Cat on a Blue Monday

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Birmans are long-haired cats, and this one was a potential champion in its class, maybe even a Best of Show. Birmans are the sacred cats of Burma, but they're not supposed to have tonsures like monks. This one does. Peggy has to stay and guard her other cats, so I came over in her place to help her aunt feed the kitties last night. I can't help wondering if the incidents are connected."

  "Not," said Matt to Seraphina, "to mention the obscene calls to the convent."

  "Convent?" Now Temple could express full indignation and ignorance. "What convent?"

  "Ours," Seraphina said serenely. "It's really just a large house; there are so few of us left. We Sisters of Charity belong to Our Lady of Guadalupe now," she added for Temple's benefit, "Rose and I and a few others. Blandina was our neighbor and we looked out for her--and the cats when Peggy wasn't around."

  "Someone is making obscene phone calls to a convent?"

  Temple demanded in disbelief. Oh, Alice, lend me your Tylenol-Three, your caterpillar and a full deck of cards!

  "To one of our nuns, Sister Mary Monica,"

  "She's over ninety and seriously hearing-impaired," Matt explained quickly, as if that made any difference.

  "So that's why you're here," Temple charged.

  "Guilty," he said, sounding exactly that. "Sister Seraphina called on me because she thought that I, being a hotline counselor, would know about the creeps that do this."

  Matt and Sister Seraphina exchanged a quick glance that was not lost on Temple. More was here than met the eye. Oh, boy, was that an understatement!

  She decided to stick to the facts she knew, Ma'am, just the facts, and Sergeant Friday could take a flying . . . flip.

  "So," said Temple, toting insanities, "Two houses practically next door to each other are receiving nuisance calls, and now one resident is . . . I don't know, either ill or hysterical.

  Miss Tyler seemed to have her marbles all in a row when I was here this morning."

  "She's been under a lot of pressure," Seraphina said firmly. "Recently she's had a little feud with Father Hernandez, our parish priest. Despite her devout ways and the parish development program, they came to a parting on the issue of whether cats go to heaven." She sighed.

  "Oh," Temple said. "I was raised Unitarian. I'm not good on this theology stuff."

  Seraphina's smile was the kind that would melt barbed wire. "Neither was Father Hernandez," she said. "We tell children that heaven will be what they imagine. Why can't we tell old people, who are closer than us to both childish simplicity and heaven, what they need to hear? Father Hernandez refused to allow even a scintilla of chance that cats could cajole Saint Peter for entry. Blandina was furious, and worse, frightened. Those cats are all she has."

  "Besides her niece," Temple put in.

  "A niece, however devoted, is not the same as the creatures she saved, as the creatures who came to this house and found a haven here. Her rescued cats made Blandina feel useful, and that is a boon at any age." Seraphina sighed again, though she did not strike Temple as the sighing type under other circumstances.

  Temple considered that old nuns were not so different from elderly maiden ladies who had too many cats and thought that their time had passed, that they could save no one but themselves and a few dozen abandoned animals. Except that nuns tended to go in for abandoned souls. Was Matt one?

  In the dark of early morning, the cats hid and moved and hungered for food. Like a school of silent fish, they shifted through the vast depths of the old house, now missing its mistress. Temple thought of the tinfoil troughs she had filled not a day before, and of how empty they would soon be, and of how empty this house would be without Blandina. She saw the cane abandoned against the bedroom wall, and heard the cats crying for love and food, food and love.

  She saw an Outsider who railed at the safeness of all little worlds, who dialed deaf, ancient nuns with even more ancient obscenities, who harassed old women and cats. She remembered the things the old woman, wandering, had said in her bed, and became profoundly disturbed.

  "Blandina had no hearing problem," Temple said. "Maybe she went out to face the night lights and sounds tonight. What made her sick? What made her so sick at heart and soul that she thought of Christ betrayed by Peter?

  I'm not particularly religious." Temple confessed, "but wasn't there a lot of the New Testament in what she said tonight?"

  They were watching her, the old woman and the man she did not know.

  "There was fresh dirt on Miss Tyler's cane tip," Temple said, "In the bedroom."

  When they rose, it was a foregone conclusion.

  Seraphina led them through the house's labyrinthine ways to the back. Dawn was bleaching the horizon white. The bushes flared like black fires against the sky.

  Cats milled around their feet in the kitchen. Cats clamored for milk and honey and Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.

  They went outside. No cocks crowed.

  The garden was still and empty. Blandina would not trust her precious cats to an outside environment, and most rescued cats disdained the cold, cruel outer world that had orphaned them.

  The three of them went their separate ways in the garden, lost in separate thoughts, searching separate ways.

  Light blotted up the darkness slowly, hardly seeming to win, but sure to.

  Temple had more to think about than old women and cats, but she kept looking for Something.

  She found magenta-flowered oleander bushes burning bright against the indomitable dawn, scrub cactus and strange flowers, sluggish lizards hissing away in the underbrush.

  The backyard was large, and fenced in with stone five Feet high. The sky was blushing pink. She walked back toward the house, thinking of feeding the cats, even though it was early. It would save a trip later.

  She came to the back door, and the light was just enough that she saw what they all had missed seeing on the way out.

  She didn't think that she screamed, but the other two were there in what seemed to be too long an instant.

  "My God!" said Matt.

  "Peter!" Seraphina said in shock, then repeated the name in a voice of distraught love.

  Temple saw what Blandina had seen, in her own backyard, on her own back door: the beige convent cat, half of Peter and Paul, nailed--crucified--by his outstretched front paws to the heavy wooden back door.

  Chapter 14

  Cat Crime

  "He's not dead," Matt said, coming into the kitchen's bright fluorescents. "Can you find a towel?"

  Temple and Sister Seraphina scattered in shocked relief - Temple for the terry-cloth dish towels that she had spotted yesterday under a stack of unused foil roaster pans in the pantry, Sister Seraphina upstairs for parts unknown.

  Both women had scurried into the house--averting their eyes from the open door---as soon as they had found the claw hammer Matt had asked for in the shed at the back of the garden. Temple felt guilty about failing to rise to the occasion while she comforted Sister Seraphina in the kitchen, but--after all-----Matt had spent his summers on a farm and was better prepared to deal with animal tragedies.

  Temple was a city girl through and through. She had to avert her eyes from road kill, even if it was a bird or a squirrel or a rat, although she noted the exact location and invariably called animal control to pick up the remains, hoping they would do so before she had to drive that way again. In fact, she would often change her route for a while to make sure the road was clear. If everyday traffic fatalities upset her that much, a crucified cat was more than even a good Girl Scout should have to cope with when there was (thank God for the small favors of long-institutionalized sexism) a man around to see to it.

  So, still feeling guilty when Sister Seraphina leaped over cats to hurtle down the stairs with a bath towel, Temple manfully offered to take the towels out to Matt.

  The cat lay on its side on a wooden bench, unconscious, Matt said.

  "Are you sure?" she asked, handing him the towels.

  "I think it's in shock. We may be
too late. But the . . . foot injuries weren't enough to kill it. Do you know of a vet?"

  "Yes, and---" Temple checked her watch. "They've just opened, thank God." She instantly blanched, wondering if invoking the deity over a cat was disrespectful.

  But Matt didn't notice. He was wrapping the cat up like a baby in swaddling clothes.

  "I'll drive; you carry," Temple suggested briskly, heading back into the house to collect her tote bag.

  Sister Seraphina was waiting in the kitchen, white-faced. "I'll feed the cats," she said as they came in. She peeked gingerly into Matt's bundle. "Will he--"

  "We'll try."

  "It's too bad you couldn't stay for seven-o'clock Mass. I'd like you to meet Father Hernandez."

  Matt didn't look at all sorry, just worried. "I'll have to pass on that."

  "Of course," Sister Seraphina murmured.

  "And we'll call with news," Temple promised, jingling her car keys.

  She and Matt rushed out, avoiding cats, and into the Storm as fast as she could unlock it.

  Temple barely noticed the morning warming up and brightening all around her; she was just glad she could drive in daylight as she pushed the Storm around corners and down lightly traveled streets at forty miles an hour, getting a slew of dirty looks from more moderate drivers.

  "Hold the bundle up," she suggested to Matt. "Maybe they'll think it's a sick baby."

  He obliged; the cat was too unconscious to care.

  "That's the most awful thing I've ever seen in my life," Temple said by way of small talk. Her knees were inclined to shake, she noticed, and so had her voice on the last sentence.

  "Quite a night," Matt answered in his usual understatement.

  She wondered what it would take to jar his composure. She just may have seen it. She had a feeling that the cat's plight had restored Matt's equilibrium, even as it had almost tipped her totally off the scale of sanity.

  "Who would do such a thing?" she asked, knowing the question was expected, and useless, and unanswerable, but needing to ask.

  "I don't know. Someone sick is the obvious answer. But in what way?"

  "And why the convent cat on Miss Tyler's door? Who was the target of this act?"

  "Usually the kind of people--or kids----who torture animals aren't too fussy about the targets. They just want to find someone who cares, who'll be hurt and shocked and frightened."

  "It could be kids, couldn't it? That's even creepier."

  "Adults don't normally do this sort of thing. If they're inclined to atrocity, they've graduated to abusing people by the time they're all grown up,"

  Temple shivered at Matt's cynicism, new from him. It bespoke a darker world view than she had suspected he glimpsed.

  She spun the Storm around the last corner and pulled into the lot, relieved to see only a sprinkle of cars for staff members. She ran around the car to open the door for Matt and clattered ahead to open the vet's door.

  An empty waiting room, Good, Temple thought as she stormed the desk.

  "We've got an emergency, a terribly abused cat."

  The woman on duty looked up, her face struggling to blend an expression of anger with sympathy. "Take it right in. I'll buzz Dr. Doolittle."

  "Dr. Doolittle?" Matt mouthed in amazement as he followed Temple into the first examining room.

  She shrugged and watched him lay the bundle on the tabletop, then reached out to stroke the cat's forehead.

  Energy and a rush of air came in with the vet. "What happened?" she asked, peeling back the towels to reveal Peter's inert form.

  Temple and Matt consulted each other with a glance. Matt spoke. "We found him nailed to a door. He's not dead, but I don't know how bad--"

  "Your cat?" Dr. Doolittle asked. She knew Temple had Midnight Louie.

  "No," he said quickly. "A . . . friend's. An elderly lady's."

  Dr. Doolittle made a sound of disgust as she put on a stethoscope. An assistant hurried in. "You two had better wait outside until we get a good look at him."

  They edged out into the antiseptic hall, then into the waiting room, where they could read dog and cat magazines or peruse free literature from manufacturers of dog and cat products--Yummy Tum-tum-tummy or Free-to-be-Feline. Not easy to forget where you were in a veterinarian's waiting room, Temple mused. Not easy to forget what brought you there. . . .

  She and Matt sat on adjoining free-form plastic chairs and stared at the vinyl-tiled floor.

  "Reminds me of the hospital emergency room," Temple said finally.

  "Yeah."

  "At least Lieutenant Molina isn't here."

  "She might have to be here yet."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's not homicide, but it's pretty close."

  "A tortured cat is not the kind of thing the police can deal with," Temple objected, for the idea of Lieutenant Molina being drawn into her life again was just too awful to contemplate. "Animals are legally viewed as property. That poor cat is worth what somebody would pay for it, period, and you know that's not much."

  "Still," Matt said, "the police Gang Unit might be interested, especially if they've got Satanist activity in the area, and they usually do."

  Temple sat forward on the chair designed to slide her deep against its back. "Satanists?" she whispered. "I never thought of that!"

  Matt shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "The cat's owners are nuns who live in a convent next to a church; the cat was nailed to the door of a devoted churchgoer who takes in stray Cats. Crucifixion is a potent symbol to modern Christians, no matter the victim, no matter the denomination."

  Temple resisted the chair seat's slick pull on her weary and stunned body, resisted slumping into her seat like a scarecrow who'd seen too much and was finally too scared to crow back.

  "Satanism," she repeated, truly chilled to the bone.

  Dr. Doolittle was there almost as soon as they heard her coming. She sat down on an empty chair.

  "He is in shock. He's lost a lot of blood."

  "Yeah, the door was pretty smeared," Matt said.

  Temple stared at him. "I didn't see any blood."

  "It was still darkish. I noticed it as I was getting him off and daylight was breaking."

  "We need to transfuse him." Dr. Doolittle was being professionally brusque. "As soon as possible."

  "Then do it," Temple gave permission. "I'm sure the owner will okay it, if Peter needs it."

  Dr. Doolittle sighed. "That's just it. We usually have one of our office cats available, but a customer fell in love with the last one and adopted it. We haven't taken in a replacement yet."

  "I don't understand," Temple said. "Office cats?"

  Dr. Doolittle took off her tortoiseshell-rimmed yuppie glasses and rubbed her face with a bony hand bearing the battle scars of her profession.

  "'We're a vet's office. Everyone's always dumping unwanted or wounded animals on our doorstep. Some we place. Some we keep. It's handy to have a healthy cat around when blood donations are called for. We just happen to be out at the moment."

  "What are the qualifications for a blood donor?" Temple asked.

  "We prefer a big, strong, healthy donor. And of course it must be a cat."

  "Louie!" said Temple, standing.

  Matt was standing too, "The Circle Ritz?"

  "We'll be right back," Temple told the vet on the way out the door.

  Getting into the Storm fast was becoming a habit. The driver and passenger doors slammed simultaneously. Temple gunned the motor and headed for home.

  The Circle Ritz was quiet. Late workers hadn't left yet; early birds were long gone. They raced up the three flights of stairs, automatically ignoring the elevators.

  Temple flubbed putting her key in her own front door; her hands were shaking so much. "Let's hope he's here. Come on, Louie, You old layabout, be laying about----"

  Inside, the apartment was cool and serene, like a scene from a decorating magazine on another planet. So much had happened since Temple had left here in t
he wee morning hours at Matt's urgent behest.

  They stood stock still, absorbing the unoccupied peace of the place like refugees from a far uglier world. Temple eyed her pale sofa, only black cat hairs, like the trail of the Yeti in the Himalayas, all advertisement and no substance.

  She ran into the small kitchen, looking high and low. Free-to-be-Feline untouched in the bowl, but the tempting top layer of Shrimp Oyster Aloha was gone.

  To the office, Matt behind her, and no familiar dark form sprawled all over her paperwork. To the main room again and--no help for it----her bedroom, which Matt had never seen, through no fault of her own, but now. . . .

  Oh, Lordy, she hadn't straightened up in here. Clothes everywhere and toppled shoes and--oh, to die; how had she forgotten about them?--four Cosmopolitan magazines fanned like a hand of playing cards by the bedside table; she read them only for the horoscopes, honest.

  And there, like a fat black spider, smack dab in the middle of her crumpled zebra-striped, red-piped coverlet.

  "Midnight Louie!" Temple squealed, picking him up in one surprised, limp, large armful. "I knew I could count on you!"

  "Have you a towel?" Matt asked.

  "No, a carrier in the storage closet."

  "No time," Matt pronounced, going into her bathroom and coming out with a bath towel that featured a top-hatted Fred Astaire doing a signature glide.

  He wrapped Louie and headed for the front door.

  Louie wasn't going to like that, but Temple jangled her key ring and tan after them.

  Once more into the Storm, The Fred Astaire towel was doing a cha-cha in Matt's grasp, but Temple was too busy driving unsafely to watch.

  The vet's. Out of the car, into the office. Matt bearing Louie like a veiled sacrifice into an examining room. Temple trotting alongside, wailing apologies as she patted Louie's only visible part, the top of his head.