Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple sensed Max’s immediate interest as Courtney Fisher, as tall and tan as the girl from Ipanema, came swaying into their charmed circle.

  “Is there anything your guests need, Leonora?” Courtney asked. “Refreshments? I’ve finished copying all the computer files.”

  Leonora lifted a languid wrist and opened her mouth to perform hostess duties, striking Temple as a trained animal warming up for a familiar act. She spared her the effort.

  “I met Mr. Van Berkleo’s assistant on my earlier visit. Maxi, this is Courtney Fisher.”

  “Charmed.” Max took her hand, bowing so low over it in a European fashion that his face gazed at the vee of her maize linen suit and any presumable décolletage anyone so slender might be expected to have.

  That’s when Temple tumbled to the fact that Courtney probably had been a mistress here: Van Burkleo’s.

  Max had sensed it instantly, in the way the two women prowled at just too much social distance around each other, like nervous tigers in a too-small-for-territoriality cage.

  “I don’t care for anything, do you, darling?” Temple responded to the recent beverage offer.

  Max hesitated just long enough to flatter both women. “No. We are here to see the animals.”

  “Then you must start here, which is, oddly enough, the ending point.” Leonora’s strangely immobile face managed the tiniest moue. “For the animals as well as poor Cyrus.”

  “You needn’t show us.” Max sounded amazingly sincere for someone who meant the opposite.

  “It is nothing.” Leonora’s face grew smug. “Cyrus died among his beloved beasts. If he could still be here with them, I’m sure he would be. In fact, I’m having him cremated so he can remain with them. You would have no objection to agreeing to his eternal residence, Mr. Maximilian, if you purchase the ranch?”

  “Ah…no. Of course not. Highly fitting.”

  Highly freaky, Temple thought.

  She heard Courtney Fisher jingle away behind them as they moved toward the den, aka the scene of the crime.

  Leonora also jangled and glided away, but toward the lair in which Temple had met Cyrus Van Burkleo. She still wore the colors of the Serengeti Plain. Her widow’s sackcloth and ashes were spots and stripes. She resembled some Bob Mackie edition of a Camouflage Barbie doll, small golden trophies of animal likenesses surrounding her person like clanging temple bells.

  Temple glanced at her new ring as she followed Max and Leonora into Van Burkleo’s office. It had the opal ring from New York beat by about fifty thou, but she wished she had that one back.

  She remembered how the friendly clerk at the estate jewelry shop had blinked not an eyelash when Max had whipped out cash to pay for the ring. “This is the fastest and flashiest way to establish credibility,” he had whispered to Temple as they left with the ring on her finger. “Like it, darling?” he asked loudly on the threshold.

  “Love it,” Temple confessed, just as loudly, with smarm, as they swept into the concourse crowded with people.

  And she did. Not the ring so much as feeling like she was starring in a Noël Coward play. She was much too short to star in a Noël Coward play.

  But that was then. This was now. Now she was reduced to a supporting role in an Agatha Christie play, as the pampered wife took command of the handsome stranger, leaving the feisty ingenue in the wings with one hell of a winking emerald ring. Temple was beginning to feel like a traffic semaphore, giving the green light to other people’s comings and goings.

  She trailed the pair into the loathsome office, amusing herself by picturing Leonora’s clumsy face and feral eyes in the place of the noble visages that actually occupied the walls.

  Not one, she noticed, was a leopard. Was that why the leopard in question had been brought into the house? To be stalked on its owner’s own home ground? She wouldn’t put anything past people who made a living from dead animals.

  Anyone that could tolerate old, confused and semidomesticated animals to be gunned down from a few feet away by men who had paid ten or twenty thousand dollars a head for the privilege…well, such a person deserved to be represented for eternity by a headstone.

  She had not seen the animal-rights protesters, so she couldn’t gauge their ability to kill in defense of taking life. She’d think not, but on the other hand, nothing enraged her as much as the deliberate death of the helpless: a child, a prisoner, an animal.

  If someone threatened Midnight Louie in her sight…although it was usually the other way around: someone threatened her in Midnight Louie’s sight, and on a couple of occasions he had taken most effective action for a house cat.

  Her imagination had sometimes magnified Midnight Louie to big-cat size and pictured him patrolling her fifteen-hundred-square-foot domain at the Circle Ritz, trolling for prey.

  Eight hundred pounds of snarling feline fury.

  Somehow she never imagined him snoozing on his back with all four paws splayed to the four corners of the room like the king of the beasts on his African savanna. Well, to the four corners of the earth. Actually, given the round shape of the Circle Ritz and the globe, none of that four corners stuff made sense. Who came up with those figures of speech? Mapmakers? A pope before Galileo, or long after him?

  Galileo. Leo. How the English pronounced the name Leo in a Noël Coward play. Lay-oh. As in Lay-oh-nar-do Dee-Creep-io. Odd how many “leos” there were in this case. The leopard itself. Leonora. Leo the lion on Van Burkleo’s wall. Next thing she knew Leontyne Price would show up as a suspect. Or Noël (Leon backward!) Coward himself. No, he was dead.

  All they needed now was a suspect named Ole, but that was a name you only ran into in Minnesota….

  “Temple,” Max said for what sounded like the third time from the emphasis he put on it.

  “Yes?” She had been mentally leo-gathering, she admitted to herself. Maybe because a female was always superfluous around Leonora, the prototypical predatory woman.

  “Would you like to see the outdoor facilities? Leonora has kindly offered to guide us. And your emerald could use some fresh air.”

  Any daydream to avoid facing the nightmare of dead animal heads on walls.

  “Of course,” she said, waving her ring-bearing hand in a very Noël Coward leading-actress way.

  Max came to take proprietary possession of the ring. Of her hand, that is, and they both beamed with nauseating expectancy at Leonora.

  “I really don’t know why you’d care to take on a game operation in Las Vegas, Mr. Maximilian. It’s a low-profile enterprise, best suited to those with a passion for wildlife.”

  “Oh, Maxi has a passion for wildlife,” Temple said, linking her arm possessively through his, “although he has a quite subtle dislike of the obvious.”

  The woman’s leonine face lifted at the muzzle—upper lip to those used to human anatomy—at Temple’s implication. Temple thought she spied a sprinkling of hairs on that strangely elongated upper lip. At the least Leonora needed a good waxer, if not a wax museum.

  “The grounds,” Leonora added, eyeing Temple’s strappy high-heeled sandals, “might be hard on those shoes.”

  She herself wore sporty, cork-soled wedgies with enough rope ties to form a slingshot.

  “These shoes,” Temple said stoutly, “are usually harder on the ground than vice versa.” She turned an ankle to display a claw-sharp spike.

  “Ladies,” Max intervened. “I doubt that the animals will care much about footwear.”

  “Unless they’re in need of something old and smelly to chew on,” Leonora added with a pointed look at Temple’s feet.

  She clattered out of the room ahead of them and led them via a long, circuitous route to the house’s huge institutional kitchen and finally out to the yard that faced into the foothills.

  At first one saw only the pool and waterfall, the plantings and rock gardens.

  As they walked farther, the desert reasserted itself, and the vast acres of land alongside the house grew apparent.

&nb
sp; Although it was still spring in Las Vegas, there was no shade on the desert, only a sense of the sun warming every stone and grain of sand, creating a tanning-booth intensity of light.

  Despite her redhead’s pale, freckle-prone skin, Temple could understand why cats basked.

  No cats lounged amid the sand and scrub, though.

  A long, low structure proved to be a suite of barred cages, like those you see in a circus, under a common roof, accessed by a security-number pad that opened a sliding metal gate. Behind the cage bars within lay, sat, slept, and paced an assortment of big cats.

  A smell of sun-warmed fur, dung, and raw meat radiated from the area. The concrete surrounding the cages was streaked with rivulets of water that trickled into the ground-level cages themselves.

  Temple was offended by these mean, utilitarian living conditions for the huge creatures, especially after passing through the luxurious house. No wonder Letty the Leopard had wanted in. Or Lennie.

  “It’s not a zoo,” Leonora said as if reading Temple’s mind. Or face. “It’s an animal compound. None of them stay here that long. We have quite a demand.”

  “All hunters?” Max asked.

  She turned quickly, as if liking the question.

  “Many. But we resell a few to those requiring exotic animals for business, or pleasure.”

  “They don’t look old.” Max had wandered up to a cage holding a black leopard, better known as a panther.

  “Some are mere zoo excess,” Leonora said, watching him like a cat.

  The panther came to rub against the bars, stopping to sniff Max’s hand.

  He uncurled the fingers slowly, like a petal opening. The huge cat pushed its blunt face forward as if to brush against the palm.

  “Be careful!” Leonora spoke sharply, her voice a rasp of caution and shock.

  Max was concentrating on the cat, not moving.

  The two stood there for a few moments, as if communicating in a silent language.

  Then the big cat moved on, began pacing against the opposite set of bars.

  “Do you know where all your animals come from?” Max asked.

  “No. Don’t looked surprised. We have suppliers. Sometimes it’s best not to know too much.”

  Max moved on to an empty cage. “It’s always best not to know too much. Is this the cage that the…rogue leopard occupied?”

  She came to stand beside Max. From the rear her artfully teased and streaked long hair looked amazingly like a mane.

  Her voice was gruff. “Yes.”

  “Any idea how the leopard got out, got into the house? Someone had to know the keypad number sequence.”

  A silence.

  Temple, ignored (and glad that Max and not she was the focus of this strange woman) studied Leonora’s body language as she answered.

  Her posture shifted from the weight on one leg and hip, like a model, to an equal-weight stance, like a pugilist. Her shoulders lowered and squared. The mane brushing the tiger-print silk blouse twitched, ever so slightly, like a tail.

  Leonora Van Burkleo was not pleased with questions about the how-tos of her husband’s death.

  “How did the leopard get out?” she answered the query with another question. “It did not let itself out. Someone had to have released it, admitted it into the house.”

  “How is that possible?” Max continued, ignoring her mad-cat signals. He was the same way with Louie. “Even if you knew the code, how would you handle the loose leopard? Granted, you get semidomesticated animals here, but they don’t just trot after people like a dog, into houses. Was it confined and then released inside, do you think? Was it led along, on a leash? Was it a particularly domesticated cat?”

  “I don’t know! We never ask these things. They’re not here that long anyway, and if the exotic-pet fanciers don’t select them quickly, we pass them along to the hunt staff.” She paused, shifted her weight back to one leg, leaned inward to Max.

  “A leopard is not a particularly large big cat. The hunters prefer lions and tigers.”

  Max lifted his hands, framed the pacing panther in them like a film director planning a shot. He nodded. “Big is everything these days. Could your husband have let the animal into the house?”

  Leonora’s weight dropped back to both feet, her knees sagging.

  “Cyrus? But why? He’d never done such a thing before. These animals are…doomed, most of them. Cyrus was not a sentimental man, but he knew better than to personalize any of the creatures. And you’re suggesting he would ‘let’ one in, like a dog? Why?”

  “I merely offer suppositions,” Max said. “The vague circumstance of his death might leave a taint about the place. You know, the ranch where the hunters become the hunted. Not too popular a concept with flabby weekend warriors looking for wall candy. But I agree. I see no reason that your husband would let a big cat into the house like a dog. Unless, of course, it behaved like a dog.”

  At that she laughed, and took his arm.

  “Believe me, Mr. Maximilian. Nothing behaves less like a dog than a big cat, no matter how many zoo habitats it has lounged in, or how many backyard cages it has languished in. A cat is wild, through and through. No one owns one. No one tells it where to go or what to do.”

  “You’re right,” Max agreed, turning to Temple at last. “Want to see the hunting grounds next, darling?”

  “Dying to,” Temple responded with feeling.

  And she knew just what kind of mythical beast she’d like to hunt there. Catwoman.

  The Jeep jolted back to the cage area. Temple supposed that was part of the Rancho Exotica “experience.” A sense of “roughing it” in everything—desert landscape, rugged ride over rough terrain, emptiness, and then sniping at some confused, fenced-in animal until it was cornered and could be killed by a blind man.

  Temple, who sat up front with the taciturn driver, tried to relax her jaws but they remain clenched.

  It didn’t help that she was covered in dust from eyelash to ankle, and that some muscular guy in safari-suit khaki was advancing to help her out of the high-seated Jeep Laredo like a great white hunter dealing with the client’s spoiled daughter. Even her emerald-and-diamond ring was clouded.

  It also didn’t help that she sensed a cloud of cold fury enveloping Max behind her as the GWH took hold of her waist and lifted her down to the ground.

  “Thank you,” Temple muttered into her assistant’s dark and brooding face.

  This was beginning to feel like Mogambo. From Noël Coward to Clark Cable and Ava Gardner. That’s what you got from watching too many old movies.

  She turned quickly to reassure Max with a look and discovered that it wasn’t fury he was radiating but fear. It was a fleeting expression, but Temple was stunned to find Max visibly anxious.

  She turned to study her unasked-for escort.

  “One of our security guards,” Leonora said. “His name is Rafi.”

  Temple nodded at Rafi—odd name—and was about to introduce herself when Max interjected himself into the scenario like a leading man treading on the lines of an extra who had stepped out of place.

  “Call me Maximilian.” He stepped in front of Temple. “Terrific layout. I’d really like to discuss it with you from a security viewpoint.”

  “Rafi is a new hire,” Leonora began.

  “Excellent. A fresh point of view is what I want. Care to stroll around the grounds for a moment, if you can spare one?”

  Rafi, a sullen type who was immediately suspicious of Max’s enthusiasm, glanced carefully at Leonora.

  She shrugged. “Mr. Maximilian is interested in buying the property.”

  “You’d sell?” the security man asked incredulously.

  Rafi seemed a bit belligerent for a hired gun, Temple thought. And Leonora’s feline face took on an edgy, guilty look that surprised her.

  “Don’t worry, my man,” Max said quickly. “I’d keep on the staff. That’s all right, isn’t it, Mrs. Van Berkleo?”

  “Of course.
If they want to stay. You may want to hire Miss Barr away from the Crystal Phoenix, if you require an assistant,” she added cattily.

  “What about—?” Temple began.

  “Courtney has decided to leave for greener pastures,” Leonora said demurely. That blunt face did not do demure well.

  Max’s attention had wandered, as if bored by discussion of people when a miniempire was before him. He gave the man called Rafi a man-to-man grin.

  “Now, about those peripheral fences. Barbed wire? Do you really think they’d keep out interlopers?”

  “What kind of interlopers?” Leonora demanded, overriding Rafi’s answer.

  Max looked startled. “Every enterprise has its enemies. What about…say, those ethical-treatment-of-animals people. Vegetarians. You know what I mean,” he directed toward the security man.

  He was walking Rafi away from the two women, off into the bush, so to speak.

  “Quite…commanding,” Leonora commented.

  Temple wasn’t sure which man she was referring to: Rafi, who had hauled Temple out of the Jeep like a delinquent twelve-year-old, or Max who had commandeered the security man like he was recruiting for the IRA.

  “Yes.” Temple joined her hostess in looking after them. “Do you have enemies? It might explain your husband’s death.”

  “You mean—?” Leonora examined Temple carefully, as if seeing her for the first time. Perhaps she was. This was the sole occasion that the distraction of men wasn’t around, and Leonora seemed to concentrate solely on men. Temple wasn’t sure if it was because she was one of those dependent yet manipulative women who loved to coax things out of men (she was still covertly eyeing Temple’s ring every ninety seconds or so), or because she watched them in a purely predatory sense.

  One interpretation made her a greedy widow. The other made her a greedy murderess.

  Murderess, the old-fashioned form, seemed to fit her to a T-shirt. Animal patterned, of course.

  “What did you think of this Rafi character?” Max asked as they drove away.

  “Calling him a ‘Rafi character’ predisposes me to not think much of him. Also your hauling him away like he had the plague.”