Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

Temple gritted her teeth and held perfectly still.

Then she glanced back at the betraying shoe, finally realizing where she’d chosen to hide.

This was a Red Hat Sisterhood onstage demonstration vignette. The Red Hat Sisterhood colors were red and purple, with a tad of lavender and pink, shades that were discernible in the twilight of the distant security lights.

This shoe was … green.

A six-inch-high green platform espadrille.

Temple’s hand reached to check out the mannequin’s ankle and calf. Nothing personal.

It was, as expected, cold and hard and stiff.

She lit her micro-flashlight to briefly illuminate the model’s face before snapping it off.

That face had been cold and hard and stiff.

As in life, actually. Only it was dead now.

Temple felt the same deadly chill in her bones.

Damn! Her prime suspect for the murder sat there murdered herself. In fact, her dead body was perfectly placed to keep watch with Temple while the real murderer went for Temple’s bait a hundred feet across the room.

Temple couldn’t think of anything to do but flash her pinpoint light over the moving figure. And scream bloody murder.

Maybe announcing hers. Because who, besides Nicky, had she notified of her scheme who was anywhere around to hear? No one.

She’d always known this was a hat-brained idea that everyone would ridicule, and now it might prove fatal.

On the other hand, this room was one big overstocked clothes closet, and the perfect place to play hide-and-seek until help came. If it did.

Chapter 56

Crack Cocaine for Cats

My sharp ears have been awaiting the signal.

Yvette and Solange are still panting with suspense behind me.

The suspense that has them panting was landing in the giant hotel linen cart at the bottom of the fourteenth-floor laundry shoot. Neither had been on a theme park ride before. Neither understood that such a speedy exit down two stories to a central gathering station was the ride of a lifetime. That people paid for such thrills and repeated them regularly, even religiously.

I had to explain all that to them after I’d clawed them free of tangled 400-count sheets reeking with human foot odors and worse.

But you cannot keep prima donna Persians down. They werehappy to heckle me unmercifully all the way down in the empty elevator I snagged for them, playing hide-and-seek through the hotel’s service regions to the back ballroom doors my Miss Temple has so conveniently left ajar. The door is open just enough for her slender self and some super fluffy felines to slip through.

I, naturally, had seen her preparing her rather amateurish little trap at our home base. She sacrificed a half ream of printer paper to create the proper mound on the hatbox cover. I immediately saw through her ruse, but was mystified as to how I could do my duty and provide her effective backup.

Not that I alone am not sufficient for the task, but extra sets of shivs are always welcome when dealing with a rogue human of unknown origin. Miss Midnight Louise, of course, has been stubbornly pursuing the Missing Max case. (If you ask me, she is way too interested in the comings and goings of dudes of another species.) So it is just me and the Ashleigh girls, who are now plenty riled from their dive and digging out, just as 1 needed them to be. I realize that I have led them into what would be the equivalent of an opium den to my forebear shamus, Sherlock Holmes. And I have then expected them to contain themselves until the exact right moment.

Even my PI-hardened senses have been twitching at the air of universal prey wafting around this huge, darkened, empty ballroom. Everything our night-piercing eyes view through the crack in the door trembles temptingly with tension.

The air-conditioning wafts the scent of all the things that trigger our predatory instincts. Feathers. Feathers small and coarse, as from turkeys and chickens. Feathers airy and long, as from ostriches and emus. Feathers soft and frilly, as from the elusive marabou, perhaps a relative of the elusive caribou, who knows? Feathers fan-long and colored like deadly poisons, from the stately peacock.

We also scent fake fur. Umm. Soft and plush and so claw-able. Microfiber! Double-knit! Spandex! Fabrics, not feathers, but also divinely designed by the great Bast for joyful stalking and rending and reducing to tatters.

I am reminded of the stalker whom Midnight Louise said had shredded Mr. Max’s wardrobe. A very sick individual, as humans go, but there was something of the jungle cat in that primitive action. I too lust after the soft dangling attractions inside human closets. Of course we domesticated cats have learned, mostly, to control these primitive destructive urges. However, we never avoid a legitimate reason to unleash them.

Taking down a murderer will do nicely.

My shivs are slipping in and out of their sheathes, eager to impress themselves on human skin and all the intervening surfaces. I can hear the rip and roar now.

But my doughty roommate’s scream is our version of the late, lamented blue-light special at Kmart stores. The Ashleigh girls, released from pampered civility by a nod of my sagacious head, surge past me, rapacious streaks of riffling fur.

“Not the one who bears my scent,” I remind them with a final snarl, and gallop forward myself, heading for the elevated area where I had earlier spied the tiny light winking as bright as a Birman’s eye.

My well-prepared missiles have hit their shambling target on the ballroom floor by the time I leap up onto the stage.

I hear the mingled screeches and screams of two species, the sublime sound of shivs skiing down several feet of snagged fabric, above and below the belt line. In my observation, there is nothing like the dainty and fluffy Persian for ripping the heck out of anything.

By now the arias of feline fury and human pain have summoned reinforcements. Security people thunder through the front double doors. Some thoughtful person has found the lights and put them all on full power.

Human eyes blink in the glaring light, but my pupils shrink to slits as I focus on my Miss Temple, clearly visible on the Glamour-Glo PhotoLaser stage not twelve feet away. Her low-shod, high-hatted red ensemble is enough to put my fangs on edge, but no one else present is rocked by her shocking and unusual lack of taste.

She is conferring with Fontana brothers three who have materialized with the lights, over the pale-painted mannequin in the hot seat.

Meanwhile, I turn to regard the ballroom floor, where the Ashleigh girls have the target down and are voraciously pummeling a pile of red-and-purple rags that appears to be still moving. And moaning.

Since my Miss Temple is surrounded by sufficient human muscle, I hurtle after my accomplices. Much as I would enjoy joining in on the fun, my position in the community as an upholder of law and order forces me to put a damper on the Ashleigh girls’ exuberant killer instincts.

“Sit and pummel,” I order, moving around to examine our catch.

Whoever described the human female as “a rag, a bone, and a hunk of hair” must have come upon one after a full frontal, two-pronged, thirty-two-nailed feline epidermis workout.

Even I am impressed. I cannot wait to hear what Miss Midnight Louise thinks about the very recent exploits of Louie’s Angels.

Chapter 57

The Naked Truth

“Nasty,” Julio said, gazing with his brothers and Temple at the seated corpse of Natalie Newman.

Temple was still shuddering, which encouraged Ernesto to put a bracing arm around her shoulders.

If Oleta Lark’s corpse had looked unnervingly alive, Natalie was definitely dead according to the TV crime scene stereotype. Her exposed flesh was bluish gray. Blotches of pooled blood streaked her narrow legs like horrible varicose veins.