Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme Read online

  “She was doubly cursed—or blessed—to be here, as they thought at the time. She was both an adopted ‘orphan’ child of a Magdalen laundress and in her turn an ‘incorrigible’ girl resident of this place. The records show they gave her the name Rebecca. She gave up a baby to the orphanage when she was sixteen. How she’d managed such a scandal under lock and key remained a mystery. She ‘escaped’ when she was seventeen.”

  Max could understand why.

  He wanted to turn and scrabble away screaming at what that short history of one young woman would mean to anyone who encountered her ever after.

  Kathleen O’Connor’s body lay buried in a potter’s field in Las Vegas, but surely her unbroken but mangled spirit must haunt this place eternally.

  Meow Mix

  There is no such thing as an old cat’s home, unless you consider being dropped off at an animal shelter with a murderous overpopulation problem or abandoned on the street to be a nice retirement package.

  I am not exactly a kit myself, but Three O’Clock has gotten a lot more creaky about the pins since last I saw him.

  “What made you think you could stay at the old restaurant?” I ask him as soon as we are tucked away among the black video-camera cases in the back of the Channel 6 van. “That joint looked closed. Why did the old guys not forcibly take you with them when they decamped?”

  “Because I did not want to go and I got ‘lost’ on purpose,” he huffs, trying to get comfy with his chin propped on a case.

  We share signature white whiskers, but I notice his black muzzle is surrounded by tiny white hairs. From my own mirror-checks, which I do on the sinktop on my way out the open Circle Ritz bathroom window at every opportunity, I am still matinee-idol black haired from stem to stern, save for the almost undetectable occasional white hair every dude and dame of our color sports.

  The old man’s muzzle is starting to look bearded, like Hemingway’s. I only wish he had a superlarge fish to share with a landlubber offspring.

  Alas, now Three O’Clock has no sea and no fish to shepherd, with the lake and the lovely golden shoreline carp it used to boast doing a disappearing act.

  “Where are you taking me?” he snarls. “I told you I am doing fine on the next-door leavings, and I wanted to watch CSI in action on my turf.”

  “Your ‘turf’ is a dried-up wasteland.”

  “So is yours.”

  “But mine has neon and foot-long submarine sandwiches and Bette Midler.”

  A rough stretch has Three O’Clock’s chin seeming to nod agreement. “Bette Midler is all right. You cannot eat neon, and foot-long-anything foodstuffs are more than I care to tangle with at my age.”

  This talk of fast food has my mind revving up. What to do with the old folks is the conundrum of the era, especially as the population of old folks is growing by leaps and bounds. Or by creeps and pounds.

  I climb a few boxes to curl my shivs around the van’s rear window slit. I see we are getting into serious traffic. Time to bail.

  “Come on, Pop,” I urge as I clamber back down. “Time to rock and roll.”

  “You young folks still into that racket?”

  “You betcha.”

  I eye the silver tangle of aluminum tripods stacked behind the driver’s seat. We need to distract our chauffeur just enough to slow down but not enough to crash and burn. It is a delicate operation, and my current partner is none too reliable. Who would think I would actually wish for the presence of Miss Midnight Louise and her nubile climbing skills?

  “Okay, Daddy-o. You are going to climb that silver metal tree while I get behind the wheel.”

  “There is no way to climb that mess, son. I will just end up in a tangle of clattering pipe.”

  “Exactly. Mount Charleston it is not, but you still have built-in pitons and can make quite a mess and commotion of it.”

  “I see. You want a distraction.”

  “Duh.”

  “Why did you not just say so? I was attracting thrown tin cans on the backyard fences while you were just a gleam in my old lady’s eye.”

  With that, Three O’Clock rousts his own twenty-pound, leftover-pumped bulk over the camera boxes and leaps like a sumo wrestler for the tripods. Immediately the unseen driver starts muttering and pumping the brakes.

  By then I have scaled the vinyl back of his seat and landed in his lap, tail faceup and claws thigh-side down and snapping into place like a staple remover.

  The screams are awesome.

  I fight to unsnag my valuable shivs as the driver simultaneously slams on the brakes and puts the gear into park, opens the door, and grabs the lapels of my furry ruff.

  We hurl outside together into the merciless sunlight as horns bellow and traffic screeches to a stop. The scene causes him to release his grip. I roll under the stopped van, pleased to see Three O’Clock slithering onto the doorjamb edge and then the street.

  “Psst!” I say, sticking out a paw to gesture him under the undercarriage.

  He slinks into the shadow beside me.

  “That guy took some really primo footage of me and thee hamming it up over those Lake Mead bones,” Three O’Clock protests. “Your escape plan has delayed getting our mugs onto the evening news, where they belong.”

  “Relax. There will be some exchange of this and that information, then all these hot steel boxes will get rolling again. Meanwhile, you and I can leapfrog from shady spot to shady spot and leave this mess behind.”

  “Your ‘shady spots’ could start mowing us down any ‘leap.’ We are not frogs.”

  I agree that there is not a lot of “leap” left in Three O’Clock Louie, but I have enough hiss and vinegar for the two of us. I soon prod the old dude out of the street and onto one of my routes to the Circle Ritz.

  “This is worse than our recent trek across half of Lake Mead,” he starts complaining. “I did not want to leave my old hangout even when my humans pulled up ‘steaks.’ I hid out until they gave up coming back out and trying to lure me away with the daily special.”

  “You are a stubborn old cuss.”

  “I am not going to give up my independence. Besides, during the last days they converted to an all free-range, organically grown menu. Those chickens must have had leg muscles the size of ostriches’. And, as far as I know, vegetables are only good for encouraging five-year-old human kits to run away from home. I had never been offered so much dry, twiggy, dirt-dusted chow in my life. Now you are dragging me across a concrete desert. With no food or water in sight. You are a cruel cat, my son.”

  I cannot claim that shade and watering holes exactly dot the city landscape if you are not near a major hotel. Sure, I know Three O’Clock has not got much stamina and has already been sore-footedly tried today. For once, I am completely perplexed. Where to park the old man until I can reunite him with his geezer gang?

  I need to find someplace soon.

  Meanwhile, the Las Vegas sun is boiling high above us in a clear blue sky, soaking into our pure black coats, making our pink tongues roll out like red carpets and our tenderized pads to crack and burn like well-done strip steaks.

  Manx! Even my ability to come up with similes has shifted into survival overdrive. I cannot believe that shepherding only one elder could be so taxing.

  I am glad that . . . oh! Of course.

  Obviously my brain has been fried on Lake Mead, along with the rest of Three O’Clock Louie’s lost and lamented cuisine.

  “Come on, Daddy-o,” I urge with a growl. “I have just the retirement pad for you. Only a few hundred more steps.”

  Argh, matey. Yo-ho-ho, and a cache of cement booties.

  Frankly, my feet feel like they have been cast in hot concrete and my legs worn down to the bare bones by the time I herd Three O’Clock through a stand of oleander bushes into a de-lovely clearing dominated by my favorite fast-food restaurant, a big brown Dumpster.

  “Have you taken me in a circle, Grasshopper?” Three O’Clock asks out of the side of his mouth. Who wou
ld have thought the old man had so much sarcasm in him?

  “This looks like the abandoned restaurant you just rescued me from. Only I do not get a lake view.”

  “Such as it was,” I point out. “I do not believe your vision was keen enough to enjoy the distantly sparkling ripples.”

  “My eyes are a durn, er, sight better than yours, lad. Who spotted those pathetic bird bones sticking up out of the lake-bottom sand?”

  “Who moved mountains to get them discovered by human movers and shakers?”

  “Humans are a cruel breed,” he says, shaking his grizzled head. “They toy with their kill. I have heard that all my life, but until I saw the pathetic pair of leg bones sticking out of the concrete ball like plant supports in an empty flowerpot . . . The poor victim was poured into his fatal cement footwear while still alive, you know. Vicious breed, humans. And you lead me into the heart of their darkness here in Sin City.”

  I sigh. “We are speaking old-time gangsters, or someone modern who was trying to emulate them. I am sure my friend the coroner, Grizzly Bahr, is even now dating and dissecting the whole gruesome mess down to the DNA.”

  “They have an ursine coroner here? That is open-minded. I am impressed.”

  I sigh again. My old man is not the only one who has chewed through a dictionary or two in his day.

  “The name Grizzly is a nickname, Daddy-o. His surname is spelled B-a-h-r. No genuine bears work for the Las Vegas forensics department.”

  “Bahr, eh? Related to your cross-species lady friend? The one you sleep with?”

  “You have been living with professional bachelors too long out at Lake Mead. You should be so lucky to have a human fan who has a lakeside recreation area named after her, although I think it was just a weird coincidence.”

  “I see another weird coincidence,” the old guy says, jabbing me in the ribs with a jovial mitt of half-unfurled claws. “Who is that hot babe I see sniffing along the Dumpster edge?”

  Can it be? Has Ma Barker, his old inamorata and my old mama, edged into sight just at this convenient moment? Manx! The sire’s eyes must be broken if he considers her a “hot babe,” although I will take any happenstance luck I can right now.

  I look where he is leering.

  Horrors! Double horrors.

  What is Miss Midnight Louise, my detecting partner and stridently proclaimed daughter—therefore the old guy’s granddaughter, no less—doing here?

  I was hoping to arrange a meet between Three O’Clock and Ma Barker and gang. Not between the Senile and the Nubile.

  “She is fixed,” I hiss in his somewhat battered ear.

  “I do not care who she is fixed up with, I am tossing my whiskers into the ring for that chick.”

  What a cluck!

  “She is also kin,” I add, emphasizing my point with a cuff of shivs to the jaw.

  “These things are hard to trace among a nomadic kind.”

  “Make one mew out of line and she will perforate your liver from the outside in. Trust me, I know this kit.”

  “So you want to keep her to yourself.”

  This is seriously not true. “She is a business partner, and that is it.”

  “Oho.”

  Before I can argue further, a low and hackle-rising growl from the oleanders behind us delays further discourse. Then comes the reading of the riot act.

  “You two roadkill bums can forget drooling over anything you see,” Ma Barker glowls. “This is my gang’s territory, and you are trespassing. I can scar your behinds with my initials and give you a sex-change operation before either one of you drifters can muster a rusty shiv.”

  Meanwhile, Miss Midnight Louise has scented our presence and is heading our way at top speed, claws kicking up asphalt like it was unclumpable litter-box sand.

  “You take the spitfire up front, and I’ll reverse to face the hellion at our rear,” Three O’Clock says.

  What is a parent for but self-sacrifice, right? Except I am the one sacrificing my most vulnerable end. Papa is literally saving his ass.

  I comply, knowing Ma Barker will recognize her baby boy from any angle and Miss Louise has already ID’d Three O’Clock as the stranger on the block.

  “You are in bad company, son,” Ma Barker growls at my rear. “Who is this aging sack of hairballs you have been foolish enough to bring here?”

  Meanwhile Louise continues her liberated she-devil act. “Freeze, stranger! Do not turn around to face me or you will be looking up Eye Patches Are Us on the Internet.”

  “He is just a homeless guy I found out at Lake Mead,” I say, not ready to make introductions under the circumstances. Family reunions can be so difficult.

  “We are all pretty much homeless, except for you,” Louise notes.

  “Have a heart,” I urge. “He is a relative.”

  “I object,” Three O’Clock growls. “The one behind me who bedazzled my old eyes with her cute not-interested act is too good-looking to be a relative, and the one in front of me now is too ugly.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, awaiting Three O’Clock’s instant annihilation.

  “Say,” hisses Ma Barker, “my raccoon shiner does not permit me the crystal-clear vision of my youth, but I am old enough to know you are not so bad yourself, stranger.”

  Huh?

  Miss Louise goes whisker-to-whisker with me to whisper, “What can Ma Barker be thinking?”

  In a moment we, gasp, then know.

  “You remind me,” Ma Barker says, “of a smarmy, swaggering, swell-headed young tom who used to come around when I was more receptive to gentlemen callers.”

  “I was all that,” Three O’Clock admits proudly, “except I do not know ‘smarmy’ from blarney.”

  “They are the same.”

  Ma Barker’s right mitt clips him a smart one in the chops. And possibly the loins. She always excelled at one-two punches.

  At any rate, Three O’Clock rolls into a ball, spins a few times, and ends up back on his pins three feet away.

  “Can that be you, Pool Hall Polly?” he asks. “I recognize the English.”

  Ma Barker bats her eyes like a baby doll, including the one that is still at quarter mast from the raccoon incident.

  Louise and I exchange a shocked stare and back off to let this play out unassisted.

  “So,” Ma says, “sonny boy managed to catch up with your mangy hide. What are you two bad boys up to now that you have twice the chutzpah and half the brains?”

  “We are working the case of the truncated shin bones, doll.”

  I wait to see Three O’clock caroming off the back wall of the police substation that is now Ma Barker’s hideout.

  Instead, she rubs back and forth on the base of the oleander bush. “So you want in on our boy’s private-eye business?”

  “No way,” Miss Midnight Louise snarls.

  “Right,” I second. “It is bad enough I got saddled with a girl. I do not need a geezer.”

  “Pipe down, junior,” Three O’Clock says, “and let your elders settle this.”

  “I am not a ‘junior,’ ” I point out. “And you better act more humble if you want to get bed and board at Ma Barker’s headquarters. She runs this outfit.”

  “Really?” Three O’Clock noses toward Ma Barker. “I have been retired from the nautical life in Puget Sound for a couple of years, but if you have need of an enforcer . . .”

  “We are all enforcers here,” Ma snaps back. She eyes me and wrinkles her sparse vibrissae, which are whiskers to veterinarians and others in the know. “So you want to hang around for old times’ sake? I can put you on probation.”

  “Probation? I ran a fishing trawler. I was the skipper’s right-hand catch-inspector. Then I retired to Vegas and got a food inspector job with the Glory Hole Gang out at Lake Mead. I should be consigliere here, at least.”

  “This is a street gang, Three O’Clock, not some fancy-schmancy operation.”

  Ma ambles over to me and Miss Midnight Louise.

  �
��So, Grasshopper. If the old guy stays, I will have to call you disgusting pet names, since the ‘Midnights’ are getting a bit thick around here.”

  “I am Louie,” I snarl. “He can be Three O’Clock. Capiche?”

  “Whatever, you two can duke it out. Meanwhile, who is going to do the honors?”

  “There is any honor around here?”

  “I mean introduce your partner to her new grandfather.”

  Louise’s baby yellows get moon size. She had not followed the family resemblance to its logical conclusion—her. If she really is my offspring.

  Even now she is arching her back and shaking out her shivs to make sure Three O’Clock knows he is not top dog around here.

  Dem Old Bones

  Temple left the Crystal Phoenix with her head still whirling with empire-building ideas.

  Give Nicky Fontana credit: the boy could dream. He was her age, just pushing thirty-one, but CEO of her only permanent contractual client. Van was an amazing executive and executor, but Nicky had the cockeyed vision it took to take Vegas establishments to the next step.

  And this time, Temple would be an idea girl from the ground up . . . or down, if the plans to reimagine the underground spaces were as open-ended as Nicky said.

  Underground. Underworld. That was so postmillennial and perfect. Dark, daring, and cooool, man, cooool.

  She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to tell Matt. And maybe her Aunt Kit Carson, who—oh, rats—was honeymooning in Europe with her first and post-menopausal husband, Nicky’s eldest brother, Aldo. Sixty is the new forty-five, and so was Aldo. Go, Aunt Kit!

  The red Miata wove through the packed Strip traffic like a computerized sewing machine on zigzag. Temple refrained from cell-phoning while driving, but her mind rehearsed what she’d tell Matt when she called him tonight.

  Temple’s head was still bursting with wild ideas when she came home to her quiet Circle Ritz condo. She’d been too busy to check with Matt in Chicago earlier. He was used to her calling him because of her erratic freelance schedule.

  She plopped down on her soft living-room loveseat, kicked off her Weitzman spikes, and kicked her bare heels into the luxuriant long fibers of her faux-goatskin rug. Then she grabbed the remote just in time to catch the opening of the six o’clock news. Matt was in a two-hour-later time zone, so she had time to chill, shower, and change before calling. More construction defaults and lower tourist numbers still made the news, along with a murder-suicide in Henderson, but the feature story tease was on “cannibal cats.”