Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “‘Enslaved’ is a harsh word.”

  “Oh, one or two clowder mates here and there have been kidnapped before. They return sleepy, having lost interest in, you know, what he’s and she’s do. I assume you know the facts of life by now without me telling you.”

  “Ma…! For Bast’s sake.”

  “Anyway.” She leans near enough to lick the inside of my ear, which was very pleasant when I was a kit and remains so. I lean away as she resumes her tale. “I have undergone the swift abduction into a suddenly hovering alien vessel, strange bright lights in my eyes, the needle in the naval, the entire alien operation.”

  “You do not say.”

  “I do. And I have the scar to prove it. And now, well, let us just say that I am not as much in demand among the youthful swinging set as I used to be. There will be no more Midnight Louies,” she adds mournfully.

  “Thank Bast!”

  She gives me the eyebrow whiskers-raised look of imminent wrath.

  “I mean, thank Bast you were returned and remain healthy.”

  “Well, my right hip has a hitch in it still…”

  “Relatively healthy.”

  “And I did get a tummy tuck, which you got from your abduction.”

  I remember Ma Barker desiring such an alteration. I suspect it is a natural side effect of the neutering process and not an “extra” thrown in, as in my case.

  “I was not abducted by aliens, Ma, but by something even scarier.”

  “What?”

  “A hair product-addled D-list starlet who ordered her plastic surgeon to make it so I cannot father kits. She mistakenly believed her Persian and I had gotten together, but when the kits all came out yellow-striped…”

  “So that mincing, yellow-bellied house cat, Maurice, your rival for the cat food commercial assignment, did the dirty deed with the purebred who is now no longer so pure.”

  “I will not hear a bad murmur against the Divine Yvette. It is not her fault she was in the throes of a hormonal condition.”

  “Hmm.” Ma purrs thoughtfully while cleaning between her toe pads. “It is not like you to miss such an excellent opportunity. Nevertheless, you did our coat color proud.”

  “I am touched, Ma. When would you, in your vagabond life on the streets, chance upon a television set on which to see your son make good?”

  “Phtttt! You split for the neon-lit twenty-four-hour air-conditioned areas as soon as you could hold your tail, and other things, straight up. You settled for a diet of fast food in tissue wrappers, but I have lived on really fast food in wrappers of—”

  I cut her off quick, before she can get to the gory part. I myself prefer to lead an eco-friendly, green life with people food that is supervised by government agencies to be wholesome. Mostly.

  “Ma, I know the urban diet is lacking compared to free-range vittles. How does that mean you can glimpse a TV set when you and the clowder are on the move?”

  “Through windows, clodhopper.”

  (Clodhopper is my pet name when she is annoyed with me and “grasshopper” is too affectionate for her current mood.)

  The purring behind us has been strengthening and now it is a full-bodied Oooom, which is a common syllable used in Eastern-style human meditation.

  Except now it alternates with the one-syllable word Dooom.

  Which is not an encouraging word in any context.

  I lower my vocal timbre to put a flea in Ma’s ear. “What are you doing consorting with a penthouse pussyfoot whose pads have only touched walnut wood parquet, marble tile, and patches of carpeting her entire life?

  “Karma was doing my horoscope.”

  “What!” I can barely keep my voice a raw whisper. “You put any stock in what this pseudo-psychic house pet whose pampered pads have never touched hot asphalt might say?”

  “You seem a bit obsessed with manufactured floor and ground coverings, Louie,” Ma observes. “I am the natural, organic type. And I will have you know I have been inside this penthouse, and any carpeting is one-hundred percent virgin wool. Karma’s faculties best operate in an unadulterated environment.”

  “‘Unadulterated environment’, that is hogwash. Karma is an unabashed member of the one percent and we are street folks.”

  “You have profited from her prescient advice a time or two.”

  “She has volunteered her prescient advice more times than I can remember, but we make our own futures, and our own decisions.”

  Ma fruitlessly washes her crumpled vibrissae—whiskers to you. She is sensitive about them being called “whiskers” now that she is older.

  “Well, I have some prescient advice for you, sonny. You know that some of my police substation clowder also monitor your Circle Ritz parking lot gratis.”

  “Not exactly gratis, Ma. They come for the delicious Free-to-Be Feline health kibble I provide.”

  “After you refuse to eat it. I know your game, Louie.” She may be winking at me or it just may be her battle-worn eyelid twitching.

  She lowers her voice to barely above a purr. “You should know that the gangster clowders on the rough side of town have reported seeing recent suspicious back-and-forths between your precious human associates around here with some of the known criminals and cat-kickers on their turf. They watch those bad guys around the clock and know what is fishy.

  “I have had them do freelance surveillance on this site since I heard that, and the guy who broke in here tonight is one of their ‘Most Wanted to Catch a Case of Cat-Scratch Fever’.

  “Not only that, when I interrogated them, they reported vehicles and persons of interest at the Circle Ritz are now frequenters of their turf.”

  “So who from here is taking a walk on the wild side?”

  “Descriptions vary. They have followed some tall, dark-coated men back to this area.”

  Mr. Max Kinsella comes immediately to mind, but also my Miss Temple’s acquaintance, Mr. Rafi Nadir.

  “And most recently, another one. Yellow coat. I believe your favorite ginger-haired roommate has something to do with a yellow-blond someone who is always out nights and free to go slumming on the dark side.”

  “Not Mr. Matt!”

  Ma shrugs. “You might want to keep a sharper eye on your Miss Temple Barr and her latest mate so he is not her last mate.”

  Ma has a point, which she drives home by bestowing a fond four-shiv tap on my shoulder before she makes like an oleander bush and leaves.

  I choose to think the gesture is fond.

  3

  Midnight Stalkers

  “Matt, my man!” Letitia enfolded him in her cocoon of warmth and bright silky color and soft, generous flesh the moment he entered the tiny radio studio.

  They were both bumping the desk and equipment, but Letitia would not allow herself to be contained, in any way. In every way, including temperament, they were utter opposites, and he envied her for it.

  He immediately checked the clock high on the wall. 11:50.

  “I’m closing the show with a medley of most-requested songs, Matt,” she said, catching his gesture. “Relax. We have a few precious minutes to ourselves.”

  And the days dwindle down to a precious few.

  He could hear the muted lyrics of regret and longing expressed in “September Song”, now massaging the airwaves in the dark Nevada almost-midnight.

  “You always read me from ten miles away, I swear, Letitia.”

  “I’m psychic, didn’t you know? It takes a worried man to sing a somber song. Now you sit your handsome, worried self down in the soft swivel chair, all its joints oiled and cushy smooth, and unfret that telegenic brow and tell me all about it.”

  He couldn’t help laughing as her strong black fingers with the inch-long French manicure false nails shaped themselves around an invisible crystal ball.

  “You’re the one who should get her own television talk show,” he said.

  As “Ambrosia” she dominated the late-night radio audience, playing just the right song t
o comfort the lost, the lonely listeners who’d tell their sad stories and be encouraged to move on past their woes.

  “No, no. No! No TV.” She waggled those Chinese Empress false fingernails at Matt. “I must be mysterious. I must just be a Voice. I must possibly be assumed to weigh a hundred-and-twenty pounds.”

  She was a voice. A seductive, velvet voice, but she weighed maybe three times that imagined weight. Matt worried about that. He worried about diabetes. He worried about cardiac issues. Yet Letitia was the most comfortable-in-her-own-skin person he knew. His boss, the mysterious, the intuitive, the amazing Ambrosia.

  He had been brooding driving into the station for his Midnight Hour two-hour counseling stint. Somehow she’d plucked that out of the air with her magician’s fingers and bushwhacked him with ten free minutes of talk therapy, and all before he had to go forth live and do likewise.

  “You’re always recreating yourself. That’s better than being packaged and marketed as an attractive product,” he agreed.

  “Hey, honey-haired boy! I sure do that. I package and market myself.” She shimmied her ample shoulders. “My Ambrosia self. You’ve done the same, as an ‘understanding’ product too. You just happen to have some looks to go with it. I made me. You made you. God made the both of us first. And we keep it that way.”

  “I know I’m a good counselor. I do help people.”

  “But do you have fun? You gotta have fun. You gotta laugh at your own mojo, man. We can change lives, but we gotta start with accepting ourselves. Accenting ourselves. Take the bad of the past and BE-spell it into the good, for everyone.”

  He had no answer to that. Her unhappy childhood, was (her amazing) hands down worse than his.

  “So why are we so pouty tonight?” she asked. “For me, I know it makes my Orange Tango lips look gooood, and I know that they come in contact with nothing but the radio mic, but guys ain’t got no reason to gloat over cosmetics.”

  When Letitia got folksy he knew he was being mocked. “You’re right, Letitia. I’m being an ass. An angsty ass. I would counsel myself to solicit a good kick in the pants. The ghost of the Mystifying Max in Temple’s past seems to be banishment-proof. He keeps popping up like a skeleton out of the grave.”

  “That man do have some serious mojo, but that kind of thing can wear a woman out. And not in a good way. Keep that in mind.”

  Her upfront fashion style, her vibrant optimism, the way she morphed into Ambrosia, both slinky and comforting, kept Matt shaking his head as he settled into his combination chair and magic carpet navigating the entire country.

  “Letitia, you’ve got my number. I do fixate on family skeletons and ghosts from the past. It’s crazy to do that with all the great things I’ve got going. Who cares why my nasty stepfather, Cliff Effinger, was killed and who did it? Not anybody, really.”

  “Right. And if you keep on gnawing at an unsolved murder, you might dig up someone who doesn’t want that solved going and putting a rattlesnake in your mailbox.”

  “So. Trying to keep up the tradition and ‘protect’ Temple as Max Kinsella always did, I might get the opposite outcome?”

  Letitia nodded solemnly. “That’s why I very, very reluctantly advise you to leave Las Vegas for the Chicago talk show offer. It’s the only course that makes sense.”

  “I’d sure like to cut Temple and me loose from a lot of bad memories. I’d work days too.”

  “That’s right. No Magical Max to wonder where he is at. And, hey, follow the money.”

  “Maybe I’ve dithered too long. The network people have been silent.”

  “After all those lavish efforts to woo you, sweetie? I bet my old seventies Plymouth against your fancy Jaguar gift car they’ll get back to you. I expect to see you on my home TV any month now, where I’ll be toasting you with a McDonald’s chocolate shake. Then I’ll stand right up and do a chocolate shake.”

  “Letitia, you always make me laugh.”

  “Then my work here is done,” she said, patting him on the cheek and dancing light-footed out the studio door.

  That reminded Matt of the crazy TV cat food advertising opportunity that had come in for Temple and her Wonder Cat. Would Midnight Louie have to do the Bunny Hop to earn his lettuce? What a mental picture. Could it be Matt had lost out to his own fiancée?

  Did he want to throw away a career to catch the murderer of a man nobody liked?

  He had to quit this Hamlet act before somebody really got hurt. Time to slip into the deep space of Radioworld.

  The minute Matt put on the headphones, he saw himself as an astronaut or a diver, somebody who floated like an infant tethered to an umbilical cord, a person abnormally high or below ordinary reality. For him, connecting with call-ins, voices in the night with an endless element of surprise, let him utterly forget himself. The first caller could sound distraught, the next hesitant, or ranting, weeping, nervous, self-justifying, shy, egocentric—his two hours on the air had come to feel like emotional Russian roulette crossed with impromptu meditation.

  Still, always in the back of his mind, his own doubts and worries murmured nowadays, soaking up his own advice and often critiquing it.

  Only tonight what threaded through the routine was a faint filament of panic he couldn’t lose, not even in a laugh with Letitia. Practicing the kind of intense investigative moves that Max Kinsella did could wear a man out all right, and maybe get him taken right off the planet.

  The first line lit up. Matt nodded at Dave, the engineer, and sat back without a creak in the chair. They used a brief delay to “dump” a joke caller or cut bad language. Not all the touchy callers, though. Listeners liked Matt’s adept way of derailing the difficult ones.

  “Gee, Ambrosia was kinda a downer tonight,” a bored girlish voice said. “What does signing off with all that ‘September Song’ stuff mean? It sounds like it was written in the olden days, girls with twirling curls and all.”

  “It was,” Matt answered. “Mid-last century. It’s about lost chances. That must not be what you worry about.”

  “‘September Song’ reminded me about having to go back to school soon. That’s a downer too.”

  “High school?” he guessed.

  “Same mean witchy cliques as junior high, only with bigger allowances. And they have all those jocks to date and wave under everybody else’s noses.”

  “What’s your name?”

  A long pause, probably for a couple reasons. One was committing to a radio conversation, the other was teenage discontent.

  “Jessica.” Said with a wrinkled nose.

  “Well, Jessica, that name has a certain gravitas.”

  “Huh?”

  “Gravitas is when people take you seriously. I’d take a Jessica totally seriously.”

  “Really?” There came the edge of hope and vanity, when a young girl thought she might be Someone to Someone on the Radio. Or the Internet.

  Dangerous.

  Matt felt he was about to commit an Ann Landers. “All that high school stuff is not what’s really bothering you. You were smart enough to know that was coming.”

  “Yeah?” She sort of liked being thought “smart”. “So tell me what my issues are.”

  “Do your parents know you hate the high school vibe?”

  “They say ‘get good grades, forget about all that social media stuff’. And they’re just… Me-dee-evil. Watch my phone and computer like I’m some baby.”

  “You are.”

  “Whaaat?”

  “What classes are you looking forward to, what activities? What do you want to be?”

  “Miley Cyrus?” She giggled. “That would send the parents up the fire pole in reverse. ‘Classes, activities’, that is so uncool, Mr. Midnight. So parent-y. I used to think you sounded sexy.”

  “Well, now we know what you really want. I can get to the next caller so you can sit there and listen, or you can come up with a reason for me to talk to you.”

  “No, wait. I want to work on the school paper
, but that’s so nerdy and the nerdy boys own doing all the jobs on that.”

  “Drop the labels. Nobody ‘owns’ anything in high school, except finding out what they want to be. And not everyone is going to like that, or like it if you’re good at it. That’s the real world. Now, you want to write for a dying media, print news. There are people old enough to be your grandparents who’ve lost their jobs and livelihoods doing that. What do you think they’d be saying if they were calling in? Would they be worrying about what some kids you’ll never see after four years think of them? Wouldn’t they do just anything to get on a crummy school paper? Maybe not. But maybe they’d wish they could go back to those days. And you can do it. And find out if you like it.”

  “Uh, but maybe nobody will let me on. Or let me on only to make me wish I wasn’t.”

  “You must have something you really want to write, or you wouldn’t freak out at trying.”

  “Well, maybe something on…bullying. Not me. Not big-time bullying, but little stuff that gets really mean.”

  “Okay. I have an assignment for you.”

  “You’re not my teacher.”

  “I’m better than that. I’m sexy. You gonna listen to me?”

  “Always.” Said with adoration. Jessica was getting a lot of time with Mr. Midnight.

  “You write something you feel strongly about. You write an essay. Not like an assignment, like what you really feel and you’re not afraid of feeling.”

  Silence.

  “And then you show it to your parents. Yes, you do. Because it will be good.”

  “Oh, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t have them going to the principal, outing me. It would be horrible.”

  “Yes. But they’re not going to do that. You’re going to tell them you want to submit the piece to the Huffington Post.”

  “Get outa here.”

  “Did you know anyone can ask to submit a piece?”

  “No! No way. No way they’d accept anything I wrote.”

  “Why not? You’re a ‘Young Person’. The media world wants to hear from Young Persons nowadays. Your experience and hopes are as valid as those of any adults. Don’t abuse that chance on crazy, ‘sexy’, show-offing. Have gravitas, Jessica. I know you have it already.”