Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

She says not a discouraging word, but nibbles on fish and cheese as if to-the-pizza-oven born. You would never know she was recently a shelter cat.

“So,” I ask after washing my whiskers, “are you alone by the xylophone?”

She giggles charmingly. “There is no xylophone in our act, just a lot of New Age music.”

“The same sort of thing. Where does the headliner, Hyacinth, keep herself these days?”

“Oh, I am not allowed to room with her. She is a star. Plus, she might nail me with her poisonous claws. Stars are very insecure, did you know that, Louie?”

“Not being one, no. And I am not sure those claws are as lethal as advertised.”

“Have you never been a performer, then?”

“I did some commercial TV work for a while, but I am mostly employed as a dude-about-town. An . . . investigator, as you know. Death. Crime. Conspiracy.”

Miss Squeaker furrows her blond brow, her blue eyes crossing slightly with concentration. What a charmer! “Are you now investigating the dangle toy on the exhibition floor?”

“Above the exhibition floor,” I point out.

“I saw the workers take him away on a stretcher with wheels. I recognized him, having seen him out and about.”

“Part of the crew?”

“I do not think so.”

“So.” I dust off the itsy-bitsy spidery tail of an anchovy; these are squinky critters, let me tell you. “Where did you see him?”

Here, Miss Squeaker settles down on her haunches to play with her food. One delicate nail-tip hoists an anchovy over to my side of the cardboard circle. I love a dainty eater, especially when she is not eating but letting me hog it all.

“What do I know?” she says listlessly. “I am only worth anything for my resemblance to the great and powerful Hyacinth.”

I bite my tongue. The great and powerful Hyacinth is one hot chick but not an empowering role model, I fear.

“Louie,” she goes on, “I cannot sleep a wink at night, dreading our opening, my debut. Fearing that the web of lines we must work upon will fail and cause me to fall. So, I go up alone to walk the wires.”

“Without a safety net?”

“There is no safety net for this show. In rehearsal, yes, but once the run begins, it will be naked claws.”

I shudder despite myself. This is no way to introduce an amateur to a circus act. “I admire your devotion to your job, and survival. So. No one knows you are up there putting in rehearsal time?”

She ducks her head, then nods. “If I am to do well, I must seem to be a ‘natural.’ ”

“Which is why you are.”

She flashes her fangs. This is the equivalent of a feline smile, nothing predatory. “Have you ever hung sixty feet above a concrete floor, Louie?”

“Just on a case, and then not happily. The only thing I think should be hanging that high is a piñata.”

Squeaker blinks wryly at me. “And those are usually made in the form of donkeys. A very meek and mild creature.”

“I often thank Bast that our kind does not have four hooved feet for then we would all be enslaved.”

“Some of us still are.”

I cannot argue. Squeaker was “rescued” but into servitude.

“What did you see up there that no one was supposed to see?” “I see why you are a prime investigator,” Squeaker says, hunkering down.

What sexy, sharp shoulder blades she has! A born sweater girl .

“There have been,” she says, her whiskers tickling the vibrissae near my ears most lasciviously, “several mysterious humans up there with me.”

“Humans are always mysterious.”

“But not always . . . sneaky.”

“No. ‘Sneaky’ is a word often applied, unjustly, to our breed. So. Who was hanging out under the ceiling with you?”

“Two men.”

“Not part of the crew?”

“No. Strangers in black.”

“Suspicious. Not my natural kind of black, I take it?”

“Not fur, no. That second skin that humans wear.”

“Spandex?”

“Yes. I had not heard the word until I left stir for show biz.”

“Understandable. What kind of men?”

“Men. They are big, clumsy. They speak, smell. They would easily trod upon one’s tail and never notice if one fell at forty miles an hour to the concrete below.”

“They would easily never notice that one had a tail.”

“Exactly.”

“So, they are not part of the crew?”

“Many men who are not part of the crew hang around the set and exhibition.”

“You mean hang around but not lethally. Did you see the victim?”

“I cannot be sure. He was a man and wore black spandex. Some call it a cat suit, and now that I have met you , I see why.”

She bats sea blue eyes at me.

Merrowphhh , I do recognize when a nubile doll is making cow eyes in my direction. Squeaker makes her slinky sister Hyacinth look like a hooker on Zoloft.

“Tell me, my acrobatic charmer”—can I help it if she giggles with a sort of throaty purr?—“how could that cat-suited man have managed to die when you have been able to survive, and thrive?”

We nose the dressing room door open and she leads me through a circuitous backstage route and up into the flies via a webbing lattice that only those of us gifted with claws might manage.

The setup is clear once we are high above the exhibition area. The magic act is laid out on an invisible web. You always knew every illusion comes with strings, did you not?

A single tightrope stretches straight and strong across the chasm below. It is steel cable, a half-inch circumference of metal filaments, both flexible and taut. If one has the impeccable balance for the job, it is a royal road of stability. A human foot, trained to curl, can toe dance across . . . as long as the body above those feet is lean, schooled, and attuned for infinite balance. No magic, just rosin and gutsy skill. The feline foot, clawed by birth, is even more flexible and clingy.

That is not to dismiss the heart and skill it takes for any living thing to perform sixty feet above the ravening crowd.

Black bungee cords are all over the place, swagged against the side walls like anorexic curtains. The way they are arrayed, you could grab one and swing down from any point on any of the four walls, which narrow into a funnel at the very top.

There is a ledge about twelve feet from the top. Squeaker (I will have to find a pet name for her, and soon!) points out black sliding panels that allow humans to enter and exit the scene and the black platforms where the Big Cats perform.

Of course, from a vantage point far below, all the machinery blends into a solid firmament of black, against which any wires, cords, platforms and escape hatches become invisible.

“So,” I ask myself as much as my guide, “the dead man had to have come out here, willingly or not, before he could get entangled in a bungee cord and garotte himself.”

“Or before someone could ensnare his neck in a bungee cord and push him off one of the launching platforms.”

I study these platforms. They are built for strength. The act’s Big Cats are of the leaner, smaller variety: black leopards. They weigh maybe a petite 250 to 300 pounds. The Cloaked Conjuror in all his gear runs perhaps 250 himself. Shangri-La, 110. Hyacinth, maybe 7 or 8. I am a bruising 20 pounds myself, and not even the tightrope trembles at my few steps upon it.

“Louie! Do not toy with the tightrope. It takes a trained professional to walk it.”

“I am a trained professional.”

“On the high wire?

“When this joint was brand new, I busted into it through the neon planet sign on the roof.”

“Really!”

“Really, S. Q.”

“S. Q?”

“A nickname, compliments of Midnight Louie. Short for ‘Cute-with-a-Q.’ Or the more common ‘Susie Q.’ Do not thank me, S. Q.”