Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

The cab made a lurching turn, then the driver, a chubby guy in his forties with a black mustache and a baseball cap, turned around.

“You wanta go to Kitty City or a debating society? We’re hee-eere.”

13

The Naked Nose

I am strictly the monogamous sort: one at a time.

Therefore, it is not surprising that I do not keep a wide-open eye on the doings of Miss Temple Barr once I have discovered that the Divine Yvette is back in town.

Not that Miss Temple Barr’s attractions have diminished in any respect. If anything, they have improved with age—i.e., during the five weeks that I have consented to room with her. It is true that she sponsored my odious outing to the veterinary clinic, but she meant well. As for the unappetizing pellets with which she has mounded my plate of late, I can overlook that, and that is all I do with them. I do not need to rely on foreign food or home cooking. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers for my better meals, and must say that I have fared quite well.

No, my infatuation for the Divine Yvette predates the entrance of Miss Temple Barr into my life. And, face it, this petite furperson with a penchant for silver fox is exactly my type. One cannot argue with a match made in cat heaven.

Luckily, the Divine Yvette is as taken with me as vice versa. This is not always the case in the mean streets and the real world. Some unrequited dudes are forced to howl their hearts out, singing the l-Found-My-Baby-but-She-Ain’t-Looking-for-Me blues in the night.

Even more luckily, the Celestial Jewel of my heart and other, less fashionably mentionable parts takes me for a hero. To hear her tell it, I attacked the fleeing murderer and was rewarded with a boot in the backside for my trouble. Yet I was still able to leap ten feet across the room and prevent her canvas ark from smashing into the wall.

The lady was asleep at the time, and far be it from me to present myself in a less noble light.

Yet misfortune did enter the scene of Love’s Young Dream. First came the perplexing human pantomime. After calming Yvette, if not myself, I amble over to the wall, loft atop a conveniently close chair seat and cautiously sniff as much of the suspended lady as I can reach. Until my nose for news has registered its impression, I believe nothing of what I see, and even less of what I hear.

Once satisfied that the poor little doll is dead and in no need of further attentions, I return mine to the contents of the pink carrier. No sooner have the Divine Yvette and I settled down for some romantic trans-mesh smooching, when I hear a sneaky step in the hall.

The newcomer is none other than the miserable dude with whom I tangled a time or two at the ABA. Naturally, he does not look down, so he fails to notice Yvette and myself—mostly myself, for Yvette is as well-veiled as a novice in a convent in her carrier, and I am hard to miss unless you are not looking for me, which this Puke-cannon person is definitely not doing.

“Glinda—” he calls softly. “It’s Crawford. The others said you never went upstairs. I know you stayed behind because you wanted a private rendezvous. Glinda—”

Hearing him makes me want to reconsider my romantic notions, permanently.

And is this guy blind, or what? First he pokes his nose into the hanging costumes. Then he sniffs out the various makeup containers that litter the countertop, although he is massively deficient in the sniffer, like all of his breed. Even a perfumed Pomeranian would have noticed by now the distinctive odor of death in the room.

But Crawfish Puke-cannon, may his tribe get rabies, bumbles through looking—not high and low, where he would at least spy the dangling damsel on the far wall, or yours truly huddled beneath the counter—but right in front of his prying nose, which instead is investigating one of the absent stripper's canvas bags.

I hiss a disgusted warning, but he is too deaf to hear it over the grind of the air-conditioning system. He pauses to taste a fingerful of frosting he scoops from a lurid wreck of cake on the counter, then moves on. He has almost reached the wall before he notices the suspended bare legs. Had Miss Temple Barr stumbled onto this murder scene, she would have fixed on those magenta satin spikes from the doorway, and have followed them up to their logical conclusion, or, rather, the dead woman's conclusion.

Now Puke-cannon’s basset-hound brown eyes are widening to display their bloodshot whites, as unappetizing a sight as squid-eyeball sushi. He looks up, and up, and up to the dead dancer's sad, tilted face. He whitens, stumbles backward into a series of chairs, which he pushes aside. Then, right by me he pauses and turns.

One last look at the far wall and its macabre decoration, and he is out of there faster than an Irish Setter on No Doz.

Then things commence to get hectic. In no time flat, a couple of brave souls peek in to verify the Puke-cannon claims. They retreat. I am forced to bid my Lost One a long goodbye (which has certain compensations).

I no sooner desert the dressing room for a bird’s-eye view atop a costume cabinet in the hall than I hear the hysterical approach of little pink feet: the extremities of the Divine One’s so-called owner (a convention my kind accepts only to lull human companions into the proper state of ignorance as to who really has the upper mitt in such arrangements).

Miss Savannah Ashleigh proceeds to wail in the hall and demand that someone enter the dressing room and extract “her Darling" from the awful place. Cooler heads point out that the police will want to see the scene untouched.

She does not care, Miss Ashleigh declares, pacing back and forth, what the police want to see. Her Darling must not be subjected to such stress. She clutches her throat, a gesture I find tasteless given the likely means of the deceased's death, but then I also find Miss Savannah Ashleigh is untalented enough to give even tastelessness a bad name.

At length another old friend from the ABA strides onto the scene. I could jump down on her head from here, and contemplate that, considering the bad time Lieutenant C. R. Molina saw fit to give the delightful Miss Temple Barr in that instance.

Instead I eavesdrop, yawning. The sound of yammering, excited humans is hard on the ears. Eventually I drop into a meditative state, repeating a soothing mantra, tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah... tuuu-nah ” (Carp is a personal favorite of mine, but its short, sharp name does not lend itself to musing upon.) With such a password to psychic peace, I could snooze at a dogfight, and often have.

I stay only long enough to see the Divine Yvette borne from the room at the hands of Lieutenant Molina herself.

“The carrier has to stay until our technicians are done with it,” she tells Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who is draping her right shoulder with Yvette’s languid length and making much over her. (Meanwhile, Yvette is making blue-green goo-goo eyes at me atop the cabinet.)

“Oh, thank you, Lieutenant,” babbles Miss Savannah. “See how the Poor Baby is purring with joy at reuniting with Momsy! Please tell me what you think happened to My Darling in that awful room. We will be in the private dressing room next door.”

Once Yvette is safe in the silicone bosom of her family, I see no point in sticking around like a used Band-Aid. No one will listen to me even if I should deign to offer my eyewitness testimony. I will be taken no more seriously than Miss Savannah Ashleigh, which is a dreadful state of affairs.