Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  A light still beams in Miss Savannah Ashleigh's dressing room. The Divine Yvette minces, one fine, furred foot set in front of the other, toward the ajar door. Even I can hear the muted sobs within.

  Yvette noses open the door, turns to give me one last, lingering look that would melt a snow leopard, then shoulders her way through.

  I hear a gasp. A cry. “Oh, Yvette! You’re back. Momsy is so glad her baby-waby is backy-wacky!”

  I stifle a gagging noise. It would be impolite to deposit a hair ball outside the Divine Yvette's door.

  At the sound of a zipper being opened, I turn and walk away.

  Miss Temple Barr is waiting up at the Circle Ritz. No doubt the caffeine In the Black Russian has given her the heebie-jeebies. I loft through the bathroom window, and she pounces on me with a full food dish.

  “Louie!” she cries. “See! No more Free-to-Be-Feline. This is Salmon Surprise, from the Kat-sup company. And no declawing, so help me.”

  She mentions nothing of the other abhorred procedure, and far be it from me to remind her. At the moment she is hanging over me like a pendulum and massaging my neck, while cooing my name. The Divine Yvette she isn't, but I have been in worse spots in my nine lives.

  33

  Electra City

  Matt Devine stepped around to the passenger door of the aqua Storm and opened it.

  Temple couldn’t “just say no” when Matt had offered to drive tonight. How could she explain knowing that he had no license? He must have had one once upon a time. He knew how to drive.

  “Are you sure you want to return to the scene of the crime?” he asked.

  Beams of light lanced the Saturday night Las Vegas sky, announcing the strippers’ competition to the very heavens. The colossus’s diaper was the focus of a thousand kilowatts of laser light every seventy-five seconds. A neon sign boasted Babes... Bodies... Boys.

  “And miss Electra’s debut?” Temple answered. “Your landlady’s not a stripping finalist every day. I hope you don’t regret skipping your stint at ConTact tonight.”

  He shook his blond head, which looked as gilded as Gypsy or June in the artificial light of the hotel entrance. “No regular client is calling now. Even though I said that knowing is worse than not knowing, I’m grateful you managed to solve who she was. I won’t have to wonder about what happened to her forever.”

  “Forever,” Temple said, “is a long time.”

  Matt nodded. “So is a day. Or a night. Why is Electra going through with the stripper contest?”

  “She’s getting a charge out of it, what can I say? We can at least try not to laugh.”

  “I’m not in a laughing mood.”

  “Me, neither.”

  They entered the hotel, Temple bracing herself to pass the Sultan’s Palace and The Love Moat. Then Matt started asking her about the details of the case and she forgot to brood over these emotional landmarks.

  “Molina says the case is cut and dried,” Temple told him. “Wilma—Carter’s her last name—has a history of mental illness, and there’s no doubt her daughters were molested by her husband. They’ve all vanished, and she’s left holding the bag of guilt. She’ll be put away, but not in prison. It’s harder to get out of a mental hospital than a jail, these days. Would you think I was crazy if I visited her?”

  “I’d think you were a twenty-four-carat human being. I envy you,” he said, as the velvet ropes parted for Temple’s VIP pass. It was the least Ike Wetzel could do, and Ike Wetzel always did the least.

  “Why?”

  They were soon seated in a wine-velvet-upholstered banquet. An obsequious waiter dashed up with glasses of champagne on the house.

  “Why?” she repeated after they had settled in.

  “ ‘Friday’s child is loving and giving,’ ” he quoted, toasting her with a tall, thin flute that sparkled like a yellow diamond.

  “When and where were you born?” she asked, curious to the last.

  “I’ll tell you someday. Shhh. The show’s about to start.”

  “Are you sure you really want to see something this risqué...?”

  “Shhh,” he said. “Kitty did it. I want to know why.”

  The show began. There was the flare of prerecorded music, the parade of performers. The glitz, the glory, the get-down-and-dirty nitty-gritty of bump and grind. The grinning boys showing off muscles visible and invisible. The glorious girls with bodies a Barbie doll would die for. The Over-Sexty set, never saying die.

  A vroom, vroom growled from the wings.

  Temple clutched Matt’s arm. “Holy hot rod, here comes Electra!”

  “Introducing Moll Philanders,” the man at the mike intoned.

  Dry-ice fog drifted across the stage. Temple expected Dracula, and instead got a sleek silvery form that spit luminous flames—how the Hesketh had Electra managed that? The cycle was ridden by a dark, ambiguous helmeted figure. “Born to Be Wild” revved up on the sound system.

  As the Vampire stopped with a batlike screech stage center, the leather-clad rider dismounted, kicked the stand into action, and began to peel leather from skin, and pose beside, atop and under the motorcycle. Temple especially appreciated her trick of lying back along the leather seat, her legs flailing in time to the raw beat.

  For an old broad, Electra was pulling out all the stops. Except. After the chaps peeled away, and even as the jacket was tossed, she whirled it around her head. It became a fringed cape that swirled through the smoke and covered her like a Turkish towel. The audience saw a lot of discreetly bare shoulder and knee, but not much more.

  A lot of flash, and very little flesh. Theater to the Max. Temple stood applauding at the end, tears of pride in her eyes. She understood Ma Bartles. Go, Electra! Give the lie to getting old and giving up. Matt was on his feet beside her, clapping sans tears.

  It didn’t seem right without Midnight Louie there.

  34

  Little Cat Feet

  The muumuu came flying at Temple in the colors of hibiscus and orchid.

  She regarded it dubiously. Ever since the strippers' competition, she was not about to buy Electra as a Grandma candidate.

  “A policewoman left this off,” Electra announced while still twenty feet down the hall.

  Temple waited within the solid frame of her mahogany double doors, alerted by Electra’s excited phone call, but leery.

  “Is it something about the stripper case, dear?” Electra asked once she was at the condo door, huffing and puffing.

  Temple regarded the thin roll of paper and shook her head. Just Molina returning the poster of Max she had borrowed, as promised.

  “And the manila envelope” Electra prodded. “Honest to Adonis, it looks like there are body parts in there!”

  “Even Molina isn’t that nasty,” Temple answered.

  But she opened the envelope with real curiosity. Then her mouth dropped. A black satin feline face emerged, pinned onto the shiny satin toe of a high-heeled pump. Two of them. A perfect pair.

  “These are Kitty Cardozo’s shoes!” Temple gave a macabre shiver. She pulled a piece of police memo paper out of the package.

  “Kitty had a spare pair at her apartment,” the brash handwriting read. “Lindy said you could have them. Looked just your size. —Molina.”

  Temple turned them sideways to read the gibberish of letters and numbers on the lining. Molina was, as too often lately, right on. Size five, double A.

  Temple swallowed. “I wish Kitty could have these.”'

  “Maybe,” Electra suggested, “she’d be happy to know you inherited them, dear.”

  “Maybe. I wish we’d found out who was hassling her. None of the other strippers knew. He’s still out there.”

  It was almost noon on the Monday after the competition. Molina hadn’t wasted any time. Maybe Temple shouldn’t either.

  Why not? Women were supposed to take risks these days.

  After Electra left, she sat in the blinds-drawn dimness of her bedroom, Midnight Louie lyin
g like the world’s largest lump of Christmas coal across her bedspread. Matt would be about ready to get a wake-up call.

  Temple picked up the red-shoe phone, its sleek plastic shape curving to her hand. She remembered Matt’s sudden confusion when she had jokingly threatened to give him a mash-call. These were perilous times, and a woman sometimes had to be bolder than her upbringing suggested. Max... Max had fixated on her, had seen her and decided. Had bent all his resources and concentration upon her. He was an irresistible force, but he was gone.

  Maybe she would have to be a little irresistible herself. Matt wasn’t Max. He was a man in hiding, too, but he didn’t dare be as open about it as Max. He had to be teased along. Someone, some woman, had to care enough to take a risk.

  Temple dialed the number Electra had given her.

  She would wake him up. She had a purring, slightly smoky phone voice. Some people thought it was sexy. How far do you go to break down someone else’s barriers? Maybe she’d find out. It wasn’t much different from those long, coy teenage conversations. Boy/girl, girl/boy, practicing for the real thing.

  The phone lifted. “Hello,” Matt said in his best professional hot-line voice. Not a bad voice, but she’d rather hear it less controlled, and more surprised.

  “Hi. This is your neighborhood hot line calling,” Temple purred. “This is your wake-up call. Are you ready to give some lessons? Martial arts, I mean.”

  Midnight Louie lounged on her bed, watching with calm, catlike neutrality. But when she caught and captured his glance, she winked.

  It was night, and Matt picked up the phone, as he always did at that hour.

  “ConTact?” the woman’s hesitant voice asked anxiously.

  “Yes.”

  “I—I feel I should give my name, but—”

  “Names aren’t necessary. Make one up if you like.”

  “Really? That simple? Mary Smith, then. Do you buy that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think, only what you do.”

  “Oh, God. I don’t know what I think. I met a man. He was so sweet. How... what do I call you? I can’t talk to you about this without a name.”

  “How about ‘Brother John’?”

  “Why do you use that?”

  “Because I am your brother, and everyone’s a John, or a Mary.”

  “Yes, maybe so. I can’t understand. He’s so thoughtful. So sweet. He hit me, Brother John. I don’t know what to do. It only happened once. Only... it’s never happened to me before. You should see the candy and flowers he sent. But he hit me. It made me feel bad... wrong. But I liked it when he apologized. I kinda got a kick out of it. I don’t understand why he has to say I’m so stupid, why I have to feel so superior and inferior at the same time. Brother John—? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. I’m listening. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Him. I’ll call him Jim. That’s not his name. But I’ll call him Jim. I just met him. . . .”

  Tailpiece

  Midnight Louie Lets His Hair Down

  Now that I have a literary reputation to consider, it is time to get a few facts straight.

  An ugly rumor is circulating that I have a ghost writer. This is what I get for being magnanimous and not demanding a coauthor byline. I am not against those of a spectral persuasion, but state here that I am fully responsible for every word attributed to me. (Not to discredit my collaborator, but I must report that some observers have even suggested that I should take over the entire narrative. Suits me.)

  Although I am now something of a literary lion, having been critically embraced to a heartwarming degree for my debut piece, a limber little four-paw exercise called Cat in an Alphabet Soup, there is also some confusion about my literary antecedents. (There has always been confusion about my biological ones, a hazard of my species.)

  I have been compared to such divergent dudes as Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Mike Hammer, "an aging mobster with a checkered past,” and a “hep cat" who “fancies himself another Philip Marlowe.”

  Listen, I come by my expressional elegance the same way I do my uncanny sense of balance—naturally. Forget all those has-been dudes like Marlowe and Hammer. There is only one Midnight Louie. It is true that I have dozed off over a few tomes in my time and left my marks on a book or two. (I particularly recommend hardcovers. The corners are unsurpassed as a scent deposit site and double as a good muzzle scratcher. Fortunately, my associate author has plenty of those lying about the office library.)

  Anyway, these so-called critics are getting my influences all wrong, as usual. Even Miss Carole Nelson Douglas puts it about that my origins blend generic gumshoe with Damon Runyon, Charlie the Tuna (the TV ad huckster, not the comic) and Mrs. Malaprop.

  I do not know this Malaprop individual from atom, but I have a bone to pick with this oversized Tuna dude (in fact, I would be delighted to discuss our differences over a long literary lunch—yum-yum). And, speaking of good taste, Mr. Damon Runyon had some admirable trends in that direction regarding the fair sex, so I will accept that comparison. As for the generic gumshoe charge, I do not share Miss Temple Barr’s affection for footwear, whatever the height.

  As long as I am on the subject of petty annoyances, someone once accused cat mysteries of being “fatally cute” and even—shudder—fluffy. They have obviously not walked my mean streets. I have not answered to “cute” since Reno Ravioli tried it in nineteen-eighty-seven and has been known as Scarface ever since. Not even little dolls so presume. And nothing has been remotely fatal to me but charm since birth, with the possible exception of Free-to-Be-Feline.

  Speaking of little dolls, I am told that the purpose of these mutual “About the Author” assignments is to mention a thing or two about my necessary associate, (I am physically challenged and need a little help in transcription, but she puts it down like I tell her. Period, semicolon, asterisk, et cetera.)

  So here is some skinny about Miss Carole Nelson Douglas’s private life, and I am in a unique position to know plenty. (After all, she did find me in the Classified ‘‘Purrsonal" column under “pets.”)

  I am sure you have been dying to know: the only thing she has in common with my delightful roommate. Miss Temple Barr, is a shoe collection that would choke a trash-removal vehicle (in my humble opinion all they are good for). Imelda Marcos is an amateur. As for the literary significance of such a fact, I leave it as a fit subject for the critics.

  Very Best Fishes,

  Midnight Louie, his mark

  Tailpiece

  Carole Nelson Douglas Untangles a Few Snarls

  Midnight Louie is like the Force: he is always with you. I am indeed supposed to shed some biographical insight here on Louie’s life and times, but he seems to have taken that over, too.

  There may be a misconception about Louie and me that I should correct before the ugly rumor he is so concerned about crops up on another front. Our association is not physical (though 1 would hesitate to call it spiritual). Perhaps metaphysical is the word. He does not cohabitate with me and mine, and never has. Our relationship is purely platonic, for good reason. We have not seen each other since 1973. That was when I wrote a newspaper article about him being saved by a Minnesota woman from a trip to the animal pound in California. Her intriguing classified ad searching for a new home for a cat who was “as at home on your best couch as in the neighbor’s garbage can,” made me write a feature story on him for the daily newspaper I reported for. A home in the country was indeed found, and we went our separate ways.

  So my introduction to Midnight Louie was a brief encounter that, nevertheless, made such an indelible impression that years later I found myself drafting him as a part-time narrator for a series of novels. Like all cats, Louie is eternal in a psychic sense. To put it in New Age terms, we communicate despite barriers of time and space. I may even be channeling Midnight Louie’s parallel life, or lives both past and to come.

  Louie would scoff at such trendy theories. Yet how can he explain away the
feet that the only feline presence in the author photo on the hardcover dustjacket is “a stuffed shill,” as he once described the soft-sculpture substitutes for the missing corporate cats, Baker and Taylor, in Cat in an Alphabet Soup?

  This substitute Louie (a contradiction in terms in the extreme—there is no substitute for Louie his own self) is, by the way, a cat-shaped, black velvet evening purse (a zipper at the back reveals a coral satin lining) with rhinestone eyes and a midnight satin bow-tie. It’s my favorite evening bag (of a large collection—so there, Imelda!), being convenient and even comforting to hold—and easy to stash under my arm when going through buffet lines. (Louie would much approve of aiding another’s food consumption in any form.)

  That purse gets a lot of comment and coos, so it was only natural that I should start calling it Midnight Louie, and even more natural to let it stand in for Louie.

  Come to think of it, I know exactly how Louie would explain his lack of physical presence in the photo: because of his semi-shady past (“expeditions of a law-deriding nature”) he must remain anonymous despite his new literary fame. That’s why he allows me to maintain my self-deluding little fiction about him keeping his distance. He has also hypnotized me with his deep, emerald, Mystifying Max eyes into overlooking his very real presence. After all, a dude who is his own witness protection program can’t afford to be too noticeable.

  See what I mean? In person or in print, Midnight Louie maintains a feline Force field all his own.

  P. S. If you enjoyed this novel, please consider putting a good review on Amazon.com,

  Goodreads and other online bookselling sites. :)

  NEXT

  Excerpt from Cat on a Blue Monday

  Book 3 of the Midnight Louie Mysteries

  1

  Louie’s Dog Day Afternoon