Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Is that where Louie was now?

Temple leaned her head over the railing and watched the British crew thrash toward the bridge.

When they were almost under it, she shouted, "Is there a cat down there?"

Two men looked up, treading water.

"A cat!" she mouthed, hoping they could read lips. She made pathetic little paddling motions with her hands.

They read her distressed face, looked under the bridge, then shook their sopping heads. Then they swam on to some hidden exit under the bridge.

Maybe Louie had found it.

Music swelled around her, but Temple was too worried to heed it. Eightball grabbed her arm.

"Look. Look there! The ship's rising again."

Would Louie rise again?

Temple saw the Royal Navy's mast-tops pricking the water's thin skin and then rising more and more, until the Captain's bare head appeared. There was the bloody prig now, still standing at attention as

"Rule, Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves" pounded over the speaker system and his battle-battered ship lifted to ride normally on the waves.

The crowd, laughing and applauding, thinned into a moving stream of indistinguishable people with pressing places to go, like craps tables. Solemnly, the British ship retreated around the point, to be restored to spanking, white-sailed condition by the next show.

Temple wandered back to the pirate-ship side, where all was broken and charred. She assumed the technical crew would have it shipshape again in forty minutes.

Could she find someone from the crew? Beg them to check the ship, the water, the staging area for Louie? Would they believe her?

"Kind of hard to believe," Eightball ruminated beside her.

She glanced at the elderly man. He was discussing the programmed destruction and resurrection of the dueling ships, but he had inadvertently answered her unspoken question. No one would believe a cat had jumped into the midst of battle to claw open a treasure chest so his human roommate could find a pair of bejeweled shoes.

Temple sadly eyed the fallen treasure, as tawdry and deceptive as any dream of riches from El Dorado to Indiana Jones's Temple of Doom.

Midnight Louie was her real treasure, not some rare shoes bearing an image she had decided was him, and not simply an anonymous black cat. Perhaps the shoes would be his memorial.

For he had slipped aboard on purpose to inspect the chest; she knew that. Somehow, he had picked up the trail of her quest and had boldly gone where she could not go.

A tear meandered down her cheek to her throat.

"Hey." Eightball jerked on her sleeve. "That's funny. Never noticed that detail before."

"What?" she asked listlessly.

"Over there by the houses, next to the parrot. Look, atop that buxom figurehead."

Temple finally did look. It would be too hard to explain the unrehearsed show that she had seen unfolding amidst the advertised attraction: the end of Midnight Louie.

The parrot still sat there in its gaudy glory, head forever cocked. The figurehead still thrust her chin and bosom into the distance. And crouching atop her tilted-back head, eyeing the parrot, was a cat. A black cat. A wet black cat.

Temple opened her mouth but said nothing.

The cat's green eyes blinked, then the left one closed as it began licking a spiky forepaw.

Chapter 20

Long John Louie

Greater love hath no cat for his human, than that he should get wet in her service.

Wet? I am waterlogged in the first degree.

At least it is an artificial body of water, so my own torso is not subject to fish-nips, leeches and other things that go glub in thedeeps.

Much as I like to give my finned friends the occasional love-nip, the truth is that they do bite and my terminal member looks much like a black caterpiller fallen on hard times.

So I sit in the semi-dark atop this somewhat wooden, naked and truncated lady known as a figurehead (why a head when her most prominent figure feature is somewhat lower, I do not know), tending to my grooming. I am relieved that Miss Temple has finally gotten her wits about her and noticed both my heroic actions on her behalf, and my long, slow recuperation afterward.

How I got here and did what I did is simple. When Miss Temple Barr leaves the scene of the crime these days--and these days the scene of the crime is my beloved alma mater, the Crystal Phoenix, sad to say--she is off on errands of a peculiarly repellent nature: looking for love in all the wrong places, such as a shoe store.

I do not know what the big deal is all about with my little doll and the two dudes at the Circle Ritz.

The solution is simple, as my old friend Sassasfras would say to her many suitors: You got the dime, I got the time.

I do not understand why humans are so addicted to the notion of exclusivity. If we felines followed that creed, we would be on the verge of extinction. True, I have been wounded by the darts of that Persian enchantress, the lissome Yvette. But this does not mean that Midnight Louie is off the romance shelf and stamped "Expired." No, siree. I am free to come and go, and do a good bit of both.

It seems to my beknighted mind that Miss Temple would do better in her relationships with the opposite sex if she would adopt a feline point of view. Obviously, the Mystifying Max is a roamer who should be taken on his own terms and enjoyed when he is in town. Mr. Matt Devine is more domesticated, although he is unaccountably persnickety about the rules and regulations for activities that are best pursued in an improvisational frame of mind. So Miss Temple can have her cupcake and eat it too, if she would only see that it takes two to tango, and they are often both asking her to dance.

However, I am not about to meddle in these complex human hormonal matters. Where I hope to lend a helping hand, so to speak, is in a smaller area of operation: Miss Temple's devotion to footwear.

Although I myself eschew decorative accessories, far be it from me to sneer at another's obsession, especially when it is a leather fetish. Yum-yum. I like nothing better than a good chew now and then, a long-standing masculine pleasure, and Miss Temple has the leather goods to keep my habit humming.

(Although she does wax indignant when I slobber on her suede.)

Now that I know that a master of the shoemaker's art has been enlightened enough to use an image reminiscent of me on some of his creations, I can only extend all the powers at my command in assisting Miss Temple to obtain these rare objects.

This is why I followed her from the Crystal Phoenix, this is why my lightning-swift brain immediately surmised that her interest in things nautical had more to do with greed (as is usual with pirates then and now) than with wanderlust. This is why I risked body and soul by boarding the pirate ship. Who else could run so neatly over the rigging? Could cling so doggedly to the treasure chest, until all its tawdry contents had been exposed and dropped to deck?

Who else could face the burning deck without getting his whiskers singed? Who could be the last man ... male ... to desert ship? Who could paddle through the dark, disgusting water until he made shore safely, then find a high and dry refuge in plain sight of my distraught roommate, who by then had, to her credit but my underestimation, presumed me dead?

Only Midnight Louie is equipped to handle these kinds of crises. Please do not try these feats in your own home. There could be consequences and an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Chapter 21

Opening Knights

"Here."

Kit thrust a fistful of printed matter into Temple's hand when she opened the door to her hotel room.

"What are these? Membership papers for the Hare Krishnas?"

"Mug shots."