Cat in an Aqua Storm Read online

My triumphal self-congratulations prove premature when this Dr. Doolittle doll instructs Miss Temple Barr to “hold him.”

  While I squirm, a series of indignities are performed on my posterior with a hypodermic that, while I cannot see it, seems about the size of the previously mentioned knitting needle.

  “Does he bite?” this latter-day Madame DeFarge inquires a trifle tardily, removing her needle to pick up another.

  Not the hand that feeds him, I think as I restrain my fury. Although, if Miss Temple Barr is planning on switching her current brand to the aforementioned scientific sludge for seniors, I may reconsider that resolve.

  1

  Electraglide in Black

  Temple pulled the aqua Storm into the shade of a spreading oleander bush and paused, her hands clinging to the steering wheel. The Circle Ritz’s condominium and apartment building’s white marble facade looked cool and calm in the blazing July heat.

  She eyed the flat Timex watch that almost covered her wrist. Punctuality was essential to Temple’s work. She had no time for fancy, deceiving little watch faces that she couldn’t read accurately at a glance. Good. Only twelve-twenty.

  She got out, clicked around to the passenger’s side and finally wrestled Midnight Louie’s carrier through the gaping car door. Her credit card might be a hundred and forty dollars lighter, but she could swear the carrier was heavier than before. Perhaps this was the result of passive resistance. Louie had been silent and ominously still all the way home from the vet’s.

  Tilting to balance the carrier’s weight, she struggled toward the condominium’s back gate. Three steps took her into silk-searing sunlight. Temple could feel her hot pink top bleaching and the crown of her red hair fading to pink.

  She was a tiny woman who didn’t like to be reminded of it, not even by herself. So she gritted her teeth and took one laboring step after another, counting each one. The high heels didn’t encourage efficient locomotion while toting overweight cats, but elevation was enough of an issue with her that she didn’t mind. Three, four, five steps... uh. Maybe Matt Devine was by the pool working on his tan and his physique, both already perfect, but why stop now? He could help her with Louie. No, she could make it herself. Eight, nine, ten steps. The gate. Ah.

  She eased the case to the hot concrete and sighed as her shoulder joint assumed its normal alignment. The vet was right. Louie desperately needed a diet.

  A distant droning she took for bees in the honeysuckle vine draping the pierced concrete wall grew louder. Temple frowned and eyed the cat carrier. Was Louie growling again? He had not accepted his trip to the vet in the best of graces. The noise increased into a surflike roar.

  Temple peered through her sunglasses toward the side street as the roar crested, then slowed into a chatter. Something large, silver and meaner-looking than a robotic junkyard dog, Terminator-style, turned into the driveway and rolled directly toward Temple.

  She felt the nasty little twinge motorcycles had inspired since The Wild Bunch. They conjured visions of Nazis and Hell’s Angels. Today’s anonymous riders, now helmeted with obscuring black visors, did nothing to improve the image.

  This motorcyclist wore a black nylon windbreaker and rolled its mount right up to Temple, the engine still clattering.

  Temple eyed machine and rider, ready to dash through the gate should it or he/she jump either the concrete car-stop or her person. Then she read the hot-pink words emblazoned over the smoked-Plexiglas visor.

  “Speed Queen?” Temple articulated incredulously.

  The engine died with a final clank as the rider’s ankle-boot-clad feet hit hot asphalt. One hand lifted from the handles and whipped up the visor.

  Electra Lark’s genial sixtyish face peered past the bowling ball of silver metallic paint that covered her head. She was grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.

  “Just me. And wait a minute. You gotta see this.” Electra slung a leg over the long black leather seat and engaged the kick stand as soon as she stood on her own two feet.

  Temple watched nervously as the older woman stepped away from the motorcycle. It tilted but did not tumble. At her high-heeled feet, Louie growled warning. No chattering silver metal beast was going to intimidate him, not even after a dose of something as civilizing as “shots.”

  “A beauty, isn’t it?” Electra demanded.

  “If you like cold steel.”

  “Hot steel, honey.”

  “It will be if you leave it parked in this noonday sun for long.”

  “Oh, no! This baby will shelter in the shade of the gardening shed at the back.”

  “Has it always been kept there?”

  Electra’s open glance shifted. “Not always. But it’ll be coining out a lot more now. I just got my license today.”

  “Hey, that’s wonderful!” Temple was always primed to applaud another person’s self-improvement program. “It can’t be easy to drive one of these monsters. But, Electra... why?”

  The woman pulled off the sinister helmet, revealing a spiky crew cut of silver hair ending in a long pigtail in back. On most late-middle-aged women such a hairdo would seem a pathetic attempt at kicky youth, on Electra it looked funky and even elegant.

  Electra’s head tilted until her ear cuffs chimed. She eyed the silver motorcycle and tried, “Because it was there?”

  “But why was it there?” Temple persisted with the determination of an ex-TV reporter. “You never mentioned having one. I’ve never seen—or even more to the point—heard it before.”

  Electra’s hand patted the leather seat as if stroking the flank of a favorite steed. “It was Max’s.”

  “Max’s?” Temple hadn’t meant to sound sharp, or shocked, but she did. Both.

  Electra’s silver-metal boot toe kicked the asphalt. “A cycle’s real practical with all the traffic jams in Vegas. And it is a beauty.”

  Temple stared at the thing as if it had landed from Mars. “I had no idea that Max liked—had—a motorcycle.”

  “Hey, he used it as the down payment on the condo.”

  Temple eyed her landlady incredulously. She was getting tired of learning things about Max after he was gone—long gone. Four months gone without a goodbye, with no explanation.

  “Speaking of the condo,” Temple began uncomfortably, “I had to take Louie to the vet and it cost a fortune. I might be a little late with the monthly maintenance money, but not the mortgage.”

  “Don’t worry about it, dear.” Electra’s waving hand ignited a shower of glints from the many rings on her fingers. “I know it’s tough when suddenly one person is paying on a place instead of two. Besides, according to folks who know their motorcycles, this baby is worth major moolah. It’s a classic.”

  “How classic can a motorcycle get?”

  “Plenty. It’s a Hesketh Vampire.”

  “No wonder it gave me the shivers when I heard it coming. Why on earth is it called a vampire?”

  “Maybe because it sounds dangerous. It howls in prime gear when the wind whistles by.”

  Temple shook her head. “Hesketh Vampire,” she repeated numbly. “Any relation to a Sopwith Camel?” That was some early biplane, she thought.

  “Well, it is British-made.” Electra proudly circled her new toy, ticking off its assets. “A full-liter engine, one thousand cee-cees. Nickel-plated and overbuilt to go literally millions of miles.”

  Temple followed Electra around the massive machine, eyeing the steeply raked windshield, the fluid silver front casing—not shiny like chrome but matte-soft, classy—and the emblem of a crown surmounted by an angry rooster head above the Cyclopean front headlight.

  “Max had this, really?”

  “Yup.” Electra’s finger stroked the word “Hesketh” under the regal but surly rooster. “The famous Hesketh flying chicken. Now it’s chicken à la queen.” She chuckled and lifted her emblazoned helmet.

  Temple just shook her head. “I don’t know much about motorcycles—and apparently knew even less about Max—but this is a
humongous machine, Electra. Is it safe to drive?”

  “Ride,” Electra corrected quickly. “Driving is for sissies.”

  “Can a woman handle it safely?”

  “Safety is not the idea with a superbike, dear,” Electra explained sweetly.

  “But a woman your age—”

  “A woman my age can use a little excitement. They say women are horse-crazy, but those ninnies are living in the last century. This thing rides like a rocket. Besides, it’s a good way to meet men, if you’re so inclined. I found me some guys who knew something about cycles and they taught me the ropes.”

  “Where’d you find bikers?”

  “They’re not bikers, just some older guys who tinker a bit. Wild Blue works mostly on vintage planes, but Eightball has played with a bike or two.”

  “Eightball? Not Eightball O’Rourke?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know him?”

  “He’s the private detective I hired to tail the ABA cat-napper.”

  Electra looked bemused. “No kidding? Until not too long ago, he and his pals were fugitives.”

  “Fugitives? Eightball claimed he had a security background.”

  Electra nodded sagely. “And so he does. Nobody around Las Vegas has been as secure as Eightball all these years. He and the Glory Hole Gang hid out in the desert looking for some silver dollars they hijacked during World War Two and hid so good they couldn’t find them again themselves. Buried treasure. The statute of limitations had run out by the time anyone found out about them, and now they run Glory Hole as a tourist ghost town. It’s in that string of abandoned settlements off of Highway 95.1 think Eightball got so used to looking for that lost treasure that he decided to get into the business of looking into this and that. Hooked on hunting, if you know what I mean.”

  “But he had a license, he said he’d been employed in detection for years.”

  “What would you say if you had a dicey background and were trying something new at age seventy or so?”

  “I can’t believe you know these people, Electra.”

  Electra eyed Temple for a long moment. “I’m not responsible for what my friends or acquaintances do or did, but these are sweet old guys. Helped me out a lot, for nothing. They even had to chop the seat padding down so my legs could reach the ground.” She slapped the black leather again, and Temple winced. “Hated to do it, but face it, Max isn’t coming back. No sense letting a primo machine rot.”

  “Right,” Temple murmured fervently.

  “Heck,” Electra added, “I bet even you could ride my new baby with the seat this low. Come on, hop on. I’ll take you for a spin around the block.”

  “No, thanks.” Temple turned to inspect her own “baby” in his vetmobile. “Louie needs to get his breakfast just as soon as I can tote in the twenty-pound bag in the trunk. I’ll pass.”

  “Chicken?” Electra grinned wickedly, donning her helmet.

  Temple didn’t honor that with a direct answer. “I’ve got a lot of work to get out on my computer before the WICA meeting at five-thirty. Sorry. Some other time,” she added with rare insincerity.

  Electra’s platinum-gray eyebrows lofted nearly to the helmet’s brim. “Wicca? I didn’t know you were interested in witchcraft.”

  “I’m not. It’s the Women in Communications Association. Great for networking, now that digging up freelance clients in the recession is more like doing black magic than white witchcraft.”

  “I wouldn’t joke about the dark arts, dearie,” Electra said with a shudder, flipping down her sinister visor.

  Despite needing to hustle, Temple couldn’t resist waiting to watch the landlady mount, expertly kick away the support, start the engine and chatter off in low gear to the shed around back.

  Then she glumly lugged Louie through the gate, shut it and headed across the area bordering the pool, relieved that Matt Devine wasn’t in sight.

  She couldn’t believe that Max had never mentioned that thing, much less using it for a down payment on the condo.... He had glossed over that issue when he’d put the place in both their names. Electra was financing it, so it was simple—if not monetarily easy—for Temple to take over the payments after Max skedaddled. And here Temple had hoped buying instead of renting had indicated that Max was as serious about permanent relationships as she was... hah!

  While these thoughts festered, her autopilot had called the elevator, punched the proper floor and gotten her off before the doors sliced together on her or Louie’s carrier.

  She walked down the semicircular hall to her door, unlocked it and sat Louie’s carrier on the entry-hall parquet. When she opened the grille, he sulked inside, reduced to a resentful glare of electric green eyes.

  “Sorry, boy. I’ll feed you as soon as I drag the bag back from the car.”

  She was back in minutes, staggering, to find the carrier empty and Louie nowhere in sight. Temple sighed, slung the huge brown-paper bag to the kitchen countertop and proceeded to exercise her nails on trying to puncture the stitched-shut top. She finally fetched the kitchen shears and took several ill-tempered stabs at the tough paper until she worried a ragged hole in one comer.

  Then she hefted the heavy bag and squatted to pour its contents into Louie’s empty banana split dish. Green-brown pellets plugged the hole, then burped out in a dirty hail, scattering like run-amok marbles on the black and white tiles.

  “Oh, holy horseradish! This feline health food is gonna break my back. Louie! Come and get it.”

  He refused to show, so Temple stomped into her bedroom to look under the bed. Nothing animal there but dust bunnies. The louvered closet doors were shut, but she jerked one open just the same. Jerk. Speaking of which, there was Max, face-to-face.

  She studied the glossy, oversized poster she knew like the markings on her mauve snakeskin J. Renees. By now, Max, the most mobile of men both mentally and physically, had become frozen into this single, hype-ridden image: black turtleneck, black unruly hair, green stare. The Mystifying Max, vanished magician, former roommate, lost lover. Was he ever.

  And now his past recycled... a massive silver Vampire on wheelies. It must have meant something to him, owning a classic motorcycle. He must have ridden it at one time, then left it behind when his act toured distant cities like Minneapolis. He must have figured a Heckwith, or whatever, Vampire wasn’t Temple’s speed, or he’d have kept it, shown it to her. Said, Hop on, I’ll take you for a ride. He hadn’t needed a motorcycle for that.

  Temple sat suddenly on the bed, still staring at the poster. She wasn’t a motorcycle moll. She couldn’t see herself roaring along the never-ending white centerline on two narrow tires and a bloated black belly of steel. Maybe Max couldn’t see that either. Maybe that’s why he’d left. She was too conventional, took herself too seriously. Maybe she would have liked it, plastering herself behind Max, wrapped up in gear with a dark crystal ball for a crown and the wind rushing at them, the road running away behind them and speed thrumming with exultation between their conjoined thighs....

  Temple rose, then used her long, lacquered nails to peel the tape very carefully from the four comers of the poster. She folded the excess tape down on the back before rolling the heavy paper into one long white cylinder. Then she stuffed it down in the far dark back comer of the closet where the last of Max’s clothes hung waiting to be taken to the Goodwill someday.

  2

  A Crummy Encounter

  “I can’t believe the nerve of that man.” The tall blonde drowned her complaint in a swallow of white wine spritzer, the PR woman’s national drink.

  “Who?” Temple, looking around sharply with news-hound instincts, saw only women gathered in cocktail-party knots.

  The blonde’s name tag said she was Sunny Cadeaux. She turned away from the two other women in her schmoozing circle to spit out two loathsomely familiar words: “Crawford Buchanan.”

  “Oh.” Temple quickly sipped her Virgin Mary while trying to dodge the leafy stick of celery afloat in the blood-co
lored beverage. “Awful Crawford. What’s he done now?”

  “You must have come in the back way,” Sunny suggested.

  Temple nodded. “I was late, and I wanted to talk to the hotel manager.”

  “Why? Are you on the arrangements committee? If so, I must say that we love meeting at the Crystal Phoenix, but I wish you’d rearrange Crawford Buchanan permanently.”

  “Sorry. I’m not on that committee or any other one.” Temple finally decided to remove the bobbing stalk and eat it. She couldn’t get near the buffet table anyway, she concluded, eyeing the horde of feasting PR types swarming it. All queens, not a drone in the bunch.

  “What were you talking to Van von Rhine about?” Sunny persisted. PR people were insatiably curious for the story behind the story.

  “About a pussycat.”

  “Pussycat?” parroted a lady in Sally Jesse Raphael-red glasses, leaning around Sunny.

  “Well, more of a tomcat,” Temple admitted. “Midnight Louie was the house cat here until he wandered to my neck of the woods. I just wanted Van to know that he was all right. She and her husband Nicky Fontana took an interest in him.” Temple frowned. “At least I think he’s all right. He wouldn’t touch his Free-to-Be-Feline all afternoon.”

  “Midnight Louie. Is that the ABA killer cat?”

  Temple couldn’t quite read the woman’s name tag from where she stood. She often skipped wearing her glasses at social events. That meant that she got potluck from menus and met a lot of Petsys and Cerols, not to mention Jams and Retes at coed affairs. This lady appeared to be named “Nike.”

  “Midnight Louie got the publicity for finding the body,” Temple explained. “He didn’t kill a thing at the ABA but time.”

  “I wish he was here and would do away with Crawford Buchanan,” Sunny suggested between her teeth in a tone that did not live up to her name.

  “What has he done that’s so horrible now?” Temple wondered.

  “Check out the ballroom entrance foyer. There ought to be a law.”

  “Crawford’s nature is to be awful,” Temple quipped, “not lawful, but I can’t resist seeing what God’s gift to PR women is up to.”