Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“Practice! Mr. Max Kinsella has never been seen to practice.”

“No doubt he has his own hideaway for the purpose, unless you believe that magicians can really work magic?”

“Of course not. But what has brought you to trespassing on such sinister grounds?”

Midnight Louise shrugs the silver-tipped ruff that nestles around her shoulders like an open bear trap with a fun-fur cover. “I wanted to check up on the boys, make sure that they were being treated right here.”

“Like you would be able to do something about it if they were not,” I jeer.

She ignores me, which is very hard on a jeerer. “Everything was on the up-and-up on the outside, where the Big Cats are kept. It was what was going on in the inside that kept me sniffing around.”

“How did you manage to breeze in through a window if the joint is so protected by security?” I ask, eyeing the cushy chamber beyond the mullioned window. A guy could film Rebecca here, the place looks so old-Hollywood-style lush, and creepy in that inimitable blend that only black-and-white movies can convey.

“I did not. Every aperture is wired for sound and fury, including the chimneys.”

“Then how do we —?”

For an answer she flips her busy tail in my face and ankles off along the ledge.

I cast one last hungry look at the Leave Her to Heaven bedroom, all chiffon and brocade and oil portraits of to-die-for dames and tall glass perfume bottles that resemble a cityscape of mid town Manhattan.

Instead of busting into Manderlay I am taking the high road to agoraphobia.

At least Louise is doing point.

Way up here the oleander bush tops scratch on the brickwork and it is a hard twenty-foot fall to the foundation landscaping, which looks to be a variety of thorny hedge.

At last Louise pauses at a porthole the size of a salad plate and sits down with unpardonable pride.

“This is a peephole?” I suggest.

“This is the only unwired entry in the place.”

I peer through the aluminum-lined opening. “I can see why. A snake would have trouble breaking and entering here.”

“Luckily, the snakes stick to the ground cover.”

I peer below, picturing serpents writhing among the thorns. No way do I want to go down.

“This is a perfect entrance,” Louise goes on. And on.

It seems she has stumbled across a former clothes dryer vent pipe in a closet that everyone has forgotten was once an ultra-modern second-floor laundry room, only now it is filled with racks of costumes and stage props. The pipe, she says, exits into the back of a red-satin-lined cape, sort of like the escape chute on an airliner.

A moment later, the tip of her tail is vanishing into the pipe. She has not even paused to consider that I might be a rather tight fit. Young kits nowadays!

Normally the Rule of Entry and Exit is: if the head will fit, you must commit.

However, this helpful motto does not allow for individuals whose proportions tend more toward those of Nero Wolfe than the Thin Man.

I must admit to wolfing down my food more often than not of late, especially when I get out and have a chance at something other than that arid mound of Free-to-be-Feline Miss Temple keeps endlessly replenished at the Circle Ritz. Luckily, Las Vegas is as much a town to eat out in as to lose your lunch (and bargain buffet breakfast) in.

However, I cannot have Miss Louise saying I am the slowpoke of the outfit, so I nose my way into the pipe.

It is dark and cold as only bare metal can be in this climate. I can already feel my innards shrinking from the chilly contact, which will only do me good in slithering through this foul worm-hole.

Still, it is quite a job to wriggle through, requiring all my superior muscular strength. I recall an anaconda from a previous case and pretend that I can propel myself by rippling muscle tone alone, as Trojan did.

Finally my head pokes through into free space. I feel like I can breathe again, and grunt and huff as I pull my body through the eye of the needle that Miss Louise’s wonderful, handy, forgotten entryway has proven to be.

I plop with a thump onto the advertised red satin lining of the cape, which is so slippery I can barely get the traction to push myself upright without flailing my battle-shivs through it until it is shredded wheat.

Altogether a most undignified illegal entrance. The only thing missing from this comedy of erroneous entry is the usual dead body I have a knack for stumbling over, especially in strange places, in the dark.

I attain my balance and swagger forward. Fortunately, this closet is so dark that the hypercritical Louise has not witnessed my struggles.

I step over the nearest supine human chest and sniff hopefully for Miss Louise’s unmistakable scent.

I am sitting, sniffing, on a supine human chest and it is not moving: neither to sit up and unseat me, or to make like it is breathing in and out and going up and down. Come on! Go up and down!

No. Uh-oh. It is business as usual for Midnight Louie. Most of my horizontal humans are dead, not sleeping, unless I am safe in my bed at home, which is supposedly Miss Temple’s bed, exceptthat all beds are the immemorial and hereditary property in perpetuity of cats. Why else do they call them king and queen-size models?

I am amazed that Miss Midnight Louise has held her tongue for so long when she has the opportunity to lord it over me and claim the body as her first find.

That is when I realize that I do not scent so much as a hair from Miss Louise’s body.

She is not here.

It is most unlike Miss Midnight Louise to abandon a fresh kill.

Unless the departure was not voluntary.

Car Trouble

Temple cast one fond farewell look over her shoulder at her aqua Storm. Although sun-faded, the car looked remarkably perky for its age. It had served her well but now it was sitting on a used car lot and she was moving on to a hot new property.

She felt like a traitor. A car took possession of its owner’s history. It was a silent witness to life’s big and small moments. She would be able to date certain occurrences from now on by whether it was before, during, or after she was driving the Storm…or not. Owning a car was almost like going steady.

The “or not” lay ahead of her in all its new-car glory.

So Temple let the Storm slip into the rearview mirror of her memory and advanced on the shining form of her new wheels, a Miata.

She knew every argument on the planet against convertibles: your hair will get scrambled, your eyes will get dried out, and you’ll end up with skin cancer. But hey, the tiny trunk was almost big enough to hold a hat, and the glove compartment could certainly contain a small bottle of sunscreen, which she would apply, along with sunglasses and scarf, with the religious zeal of a redhead.

She opened the driver’s door and got in.

The hat she hadn’t bought yet, nor the sunscreen, but she could put on the sunglasses.

The sun warmed the top of her head. She looked around for someplace to stow her ownership papers so they wouldn’t blow away. The tiny glove compartment.

She turned the key in the ignition, inhaled the sun-baked scent of new car and resisted looking back one last time at the Storm.

This was the first car she had bought all by herself. The Storm had been a Barr Family Production, at least all parts of the Barr family that were male, which most of it was, except for her mother and herself.

Her father and brothers had kicked the tires, negotiated with car dealers, done everything but drive it. This baby was hers alone! She had visited all the web sites, tracked down the MSRP, interrogated the local dealers, and finally decided who she would allow to sell her the car at her price.