Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Maybe you’re right. Where? When?”

  She backed up, went around to the passenger side of the car. She downed the rest of her champagne in a long-throated gesture. Then finished his mostly full glass. She started stashing the equipment in the car’s rear seat.

  “No. You don’t get to plan. To prepare. The next time you see me. I choose. If you want to enjoy it, you’re allowed, you know. But I think you’ll hate it. All I can say is just think of England. Or your landlady or that island mama you work for, or this little carrot-top wetting her Gap capris.” She gestured at the other side of the car, where Matt didn’t dare look because he didn’t want to remind her she was leaving him with another woman.

  “What if I surprised you?”

  “You can’t. That’s what’s so delicious about it. You couldn’t surprise me in a hundred years. So keep that ring warm for me.”

  She darted into the front passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

  The engine started with a quick, quiet hum. The car pulled away, the tires peeling like black Band-Aids from the loose gravel on the surface.

  Matt rushed to pull the girl away from the departing tires. Her ankles and wrists were circled in duct tape.

  She mewed behind the silver gag.

  “It’s all right. It’ll take a while to get this tape off without hurting you.” He looked around the deserted lot, then pushed his arms under her knees and back, picked her up, and headed toward the Blue Dahlia.

  Main Course

  “It’s a good thing they trust me to lock up,” Molina said, pouring lighter fluid onto a cleaning rag she had found behind the hall door, the one that didn’t lead to her dressing room but to a maintenance closet.

  “If they couldn’t trust you to lock up, who could they trust?”

  She gave Matt a look — a long, hard Molina look — then soaked the tape over the girl’s chin. “There you go. I know you want to sing out right now like Britney Spears, but ripping this tape off would give you a rug burn for a week. In the movies, they just tear away duct tape, but that’s make-believe. There. It’s coming. Just a bit more, and don’t lick your lips unless you like the taste of kerosene.”

  While Molina calmed the captive and eased the gag off, Matt dowsed the girl’s wrists with fluid.

  The reek was stomach-turning. He watched her pale face turn delicately green.

  “Off!” Molina announced the obvious.

  She squatted beside the girl they had propped on a restaurant chair, looking like a den mother in her jeans and vaguely Native American suede jacket with odd bits of beads and fringe.

  “What’s your name?”

  No “dear,” no “honey,” Matt noticed. Nothing infantalizing. She wanted this victim to feel like an adult. In charge again. Able to answer. Able to point fingers.

  Matt started untwining gummy duct tape that had adhered to him as it released her.

  The girl noticed the phenomenon. Her lips trembled into a small smile. “Guess I got Mr. Midnight into a bit of a jam.”

  “You were in a bit of a jam,” Molina said, sympathetic but not enabling. “Your name? It’s okay. You’ve lucked into an off-duty cop.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, me. Lieutenant Molina. Now…you.”

  “Vicki. Vicki Jansen.” She glanced at Matt, almost apologetically. “I never expected to see you again so soon.”

  “Same here,” he said.

  “Who was that witch?”

  Molina eyed Matt, curious to see what he’d tell an innocent bystander.

  “A…rabid fan, I guess.”

  “Kinda like me.”

  “You weren’t rabid.”

  “A little.” She flushed. Redheads had that tendency. “It made her mad. That I kissed you.”

  Molina’s frowning eyebrows told Matt what she thought of that.

  “You were just impulsive,” he said. She shouldn’t blame herself.

  To him guilt was an untallied cardinal sin. He didn’t want to lay it on anybody else. But he wished Vicki hadn’t confessed her indiscretion outside the radio station. Still, Molina had to know. A gushing nineteen-year-old throws herself at him at 1:00 A.M. one night. The next night she’s a captive audience for Kitty the Cutter’s elaborate revenge.

  “Are you all right, other than sticky?” Molina was asking, working on the ankle tape. “Anybody you need to call? You’ll have go to the police station to make a statement. Don’t worry. I’ll take you. It’ll be very discreet.”

  “I just have a couple roommates at UNLV. I dropped my purse in the dorm parking lot there when she…held that gun on me.”

  “What’s the address?” Molina picked up her cell phone. “I’ll have a patrolman drive by, try to get the purse. What time did this happen?”

  “Gosh, eight P.M. or so. What time is it now?”

  Matt jumped up. “It’s after eleven. I’ve —”

  “I know.” Vicki smiled up at him despite the reddened skin the gesture aggravated. “You’ve got to get to the station. Thanks so much. It was really wonderful the way you distracted her and made her let me out of the car.”

  He could tell Molina was itching to hear his version of the encounter and shuddered to think what Vicki might tell her while he was off doing his job.

  “Sorry.” He pulled out his key ring, immediately spotting the ugly reminder of Kitty’s ring. “I guess I’m making everybody have a late night.”

  “That’s your job.” Vicki smiled again, this time with tremulous, fannish adoration. “Keeping us all up late.”

  “She’ll be fine.” Molina sounded brisk and possibly annoyed. “I guess we all just love being kept up late.” Definitely annoyed.

  Matt rushed out to the parking lot, mounting the Vampire and donning his gloves and helmet, looking for lurkers and finding none. He peeled out of the lot. He had a lot of anonymous listeners to think about. And one no-longer-anonymous tormenter.

  The Laddy and the Vamp

  In no time flat, or round, or oblong, we are up on the third floor.

  Only if this upper chamber is an attic, then my refound mama is Mae West in drag.

  This is a ballroom.

  Or was.

  It is a wide room, but six times longer than it is wide. Arched windows with a mosaic of glass set into wooden struts fracture the night into a faceted jet-black mirror that will reflect even our dark presence if we do not watch ourselves.

  It is easy for me to whisk under a settee by the wall. Mr. Max does not whisk, but he can melt, and he ducks into a pool of shadow thrown by a pedestal surmounted by a fern as big as a weeping willow tree.

  Everything up here is big, like a movie set that predates the Edsel.

  Speaking of big, so is the other cat dude that unknowingly shares this space: a leopard. While I was taking the scenic route, Leopard Boy was imported here by the actual residents.

  There are two humans in the room, but they are less interesting, at least to my sniffer. I see that they have the Mystifying Max’s undivided, though covert, attention, however.

  Osiris, for it is he, the only leopard I have a nodding personal acquaintance with, lets his huge nostrils fan like bat wings. He knows Mr. Max’s scent and my own, but since we were both involved in his recent rescue, I trust he has the smarts to keep his animal edge to himself and let the scent-blind humans with him do business as usual. Which is to say, remain in the dark.

  I have, of course, seen the Cloaked Conjuror before, from a distance. He is garbed like a hero or a villain in one of these science fiction/martial arts/Arnold/Jean-Claude films. Big, but enhanced even more by built-up boots and body building and impressively padded armor, wearing a leopardlike face mask that disguises his voice as well as his features.

  Him I have seen and heard before, and he does not scare me. I happen to know that some of the magicians in this town, and beyond, have taken issue with his best-selling act: debunking the tricks that magicians have used to hoodwink audiences for decades. The brotherhood
of the cape and the cane do not take kindly to being outed. Whew. The brotherhood of the cape and the cane sounds like they are tap-dancing vampires, but that is too amusing a characterization to convey the menace that a cadre of lethally annoyed magicians could evoke.

  So let us look at the lady present.

  I have seen her up close once before, and when I realize who, and what, she is, it is all I can do to swallow a betraying hiss.

  This witch took my Miss Temple’s fancy new opal ring Mr. Max had given her, took it right from her finger onstage at the Opium Den and then saw to it that Miss Temple, and I, who was rushing to the rescue, and the ring, all disappeared from that stage, perhaps never to be seen or heard of again.

  Happily, we resurfaced, thanks to a little help from our friends and a couple of enemies. All except Miss Temple’s ring.

  I must admit I am not surprised to see Miss Shangri-La in attendance on the Cloaked Conjuror. He had admitted to Mr. Max in a private conversation earlier, which I made certain to overhear, that he was hooking up with this female magician-thief. Seems he thought his act could use some sex appeal.

  I cannot for the life of me see how a Dragon Lady in the mandarin-nailed, oddly berobed getup of a ghost from a Chinese opera adds sex appeal to anything. She is wearing a mask, but it is all makeup: chalk-white paint that blushes blood-red high on the cheekbones and makes a mask over the slanted black-drawn lines of her eyes and eyebrows. The painted lines draw her features tauter than a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. She looks mean, and wind blown, as if a demon held her captive by the end of her long, black hair and was fighting to pull her back into hell.

  If this is sexy, I am Father Christmas.

  However, I long ago gave up trying to understand what humans find enthralling, other than my own breed, which is quite understandable.

  I can see that they are hard at work here: the masked man and woman and the barefaced, hair-faced leopard.

  It is a trick as old as illusion: the lady becomes a leopard and the leopard becomes a lady.

  Shangri-La’s elegantly tattered robes (they look like my pal Osiris has used her for a scratching post recently) part as she moves to reveal a glittering leopard catsuit beneath the frills.

  This sight gives me a chill, I admit. I am always chary of humans in catsuits. To me, it bespeaks a primitive need to hunt us for our hides. Although I call Mr. Max’s second-story outfit a catsuit, it is merely black slacks and turtleneck sweater. But Miss Shangri-La wears the real thing, like a second skin, except for me the mottled pattern is more reminiscent of a large, suffocating snake than of an elegant jungle cat.

  I wonder if she is wearing Miss Temple’s ring, and then I do not wonder much more, because a sharp nail taps me on the shoulder, and it is not one of Miss Shangri-La’s four-inch nail-fangs, as she is still across the room.

  You cannot call what I have just then so much a premonition as a sick headache all over.

  I glance over my shoulder to see the baby-Bluebeard blue eyes in their own lavender-brown mask of velvet fur. (Okay, Bluebeard was a guy monster, but just pretend he had a sex change operation and you would have Hyacinth.) I glance to check the color painted on those lethal toenails so close to my jugular vein: not tinted blood red or poison green today, but gangrene teal.

  Once again the evil Hyacinth has found me before I found her.

  I just hope Miss Midnight Louise is still lost, because I would never want a maybe-relation of mine to be found in company such as this. Especially me.

  The only good thing about this revolting situation is that Hyacinth only has eyes for me.

  She has missed Mr. Max Kinsella entirely.

  I guess that is the price of living in a cat-centric world. I have long accustomed myself to dwelling among humans, and while some street dudes would consider me a traitor to the Code of the Road, I have always found it more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

  So my path is clear here: I must keep Miss Hyacinth distracted and allow Mr. Max to do his strange, solo, human nosing around.

  “You just cannot seem to keep away from me, Louie,” Hyacinth purrs in the odious way of a female sure of her lures.

  Vanity, thy name is feline fatale!

  “Who could?” I reply.

  Now I must confess, privately, that I have never been much attracted to these lean, mean ladies of an Eastern persuasion. They make like they are so demure and all the while they are practicing kamasutra violin or sushi tiramisù, a lethal variety of either marital or martial arts (sometimes they are the same, in my humble observation) nobody else in the world has ever heard of or knows any more about than they do Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s baritsu, an Oriental art so obscure it has never been heard of again. If only I could say the same for Hyacinth.

  But I make the chitchat with the cat-lady while watching her petite mistress curl herself into a box until she seems to disappear. Osiris obediently crouches in a matching box, ready for the cloth to be flourished away and reveal him in her “place.”

  “You enjoy watching these laborious delusions?” Hyacinth asks.

  “This house does not seem to be equipped with cable,” I say with a shrug. “Do you have something more provocative in mind worth watching?”

  “Besides me?”

  “There is no one besides you,” I flatter outrageously. “I see that you have forsaken the film world for the live stage.”

  “Not permanently. I’m up for the lead in a cat food commercial.”

  “Really?”

  “They are searching for the perfect partner for me. A Bombay is the leading candidate.”

  I shake my head. “Too rangy, too shorthaired. Your unique appeal would be better enhanced by contrast, not a competitor.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  I polish my nails on my exquisitely groomed vest. “Sophisticated dude about town, formal black coat, luxurious satin lapels. The Cary Grant type.”

  “Hmmm. You must come up and see me sometime.”

  “Ah…I think I have done so already. I mean, an attic is ‘up,’ right?”

  “This is no attic.” Hyacinth shows me her scrawny tail as she turns and slinks along the wall toward the stairs.

  I follow, as I wish to give Mr. Max free rein.

  “This,” Hyacinth goes on, “was a ballroom, screening room, and assignation room for the late great film star Carissa Caine.”

  “Now it is rehearsal hall,” I note.

  “All things decay with time.”

  We are retracing my steps down the stairs. I wonder if we are headed for the basement. Oh, joy. No doubt that is not a basement but a wine cellar, film vault, and temporary dungeon.

  Above us, behind us, I hear man, woman, and cat debating their various roles in an illusion.

  So where is Midnight Louise?

  “As I was saying,” Hyacinth goes on, her lisping purr reminiscent of Peter Lorre in his more pussyfooted impersonations, “I might be able to put in a good word for you on the TV commercial circuit.”

  “I have other fish to fry, or chow down at least. I could not care less about being an Á La Cat spokescat.”

  “Other fish! You refer to your dubious appearance on the TV court show, no doubt, where you made a spectacle of yourself with that pallid little tart of a Persian.”

  I bite my tongue. Literally. Such a description of the Divine Yvette is blasphemy to Bastet herself. But let the Goddess take her revenge in her own time. I am working undercover and must not betray my true purpose, which should be easy because I am not quite sure what it is yet.

  “Yvette is a good match to her mistress, I suppose, although I do not think Savannah Ashleigh is of the Persian persuasion. And your own lovely mistress, what breed is she?”

  “Shangri-La?” Hyacinth sits to add lip gloss to her already gleaming and unnaturally painted nails. “I have never seen her without her mask of makeup. We are both members of masked breeds, perhaps that is why we understand each other. She is small and lithe, like myself, and
I flatter myself that she is of a similar kind, an ancient race from the East, wise and inscrutable.”

  “Hmmm,” say I, who loathe the word inscrutable. To me it is a synonym for “stuck-up.”

  “Ommmm, Louie?” Hyacinth mistakenly quotes me. “Are you meditating? That is a very enlightened thing to do, perhaps more Indian than Asian.”

  I am not about to remind her of the glorious Persian’s roots in Afghanistan, just above India. She does not seem capable of appreciating the many attributes of the Divine Yvette.

  “Ommm, hmmm,” I reply diplomatically, managing to straddle both East and West. I am not convinced that Hyacinth even knows the origins of her deceptive mistress. I suppose I will have to leave solving that mystery up to Mr. Max.

  I chafe, sorry to be no longer eavesdropping on the humans and the leopard upstairs.

  Miss Hyacinth mistakes my unease for other urges.

  “I am working,” she says shortly. “I do not have time for dalliances.”

  Hallelujah!

  “Now that we have met again, without prison bars between us,” I gabble like the lovesick swain.

  “The bars between us were always of my doing, Louie. I am devoted to my role in life. My mistress has plans for us that are so much more ennobling than making fools of ourselves on stage or on sets. I realize that you have developed a hopeless passion for me, but you must realize that it is midlife crisis on your part. I am too far above you to encourage your pathetic attentions. I cannot allow myself to be distracted from my mission by personal concerns. You may kiss my hand before you go.”

  Right. Like smack her in the kisser with my mitt. But she has handed me an advantage, however odious. So. I am an obsessed admirer, am I? Gives me an excuse to turn up where I need to. We obsessive types do not give up, do we? I get the impression this dame likes it that way. I let my eartips dip.

  “I am desolate, chèr Hyacinth, but I understand, my dear llsa. I will remain here in Las Vegas, hunted and haunted, while you fly away to more elevated planes.”

  She bats her demon blue eyes. (They look a lot like Lieutenant Molina’s peepers, come to think of it.) They wink like the three rows of faux blue topazes in her collar. (She wears a dog collar, of course, like any self-respecting subversive dominatrix rock diva.)