Cat with an Emerald Eye Read online

  Cat with an Emerald Eye

  Prologue

  A Higher Calling

  I am told that most people would be happy to receive personal advice from on high.

  However, I am not most people. I am not even a person.

  And right now I am preparing for my annual autumn slump. This, I believe, is a universal condition. When that first October evening turns nippy, something primitive in the cells of every red-blooded critter stops dead for a moment, looks around and turns into a couch potato, or maybe a pumpkin.

  Call it a genetic disposition to hibernate. Call it a seasonal disaffective disorder. Call it Ishmael.

  Whatever, it is one of nature's most powerful urges, and I did not get the enviable reputation I have as the primo progenitor in this town by ignoring nature's most powerful urges.

  It does not matter that my hometown is Las Vegas, where virtually year-round it is hotter than the scales on the back of a skink. Of course, my closest acquaintance with a scale is in the piano bar of the Crystal Phoenix, since I came fresh from the factory with a luxuriant coat of jet-black fur. Still, there is bone and muscle under all this velvet plush, and I am old enough that a chill can creep past my barrier fuzz and into my skeleton. Come September, the nights dwindle down to a precious few degrees, like forty or fifty. Then October, November, and December kick in and it really gets cold when the daylight goes on down time.

  So in late October I long to dine diligently, drink deeply and then curl up someplace off the ground, where I bury my nose in my external muffler, flatten my ears to the slap-happy, insomniac uproar of Las Vegas doing business as usual and hope for a long winter's nap. Maybe I will not even blink my peepers ajar until, say, March and the IRS is threatening. (Though I am exempt from personal taxes, and that is another story.)

  As far as I am concerned, from this moment on, Miss Temple can deliver meals to my feet.

  She can even tent a few newspapers over my head and forget about me until the cobwebs start looking like macrame plant hangers ... and the resident spider is big enough to go to med school.

  But then, as I lie there, gently napping, suddenly there comes a twitching, as of someone gently switching a tail a-dust with itching ... powder.

  Urgh! How can I describe this unnatural, burrowing feeling that comes stealing over my contented, drowsing form? Like a fly walking tippy-toe over an emery board. Like taking a sitz bath in rock salt or getting a grain of sand between your two hardest-to-reach toes...

  Oh, it is awful! One of my eyelids snaps open like a runaway shade letting in a fistful of daylight. I am a peaceful, twilight kind of guy. Why else would they call me Midnight Louie?

  And right now I am all a-pant for shorter days and longer nights. That way my serial naps can stretch out into one long snooze. But it is not to be, not with the kind of neighbors up with which I have to put.

  And I do mean up. I can feel the intangible itching powder drifting down two floors from directly above me. My left ear does the Jerk. Then my right. A buzzing as of something nasty scuzzing about the edges of my consciousness makes my right leg try to get up and walk...

  without me.

  And I am having such a splendid dream, adrift with the Divine Yvette on the river Nile as it snakes through the lobby of the huge new Oasis Hotel past a cast-chrome Sphinx with Bette Davis eyes, cruising under a canopy of tall date trees... that are dropping coconuts on my head, my consciousness ... bullets and bulletins from another, less imaginative and more wakeful intelligence.

  Rats! (If it only were.)

  I come cold awake with a start, my patented night vision instantly focusing on the shadows of Miss Temple's living room furniture. I am tempted to waddle into the kitchen and see what there is to eat, but another nugget of unwanted knowledge crashes onto my cranium with full force.

  Louie! Come here, I need you.

  You and the cast of CATS! , I think sourly.

  Do not be grumpy, I am admonished in the privacy of my own head. You know what you must do.

  Au contraire. I know what I will not like to do. So, sighing in the hopes that Miss Temple will awaken in the adjoining bedroom and rush out to take me captive (dim chance), I struggle out of my contented curl on the sofa, rise, leap down to the (ugh) cold parquet, then stretch my legs and arms in turn.

  ("How many arms does a cat like you have?" I can hear some yahoo asking with a sneer.

  Two, up front, like everybody else, and two legs out back. Anyone who wishes to consider my two front limbs mere legs has not seen me open a French door lever.) Anyway, I stretch all four of my extremities and head for the guest bathroom, which is seldom used. Even I almost never disturb the dust in the litter box Miss Temple Barr keeps under the sink. Now I leap upon that sink (yieee, cold porcelain on my delicate pads!), loft to the sill of the long, high window and wriggle through its open slit.

  The night air is compress-cold and slaps my kisser back and forth a few times, especially when I take a few drags of its frosty breath and then exhale a visible stream of icy air. Ick. All my body heat is escaping into the wild black yonder of this night in the lonesome October. I jump down to the patio, up to the railing and then up again to the arching palm tree that is my private bridge between domestic coziness and urban scuzziness, between uptown bliss and downtown danger.

  Now that I am roused and on the move, the battering of my brain has ceased. I pause, my built-in pitons digging into palm bark, and gaze up, toward the moon. Nearly full, its ruddy face leers down on us all like a Peeping Tom. Or like a Peeping Pumpkin, rather, given the season so soon upon us.

  I shiver, or perhaps I shudder. My kind has never liked this time of year for reasons that have to do with comfort of a kind other than physical. While I thus muse, I suddenly realize that the nighttime silhouette of the Circle Ritz, which I know so well from similar evening jaunts, has developed a startling new feature.

  I stare as if seeing will make it disappear, but no such luck. Something pale and wan gleams atop the railing of Miss Electra Lark's penthouse patio against the leering dark forms of topiary trees turned into nightmare grotesques. Perhaps Miss Electra has imported an albino pumpkin to her patio, and not yet carved a face into it.

  Alas, no. Though the object is round enough to be a vegetable-in-waiting for a bit of seasonal surgery, it displays a trait quite alarming in a vegetable. It walks along the rail to better see the moon.

  I fear that my long winter's nap is over before it has barely begun. The reclusive creature known as Karma has never seen the light of day. Anything that has pried her from sanctuary to commune with the moon like a mere dog... is something that I wish to know nothing about.

  Louie! Do not dawdle.

  Oh, my aching inner ears! To hear is to obey, but not to like it. I run along the bowed palm trunk, leap to an upper balcony and zigzag my way up the building's slick exterior. One poorly timed pounce, and I will be road kill.

  Chapter 1

  Magic Acts

  Temple awoke, sitting up in bed.

  She patted the coverlet, hunting for the warm, furry bulk of Midnight Louie.

  He was gone.

  She wasn't surprised.

  In her dream, the big black cat had also disappeared. But the dream cat had been a massive animal, a panther sprung to life from an Art Deco design--angular, with industrial-strength musculature.

  She shut her eyes, visualizing the dreamscape again.

  She was the magician's assistant for Siegfried and Roy, pinioned on stage in the glare of the spotlight, while huge white lions and tigers and one black panther cavorted around her. The Big Cats posed, paws raised, on a pyramid of perches painted to resemble the tops of New York City skyscrapers. At the highest p
oint, atop the Chrysler Building's silvery pinnacle, sat the sole Black Panther gleaming as if carved from Whitby jet. All the Big Cats sparkled in the light, like giant rhinestone brooches. The white tigers' stripes were aurora borealis rainbows. These bejeweled animals even out-shone Siegfried and Roy's most glitzy jumpsuits. Both magicians sported long, Elvis-thick sideburns, Siegfried's golden and Roy's panther-black.

  Temple couldn't see her own outfit, since she was the dreamer, but she knew she wore the Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal shoes, and the audience was applauding her, them.

  And though everything was viewed through the bright and gleaming telescope of Dream, Temple remembered an odd ominous sense of the darkness beyond the stage lights. Feral eyes gleamed where the audience should be, untamed Big Cats waiting to pounce and take back the stage.

  Then one animal on stage leaped: the Black Panther balanced on the Chrysler Building (which had somehow become an Art Deco step pyramid) soared through the thin, spot lit air into the density of the darkness beyond.

  Oh, Temple had cried in the dream. That wasn't in the script. Then the darkness coalesced into a pride ofblack panthers and they all crowded onto the stage, devouring the light.

  A dark magician stood atop the highest perch, a man in matte black without a face. Just before the last light went out, before the only thing Temple could sense was a smothering sound of purring, she saw him wave one arm

  The dream ended. She was awake, and knew it. She wished she had photographs of the gorgeous bejeweled cats, of Siegfried and Roy in Elvis sideburns. She probably should get up and write this one down, but then she could search for Freudian symbolism and that would ruin the effect.

  Temple shivered. She wished Midnight Louie weren't gone. He was warm and fairly friendly and reassuringly portable. She wished she hadn't dreamed about the dark magician. She knew she wouldn't have to look too far or too Freudian to assign the real Max Kinsella an even-more-mythic role in this dream: Death.

  Chapter 2

  Bad Vibrissae

  "Nice night," I greet Karma.

  "Not really." She turns toward me, the moonlight silvering her turquoise-blue eyes in passing.

  I admit that my salutation was not original, but that is no reason to turn contrary. However, I am well aware that Contrary is Miss Karma's middle moniker. I have no idea what her last name is; certainly it is not "Lark."

  "I thought you did not take the night air," I go on.

  "Evil intentions frisk through the dark like dust motes," she notes lugubriously.

  "Yeah, the night is made for felony. Lucky for me, or I would not have a mission in life."

  "And at this time of the year, evil turns blacker."

  "Oh, come now! I happen to wear that much-libeled color."

  "So?"

  "So I am not so bad."

  Karma is silent.

  "At least you come when called," she says at last.

  Before I can resent that comment, she turns tail on me--a long, bushy tail that rearranges my whiskers and tickles my nose--and plummets to the patio stones. I am expected to follow, so I do.

  The French door is ajar. Once there, she gives me the flounder eye over her shoulder. Talk about cold fish! I am facing piranha on ice here.

  "You will have to be silent within, and no clumsiness, Louie. I do not want Madame Electra awakened."

  "Ninja is my middle name."

  "Not in my address book." In she pads on her dainty white mittens and spats.

  I eel through after her, only the door seems to have swung shut again, because my midsection forces it further ajar. As I pass through, the hinge gives a screech that would disconcert an owl.

  "Sssst!" my guide hisses, pausing to slip a Dainty White under the French door and pull it shut.

  I am sorry to report that she manages to close it without making a sound.

  Not much light squeezes through the mini-blinds drooping shut on every window. Even the French doors have shirred drapes over their glassed sections. You would think Miss Electra Lark was practicing something illegal up here, given the blackout curtains.

  "It is I," Karma whispers suddenly.

  "I already know that, and then some!"

  "I mean that it is for my sake that the mistress darkens the windows and doors. I am too sensitive."

  Oh, Bast! (I should not take in vain the name of my kind's most ancient goddess, but I hate these dames that act as if they are made of mother-of-pearl and you are sandpaper.)

  "Louie, please! Your negative emotions and Neanderthal attitudes rub my delicate psychic vibrissae the wrong way. You did not like it when my tail ruffled your whiskers. Please consider my spectral extensions, and contain your worst intentions, even mentally."

  "Huh? You are saying that you got ghost whiskers?"

  I see her fangy little smirk even in the dark.

  "A primitive way of putting it, but then what else could I expect from one of your background and temperament? Yes, Louie, my vibrissae are sensitive to more than the mere corporeal."

  More than the mere corporeal...It only takes me a minute to figure that out.

  "You say you have a private line to dead things? Cannot do much for your appetite."

  "My appetite has always been dainty."

  That is a laugh. This babe is a long-fendered, cream-colored limo of a lady, even if her car radio is always tuned to the Spirit Channel.

  "I think better without too much food," she adds. "You could do worse than to follow my example."

  "No, thanks. Heretofore, I have had no wish to communicate with the hereafter, and I do not foresee that changing. So what does a highfalutin' High Priestess of Hocus-pocus want with a streetwise dude like me? Am I not simply too down-to-earth for the likes of you?"

  "Indeed." She sighs. "But I cannot subject myself to outer infelicities, particularly at this hazardous time of year. I need an emissary."

  "You need your furry little forehead examined! You think this is a hazardous time of year for you? How would you like to walk in my pads, wearing my--albeit handsome--risky cat suit every day? Popular as black cats are in holiday decorations, on the street they are bait for every sadistic kid and the occasional deranged Satanist. You should go out in my place these days, not vice versa."

  "That lamentable bias against black may be real, Louie, but you have survived the dangers of the season for several years, though you have never confronted dangers of the spiritual sort before."

  "Say you! You should know, my good feline, that I have seen the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson on more than one occasion."

  "Oh, pooh! So have some humans who are barely psychic. A kitten could spot that tired old revenant at the age of two weeks with its eyes closed! I am not speaking of benign and paltry spirits, but of those too terrible to name. I am talking of an unholy conjunction of means, motive and opportunity. I am seeing death in the cards."

  "Death? Or ... murder?"

  "All death is the murder of hopes."

  "All death is not against the law, not the law of this state anyway. People do it religiously every day. So all this staring at the moon and mooning about the penthouse in the dark is to say you think someone will be murdered? You could predict that every day in Las Vegas and be right."

  "This will be a most... unnatural death."

  "Are not they all? At least in my book."

  "I see someone near to you involved."

  "Miss Temple Barr? Another easy prediction. She has been up to her kneecaps in murder ever since I hid behind the corpse at the American Booksellers Association convention and helped her find her first body. Our association has been the same old same-old since then."

  "Have you ever wondered why, Louie?"

  "Why we formed our association? I got Miss Temple eating out of the palm of my pad, that is why. I saw a soft touch and I went for it. Call me manipulative, but it is a tradition with our kind."

  "I know why you have come to reside at the Circle Ritz. You needed shelter." Before I can object to
this humiliating review of the con job of the century, the sublime Karma goes on. "No, Louie. I was asking another question: do you know why your mistress encounters so many instances of murder?"

  "For one thing, Vegas is not exactly known for a nonviolent lifestyle, at least on and around the Strip. Then, I guess that Miss Temple, being a publicist whose job it is to make clients look good, has no liking for untidy situations that attract bad publicity. Murder certainly qualifies as that. Miss Temple cannot help herself. She is a compulsive fixer-upper."

  "No. The reason is you, Louie."

  "Me? What do I have to do with it, other than saving Miss Temple's Bandolinos every so often, and solving the murder without ever getting any credit for my intrepid investigations? Call me the Deep Throat of catdom."

  "You have always been a big eater, but it was not until you came in contact with someone whose job took her into the city's dark heart that crime became an avocation. You are the Jinx personified, the unlucky element that brings your mistress to the razor's edge of danger time and time again."

  "Me?" I am shocked. I have always seen myself as a debonair, happy-go-lucky charming kind of dude. Now I am told that I am no more than an unlucky charm.

  "You have an obligation to counter your unlucky influence."

  "I do my own investigations, do I not?"

  "Yes, but that is after the crime. Now I am asking you to anticipate a crime, a terrible miscarriage of justice."

  "And what do I get for it?"

  This relevant question the Sublime Karma ignores.

  "The crime will not be obvious." Karma cocks her head and dark-tipped ears as if listening to someone... someone who is not present in the penthouse. Or, at least, someone who is not visible.

  I follow the direction of her azure glance and see only the shy dance of stray light off reflective surfaces in Miss Electra Lark's eclectically furnished living room. There is the dull gray gleam of the picture tube on her blond fifties television console. A more lurid spark lights the huge green glass ball that sits atop a base formed from some brass elephants with hemorrhoids doing the lambada. On second thought, I am glad that I do not "see" anything. What is said to be invisible, I think, often has good reason for that condition.