Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

You're right; it's kind of fun to mystify Lieutenant Molina. Especially when she's wrong."

"Well, I better get ready for my official grilling. We might as well go together. Can I drop a cat off here on my way out?"

"I'll pick you up on the way down," he said firmly. "And why don't you give Midnight Louie a chance to warm up to Caviar?"

"I'm all in favor of warming up," Temple said, slipping out the door and kicking up a sequined foot as a parting gesture in the true burlesque style. All she was missing was the drum roll.

Chapter 36

Louie Dodges the Bullet

I owe a lot to this little dish of Caviar.

She provides a quiet and admiring audience when I make my triumphant return from the House of Wax and Wayward Kitties, although she has a mysterious, smug expression painted on her piquant little mug that much reminds me of the officious Karma.

I tell her that she shows promise.

"And one thing I do promise," says she, as fast as you can say Jackie Robinson. "Nobody has any say over where I go, what I do, or what condition I am in."

"All right, all right," I say. "I will let your foul bowl of Free-to-be-Feline rest beside mine in perpetuity in honor of your acts on my behalf, but that is the end of it. This place is mine, from the pink marabou slippers in the bedroom closet to the French doors and patio to the disgusting litter box in the second bathroom to the escape hatch at the top of said bathroom, and I lay down the rules."

"You lay down about twenty pounds," says she with the agile stretch of a cool cat, "but face it, your time has come and gone, Fatso. You are outdated. You are not with it. You are a dinosaur."

"Listen," say I, "dinosaurs are a very hot item nowadays."

"Jurassic jitterbug," she jeers. "I admit," she goes on, "that I do not like old dudes in any condition being nailed up anywhere--with the exception of my unesteemed, absconding father,

may his whiskers rot wherever he is--but do not get the impression that I have any sympathy for such benighted dudes as you. You are an anachronism."

"Listen," I hiss back, stung to defending my tom-hood, "I am not now and never have been a relative to an arachnid."

"I mean that you are out of time and place, seriously out of date. The only way I would give you the time of day was if I were a water-clock!"

"Now, now Caviar," I say. "Such a nice, genteel name for a little dame. Surely your esteemed mother reared you to be more of a lady."

"Ladies get stomped. And, speaking of names, what is yours?"

Here I hesitate. "I have been called a lot of things."

"I do not doubt it," says she with a dainty sniff.

"Friday, once. Sergeant Friday."

"You do look like an unlucky dude, not to mention passe."

"And . . . Blackie."

"Boston Blackie, no doubt," this little doll sneers.

She is arrogant, uppity, ignorant and downright insulting, but she is kin. I hold my temper, which is getting most temperamental at such restraint.

"And . . . Thirteen."

"Must be your age."

"Not . . . quite," I say, quashing a desire to cuff her halfway to the French doors.

I am always the gentleman, except when it occurs to me that the parents of this little doll could have exercised a tad of tough love. Since I am one of the said parents, it is sad to realize that she has passed beyond the reins of paternal discipline. No doubt my intervention now would be termed abuse. So I return to territorial rights.

"This is my place. I was here first. Miss Temple Barr is my person. No matter who you are, or what you did in the preservation department, which I admit showed promise, I am not giving up my present circumstances to make up for your past."

"We shall see," says Miss Caviar with admirable cool.

But she has forgotten entirely the issue of my given name. I was not born yesterday, and sometimes that is a strategic advantage.

Chapter 37

Resolution and Absolution

Matt wasn't surprised to find Sister Seraphina waiting in the office at the downtown police station. He was startled to find Peggy Wilhelm there, and so was Temple, he noticed.

He and Temple must be thinking the same thing: Peggy Wilhelm was tangential to the entire case--to the will, her aunt's death, even to the cat-show atrocity, if shaving a cat could be considered an atrocity by anyone other than a cat fancier.

Neither of them was surprised to find Father Hernandez absent, as he had been all of last night. Why was Lieutenant Molina drawing out the ugly inevitable, playing cat-and-mouse with all their fears? Had she found new evidence at the rectory? Did she need Matt's testimony on the blackmail letters to make the case? Perhaps that was the issue she would illuminate today.

Matt watched her with interest. She sat behind a big, cluttered desk in this large but cluttered office that was clearly not hers; the family photos on the long table behind the desk showed rows of smiling black faces. The office must belong to some superior who had been apprised of this meeting, had approved and then vanished to leave the details to Lieutenant Molina--which indicated that her superiors respected her enough to allow the occasional offbeat approach.

But the lieutenant was nervous, Matt decided, watching her fidget with folders on the desktop and avoid the gathering eyes. She displayed the brusque efficiency of someone who did not like what she was about to do, but saw no other way out.

Matt braced himself. So far, Lieutenant Molina had shown a talent for unearthing embarrassing facts--lacks--about himself. She had also recently confronted Temple with some unappetizing information about her missing significant other, Max Kinsella. What? Matt wondered. Temple was usually so honest and open, but about Max Kinsella she was a locked-room mystery. The room that occurred to Matt was a bedroom, so his speculations veered quickly away from that unknown territory.

Lieutenant Molina cleared her throat and tapped a manila folder on the glass-topped desk, a teacher rapping for order and attention.

They hadn't been talking to each other, idly buzzing back and forth; they needed no formal convening. Maybe Lieutenant Molina did. What did C.R. stand for, anyway? Was that her lack, her secret?

"This is irregular," she confessed, almost hesitant.

She didn't like this closed circle, Matt saw, this mystery that was sure to explode like a fragmentation grenade and strike somebody--an entire congregation of shocked and sorrowful somebodies--any more than he did.

"I am confronted in this case with a number of inexplicable, seemingly unrelated events." Her vivid blue gaze touched every listening face. "Of course they are not unrelated at all. There are also . . . elements that do not seem to make sense. They do. I should warn you that I am not seeking a solution here; I know it. I am hoping that some unclear areas will resolve themselves. As a start, I will report on the solution to the hissing and obscene phone calls to Miss Tyler and the convent, to the attack on the cat Peter, to the shaving of the cat Minuet at the cat show. These, we know, were all interconnected, but the logic linking them was . . . distorted.

"Before I begin, does anyone here have anything to say?"

They eyed each other, each looking sheepish and guilty, for each was probably concealing something. Matt knew Temple bore the burden of more knowledge of another person

than she felt comfortable carrying--but who was her confidante? He shared the same burden of Father Hernandez's blackmail letters. Did Molina know of those; would he be better off admitting their existence now?

Sister Seraphina had concealed Father Hernandez's flaw--his sudden dependence on a liquor bottle. Did she hide more?

And Peggy Wilhelm, was she hiding knowledge of her aunt's affairs that would make the elderly woman's death her possible murder--understandable?