The deliberately mysterious Karma has indicated that a large portion of Las Vegas's cat population is in danger of a blanket snuffing. The animal pound is too obvious a site of feline slaughter. Karma is anything but obvious. So, where do scads of cats gather? I do some walking around, which is conducive to thinking, and come up with nothing but the Cat's Meow retail establishment, a clearing house where wandering strays are promptly seized and made into other than what they were; that is, eunuchs. Some of the more successful products of such experiments end up as window-dressing, not for sale, but for display in their diminished state.
I am the first to admit that the feline gene pool is more than somewhat vast, not to mention mathematically staggering. Still, some sense must be used in determining who to turn off and who to leave free to turn on. I am not about to put my particular genes lower on the evolutionary ladder than any other dude's of my acquaintance. In fact, I have been thinking of making a sacrifice for my community by offering a donation to one of these sperm banks that specializes in providing material of a superior sort. My kind of street smarts is just what the species needs, but there is a foolish prejudice against dudes of a free-wheeling background.
I say nature, not nurture, makes the feline. These pampered purebred pussurns are not worth one of my used-claw sheaths. Where and when have they demonstrated their survival suitability? Dudes of my sort, of which there are damn few, excuse moi franpais, are just what the doctor ordered for my besieged and rapidly degenerating species.
Speaking of which, I encounter a bit of unforeseen luck. I have returned to the Circle Ritz and my dear little doll's apartment, and am reclining on one of my favorite spots, the latest edition of the day's newspaper (before Miss Temple Barr has had a chance to read it), when I begin to knead my powerful front limbs in the Sports Section of the Las Vegas Sun, which is my form of aerobic exercise these days.
In the process of this exertion, I inadvertently crinkle back the top pages. What to my wandering eyes should appear but the Classifieds section, the "Pets" part in particular. And what do I see advertised but another of these disgusting auction-block debacles for my kind: a purebred cat show at the Cashman Center. Now there is where a cacophony of cats could be found! What if some demented soul, some mad bomber, perhaps, was to strike while the clans were gathered, so to speak? Such a scenario would fit Karma's vague predictions of death on the grand scale.
I rise and go now, to enter an arena I hold in the greatest of contempt: a cat show. Let no one say that Midnight Louie does not give his all for his kind.
Within an hour after making my noble resolution, I am inside the Cashman Convention Center, crouching under an avalanche of empty cartons once home to bags of Pretty Paws scented, clumping cat litter. I do not know many cats, not even the clumping kind, that enjoy the aroma of mentholated grass, which is the after sniff that Pretty Paws leaves in its footsteps.
One would think that a prime specimen of rampant felinity like myself would be in-like-Flynn when it comes to crashing a cat show. I regret shattering any such delusions, but a cat show is perhaps the one venue most closed to one of my sort, for a very simple reason. These precious pussums--and I do mean "precious" in both senses of the word--are too valuable to be let loose on these vast premises. Hence any cat present is either caged or carried. Since neither condition appeals to me, I will indeed have to make like a feline Errol Flynn to storm this castle of kittydom without getting tossed into the nearest dungeon, i.e., a cramped cage with sanitary facilities that are much too conveniently close for one with my supersensitive sniffer.
So I peek out from under a Pretty Paws box and plot my course. At the moment, I shelter under the admissions table, where two-footed individuals are paying a pretty penny to get in and gawk at the creme de la creme of catdom. I eye the jungle of table legs surmounted by rows and rows of common cages hidden beneath enough pouts, swags and drapes to clothe Little Bo-Peep for a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta.
I am not fooled for a moment: froufrou does not transform a steel-mesh cage into a pleasant site for Midnight Louie. But speaking of pleasant sights, I notice one such resident not too far away: a long-haired platinum blonde who has nothing better to do than yawn, with no one in attendance. l decide to begin my interrogation there. During a lull of passing shoes, I tippy-toe over the concrete floor and hurl myself behind a drapery intended to conceal the under-table clutter. I shudder to see a basket brimming with torture equipment: combs, brushes, powder and--my nemesis--nail clippers. Nobody gets near these retractable shivs unless I am forced to use them. I also spot something I recognize only from my brief sojourns in various veterinarians offices: a battery-operated clipper equipped with jagged steel teeth. Such an instrument is frequently applied to dogs, who, through thousands of years of domestication, have allowed humans to modify their body hair like topiary trees, and to some unfortunate feline souls who found themselves in circumstances where they could not attend to their daily grooming and ended up in one solid snarl. If you have never seen a clipped cat, you have been spared a terrible sight; most of my kind look best in their dress coats.
Since l dislike spending much time in the vicinity of these fiendish so-called grooming instruments. I slink out from under the cloth and vault atop the table.
I find myself lace to lace with the strangest creature I have ever seen: it is long, lean and the color of a nice dollop of kidney-and-liver pabulum--a taste bud-terrifying brown-gray shade. And it is wrinkled all over. I would take it for a shar pei, an ugly customer of the canine persuasion that looks like everything but its skin shrank in the wash, except there is no mistaking the scent of a feline.
It hisses at my sudden appearance, and the sentiment is mutual. I feel I am looking in a mirror and seeing the image of a ghoul. If it were a girl ghoul, I might be tempted to linger, but this is definitely a dude, and nobody so naked should be gawked at without somebody collecting a tee, usually at a side show.
I return unceremoniously to the cool concrete floor and resume my two-yard dashes from tablecloth to tablecloth, avoiding human feet----and eyes--with my usual subtle and almost super natural skill. I told you that these genes were A-1!
Never have I encountered so many weird-looking members of my species. The people on parade here are no prizes. either, but luckily they are oblivious to ordinary dudes engaged in surreptitious spying when they have so many extraordinary dudes and dolls, to whose every sneeze and sniffle they are attuned.
I do encounter one rather ordinary, albeit famous, face. This is a big, brown-and-black kisser of the variety called tiger-striped. I have paused to admire the solid-brass nameplate on the cage when I glimpse the inhabitant, who is almost as large as I am.
"The notorious Maurice, I presume," I say.
His ears perk up. "What do you know about my notoriety?" he asks in a throaty growl.
"I have seen your television ads. Is that Yummy Tum-tum-tummy stuff any good?"
"Naw," says Maurice, yawning. "They have to spice it with tuna fish in order to get me to look like I'm eating it. And with all the time those commercials take, the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy is half rotted anyway."
I wrinkle my nose as it smelling a rat. "That spokes cat gig pay pretty well?"
"Perhaps, you would have to ask my trainer."
"You have a personal trainer? What is the matter? Has the Hollywood life made you forget how to leap, look and listen?"
"Fame---even without fortune----is better than warming a cage floor at the Big House."
"You have been on Death Flow, too?" I ask, impressed. Not too many of us end up with a commuted sentence, and our own series of television commercials to boot.
"Plucked from the jaws of death," he affirms in a bored tone.
"My autobio is available in children's book sections everywhere. It is called 'Maurice, the Miracle Cat.' "He fans his nails--clipped, of course--in an affected way to examine them.
For all his down-home looks, this dude loves to put on airs.
&nbs
p; "You have not heard any rumors of an attempted uprising against cats?"
"What nonsense!" Maurice says with a superior sniff. "I am told that cats are now more popular than dogs. Who would want to harm them?"
"You have been living the soft life for too long," say I, scowling. "The animal shelters work night and day shuffling cats out of their mortal coils, not to mention the random pieces of ricocheting metal that charge down the street, known as cars. You also overlook the bad old days, when our kind's association with what some authorities regarded as the wrong people led to a witch-hunt that consigned millions of our forebears to the fiery furnace."
"Ancient history." snarls the tiger-stripe before me.
Easy for him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong series of television commercials to boot.
Easy tor him to say: he was not the wrong color in the wrong century. Given that ancient history, it is lucky that a dude of my particular dark dye lot is here at ail.
I see that Easy Street has made Maurice--bet his original name was something simple like "Boots" or "Tuffy"--insensitive to social issues, and move on. it occurs to me, however, that any evil-deer wishing to do cats in general a public disservice could do worse than to begin with a visiting celebrity like Maurice. Perhaps I do not wish to stop this fiend.
But duty comes before poetic justice. As I wend my careful way between cages, avoiding cooing humans and raised stainless steel combs. I come across a strange rumor. It begins with a coy Siamese whose baby-blues hold a come-hither look. l have never cared for the oriental type--too skinny and too often cross-eyed and kink-tailed, and always temperamental--but I sashay over to find her chocolate-brown tail tapping impatiently outside the grillwork of her cage.
"What is the scoop, Big Boy?" she asks, nothing infantile about her baby-blues now that I am closer. "How did a he-man like you bust into this sideshow'? Are you an escapee from the Household Cat Division?"
Chapter 12
Wakeup Call
A ringing sound in his ears awoke Matt. He sat up in the dark, his body pounding with sudden alarm, his mind trying to remember. He often dreamed of the phone ringing, natural enough when his working life was spent answering it. Had that awakened him, or--
Another ring of the phone, a falsetto wobble from the main room. No dream, but who would call him at---he focused on the bedside clock-radio's LED numerals--four-thirty in the morning? Who even knew his phone number besides the hotline?
Awake and even more alarmed now, he got up and stumbled into the dark, trying to avoid the boxes of books he still hadn't unpacked, trying to find his way quickly through the rooms that still didn't seem his.
"Yes?"
He expected a pause and a hang-up, wrong number, or someone looking for a crack-of-dawn pizza.
"Matt?"
No mistake. Woman's voice he couldn't quite place.
"Yes?"
"Thank God!"
"Sister Seraphina! What--?"
"You've got to come."
"Come . . . where, why? Now?"
"Now, to the convent."
"What's wrong?"
"Our neighbor lady--a very old lady--is terribly ill, and Father Hernandez . . ."
"Yes?" he prodded.
"Father Hernandez is not functional. I need your help."
"Have you called an ambulance?"
"It may not be necessary, but you must come at once. More is needed."
He didn't want to get caught up in this, couldn't get involved in this. "Can't you handle it?"
"She's an old, old lady, Matt; from a generation that trusts only men in a crisis. It would be better if you came. Please, Matthias--Matt. "
He kept silent again. He had been asleep for only an hour;
Waking up so suddenly put his brain in deep-freeze. "I--l don't have a car, no transportation." Even to him, it sounded like an excuse, although it was true.
"Oh, Matthias, you must come quickly!"
He had never heard Sister Superfine sound so out of control, an old woman with a dysfunctional priest, an obscene phone-caller and now an injured neighbor on her hands.
"I'll get a car," he said, "and be there as fast as I can."
"Please hurry."
It was the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but even before she had hung up, he had switched on the small lamp by the phone and opened his almost-empty address book to a number at the beginning.
Chapter 13
Extreme Urgency
Temple was waiting outside her apartment door in a double-knit navy-blue jumpsuit, with her car keys and a tote bag, two minutes after Matt called.
"Of course you can have my car in an emergency," she had told him, not taking time to ask why.
Now she wondered. He hadn't sounded panicked, only deeply distracted beneath the haste, and oddly reluctant.
Footsteps pounded down the distant stairs and Temple went to meet them. At least he had remembered to forget calling the fatally slow elevator.
The low, night-wattage of the hall sconces made the Circle Ritz's interior seem eerie and isolated, like the limitless maze of corridors on an ocean liner. Temple almost expected the floor to lurch. What could be so urgent?
She met a running Matt by the elevator, where he reached for her car keys like a drowning man for a line.
She pulled her hand away. "I'll drive."
"You don't have to---" He reached again.
"Matt--no! This is an emergency; you might have to go fast. It's my car; I'll drive. Come on."
Temple headed for the door to the stairs and bulled through, Matt following and arguing too loudly.
"Temple! I don't want you involved." he insisted behind her. "I can drive fast--and safely, for heaven's sake. Give me the keys."
Even with their voices lowered to hoarse whispers, the words echoed up the concrete stairwell and buffeted at the safety doors separating them from resident sleepers.
Temple kept going--fast, clattering down the hard stairs in her slide on wedgies, the loose shoe backs slapping the soles of her feet as she skittered tight around each turn of the stairwell.
She charged out into the still, hot Las Vegas night, heading for the Storm until Matt caught up and hooked her arm, stopping her and spinning her around to face him in one economic gesture.
"You don't need to go." he said, insisted.
He must have dressed as quickly as she, yet in appearance he was the same unruffled Matt she always saw in his knit shirt and khaki pants, casual, calm. Except that now his voice vibrated a hint of exasperation she had never heard before, maybe even . . . desperation.
She hated to 'fess up--she didn't need to rise in the dead of night like a misdirected zombie on an errand of mercy--but if he wanted, needed, her car, she would have to admit what she knew.
"Yes, I do need to go, Matt, because you don't have a driver's license and I'm responsible if anything happens."
Stunned, he froze for a moment, and then followed without protest as she made for the car again. "I forgot, but--how . . . did you know" he asked over the Storm's top as she unlocked the driver's side.
Temple leaned across the seat to open the passenger door. "Lieutenant Molina." Matt really froze at that one. She was sorry the nearest streetlight was too distant to illuminate faces.
"Come on, get in." Temple started the car so suddenly the ignition gargled a protest. "Where are we going?"
Her question seemed to interrupt a series of questions he was asking himself. He shook his head to clear it. "Do you know where Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is?" He sounded resigned now. "Seguaro and Del Rey?"
"No, but I know the intersection, just tell me where to turn when we get there."
Even at five in the morning, Las Vegas streets sported traffic: if Chicago was the city that never shut down, Las Vegas was the one that never shut down or shut up. Temple guided the Storm along the fastest route at a slightly racy forty-five miles an hour. "What'll I say if the police stop us?"
"How did Molina know?
" asked Matt. still dazed that she knew about his status--or lack thereof--with the Nevada State Motor Vehicle Department.
"How did she know about your license? Or your absence of same?" Temple flashed Matt a glance as a streetlamp flared overhead. His habitual calm looked more like numbness.
"She checked you out. Bet you didn't dream that I would be so dangerous to know. Yes, sir, Lieutenant Molina has a nagging curiosity about men of my acquaintance."
"Damn," he said, the only time she'd heard him swear. Why he said it was not clear.
"Yeah, Molina makes me say that a lot, too," Temple put in to lighten the atmosphere. "She is one stubborn daughter of a dork."
"Daughter of a dork?" That had shaken his unnatural calm.
"Well, son of a bitch is sexist, and besides, Molina's the wrong sex for it."
Matt's laugh sounded less like amusement and more like surrender. Obviously, things weren't going his way tonight, and Temple was one more unpleasant surprise. She wasn't supposed to know about his errand, and she wasn't supposed to know he didn't have a driver's license. Why? She was becoming almost as curious as Molina. Temple reflected.
"What are we riding to the rescue about?" she asked as she turned onto Seguaro.
He laughed again, wearily. "I don't exactly know. I recently . . . heard from an old grade-school teacher of mine from Chicago. She called out of the blue a few minutes ago, begging for help. l don't even know how she got my number?!
"Chicago? I thought you were raised on a farm."
He turned to face her at last. "What do you mean?"
"That's how you knew Midnight Louie was a he, you said on the day he came, that day we met by the pool. You said you learned that animal-husbandry sex stuff growing up on a farm."
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