Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

I agree that humans can be unbelievably dense, but am myself a bit puzzled.

“Dig!” she orders. “Unless you want your roommate to walk right past the entrance to the third tunnel.”

Third tunnel? What are number one and number two … ? No, I am not referring to the coy way people describe the major variations of dog doo-doo and dog dewatering.

We have tunnels from Gangsters and the Phoenix meeting in the middle.

Third tunnel?

I see only a crack in the seam where dirt floor meets plastered wall.

Then a small furry head pokes through.

I need no further invitation to scrape away with all shivs going like a circular saw. No dirty rat is going to move in on my territory, which is anywhere I happen to be.

“Louie!” a familiar oncoming female voice calls in shock behind me.

“Louise,” calls an even more shocked male voice.

“Dig until we bare dirt,” Miss Midnight Louise hisses into my ear hairs until they tickle. “They will not get the picture unless we draw out every last detail.”

“Must be mice,” I hear Macho Mario Fontana say, dismissing our prey.

Mice? My well-placed spitball would handle mice. We are talking bigger game here.

“Is the bigger one our Three O’Clock Louie?” I hear chubby Spuds Lonnigan inquire in a slightly breathless wheeze.

He is a fine one to mistake me for my older, fatter father! That is like the potbellied stove calling the cattle black. Or some such phrase.

I hear a sharp squeal from within the wall and see that Louise has pinned a long, hairless tail with her fanned front shivs.

“Rats,” my brilliant Miss Temple points out. “We will have to fumigate. No way Gangsters can run a restaurant down here until the entire rat population is completely eradicated.”

Murderous little thing, is she not?

That’s my roomie!

I lay a big mitt over Louise’s dainty one and pull back with one powerful jerk, revealing the entire rat. Case closed.

Before I can do a karate chop to the neck, the rat’s racing claws kick something big and dusty out of its hole right into our faces.

We sneeze in tandem, our claws relaxing in one uncontrollable reflex moment.

Rats! Exhibit A is history. We step back, boxing our nostrils and vibrissae free of some pretty well-aged dirt and sand.

My Miss Temple approaches on her hind claws, aka spike heels, and bends to pick up the trash. Humans, even the best of them, are hard to figure sometimes.

It is obvious that Louise and I deserve to be picked up and made much of for our valiant effort to seek, find, and agitate vermin. Not that we would accept such namby-pamby fondling even when well deserved. We are professionals. Just buy us a steak and salmon dinner and call it quits.

Miss Temple unfolds the wad of paper.

“This looks like … a stock certificate.”

“Yeah?” Nicky asks. “That’s worth about a penny these days.”

Miss Van von Rhine stretches out a hand. “Let me see.”

The light is dim, but long, tall Pitchblende O’Hara steps up and produces a tiny high-intensity flashlight.

“This and a Swiss Army knife are always in my jeans,” he explains.

Miss Van von Rhine quirks a smile at her confident spouse.

“You’d be wrong, Nicky. This isn’t as old as it looks, and it looks less like a stock certificate and more like a bearer bond.”

“Bearer bond?” Miss Temple asks. “Is that worth anything?”

“Ten thou,” Mr. Nicky says, taking it to stretch the crumpled paper smooth, “to anyone who holds it in his hand.”

“Or hers,” Van says, taking custody.

Girls can be so possessive.

Love Connection

It was early evening by the time Temple returned to her Circle Ritz condo. She was still a having a brain attack that made her stomach turn cartwheels. What an amazing turn of events! What a PR break, if she handled it right.

She had to slow down and think. She had to call Matt.

First, though, she had to take a shower and blast the plaster and limestone dust off her epidermis and out of her hair. The showerhead installed over the vintage bathtub was a fancy chrome “waterfall” type, expensive and European-made. Its warm, tingling downpour rinsed her right off. Yup. She was enjoying one of Max’s upgrades of the premises. She so did want to wash that man’s memory out of her hair.

Perhaps only leaving the condo that had initially been “theirs” would end the unwanted memory reruns. Matt’s unit was too small for two, though. Unless Electra would let them remodel two units into one, they might have to move out. Darn. Rip Midnight Louie from his charming Circle Ritz home? Unthinkable!

Temple, now double-wrapped in a huge Crystal Phoenix bath towel (perk of the job), padded barefoot and dripping into the main room. She threw herself down on the living room couch and picked up her iPhone to dial Matt’s cell phone. No answer.

He often turned it off when traveling, perhaps the only annoying habit he had. When Matt was on camera on a major TV talk show, he sure didn’t want a ring tone broadcasting over the air, even though Temple had installed Leonard Cohen’s awesome “Hallelujah” and it was pretty playable.

She left a message, part love note and part incoherent job report, disappointed. Matt always had long business dinners at fancy places when he was in Chicago, so they often didn’t connect until midnight or later.

Temple couldn’t wait that long. She was bubbling over with ideas and anxieties (wasn’t that always the way?) and needed to run them by someone she could trust. What she was planning was risky to the point of being a hokey failure, but her job depended on selling her bosses and the public on her thinking. A consultant always needed someone close to consult.

Matt’s room phone rang and rang.

She tried the cell phone again. If the dinner ran late and the wine had been primo, she knew Matt would call her on the room phone from bed. He knew she liked to wake up to his voice, and while it wasn’t totally phone sex, it was sweet-little-nothing sex that left them glowing and intimately connected, long-distance.

Matt’s experience hosting The Midnight Hour radio call-in program had made him a sex symbol to thousands of women, and Temple had that smooth baritone on personal speed-dial. She indulged in a little shiver that cooled down her overactive brain.

Temple kept her old-fashioned line phones because they were cozier to cuddle up to and she used a headset on her cells for business calls. She didn’t want to get brain cancer from long cell phone calls. Well, it could happen! Besides, her longtime bedroom phone was shaped like a red spike-heeled shoe and she’d never give it up.

Temple jumped up and went to her tiny black-and-white kitchen that would wake up a narcoleptic. She opened the refrigerator and stared inside, then did the same with all her cupboards. She hadn’t eaten dinner but she was too jumpy to find anything appetizing … except her absent fiancé.

Back to the living room to scan the day’s newspaper.

She jumped up again in five minutes and did an all-room under, inside, and above search for Midnight Louie. At least she could tell him her plans. He listened with remarkable attentiveness and intelligence and only yawned occasionally during her monologues.

But the only black body hairs and rare white whisker she could find were throwaways. Who knew where he’d gone after the hubbub in the Chunnel of Crime-to-be?

Back to the kitchen. Caramel corn. No! Blueberry yogurt. No. Try the phones again. No answer.

She finally went to bed without supper, all alone without her iPhone. She found a terrible sixties movie on a bottom-feeder cable channel and watched it until her eyes crossed and her nerves flatlined and … she went to sleep.