Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“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 Burk leo’ s wall. Next thing she knew Leontyne Price would show up as a suspect. Or N oë l (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.

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.