Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Mira was astounded to the point of laughter. “Clifford? Drawing a classical sculpture in high school? Matt, maybe he was just a regular boy once, but he got caught up in the gangs once he got out. He concentrated on dressing sharp and getting jobs he could hang out on street corners to do.”

“You married him graduation summer,” Matt reminded her, and himself. “Maybe you saw the boy who drew.”

“I was one of ‘those girls’ who graduated with whispers, not hope and celebration. Clifford didn’t seem so bad at first. No one else would have me.”

Temple looked down, finding her fingers smoothing the slick cover of the old yearbook. The same whispers haunted her high school graduating class. This girl. That condition. And then she vanished. It never ended. Odd about the Vatican preserving all those old Greek and Roman statues, most naked and anatomically correct, and all revived in the age of Michelangelo. Comic book supermen were modeled on those muscular ancient gods and heroes.…

Temple grabbed the sketch Matt was regarding with an expression half puzzled and half repulsed.

“I know what statue you’re thinking of,” she told him. “It was the man who angered the gods and they sent a sea serpent to kill him and his sons. It’s an amazing evocation of sheer human struggle and agony … and it’s also—wait for it—very similar to the man fighting a serpent constellation that was just in the news recently.”

“Serpent. Constellation?” Mira was confused. “Isn’t Constellation a jet plane name, like those you drew when you were a kid, Matt?”

“Not in this case,” Temple said. “I mean the constellations of stars in the sky the ancient Greeks named, just as they sculpted the ‘man versus sea monster’ statue. Matt.” She eyed him in triumph. “This is not the star map, but the full, founding image of the constellation called Ophiuchus.”

“Oh-fee-you-cuss?” Mira was seriously confused. “Or ‘Oh, fie! You cuss?’”

“The accent is on the ‘you’ part,” Matt said. “And nobody cusses.”

“It’s ancient Greek,” Temple explained.

“It certainly is to me.” Mira’s smile was bemused.

Temple spelled it out for her. “Just think of it rhyming with ‘mucous.’”

“I’d rather not. You kids.” Mira was chuckling now. “Krys, and now you two. I think the younger generations speak in code.”

“This may have been used as a code by some very bad people,” Temple said. “Ophiucus is the lost thirteenth sign of the zodiac that a secret society in Las Vegas called the Synth took for its signature. Matt’s tracking Cliff Effinger to Vegas might have kicked off a sequence of crimes tied to the conspiracy of magicians and … other worse elements.”

“The mob?” Mira asked.

“Those two catnappers sure were.” Temple was also thinking of the international terrorists Max had been tangling with half his life.

“Whatever is going on,” Matt said, “Effinger must have salted away something in these memorabilia that will shake Las Vegas to its criminal roots.”

“Clifford was still using me,” Mira said, furious and showing it. “That ends here and now.”

Krys came charging in from the depths of the apartment … the two hundred private square feet of it otherwise known as her bedroom.

“Squee!” she shouted. “People! Where’s that so not-Manx cat? I’m gonna make him a YouTube star.”

“You don’t like him,” Temple pointed out. “Or me.”

“That’s before I saw the local TV news hot flash on the Internet. That is so cool what he did. A major piece of pussycat performance art. And the centerpiece is that totally shallow materialistic icon, the leopard-pattern purse-pet bag! All the scene lacks is a stiletto heel, so if you’ll leave one behind, Tempie dear, I’ll immortalize it in 3-D.”

Temple rose, trying not to overturn her kitchen chair. “If I leave it behind, it’ll be implanted in someone’s shallow, competitive irreverent rear end.”

“Tush,” Krys said. “All’s forgiven. You rock. You all have to come into my room and get a load of Five News footage.”

Temple opened her laptop on the kitchen table. “Show us right here and now.”

“O-kay.” Krys commandeered Temple’s seat and moved the laptop cursor to a browser, then a news page. Listed along the right side were the local items.

She clicked on one reading CHICAGO HOODS NAILED AND JAILED and clicked the video arrow to show a slow pan of a warehouse that looked as if a Die Hard movie had been filmed there just last week.

A voice-over told the tale.

“Police alerted to gang activity zeroed in on an abandoned warehouse on the south side today, finding two long-wanted criminals bagged and snagged in a trap of crating materials studded with rusted carpenter nails, apparent victims of assault via nail-gun, something new for the mayhem crowd.

“Benny ‘the Viper’ Bennedetto and Waldo ‘the Weasel’ Walker were found unconscious and suffering from numerous ‘packaging’ wounds in a scene of chaos. Abandoned in the middle of the mess was what police describe as a ‘high-end cat carrier.’ The conclusion? These would-be mobsters must have been trying to round up rats and got caught in their own trap. Call Paris Hilton’s abused designer bag rehab center. The petty crooks come free for the taking.”

The video’s last image showed the incongruous leopard-pattern carrier sitting untouched in the middle of the scene perhaps stage-managed by Spielberg’s Industrial Waste and Wreckage spin-off company instead of Industrial Light and Magic.

Temple ID’d the artifact in tones evoking a blend of bereaved mother and indignant shopper.

“ Oooh, that’s the cat carrier I got in the Treasure Island shopping mall. This accessory in the wilderness shot reminds me of my last.… actually, my first official case, which included Louie’s discovery of the marooned Boots Benson concrete-encased cowboy boots found high and dry in the drought-revealed bed of Lake Mead.”

“Imagine what your cat could find in a real lake,” Krys said. “Lake Michigan is almost the size of West Virginia. There are whole big ships down there.”

“Louie doesn’t like water in larger than drinking bowl quantities,” Temple said, quashing Krys’s plug for her hometown. “And, apparently, he really doesn’t like low-level mob functionaries.”

Louie kept his druthers to himself, maintaining his lofty sagelike position on the kitchen counter. Only the very tip of his dangling tail switched back and forth like the tuft on a lion’s terminal appendage, demonstrating that neither Viper nor Weasel had touched Hair One.

“Louie isn’t much mourning the loss of his high-class carrier,” Matt said.

“We’ll never get it back. I’ve found the police to be very high -handed about stowing irrelevant evidence in their lockers,” Temple said, musing on Molina’s unwarranted custody of Max’s promise ring, only recently returned. Maybe that was the only way Molina could get and keep one of her own.

Everyone’s intent gaze awaited the source of her assertion about police behavior. Temple was not going to back up her comment in this crowd with that example.

“But I suppose,” Temple went on quickly, “the police would not exactly welcome me calling again, anyway, asking for a personal favor. And I couldn’t bring up the carrier without … letting the cat out of the bag that my cat really was kidnapped and at the center of that whole scene. It was a one-of-a-kind accessory, though.”

“Krys,” Matt said, “would you be a doll and pick up a new carrier for Louie? Temple and I have lunch and dinner dates tomorrow and fly out first thing Tuesday.”