Cat in a White Tie and Tails Read online

He’d started the car, when something hurtled atop the hood and pressed against the windshield, making him duck below the dashboard.

  A cautious peek revealed no Molotov cocktail, but … Louie? What the—? The resident black cat hadn’t gone a-traveling with the happy couple?

  Then he saw that the feline eyes glaring into his, utterly unafraid, weren’t green, but intensely gold.

  This cat was smaller and fluffier than Midnight Louie, but Temple had proved that size and delicacy were no issue, not even when recently tangling with a serial killer.

  The cat’s gaze was so hypnotically “trying to tell him something,” Max settled back behind the steering wheel and began to open the driver’s door to shoo it away.

  And started again at a figure bending down to the window. Opening it admitted a wave of Las Vegas heat.

  “Max Kinsella,” Electra Lark said. “Stop lurking out here in the bushes and come in for a glass of iced tea, or stronger. I haven’t seen you in far too long and I’m betting a quick tour of the premises might do your meandering memory some good.”

  “I was just—”

  “Watching over us, like that colony of stray cats that moved on but still visits. It’s always good to remember where you came from. Isn’t she a beauty?” Electra straightened to eye his new hood ornament. “I believe that’s Miss Midnight Louise, the ‘house’ cat at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. Not a stray. She’ll find where she wants to go.”

  Electra turned and headed toward the building’s rear glass door, her flip-flops slapping the hot asphalt like clapping hands. Max eased his frame out of the Beetle’s surprisingly roomy driver’s compartment. He eyed the black-marble-clad round building not unlike a bunker, except for the architectural frills.

  Electra’s hot pink–clad form—and there was plenty of it—was in perfect 1950s sync with the age of her building. Rock ’n’ roll, Cadillacs, and skinny black ties.

  She was right. It was good to remember where you’d come from. And he’d just now recalled the place had an attached Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel where Electra officiated as justice of the peace.

  Despite the view of the departing couple heading for places unknown, Max was not in a mood to dwell on forthcoming weddings.

  Chapter 3

  Las Vegas Leavings

  No one can say Midnight Louise was not there to see the Old Man off.

  “Off” is right. He is again subjecting his keen hearing to heights of thirty thousand feet, plus. I suppose it soothes the male ego to board some shiny silver missile-shaped object that punches through clouds at five hundred miles an hour.

  But clouds are merely cotton candy, and earth-bound troubles do not go away just because you do.

  I was pleased to see that Mr. Max Kinsella also found it wise to oversee the ill-conceived jaunt to Chicago. That man has instincts that would do a puma proud.

  Of course, they are a bit tarnished now. It is a sad day when my unexpected pounce would cause him to duck, but I made very sure that none of my exquisitely filed nails would scratch his vehicle’s finish.

  The velvet glove. That is my byword. Of course, one must maintain a set of stainless steel stilettos underneath it. My kind often plays five-card stud, so to speak, rotating “hands,” like changing out sets of brass knuckles in a fight.

  Right now I play the faithful companion, running to brush past Mr. Max’s pant legs into the Circle Ritz. I have always believed he is the one most likely to succeed at solving the schemes and scams that have woven webs around the Circle Ritz residents. Besides, a top ’tec can always use a savvy partner, whether he knows it or not.

  “This cat,” Miss Electra Lark notes, “looks like Midnight Louie’s smaller, fluffier younger sister.”

  She could have added “smarter” too, but I am not one to carp, unlike the resident cat in question, though I emit a gentle mew of reproval.

  “You seem to have a lot of black cats around the building,” Mr. Max says.

  Miss Electra notes his thick dark hair and winks. “Some of us are partial to black cats of all species.”

  After that they ignore me, so I am able to take the grand tour of my sire’s famous home turf. I can see why it is dear to both humans and felines. Since the outer design is round, each unit has an interior private hallway with a front door and a doorbell.

  I love doorbells, which are missing from all 1,200 doors at the Crystal Phoenix. I love using them for leaping practice so I can operate elevator floor panels. When the CEO of Midnight Investigations, Inc., assigned me to stake out Mr. Max’s house for so many nights, I practiced ringing the neighbor’s doorbells for exercise.

  How amusing it was when they answered and thought no one was there, even though I kept myself in plain sight.

  For Mr. Max this tour is a memory exercise. Miss Electra shows him into a couple of empty units and then we take the elevator down again. I am so tempted to show off my elevator button-punching skills, but realize it is best to keep my full powers concealed.

  She does take him past the main floor wedding chapel, silent and dim at the moment, yet eerie, because she has peopled the pews with soft sculpture figures. I leap up to drape the lap of Elvis Presley’s glitzy white pleather jumpsuit.

  Umm, warm and highly worthy of paw-pummeling.

  “Off of the King,” Miss Electra orders. “It is the queen cats may look at.”

  I always appear to obey in public, so I trail my human escorts back to the charming circular entry hall with its single hanging chandelier.

  In moments, Mr. Max and I are jerked from elegant interior to glaring sunlight on parking lot asphalt that duplicates what paves about half of American dirt.

  Here I am at a crossroads. I can continue to shadow Mr. Max’s butter-soft black leather loafers or I can go about my own business, which is always, of course, since I am a sleuth, someone else’s.

  So do I catch a lift in the silly clown car Mr. Max uses to keep a low profile now? That is a smart move undercover-wise but not what you would call a sweet ride. It does not soothe the savage soul when I know the old man has been hitching rides in limos lately. He is getting soft and could use a showing up, and I am the gal to do it.

  Time to investigate on my own.

  With that in mind I do a uey and head for the street, perking my ears for the unmistakable shake, rattle, and roar of a UPS truck. They are the unofficial public transportation for the more adventurous of my kind.

  They make a lot of stops, their doors are always open, the drivers are always filling out papers and thus able to be slipped past, and they are loaded with nice bulky items to hide behind.

  Of course, the drivers’ routes are limited and the savvy hitchhiker must know when to forsake one chauffeur for another working nearer her goal.

  In less than three “transfers,” I am on the Las Vegas Strip, a mere mile or so from my destination. Yet one mile of hoofing it in the hot sun, to a four-footed individual with a three-inch stride like me, is like going for a six-mile hike were I a two-footed person with a fifteen-inch stride.

  I am also not about to lose time zigzag-stitching my way through air-conditioned hotels. Taking a rest in the shade of a Stripside bush at the Paris Hotel, I plot the next leg of my journey. I rarely show myself on the Strip. It causes unwanted comment and I also am in danger of being captured and possibly killed for my “own good.” It is, as the cliché makes clear, a jungle out here.

  Like my old man says, “Kits, do not try solo roaming if you live safe at home and consider a stroll to the litter box a taxing trek. We at Midnight Investigations, Inc., are Vegas veterans and professionals at eluding traffic and tourists and sunstroke.”

  Right now I am goggle-eyed at passing the parade of portable three-card monte games of chance; mimes; rap artists and tap, break, and ballet dancers; street musicians and magicians; men on stilts; women on Rollerblades and cops on patrol.

  You would think the acts from Circus Circus Hotel and Casino up the Strip had gone on strike and taken their ski
lls to the street. I must keep my tender toes dodging the emphatic stomps of tap shoes and toe shoes and clown shoes and sports shoes.

  An endless drone of song and spiel drifts down to my level. My ears are unfortunately geared to pick up every sound, not drown them out. What is going on here? Then I realize this streetside show is not a special event, but a new curse brought on by today’s Las Vegas, which suffers the lowest house values and highest job losses in the nation.

  These bustling and hustling theatrical folk are all fancy panhandlers. Begging is against the law on most city streets, so they “perform” for their supper while the beat cops in their beige Bermuda shorts try to please the big venues and avoid irritating the tourists by moving the impromptu show folks along.

  I have been known to cadge a meal, or three, a day. Then I won my slot as the Crystal Phoenix house detective, not to mention the services of the hotel’s devoted Asian chef, who has an award-winning hand with what is called the “fruits of the sea” on the best menus in town.

  This keeps me far away from the giant fish tank in the lobby of the Mirage, and most of those fish are really too big to consider prey instead of predator. The Mirage is not about to spotlight sardines and anchovies, except on menus or at sushi bars. However, when you are talking about the latest 3-D movie spectacular, that is where you will find me rapt and gazing at the big screen.

  For now, though, I stare at the endless passing parade of street performers, which stops frequently to bilk the tourists of a buck or two. This is a job even my senior partner’s Miss Temple could not manage. The hotels wish these colorful pests to be gone so all the dollars will flow into their own expensively housed coffers. Yet, to be seen hustling away folks likely hurt by the international wave of economic woes … is bad for business. So, for once, the powers-that-be in Las Vegas face a lose–lose situation, when it is always win–win in their casinos.

  However, I am on a mission to foil a possibly international gang of robbers, killers, and bad actors far beyond what these sidewalk performers can manage. How will I make my smooth and swift way through such a milling crowd without losing toes to the crush?

  Then I notice a new sight on ye olde Boulevard. Human heads skating along a full foot above the rest. The motion is too steady, and too slow, to come from any sort of skateboard.

  I use my claws to ratchet up the nearest palm tree trunk, a tough, rough climb.

  At that height, I spot a group of people who are rolling along together on a bicycle built for one, meaning it is not a bicycle. They are instead sailing forward while standing still on two fat wheels at either side of their lazy feet. Their hands curl pawlike around a very short handlebar.

  The sight is enough to make a cat laugh. They all look so straight and solemn that boulevard strollers stop and turn, and make way for them. That is what I need! A royal escort service.

  I immediately recognize a fad at work, the so-called Segway. Sadly, the rolling platform is only big enough for two admittedly flat feet. Once again we four-foots have been blatantly discriminated against.

  While I fret at the injustice of it all, the leader of the Segway easy riders announces passing landmarks on the tour.

  My goal is only three massive properties farther along the Strip. I twitch my whiskers in indecision, rejecting hitching a ride on the wheels’ skimpy metal fenders that offer no purchase for claws.

  I am lithe and supple compared to my middle-aging deadbeat dad, but even a slip of a thing like me recognizes when there is no room at the inn.

  The wheeled group sweeps on by, my opportunity gliding away with them.

  Then I see what brings up the end of the Segway parade … a three-wheeled version for oldsters, wisely including a metal basket attached to the rear. With a leap and a bound I am in the last basket passing. I cannot claim this is a discreet or comfy mode of travel, but it is easy on the footpads.

  My driver is a white-tufted snowbird in Bermuda shorts the better to showcase stilt-thin yet hairy legs. Ugh. Not an enticing sight, all that naked pink skin turning lobster red between the occasional whiskerette.

  Speaking of whiskers, I cannot keep my long and delicate vibrissae from tickling the codger in the calves.

  That sounds like a new nursery rhyme, “The codger in the calves.”

  This sight must have struck the milling pedestrians as amusing as well. Perhaps my hitching a ride has entertained the masses too. They begin twittering and pointing. When I say “twittering,” I mean it in the old-fashioned sense, but the raised cell phone cameras mean they are also “tweeting” photos of my impressive forward motion, as they say in covering football games on TV.

  I am thankful my old man uses antique investigation methods that will keep him from swiping, and then “swiping” Miss Temple’s cell phone. It is possible I may end up on YouTube, the first in the family to go viral.

  That would really frost the old dude’s white whiskers. He is the sort who aims at being the only viral feline entity in Las Vegas.

  Meanwhile, my Ride of Fame continues. My unintended chauffeur beams and doffs his plaid fishing cap with one hand, taking a bow. He simultaneously rubs his tickled calves on the basket grid while I offer pointed warnings by boxing his ankles with my famous Front Four defense, to continue the football analogy.

  Whole lines of people on foot are stopping to stare and laugh. Dollar bills are showering over me and into my basket. I am about to turn to take a bow when my oblivious chauffeur, his head so turned by the attention, loses all concentration. His three-wheeled chariot runs straight into a palm tree trunk.

  Whomp.

  I had not anticipated such an abrupt stop and could clearly claim whiplash, but that would be fraud. In one fluid motion I do a triple back-twist out of the basket onto the sidewalk, landing on my tippy toes, to much applause and further media commemoration. This will outdo my unadmitted sire’s recent local TV news caper finding the bodiless, booted feet in the dried-up bed portion of Lake Mead.

  Several walkers rush to push the old fellow back onto the sidewalk and applaud as, like the Mississippi, he just keeps rolling along.

  They then start looking around for me. Not a chance. Unlike Daddy dearest, I know when to duck the spotlight. My loyal audience assumes the worst, that I have fled to nurse my injuries. Cries of “poor kitty” grow faint in my wake as I work my way through the low landscaping under the Boulevard palms.

  “Poor kitty” is right where she wants to be. I have it made in the shade once I thread through the leafy underbrush, past a lot of milling and sniffy sneakers and into the dim, ice-palace air-conditioning of my destination.

  Gangsters is a boutique hotel. “Boutique” is one of those fancy French words my senior, very senior, partner likes to toss off in front of certain purebred females he is always striving, in vain, to impress. It means “small and expensive.”

  In Las Vegas, it means short-storied and off-Strip. Still, a very snappy neon sign of a fedora and a gun barrel set the theme atop the nine stories.

  I am not expensive, but I am small, and black like my old man, so moving around Vegas in the dark and indoors, which is almost always dark, is no trick. I head inside for the signature “fine dining experience” on the premises, which is not the kicky vintage carousel bar on the lower level, but a new top-of-the-tower eatery called Godfather’s.

  Yes, this is an ultra-macho venue. You will find no restaurant named Godmother’s here. In fact, I think us Vegas girls of various species should get together and back a female-friendly hotel-casino called Chicklets. I nominate our friend Van von Rhine, lady Exec of the Crystal Phoenix Hotel, as chairman of the board.

  Anyway, you work with the hand you are dealt, and my particular ace in the hole at the moment is one large black cat-dude more interested in expanding his waistline than building his sphere of influence. He makes the senior partner of Midnight Investigations, Inc., look junior.

  First I have to weave through a lot of waxed legs and spit-shined evening loafers to the rotati
ng restaurant ring with the window views of neon and natural sunsets. It might be impressive to tourists, but I usually have a floorside view.

  I meander unseen among the seated lower limbs. How can fashionable femmes walk on these curved, rocking chair platforms and stiletto heels that make Miss Temple Barr’s shoe fetish look like a low-end lace-up sneaker sort of love?

  The super-stiletto-shod stars can barely totter to David Letterman’s sofa to make knee-crossing a revelatory art on the scale of the now-common “wardrobe malfunction.” But here their footwear fans are now, courting bunions and surgery en masse.

  All I will consent to nowadays is a discreet pedicure on an upholstered piece of overstuffed hotel furniture. I feel the Crystal Phoenix owes me that much for my services as unofficial house detective. I assiduously avoid leather as a nail-filing system, understanding that such furniture there is often high-design Italian and that my appropriating it as a scratching post would be courting extreme annoyance from the ruling Fontana family dynasty.

  Meanwhile, here at the lower end of the franchise, Gangsters, I nimbly either avoid or blend in with the black-trouser-clad male and female waitstaff as I wend from table to table.

  By the way, the word “waitstaff” is another favorite annoyance of mine. In the fever to eliminate the sexist terms “waiters” and “waitresses,” human society has come up with another nonsense word on the scale of “brillig.” Even Alice in Wonderland would be loath to “eat” and “drink” the many interesting concoctions of her expedition if they were presented by people called “waitstaff.” That always reminds me of a wizard standing by with a big stick.

  Even as I muse, I blunder into sudden impact with a large furry lump like a muff dropped at a lady’s feet.

  “Get your own table brushings,” a voice grumbles.

  “You are the table brushing I am seeking.” I have finally tracked down my clan’s patriarch, Three O’Clock Louie.

  “This is an order of New York steak I am staking out,” he says. “It is due hot and sizzling any minute now. Scram.”