Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Rafi Nadir.”

“Whoa. This is the big one, Louise.”

I sit back on my haunches, feeling my heart blip with shock.

How the Hallelujah Chorus would Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s ex-cop ex-cohabitator know of the Randolph-Kinsella house or connection … or any of the many mystery threads involving my Miss Temple that Louise and I have been following these many, many months like bloodhounds? Excuse the expression, but sometimes only a doggy comparison will do the job—speaking of doggy expressions.

“My vibrissae almost went as white as yours overnight,” Louise agrees. “Even worse, Mister Rafi stayed about as long as Miss Temple.”

“Twenty minutes or so you said. So it was … cordial?”

“Who knows? I only know that both visiting humans left the house under their own power. One would think, unlike our kind, they would not hunker down and glare silently at each other for many minutes.”

“You will certainly not question the senior partner’s instincts or orders again,” I say.

“You have that wrong. This just confirms my instincts at the Neon Nightmare more than two months ago that Mister Max is the one to watch.”

“And that is just what you will be doing again tonight.”

Miss Louise’s muzzle makes an annoyed moue, which is a French word for a dainty grimace.

I leap, claws in, to the sun-baked leather seat and then place my front “velvet paws” on the leather upholstery edging the rolled-down window. Bast knows that scratched cowhide would not only give away the presence of feline stowaways but earn Miss Temple’s swift dismay and wrath.

“What is happening?” Louise asks.

“Miss Temple has returned from exploring the back forty looking as if she has spent a month on the African Queen with Humphrey Bogart.

“Oooh! And she is always so smartly turned out. Let me see.”

Midnight Louise has lofted up beside me without a claw prick and is blinking her old-gold-colored eyes in the bright sunlight, taking in my human’s scratched legs and arms and limp curls.

Meanwhile, Miss Savannah Ashleigh has been sitting in the Sky’s driver’s seat with her earbuds inserted and her garish blond head bouncing in tune to some pop-rock drivel.

The world is not a just or kind place.

I stare at the pale adobe walls of a house barely visible through the overgrown scrub surrounding it.

“I am about to reverse myself, Louise,” I say.

“At least you are just a backseat driver.”

“We are coming back here in the dark of night and are going to bust into that illegal cathouse.”

“Oh, you guys love to pile on the sleaze and pose as masters of sex and violence. This is a private residence, not the Sapphire Slipper ranch out in Nye County. I doubt we will find anything illegal inside besides too many cats.”

“Which there can never be too many of,” I get in as a final word.

Chapter 10

Gathering Vultures

On the sun-seared front concrete step spilling unpicked-up daily newspaper rolls, Temple eyed the rusted screen in the battered aluminum outer door and donned a mental suit of armor, not rusted.

She knew hospitals didn’t keep the terminally ill around as long as, say, in her mother’s day. The patient’s home now was a bridge to hospice care at the point of no return. Temple braced herself for the sights and sounds of bedridden illness she had experienced among her extended family now and then as a child.

Savannah showed no such reticence or sensitivity.

Her spike heels kicked away any blocking newspapers as she used a key like a weapon to belabor the big but grungy-looking front-door lock. The wooden door cracked open on darkness and the tepid, wet indoor temperature likely created by an old-style “swamp cooler.”

Temple didn’t have to worry about bracing against the odors of bedpan and medicines. What hit her and Savannah like a tsunami was an invisible wall of litter boxes kept in a musty, closed-windows house.

“You’ll get used to it.” Savannah waved her free hand in front of her face. “My aunt did. It’s worse now, of course, since Pedro Gomez kicked the bucket in the back forty.”

Temple could only nod while holding her breath. Bless Midnight Louie for using the bathroom window to go outside to do his duty most of the time, and not the bathroom litter box.

Now she knew at least two things Pedro had done for Violet. One was to collect and recycle the daily newspaper, a rarity these Internet days. The other was to dig daily shallow graves for the sifted leavings in box after box of used, probably clumping litter.

Finding unsullied new ground to dig must have taken him far from the house and near the retention basin, making Gomez a sitting duck beside a deadly, man-made dry wash.

Temple also realized that Pedro burying cat litter by the light of the moon might have given someone criminal notions of buried treasure. That was another angle.

Why go to such lengths? Because … leaving so much used litter bagged for the city trash haulers would put them in revolt—and, Temple realized, tip off health officials to the fact that Violet was a cat hoarder. And just what was her last name? Surely not Ashleigh, a stage surname if Temple had ever heard one, and she’d heard many.

Meanwhile, Savannah exhaled a shallow breath and stalked on echoing heels into the house, which was floored only with bare concrete and some wood sections. Temple suspected any carpeting had long ago succumbed to litter-box overflow and been ripped out.

The main room was dim, thanks to deep adobe window wells. It was occupied by a bulky island that Temple’s focusing eyes identified as a hospital bed. Around and on it lay a half dozen cats of various sizes and patterns, surrounding the sickly white shadow of a woman.

Temple stared at Savannah’s aunt Violet, thinking of the portrait of Dorian Gray aging in an attic while the real man stayed artificially young in his everyday environment. That was the sort of resemblance Savannah Ashleigh’s aunt bore to her niece.

“My aunt,” Savannah introduced her to Temple, “Violet Weiner. I could attach a few ex-husbands’ names to that, but neither Violet nor I choose to remember those skunks. Now, Violet, this here gal may be young and look a little silly, but she is going to find out what happened to Pedro.”

Temple threw Savannah a warning look as she approached the bed. She didn’t need any extravagant claims wrapped in the disparaging word silly.

Violet lay half-raised on the bulky hospital bed, like a Lazarus in suspended transition between life and death. The old woman’s hair was long, wild, and a dazzling platinum-blond color, but only because it was completely and magnificently white, naturally. Her bone structure was as camera-ready as her niece’s, but the skin had collapsed onto it. Her lips were thin and pale, and her torso was paper-doll flat under the white hospital sheet. No collagen, no breast implants, just her unassisted form.

“Oh, Pedro,” she murmured, her head tossing on the pillows. “He hasn’t come to the house in two days. The cats and I could always depend upon him. I’m so worried. Is he here now? I want to see him. We miss him. It’s terrible to miss someone.”

Her low mourning-dove coos turned harsh with conviction. “He’s dead, they say. I know someone did something to him, like they did to Alexandra. She died, you know. Far away. A terrible accident, they said. Like Pedro. I don’t believe what they say.”

She glared at Savannah, but only because she was known to her, and handy. Violet was an old sick woman. Temple wondered how many years separated Savannah and Violet. How fascinating that Savannah’s stage surname, Ashleigh, was almost an entire alphabet away from their shared maiden name.