Even from a distance, I could detect a blush creep up Jaki’s cheeks, but ever the good sport, she still smiled. “That’s right. I don’t see that friend anymore, but I’d never part with Gordie!”
“Gotta give her credit,” Mark muttered to me. “She’s not letting him throw her.”
“He’s just trying for a laugh,” I said. “He figures all her fans know about her and Alec.”
Perry gave his guest star a break at that point, and asked her what else was special about Scottish Fold cats.
“Well, I have found out a lot about them,” Jaki said. “The main thing, of course, is that the tips of their ears fold forward, the way they do on some dogs. It’s a genetic thing. They only started breeding these cats in the 1960s, and the first one came from Scotland.”
Perry encouraged her to hold Gordie facing the audience so everyone could see his ears. “And are they all this silver color, or—”
The overhead and stage lights flickered. Then the whole room went black.
Without a working microphone, Perry still made himself heard above the anxious rumblings of the audience. “It’s okay, folks. Please stay in your seats. I’m sure it’s just a temporary glitch.”
My eyes adjusted to the murky darkness, lit by only the red EXIT signs over the doors and some dim cove lighting in the ceiling. Most people stayed seated for a minute or two, expecting the problem to be resolved.
The fire alarm sounded, repeating three shrill blasts.
Now the crowd stirred nervously, and some began to leave their seats. In the gloom, I could see Perry and Jaki glancing around in panic, too. A couple of figures who looked like support staff ran onto the stage to assist them.
Meanwhile, Mark, Becky, Chris, looked at one another. In wordless agreement, we left through the back doors.
In the hall, we could see our way by the late-afternoon glow through the windows along the outer wall. The sconces and other lights in the upper corridor also appeared to be knocked out. The nearby escalator was working, though, and so was the ultramodern chandelier that hung over it. I pointed this out to my friends.
“Might just be a minor bug in the system,” Chris said. “But they’ll probably pull the plug on her interview anyway, until they check it out.”
“What a bummer,” groused Becky.
Along with most of the audience members, we took the escalator down to the hotel lobby. There we waited with dozens of other confused folks until someone finally silenced the piercing alarm.
An announcement followed in a calm, female voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, one of the hotel’s fire alarms has been triggered, and we are investigating the cause. Please evacuate all upper floors and proceed to the lobby until we can be sure that it’s safe for you to return to your rooms. Do not use the elevators. Cat show participants can remain in place in the ballrooms for now. Thanks for your cooperation.”
“Think it’s an electrical problem?” I asked Mark. “First the lights, then the fire alarm?”
“Does seem like a weird coincidence,” he said.
The crowd in the lobby swelled as overnight guests evacuated their rooms, many with their cats in tow. Through the tall windows we saw one fire truck roll up outside with no apparent urgency. However, two black-and-white Chadwick PD patrol cars already stood near the hotel’s entrance with their emergency lights flashing.
A uniformed, female cop strode past me at a brisk clip, talking into her radio. I caught just a few words: “Need ambulance. . . security guard down, in stairwell . . . unresponsive.”
What did that mean? An accident, maybe? Someone electrocuted?
A knot of panic-stricken hotel guests had jammed up at the lobby’s automatic front doors, trying to get out to the plaza.
“C’mon,” said Mark, “there’s another exit from the concourse.”
We followed him out that way and ended up in the parking garage. From the back corner I could hear raised voices. Two of them belonged to Perry and Jaki.
“Sweetheart, I’m sure he’s okay. We’ll find him. Just calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, and don’t call me sweetheart!” The lady did have a set of lungs, for sure. “Mira said some random guy grabbed the carrier from her. She thought he was a hotel employee, but no one’s seen him since.” I heard hysterical tears in her voice. “Oh my God, somebody took him! They stole Gordie!”
Chapter 7
The young pop star sounded so distraught that I wanted to do or say something to help her. I rounded the blind corner of the parking garage and saw her sagging against the shoulder of a tall, elegant black woman in a businesslike beige pantsuit. Nearby stood Perry and another man, a bit thick around the middle, with graying temples and a black mustache. When the older guy noticed me and my friends approaching, he stalked over to intercept us. His forbidding glare stopped me in my tracks.
“Nobody comes back here!” he barked with a faint accent. “Who are you and what do you want?”
I felt Mark’s hand on my shoulder, warning me not to get involved. But the knowledge that he had my back also bolstered my courage. I introduced myself and showed my ID tag. “I’m a volunteer with the expo, and I was in the audience for Jaki’s interview just now. Is it true? Is Gordie missing?”
Since the guest star continued to reject his help, Perry left her and came to my rescue. “These folks are okay, Hector.”
“How do we know that?” the other man demanded.
For whatever good it might do, I fished a business card out of my shoulder bag and handed it to him.
“C’mon, Cassie.” Mark tugged at my elbow. “We don’t want to intrude. . . .”
“Of course not,” I told Perry and Hector, whoever he was, “but if I can do anything to help . . . maybe keep my eyes open for the cat . . .”
Perry’s cell phone rang, and he stepped to one side to take the call.
“Keep your eyes open for it.” Hector snorted. “And then maybe you’ll want a reward for returning it, eh?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
By now, Mark, Becky, and Chris all were urging me to step away from the situation, and I knew I ought to. But when Perry ended his phone call, his stunned expression froze me in my tracks.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“A security guard went to find out what made the conference room black out. They found him dead in a stairwell. They’re not sure yet what killed him, but—”
Hector threw up his hands, though he kept his voice low enough that Jaki wouldn’t overhear. “Someone got murdered? That’s it, we are out of here. My daughter isn’t staying in this place one minute longer!”
Okay, that solved one mystery. Becky had mentioned that Jaki’s father acted as her manager.
Blanching beneath his tan, Perry shook his head. “I’m afraid Jaki is staying here, at least a while longer. We all are. The cops don’t want anyone to leave until they have a better idea of what happened.”
We heard a chime, and the doors of the garage’s rear elevator opened. Out sprang a young woman dressed all in stretchy black; she had Jaki’s coloring, but tomboyish angles where the sexy singer had curves. She threw her arms around the star and said, “Cuz, I’m so sorry!”
“He’s not upstairs, either?”
The newcomer shook her head. “I should never have handed him over to a stranger.”
“It’s not all on you, Mira,” Jaki told her. “I should have been paying more attention, too. Right after you put Gordie in his carrier, the fire alarm went off and Perry tugged at my arm, said we had to evacuate.”
Mira nodded. “I swear, the guy looked like hotel security, and he said he’d take Gordie someplace safe. I tried to ask you if it was okay, but you were facing away . . . and by the time I looked back, they were gone!”
The woman in the pantsuit tried to reassure Jaki that her pet’s disappearance probably was just a misunderstanding. “He could have thought there was a fire and taken the cat out of the hotel, some back way. Gordi
e will turn up soon, you’ll see.”
An announcement told us that the fire siren had been a false alarm, and it was safe for guests to return to their rooms. Mira and the older woman persuaded their tearful young star to go back up to her suite while they checked into the situation with her missing cat. Hector yanked out his phone again and stabbed at numbers on the keypad, making another desperate call.
Mark and I backed off then and followed our FOCA friends toward the concourse. Perry caught up with us to deliver one last message: “Please, guys, keep this quiet! The police are going to say that they’re investigating an incident at the hotel, but without any details.”
“But if people are in danger . . .” Becky began.
“From what I heard, there’s no obvious sign of foul play,” Perry told us. “The guard might just have fallen down the stairs when the lights went out. Any rumor that it was murder could cause a panic, and we can’t have all of these people going into a frenzy!”
“We understand,” Mark said.
“And,” I added, “I guess if we even say that the cat’s gone missing, whoever took Gordie might turn him loose to avoid being caught.”
“Well, yeah. That, too.” I’m sure, after the news of the dead security guard, Perry had temporarily forgotten about the kidnapped cat. But I suspected that Gordie still would be topmost in Jaki’s mind.
As the four of us passed back through the double glass doors into the convention center, Chris muttered, “What a freakin’ mess, eh?”
“Crazy,” I agreed. “So, Hector is Jaki’s father and manager?”
Becky nodded. “They worked out that arrangement when she was just a kid doing the TV series. Probably to keep her from being exploited by sleazy showbiz types.”
“The lady in the pantsuit is Rose Davidson,” Chris told us, “and the girl in black who just came down in the elevator is Mira, Jaki’s cousin and personal assistant. I went to college with her.”
Aha, I thought. His reliable source for all the inside-showbiz gossip.
As we walked back down the concourse, Mark shook his head. “The missing cat has to be a simple mistake. It probably has nothing to do with the dead guard.”
I disagreed. “Or it could have everything to do with it. Maybe somebody caused the room to black out, and the fire alarm to go off, while Jaki was doing the interview. The confusion gave him a chance to steal the cat.”
“And to kill a man in the process?” Becky challenged me.
“Like Perry said, that could’ve been accidental,” Mark reminded her, “if the stairwell also went dark, and the guy was taking a step at the wrong time.”
I had a sudden inspiration, but one I thought I should keep to myself. “’Scuse me for a second, guys. I’d better check on my mom and Harry. They’re over at the cat show and probably don’t know anything about all this.”
“And you shouldn’t tell them.” With a glint in his eye, Mark added, “Remember, Perry said not to.”
I ignored the ribbing. “I wouldn’t, anyway, unless it was really necessary. How about we meet back here in half an hour at the food court?”
Everybody else agreed to this, and I headed toward the hotel. At least no cops or guards barred people from entering that part of the complex any longer.
As Harry had predicted, the cat show extended throughout four merged first-floor ballrooms. The doors of the two center rooms stood open to the corridor, with a banner for the event stretched across the top. I could have found my way without signage, though, just by following the intermittent mews and the mingled odors of cat litter and dry kibble.
To the right I passed six partially curtained booths, called rings, where cats were being judged. Two currently stood empty, the wire cages along the back unoccupied. In one ring, handlers were picking up animals from the last round and the judge was wiping down the raised table with disinfectant. In the other three, judges tried to entice a massive Maine Coon to chase a feather toy, or checked the stubby tail on a red-and-white Manx, or stretched a Siamese full length as if he were airborne. I had to wonder what the cats thought of all this strange behavior, but most had been handled this way all of their lives and were used to it.
I made my way to the benching area, where the competitors waited between judgings in their fairly roomy, comfortable cages. I had no idea where Harry and Mom had set up, but that gave me an excuse to wander down all of the rows and admire the variety among the animals and their cage decorations. Most cats had at least one person keeping watch over them, and some owners had taken their restless pets out to cuddle or play with them.
They were not grouped by breed, so I kept my eyes peeled for any Scottish Folds. I spotted only four, and just one silver tabby. According to the info on the cage, she was a female, and her markings were much lighter than Gordie’s.
That didn’t convince me that he had not somehow been smuggled down here to the show floor. Many of the cages were heavily draped to protect their inhabitants from sensory overload, and some openings even were screened with a fine black mesh that made it hard to tell if they were occupied at all. It would be so easy for someone to bring Gordie’s carrier in here, transfer the cat to a heavily swathed cage, and hide him until the coast was clear to spirit him away.
Mom hailed me before I saw her, and I gathered from her bright smile that she was having a decent time. I wound my way toward her, through the other seated owners and handlers. Harry turned his lean, professorial face toward me, with Looli lounging in his arms like an elegant, bat-eared E.T. I reflected that Harry had made a pet of the only living creature paler than he was.
“Look!” Mom pointed to a row of three small, shiny ribbons in assorted shades on the Sphynx’s cage.
“Way to go Looli, Harry!” I congratulated him, as I read the title of a blue one: Best of Color. “Guess she’s still got it.”
“Well, her coloring always gets attention,” he said proudly. “But she should have a good shot at Best of Division, too, because she has such a great temperament. When the judge handles her she’s always relaxed, but when he swishes that feather toy she’s also ready to play.”
“Aww, such a good girl.” I held out my arms so Harry could pass me the leggy little creature.
He went on to explain, or try to, the whole judging process. I gathered that Looli competed as a Premiere, or adult altered cat, and as a Specialty Shorthair. In some rings she’d go up against other exotic shorthair types, and sometimes only against other Sphynxes. How many points she would accumulate toward a Premiereship would depend on how many other cats she’d beaten for a certain title. Oh, and the top prize, or “final,” wasn’t always a blue ribbon—depending on the category, it might be brown or even black. But a rosette, a multi-ribbon award with a medallion at the top, always meant some type of major prize. Looli would get one of those if she won a significant number of finals.
Though all of these technicalities set my head spinning, I nodded and pretended to absorb them. Meanwhile, I enjoyed the simpler, quirky charms of Looli’s wrinkled little face, huge ears, and wide, curious yellow eyes. I will always prefer my cats with a bit more fur, but had to admit that petting a Sphynx was an interesting sensation—like stroking warm suede. And she purred as sweetly as any other cat.
I flashed back on Glenda’s complaint, that cats bred for special traits also tend to inherit special problems. I knew Sphynxes got oily skin, lacking the fur to absorb it, and when Harry had boarded Looli with me, I had instructions to bathe her every other day. “Do you give her a lot of baths to prepare for a show?”
“I was up early this morning doing just that,” he said, “before I picked up Barbara to bring her to the hotel.”
Okay, so he and my mom hadn’t spent the night together. Not that it was any business of mine. Why did knowing that make me feel better? Was I really such a sulky child?
“It amazes me, how much work these people go through to get their cats ready for a show,” Mom said. “We were talking to Nancy Whyte, down the row
here, who has these huge, fluffy cats. . . .”
“Maine Coons,” Harry put in.
My mother nodded. “And she was telling us—Oh, here she is now!”
A plump woman with a full head of blond curls—giving her a silhouette not unlike one of her cats—was just returning to her seat. Her rather short arms struggled to support a massive brown tabby with white underparts. The animal gave her no trouble, but his sheer size would have challenged Vin Diesel.
Mom eagerly introduced the two of us. “This is my daughter, the professional groomer. I was just telling her how much you went through to get King here ready for the show.”
Settling in a chair with her boy—who apparently had just scored his second final, in Longhair Specialty—Nancy sighed. “It’s a production, all right. I wash and condition and dry and fluff and powder. Of course it pays off, because by the time he goes into the ring, he looks spectacular. But he’s a big fella, I’m kind of a little woman, and sometimes I think I’m just getting too old for all this.”
Harry explained that I was doing public grooming demonstrations out on the plaza. “Cassie’s got a van now, so she can make house calls.”
“Mom, Harry, please!” I said, embarrassed by their naked attempt to drum up business for me. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted the gig. King was indeed a lot of cat, and his prep routine sounded way beyond what I usually provided for my customers. Besides, if Nancy was a breeder, she might have plenty more Coons at home.
At least she didn’t seem to mind the sales pitch. “There’s an idea. And you’re in Chadwick? I’m in Sparta, not that far. Maybe you could groom for me sometime.”
“How often do you show your cat?” I didn’t want to make such a big commitment that I wouldn’t be able to deal with my other customers.
“I have two, King and his sister Jessy, but I only show them a few times a year. I have a sister who comes along when I go out of state, but maybe you could help me with the Jersey shows.”
We exchanged cards and agreed to talk further after the expo was over. Then a couple of admirers stopped by to ask her about King, and she turned her attention to them.
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