Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt Read online

  Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

  Prologue

  Home for the Holly Daze

  I know one thing about the forthcoming New Year's weekend. At least I am going to hit ye olde home town before they dim the Christmas glitz and glitter along the Las Vegas Strip. Not that you can tell much difference between the normal wattage and the extra icing the city establishments put up for the holidays. The usual blinding is the usual blinding on any occasion and in any season.

  I am not sure jolly old Saint Nick could navigate his sleigh through this glitter-strewn sand-dome without embedding Rudolph's red-light nose into the tip of the Luxor pyramid or entangling the reindeer in the mane surrounding Leo's three-story head at the MGM Grand or, perhaps most amusing to imagine after my sojourn in the Big Apple, crashing King-Kong-level into the tip of New York-New York's downsized version of the Empire State Building.

  The flight from La Guardia airport in New York to McCarran airport in Las Vegas is a three-hour some jaunt with the clockspringing back an hour to match each hour in flight. So I while away what passes for six hours hanging in the sky and controlling my bladder while hunched underneath a seat within a carry-case zipped tighter than a drug lord's lips. Jonah and his adventure with Moby Leviathan had nothing on me.

  Like Jonah, I cannot say much for the view from within the belly of the beast.

  But once we land and I am pulled out, slung over, bumped past and trekked through the airport, I am soon listening once again to the Lullaby of Broadway as it is played in this little town in the West: in the metallic hip-hop fascinatin' rhythm of the slot machines.

  Once on the ground, I doze my way home. Luckily, my kind long ago learned the secret to travel without tears. We simply assume the fetal position and retreat into an appalled ball.

  Some favor the piteous wail rigorously applied at forty-second intervals as an appropriate response to uninvited transportation. I go for the silent treatment. Let them wonder what you are really thinking! It is too easy for humans to ultimately ignore even the most piercing howls.

  They have astounding powers of concentration when the situation requires--as the infant Homo sapiens has proven in experiment after experiment.

  So why strain my throat merely to insure that the humans around me share my anxiety and discomfort? A vocalized grievance, no matter how just, ultimately becomes an annoyance. An unspoken rebuff is also inevitably magnified in the mind of its recipient until it reaches the proportions of a globe-trotting guilt trip.

  "Oh, poor Louie!" I hear Miss Temple Barr croon under her breath above me, as I bobble against her body to the beat of her mush-soled New York City tennis shoes. You would think we were Fred and Ginger, could either one of us tap dance. "You are being so good. We will be home soon, I promise, and then everything will be back to normal."

  I am not so sanguine. For one thing, in Las Vegas "normal" is never the norm.

  For another, the Santa slayer on Madison Avenue may be identified and facing an interminable wrestling match with the long arm of the law in a Manhattan courtroom, but I suspect that other, less violent crimes were committed during our New York visit, and those too will have more personal consequences, although perhaps not legal ones.

  For one thing, while I enjoyed my unauthorized trek to Midtown and the Divine/Sublime Girls' digs at the Algonquin Hotel, it was not lost on me in all the excitement that Miss Temple Barr was also Absent Without Leave to the tune of one entire night away from the sheltering roof of Miss Kit Carlson's impressive Greenwich Village condominium.

  (Although it is quite expected that I have in the past, and may in the future, spend the night away from our shared accommodations, Miss Temple is not allowed that privilege, which is a male prerogative common to every species.)

  But back to my abandonment in Miss Kit Carlson's fancy digs. I admit that I was busy catching up on some well-deserved rest during the "missing time" on Miss Temple's part, after the double strain of auditioning for television and detecting a murder and a murderer, but I do not believe that abduction by aliens would explain her strange behavior after the absence in question.

  Throughout our last day in New York, she was nervous and distracted to the point of conducting an extremely banal telephone conversation with someone I cannot identify but I suspect was of the male persuasion. She and the delightfully nicknamed Miss Kit spent the rest of the visit with their heads together. Even during the farewell party that evening, which Miss Temple's thoughtful maternal aunt put on for her benefit, I caught my winsome roommate brooding while standing alone in the spectacularly pointed prow of Miss Kit's flatiron-shaped apartment, gazing upon the dark bulk of Manhattan lit up like a cruise ship on speed.

  I rubbed against her wine velvet sleeve until it was nearly black with my stray hairs, and produced my most gently inquisitive murmurs, but she barely noticed me.

  These humans are so delicate of feeling and difficult to read at times. Inscrutable would be the word, I suppose, rather like the statues of Bastet, the goddess of all things fine and feline.

  Well, I am quite up to solving yet another problem in the always-puzzling realm of human behavior. Miss Temple need not worry! I will bend all my gumshoe skills to getting to the bottom of her bad mood as soon as we get home.

  Chapter 1

  Murder on the Home Front

  Temple's recent holiday trip to New York City had convinced her of one thing: she would make a lousy undercover operative. (Although her five -alarm-fire -red hair should have tipped her off to that likelihood long before now.)

  Today, on her return home, she was discovering how hard it was to scurry anonymously through the vast, gleaming Las Vegas airport while toting a twenty-pound black cat in a purple knapsack affixed like a baby- carrier to her decolletage.

  Temple had no decolletage worth noticing at the moment (or any other moment, in her modest opinion), just Midnight Louie hanging limp as a sack of couch potatoes front and center.

  If anybody tried to shoot her, she'd be more protected by feline flab and fur than by Kevlar body armor.

  Of course, no one (that she knew of) wanted to shoot her at the moment, but someone might be hoping to spot her. She didn't want to see anything but the Whittlesea Blue cab that would whisk her home to the Circle Ritz.

  No surprises, she thought, dragging her rolling luggage behind her through the hectic between-holiday crowds that besiege the Slot-machine City over Christmas and New Year's.

  No Electra Lark checking the plane schedule Temple had left with her, then deciding to drop by McCarran Airport and pick up her returning tenant on some good-Samaritan whim.

  No Matt Devine playing Boy Scout gallant. No Matt getting Temple's car keys and arrival time from Electra. No aqua Storm idling eagerly at the ground transportation curb to waft Temple home in its aging but game style.

  And no, please God, no Max Kinsella appearing from behind a mirrored pillar to load Temple and belongings into his oh-so-discreet inherited ebony Taurus. No Max to transport the whole kit and caboodle back to the scene of the crime, the Circle Ritz, where they might encounter Electra Lark or, worse, Matt Devine and have to explain things. Or not explain things. Which was even more incriminating.

  "Don't nobody even remember me for at least twenty-four hours," Temple whispered fervently to herself.

  She was running on an emotional jet-lag high that the three-hour turn-back in time wouldn't help. She needed to get her feet on the ground, Louie off her back (or front, rather), her mind in the proper time zone and her emotions on some course resembling an even keel before she wanted to see a soul, or a soul to see her.

  "Temple Barr!"

  " Oh, no!" She stopped and turned, stricken.

  Oh. Only Cra
wford Buchanan, the slime reporter. To think that she would ever be relieved to see him. His brown distressed-leather jacket had to have escaped a J. Peterman catalog, along with an ivory silk aviator scarf that dangled almost to his knees and would look infinitely better on either gentleman of her acquaintance that she was so intent on avoiding at the moment.

  "Well. If it isn't the Munchkin Hunchfront of Notre Dame," Crawford went on, as he was always going on, his conceited drawl emphasizing his one good attribute, a deep, thrilling, radio-mike voice. "Does that cat ring bells in his spare time? He certainly does nothing for your figure."

  "Louie and I are both too travel-worn for chitchat. What are you doing here? You don't look like you're heading in or out. No baggage."

  "Elementary deduction, my dear Watsonette. I'm here to pick up my squeeze. Her and her kid visited family for the holidays."

  "I loathe the expression 'squeeze.' "

  "Too bad. It's here to stay, T.B. Just like me." He leered.

  Crawford Buchanan was the only man outside of a silent movie melodrama who still knew how to leer.

  Temple turned and resumed her race for the airport exit. "Tell it to the marines. I have a feeling they could fix that."

  A Whittlesea Blue cab was waiting. Several were. Temple took the first one and collapsed into the backseat. The ride from McCarran airport was almost laughable. Seen from the runways, Las Vegas Strip landmark hotel-casinos made a crazy-quilt skyline: the Luxor's pointed pyramid jousted with the fools-cap Disney-blue towers of the Camelot, which tilted at the new New York-New York's boxy art deco skyscrapers, which contrasted with the Mirage's tidal-wave wall of gilded glass.

  Entering Las Vegas was like driving into a town of half-scale architects' models, a Twilight Zone set that even Rod Serling could never have imagined in quite this unlikely juxtaposition.

  Temple and Louie were deposited before the Circle Ritz's round fifties silhouette in no time flat, for an absurdly low fare.

  She had asked the cab driver to drop them at the wedding chapel in front. Not that she was expecting imminent nuptials, but this way she could sneak in the attached apartment building's side entrance, avoiding the back entry via the parking lot and the pool, where she was likely to confront the Ritz's usual suspects.

  In the deserted marble-lined lobby she pushed the elevator button, glad to have only one elevator to deal with and only four floors of building ahead of her, after her sojourn in high-rise New York-New York, the Original.

  The elevator doors opened, revealing . . . nobody. Temple darted in like a daylight robber, cussing when her wheeled baggage rollers caught in the brass-edged gap between lobby and car. She wrestled her key out from her tote bag during the one-floor journey and clenched it between her teeth for safekeeping while both hands were busy dragging baggage.

  The thick hall carpeting nearly derailed her bags, but she finally turned down the cul-de-sac leading to her front door.

  There she leaned the bags against the wall, reclaimed the moist key and unlocked her door.

  Solid mahogany heft drew it open of its own accord. Sighing at this small boon, she stepped over the threshold.

  She broke through an invisible skin of her own absence, en-countering the undisturbed peace of rooms abandoned for a while. Everything in its place, including silence, and a blessed familiarity. The effacing hum of the refrigerator. The place even looked neater than she had remembered leaving it, but that was just the Alzheimer's effect of being away kicking in.

  She unhooked Louie's CatAboard Seat, letting him and it ease to the floor.

  He was out and sniffing around like a bloodhound, then edging out of sight. She heard a muted thump atop the kitchen counter as she wrestled the luggage inside.

  A sense of deja vu subdued her like an opiate as she warily moved through each room, hunting nameless snares and traps. She entered her own bedroom like a thief, expecting another's spoor. Nothing but her own imagination and some hallucinogenic fragrance. Being away always brought her back a temporary foreigner attuned to smells and sights residence had made undetectable.

  Too weary to unpack, she tilted her luggage against a bedroom wall before returning to the main room to lock the front door. Then she rooted through the cupboards for something succulent to spoon over the eternal mound of dry Free-to-be-Feline pellets occupying Louie's dish like one of those lifelike ceramic desserts restaurants parade before jaded diners' palates nowadays.

  The cat thumped down from somewhere in the living room and came running for smoked oysters in shrimp sauce. Temple collected and folded his-- her --carry-pouch and tucked it away in the tiny guest closet. She returned to the kitchen, wondering what she should do. Eat.

  Rest. Or sit down and stare at the walls.

  Someone knocked at her door.

  Temple's jump made Louie look up resentfully from his eating.

  The knock had not only startled Temple but it had interrupted the total concentration Midnight Louie required for dining.

  Heart pounding for no good reason, Temple went to open her door without peeking through the tiny peephole. She had to face the music some time, no matter who was playing what instrument.

  "Electra!"

  "I heard your cab arrive and thought you might want your mail." Her landlady hefted a cardboard box overflowing with rolled-up newspapers, mail-order catalogs, bills, solicitations and Christmas cards.

  "Thanks. I think. Did you have a nice holiday?"

  "Great. A couple of the kids got to town, only one with grandchildren. And you?"

  "Interesting."

  "Oh?" Electra, clad in a seasonal muumuu whose pattern somehow blended orchids and evergreens, paused after depositing the box of mail on Temple's coffee table, awaiting a report.

  "Sit down," Temple said, capitulating. Of all the people she might have encountered immediately on returning home, Electra was the least harrowing. "Want something to drink?"

  "Nope. Egg-nogged, wined and Mimosa-ed my way through too many meals out while the kids were in town. I'll just get a load off my feet--and it's more load than before you left--then settle next to my pal Louie. Oof! He's got oyster breath."

  Electra's weight not only dimpled the love-seat cushion, but caused Louie to roll right into her evergreen orchid patch. Too rotund himself to fight gravity, they stayed hip to hip and floral print to fur. Louie even began to purr.

  "Aw, he missed me. My little big boy. Well? Did you two win the commercial contract?"

  "Don't know. We didn't exactly endear ourselves to the advertising agency. I managed to implicate a murderer among them."

  Electra clapped her hands until the copper, silver and brass bangles on each wrist jangled.

  "Some people would be so greedy for their own advancement that they'd rather conceal than reveal such a thing. I'm sure your integrity made a big impression on them."

  "Integrity is not the desirable commodity it used to be. And concealing things isn't as easy as it sounds," Temple answered grimly.

  "Is there something I should know?"

  Temple paused, rubbing her ... temple. "No, but there's something I should know. Is Matt back yet?"

  "Last evening, just in time to rush to his job at ConTact. But he seemed in a peach of a mood. Must have had a good Christmas visit home in Chicago. Poor guy. He was moping around after you left for New York."

  "Not merely over my departure!"

  "Well--," Electra, a card-carrying justice of the peace, seemed to toy with a temptation to fan the flames of like into the ashes of true romance. "No. He seemed to have a lot on his mind.

  But you were definitely in there."

  "I think I know why." Temple grinned. "Have you been inside his place recently?"

  "Me? No. I do not snoop when tenants are off the premises. Although, now that you mention it, I heard a lot of strange thumps from his apartment. Almost sounded like a body being dragged around."

  Temple nodded sagely. "A dead weight indeed. I persuaded him to invest in a flashy v
intage sofa before I left. It must have found its way home."

  "Flashy? Matt? That doesn't sound right. He's such a dear boy and I love him to death.. ..

  really, I mean that, though not literally, given your track record with corpses--but sometimes he seems rather naive and a little staid."

  "No law against that," Temple said rather briskly. "Sometimes I feel rather naive myself."

  "And you all of what--? Thirty?"

  "Don't mock me, Electra. Between my recent immersion in murder, among other things, I'm aging rapidly."

  "You do look a little peaked."

  "Electra, nobody's called me 'peaked' since I was in high school and my mother was on my case."

  "Thank you," she said complacently, patting Louie. The cat stretched as long as a yardstick and kneaded his claws against a particularly lurid orchid on Electra's knee.

  "Ouch!" she complained. "Cut that out! His claws are sharper than needle-nosed pliers."

  "He hasn't been able to run around nights and use them. He was strictly a lap cat in New York City."

  "Lap of luxury," Electra said fondly, scratching Louie's chin while he stretched his head back and slitted his eyes. "It's really nice that you found each other," she added.

  "Huh?" Temple was having a panic attack, wondering if Electra were as psychic as she claimed her cat Karma was.

  But she hadn't detected memories of Max floating among Temple's conflicting thoughts; she was speaking of the current resident male, Midnight Louie.

  "He's a great companion," she went on.

  "I don't know. He runs around a lot nights and comes in at ungodly hours expecting to be petted and pampered, and usually fed."

  "It's a good thing you're solo these days--and nights-- though."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Louie doesn't strike me as the type to share."

  "Louie doesn't own me. I didn't promise to forsake all others when he tripped into my life at the convention center. Actually, he tripped me quite literally."