually near my favorite part of any domicile: the kitchen.

  So I pad over cool tile, keeping near the walls where I can always slink under a piece of furniture at a moment’s notice. I finally find the stairs, snaking up the wall like a boa constrictor up a banana tree trunk.

  And there I finally hear something: sound and motion in what has seemed until now a dark and deserted house.

  It looks like I will be visiting the attic, after all.

  And then I freeze, so still my whiskers would snap like whips if I were to move again.

  I am not alone.

  Not only that but the presence I now sense is not one of the many domestic cat trails I have crossed during my wanderings. It is not feline at all, which is odd in this house so marked by the presence of my kind, small or gigantic.

  It is man. One man. As black as the night we share. I watch him move like a tide of shadow up the staircase, always rising, never seeming to move much, yet eating up steps like the ocean swallows sand.

  I allow one whisker to twitch in recognition. Or tribute. It is the only human I would consider for a partnership in Midnight Inc. It is the incomparable cat burglar in the midnight cat suit. It is Mr. Max Kinsella himself out for an undercover stroll, right where I have decided all the action is. Or where it would be did either of us know what most of this action was about.

  I wonder if Miss Temple knows that he goes wandering around at night without her.

  I suppose she does. She is a very modern lady. She certainly knows that I do, and what is good for the Tomcat is good for the Maxman.

  Frankly, I am pretty impressed by Mr. Max’s savvy and nerve. He is a lot bigger and thus easier to spot than I am.

  I decide to follow his lead and pour myself up the stairs like a sinuous Slinky toy defying gravity and going up, not down.

  No one notices Mr. Max, and Mr. Max does not notice me.

  That is the way it should be.

  If only Miss Midnight Louise was not a loose cannon somewhere in the vicinity, I would not have a thing to worry about.

  Not that I ever worry.

  Vamp…

  Shaken by the imagined lethal consequences of his own scenario, Matt dialed Molina’s office as soon as he got back to his apartment.

  She had said “later.” Now was later. Maybe too late.

  “I’ve really got to talk to you privately right away,” he said as soon as she answered, skipping the usual greetings, not even saying who he was. He sounded more like her than himself, but none of the usual social chatter seemed necessary anymore. “Right away.”

  “That’s obvious,” she said. “Where? You’re apparently too freaked to tolerate a police station meeting.”

  “Freaked.” The word made his mind speed down emotional dead ends like a rat navigating a maze of brain tissue. “I guess you could call it that. Some place where no one could draw the wrong conclusions. Some place…happenstance.”

  The other end of the line went silent. Finally: “One of the hotels?”

  “No, a lot of bad stuff has happened in the hotels around here.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “How about —?” He knew she wouldn’t like it, but he did. “The Blue Dahlia.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t shown up there in ages.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…none of your business.”

  “Because a woman’s body was dumped in the parking lot, and it became your business, that’s why. You really need to get back on that particular horse, Carmen.”

  “You’re telling me what I need? You’re the one with a stalker who won’t let you breathe without looking in your rearview mirror.”

  “They must miss you at the club.”

  “I always came and went when it suited me. That was part of the deal.”

  “Part of the charm. You don’t want to lose that outl
et.”

  “Singing?”

  “That, and being unpredictable.”

  “You think I’ve been predictable?”

  “Lately? Yes.”

  A long silence on the phone. It wasn’t just that being predictable was insulting. In her line of work it was dangerous.

  “You oughta be a psychologist, Matt, anybody ever tell you that?”

  “My guidance counselor in high school, and look where it got me.”

  “Okay, Mr. Midnight. Carmen rides the high C’s again. The Blue Dahlia. Tonight. After nine. Watch your back.”

  Matt was smiling as he hung up. He felt the same satisfaction as when sweet reason had encouraged a radio caller to take a baby step past some personal stumbling block.

  He understood why Lieutenant C. R. Molina needed to moonlight as the semianonymous jazz singer Carmen. No last name. Molina always said she sang because she could, and she was right: her voice was a terrible thing to waste, a smoky contralto born to carry ’40s torch songs to the Casbah and back. But there was much more to her clandestine singing career than that.

  Somewhere, far in the past, young Carmen had died a necessary death, resurfacing as the gender-neutral C. R. The only time her birth name came out to play was on the tiny stage of the Blue Dahliaand only when Lieutenant Molina decided to loosen the leash. Carmen showed up when she showed up. The trio that backed her knew that, and most often played sans vocals. The Blue Dahlia management knew that. The customers knew that.

  And they all liked it that way. In her fashion, Molina was a magician, appearing when and where least expected, then vanishing again. It was odd she so detested Max Kinsella, since they had that arbitrary magical showmanship in common. But sometimes Like loathes Like just because it recognizes itself through a fun-house mirror darkly.

  Matt found his thoughts jerked back toward the woman he really had to worry about: Kathleen O’Connor. Did he detest her because somehow, in some way, they had too much in common?

  It made his skin crawl to consider such a hateful soul akin to his in any way, but the years as a priest had shown him that evil was almost always a distortion of good. Evildoers always had a self-justification. And so did inveterate do-gooders. Which made them closer relatives than either would care to admit. Killing and kissing cousins.

  Matt decided it was time, a little late in fact, to search his rooms again for listening devices. Every time he left home, Kitty the Cutter could pay him a surreptitious visit. Would she have bugged Temple’s hallway? The notion seemed ludicrous, but what would she do if she had heard, or seen, that surreptitious scene? Matt studied his sparely furnished three rooms, hunting hidden cameras. Having a stalker was like having a ghost for a roommate, a malign, murderous ghost with a license to kill in physical form.

  THE BLUE DAHLIA.

  The words were etched like acid on the black-velvet Las Vegas night: on the classic, cursive, lurid neon sign that made every bar in every podunk town across the country a little Las Vegas for the evening.

  If Matt loved anything about Las Vegas, it was its neon. And the Blue Dahlia owned the epitome of the art form: a lush magenta blossom arching over the cool blue words like an orchid corsage from a long-ago prom, a 1940s prom, when girls wore shoulder pads and their hair rolled high at the sides to match, and guys wore fedoras and boutonnieres.

  The parking lot asphalt should have been rained into patent-leather slickness to complete the film noir setting, but this was Las Vegas, the desert Disneyland. The best it could do for any atmosphere was ersatz everything.

  Matt parked the Hesketh Vampire near but not under one of the glaring security lights. He hadn’t ridden the motorcycle in weeks, but he wanted any pursuer to dismiss this as a solitary outing. A man on a motorcycle traveled solo. Miss Kitty had shown a disconcerting interest in anyone he might pair up with.

  Inside, the hostess, a wispy nineteen-year-old, mounted on those clunky Minnie Mouse platform shoes they all wore nowadays, showed him to a small round table for one. His chair faced the token parquet dance floor in front of the tiny stage. A trio as classic as a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou occupied the tiny stage: a bassist, a saxophonist, and an electric keyboarder.

  The music broadcast the relaxed yet jazzy insistence of updated Bach by Louis Armstrong. Be-Bach. You could let it be background Muzak, or get lost in the fascinating rhythms.

  Matt used the oversize menu as a cover to study who was already there. He ordered a scotch on the rocks while he apparently dithered over the menu. His watch read 8:45 P.M.

  No one had come in after him and only a scattering of customers littered the tables on a weeknight.

  The quiet made him edgy. Expecting someone dangerous was more nerve-wracking than seeing him — her. It wasn’t Molina’s entrance that was the question mark but whether Miss Kitty would show up. And she might not look exactly as she had the last time he had seen her. He’d hope not! She’d worn motorcycle leathers then, like a punk London messenger boy. Before that…he’d always remember the day he’d first seen her at the Circle Ritz poolside, immaculate in a green silk pantsuit that matched her eyes, her Snow White coloring as startling as a billboard of a chorus girl in its high-colored photogenic perfection.

  A new instrument was harmonizing with the trio, meaningless syllables riffing up and down the scale in inspired improvisation.

  Matt shot a look at the stage. She was there now. Appeared from nowhere like a musical magician. Carmen. In the soft single spotlight, a portable mike in hand, she wore her draping long black velvet gown like a ’30s socialite in a Marx Brothers movie, a flash of bare arm through the shoulder slits the only pale spot on her figure besides her face in its dark helmet of hair.

  Oddly enough, Matt found the feminine side of Molina more intimidating than the plain-Jane facade she wore on the job. She was a big woman, just shy of six feet, and there was nothing delicate about her bones or her blandly practical manner and manner of dress. But here she donned some of that ’40s dame toughness, even as her voice toyed with and tortured the rainy day lyrics and throaty sounds of Gershwin.

  Matt could guess why she kept her songtress side under wraps. A singer sells raw emotion and that can make a performer seem vulnerable, especially throbbing out the torch songs Carmen was born to croon.

  Matt didn’t see vulnerability as a weakness, but as a strength. Being human made it possible to rise above human fears. Molina was one of the few people in the world he felt was competent to handle anything, whatever she called herself, or whatever she wore. And despite the words of woe she sang so eloquently.

  So he relaxed more deeply at the Blue Dahlia than he had allowed himself to do for days. When the waiter returned he ordered the sirloin tips in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, as if he was actually going to enjoy this excuse for a secret meeting.

  And he did. Everything had arrived and been savored by the time Carmen’s set ended at ten o’clock.

  Matt studied the tables. Ebbing diners had been replaced by ranks of drinkers, who chattered now that the music was instrumental again.

  No one who could have been Kathleen O’Connor in disguise or out of it remained in the room.

  Matt left cash in the padded leather bill holder, got up, and followed Carmen’s exit through a narrow green velvet curtain spotted with fingerprints.

  The short hall beyond led past a cigarette machine and the restrooms to a couple of closed doors. It smelled of cooking oil and spilled Coca-Cola.

  Matt knocked softly at each door. The second produced a muffled “Come in.”

  The room beyond wasn’t large but the huge circular mirror on a vintage dressing table reflected almost his full figure in the doorway.

  He looked out of place in his khakis and lightweight navy nylon jacket. No fedora. No striped suit. No red carnation in his button hole.

  Molina wasn’t sitting at the table but leaned against one of the pillars of drawers on either side.

  “I’m going to kill you,” she announced.


  “Not you, too.”

  “My threat is serious. Do you know what you’ve done? My voice is creaky, the range is shaky. I can’t believe that a few weeks off could work such ruin.”

  “You sounded great. Very Barbara Stanwick.”

  “Yeah, thanks. She didn’t sing.” Molina shook her head. Her no-fuss bob wasn’t quite in period but somehow seemed to match the shabby nightclub ambiance. She pulled the blue silk dahlia from the side of her hair. It contrasted dramatically with the only visible makeup she wore, a dark-lipsticked ’40s mouth, but a moment later it lay on the pedestal like a crumpled blue tissue, frail and expendable looking, like a dead stripper.

  Matt knew that the recent unsolved death of just such a blossom in the dust was gnawing at Molina’s professional and personal life.

  “Odd,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’ve both got similar problems.”

  She arched her dark eyebrows that Temple always fussed could use a plucking. Matt saw them as a strong frame for the remarkable blue-zdahlia eyes that were her most memorable feature, as coolly hot as neon.

  “You’ve got a killer who just barely eludes you,” Matt explained, “and I’ve got a killer I can’t quite manage to elude.”

  “So what’s your nemesis up to now?”

  “A nemesis is an avenger seeking justice. Kitty O’Connor isn’t that. She doesn’t even know me. She’s a…persecutor.”

  “What’s she done now?” Molina looked like she should be lighting an unfiltered cigarette, but she wasn’t.

  “She showed up where I work.”

  “The radio station.”

  “Yeah. I was leaving for the night, the morning, actually. About one-thirty, with my producer. And this figure came racing in on a Kawasaki Ninja, leather-wrapped from neck to toe. She charged us like a bull on that cycle, tore a necklace right off Letitia’s neck, then went roaring off flourishing it as a trophy.”