Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

So pardon me if I am not enthralled by the praise heaped upon her from several dozen honeyed throats, all with an eye on a new home, sweet home. Mine. I almost snicker to imagine them encountering the current inhabitant. Let them match switchblades and repartee with the hard-as-snails Caviar and see how well they do!

I also hear tell of other visitors. "Birman Breath" is not highly regarded by the crew, most of whom are not pedigreed and are highly scornful of such pampered creatures and their personal pamperers. The description--grizzled-head female, portly and often leopard-spotted or tiger-striped--puts me in mind of Miss Temple Barr's hapless contact at the cat show, whose prizewinning entry was savaged by a dog clipper.

I perk up. I did not know that the cat with the new punk haircut was a Birman. I picture Karma shaved to the skin in a two-inch swath from eyebrow hairs to tail tip, and once around the middle.

The effect is both amusing and demystifying. The description of the most mysterious visitor proves to be the most provocative also. The particulars vary from witness to witness, perhaps gaining embellishment with repetition, but I think that at last I am on the trail of the villain who did such violence to Peter the convent cat.

As the residents tell it, this person is a monster indeed: dresses in my colors from head to toe to mitts, including soft soled shoes that do not smell of natural materials, such as leather. A faceless, hairless tan head. Sex undetermined.

I favor the male, and--given the black--either a burglar or a. . . priest.

This person has come and gone surreptitiously outside the house since before Miss Tyler's demise, a shy and elderly cream confides.

Since her death, the Great White puts in gruffly (this ex-he is evidently boss around here), this same person has become an intruder. He seems to be looking for something.

What of the night of her death? I ask.

Here there is a marked difference of opinion. Most of the witnesses were sleeping. It is only since their mistress's absence that they have become nervous by night and day, and notice more. Before, the only people around out of doors were repair persons and the like.

The quiet cream claims to have glimpsed the intruder's legs running down the stairs after Miss Tyler fell.

I ask why this news was not forthcoming on my last visit.

After an awkward silence, the cream confesses that the assembled residents "did not know whether to trust an outsider or not."

Just such an attitude, I remind them testily, has led to much grief for the great sleuths of history, from Sherlock Holmes up to my personal favorite, Seymour Katz, the Peoria P.I. whose exploits in Undercover Agent magazine I have followed since I was a kit.

Where, I ask them next, has the intruder been intruding about the house?

After an unclear chorus of replies, I get the gist: upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.

I decide to investigate the same turf and so I trot upstairs first. Naturally, the crime scene is a mess. It has been tainted by Lieutenant Molina's scene-team, which has laid a trail of unnatural chemical substances over everything. Then a convention of handy helpers has been through, among whom I recognize the subtle scent of my own little doll, which is music to my nose, unless she happens to be confusing a crime scene, which she is.

I trot down the fatal stairs, observant for any telltale traces. I see nothing but the expected cat hair gathering into dust bunnies here and there.

Finally, on the first floor again, I am struck by something one of the witnesses said. "Downstairs," I repeat in a contemplative monotone. "Is this downstairs, or is there more below?"

The Great White finds this question too obvious to answer, but a half-grown black-and-white with a freckle on his pink nose steps forward to say that a further set of steps beckons beyond the kitchen.

There I go, to find a painted wooden door handily ajar.

They are not allowed down there, the cream cautions in a quivery voice. The Great White sneers and says that doesn't mean that some of them have not been down there plenty.

I am not fond of basements. They are dark, damp, spider webbed, crammed with old, forgotten junk, and usually escape proof. Luckily, they are rare in Las Vegas, except in the older houses, of which this is one.

It occurs to me that others may have overlooked the basement, too. If people are searching the house, whether honestly or clandestinely, it behooves me to do so as well. I growl a warning to the others to remain upstairs, no matter what happens, and I trot down the dark stairs.

Ugh. Painted wooden treads, with those nasty black-rubber safety covers tacked on. Nothing says "dirty, dank, possibly haunted basement" to me like that shifty stairway to the lower depths.

My eyes adjust slowly to the eternal twilight here. Contrary to legend, my kind's sight is not keenest in the dark. My ears and super-sensitive whiskers serve me better. I hear a clink and a scrape in the farthest, darkest corner.

I slink in that direction, waiting for my fabled night vision to adjust and let me detect a scintilla of difference between darkness and shadow. Apparently my fabled night vision is waiting for another legend, the Robert E. Lee.

Before I reach the corner, I hear a single, grinding step.

A full moon of light beams into my bedazzled pupils, which slit tighter than the eye of a needle unreceptive to camels and rich men like the late, great Aristotle Onassis. Even as my vision adapts to the blinding glare, a pair of dark, shapeless human mitts looms toward me, bearing something white like a wadded up, wet diaper.

"A black cat! Perfect for the church door on Friday," intones a voice more distant than the announcer in a bus station. I see nothing but my approaching doom in the form of a wet, white cloud.

The revolting material is slapped across my kisser. At first I think I smell Pampers, but the odor is heavier. I struggle, claws boxing the air. I snag something--cloth, and then I am swaddled like an infant in a tough outer fabric that my flailing limbs tear at but cannot escape.

As I involuntarily slip into Lull-a-bye Land, I recognize the means of my capture: the storied cloth soaked in sleep-inducing chloroform that P.I. Katz is always encountering--and the equally fabled, and feared, burlap bag. Could it be that Louie is going for a Midnight swim?

Chapter 33

The Fur Flies

Temple, still despondent and now feeling guilty, in addition, entered her foyer without enjoying the usual glow her smart accommodations gave her.

Worse, Caviar had acted agitated from the moment Temple had returned from Matt's apartment, as if the cat knew that her fate--not to mention her reproductive future--had been decided.

She had been pacing the living room when Temple had peeked in, and she'd resisted all attempts to be picked up and calmed, despite her earlier docile behavior. Now she was yowling, regarding Temple with piercing owl-gold eyes and regaling her with even more piercing cries.

Temple just couldn't ship her off to the vet's, but she had to isolate her in case Louie returned. She wrestled Louie's cat carrier from the front storage closet, then struggled to push Caviar inside, feeling like a monster. Caviar complained in a soprano shriek en route, and even more loudly once locked inside.

Temple showered Caviar with soothing chirrups as she left the carrier in the kitchen, feeling like she was waving a cheery toodle-oo to Sidney Carton on the way to the guillotine.

Temple frowned. The cat's reversal of behavior was most odd, almost as if she were . . . well, upset about something. Had Louie come home?

In a lather of guilt and urgency, Temple began to search the premises. Perhaps now that Caviar was corralled, Midnight Louie would deign to show himself. She looked under the bed, in the darkest reaches of the bedroom closet, behind the bathroom doors, atop the office bookcases, under the desk, behind the green plant, on the dining-chair seats in one corner of the living room. No Louie anywhere.