Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“I have been thinking of moving the colony there,” Tom admits, “but we grow weak and fewer, and many like the free food too much. We have gone soft.”

“Not very. Trust me,” I reassure them.

So I get the general location of the Dead Place, which I am happy to learn is in Las Vegas proper, if there is any district in Las Vegas you could call “proper.” I had enough treks into the desert during my last case to leave permanent sand calluses between my toes.

Then I bid the gang adieu. Ma escorts me to the edge of their territory.

“Imagine,” she muses with a trace of fondness, but very little. “The Grasshopper hangs with Big Cats.”

“You could come back with me. I am sure I can get you a cushy position at my pad, the Circle Ritz.”

For a moment her eyes soften.

I press on. “Air-conditioning. Sunspots. Security. Down comforters.”

She shakes her head. “They need me here. We are dying out, of course. That is the plan.”

I try one last ploy. “Ah, Dad has retired on Lake Mead. Runs the goldfish concession at this eatery they named after him, Three O’Clock Louie’s.”

“Your father is a restaurateur?”

“Sort of.”

She shakes her grizzled head. “I thought he had to follow the sea.”

“He followed it to a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest, but he came back here to retire.” I look at her edgeways. “Maybe he wanted to find us.”

“Three O’Clock! He always was a loner, that one. We had some good times, though. Nice to see you, boy.” She cuffs me one more time. “But do not come around again. I may not be here to save your ashcan.”

I gulp. I have not mentioned her maybe-granddaughter, Miss Midnight Louise. The maternal instinct is a hormonal thing with our breed: strong as steel when kits are coming and growing…gone with the wind once they have left the litter.

Still, her eyes are suspiciously shiny as I turn away and begin my long midnight stroll toward the Dead Place.

Dead Air Time

Matt Devine pulled off the huge foam-padded earphones.

This heavy-duty headset always reminded him of the “earmuffs” people wore at target-shooting ranges.

Some nights, wearing them, he felt like the target.

“Rough shift?” a woman’s voice asked.

For a moment he was disoriented. Without the strange, isolated intensity of a phone-line link to the whole, wide radio-listening world, the nearby unamplified sound of a normal human voice was surprising, even alarming. He’d thought he was alone.

Matt swiveled around on his stool. Had she —?

But it was only Letitia, the host who preceded him on WCOO’s nightly schedule of moody music and listener requests followed by his Mr. Midnight call-in shrink gig.

“Letitia. I didn’t know you’d stayed for my show.”

She lowered herself to the empty stool. This was quite a production, because there was well over three hundred pounds of Letitia to lower.

“I’m your producer, after all.” She folded her arms over her formidable chest and stared at him.

To the world of the airwaves she was her pseudonym, Ambrosia, the warm, maternal voice that teased mention of hurts and shy loves out of anonymous callers and then played the perfect song to celebrate or soothe. “You Light Up My Life,” “The Rose,” (Matt had to admit he liked the clean poetry of that one), that sort of thing. Most of the songs were soothers, and Ambrosia’s hokey therapy worked wonders. Matt, formerly a priest in a fairly formal religion, tended to distrust easily accessed emotions, but he couldn’t deny the magic Letitia/Ambrosia performed each night from seven to midnight.

Even her morbid obesity wasn’t unusual for a radio personality. Radio was the ideal medium for the less-than-medium attractive. Garrison Keillor wasn’t only a self-proclaimed “shy person,” but one of the homeliest men in the public eye since Abraham Lincoln. It had made him a star. On radio, and then in books. Not on TV.

Hefty size aside, Letitia was gorgeous and dressed like an MTV queen. Tonight she wore a pleated tangerine polyester pantsuit draped with a chest plate of African beads. The seriously chubby fingers braced on her knees were choked with high-carat solitaires of semiprecious gemstones. Silky smooth brown skin set off her eyes the way black velvet showcases diamonds, and they were meticulously made up with metallic swaths of shadow. Looking at her was like regarding a bird of paradise.

“You look gorgeous tonight,” Matt couldn’t stop himself from remarking, though he seldom felt comfortable complimenting a woman on looks alone.

“Thanks.” Her self-esteem preened visibly. “You look pretty good yourself.”

“It’s not anything I do,” he said, instantly uncomfortable.

She just shook her head. “I told you when I hired you that you were too pretty to be on radio, but that’s okay. They can hear it in your voice.”

“People can hear how I look?”

“They get an image. If you have a nice voice, it’s a nice image. Radio’s the only place I can be taken for a size six, honey!”

A rich rhumba of laughter emerged from the bright drum of her huge body. She cocked her gorgeous head with its decorated dreadlocks to hear herself. “Then again, maybe not. Too much reverb for an anorexic.”

Matt couldn’t help smiling.

“Now that’s better, Mr. Moody Midnight. You keep smilin’. Remember, they hear it all in your voice. So what’s the matter?”

“You hear something in my voice?”

“I hear everything in your voice, baby. It’s nothing personal. It’s my job. I read voices. Yours has changed.”

“How?” He felt an irrational surge of defiance. If she could hear it, so could…anyone.

“Tighter, more cautious. Strained. If you were a singer I’d be worried. We got to get back that nice, easy open throat you were born with. So tell Ambrosia what’s the matter. Don’t think of me as your producer; think of me as that nice smooth-as-white chocolate voice on the radio.”

She shook with laughter then, picturing herself as white chocolate. In a way she was, thanks to radio. Ultraslim, no-calorie white chocolate.

Matt sighed, relieved to have nothing to hide behind right now. Letitia was indeed his producer. If she detected something strained in his performance, then it was her business. And…half the world confided in Ambrosia and felt better for it. Maybe he could share a bit of that magic too. God knew he had a lot to confide.

“So tell Mama.”

The admonition made Matt superimpose his mother’s image over the gaudy mountain of Letitia. Mira Zabinski was small, pale, constrained, lost like a pastel portrait by Degas against a lush Gauguin oil painting of the islands.

He felt a pang of disloyalty along with relief.

“When did you notice a change?” he asked.

She considered. “Around ’bout that time Elvis started calling you.”

“Letitia, it wasn’t Elvis —”

“Let me think it was Elvis. I’d feel better thinking it was Elvis. A lot of people would. He’s kinda a patron saint for the dysfunctional, you know.”

“I know! I heard that loud and clear from the callers back then. So I started going wrong then?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong with you, then or now.” She stood up. “Let’s go get some fruity drink some place. I’m buying.”

Matt knew then that it was serious. He was slower to rise. Half of him welcomed a chance to share the trouble he’d doled out piecemeal to the people he knew over the past few weeks, partly to protect them, mostly to protect himself.

Protecting yourself was constant, lonely, back-breaking work, and he was tired of it.

They paused at the door to turn off the lights. Their familiar studio landscape vanished like a stage set. After Matt’s “Midnight Hour” program, the station went to satellite feed until regular programming resumed in the early morning. Only a lone technician kept the sound of music flowing over the air waves.