Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Read online

  “Those feral cats! They pack and attack like dogs. I’ve seen them hunting that way in the barrios of the major South American cities, more so than in the U.S. You saw it. Your girlfriend’s housecat can don the ‘mask’ of a carnivore and the cloak of darkness and be as feral as a black panther. And if you want to see my scars, you’ll pay dearly for the privilege.”

  Strong emotion had pinked her marked cheek, her small, strong body had tensed even more, and Max felt it, the adjacency, the intimacy, the mind’s-eye photographic still of them lying almost side-by-side and, more than a memory, a feral desire to embrace heat and danger and sin and maybe even death.

  “Your three a.m. shrink,” Max said to change the subject, the emotional rush, ASAP. “He said you were cat-track free.”

  She frowned, distracted. “So that’s what he was up to that night? Trying to see my backside without committing a mortal sin?” Her small cascade of laughter startled Max as much as a machine gun spray of bullets, but he kept still. “Father Straight-and-Narrow broke a sweat going undercover, all right. My God, he’d almost got me to admitting there had been some good priests, but he had to ruin it by going off and leaving. All men are alike.”

  Max found himself smiling along with her, mentally clinging to the fact she was a psychopath made not born, but still a psychopath. Going off and leaving her was a cardinal sin in her mind.

  Kathleen shifted her seat to the recline position so abruptly that Max jerked upright by reflex, every muscle tensed.

  “Relax, Max,” she purred, turning her face so close to his he smelled the lemon from the Atlantic cod on the dinner menu. “We’re going home, to where ‘our hearts have ever been’. Or, rather, to where our young hopes have been left dead and buried, like Danny Boy’s abandoned love. You think you hold my daughter’s name and location hostage. I certainly hold your sainted cousin Sean’s location hostage. All these years, and kin still separates us, and joins us. I’ll take you home as no set of ruby red slippers could, not even on the munchkin feet of Temple Barr.”

  He leaned back and tilted the hat brim lower over his eyes, done with jousting. “Where do you wish to go first, my wild Irish rose? To meet my lost kin or your own?”

  “To Hell, where Jack the Ripper claimed he was from.”

  “Fair enough,” Max said. And yawned.

  He knew the next step now.

  He hoped those he’d left behind in Vegas were making the right moves too.

  16

  Off, Off and Away

  “This certainly is a…squat…main terminal,” Matt said.

  He turned in the car’s passenger seat to view Minneapolis-St. Paul airport through the rent-a-Ford’s rear window. Temple kept her eyes on the road as she drove around continually curving exit lanes.

  “Don’t look back,” Temple said. “And I’m pleased you’re not nervous with me driving.”

  “Why should I be? Glad we got some sleep on the flight, though. Even you, who doesn’t work nights.”

  Temple swallowed an urge to lie and over-explain why she’d been shy of sleep the night before. In daylight, that midnight Araby Motel expedition with Electra looked even more loopy than it had at the time.

  Matt turned to face front and the passing freeway flora. “I like the coolness, but it sure is hairy here, like in Chicago.”

  He was right. Minnesota greenery was aggressive. Temple had forgotten that after living a couple years in a desert community like Las Vegas. Still, she was pleased. Most guys, even the best of them, had trouble relinquishing the steering wheel to a mere girl. Her brothers had been the worst at that.

  “Don’t diss the terminal, Chicago boy,” Temple said. “My mother was an extra there when they filmed Airport.”

  “Airport?” Matt repeated.

  Temple sighed. Airport, yes, the major motion picture of 1970. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had gone crazy at being the film’s site. For Temple’s mom, it was the highlight of her college life. One day she’d spent the afternoon hours until dawn “milling” left and right in the main concourse area, depending on whether her birth date was an odd or even year. Repeated examinations of the final film’s stopped frames had revealed no glimpse of her telltale fire-engine-red hair.

  “Being an extra sounds hard on the feet,” Matt said after Temple explained.

  “My mom felt no pain. She glimpsed star Burt Lancaster and even saw a scene-stealing cameo by the ‘First Lady of the American Theater’, Helen Hayes.” Temple cranked the steering wheel hard left as they glided under an underpass. “That terminal has been built onto since then. Back in that day it was considered ultramodern and exciting.”

  Matt shook his head and faced forward. “All this greenery seems claustrophobic after doing time in Las Vegas.”

  “It is pretty hairy around here.” Temple grinned as she spurted the rental car into the pulsing westward traffic flow.

  “Do you mean ‘hairy’ as in masses of flowing leaves or scary ‘hairy’ as in what meeting your extended family will be like for me?”

  “Both.” She spared him a glance from the crowded lanes. “Don’t worry. Your blond coloring will fit right in with all the Swedes and Norskys in Minnesota.”

  “Your brothers too?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Where did your red hair come in?”

  “Must be some Scots-Irish in the mix.” Temple smiled. “You don’t look too edgy for a prospective son-in-law. We’re on the Interstate and you’re still not nervous about me driving.”

  “Why should I be nervous or driving? You know the terrain, and I don’t.”

  “You’re just too logical for the average guy. I love it, but I warn you that logic won’t work with the Barr family Front Four.”

  “Your…brothers,” Matt guessed. “I know they’re all older, but why do you call them the Front Four?”

  “Football nuts.” Temple sighed. “Then they go to lakes and do horrible things to innocent fish. Even in the dead of winter. They’ve been teasing me since I was born and haven’t stopped yet.” Temple recalled the joke emails from her brothers popping up occasionally on her cell phone. She knew they missed her, but, being boys, didn’t dare admit it.

  “So you escaped.”

  Temple nodded, not taking her eyes off the road. “It was all ‘harmless’ stuff, but I was grown, moved out, and on my second great job before I left the Twin Cities, and I still never was able to shed their ‘Little Sister’ attitude. Their really little sister.” She made a face.

  “So you’re more nervous than I am about what our reception will be?”

  “You shouldn’t worry. Mom’s on our side. Or yours, rather. And Dad’s automatically for anyone who is not tall, dark, and Max.”

  “Max isn’t so bad.”

  “You say that?”

  Matt shrugged. “Your dad only met me once in passing. How do I get a free pass?”

  “He knows Mom watches The Amanda Show, and will probably run off with you if I don’t.”

  Matt laughed. “I had no idea of the kind of pressure I escaped by being a blissfully ignorant of family matters during my sixteen years as a seminarian and priest.”

  “Or you escaped by not meeting my whole family until now.”

  “That Vegas hit-and-run dinner did its job in making me a ‘better than’ instead of an ‘also-ran’. Apparently the great and powerful Max Kinsella didn’t score too high with your parents and brothers.”

  “Putting it mildly.”

  Matt turned his head to view the neighborhood and hide a grin. Temple knew Matt, her Current and Committed, would always want to one-up Max, her Ex and…Exiled.

  It was surreal to wonder if Max was in Ireland dodging stalker Kathleen O’Connor while she and Matt made a Romcom movie-like journey to her parents’ home to pave the way for their wedding.

  “Pleasant neighborhood,” Matt commented.

  Surprised, Temple surveyed the long and low sixties split-level homes that had always seemed bland to
her as they glided past. “Compared to the close-packed two-story, nineteen-twenties brick two-flats your Chicago relatives live in, this is Super Suburbia,” she agreed.

  Seen with new eyes, the expansive lawns were gently rolling and as green as envy. In fact, Minnesota’s lush emerald lawns were a prize asset. What a pain to mow all summer long! Temple wondered if her brothers helped Dad out these days, even though they were all married with children and lawns of their own to mow.

  Oh, God. Children. She hoped that topic would not come up when her many nephews showed up tomorrow for Sunday dinner. Too much too soon.

  A familiar string of brass numbers on a wrought-iron lamppost by the curb had her turning into the driveway in front of a two-car garage. Concrete stairs flanked by yew trees were now hosting a stream of large, looming, descending adults.

  “The big question is,” Temple said, popping the trunk lid, tightening the combs on her zebra-print pillbox hat, and leaning in to give Matt a last, private comment as five tall male shadows surrounded the car.

  “What sleeping arrangements will they assign us?”

  17

  The Midnight Louie Boogie

  Now that the lovebirds are hundreds of miles out of my way, I can thoroughly investigate the midnight incident of slot machine madness without fear of my Miss Temple showing up.

  Luckily, as night falls and maybe even knocks itself out, I find Miss Midnight Louise at the nearby police substation where Ma Barker’s clowder is based.

  “Why are you sticking so close?” I ask.

  “I fear,” she says, “we need to investigate the underground gambling hell from which those antiquated slot machines were imported and exported in a matter of only hours last night.”

  “Maybe you have hit on it, Louise. We witnessed some sort of traffic in antique gaming machines.”

  “Whatever was going on is crazy,” she concludes.

  I cannot disagree, so we trot the few blocks to the old building and slip through the broken slat in the padlocked rear basement doors that allowed the slot machines in and out hours ago. It is hard to imagine the stomp of work boots up from the dark regions below on these deteriorated stairs, but is maybe why they are in such bad shape. The slot-machine parties have been held here before.

  The night is ours, in its customary still, dark condition. This is when we creatures of darkness—bats, cats, rats, owls and opossums—come forth to explore. Or hunt.

  I must admit that my long domestic routine with Miss Temple Barr has made me a bit weary in the middle of the night. Since both of her suitors had night jobs, we all had to stay on the same page, as they say, and retire in the wee hours.

  I let Miss Midnight Louise lead on our path down into the lower depths, now that the slot machines have been returned to the obscurity they had so long ago earned.

  We slink down the shambling stairs at the building’s rear, step by step, stealthy pad by stealthy pad. We are a moving whisper in the night. Unseen and unthought of.

  Such lesser lights as Punch and Katt and the moneyman Leon Nemo would never linger here, with dawn only an hour away.

  Yet the very ebb of night is prime time for our kind. Louise pauses to let me lead now. Earlier, I explored the slot-machine-spewing basement briefly, and noted that many locked storage rooms line the space. I had assumed the most recent residents, antique mall purveyors, each had possessed a basement storage facility. I had not realized that vintage Las Vegas slot machines would be a major collectable.

  Three steps down, Louise puts her chin on my shoulder and curls her shivs into my manly flank. Such an affectionate pose is highly unlikely from her. I detect a subtle shiver of anxiety. “Louie. I sense something is not right.”

  She almost always calls me some scathing derivation of “Pop” or “Dad”.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I do not think we are alone down here.”

  “Of course we are not alone. There are random rats and mice eating away at any of the storage room contents that are edible. Or not.”

  “Hmm,” says Louise, “perhaps we could eat away at the rats and mice.”

  She cannot fool me. She is totally addicted to the Asian sushi offerings of Chef Song at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. I am the Great Black Hunter, who once subsisted and feasted on the chef’s prized koi pond residents. Now I am planet friendly. I dine on kibble and people food, which is getting more politically correct by the month. Soon I will be surviving on moth and marigold.

  Still, my whiskers tremble to a waft of insubstantial air, the mere murmur of other times and other faces. Karma is not the only feline phenomenon who can channel past hauntings.

  My ears pick up a tinny, fragile sound. Am I hearing the circular shimmy of an old record spinning on an antique gramophone?

  My shivs begin to twitch in an intoxicating rhythm. My pads begin to tap dance down the stairs.

  Have you seen some of those Disney cartoons from the thirties, where every character from Goofy to Mickey Mouse steps to a syncopating beat? It is like I am back in one of my À la Cat commercials, with the Fontana brothers in their zoot-suited sartorial rainbow backing me up. Me, the hep black cat leading the jazz-baby, swing-time parade.

  I am looking around, and my trusty night vision is broadcasting in black-and-white.

  Hi-de ho.

  Thirties nightclub and film black entertainer Cab Calloway is swinging out in his pale zoot suit and pancake hat, singing “Minnie the Moocher”.

  That was caught on film. This is Vegas, baby. where the ghosts go to jive. I spot Josephine Baker, the black Venus of Paris, as long and loose and lovely as an exiled black American performer on the Continent has ever been. She has the liquid moves of the Black Ninja Brigade in Ma Barker’s clowder.

  Here she is again, in a magic basement, conjuring thoughts of Count Basie, bein’ told by the Strip hotels black folks cannot come into Miss Josephine’s Vegas show. So she sits on the stage doin’ nothing. Hi-de-ho. Us black cats rush the aisles when we are finally let in. Then she cuts loose.

  So do I. I spin Louise into a ragtime do-si-do. And the faster we spin, the more we see of the phantom basement and its ghostly cavalcade amid cries of “Go, voodoo daddy”!

  I am watching the film clips from a black-and-white forties’ film, Hellzapoppin featuring black performers doing a heckuva lotta jazztime, swingtime, and lindy hopping. These folks are as fluid in motion as my kind is. They are doing back flips, under twists, every spine-bending, mind-bending move we black cats can make.

  All the dancers are dressed in old-fashioned service roles uniforms of that era, frilly white maids’ aprons and caps over black uniforms, and as white-capped and white-clad cooks and nurses, white-coated waiters and train conductors, or jumpsuit-capped service uniforms all wearin’ black-and-white spectator shoes and bobby sox. Everybody, every hep cat who has got rhythm is mopping up the floor with more moves than even a movie camera can record. It is past the birth of jazz and swing, it is an infectious sound and beat and joy of breakin’ out of an uptight time.

  I am doin’ a rear-leg risin’ solo, swinging Louise around by her fast-tappin’ tail and the whole place is jumpin’ with jive.

  The quick-timing feet in their bobby sox and shoes retreat to the edges, the lines of storage units padlocked shut, to leave Louise and me doing our spotlight solo.

  I am five again, doin’ jive again, serenading the ladies from the backyard fence with Hi-de-ho. I make a classic cool daddy-o with a cat-chain down to my ankles. I am the cat’s pajamas with a harem of crazy little mamas.

  “The lyrics are politically incorrect, Daddy-o, but I did not know you could cut a rug,” Louise says, turning a tight circle on her tippy toes. “You are the RKO-radio Daddy-o.”

  I know this is a dream, or a hallucination, but it seems all the pent-up, long-gone pizzazz in Vegas’s secret past has survived in this old building and its basement.

  And then everything unwinds to slow motion, and the movie folk dances slow until they are
almost at a standstill, like a photographic still.

  And in the still, still of the night, I hear the “Memphis Cat” Himself, wailing out “Heartbreak Hotel” like he did it his first time in Vegas at the New Frontier Hotel.

  I see Elvis in his prime. Nineteen fifty-six. A black-and-white figure from an era photographed in black-and-white.

  I see the storage lockers as cells, and Elvis sliding down a fireman’s pole and rocking out like a crazy-limbed Siamese in mating season.

  “Look, Louise,” I say. “The King is here.”

  “Kitty Kong?” she asks, looking around for the rumored King of Cats. But she cannot see Elvis. Only I can.

  This is not the first time I have seen Elvis in Vegas. He and I go back a long way, thanks to my nine lives. He knows I will keep quiet about his ghostly gigs. He knows I pick up and amplify his vibe. And now he is the absentee star of a new Vegas attraction. The Elvis Experience offers Graceland artifacts, theater shows…and the obligatory wedding chapel.

  Poor Miss Electra is getting a lot of competition. I hope she will be allowed to keep her soft sculpture tribute to Elvis in her Lovers’ Knot wedding chapel pew. He has the best lap of the lot and likes the company.

  The EE is Everything Elvis, but no Elvis tribute performers need apply. It opened April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday, I happen to know, thanks to Ingram—at Westgate Las Vegas. The Westgate was previously the Las Vegas Hilton and earlier the International when Elvis performed there. Many of the current staff knew Elvis, including an eighty-two-year-old cocktail waitress who worked during Elvis’s first show there. I find it amusing that Elvis will be occupying 28,000 square feet of the former Star Trek: The Exhibit attraction. Perhaps Elvis will transport in some night and we can boogie.

  Back in the fifties, Elvis bombed with the New Frontier’s audience of Midwestern married couples more into Lawrence Welk than the Memphis Cat. But that is all right, mama, that is all right with me. We hep cats are accustomed to being misunderstood by unenlighted generations before and after us. He came back and owned the town.