Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

Dwarfing the little Lowery organ on one sideline, Matt Devine sat in his emerald-green shirt and khaki pants, looking like a PGA pro dragooned into musical servitude. Electra’s muumuu was concealed by a rusty black graduation robe that gave her a properly clerical look. She nodded once and smugly to the waiting Matt.

The organ huffed into life. Temple listened, first curious, then surprised. Music, marchlike and softly sensuous, swelled into the cathedral-ceilinged chamber. The couple advanced with the traditional nervous stutter of measured paces. Hat brims on the gathered mannequins seemed to nod in approval.

Temple blinked. It had been a rough day. She’d found a dead body, earned a long-distance record for carrying the world’s heaviest cat, met a devastating new tenant of the male persuasion just when she was terminally down on the opposite sex, and now she was melting to the spell of a wedding march she’d never heard before. In a minute, she’d be hallucinating the “congregation” humming along in chorus.

She got the hallelujah out of there.

“O kay, kitty,” Templetold the cat on the last leg of her journey. “This is a very special place. It’s round, see, the whole building. What we have here is my front door— shhhh ; just a minute while I find my keys!—solid coffered mahogany. They don’t waste wood like this anymore. Not since the fifties. This was some ritzy place until it hit the skids in the seventies and Electra came along to gentrify it. Now you get to call it home in the nineties.”

The door hushed reluctantly open on solid brass hinges; it was that heavy. Temple lugged the carrier over the threshold. Then she was inside, and any of her Minneapolis friends who might have wondered why Temple stayed on in Las Vegas when Max vamoosed would know.

“Nice, huh? I’ll let you out, you look around, and then we eat.”

This agenda apparently suited the cat. He emerged cautiously from the carrier, putting one massive paw before the other as precisely as a chorus girl at the Tropicana.

To the left was the odd wedge-shaped kitchen, but after one long whisker-quivering sniff, the cat turned toward the living room, padding silently across the walnut parquet floor.

Temple loved her place, with or without Max. Its decor was a concoction of imagination and serendipity rather than of money and time. The major rooms were pie-shaped wedges widening to curved exterior windows. Vaulted white plaster ceilings seemed to ripple like sand dunes to meet the walls, generating a soft, aquatic play of light. No wonder Electra was a bit mystical after living here for almost twenty years.

The black cat was not interested in mystical or aquatic unless a tasty finned morsel was involved. He headed for the French doors, paws braced on the struts, to size up the triangular garden patio beyond the living room.

“No outside,” she told him, setting her apartment thermostat a bit lower for the evening. “That reminds me; I’d better round up a roaster pan or something. Yeah, that’s the bathroom, my bathroom, so don’t get any ideas.”

The cat was poking his jet-black nose behind the toilet. He stretched like a ladder against the inch-square tiles of the bathroom walls, reaching for the lone, small window. “Too high for even you, smarty!”

He agreed, for shortly he was in her bedroom, inspecting her piles of clothes—“So I’m untidy; so what. We’re not married or anything.” He leaped atop the California king-size bed to recline in the exact middle—“Off! If you’re lucky you’ll get a pillow in the corner. That’s what I tell all my male sleepovers.”

His paw edged the louvered closet doors open to reveal a treasure trove of shoe soles. “Sniffing? No monkey business! I’ll get you the proper facilities in a few minutes.” The cat stretched up the inside of a closet door, his extended forelegs playfully patting a poster taped to the door.

“Yeah, you got it, bud. My dirty little secret. You are looking at one of the last remaining vestiges of ‘The Mystifying Max’ in Vegas. Right, worth a good long yawn. What a bore. So predictable of a magician to just vanish, for heaven’s sake.”

Temple regarded her memento. The Mystifying Max had a look both puckish and lethal, hair so black you’d expect to find it in your stocking on Christmas morning and strong, bony, clever hands. He wore a navy turtleneck and a “now you see it, now you don’t” expression, which pretty much summed up their relationship.

She picked up the cat, an intemperate decision. He still weighed a ton. But his eyes were almost as green as The Mystifying Max’s.

“I hope you’re not two of kind,” she murmured into his thick ruff, “and aren’t gonna run out on me, too. You I need. Somehow, some way, you’re gonna defuse this murder thing at the ABA for me; I know it.”

The cat, for all his bulk, remained complacently cradled in Temple’s arms, although his green eyes were roaming the Dairy Queen ceiling as if searching for a way out.

Temple tightened her grip. “Don’t you do that to me! Don’t you dare!”

5

The Fall Guy

O h, the personal complications that result from the simple if somewhat unprecedented impulse to do a good deed in a naughty world.

I refer to my subterfuge of allowing someone else to stumble over the body while in pursuit of yours truly. I had not anticipated having to put up with the inconvenience of my own capture. Nor would it be lost on any of my intimate acquaintances that a canvas book bag, however sturdy, is less than sufficient to contain a dude of my fighting weight should I require egress.

Yet it is my last wish at the scene of the crime to create a scene of another kind, so I go quietly into that good, navy-blue-canvas night.

The portable cell is another matter. Even as clever an operator as myself knows that those steel bars latch on the outside. My particular prison is formed from nubbly plastic in an ugly shade of beige that resembles certain commercial cat foods of my very passing acquaintance. It does not do a thing for my coloring, not to mention a physique that was never meant to be crammed into a cell designed for the wimpy common housecat.

I take all this in relatively decent grace. The Master Plan calls for my swift and discreet removal from any connection—mental or physical—with the corpus delicti. As even schemes of mice and men oft gang a-gummy, to paraphrase the Scottish poet, so does Midnight Louie’s.

For one thing, I do not count on landing in the custody of a feisty doll like Miss Temple Barr. During my day in stir at the convention center she keeps me close by most of the time. (Who can blame her? She is not an undiscriminating little doll.)

This permits me to hear more than rests easily on my abnormally sharp ears. Although I have revealed the dastardly deed without establishing myself as a suspect, I had not expected my self-preservation tactic to make a sweet-and-tart little dish like this Temple doll the fall girl, so to speak.

It becomes clear, as the voices of ABA and convention center policy growl outside my polyurethane prison walls, that Miss Temple Barr is in worse trouble than myself, her job being that of burying bodies rather than tripping over them.