Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“That dead ’un at the convention center? What’s this got to do with that? I don’t mess with homicide cases.”

“Nothing. This is cats.”

“Cats?” He spoke as if she’d named an alien being.

“Pet cats. Two are missing. What is your fee per hour?”

“Pet cats are missing all over the world. Nobody seeks professional help for it. Fifty dollars, plus expenses.”

“There wouldn’t be expenses. It’s a simple... drop.”

“Drop, missy? Where’d you get that lingo?”

“TV.”

“Don’t have one. Hasn’t been anything good on since Sid Caesar.”

“Before my time,” she shot back. “Are you bonded?”

“Are you kidding?” He paused to groom an unruly eyebrow with a forefinger, the way another man might stroke a mustache. She would have sworn he looked mischievous. “My word is my bond.”

“Are you kidding?” She shifted to rise and leave.

“Look. You don’t get a license unless the police say so.”

“You got a license?”

He pointed to the wall beside her, where a cheap black frame defined a document. Temple rose, got out her glasses and took her time deciphering the cursive script in the dim light.

“I don’t know, Mr. O’Rourke,” she said, resuming her seat, “there’s money involved.”

“Eightball,” he said.

“Huh?”

He gestured to the shiny black ball on his desk. “Eightball. It’s what everybody calls me.”

“Isn’t an eight ball supposed to be unlucky?”

“Only if you mess with it too early in the action. If it’s last on the table, the way it’s supposed to be, it’s lucky for the winner. I usually last to the end at whatever I do,” he said, with an emphasis both crisp and salacious.

Temple, surprised, laughed. She would bet that Eightball O’Rourke would be no one to tangle with in a barroom brawl if he had a broken bottle in hand, and as for his endurance in other pursuits, she wasn’t about to challenge it.

“How much money,” he asked genially, “and what’s involved?”

“It’s ransom money.”

“A kidnapping?” He whistled through teeth so white and even that they had to be false. “I don’t usually send folks to the cops, but even if it is only cats—”

“The ransom is five thousand dollars. That may not seem like much for a kidnapping.”

“That’s considerable for cats,” he admitted. “You want I should tail the napper when he picks up the cash?”

“I want you to drop off the cash so that I can tail the catnapper.”

“You got this backward, miss. Tailing’s the hard part. You could drop the cash and know it’s done and let me do the walking. That’s what you use the Yellow Pages for, isn’t it? ‘Let your fingers do the walking’?”

“If you think that’s best. We could meet before the... drop and I’d give you the ransom money then.”

“And give me my money, too. Then. Heck,” he said when she hesitated, “if you aren’t sharp enough to make sure I drop the dough, how were you gonna tail a kidnapper?”

“I was hoping it would be somebody I’d recognize.”

“Don’t they all.”

“How much is this going to cost?”

Eightball O’Rourke eyed the big round schoolhouse clock on the wall. “We talked a half hour here, say another couple hours before and after the drop. Hundred fifty dollars flat unless your napper takes off for the Spectre Mountains and I gotta trail him.”

“It could be a her,” she said.

“Don’t matter. Either sex trails the same.”

“One thing. Is there anything you can do to ensure the safety—and safe return—of the cats?”

“Nope.” Eightball O’Rourke rose and extended a hard, dry palm for a farewell shake. “Not a damn thing.”

15

Hunter on the Prowl

T emple returned tothe convention center after five p.m.for the second night in a row. This time she found the office empty and Midnight Louie lounging on her desktop grooming his expansive, jet-black belly.

“Hey, guy. Where you been all day? Enjoying the convention center?”

The cat looked up, impassive, and began taking long licks at his copious chest hair. His feline face had that vaguely withdrawn look that some people interpret as superiority to other beings.

Temple shrugged. Louie had already demonstrated that he had his ways in and out of the mammoth convention center, as well as around it. She wouldn’t even be surprised to find that he had beaten her back to her apartment one evening, and was waiting on the patio outside the French doors, bored as you please.

Louie was abstracted at the moment. He accepted her strokes of greeting with a short “merow” and a narrowed glance. Perhaps he was just tired, as Temple was.

She sat at her desk without bothering to drop the tote bag. A minute to compose herself and then she had to hustle Louie down to the car, red-hot by now after roasting in the peak afternoon sun. Then they’d go home to a chill, refreshing tuna dinner: raw from the can for him, salad for her. Cats left a lot of half-full cans of tuna sitting around going stale. Better that she eat it than that Louie should suffer from refrigerator-mouth tuna, at which he always turned up his jet-black nose.

“I’ll eat the lettuce,” she told Louie. “I’ve got to watch my figure even if you don’t.”

Approaching feet echoed down the hall. They stuttered to a pause, then rounded the corner into the office.

“Temple! Thank God you’re still here!” Lorna Fennick cried rapturously.

“What now?”

“Lanyard Hunter wants to talk to you.”

“Haven’t you got that backward?”

“No. After his media interview this afternoon I mentioned that you wanted to speak with him. He immediately asked if you were ‘the cute redhead’ he kept seeing with me. Naturally, I said yes. He said dinner tonight would be fine. I think he likes you.”

“Oh, Lord. That’s all I need. A mashing murderer.”

“Temple, you don’t think—?”

“No, I’m just tired and irritable and surprised. Why’d a famous author want to waste time on me when he could be wined and dined by his publishers and assorted hangers- on?”

“Look, this is Sunday evening. After tomorrow, it’s virtually over. Maybe he’s just attracted to you.”

“Why? I’m not a hospital.”

“That’s below the stethoscope, Temple. Aren’t you PR woman enough to take advantage of an interview you wanted when it drops into your hand like a plum?”

“More like a plumb bob,” she complained. “That’s what I don’t like. Hunter is playing too easy to get.”

“Well, you don’t have to.”

“Okay, what’s the deal?”

“You pick him up here at six-fifteen. Take him wherever you figure is the best setting for prying information out of him.”

“Are you suggesting I use my feminine wiles?”

“I’m suggesting you use your public relations savvy.”

“Okay. I gotta scram this place, then get Louie home and ... sob, freshen up ... to get back here in”—Temple consulted her watch, whose minute and hour hands seemed to have shrunk or stretched to a matching length—“fifty- five minutes.”

At that she fished her car keys from her tote bag, drew the handles over her shoulder and swooped up the lounging Midnight Louie in one uninterrupted motion.

“ ’Bye,” Temple called to Lorna through the key ring between her teeth on the way out. “And thanks. I think.”

Not even Wile E. Coyote can move faster than a PR woman on the run. Crisis is the profession’s middle name. Temple’s aqua Storm darted like a dragonfly through the five p.m. traffic, its glittering sides snaring reflections of a searing red sun melting like strawberry syrup over the chocolate ice-cream peaks of the western mountains.