Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"Good idea!" Cleo seconded.

Cat people moved away in an animated clump, discussing self-defense plans.

Temple eyed the skinny, shaved cat in the cage. "Somebody must really hate cats to do this."

"Or me," Peggy Wilhelm put in bitterly.

"It does look like a rival, doesn't it?" Cleo asked.

Peggy nodded. "Those phone calls were a warning. Maybe I should have stayed out of the show. Now I'll have to be here all the time the cats are present. I don't know who will take care of Aunt Blandina's cats."

All three shook their heads in downcast contemplation of the quandary, and its cause.

The abused Birman lifted a pale, unshaven forepaw and began to lick it.

"Maybe I could do it," Temple was horrified to find herself saying. She abhorred a vacuum in volunteering. "Just twice a day all right?"

Peggy Wilhelm was less than ecstatic. "Who are you? What do you know about cats?"

Cleo made a hasty introduction, and then added. "One reason I specifically wanted Temple to handle the cat show publicity is that she's been involved in crime at similar events before. She found the corporate cats that were kidnapped at the American Booksellers Convention last Memorial Day, not to mention a dead editor and several dead strippers at the Goliath competition last month--"

"Look," Temple interrupted in the interests of not sounding like the Typhoid Mary of murder, "I didn't 'find' the strippers' bodies; just the editor's, and that was enough."

"But can you feed cats?" Peggy Wilhelm wanted to know with the severe face of a wet nurse handing over a charge.

"I've got only one, but he's nineteen pounds, so I guess I do all right."

"What kind is he?"

"Alley,"

"Oh." So much for Louie, "I guess you could do it. I'll call Aunt Blandina and tell her you'll be over this afternoon.

She lives only a few doors from me, on Sequaro."

Temple pulled her fat organizer clutch out of her tote bag and wrote down the aunt's address and phone number, as well as Peggy's.

"Maybe we can talk later about the phone calls," she said, putting away her arsenal of information.

Peggy Wilhelm nodded while eyeing the new, punk-look Minuet at her pathetic grooming ritual. "I've got to find a sweater for the poor dear before she catches her death." Her eyes narrowed with fervor. "If I ever find out who did this to her, I'll shave them where it hurts!"

Chapter 9

Nunsense Call

Our Lady of Guadalupe was what its name implied: an aging parish in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Matt watched skin tones on the street deepen as he neared the pale adobe tower he had steered by for the past few blocks.

Oleanders and rose bushes bordered the fronts of little old houses not much bigger than shotgun shacks. He hadn't heard that term until he had left Chicago for sunnier regions. It specified homes so small that a shotgun fired from the front door wouldn't expand its pattern enough to scratch so much as a sill before it exited the back door.

These sleazy, peeling constructions of slat board, along with the occasional stucco, wouldn't have survived a Chicago winter, nor would their residents. But warm climates allowed substandard housing to stand longer than it should; heat couldn't kill as easily and obviously as cold could.

Black wrought iron underlined a house here and there, usually in the form of burglar bars, though it was often for looks rather than for security. One enterprising homeowner had upended a claw-footed porcelain bathtub in his front yard, painted its inside the saccharine shade of bright blue that can never be found in nature and represents the Virgin Mary for some reason, and installed a plaster stature of her, head and eyes downcast modestly to the left, hands folded prayerfully over her flat breast. Despite the cheapness of the plaster icon, the sun carved graceful shadows into the folds of her long, gathered gown.

Yard ornaments--pots and vases and birdbaths and donkeys burdened with baskets of geraniums---scattered over the gravel and dirt like a pecking flock of gaudy, migrating terra cotta. Huddled under the dubious shade of ramshackle carports or a stand of scraggly trees stood hulks of Detroit's best---past tense. Twenty--year-old red Monte Carlos bleached rust-pink rubbed fenders with jazzed-up brown or Yellow Firebirds. Some newer-model cars tricked out with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror had been restyled into bad-looking low-riders.

Matt heard the distant squeal of kids--lots of them. This grade-school playground would not be the vast, open area of asphalt he remembered from his Chicago school days, but a shaded, dusty patch with kids in clusters under the tree bordered edges, where the worn swing sets and jungle gyms creaked and shook to lazy users in the becalmed desert heat.

His walk had worked up a light sweat that evaporated as soon as it appeared. He paused before he came to the church, a low, cream-painted structure with a rusty tile roof, its single, square bell tower rising three stories on one side.

The church was planted deep in the neighborhood. Houses stretched away from it with hardly a demarcation line. The school and playground must sit on the other side, Matt decided as a harsh bell clanged and the screeching voices softened into giggles that cooled to faint laughter, then silence.

The houses nearest the church were obviously the oldest and largest in the neighborhood. Matt studied them, trying to pick out the convent and failing. In Chicago, churches were as obvious as dump trucks: large, lumbering edifices that called attention to themselves, established ted brick or gray stone behemoths with naves that aspired to cathedral heights. Rectory and convent were built to match, impressive structures that parish children passed with hushed giggles.

Here there was no institutional signal, just a lot of vaguely mission-style little houses, and then, the Big House. Matt nodded as he stared at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a low box with a pointed roof and that one plain tower. More churches should be built in such proper proportion to the people they serve.

Sister Seraphina had given him the address, but he headed to the two-story adobe building that he figured was the convent, and then looked for a number. It would be interesting to see if his Catholic grade-school instincts were intact after all these years.

When the address numbers got large enough to read, he saw he had been right. Matt smiled to himself. Maybe the lack of yard bric-a-brac had given the place away. It was too neat, too stripped down to the essentials. No matter the architectural style, every convent had that in common, that bare, clean, dustless feel. Rectories, on the other hand, no matter how modern, always broadcast an air of fusty, bachelor disorder on the brink of becoming unmanageable.

He entered a small courtyard edged in sun loving, white-and-magenta periwinkles and rang a doorbell.

Despite its modest exterior, the place was large enough to swallow all sound of the bell. Waiting at a convent door always felt like waiting for the Wicked Witch to open the Halloween portal: which nun would come? Grade-schoolers at St. Stanislaus all had their favorites--and their mortally feared.

The broad wooden door swung open with an energetic swoosh that sucked hot air past Matt. A figure was framed in shadow.

"Matthias, Sister Seraphina greeted him with robust delight. "Come in."

Just before he stepped over the threshold, an unseen lurker darted past, a dusty yellow cat big enough to tap his knee with the tip of its tail.

"Peter!" Seraphina admonished in a fond tone no thirteen-year-old hardened case would heed. "You're a pretty pushy gatekeeper. Did he get hair all over you?" she asked Matt. She turned to conduct him to the visitors' parlor, and

Matt found himself expecting something: the billiard-ball click of oversizcd rosary beads. But that memory came from his earliest grade-school days. Nuns no longer wore robe and rosary and wimple. Still, Sister Seraphina had been in uniform--a black habit with white touches at the headdress---when he had made her acquaintance in the fourth grade. He secretly dreaded seeing her without her charismatic costume.