Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“So you’re saying the management ego is fantasizing a theft ring to add to their sense of importance?”

“Yeah. People in power fantasize a lot, but I guess you’ve never been in power, except for wearing a collar and an odor of sanctity.”

“You don’t know what I did after seminary, Jerome, and you sure don’t know what I did in seminary, that’s clear. Do we have to settle that old stuff before you can talk about what’s happening at Maylords? Because I’m ready to cast guilt with you stone for stone. Quit tiptoeing around the past. What’s your issue? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on … then or now?”

” ‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.’ “

“I’m not that pure anymore, and I’m not sure I want to be, if that’s what keeps me from seeing the devils all around. Tell me about the devils, Jerome. I know they’re out there now. I had one on my own case for the last few months.”

“The devils are the people you know best, the ones you trust, that’s the worst part of it.”

Jerome rolled his waste paper tightly into the white bag, got up, and walked to a refuse container.

He dropped the bag inside with the panache of someone making a gesture far beyond the simple act he was performing to the naked eye.

Matt waited on the bench. Ethel M’s cactus garden had nothing in common with an old-time confessional, but Matt was sure it would serve.

Chapter 19

Mum’s the Word

“I do not see,” Miss Midnight Louise observes, “why we have to trek eighty miles to the north side of town when all the

criminal activity we are investigating is taking place in trendier parts south and west.”

“We are not hunting perps up here, we are after witnesses.”

“And what would witnesses be doing so far away from the scene of the crime?”

“The same thing we are, hunting.”

It does not help that we are conducting this conversation in the back of a beer truck hurtling over some of the city’s most potholed streets.

“Just because I have a cushy job as house detective at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino does not mean I have forgotten my streetwise ways,” she says. “We are heading right into gang territory.”

“Yes, but at least we have not been rendered shivless by some misguided human. Midnight Inc. Investigations fears nothing human.”

“I am not talking about the Crips and the Bloods and the Hell’s Angels biker gangs, Pop. I am talking about the Wildspats and the Shivmasters and the Distempers that operate up here. There are even the K-9 Packers and the Hydrophobias. Remember what happened the last time you tangled with an escapee from the Coyote nation. Those dog dudes give no quarter.”

“I am not looking for small change, kit. Besides, I have snitches up here.”

Louise leaps down from a beer crate to sniff the piss-yellow puddle on the truck floor. “At least you could have found a dairy truck to

hijack. This stuff smells as bad as hairball spit-up before it’s been laundered by a bile factory.”

“Actually, you can develop a taste for it,” I say from experience.

“You can develop a taste for anything,” she jeers. “I have seen the Free-to-beFeline heaped on your bowl at the Circle Ritz.”

“Miss Temple is a health food fanatic.”

“Not for herself, that much I have noticed.”

“She is only thinking of my better good.”

“Come on, Pops. Admit that you would love to muscle in on my private chef at the Phoenix.”

“Oriental cuisine does little for me, except for the koi.”

At this point during our culinary discourse the truck does a wheelie around the corner that slams Louise and myself against its

dented steel side. This adds indignity to personal assault by tilting so far over that the beer puddles around our captive feet.

Louise leaps atop a swaying carton, shaking her dainty black tootsies and sprinkling a yellow rain on my head.

The wild turn has shaken the roll-down door loose and I spy daylight. I head for it.

“Quick! Before we’re locked in here until the yahoo driving it comes back to release it.” Louise follows my orders for once and is out the vanishing crack of daylight like a furry eel.

We stand in the street and watch the beer truck roar into the distance, leaking yellow rain.

“So this is the mother country,” Louise says, gazing around.

I turn to take in your usual urban slum. The terrain is filled with small shabby crack houses, weed-choked sandy lots, cars lacking

wheels, and windows flaunting iron burglar bars like better domiciles flash white-painted shutters.

Fast-food wrappers skitter across the rutted streets, rasping like autumn leaves … not that Vegas, with all its palm and pine trees, is

much for fallen leaves in the autumn or any other season.

The flap of dry paper has Miss Louise making 180-degree turns with her back up and shivs out.

There is still nothing to be seen except urban decay.

I hear the distant rumble of a low-rider, so I shag Miss Louise out of the middle of the street and into the nearest vacant lot, which is

not hard to find. This section of town is mostly vacant lots.

Amid a tall stand of pampas grass, a silver mesh cage crouches. A rank glob of commericial cat food hunkers in one corner like a

dead gray rat.

“Sucker bait,” Louise diagnoses with a disdainful sniff. “How they hope to lure any hep cat with that lump of two-week-old chopped

mackerel liver is anybody’s guess.”

“If you had not eaten in two weeks, I guess you would be lured,” I point out.

“So this is a feral internment camp,” she says, looking around. “I always kept to myself on the street. Better company.”

I notice that her ears are at half-mast. “You know about the Program, then?” I ask. She has never said much about her roaming

days, other than that I was the cad to blame.

“What is new?” she asks with a careless swagger. “The helpful humans trap the Wildspats and their ilk, and whisk them away for a

low-rent neutering, then they return them to their turf, expecting attrition to eliminate the colony members without them having to resort to so-called euthanasia, or what I call knockin’ ‘em off wholesale. It is one way to reduce dependent populations without resorting to open warfare. Or welfare.”

“Not such a bad solution,” I say. “These ferals are never going to cozy up to a domestic situation, and this way they do

not litter the streets.”

She shrugs, unconvinced. “Not all of us can rehabilitate. Still, it is not our fault that we have been abandoned by humans and forced to fend for ourselves. I cannot understand why we allowed ourselves to be domesticated in the dim, distant past in the first place.”

“I do. We were taken in by the nice ones before we met the mean ones. It is still the same old story, optimists end up

pessimists in the face of the real world.”

“So what are we doing here in this pathetic part of town? What can we learn except who hates whom and how much more misery there is in the world than we thought?”

I look around. The long weeds are stirring. I did not expect that we would be allowed to gawk unmolested for long.

The only question is which gang has happened upon us. I am hoping the proximity of the Spade Ladies Cat-tail Gardening Club’s portable pied-�-terres means that our own species rules the immediate roost around here.

On the other mitt, my hopes may be misplaced.

I spring into position back-to-back with Louise and spit out a … suggestion.

“Suffering Succotash, Louise! We are on alert until we find out who is rattling the sagebrush around here.”

I hear her shivs clawing sand. Her fluffy rear member is twitching up a sandstorm of irritated feline fury. Mine makes like a metronome itself, pounding possession into our square foot of turf.