Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

Sister Rose tsk-tsked in bewildered sympathy. Her faded pink terry-cloth scuffs were washable and had weathered several cleanings. Of course they were not Italian.

Sister Seraphina swiveled alertly to the hall. A moment later, Matt appeared in the doorway.

No one dared ask anything. He read their anxiety--at least Temple's and Seraphina's--but he could not guess the cause.

"Father Hernandez wasn't in the rectory," he said.

Temple and Seraphina settled back into their chairs with a mutual sigh and a significant look.

"Is it important?" Matt asked.

"It may be," Temple said. ''Someone was in the Tyler house. Someone had captured Louie and chloroformed him and stuck him in a burlap bag."

"Why?" Matt asked.

She went on wearily. "I don't know. Someone had started the house on fire in Blandina's bedroom."

Another voice added to the narrative. "Someone stopped him."

Lieutenant Molina appeared in the hall behind Matt, who quickly eased into the room to allow her entry.

Molina eyed the room's occupants, her glance pausing appreciatively on the nuns' robes before it rested on Temple and her libation.

"Apparently Queen Victoria here has been practicing her marital arts' p's and q's. She stopped him from setting the house afire and perhaps committing other violence." Molina sank down in one of the brocaded side chairs. "I could use some tea myself."

"We all could." Sister Seraphina nodded at Sister Rose, who scurried out like a dormouse on a secret mission.

Matt leaned on the edge of the desk near the door and watched them all, thoroughly perplexed.

"What exactly has happened?" he asked.

"My question precisely." Molina pulled out her notebook.

"We have a rather . . . distraught . . . suspect in custody."

"Suspect?" Seraphina emphasized.

Molina nodded neutrally. "We have the professional detective's bane, Miss Temple Barr, on the scene and heavily involved. We even have an unauthorized cat on the premises, the equally baleful Midnight Louie. Where is he now?"

"Somewhere in the convent," Temple supplied.

"We found a burlap bag somewhat . . . damaged, and a cloth soaked in chloroform. Apparently it had been used on the cat."

"Peter!" Sister Seraphina sat up. "That's how someone captured him for that horrible attack; they chloroformed him. Was it satanists, Lieutenant?"

"You tell me. We found a satchel of . . . tools near the bag. Hammer. Spikes. Looks like more of the same was on the schedule."

"Louie was a candidate for crucifixion?" Temple shuddered with a sudden chill and reached for the fallen blanket.

"Possibly."

"Has your prisoner said anything about that?" Matt asked.

Molina's blue eyes regarded him with the clear, emotionless stare of a Siamese cat. "Nothing . . . sensible. Yet."

The eyes returned to Temple. "I hesitate to ask this. I am not in the mood for original answers, but yours surely will be more coherent than his at this point. Why were you

there?"

"Well," Temple began, "it was the state of Midnight Louie's Free-to-be-Feline that first made me uneasy ..."

Molina shut her eyes, and Temple continued, glossing over the obituary page tented over Louie's dish and concentrating on her great specific and general concern for cats singular and plural, on her impulse to check on the Tyler cats, on her shock at finding an intruder and a fire in the house, and especially on her amazement on finding Midnight Louie in the bag.

"So it was all a wild coincidence," Molina summed up in a deadpan voice.

At that moment, Sister Rose appeared beaming on the threshold, a tray full of tall, iced-tea glasses in her hands, with Midnight Louie massaging her ankles as if begging for catnip.

"Sometimes things happen that way," Temple said as Sister Rose distributed the glasses.

They were accepted with distraction. Sister Seraphina took a large sip of her tea, then her lips puckered, but her face seemed not to register anything except the secret worry she carried for Father Hernandez. Lieutenant Molina's closed-mouth attitude to the identity of the man apprehended next door did nothing to allay her anxiety.

Molina let her glass sit on a side table as she poised her pen over the notebook but wrote nothing down, which was rather unsettling.

Matt sipped his tea politely, then braced it on one slack-covered thigh. "So Temple nailed the bad guy. Personally."

"Yes," Molina said in her disconcerting tone that was half-bored, half-mocking. "Do tell us about it."

"He found me in the kitchen," Temple began. "I didn't know he was there. The lights were off when I came in, and I was trying to find a light switch that would work when he came up from the basement--I didn't even know there was one!--dragging a bag. At first I thought he was someone from the neighborhood, or a repairman or something. Then he dropped the bag and went for me. I didn't want to go upstairs, but I ran into the stairs and was forced up. I tried not to get cornered in a bedroom, but there was nowhere else to go. I managed to drag a trunk in front of the bedroom door, and then I saw the dresser on fire. I threw a table through the window--"

"Good thinking!" Matt said approvingly, sipping his tea absently.

Molina watched him, and did likewise.

Nobody batted an eye. Sister Seraphina sipped her tea frequently and nervously, her face reflecting worries other than the specifics of Temple's ordeal.

Actually, it felt more like an adventure in the telling. Temple warmed up to her tale, or perhaps to her tea. She took a throat-soothing sip. "Well. There I was, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea." Here she glared at Molina. "He looked like a demon, all in black with a burlap mask over his face, only his eyeless eyeholes staring at me."

''His eyeless eyeholes'?" Molina queried, her pen skipping over the lined notepad.

"You know what I mean! And then, while I was fighting the fire with a rag rug--"

"A rag rug," Molina repeated in a tone of utter disbelief, her pen moving. She buttressed herself with a long slug of tea.

"--he got me from behind with a chloroform-soaked cloth."

"A chloroform-soaked cloth," Sister Rose repeated in awe, nodding and sipping tea with a broad smile. "You are a brave girl."

"I was smothering, and I knew that if I passed out ... so I gave him his ground--" she looked at Matt, who nodded approval "--and it surprised him, just like it was supposed to. The cloth lifted enough for me to twist away and slug his upper torso with my tote bag while I jammed a heel into his kneecap."

"Sounds . . . quite athletic," Sister Seraphina commented, guzzling more tea.

Temple refreshed herself as well.

"Then ..." she hadn't had as rapt an audience in years "... I picked up a table leg and when he charged me again, I hit him hard on the carotid artery."

"Carotid artery?" Sister Rose repeated the phrase as if it were Latin. "Is that something nice girls should do?"

"Definitely not," Temple said. "He went down for the count of--say, six. That was long enough for me to get out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He tried to follow, but then the door opened and this huge, helmeted figure blocked the exit and the whole Las Vegas Fire Department came in--my knights in shining slickers bearing battle-axes--and saved me and snagged him and even gave Midnight Louie the breath of life."

After a pause, Molina said, "You realize that none of this makes sense."

"No," Temple agreed demurely, "but it's a hell of a tea party story."

In the silence, Sister Rose giggled. "Poor Midnight Louie. Poor kitty. He should have some restorative tea." She poured part of her remaining half-glass into a huge glass ashtray--no doubt kept for the bishop's cigar if and when he came--and placed it on the floor before the cat, who was grooming himself within an ounce of his overweight.