Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

Mr. Jay Edgar was hung. Hanged? Whatever. He was strangled, ergo no blood. And ergo the several straight marks of a ladder’s feet, made by the killer to string him up…and made by the authorities to bring him down.

“Our guy,” I tell the ladies, “was turned into a human chandelier pendant.”

“Then your keeper’s clowder chief cannot have done it,” Ma says.

“For once and for all, Ma, get it right. My roommate, Miss Temple Barr, is a client of my detective business. Miss Electra Lark is a landlady for the Circle Ritz residents. I deign to live there and also to provide personal protection for Miss Temple. For the last time, I am not a kept cat. I rule my own roost. And I am an independent private investigator. I will not compromise any investigation. As for Miss Electra, I must consider she could have done this killing if she had a coconspirator.”

“She could have made someone do it if she had a gun,” Louise says. “And by the way, Ma, I am a full partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc.”

“Junior partner,” I say.

She huffs and puffs. “A female cannot be a ‘Jr.’, although you certainly are a senior citizen.”

“No quite yet, you little ingrate.”

“How I put up with your senile maunderings, I do not know.”

She waps me across the nose. I wap her across the nose.

Wait. That nose-wapping was not us. It was Ma Barker doing a one-two rowdy-kitten slap-down. I have not felt the like in years.

“Sit down and shut up,” Ma growls in a disciplinary basso that lives up to her canine name. “If this is the way you two run your business, you will soon be pulling guard duty for those pesky alien abductors. I suggest if these so-called abettors to a hanging are a real possibility, you start looking for, and finding them.”

I fear that Ma Barker is right. With Miss Temple’s private life all in a lovers’ knot wad lately, I fear she has forgotten me and my crime-solving prowess. Hopefully, her affairs will get much simpler post haste and finding the murderer will be number one on the menu.

24

Counting Sheep

“I’ve been in a bar, now I want to go into the convent.” Kathleen announced as Max steered the Honda out of Dublin on the busy M1. “Is that what you’re hoping, Michael? That I’ll finally ‘find religion’, as you put it in the States?”

“No, but you badly need to find a new mania, a new cause,” he said.

“Do I? I don’t need to find anything you might think I would.” She sure knew how to pout, looking kittenish with her chin pointed down and her unearthly aqua eyes gazing up at him. The fading pink scar tracks looked like she’d run a pale lipstick tip over her cheek for some punk-style look. “I know about That Damn Movie.”

“‘That Damn Movie’ doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Phil-o- meen -a.” Her bitter, twisted lips mocked the title and herself.

Max nodded. “The Little Indie Film That Could. Dame Judi Dench playing the title character got the film a lot of notice for a biopic. Oscar nominations.”

“I’m amazed you and the Circle Ritz crowd are so au courant about films. Particularly that one. Always thinking of me and my sad orphaned history.”

Max shrugged. “And it’s a great detective story.”

“Not solved by Philomena. That woman was a sheep. Her toddler was taken from her, sold to American adoptive parents for two grand, and the Magdalene ‘asylum’ for fallen women would never tell her where he was sent. She only found where he was after he was middle-aged and dead, and after he’d had himself buried at that damnable place in case his birth mother ever came looking for him. The nuns knew they were searching for each other and kept them apart. Philomena did nothing but accept that she deserved the disdain and pain the Church handed out to her and her despised unwed mother cellmates. Sheep. Meek sheep.”

“I see Philomena’s quest as one of being reconciled with the past,” Max said. “A horrible past, but she accepted that she couldn’t have changed it.”

“She could have taken the baby and run.”

“You did that, Kathleen. You owe your plucky past self more than rage and bitterness in the present.”

“And what about your past? You clutch your guilt like a talisman. It’s a way to ward off people from getting close, isn’t it? Father Matt would say that. Poor Michael. You can’t leave your young self behind either.”

“Don’t call me Michael.”

“I’ll call you what I want to call you. Is Michael the Martyr any better or saner than Kitty the Cutter?”

“No,” he said. “The punishing world you fled now has been exposed and has changed, but women and children are still being treated as badly, or worse, in much of the world elsewhere today.”

“Screw foreign atrocities. I only care about my world. My IRA work helped end the daily brutal rule of the English over the Irish in Northern Ireland.”

“And it was for the Irish Catholics you fought.”

“Sheep, but now that they’re not distracted by centuries of ethnic discrimination, perhaps they’ll become more critical of their goddam religion.”

“Or, their religion will become more critical of itself.”

“Religion causes strife and suffering because it encourages people to despise those not of the ‘true’ faith. Look at the Mideast.”

“Not my field of operation.”

“What is, now?” she asked.

“I’m retired, although some folks won’t accept that.”

“And your last mission is to find dear lost—but alive if I’m not lying—Cousin Sean.”

“Not quite my last mission.”

“Right. You want to find the grave of your partner in undercover work.”

He nodded.

“And you wanted to introduce me to my now-grown surrendered daughter, whereupon I would supposedly melt into a bloody, woolly, ill-smelling, bleating sheep of sweetness and light upon a first glimpse of her.”

“Never expected that.”

“So. We have a rental car. You are licensed and able to drive on the left side of the road. Where do we go next?”

“To church, I think.”

“I won’t cover my head. I won’t kneel. And I may spit in the baptismal fount.”

Max laughed. “You’re finding your inner brat. I’m glad you’re making up for lost time.”

And he was.

“This is the place where I was kept,” Kathleen said as Max pulled the Honda up to the convent church. He’d made sure to rent a car model different from the one he’d shared with Garry a mere two months ago. Yet, every time he glanced left at Kathleen in the passenger seat, he saw a gray ghost with a slack neck and bloody temple in the curve of closed window glass behind her.

“It’s also the place I visited on my last trip.” Max closed that conversation by going around to open her door.

She swung her narrow legs to the ground, looking up at him in that same disturbing way he only indentified now: like the preternaturally knowing evil child in a horror movie. He pulled her up by the icy hand. She seemed to take perverse satisfaction in his courtesy.

The old brown brick building with red-brick bordered windows looked as ancient and abandoned as before when he’d visited with Garry. Against troubled gray clouds a crucifix stood in relief atop the rambling building’s only peaked roof.