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Cat in a Leopard Spot
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Cat in a Leopard Spot
By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates
MYSTERY
MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES
Catnap
Pussyfoot
Cat on a Blue Monday
Cat in a Crimson Haze
Cat in a Diamond Dazzle
Cat with an Emerald Eye
Cat in a Flamingo Fedora
Cat in a Golden Garland
Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt
Cat in an Indigo Mood
Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit
Cat in a Kiwi Con
Cat in a Leopard Spot
Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives (anthology)
IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES
Good Night, Mr. Holmes
Good Morning, Irene
Irene at Large
Irene’s Last Waltz
Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (anthology)
HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Amberleigh*
Lady Rogue*
Fair Wind, Fiery Star
SCIENCE FICTION
Probe*
Counterprobe*
FANTASY
TALISWOMAN
Cup of Clay
Seed upon the Wind
SWORD AND CIRCLET
Keepers of Edanvant
Heir of Rengarth
Seven of Swords
Cat in a Leopard Spot
A MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERY
Carole Nelson Douglas
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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For all defenders and rescuers of creatures great and small.
You know who you are, and you know what you do, and why it matters so much.
And the animals know it too.
Contents
Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times…
Prologue: Caged Heat
Chapter 1: Caged
Chapter 2: Bad News Breakfast
Chapter 3: News Flush
Chapter 4: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Chapter 5: Magic Act
Chapter 6: Sister Act
Chapter 7: A PR in PI Clothing
Chapter 8: Portrait
Chapter 9: Heads or Tails?
Chapter 10: Animal Instincts
Chapter 11: Portrait of a Shady Lady
Chapter 12: Caged Meat
Chapter 13: Trial and Error
Chapter 14: Heaven Scent
Chapter 15: Hussy Fit
Chapter 16: Hissy Fit
Chapter 17: Judgment Day
Chapter 18: Day of the Jekyll
Chapter 19: Sketched in Suspicion
Chapter 20: Feast
Chapter 21: Taxidermy Eyes
Chapter 22: Likely Suspects
Chapter 23: Déjà Vu
Chapter 24: Chuck Wagon
Chapter 25: Guilt-Edged Invitation
Chapter 26: Polishing Off the Past
Chapter 27: Cousins Under the Skin
Chapter 28: K as in Karrot Stick
Chapter 29: Damage Control
Chapter 30: Ringed In
Chapter 31: Elvis Leaves the Building
Chapter 32: Animal Wrongs
Chapter 33: Track of the Cat
Chapter 34: Calling on Agatha
Chapter 35: Tiger Paws
Chapter 36: Synth You Went Away…
Chapter 37: Human Error
Chapter 38: Murder Wears a New Face
Chapter 39: Collusion Course
Chapter 40: Calling the Cops
Chapter 41: Hunt Club
Chapter 42: Secret Witness, Silent Witness
Chapter 43: The Black and Blue Max
Chapter 44: Pretty Please Don’t!
Chapter 45: The Most Dangerous Dame
Chapter 46: Stalemate
Chapter 47: Dead Ahead
Chapter 48: Men in Beige
Chapter 49: Bless Me, Mother
Chapter 50: Action Traction
Chapter 51: Cops in Khaki
Chapter 52: AnticliMax
Chapter 53: Cat Burglar
Tailpiece: Midnight Louie Enjoys Being a Pussycat
Carole Nelson Douglas Considers Louie’s Future
Cat in a Leopard Spot
Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times…
As a serial killer-finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), I want to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.
None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for thirteen books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural feline male dominance. But no, I refer to the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.
That is when I begin my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Leopard Spot.
Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a guide to the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:
To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who has reunited with her only love…
the once missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility: years of international counterterrorism work after his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack in Ireland during a post-high-school jaunt to the Old Sod…
but Mr. Max is sought by another dame, homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina, who is the mother of preteen Mariah…
and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent good friend, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink who not long ago was a Roman Catholic priest and has tracked down his abusive stepfather, Mr. Cliff Effinger…
which did not delight Matt’s mother in Chicago, who is emerging from her unhappy past and desperately seeking Matt’s real father, purportedly long dead in Vietnam.
Speaking of untimely pasts, Lieutenant Carmen Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career on the LAPD…
or that Mr. Max Kinsella is hunting Rafi himself because the lieutenant blackmailed him into tailing her ex. While so engaged, Mr. Max’s attempted rescue of a pathetic young stripper soon found her dead…and Mr. Rafi Nadir looks like the prime suspect.
Meanwhile, Mr. Matt has drawn a stalker, the local girl that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland…
one Kathleen O’Connor, for years an IRA operative who seduced rich men for guns and roses for the cause. She is deservedly christened by Temple as Kitty the Cutter…
and—finding Max impossible to trace—has settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine…
while he tries to recover from his crush on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, when Mr. Max was AWOL by no
t very boldly seeking new women, all of whom are now in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.
This human stuff is all very complex, but luckily my life is much simpler, revolving around a quest for union with…
the Divine Yvette, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some cat food commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her airhead actress mistress…
Miss Savannah Ashleigh, whose brutal measures against me resulted in a lawsuit filed by my dear roommate Miss Temple…
who is unaware that my unacknowledged daughter…
Miss Midnight Louise, has been insinuating herself into my cases, along with the professional drug- and bomb-sniffing Maltese dog, Nose E., or—when he is not available—most unsuitable substitutes…
or that I have had a running battle of wits with the evil Siamese Hyacinth, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician…
Shangri-La, who made off with Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and who has not been seen since except in sinister glimpses…
just like the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may take contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, the Great Gandolph, and the GG’s former lady assistant, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical killed in cultlike surroundings among strange symbols, Jefferson Mangel.
Well, there you have it. The usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.
With this crew, who could?
Prologue
Caged Heat
The big cat kneaded, kneaded, kneaded its clipped claws into a huge pillow covered in plush leopard print.
Its long, spotted body lay in leafy shadow, blending with the dried mesquite leaves beneath its splayed hind legs.
Distant security lights cast urine yellow puddles on the varying terrain the big cat called home. Like walls, sheer slick stucco cliffs enclosed areas of thick, glossy tropical greenery, rocks where mini-waterfalls plashed into deep and drinkable pools, and desert scrub with ready-made dirt wallows where the sun would heat earth and fur into one harmonious purring, simmering mass.
He lived alone, the big cat, except for the birds of passage that paused in the higher branches of his compound, but he answered to the name of Osiris. It was called by those who fed him and played with him and took him away every nightfall to a vast, confusing place where he performed tricks in other, cooler pools of light.
Osiris’s sharp shoulder blades shifted as he bent to groom one massive paw, huge canine teeth gnawing matted tufts of hair between the pads. He knew this life and accepted it. Sometimes he would meet others of his kind who performed the same rituals he did. They understood each other and walked softly around their scents and space, except for an occasional growling match. They too had clipped or even missing claws on their forepaws, and were more likely to hit than slash.
The big cat rolled over, stretching long and lithe. His neat ears flicked backward. Did he hear the brush of a footfall on a dry leaf, a rustle in the night? He turned, his expanded pupils studying shades of gray, most of them familiar.
He twisted and vaulted to his feet. Something came.
A warning growl warmed his throat, soft but escalating.
Something moved. He moved as swiftly.
And felt a sting in his shoulder, sharp as a cactus thorn, but with a burn that didn’t ease after first prick. No, this pain dug in deeper and wider, until his whole big frame felt as soft as the pillow he had been pummeling. He collapsed bonelessly beside it like a litter mate, lost to the night and his own senses. Dead to the world.
Chapter 1
Caged
At 2:00 A.M. Matt Devine stepped outside the radio station, glad to find the parking lot deserted for once. What a guilty, if rare, pleasure. Staying an hour after his radio show ended meant that the loyal fans who gathered to greet him at 1:00 A.M. had given up and gone away.
He took a deep, liberating breath. Signing photos for fans in the wee hours was not a favorite part of his radio-shrink job.
Only four vehicles squatted on the otherwise empty parking lot. Each hugged a light pole, parked by staff members who knew they’d be the last to leave and wanted as much light as possible against the dangers of the lonely night.
Wanting as much light as possible against the dangers of the lonely night. Sounded just like what his call-in clients craved.
Matt grimaced. Life was a metaphor, especially when you earned your living as a radio shrink. Still, he glanced carefully around. There was one particular “fan” he hoped never to see again. She made a habit of jumping him after he got off work in the wee hours, both here at WCOO and before that at ConTact, the hot line counseling service where he’d honed his phone advice technique.
Each parked vehicle reminded Matt of its owner: the producer/radio personality known as Ambrosia’s late ’70s red Cadillac convertible; Dwight the technician’s beat-up minivan; Keith’s decidedly downscale aging Toyota hatchback with its spindly tires about as wide as a ’60s necktie and that’s all.
Then there was his transportation.
Locked and tilted toward one of the sentinel parking lot lights the Hesketh Vampire’s convoluted silver silhouette looked like it belonged in a movie. The British custom motorcycle was borrowed wheels, but it could make a faster escape than the Volkswagen Beetle that was recently his, courtesy of Elvis. Or Elvis’s ghost. Or one of Elvis’s whacked-out impersonators. Or fans.
After his most recent unscheduled encounter with the woman Temple had nicknamed—Ouch! “nick” was the name of her game, all right—Kitty the Cutter, Matt felt safer with the ’cycle’s speed and agility, although more exposed on the bike than in a car. He still wasn’t sure that the phantom biker he glimpsed now and again wasn’t Miss Kitty. Then again, it might not be. If not, who was it? How about a ghost?
Matt smiled at his own fears. Monsters and ghosts. He was acting like a kid scaring himself with the dark. Except that it was indeed dark at this hour, and getting darker. Another metaphor.
He stopped thinking, an occupational hazard in both the radio talk-show game and his old vocation of priest, and went over to the streetlight-turned spotlight to unlock the bike, don his helmet and gloves, then spur the metal steed into the dull roar that would soon become a whine as it hit the streets and cruising speed.
Like any performer coming down from a late-night show, Matt was in no hurry to head home to the Circle Ritz.
He found himself pondering the mysteries of human, and more often inhuman, behavior after an hour of hearing everybody’s miseries. Now he had his own lethal mysteries to ponder. The current crop made his recent search for his lost stepfather look like a cake-walk. Poor Effinger, the ultimate loser; outclassed by an uppity hit-woman.
At least he assumed that was what Kitty O’Connor was. An odd, sadistically seductive hit woman, with a modus operandi of introducing herself to her victims. And, in his case, she had an even odder price. Or was it only his case? Was he part of a longtime pattern with her?
She had been Max Kinsella’s Waterloo years ago, when he was still a teenage tourist propelled into the lethal jig that politics, bombs, and the IRA had played for decades in Ireland. Now Kinsella, all grown up, was Matt’s personal bane, ever since he’d come back and taken Temple back, not that Matt had ever had her. It was easy to blame Max for Kitty’s brutal entrance into his own life. And wrong.
Wanting to resent Kinsella for every loss in his life, Matt tended to overlook one key fact: Kathleen O’Connor had first approached him during his hunt for Effinger. To this day, she still didn’t seem to know that Matt had become infatuated with Temple while Kinsella was among the missing. So Kitty was stalking him long before she could suspect any connection between him and M
ax, via Temple. She still seemed blind to the faint outlines of a former romantic triangle, and Matt would do anything to keep it that way. Temple must be protected at all costs. That was probably the only issue he and Kinsella would agree on.
The howl of the Vampire’s famously loud motor mimicked the chaos of his thoughts. The bike almost took its head like a willful steed. Soon the powerful motor was idling in another parking lot, this one utterly empty, except for the cold puddles of blue-green night lights.
A large, low building huddled like a bunker in the moonlight.
Matt locked the bike, hung the silver moon of his helmet on one handlebar, where it reflected its twin sister in the sky. Then he ambled across soundless asphalt to the sidewalks leading into the man-made Garden of Eden beyond the building.
Well, part Garden of Eden, he corrected himself. The other part of the Ethel M candy company’s famous cactus collection was Garden of Gethsemane. Garden of thorns. Where Jesus had spent his last hours before submitting to the mockery of trial, torture, and death.
Naturally, an ex-priest in Las Vegas needed to find someplace lone, harsh, and absolutely natural for contemplation. The area was meant for self-guided tours, kind of like life itself, and was a no-man’s-land at this hour, even in around-the-clock Las Vegas: 24/7, like they said. Everywhere was getting onto Las Vegas time nowadays: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Somewhere in that blur of time, Sunday had been swallowed up. Were God interested in creating Las Vegas, which Matt was pretty sure He would pass on, as He had on Sodom and Gomorrah, He’d probably skip taking the seventh day of rest off. Las Vegas and the Internet never slept.