Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Read online

  “You need backup?” Ma’s harsh voice asks behind me.

  “Not hardly.” I yowl. I rake my claws into the nearest oleander trunk for a dose of poison. I am already halfway to the leaning palm tree that is my ladder to our balcony.

  I am twenty pounds—give or take sixteen ounces here and there—of snarling defensive fury. If my dereliction of duty tonight causes one glorious red-gold hair on my Miss Temple’s head to acquire a split end, somebody’s epidermis is getting a bone-deep massage.

  I am up the palm tree’s rough trunk like a Singer sewing machine set on “Gather”. I bound to the railing, then to the balcony floor, and shoulder the door wide open. It hits the wall loud enough to wake Miss Temple and cause a thumping and shrieking in the bedroom. I hesitate momentarily.

  Ma is right, human bedroom activities can be…er, confusing to those of our persuasion. Has Mr. Matt come home early from his Midnight Hour radio gig and paid an amorous visit, despite past restraint? Is this assault or ecstasy? I am sure humans ask the same thing of my own kind’s activities of that nature.

  Yet this is no time for inter-species sensibilities to hold me back. With a banshee battle cry (or one of my own courtship wails) I charge into the darkened bedroom.

  2

  Off-Guard

  Temple awoke to a ray of light streaking across her vaulted bedroom ceiling.

  Then something like the weight of a dead body fell crosswise onto her bed, pinning her hundred pounds to the mat. Uh, to the mattress.

  Was this a nightmare? Was she really awake?

  Her heart went into a chorus line of rapid-fire beating, and not because of a welcome but unprecedented surprise post-midnight visit from her fiancé Matt Devine.

  A glimpse of the red LED letters on her bedside clock showed 2:15 a.m., too early for Matt to be home from work. So…

  Not. A. Dream.

  She screamed, bucking and kicking to free any and all limbs. At least the dead weight wasn’t a “corpse”. It jammed an elbow into her side, gave a basso groan, and thrashed across the covers to leave the bed. A California king-size mattress offered a lot of wallowing, mushy territory to leave.

  Apparently the invading big lug hadn’t expected a super-long bed and had tripped. Some klutzy cat burglar he was.

  Temple’s cries of “Help, fire!” echoed from the ceiling while her churning legs pushed her upright against the upholstered headboard, where Midnight Louie perched atop the tufted-linen, cussing out the intruder. Their combined outraged yowls passed through the—what? Open? How?—French doors to pierce the night silence.

  Louie’s infuriated lethal weapon—tail switches—slapped Temple across the face as she lunged for the only defensive weapon available on the bedside table…her red plastic phone shaped like a high-heeled shoe. At least she’d had practice swinging a spike heel like a bludgeon in the past…

  Meanwhile, the burglar’s flashlight had fallen onto the bed, casting a narrow beam at no one and nothing.

  Someone was in the hall, pounding on her front door.

  “Temple, Temple!” Electra Lark, the landlady, shouted while brutalizing the metal lock with frantic scrapes of her passkey.

  Temple sensed out-of-place arrangements in her usual nighttime landscape, the most obvious being the large, moving shadow of a man far from dead through the open door to the balcony. Beside her, Louie’s bristled tail gave her one last kisser swipe as he jumped to the mattress foot ready to spring atop the intruder’s vanishing shoulders.

  “Louie, Louie!” Temple hollered in counterpoint to Electra’s screams of, “Temple, Temple!”

  If the invader had not known the names of the occupant and purported pet by then, he sure did now. At least “Louie” sounded like a resident (and presumably formidable) male instead of only being the resident male…cat.

  “He’s getting away!” Temple shouted to whoever might hear or care. She hoped the light illuminating her ceiling was on a police cruiser already arrived outside, although it was not the carousel of flashing red and true blue she’d welcome.

  The escaping man growled a dirty word even Midnight Louie’s full-range of feline invective couldn’t match, and shrugged off the cat’s pounce. Temple had clawed her way to the bed’s foot by then, hoping to cushion Louie’s fall. Silly her. She spotted the reflective greens of his eyes already atop the bureau near the open balcony door.

  The departing shadow met a like form swinging down from above like Spider-Man. Then the two figures blended into one.

  By then, Electra had managed a panting entrance and turned on the living room lights. “I have a gun,” she shouted, rather shocking coming from a plump older lady in a pineapple-patterned muumuu. “Temple! Which one should I shoot?”

  The landlady’s breathless threat alarmed Temple more than it did the two men. From the heavy breathing and scuffling sounds on the small triangular balcony, the women were hearing a serious fist fight. “Shoot nobody, Electra,” Temple said. “We have the intruder on the run.”

  Electra’s wide, bright flashlight beam grew to spotlight the men dwarfing the open doorway and rocking the terra cotta pots. Then one ducked unexpectedly. The other catapulted over his bent back…and the railing, to fall onto the parking lot one story below with a raw cry of pain. Electra reached Temple, her big, square flashlight trained on the last man standing…on the balcony, at least.

  “Max,” Electra mouthed with the tiniest breath of surprise. And hope.

  “No. Matt!” Temple said, just as surprised. She ran to him. “How did you know I was being home-invaded? Did he hurt you? Are your stitches all right?”

  “I think you should ask if I hurt him.” Matt clasped her in a bare-chested embrace, so romance-novel coverlike she was inclined to swoon instead of follow her first instinct, which had been to throw plant pots down on the vanquished intruder. She settled for leaning over the edge in Matt’s firm custody to view the perp.

  A shambling black form was up and loping apelike to the shrubbery edging the parking lot, right into the oleander hedges. Screams and curses ensued, along with yowls and curses. This was a feeding station for the Las Vegas Cat Pack, not a one of them declawed, and they deeply and effectively resented trespassers.

  That left the deserted couple in the full beam of Electra’s flashlight, clinging breathlessly and asking if each other was all right.

  “Golly, kids,” Electra said. “That was scary.”

  Matt frowned. “Not as scary as the sight of a presumably loaded gun aimed at us.”

  “Um, oh. Sorry.” Electra lowered the flashlight beam, then the gun barrel. “Sure it’s loaded. It’s for protection. You two better get away from the window. I’m going to drop off the hardware at my penthouse and then go downstairs to call the police. A squad car can at least check the lot.” She headed through the unit door into the hall.

  “The intruder is gone,” Temple called after her. “And probably marked for life,” she muttered. “Those oleanders are crawling with feral cats.”

  Matt stepped inside to get them out of the public view, if any public other than alley cats lurked to view them.

  Midnight Louie meowed indignantly from the floor, stalking inside before Matt swept the French doors closed and locked them. The cat jumped atop the bureau to wash his jet-black gloves.

  “I think we were more alarmed than Electra.” Matt pulled Temple close again. “When I realized the screams were coming from your room—”

  She allowed herself a delicate shiver as he pulled her down beside him on the living room sofa. “I glimpsed the clock when the intruder pounced, but didn’t think you were home yet.”

  “Left early and made good time. I should have checked in with you, but didn’t want to wake you.”

  “You should have.” Temple burrowed into his arms. “I didn’t know you slept topless,” she said, “or I would have been upstairs to wake you.”

  “That’s a big problem and we’ve got to put a stop to it,” Matt answered.

  �
��You sleeping topless or my not knowing that?”

  “Both.”

  “You can easily get rid of these martial arts bottoms,” Temple said, toying with the waist string. “I’m so impressed by my Tarzan, swooping down to rescue me.”

  They were snuggling on her sofa like sleepover teenagers, both too revved to go back to sleep. Midnight Louie stalked away to make periodic prowls from the bedroom to the office bathroom where his always-open escape hatch window was, yowling at anything possibly still lurking in the darkness outside.

  “I woke up hearing you screaming,” Matt said, “and I could have scaled the Paris Hotel Eiffel Tower to get to you.”

  “So…you’re more King Kong than Tarzan?”

  “Don’t joke, Temple. You must have been terrified.”

  “Too scared to be terrified. I turned into the Little Engine That Went into Overdrive. I screamed, I kicked, I clawed, but I think the guy was as startled as I was. He seemed to be struggling to get away from me as much as I was intent on eluding him. Then Louie came flying, all claws so not in, and they are like Ginsu knives…then Electra was at the door shouting, pounding, and scraping her key in the lock.

  “Bottom line”—she pulled the waist strings again—“I think he was a burglar, not a rapist.”

  “I’m serious.” Matt quieted her teasing fingers. “I don’t know what that intruder was after, but it’s crazy for us to be apart nights at this stage, even if I have night-owl work hours. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m telling Tony Valentine to amp up negotiations with the TV talk show people in Chicago. We’re either going to relocate or get more secure quarters here.”

  “Telling your agent to call Chicago? Matt, that’s wonderful.” Temple sat up, recharged. “I’ve hated that you put off your career opportunity trying to protect me from Kathleen O’Connor. If you’d asked me, I’d have said let her eat eggroll.”

  “More like corned beef and cabbage, given her Irish heritage,” Matt said with a smile. “And I hated not telling you. Thanks to her blackmailing me into ‘counseling’ her after my two a.m. show sign-off, I’ve spent more night hours with her than you lately.”

  “Oooh! Finding that out had me steaming—or not steaming—but she’s gone now. When she returned the stolen mate to my shoe I got the message that she was done tormenting us. She has her real target in her sights now. I’m sure Max has lured her into following him to the Old World.”

  “So if she’s gone, who’s breaking into your rooms in the middle of the night now? And why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just a garden-variety thief. After having a psycho stalker, that would be refreshing.”

  “Don’t even kid about it, Temple. Changes have to be made. We’re going to sleep in the same unit.”

  “And not sleep there too?”

  “And not sleep there too. But you’ll still be alone from eleven p.m. to almost three a.m. And don’t tell me Midnight Louie is adequate protection.”

  “Whose unit are we moving into? All my clothes and shoes are down here and that’s a lot of stuff compared to your sparse closet.”

  Matt considered. Temple knew he probably felt her bedroom held too many memories of Max.

  “We could use this pull-out sofa in my place if the big bed in the bedroom has too many cat hairs for you,” Temple suggested. “And here is cozier.”

  He laughed and pulled her closer. “You’re not mentioning the elephant in the other room, but I think I’m over that.”

  “I’m sure the Fontana brothers can give us private security.”

  “That’s not good enough in the long run, and I don’t want our nighttime whereabouts public knowledge. There’s one thing we urgently need to do, though.”

  “What?” she asked, getting cuddly again.

  “Temple, we’re going up to Minnesota to do the family meet thing ASAP.”

  Temple threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Matt, I can’t wait to get you up to Minnesota, where you will knock my family’s socks off! It’s time. I’m so glad we’re finally free to live our lives without any monsters from the past messing with our future.”

  “Amen.” He answered her with a long, breathless kiss that morphed into more. “Enough with business from the past. Still, where do you keep your maps and notes from the Synth magicians’ plan for a major magical heist, the Ophiuchus star map and all the Effinger Chicago lockbox leavings?”

  “You don’t think someone was after that?”

  “Not likely. Who knew about it but you and me and Mr. Magic Kinsella? Better let me keep it, though. Danny Dove put a hidden safe in my rooms.”

  “Good thinking. Especially if we’re making a quick trip out of town. Oh, you are so smart.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And handsome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And hot.”

  The only answer to that required no further dialogue.

  3

  Off the Map

  Midnight Investigations, Inc., is having a meeting of the board, and all I can conclude is that we are both bored by a—heh-heh…pawcity—of evidence. (I do know how to spell “paucity” but cannot resist an occasional pun for fun.) What we are dealing with is not fun.

  The two principle partners, Miss Midnight Louise and I, have finished scouring the Strip from the Downtown Experience to the Excalibur Hotel and the lower Strip luxury hotels like the Luxor and the Mandalay Bay.

  We have then zigzagged our paws east and west of the Strip like berserk sewing machines.

  Three days, and not a trace.

  Mr. Max Kinsella and Miss Kathleen O’Connor have left not a trace or track of themselves in this whole town that is not seventy-two hours old.

  Even Miss Louise’s fluffier-than-mine tail is dragging. She curls it around her sharply manicured toes and gives the terminal hairs a listless lick.

  My own agile, whip-thin appendage just lies there like a dead snake. Well, maybe a sleeping Black Mambo, because I am always armed and dangerous, even when I am discouraged.

  Discouraged! That word is banned from Midnight Louie’s vocabulary.

  “They are gone,” Miss Midnight Louise says. “Really and most clearly gone.”

  “Most clearly and most sincerely gone,” I agree. “Even Nose E, the drug and bomb sniffing Maltese dog, could not inhale one recently shed skin cell from either of them.”

  “At least it was not a violent departure,” she says. “We could not find a blood trail either.”

  “That is even worse. Now we are not only totally in the dark as to whether the departure was forced or voluntary, but whether they went off separately, or”—here I shudder—“together, Bast forbid.”

  Miss Louise’s head seems to nod morosely as she tongue-lashes her long black bib. “It is like sitting through the endless battles of the first two Lord of the Rings movies and never seeing that miserable ring go over the cliff into the fire in the third one. Who knows what epic battle of good and evil between Mr. Max and Miss Kathleen is even now occurring offstage?”

  “And we shall never know what disposition has been made of our own local favorite magician, Gandolph the Gray,” I add, “or in what forgotten plot of the Old Sod his body may lie.”

  “Oh, quit wailing like a Dublin pub band,” she snaps. I mean literally snaps.

  I back off, pretty literally too.

  “And,” she adds, “Garry Randolph’s stage name was Gandolph the Great, not Gray. You are confusing him with the fictional inspiration for his performance persona.”

  “Same difference. Dead and gone is dead and gone.”

  “Gandalf the Gray came back from the dead to Middle Earth,” she points out. “But no one is likely to fight to return to this glittering bit of High-end Earth. Listen to me, Da.”

  I roll my eyes at her using the Irish version of “Dad”.

  “We can be sure,” she goes on, “Mr. Max Kinsella is capable of charming news of his late mentor’s final resting place out of a four-leaf clover, but perhaps not if
Miss Kitty the Cutter has lit out after him, as it seems.”

  “He wants to lead that Hibernian headcase a merry chase away from our favorite people,” I say. “And the scene here is much more serene without him here, the awkward ‘X’ as in X-Acto knife, not to mention being a leftover leg of a romantic triangle.”

  Miss Louise growls.

  “Oh, I forgot, Louise. Your favorite person is Mr. Max, and now he has left you lovelorn and forlorn in dull olde Las Vegas while he engages in a deadly game with Miss Kitty in Ireland.”

  “And that is yet another thing. Your Miss Temple was clever to nickname her ‘Kitty the Cutter’ for her lethal ways with a straight razor, but I am beginning to resent a pet name for our breed being constantly associated with a psychopath.”

  “This is old business, Louise, and we avoid the main issue here. If Miss Kathleen O’Connor is gone, who has perpetrated the latest outrage on my Miss Temple? I was indeed farsighted to have the Cat Pack move a sizeable presence from the police substation to the Circle Ritz grounds.”

  “You? It was I who convinced Ma Barker she needed to expand her territory.”

  “Me, you. Schmee, schmoo. What are we going to do about it?”

  “Obviously your duty lies with Miss Temple. The Cat pack got a generous sampling of the intruder’s DNA, but we do not have an inside operative at the crime lab to process it.”

  “Much less a CSI with the skill and stones to remove the evidence from the claws of a pack of ferals. Besides, I think the last thing this poor excuse for a housebreaker wanted was an encounter with Miss Temple.”

  “Why?”

  “She leaves a night-light on in the second bathroom to facilitate my coming and going through the open narrow ‘eyebrow’ window. This is an example of her tender regard, for we know I do not need any night vision amplification. The intruder could have thought the resident was sleeping on the other side of the unit.”