Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “No! We protest. That’s what we do.”

  “Who was to watch your protest, way out there? Those ‘security forces’ could have shot you all and buried your bodies hipbone-deep in sand for decades, eternity, and no one would have ever known. Just as no one would have ever known your group was out there to kill Van Burkleo if you hadn’t been spotted.”

  “Who spotted us?” He was suddenly belligerent. “Not the security guys. They were looking for vehicles, and we hiked in. We’re good at subterfuge; have to be to spring ‘surprises’ on the killers. Who was it? That guy who claimed to be on his own out there?”

  “Guy?”

  “He dove into the same wash with us to avoid being spotted by a patrol. Somebody else must have mentioned him. You want a suspicious character, he was it.”

  “I haven’t talked to the other suspects yet,” Molina said, “and I’m not interested in any lone wolf your imagination dreams up. I bet they don’t mention any such person when I get to them.”

  “They will! He wasn’t one of us. We have no reason to protect him.”

  “Glad to hear it. So tell me about this guy.”

  “Well, he dives right on top of us. Broad daylight. Doesn’t want to be seen, all right, but he’s wearing black from head to tail. Foot, rather.”

  “Black?”

  “Yeah. Midday on the desert. Says there’s always a shadow so it’s a good cover. Black. He doesn’t know at first what we’re doing out there, but he figures it out real fast. Acted like he was sympathetic to the cause, but Alyce wasn’t buying any of it. We didn’t argue too much with him; any uproar would draw the patrols, but we never bought his lame story for being out there. And he got mad at us. Said we were fools and risking our lives. That the security forces would have us for barbecue. Well, they didn’t catch us. Your people did.”

  “City slickers,” Molina said, pleased.

  “That’s what this guy was. A city slicker. He had a lot of nerve to be out there with us.”

  Molina was struck by the last sentence. A city slicker with a lot of nerve. All in black.

  “What did he look like?” she asked blandly.

  Sprague rolled his eyes as if the gesture would jump-start his memory. “Tall guy. I think. Lean as a whipsnake. Dark hair. Eyes…not sure. Thirty-four or -five maybe. Maybe younger. Acted…seasoned. We were kind of dazzled when he was there, and when he took off, we wondered what kind of line he was handing us.”

  Molina leaned her head on her hand. Turned off the tape recorder. “Can you just sit here for a minute?’

  Sprague looked startled to death at her question. What the heck else could he do until someone told him he could leave or bailed him out?

  She left the room, peeked in on the detectives. “Hang on,” she told them. Then she did a straight-line dive back to her office and a certain manila folder in her bottom file drawer.

  In four minutes she was back, sitting across from Evan Sprague and flipping open the folder.

  “Look anything like this?” she wondered. Idly.

  Sprague frowned at the single sheet of paper inside the open folder. “Bad hair. Worse jewelry.”

  “Can’t argue with you.”

  “I guess it could be him. Yeah. The face structure is the same, but the effect is…way different.”

  “Can I call that a strong maybe?”

  “Maybe.” He frowned at Janice Flanders’s sketch of Vince from Secrets. “Like the same person inside a way different skin, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes,” Molina said, spinning the sketch to face her. “I do.”

  Snakes shed their skins all the time…. And at last one of them had done it on the scene of a crime in her jurisdiction.

  Chapter 22

  Likely Suspects

  Max was waiting in Temple’s living room when she schlepped Midnight Louie up from the car in his carrier.

  “Just in time,” she announced, not a bit startled to find Max arranged like an art deco print (Big Black Panther on Big White Sofa in a Big White Hollywood Set from the ’30s) in her locked condo. “Let the revels begin! Louie and I have triumphed in the courts of justice.”

  Max sat up to watch Temple liberate the cat from his grille-front carrier. “I thought Louie the Wonder Cat was such a good traveler that he didn’t need a carrier.”

  “He doesn’t. But courts of law require animals to be ‘contained,’ unlike even the worst human criminal, even just to show up to collect a judgment. It makes me boil. Did you know that animals are legal nonentities? Mere property! Like they didn’t have feelings, and we humans didn’t have feelings for them. Would you believe this magnificent cat has a courtroom value of thirty-two dollars?”

  By now Louie had emerged from durance vile and was regarding the Max-occupied sofa with loathing, but definitely not fear.

  Max regarded Louie in turn. “Thirty-two dollars seems generous.”

  “Oh, come on, guys! Get over it! Louie, sit on the other end of the sofa, there’s plenty of room, even for you. Max, just sit. Don’t move a muscle. If you stir, Louie may not go up on the sofa.”

  “This is mentioned to encourage me to play statue?”

  “It’s my sofa and if either of you want to sit on it you’ll just have to get along.”

  Even Louie seemed to understand this last threat. After giving Temple a long green stare over his black shoulder, he stretched to pointedly sharpen his claws on the nubbly fabric. Then he leaped atop the arm farthest from Max and began smoothing the saw-toothed dishevelment of the hairs along his spine. Presumably the presence of the Mystifying Max had turned his usually sleek coiffure into an instant Afro.

  “Okay,” Max told Temple, “now that we’re friends”—the two were five feet apart—“I’ll let you tell me about your court date before I tell you about the court date I’ve just avoided. So far.”

  “Really.” Temple regarded the two black figures on her sofa with the satisfaction Roy might take in a pair of white tigers’ going to their proper stools. “Well, first I’m going to get a glass of wine, then I’m going to take my shoes off, and then I’m going to sit down.”

  She headed briskly to the kitchen while Max took belated stock of her shoes, a beige suede pair of pumps apparently judged sober enough for a court of law.

  He checked the cat, which was glaring at him while whipping its tongue over its muscular shoulders and showing its teeth in the process. At the moment, Louie reminded Max of the disapproving father of a teenaged daughter.

  Not that Louie could possibly know what fatherhood was all about, having the morals of an alley cat.

  Temple had not offered Max any refreshment, alcoholic or non, which meant that she was in a ruffled mood. Despite her air of celebration—zip-a-dee-doo-dah—not everything was going her way.

  Temple always tended to micromanage when she was under stress, even cats and lovers. Nobody had ever said she wasn’t a brave woman, and her recent excursions into crime-solving proved the point.

  So Max sat back, and waited. Once Temple had settled down, he would get his chance to astound and amaze. He always did.

  Temple pulled a single, stemmed glass down from her cupboard—Max could wait on himself, he knew where everything was—and tried not to notice how pleased she was to see him here.

  Pouring the red wine into the glass, she let her shoulders relax. Even getting her money today couldn’t soften that judge’s on-camera tongue-lashing yesterday, the sour topping to a very sweet day otherwise. Maybe they’d cut it for the actual broadcast. She couldn’t even remember what she’d said during the parting interview, she’d been so stung by the charges Judge Geraldine Jones had hurled at the end.

  She, an irresponsible person? A bad pet owner? She hadn’t asked for a cat, gone out looking for one, or for a dead body, over which she and Louie had met so propitiously almost a year ago.

  When neither one of them had panicked, she knew that they were made for each other. And did Judge Geraldine Jones have any idea of
Louie’s remarkable intelligence and enterprise? He was not an ordinary cat. You couldn’t keep him penned up inside. She knew you—she—should. Everybody else should with every other cat. Except Louie. Who would annoy Lieutenant Molina and contaminate her crime scenes if he were confined to the condo? Who would bail Temple out of hot water, in which she was so frequently immersed, through no fault of her own but nosiness?

  The fact was that Louie was not an ordinary cat, and he could not abide by ordinary rules. And Temple had never expected to be a cat owner. Hah! What a contradiction in terms that was. One did not own a cat, one cohabited with a cat. On its terms.

  Rather like Max.

  Why did anyone put up with either one of them?

  Buttressed, she came back out into the living room. Why? Well, they were handsome devils, no doubt about it, and so much alike they should be blood brothers.

  Temple sat on Louie’s half of the sofa. Actually, it was the only vacant human half, since Louie was still holding himself aloof on the sofa arm. Nothing can be more uppity than a cat with a point to prove.

  “So how was your day in court yesterday” Max said genially.

  “Do you want to get yourself a glass of wine first?”

  “No, thanks. If we’re going out to celebrate I’ll save it for later.”

  “We can go out? In public? Together? Really?”

  “If Louie lets us. He looks exceptionally disapproving at the moment.”

  “I mean, you don’t have to…lurk?”

  “I always have to lurk, Temple, but I think we can risk the occasional public foray.”

  “Gosh, we haven’t eaten out in a real restaurant since…”

  “Since Michael’s in New York.” Max took her hand, her bare left hand. “When I gave you the ill-fated ring. You did say that opals were unlucky.”

  “You did say that was just superstition. I’ll get that ring back someday. I know I will.”

  Max only smiled and lifted her fingers to his lips. “Your day. Remember?”

  Temple had almost forgotten, but she kicked off her pumps…had to dig out something snazzier for dinner tonight…and kicked off her tale of indignities.

  She stopped just short of the judge’s searing lecture.

  “No wonder Louie’s so pleased with himself,” Max commented. “He earns you twenty-five hundred bucks and manages to squeeze in some quality time with the foxy lady.”

  “Honestly, the way those two cats were behaving, you’d think Louie was the father of those kittens.”

  At that the cat thumped resoundingly to the floor and disappeared.

  “Alone at last,” said Max, who had never released her fingers. “Apparently fatherhood is a tender subject for Louie just now. He can never be one now, you know.”

  “You’d think he’d thank me! Look at the grief those striped kittens have caused. Besides, Louie isn’t the paternal sort.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked after him, or where he’d disappeared to, probably her bedroom. He knew how to pick his theater of operations. Lose one beachhead, take over the next most likely contested spot.

  “I don’t,” she admitted. “And I never will. Anyway, it was so delicious to see Savannah Ashleigh wailing and screaming. Such a baaaad loser.”

  Temple decided not to ruin the celebration by mentioning the judge’s lecture. “Where are we going for dinner?”

  “How about the Rio?”

  “Oh, great! I love that blue-and-magenta free-form neon all over the new high-rise building in the complex. It has more ooomph for being off the Strip. Did you ever notice how the swoopy wings and plinth look like that ultramodern statue, the Christ of the Andes?”

  “No.” Max laughed. “And don’t point that out to anyone else. Las Vegas is supposed to be godless.”

  “More churches here per capita than any city in the U.S.”

  “Thank you, fountainhead of PR information. Now, are you going to change into something celebratory? You do sort of resemble Allie McBeal.”

  “Ick! Lawyer power suit. At least my skirts cover my bony…knees.”

  Temple hied to the bedroom, where Louie was sprawled diagonally across the zebra-print comforter, managing, with his forelegs and luxurious tail extended, to pretty much make the surface unfit for human habitation.

  Since the Rio cultivated a Mardi Gras air, and since Fat Tuesday was coming soon, Temple pulled out the Midnight Louie heels in all their Austrian crystal glory. With her feet shod in Stuart Weitzman’s, she was up to anything, including rummaging through her jumbled closet to find something suitable to wear. What did you wear with your Cinderella shoes? She paged past a simple black dress with buttons all down the front, quickly, and settled on—aha!—that exquisite vintage ’60s silver-knit suit with short swirly skirt and tailored jacket.

  Grabbing a small black purse, she was ready for a night out.

  She did pause in the living room to grab Max, not literally.

  He stood when she entered the room. No matter what she wore, Max had the gift of looking perfectly attired to complement it. His wardrobe of magician’s black was just casual enough, and just expensive enough, to suit any occasion. A shawl-collared Italian blazer over his black turtle neck made him look fresh from the Concorde, and before that Paris and Milan.

  “Aren’t we a couple of quick-change artists?” Temple asked rhetorically. “You still driving the Maxima?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “It’s actually nice to know what our transportation is, for a change.”

  He opened the door to the hallway just like a regular date, and they were off.

  Within thirty minutes they were seated at a window table in the VooDoo Café, on the fiftieth story, just a story below the rooftop VooDoo Lounge. The restaurant was dim, the better for diners to eat up the view. Tables lit by candles in colored glass holders were standard, but the view of Las Vegas as the Bloody-Mary sun slid down behind the mountains and the Strip’s neon landing lights gassed up for the night ahead was spectacular.

  Temple didn’t ask how Max had managed to get a good table so fast. She suspected it had something to do with a cell phone and his invisible but potent brand of “pull.”

  Their before-dinner drinks were tall, exotically colored, and expensive, but uniquely flavored.

  “To twenty-five hundred dollars in a day’s work.” Max tipped the sickle moon of orange slice hung on his glass lip to her lime-slice-hung glass lip.

  “Peanuts compared to what you used to make,” Temple noted.

  “At least brazil nuts. And I didn’t make it from upgrading a thirty-two-dollar cat to a twenty-five-hundred-dollar one.”

  “They don’t usually award much of anything for crimes against animals. Luckily, Louie’s high-profile performance history played a role.”

  “I imagine you’re still enjoying seeing the Great Satan, Savannah Ashleigh, properly fried.”

  Temple nodded, sipped, then thought. “You know, she was really disappointed. I had the funny feeling she could have used the money.”

  “Now, don’t ruin your victory by worrying about the loser.”

  “Worry? Me? About Savannah? I can really use the money. I’ve been so busy putting the finishing touches on the Crystal Phoenix campaign that I haven’t taken another job in weeks.”

  “If you need any money—”

  “I know. You’ve got it. Or is that It?” She smiled wickedly as she put the capital I in her inflection. “I’m fine. It’s nice to know I have a chump to fall back on, but I’d really rather do it myself.”

  Their waitress came to take their orders and by the time she had gone their cocktails were at half-mast.

  “So,” Temple said, feeling really relaxed for the first time in ages. “That was my day in court. How was your day?”

  He told her.

  Temple’s jaw dropped about two minutes into the recital, and stayed that way until she finally could round up a question or three hundred.

  “You’ve
been back out in the desert with a pack of wild animal-rights people?”

  “Just three.”

  “And…hit patrols?”

  “‘Security’ is the formal term.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it earlier? So where I was snooping a couple days ago really is a top-secret, high-dollar canned-hunt ranch?”

  “Not so secret now.”

  “And the owner got killed last night? That man I met? Van Burkleo?”

  “The medical examiner’s report hasn’t said homicide yet.”

  “Like you know all this stuff! Out of the mouths of the police and into Max Kinsella’s ear?”

  “The worst part is the nature of the killing.”

  “A killing of nature, what with the leopard on the scene, I bet. Do you think the animal did it?”

  Max shook his head. “Too…pat. Especially when you know who the leopard is.”

  “You’re sure the Rancho Exotica leopard is CC’s? Do leopards have identities?”

  “Doesn’t Midnight Louie?”

  Temple nodded. She was starving, but the information download at the table was far more taste-tempting than anything she had ordered, as good as it sounded.

  “But I know Louie. Big cats I only glimpse. I’ve seen Kahlua, the black panther you borrowed for a special effect once, but I never knew who owned it. Gandolph didn’t ever work with a big cat—?”

  Max shook his head at mention of his mentor. “No.”

  “There are probably lots of leopards in Vegas. A dozen magicians around town must use leopards. They love to change them into human vixens. You once said maybe I could be your assistant. I suppose I could change into a snarling, sensuous leopard lady.”

  “Maybe you could, but get your mind back on who might use a leopard as an accessory. In the criminal sense. You already were in a position to see who would use a leopard as an accessory in the magical sense, even if I hadn’t told you who the kidnapped leopard belonged to.”

  “I was in a position? To see? When? Oh.” Temple nodded sagely, finally getting his reference. “TitaniCon was crawling in Khatlords from Space Trooper Bazaar wearing spotted masks like the Cloaked Conjuror’s. And then I saw CC in person at the judges’s table in his leopard facial appliance…but, Max! How would you know that I saw the Cloaked Conjuror at TitaniCon? You weren’t there, except on the outside.”