Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Have you ever?” Matt felt obliged to ask, though he was trying to ignore the woman’s presence.

  From what he could tell, all the while trying not to see any better, she was attired in iridescent strings. A quartet of strips, and where they went, or didn’t, he did not want to go, or know.

  “Seen him?” Her face was bare naked too, but easier to take. Her full lower lip—collagen-enhanced?—swelled with doubt. “Don’t think so. You ever seen me?” she asked provocatively.

  Matt shook his head, glad Janice was supporting him with the same gesture.

  “I’m the star attraction.” She pointed toward the stage where the sleepwalking Marilyn wannabe was easing her halter-style straps off one shoulder, then the other. Even Matt knew this wasn’t very seductive. “Aren’t I the star, Rick?”

  “Sure are, Redd.”

  Matt was glad of an excuse to look at her hair, a dramatic magenta-mahogany color found only in a chemist’s lab. The color was nothing like Temple’s natural coppery crimson mop. If the color was surreal, the way it was looped and piled on top of her head was even more artificial. At least, Matt thought, she had a greater mass of hair on her head than clothes on her entire body.

  A long-nailed hand curled over his shoulder. “You’re new here.”

  Janice was watching from what had become the sidelines with a distinctly chilly Mr. Spock distance. This was his show, and his problem.

  “I intend to stay that way,” Matt said. “New here.”

  “Aw, too bad. I was going to let you buy me a drink. I don’t have to go on for a half hour. Onstage, that is.”

  She twined herself and her strings around him, in the process almost pushing Janice off the neighboring barstool.

  Matt had never felt more embarrassed and less in the presence of a near occasion of sin. This B-movie seduction scene was so hokey it should be shown to the troops to turn them off, except he had a feeling not much would turn off troops.

  He tried to pry off her invasive hands.

  “What’s your lady friend doing,” she demanded, clinging more, “taking notes?” She looked over her shoulder at Janice.

  Matt found a wave of relief turning into a churn of guilt.

  “You need some ideas, honey?” the lady known as Redd said.

  “I’m a staff artist for the National Enquirer,” Janice answered coolly. “We’re doing a piece on The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas. Mind if I sketch you?”

  “Yes. I do.” Redd straightened. Her face was already painted as perfectly as Janice could ever do it: pencil-arched dark brows, bowed scarlet mouth, eyes so deeply shadowed their own color was neutralized by the shimmering smoky claret aura around them.

  Redd’s taloned hand struck out to capture the sketch pad, so swiftly that both Matt and Janice jumped, but did nothing. “This is no stripper.” She eyed the portrait of Vince with an odd expression, part repulsion, part a hunger Matt couldn’t name.

  Janice reclaimed the pad just as swiftly. “I said The Wacky Strippers of Las Vegas, not just women strippers.”

  Redd’s darkened eyes smoldered.

  Matt smelled something really tacky brewing, like a catfight. He stood up, grabbed Redd’s arm. “I thought you wanted me to buy you a drink?”

  She whipped around to face him, eyes as feral as her mouth frozen in a half snarl.

  “You ready to pony up?”

  He shrugged. Anything to save the day, or night.

  Rick spoke for the first time, like a member of an audience who suddenly finds his voice. “What’ll it be, Reddy?”

  “My usual.” She undulated onto the empty stool next to Matt. He was glad to serve as a barrier between the two women.

  Redd, or Reddy, threw a sultry smile at Rick. “A Bloody Mary.”

  Matt watched Rick mix the tomato juice and vodka over copious ice cubes, then stake the glass with a limp stalk of celery. He assumed the liquor content was about as limp, and as limp as the ten-dollar bill Rick extracted from his fingers. No change was forthcoming.

  “So,” said Redd, growing on him like kudzu, “you new in town?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to be sure to catch my act. In about twenty minutes. I’m the headliner.”

  He nodded noncommittally. He hoped he and Janice would be gone in ten.

  Her arm twined his, her leg had stretched and then flexed over his thigh. He could feel her muscles, taut and as stringy as her costume. Stripping, he assumed, required both dexterity and strength.

  It was like being embraced by a boa constrictor.

  Matt had just about decided to be ungentlemanly and dump her, when Janice attracted her own variety of snake.

  The guy who slithered up was as muscular as the voluptuous Redd. He and Janice must be wearing targets on their backs, Matt thought: newbies to the fleshpots.

  Jaded must be the middle name around Secrets.

  The man beside Janice was thick-set, obviously overbuilt and obviously flaunting it in a tight T-shirt advertising some heavy-metal band that looked like torturers on leave from Torquemada and the Inquisition. Torquemada and the Inquisition. Sounded like a rock band name. The guy’s fleshy face sagged in all the wrong faces, just slightly enough to blur his strong features.

  “You folks buying?” he asked. It sounded like a threat.

  “So far,” Matt said, just to divert the guy’s slimy eyes from Janice. That merited a scowl and a glance at the entwined Reddy Foxx.

  “Well, I know you must be a big spender, at least, if our star attraction is wasting her between-set time with you.” He glanced back at Janice, who was trying to look cool but was doodling hard jagged lines on the corner of the overturned sketch.

  Matt was so glad Vince was facedown for the moment that he barely noticed Miss Foxx’s barely legal custody.

  The bouncer smirked, glancing from one to another, all three.

  Apparently everyone was too controlled for his taste.

  He flicked Janice a glance. “We don’t encourage dykes in here.”

  For an instant even Rick stopped nervously wiping down the bar. These were his private customers, and he didn’t want the bouncer to find that out.

  Matt was stunned, not knowing what was required in the way of defining his lady friend’s honor.

  After a few seconds’ silence, Janice laughed easily. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m here on police business. You want to call someone a dyke, I suggest you call up the lieutenant who sent me here. I’m sure she’d be interested in the customer policies here at Secrets. Me, if I took your comment personally, I’d just call the ACLU.”

  His expression tightened, and he glanced suspiciously at Matt.

  “What is this? Some gay door-busting setup?”

  “Rafi.” The voice of reason came most surprisingly from the entwining Miss Foxx. “Don’t be a big bad bigot. It’s bad for business.”

  His shoulders shifted uneasily, as if he knew he was in the wrong, but didn’t know how to back down from it.

  “We’re leaving anyway,” Matt said, standing up and automatically dislodging Miss Reddy Foxx.

  Janice grabbed her sketch pad, uable to keep Raf from gawking at the image, and brushed past both the stripper and the bouncer.

  “When I said I felt like a gunslinger here to ‘draw,’” she muttered to Matt as they headed for the blackness that harbored the door out of there, “I didn’t think I was speaking literally. Does everybody get harassed like that at these places?”

  Matt glanced back at the unlikely couple—or maybe the perfect couple—their exit had marooned at the bar.

  “Only if you’re obviously out of place, I bet.”

  “And we are.”

  “Were,” Matt said as they pushed through the big metal door and he took a deep breath of welcome smoke-free, sound-free night air.

  He wished he could as easily leave behind the strange image of Max Kinsella that Janet had sketched tonight.

  “Want to come in?” Janice asked on her t
hreshold.

  Matt hesitated, and watched her instantly regrouping for some face-saving comment.

  He looked back to the pink Probe at the curb. Once. What serious whacko would tail a pink Probe, really?

  “Since we’re both gay, I’m sure it wouldn’t do any harm.”

  Janice laughed in relief. “What a creep. Okay. Come on in.” Now she was scrambling to appear unsurprised.

  This dating dance was a version of the twist crossed with doing the hokeypokey.

  She rattled the keys, while Matt savored his power at doing the unexpected. Janice was the soul of serenity, but now she wasn’t sure of anything.

  Matt was. Now was the time to face facts.

  She walked in ahead of him, turning on lamps. Lamps, not overhead lighting. It gave her airy, ingratiating rooms by day a mysterious, shrouded look by night, suitable for seduction.

  Except he didn’t think either she or he was up to that.

  “Coffee? Or wine?”

  “Something in between?”

  “Beer?”

  He nodded, relieved when she left the living room. The clocks ticked down the hall and around the corner. Ticking clocks seemed old-fashioned for a woman with a modern style like Janice, but he liked their companionable predictability. If a grandfather clock could be heard around the corner, maybe a grandfather was lurking somewhere.

  A stab of curiosity about his paternal grandfather crossed his mind. Forget it. Lost in space and time.

  He sighed, relaxed. Janice’s figure coming from the kitchen bearing two tall glasses could have been Betty Crocker’s. Not Martha Stewart’s. That was domesticity as de rigueur empire.

  “It’s odd,” Janice commented as she sat beside him on the long, cushy sofa after setting the pilsner glass on the tile-inlaid coffee table. “But I got the impression both of our pickups recognized my sketch, but weren’t saying anything.”

  Matt nodded, sipping the smoky, stinging beer.

  “I got the impression that you did too. And you weren’t talking either.”

  Matt swallowed more beer faster than he would have liked. “Me? Know this Vince guy?”

  “Yeah. It’s incredible that someone like you would know an obvious sleaze like him. Do they always do that?”

  “Do what? And who?”

  “Women. That stripper babe was wallpapering you. She could have come off one of those TV nighttime soaps. Bloody Mary! For gawd’s sake. Reddy Foxx.”

  “It’s the Mr. Midnight persona, not me.”

  “Did that broad know you were Mr. Midnight?”

  “Broad?”

  “Broad.”

  Matt realized that on some primal level, Janice—levelheaded, single-mom-to-the-core, earthy Janice—resented the heck out of some semi-naked woman messing with her escort.

  “That was an excursion into a Mike Hammer novel,” he said. “Too unreal. Vince. Rick. Reddy Foxx. And what was the muscle guy’s name?”

  “Raf. Gave me the creeps. The kind where you wish you were packing an Uzi.”

  “Janice!”

  “Well, I did. Going there was a big mistake. No amount of money is worth getting slimed.”

  “I have to agree.”

  “So? Does it happen often?”

  This was a perfect lead-in. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  She waited, never having sipped her beer. He felt like he was on trial.

  “The reason I canceled coming over tonight for dinner in the first place is that I have a stalker.”

  “Stalker?”

  “A stalker. Must have picked her up from the radio show. The downside of fame, such as it is. It became clear this weekend that she was obsessively jealous of any women I associated with. Which means it’s dangerous for women to associate with me.”

  Janice sat forward. “So that’s why you were so…distracted all night. Looking over your shoulder all the time. Made me think you were sorry you agreed to go along.”

  “No. I’m glad you weren’t there alone. I was just…looking for a stalker.”

  “In the car too. Always checking your rearview and side mirrors?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re not kidding. You’re being stalked.”

  “What’s worse is that people who have anything to do with me are being stalked by default.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do? The police?”

  “First, it’s considered funny when a woman stalks a man. The weaker sex, remember? Second, how many of those innumerable women who are stalked have to end up shot dead in a parking lot before the law can lift a finger against the stalker? Think it works any better for male victims?”

  “Matt. That’s terrible.”

  “I’m just beginning to guess how terrible it is.”

  “That’s why you’re driving the funky old car tonight?”

  “Borrowed it from my landlady. Figured no self-respecting stalker would suspect a pink Probe.”

  “Matt. Is it that she-devil I sketched way back when?”

  “Yeah. How—?”

  “I just realized that was a face capable of extremes. How do you know her?”

  “I don’t. She used to know someone I hardly know years and years ago. I don’t know what makes her tick. She just has it in for me, personally and generically.”

  “Generically?”

  “She hates priests. Ex-priests. But I think she’s mainly trying to get to someone else who’s unreachable. So I’m the prime substitute. Plus, she knows I don’t know how to handle this sort of thing.”

  “You seem to be doing all right. Going undercover in a pink Probe.”

  “That only works for a while. Believe me, I’ve seen anyone female around me, even a child, attacked by this woman.”

  “And that happened last weekend?”

  “Last weekend. Lost weekend. The last weekend of my freedom, that’s for sure. So I didn’t cancel dinner because I’m afraid to be alone with you. That’s what you thought, I know. I canceled because I’m afraid of what danger being seen alone with me will bring to you. Okay?”

  “And tonight?”

  “Tonight I’m taking a chance because I owe you an explanation. I did watch as best I could, and I don’t think anyone followed us.”

  Janice sank her chin into her hand and contemplated the sour scenario. Suddenly she sat upright. “Well, that slut Reddy Foxx is in real trouble if your stalker somehow slipped into Secrets.”

  Matt laughed, enjoying the feeling. “Thanks. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll associate only with fallen women from now on and let my stalker eliminate the femme fatales of the world.”

  “Well, I guess they shouldn’t have to die for being cheap hustlers. I can’t believe it. Matt, do you realize how constricting life could be?”

  He nodded. “But maybe my stalker has underestimated me. I came from a constricted lifestyle, remember? Maybe I can outlast her.”

  “And in the meantime, your life is not your own.”

  “That’s true. But isn’t free will often an illusion?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just an artist, not a theologian. I’m going to miss you,” she said, lifting her beer glass for a toast.

  He touched glass rims with her. “Me too. I guess I’ll find out a lot about free will in the next few weeks.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “I’m glad too.”

  She smiled. He smiled. Maybe this evening could have ended differently, but not now.

  Chapter 12

  Caged Meat

  The smell of blood and bone spewed all around him.

  He paced back and forth, trying not to think about it, but the odor was too strong to ignore.

  The night was panther dark. No lights except the vague overhead glimmer of most nights in this harsh land.

  He had water at least. Not blood.

  The smell was maddening! The smell of slaughter.

  He couldn’t understand why he was being tormented like this: caged and affron
ted with the stench of bleeding meat.

  Or was it a dream? He had dreamed these dreams before.

  How long in this prison?

  How long since he had been stung into sleep and taken from his home?

  No one knew where he was. He knew no one here. The blood wasn’t the only smell. There was the reek of urine and dung. His grounds had always been cleared quickly.

  In the hot sun flies buzzed around it all: filth, raw meat, his eyes and ears.

  At night the smell was the overpowering assault.

  He heard others move in the night. He heard a rhythmic scraping sound.

  And sometimes he heard footsteps, as the keepers with the barking whips moved back and forth, as he did in his prison, only they were free.

  He lurched up from a prone position on the cold concrete to the corner opposite the rancid hay that was his bed and marking place.

  Water at least. He drank thirstily, satisfying no craving.

  Without water he would have died in the day’s heat. So they did not mean to kill him. Not yet. He knew that much, and no more.

  But the smell, all around!

  He lunged at the bars with a guttural cry of anguish.

  He would go mad!

  Why had they done this to him?

  Chapter 13

  Trial and Error

  Louie lunged at the closing grille of the cat carrier, growling.

  “I’m sorry, boy. This is lousy timing, but we have an appointment with the long arm of the law. Just think of it as stardom calling again,” Temple told him.

  She was still panting from the effort of cornering and corralling twenty pounds of reluctant feline. “We’ve got a media date. Tape will be rolling at ten A.M. sharp.”

  What a ham. As if hearing a magic formula, the big cat quieted down. Now apparently reconciled to the need for this odious means of transportation, Louie tucked his big black paws underneath him and settled into the folded Martha Stewart towels Temple had gotten for Christmas from her mother. There were bunnies on them, just as there were bunnies on her Christmas bedroom slippers.

  Was her mother not-so-subtly trying to tell a thirty-year-old daughter that it was now time to breed like a rabbit?