Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

That’s when he knew that there were no perfect endings, just endless wishes that there were.

Disappearance Inc.

I have spent the night not panicking.

This is hard to do when you are locked in a closet in a strange house that is hidden behind a forgotten cemetery. Especially when sharing said closet with you is a bunch of spooky magician’s gear and a stiff stretched out on the floor like a rug du jour.

I mean this guy — and I have pussyfooted enough over the corpus delicti in the dark to know that it is a guy — is harder than the concrete they wrapped around Ugly Hugo Manicotti’s tootsies before taking him to diving school in Lake Mead back in ’59.

Eventually I settle down to the head’s-up detecting I am noted for and realize that my closet corpse is so wooden for a reason: he is a giant-size Pinocchio, a mere dummy probably used in some body-switching illusion or another.

This is what comes of taking a supposed relative for a partner: the usually canny operative loses all sense of proportion when the partner in question goes missing.

I revise my previous conclusions. If Miss Louise had figured out the dead guy is really just deadwood, she would have had no compunction about moving on from our point of entry to other, more interesting, and thus more perilous, places. We two need to have a serious talk about not pressing forward on our own, leaving the senior partner in the dark quite literally.

I tromp over Dead Fred’s nose, which is not prevaricatingly long (although the dummy maker must have had a sick sense of humor as something else on this anatomically correct stiff is), and nose the door open a smidge with my own admirably proportioned schnoz.

That it obliges my nudge tells me Miss Louise has gone this way. I slip out into the semidark and pull the door almost shut again.

Of course I am at a loss, while Miss Louise has obviously scouted this terrain previously.

I am really going to bawl her out for numerous acts unbecoming to a partner when I find her. I eye the room. It is vast, shadowy, and smells of mothballs and dustballs. I am guessing it is a mostly unused storeroom. The Cloaked Conjuror had hit Las Vegas like a leopard-spotted tornado only months ago. I imagine clandestinely finding and purchasing this hideout was a difficult job, and did not leave much time for dusting every nook and cranny.

Housekeeping is such a bore anyway, which is why it is better done by the female of the species. I note with disgust that my particular female of the species has carefully used her fluffy rear member to blur her distinctive footprints across the wood-plank flooring.

I must follow in her footsteps, but more slowly, lacking the builtin feather duster, as my aft member is long, strong, and buzz-cut. See what I mean about females being suited for domestic tasks?

After backing to the door and doctoring my trail with dust-busting swipes from my front mitts, I am able to nose another door open and survey a long hallway with the kind of railing that nasty Damien kid from the Omen films would love to push an unwary relative over.

I am nobody’s unwary relative, not even Miss Louise’s, so I look sharp both ways before pulling the door almost shut behind me — I believe in rapid retreats — and tiptoeing down the long, thread-bare carpet that looks like something Queen Elizabeth tossed out at Windsor Castle. After the fire.

Wherever my wandering waif has gone, it is somewhere in a decaying mansion filled with the ancient traces of — I sniff the air — rats, bats, and…cats!

Somehow I do not believe that Miss Midnight Louise all by her lovely self in a few hours has accounted for the distinct attar of cats I sense in the air. Nor is that a lingering scent of days gone by, as is the essence of rat and bat.

These are contemporary cats. Alarmingly current cats, and of a strange, potent, malodorous breed I have not encountered before, not even in my wide and long travels.

That darn brat! She has rushed in where her elders would hesitate to tread, and now I have to get her out of trouble before anything drastic happens. I sniff again, though I am sadly lacking the specialized skills of even the smallest breed of dog. Ah! A waft of willfulness. An odor of the nunnery. A scent of superiority. Midnight Louie has his quarry and he will hunt her down.

Easier vowed than done.

I soon discover that the house is vast and rambling, a shadowed stucco labyrinth accessorized with enough black wrought-iron railings and lighting fixtures and hardware to supply the Spanish Inquisition for a couple hundred years.

Corners that aren’t occupied by vintage magical artifacts are the property of empty suits of armor or such wall ornaments as fully loaded medieval cross-bows.

While human occupation seems distinctly sparse, I scent enough passing cat tracks to make me think the place is haunted by unseen felines. Maybe Los Muertos are really Los Gatos Muertos.

The hair rises on my hackles at that encouraging thought.

Worse, with all the Big Cat spoor, I cannot detect the delicate trail of Midnight Louise. It had been a black day (excuse the expression from the senior partner of Midnight Inc.) when she had undergone the politically correct procedure: it had neutered her scent trail as well as her feminine nature. Not that Miss Midnight Louise had ever displayed much of a feminine sensibility, before or after her operation.

I rest in the shadow of another of the empty-headed knightly guards and ponder what to do next. This joint must have as many rooms as a yuppie has flavors of exotic coffee to brew in the granite-kitchen-countertop Krups.

I think like a crook.

What would be the creepiest, most inaccessible, unsuspected part of this mausoleum where I could get up to nefarious doings uninterrupted?

There is only one answer. Well, two. Either the attic or the basement.

Now, basements are a rarity in Las Vegas. Hot climates don’t lend themselves to cramped, damp, clay-walled holes in the ground. Most homes here are built on concrete slabs. Residents know that there is nothing creepier under their toes than some flattened scorpions crushed during construction.

Myself, I will take a dusty, dry old attic over a dank, dark basement any day,

Which is why I suspect this joint is old enough, and was lavish enough in its heyday, to have supported such a nice, built-in set decoration as a basement. I mean, the place already is a perfect setting for a slasher movie.

The only nice part about hunting for a basement is that the entrance is usually near my favorite part of any domicile: the kitchen.

So I pad over cool tile, keeping near the walls where I can always slink under a piece of furniture at a moment’s notice. I finally find the stairs, snaking up the wall like a boa constrictor up a banana tree trunk.

And there I finally hear something: sound and motion in what has seemed until now a dark and deserted house.

It looks like I will be visiting the attic, after all.

And then I freeze, so still my whiskers would snap like whips if I were to move again.

I am not alone.

Not only that but the presence I now sense is not one of the many domestic cat trails I have crossed during my wanderings. It is not feline at all, which is odd in this house so marked by the presence of my kind, small or gigantic.

It is man. One man. As black as the night we share. I watch him move like a tide of shadow up the staircase, always rising, never seeming to move much, yet eating up steps like the ocean swallows sand.

I allow one whisker to twitch in recognition. Or tribute. It is the only human I would consider for a partnership in Midnight Inc. It is the incomparable cat burglar in the midnight cat suit. It is Mr. Max Kinsella himself out for an undercover stroll, right where I have decided all the action is. Or where it would be did either of us know what most of this action was about.