Cat in a White Tie and Tails Read online

“He did not dress much like a priest.”

  “None of them do these days. It is a marketing thing. Jeesh.”

  “I do not know if I want to mess with priests. They can call down all sorts of trouble on you. I have never had one tackle me so hard like he did in the airport over this sissy cat carrier.”

  “Ex-priest, otherwise he would not be traveling with the redhead. Forget him. We have the carrier. We have the pussycat in it. We have the hostage. The thinking in Vegas now is we can shake up Cliff’s Chicago connections, and get what he hid up here.”

  “Who is doing all this thinking in Vegas?” Lefty asks.

  “The answer to that is above our pay grade.”

  “We have a pay grade?”

  “No! It is just an expression. Now forget about who is behind this. Knowing that will get you a ride on a sinking ship. Do you want some easy dough?” Shifty eyes my carrier. “Who is gonna stop us now. Animal control?”

  The mutual yuks echo off the concrete ceiling twenty feet above.

  Lefty nods, finally appeased. “The Congressional crooks in Washington are eating into my Medicare coverage. I have a lot of work-related injuries. They are killing the middling class. Let us do it.”

  “So,” says Shifty, “I will leave a message on the phone. Gawd, these little lit-up buttons do not always depress. It is depressin’.” His dexterity on a smartphone keypad is like watching King Kong tap dancing on a piano keyboard.

  “You do not have the victim’s number on speed dial?” Lefty asks.

  “These busted fingers cannot punch in all those little keys.” Shifty (who cannot shift, it seems) grunts. “Hmm. No answer. They are still out. Good. I will leave a message to make them squirm.”

  He takes a deep breath, then coughs. Cigars will do that to you.

  “Listen, folks. We got your damn cat. We do not like your damn cat. We will call every hour to see if you got what you know we want. We will chop off an inch of your damn cat’s tail each time we call if you do not come across with the, uh, stuff we want. You know what we mean. Then we will start on the legs. So, uh, cough it up, and we will have an exchange where you can leave … er, what we want and collect what is left of your cat.”

  There is silence as Lefty shuts off the cell phone.

  “That was not very professional,” Shifty rebukes him.

  “Whadda mean, ‘professional’? We do not even know what the Vegas bunch wants. They have left us in the dark looking stupid.”

  I could point out that is not very hard, but hold my tongue in case they get an itch to chop it off in sections.

  “And I do not know about all that cat-chopping you have committed us to. They have nasty, infected claws, you know. We could get rabies.”

  “I was just saying that. You gotta threaten the hostage, and not with something namby-pamby. You gonna eat the whole sausage roll?”

  Chapter 19

  Tail End

  Riding back from Sunday dinner in the Camry’s backseat, Temple felt both well fed and well feted.

  Apparently, she was too darn cute to be considered the femme fatale who stole Father Matt. She passed the religion test when she sweetly told Uncle Stach that she was considering three wedding ceremonies, his, hers, and theirs and that St. Stanislaus Cathedral near downtown was her first choice. The Old World architecture was breathtaking, glowing golden paintings and arches and vivid stained glass.

  Matt had taken Temple, Mira, and Krys there for Mass that morning. Temple had attended Mass with him at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Las Vegas, but she’d been impressed to realize that a formal church wedding would bring Matt full circle in both his faith and his future.

  Also, walking down that long impressive aisle as a bride would be so British royalty. Her parents were extremely open-minded about sex and religion except for the first one when it pertained to their baby daughter. So the open-minded Unitarians would sop up the traditions and her mother would sop up her hankie because every mother of an only daughter really wants her daughter to have a white-gown pomp-and-ceremony wedding day.

  A freeway had cut close to the cathedral, leveling the old Polish neighborhood. A statue of the New World’s Our Lady of Guadalupe in her vivid blue cloak gleamed amid all the gold-flecked Old World icons of Madonna and Child. This must have been where Matt’s parents had met, Temple thought, eyeing the tiers of flickering votive candles, although no one was talking about that.

  So Temple wasn’t surprised when they drove out into the suburbs to Uncle Stach and Aunt Wanda’s house, which was filled with Zabinskis large and small. Nothing marred the Thanksgiving-festive dinner, starting with barszcz, beet soup. The whole family enjoyed spelling out their consonant-heavy words for Temple’s benefit, and Krys was particularly articulate on intoning the full form of her name, K-r-y-s-t-y-n-a.

  Matt leaned near to tell Temple that Krys had used to “hate” her Old World name spelling.

  Every kind and color of kielbasa were available, sausages colored from beige to yam golden to oxblood red brown. Given the large contingent of cousins both older and younger than Matt, there were various meats from breaded pork to Americanized turkey with giblets and gravy, boiled potatoes and noodles and lots of cream and poppy seed pastries for dessert, along with wine.

  The long after-dinner recovery time showcased Krys’s slow burn at Temple’s easy adoption by her demanding family. She flirted furiously with Matt’s younger male cousins, of which he had enough to make up a new Fontana brothers gang. She drank way too much beer. And she declined driving home with them at 6 P.M., saying she was having too good a time. She would be along later. Maybe.

  “Krys,” Mira had rebuked her. Matt just smiled and escorted Mira and Temple out the front door.

  “She’s a big girl,” Matt told his mother on the way to the car.

  “I never knew she was so silly.”

  “She’s what … just past twenty, Mom? A good age to still be silly. Anyway, I thought the afternoon went well. Not the usual awkwardness about my decision.”

  “Or me,” Mira agreed.

  “We’re a triple threat,” Temple said, linking arms between them and thinking how odd it was that people would let their nearest and dearest become outcasts, to any degree.

  Then she thought how Max’s parents and aunt and uncle couldn’t handle his survival when his cousin Sean had been killed, driving Max away into the itinerant life of a magician-cum-counterterrorist at an age when he should have been entering college.

  Her own family had never “approved of” her move to Vegas with Max. Or of Max.

  As Matt installed his mother in the front seat, Temple claimed the back, then sat in the middle and leaned forward to chat with them both, relieved to have passed the not-Polish, not-Catholic test. Mira was as happy and relaxed as Temple had yet seen her. Maybe it was the two glasses of dinner wine.

  Krys and her glowering postadolescent pout had bonded them. All three were over and done with familial disapproval.

  They were still laughing and joking about the golonka, pork knuckles, Uncle Stach had teased Temple about refusing to eat when they entered the apartment.

  “Sit on the sofa,” Mira said. “I have some Madeira Krys didn’t know about, given to me by the restaurant long ago. I would like to make a private toast to the engaged couple.”

  Matt pulled Temple down beside him on the sofa for a not-so-quick kiss while his mother bustled away. He mouthed at Temple, “Mo-ther? A third glass of wine in one day? Ma-deir-a in her cupboard?” he whispered.

  Mira returned, three tiny cut-crystal stemmed glasses fanned expertly in one hand and the labeled bottle in the other. Breathlessly, she put the pieces on the coffee table and poured the rich amber liqueur, making the glass bowls into cut-topaz jewels.

  Matt kept his arm around Temple’s shoulders as Mira raised her glass. Temple’s toes curled in her shoes. Being “family” so fast felt amazing. She missed her own. Next.

  “To my wonderful son and the perfect partner he has foun
d for his new life. Na zdrowie.”

  Temple eyed Matt, who toasted her. “To your health.”

  “Na zdrowie,” Temple repeated with a lift of her glass, echoing the accent.

  “Perfect,” Mira said, beaming. “Like a Polish girl.”

  She rose to return the bottle to the kitchen. Matt’s mother apparently went light on alcohol, probably because of Effinger, Temple supposed.

  Mira had stopped in midpace.

  Matt noticed and looked beyond her. The wall phone in the kitchen was blinking red. “You have a message, Mom. It’s okay. Take it. Temple and I will just make out on the couch.”

  “Matt.” Mira turned on him in admonition, but she was blushing. “I won’t take it now and desert my guests.”

  Matt frowned. “Krys was pretty pi … perturbed. Better check.”

  Still Mira hesitated.

  Temple rolled her eyes at Matt. This might be the rebuffed swain calling. Mira didn’t want them to hear.

  “Just check it, Mom,” he said. “We’ll go into the dining room and page through the family album again, now that Temple has met so many of us.”

  They did as he suggested, keeping their voices hushed.

  “She’s in a horrible position, Matt,” Temple whispered. “The soap operas are all going off the air, but your mother, after trying to live as low-profile a life as possible for years, is cast by fate in a doozy, caught between two brothers.” Her eye fixed on a tall young guy early in the album. “Is that Uncle Stach? Life certainly was broadening for him.”

  “All that beer and sausage. Strange, I don’t care for the ethnic menu.”

  “You didn’t grow up on it.”

  “No,” he said, turning serious. “I never developed a taste for Polish conviviality.” He and his mom had always been on the fringe, awkward reminders of the family’s inability to deal with real life.

  A cry from the kitchen followed by something hitting the floor made them jump up in tandem, the album slapping shut on Uncle Stach and Aunt Wanda and their brood.

  It took only steps to reach Mira. She was standing stricken beside the telephone, the receiver dangling on its curlicued cord at her feet.

  Matt swooped on it and straightened, putting the receiver to his ear, then skewing it sideways so Temple could stand on her toes to hear the last bit of the message. A brusque cold male voice was saying …

  “—chop off his tail inch by inch.”

  Chapter 20

  Lefty Behind

  Ah, Sweet Home à la Obama.

  I am still in Chicago. I am still in stir.

  Beer tops pop again. Cigars reek. I peer squinty-eyed out the black mesh at the end of my carrier. The cigar smoke is rising up from the beer cans upon which the stogies are perched while my captors chow down.

  I must say that Chicago sausage is some of the most highly spiced and aromatic I have ever sniffed, no doubt because so many Poles, Germans, Czechs, and other Eastern European folks settled here.

  “What was that?” Shifty stirs and lowers a foot from the crate to the filthy floor. “Is that damn cat growling?”

  “Let it growl. We can always cut off its tongue.”

  Actually, it is my ungovernable stomach growling and if the boys get in a position to do my innards violence, it will already all be over for Midnight Louie.

  I have had enough of this nonsense.

  I know what I came to find out. Effinger died in Vegas with a certain valuable something or piece of knowledge in his possession and a year later it is still missing, yet so desired that the Vegas outfit, whoever they are, are digging into his past to locate its hiding place.

  Luckily, these boys have very little muscle tone and dumped my carrier with the zippered opening facing away from their cozy little campground. My paws punch the side where the zipper closes, forcing it open an inch or two. Then I lift my whiskered lips in “silent snarl” position and tilt my head so my right fang is bared and ready for action.

  It takes a few “casts,” as in fishing, but I am a master koi-snagger. I finally push the fang tip through that nice little hole on every zipper tag. No doubt it is for the ladies to put a gizmo through if they are seeking to do or undo a back zipper solo. Handy dudes are not always handy, you know.

  Now I jerk my head up in stages, easing the zipper open bit by bit. Yes, it is tedious work, but the cause of freedom can never be taken for granted.

  As my nose lifts higher and higher, the odors of sausage and cigar smoke engage in an almost unendurable duel in my olfactory senses. I crave the one and abhor the other and must also resist a strange urge to sneeze.…

  The carrier end finally falls away like a … sausage casing. After a last glance at my captors snoozing off after their stomach-stuffing feats, I spurt into the cavernous space filled with abandoned hulks of factory equipment casting massive shadows.

  Your ordinary hostage might be intimidated by the iron bars on the high windows and the small broken-down entrance on the far side of my captors.

  However, I have allies—or shills, if you will—everywhere, especially in down-and-dirty presumably empty places and locales.

  I climb a shaky tower of empty crates until a bit of daylight shows through the broken chicken-wire backed glass. Once elevated, I hiss softly through the bars an irresistible code word.

  Sssausssage. Fresssh Polissssh ssssausssage, kielbasa alive, alive-o.

  How sweet it is to have a native secret language. I do not wait for my troops to arrive, but scamper back down to the concrete floor, the crates now crashing and scattering from my uncontrolled weight and pace.

  The clatter brings Shifty and Lefty awake. They blink and look up, perhaps searching for Santa. I rocket right toward and under Shifty’s propped-up legs, slashing as I go.

  “Arghhh!” As he falls over sideways he reaches for a stabilizing crate, but they are all shaky. I see the comet of a falling lit cigar. “My eye!” he shouts. “It is burning. I am blinded.”

  Lefty swipes an arc of cheap beer at his pal’s face, leaving Shifty’s head dripping, one eye closed and the other blinking out beer.

  Meanwhile I jump onto a crate and get a sausage round down and rolling toward the entry point just as a flood of cats comes bounding through.

  “Rats!” Shifty cries, turning around to see with his one eye. “We are being attacked by rats.”

  Shifty has pulled the pocketknife from his pants.

  “That is all you have for a shiv?” Lefty demands. “It is not big enough to chop off a rat’s tail and now they are all coming for us.”

  I turn and make for the piled crates rimming the space, racing up them in plain sight. If you have both eyes.

  “That cursed cat,” Lefty yells. “Get him!”

  “Why bother?” Shifty yells back, quite rationally. Now that they have phoned in their threat, my well-being is moot.

  “He has stolen our sausages.”

  Enraged, Lefty charges toward the decrepit crating even as I dig in my taloned hind claws to dislodge a particularly large one with a great white shark’s jaw-worth of exposed four-inch sixteen-penny nails, all rusted and corroded and sharp as a giant serpent’s business fang.

  I kick it right into the oncoming would-be chopper.

  He trips on a shattered piece of crating, lifts his arms to protect himself from the handy cat’s version of a spiked Iron Maiden torture device closing on him, screams and flails into embracing the inevitable, and falls over forward right on it.

  Meanwhile, Shifty, stumbling madly to escape the “rats,” has knocked himself into a crate, spilling open beer cans and the second cigar, so his pant legs are now catching fire and his upper torso is beer-soaked.

  I turn. The chaos is complete. I eye the one untouched item, an island of calm integrity, sadly. My Miss Temple was so proud of her leopard-pattern carrier. Now it is mere salvage.

  The locals surround me.

  “You are the dude who cried ‘sausage’? What do you want for them?”

 
“They are all yours, boys and girls. All I need is to be pointed toward a ride to the near northwest side.”

  “You are not from around here. Which ward is your turf?”

  I doubt these homeless street types have ever shared a sofa with a human, much less a Las Vegas condo. And I do know Chicago is divided into political “wards.”

  “My line stems from Ma Barker of the Vegas turf.”

  Sagacious whiskery nods all round.

  “Yeah, but where do you reside here?” a lean and hungry yellow-stripe Tom asks.

  “The Palmer House Hilton Hotel.”

  Tommy shoots off his mouth. “You are not a Gold Coast Michigan Avenue swell, fella.”

  I nod at the abandoned carrier. “Eye my personal transport and weep. Never mind the ride advice. I will catch my own.”

  I stalk out onto the street, looking for the golden glint from a pimpmobile, preferably an Eldorado. That will get me to the nearest high-end lucrative corner for some set-upon hookers eager to help out a fellow street denizen, and then I can catch less glitzy transport. I tell you, lore has it half-right. A fur coat will always win over the ladies … especially if you are a dude in need wearing it.

  Vegas teaches a cool cat more ways of the world than Chicago ever thought of.

  Chapter 21

  Past Tax Due

  “Louie,” Temple intoned mournfully.

  And stared in a daze at the checkered tablecloth.

  They’d all sunk onto the kitchen table chairs as Matt had replayed the message, twice, stopping before the tail part. No one needed to hear that again.

  “The airport,” Temple said. “I wasn’t mistaken for a rich witch. It wasn’t an attempted jewel robbery. They were after Louie as a hostage. It’s all my fault. I didn’t think beyond what the security guard thought.”

  “Who did?” Matt’s warm hands squeezed her cold fists. “How would these creeps even know Midnight Louie was along?”

  “It’s my fault,” Mira said firmly. “It’s just that I was … am … so easily bulled when it comes to Clifford. I’ve wished so much for so long he had never existed, which is a sin, I know, Matt.” Her anxious glance skittered off his concerned expression.