Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Well, all Las Vegas knows about it now,” Electra said.

Temple went to take the paper and unroll it, turning to avoid Louie’s big black paw batting it as if begging for a look-see.

She studied the inside feature-section page. The text in question was some show biz interview continued from the section front. Words like “audience” and “popular” leaped up at her. And then, “Max” and “Kinsella,” preceded by the oft-repeated phrase “death threats.”

Temple sat on the sofa arm, eyes still glued to the Roman type, her rear almost mashing the end of Louie’s now twitching tail.

Before she could make much sense of the context, a knock sounded on her door.

“You must have jammed the bell pounding it,” Temple accused her landlady as she went to answer the summons.

If she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the article, she would have figured out who it was. The blond man who stood in the private hallway, reading his folded copy of the morning paper by the faint glow of Temple’s entry wall lamp, always knocked, not rang.

“Did you know about—?” He stopped as he saw past her to Paula Revere on the couch.

“I do now,” Temple said. “Come in and join the pajama party.”

That seemed to be his first clue that Temple was indeed attired in something skimpy and cotton knit.

“I should have called,” Matt said, hesitating on the threshold.

“Why? Electra didn’t. I can’t believe you two got to the morning paper ahead of me. I’m an absolute news junkie. Oh, wait! Don’t tell me it was on the early TV news.”

“Well—” Matt looked sheepish, just as Electra had only minutes earlier.

Temple closed the door after him, wondering why Matt seemed a little punch-drunk this morning, and why a professional night owl was up so early anyway. Wondering also what full frontal news coverage would do to Max’s cover.

While Electra leaped up to greet her favorite tenant, Temple took a side trip into her tiny black-and-white kitchen to see what she could offer her surprise guests.

“Coffee, tea, or cranapple juice?” she asked, sticking her head around the barrier wall.

“Coffee,” they caroled obligingly. If Temple could cook anything, it was coffee. She filled the coffeemaker higher than she had since Max had inadvertently moved out a year ago by vanishing from the Goliath Hotel, and pulled a trio of mugs down from the cupboard.

“Does it say anything else?” she yelled into the other room. Cooks were always kept busy in the kitchen and had to miss all the good conversation, another thing she had against the culinary art.

“Just that,” Electra yodeled back in the fruity register of late middle age.

“Isn’t that enough?” Matt put in.

“You’ve got it.” Temple shuffled out on her cozy but Disneyesque bunny slides. Her mother had sent them one Christmas, and they were too small to pass along to anybody else along the bunny trail on the gift chain. Temple wondered what Freud would make of the mother of a thirty-year-old daughter who still shopped in children’s and junior departments for her daughter. Probably that the daughter was a shrimp.

“You two rip that article to shreds while I go change,” Temple suggested. “And if the coffeemaker makes strange choking noises, go to its aid.”

They nodded, the blond and multicolored heads lowered over Max’s first ink in over a year.

Louie nosed his way between them as if to join the confab.

In five minutes Temple’s cherry-amber waves of chin-length hair resembled a style and she was dressed in a two-piece knit outfit. The bunny slippers had been replaced by svelte Onyx platform sandals with clear plastic uppers embellished by silver studs.

Donning the right shoes was as magical for her as Dorothy’s red sequin numbers. She returned to the main room, her mood upbeat, to find the coffeemaker docile and her guests still rapt over the story.

In two more minutes the ritual mugs were steaming on the coffee table and Temple had retrieved her own copy of the morning paper from the hall to study the story for herself.

A silence broken only by sipping noises finally cried for a major interruption.

Matt went first. “Do you think Max Kinsella knows about this?”

The phone rang.

“He does now.”

Chapter 3

News Flush

There is nothing more boring than old news. Unless it is a group of people going gaga over old news as if it were new news.

Now I am subjected to the old “three’s a crowd” situation in my own living room.

Not only am I crowded on my sofa by Miss Electra Lark’s encroaching muumuu, but they nose me out of my morning peek at the paper too.

Much ado about nada . Nothing. Like they did not know (or could not guess in Miss Electra Lark’s instance) that the Mystifying Max had probably gone AWOL all those months ago because of death threats.

My Miss Temple surely knows that, as certainly as her name is Temple Barr and she is the most devoted roommate a guy of my propensities could have, except for a troubling tendency for getting involved with dudes of her own species when she should be concentrating on dudes of my species, specifically me.

It is true that, like fickle people everywhere, this threesome soon bustles off on their daily duties: Miss Electra Lark to tend to affairs at the Circle Ritz condominium and apartments, Mr. Matt Devine to do the sensible thing and go back to bed, as his evening shift did not end until early in the morning; Miss Temple to race over to the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino to ready every last detail for the grand opening of its newest attractions. One of its less advertised attractions is likely to be the Mystifying Max, whom I suspect she will meet en route in hopes no one will be any the wiser. Except me, of course, who is the original Wise Guy.

So there I am left alone in the wink of an eyeball, with the newspaper to myself, not to mention three mugs with congealing coffee rings in their bottoms, and not a drop of cream, or even skim milk, in sight.

I do not even have to stretch too far to pull the disheveled pages toward me. I do so hate to be the last to get to the morning paper and find it shopworn.

I use my built-in clippers to scratch out the desired article, the column in which the fateful mention of death threats was made.

Are any of my erstwhile companions aware that I have been drugged, caged, and transported against my will time and again? That I have so many death threats hanging over my head they would weigh as much as a showgirl’s headdress at the Rio?

No, no one worries about Midnight Louie except Midnight Louie.

So. The Cloaked Conjuror is working with a new cat. That is the part of the article that perked my ear, naturally, since it had to do with matters closer to home. Could the sinister Hyacinth be moving her act to another magician? That Siamese siren has a habit of showing up on the scene of the crime, including the murder at TitaniCon only a few days ago.

Time for me to find out. And this time I am not going to beard this lioness in her den alone. This time I am going to bring some muscle. To catch a thief, use a thief. To trap a tricky dame, use a tricky dame.

Now, let me see…where would a wise-guy PI like me find one of those?

Chapter 4

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Molina felt like the wolf at the three little pigs’s door.

She was still huffing and puffing, at least, from hoofing it up three flights of stairs. Needed more time at the gym than behind a desk.

The faded stucco apartment building had no elevator, and the cheapest units were at the top. A scuffed plastic trike sat abandoned by the door. Who would let a three-year-old ride a trike on this narrow concrete balcony that ended in a corkscrew of stairs downward?