Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 35

Three's a Crowd

"I wish to hell," Molina said over the phone, "that you'd left the evidence, if it is such, in place."

"I called you the first moment I could."

"And you left her-- ?"

"Sitting in the Laughalot office on Charleston."

Temple herself was sitting on her bed, the recipe box and the letter opener beside her.

"I'll wait here for someone to collect these things. And, Lieutenant," Temple rushed on, detecting the preparatory rustle of an imminent hang-up. "I'm really worried about something.

Midnight Louie has been gone for over twenty-four hours. It's not like him. He always comes home, at least to eat. Since I started adding some Yummy Tum-tum-tummy over his Free-to-be-Feline he's been much better about eating at home too."

"The cat? Cats ... go places. Call the pound."

Temple sighed and cut off her side of the connection so she could do just that.

But first she called Max.

"You went back alone when you knew this woman was there?" he asked.

"I thought at the time that she had tried to implicate me in Darren Cooke's death to protect his reputation. I didn't realize she had caused it. His death, not his reputation."

"And you left her there alone?"

"I was hardly equipped to take her into custody. And lucky to get out of there, frankly."

"And you just called up Molina to tell her all about it?"

"Max, can you speak in something other than questions?"

"No. Are you all right? I mean, physically. I'm not so sure about the other."

"Well, I'm a little wobbly. And I'm worried about Midnight Louie. I've haven't seen him since

. . . early yesterday."

"Forget the cat! Nobody knew where you were. We could have been wondering into next week if anything had happened."

"It didn't. Not really."

"I'll be right over."

He hung up as abruptly as Molina.

Temple flopped open the huge Las Vegas telephone book and hunted through the White and Yellow Pages until she finally found the animal facility listed under "Animal Shelters."

The animal pound, after what seemed like twenty-nine rings and a voice-mail program with a roster of innumerable numbers to describe and hit, finally took her recorded message of Louie's description and her address and phone number.

Temple sighed, and called Matt.

"Sorry to bother you on your afternoon off."

"No problem."

"I wondered if you'd seen Louie anywhere around the place? He's been missing for almost thirty-six hours--"

"Cats roam, and you do let him out. I'm sure he's fine and will be back in no time."

"Oh, dear. I'm not. Anyway, I have some new information on the Cooke case that's very puzzling, given that you've heard from your famous sex-addict client since Cooke's death.

"I talked to Darren's illegitimate daughter, the one who's been sending him the hate mail.

And she says she came to his room at midnight Sunday night, just like you heard on the phone, only it can't be her you heard arriving, or him you were talking to, since that man is still calling you, and Cooke's dead. Unless he's a ghost. Or could she be one?"

"I'll be right down." Matt hung up the phone as abruptly as Molina.

They all had hangupitis, Temple concluded, sighing again. She felt so terribly, terribly tired, and wasn't thinking too clearly. But she understood that was because she'd had to deal with a deranged personality for a long time all by herself.

What really worried her was not what she had just been through, but the empty, undented space on her coverlet that testified to Midnight Louie's even longer absence.

The doorbell rang.

Listlessly, she got up to answer it.

"Temple, you're not making sense."

Matt backed her into the room and actually pressed the back of his hand to her forehead as if she were an ailing child. Then he pushed her gently onto the sofa.

"Yes, I am," she answered. "In my way. You of all people should understand how taxing it is to talk to a compulsive, especially when you're trying to outthink one and you have no grasp of the real picture."

"You mentioned Cooke's daughter. You found her?"

"Right in the family circle, so to speak. His personal assistant. She's the one who marked my card and slipped it into the recipe file. I figured she wanted to protect her boss's reputation as a ladies' man, so no one would think he killed himself for impotence or something. But the real motive was quite the reverse. She wanted to ruin him, and didn't care who she used to do it."

"Card? Recipe file. And this daughter came to his room at midnight? But on the phone I heard a man welcoming a woman who had obviously come to sleep with him."

"Yeah. Well. That fits."

"Temple, you are really ragged out. You're not making sense. You implied that Cooke's secret daughter came to sleep with him."

Temple nodded. "Which she did, and then told him who she was and that she wanted all his money on top of it. No wonder he killed himself."

Matt literally drew back. "That's . . . horrible. She must be completely demented."

"No, not as much as before, maybe. I mean, when she went for that pewter letter opener, I thought I was dead meat. But I remembered what you said about an attacker having already chosen his or her--I suppose I should use that weasely phrase here--weapon, but that I had a choice of anything in the area. It really helped. She was no problem, really. At the end. I just took all the evidence, walked out and left her. You would have been proud of me."

"Proud of you? I'm appalled. Where did all of this happen? What made you think you could go off alone and confront her?"

He had grabbed her shoulders, but Temple just stared confusedly into his shocked face. She thought she was being admirably coherent considering how she had spent the last couple of hours.

"The office was on Charleston," Max said, stepping in from the patio behind them. "And we'd both been there the night before."

Matt's hands loosened. This time he drew back with edgy caution. Temple blinked and looked away. Now the cat was out of the bag.

"Why are you wasting your time asking questions?" Max continued. "Temple's obviously shocked and exhausted. Where's the medicinal brandy? Same old place?" He eyed Temple for a response she was incapable of making, then vanished into the kitchen.

Matt stared at Temple as if he'd seen a ghost.

She shrugged. "I had to let him know, seeing as he broke us into the office in the first place."

"Broke you in?" Matt whispered in disbelief. "This entire . . . scenario is nuts."

"I agree." Temple leaned against the sofa back, feeling too lethargic to sit up. "I wish I knew where Louie was."

Max had returned with a juice glass full of something clear, no ice.

Temple squinted at the blue grass, from a set colored in various jewel tones. "What's in there? Amber or white?"

"Just drink." Max knelt beside her to chime the glass against her teeth.

All this solicitation was most uncomfortable.

Matt, still sitting beside her, watched in disapproval. "Temple doesn't need alcohol right now. She needs to talk out her severe emotional strain."

"Nothing cures 'severe emotional strain' better than a bolt of booze."

"This stuff tastes like rubbing alcohol!" Temple protested after one swallow, pushing it away.

"That's what you get for buying cheap vodka," Max said. "I've told you time and again."

"It's always mixed with something else. Who could tell? Unless they were forced to chugalug it straight. Listen, guys." She looked left and she looked right. "I appreciate you both being so concerned, but I'm all right. I called Lieutenant Molina like a good citizen, and the police are sending someone over to get the goods, and will probably pick up Alison Darby for her own safety. Maybe suicide runs in the family. I wouldn't want her to kill herself because she told me the truth. Now I just wish someone could help me find Midnight Louie."

Blatantly, in front of her, Matt and Max exchanged a glance of complete harmony: she was not herself. Temple had flipped.

Before she could protest this outrageous collusion among rivals, someone knocked on the door. This time, everyone exchanged glances.

"I'll get it," Matt said, since he was the only one who really could.

After he opened the door there was a moment's silence.

"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," Matt said loudly.

Max eeled out the patio doors so quickly he seemed like merely a passing s un shadow.

Temple sneaked another swallow of the awful vodka, then Matt led Molina into the room.

"I never dreamed you'd come yourself," Temple said, pulling herself together. "How nice you're worried about Midnight Louie too."

The lieutenant and Matt exchanged a significant glance.

Temple could have screamed, but she didn't want to be mistaken for a crazy woman, although it was a little late to worry about that.

*****************

"I should have called you in the first place," Temple told Electra when Molina had left, and Matt had left and Temple had finally called someone who was fascinated instead of appalled by her story.

"You just go to bed, dear. Gracious, talking to that poor girl would have been like watchin g five years of soap-opera plots on fast-forward. Such a lurid tale! And so interesting."

"But what about Louie?"

"You're right. It's not like the big black bozo to be off so long. Do you have the phone numbers of the people connected with the film commercial anywhere? Maybe he returned to the places they were working. You know Louie, always likes to be at the scene of the action."

"Yes, Electra! You're the only one who's been able to handle my story without hysterics or to see that something must have happened to Louie. Let's see ... the numbers are on the Rolodex on my desk under 'A La Cat.' Would be right after Alabama'... if I had such a category on file, which I don't, but I can't remember what would be ahead of or behind it. Maybe I'm not making sense."

"Understand you perfectly, dear. I'll go hunt, and then call around. Now you just settle down. I'll call everybody I can about Louie."

At last, a woman of action!

Temple edged down in the bed covers, too weary to wonder at the fact that her living room had almost hosted Matt Devine, Max Kinsella and Lt. C. R. Molina all at the same time. Now that was really frightening!

Electra had figured that out too, because when she came back to report that the film crew had been inactive that day, she sat on the bed's edge.

"I know you're tired, but what did Matt have to say to Max when he showed up?"

"Nothing much. They were too busy making faces over my head."

"And then the lieutenant came?"

"In person," Temple mumbled from under a warm roll of sheet and blanket. "Max was outta there like . . . like Louie. Then Matt and Molina made faces over my head, as if I were some certified idiot."

"They just don't have much imagination." Electra pondered for a bit, while Temple flirted seriously with sleep.

A nice warm, white silence hovered everywhere.

Electra hovered in that vague cloudy limbo too, present but unintrusive. Temple was finally slipping back into the flamingo land from which she'd awakened this morning when--

Someone rang her doorbell.

Oh, it was loud! Oh, it had jerked her back to reality. Who had the gall to be at her door now?

She heard Electra trying to rush quietly to answer the doorbell before the offender could ring again. Temple was still too dopey to move.

Until Electra screamed.

Temple sat up, scrubbing her face to brush away the cobwebs.

She stumbled out of bed, lurching in Electra's footsteps. When she got to the main room, she found her landlady, her back pasted against the closed apartment door, her muumuu looking like a floral stick-on decal.

"Who's out there? Electra, is somebody bad trying to get in?"

"Don't look. Let me call Matt. You don't want to see."

Of course, nothing would have snapped Temple into full, alert consciousness just then, except the assertion that there was something she shouldn't see.

"It's my doorstep. Although there's no step, really. So ... step aside and let me see," Temple ordered with all the articulate authority of a drunken sailor.

"Really, no. I'm terribly afraid--it's just better to let a man handle this."

Another set of fighting words. "Stand back, Electra, or I'll--"

Temple grabbed the doorknob, leaned back and pulled with all her might.

The door gave not a whit, but Electra was intimidated enough to move away.

"You'll wish you'd listened to me. I'm calling Matt."

She was at the kitchen phone punching in the number before Temple had opened the door enough to see a white bundle lying on the floor of the dim hall cul-de-sac.

"Laundry?" she asked. "Somebody wants me to do their laundry? It had better not be male!"

She heard Electra blathering behind her.

What was so horrifying about a pile of dirty clothes?

And then the bundle moved.

Or something inside it did.

Temple would have screamed, but choked it off. Anyone who had walked away from an incestuous psychopath only hours before was not about to be spooked by a post-Halloween ghost.

She crouched down. The bundle was really only one pillowcase. A white satin pillowcase, as a matter of fact. The contents stirred again. Frankly, Temple was thinking . .. snakes!

But as the pillow shifted, she saw that something dark sprinkled the white surface . . . Oh, boy. Blood. In nice fat droplets.

What kind of a sadistic prank was this?

She found the pillowcase's open end, tied into a pucker by a . . . pink velvet headband? She was about to try the knot when Matt's footsteps came pounding down the muffling hall carpet.

"Don't do it!" Electra urged hysterically behind her.

"I wasn't going to open it. I know it might be snakes."

"Snakes!" Electra wailed. "Oh, I do dearly hope so."

A hiss from within the bag appeared to answer her prayers.

Temple jerked her hand back, and cocked her head at Matt as he knelt down.

"Better get a bucket or something in case it is snakes," he said, looking at Electra.

"Who would leave a bag of bloody snakes on my doorstep?" Temple asked.

"Maybe some of the snakes you've been stirring up lately." Matt was grim. "You'd better brace yourself--"

He was working loose the velvet band, and stopped only to take the plastic bucket Electra had found.

"Use these," she said, tossing him a pair of rubber dish-washing gloves. "All I could find."

He hesitated, then donned them awkwardly. They really were too small, but fairly thick rubber in a protective sense.

Then he opened the mouth of the pillowcase wider and wider. Something came writhing and slashing out, hissing to high heaven.

Temple, startled, jumped back with an indrawn breath.

"I was afraid of that." Electra began a soprano wail that went up and up the scale.

It was Midnight Louie, reeking of chloroform, twisting and turning like a black tornado, his claws making coleslaw of Matt's rubber gloves.

"What have they done to him?" Temple wailed.

Matt finally released the cat. The hisses subsided to a long aria of dull growl. Louie lay twitching and blinking in their midst, his eyes wet and shut, his fur matted and unkempt.

"He's alive," Matt pointed out. "We need to examine him in the light. Get a towel, Electra."

She raced for the bathroom.

"Louie." Temple reached a hand to his disheveled head.

He snarled, and she snatched it back.

"What have they done to him?" she asked, whispering.

"He seems disoriented. I think he's been knocked out."

"But why? Just to ... scare me?"

"Whoever did this was sick." Matt took the two thick bath towels Electra offered. "Talk to him, Temple. We don't want him any more agitated than necessary."

Matt dropped the towels over Louie's huddled form, then gently tucked them under the cat and lifted the whole package.

Black feet flailed as the growls rose to another deafening shriek.

"Get the pillowcase," Matt yelled at Temple as he rushed inside.

She snatched it up and followed. Electra, on the phone, nodded as she listened. Her mouth pantomimed the word "vet."

"Any apparent broken bones?" she asked.

"He's still kicking," Temple said.

"Visible wounds?"

"Hard to tell," Matt announced.

Electra nodded one last time. "Okay. We'll bring him right in." She hung up. "I don't think Temple should drive."

"Oh, for heaven's sake! I drove home after the assault in the parking garage. Besides, I doubt that anyone but Matt can hold him. Grab my tote, Electra; I'll open doors."

The trio hurried outside as fast as their routine allowed: T emple leading and opening, Matt holding the protesting wad of towels, Electra in the rear, toting Temple's tote bag, digging for car keys and closing doors behind her as she went.

The keys were ready by the time they reached Temple's car. Electra opened the passenger door to seat Matt, then struggled into the less capacious backseat.

Temple was awake and then some. She revved the Storm so fast it almost choked, and burned rubber out of the lot.

"Ooh," Electra murmured as the sharp turn onto the side street shoved her all the way to the opposite window.

But nobody dared criticize Temple's driving, and they did arrive safely at Dr. Doolittle's in record time.

"This seems familiar," the receptionist said as she waved them into the first consulting room without a pause at the desk. "What's wrong with this little guy?"

Nobody corrected her. "We don't know," they all said at once.

Louie's feet, battling to escape the confining towels, made skid marks on Matt's arms.

Dr. Doolittle came in, her white lab coat flapping with haste, the vet tech behind her toting Louie's slim record file.

"What have we got here?"

Matt described how Louie had been found, while Temple produced the bloody satin pillowcase.

"Those blood drops came from the outside, not the inside," Dr. Doolittle said with a frown, gingerly peeling back tangled towels to unveil Louie.

He sat blinking under the fluorescent light, ears back, eyes squinting almost shut, fur wet and full of cowlicks. His hind feet splayed out, while his forelegs would hardly brace his solid weight.

"Hmmm. Quiet down, boy. You're gonna be all right." Dr. Doolittle concentrated only on Louie, gently feeling each of his legs. (He didn't like that, and said so.) Then she hefted him onto his feet and felt his torso. He lowered his head like a big black bull and snarled. She even ran her hands over his tail.

Then out came the stethoscope and finally the thermometer.

"Uh-oh." Temple was quick to grab Louie's shoulders. The tech held his head so he couldn't bite, while Matt grabbed his hind legs so he couldn't kick and scratch. Electra, watching from a corner of the room, seemed to enter a meditative trance.

The insertion of the thermometer nearly sent Louie up the wall of human flesh holding him down. Waiting for the instrument's beeped "done" signal seemed an endless ordeal to one and all.

"Everything looks normal," Dr. Doolittle said finally. "Heart's a little fast, but this struggle could do that. He's obviously been anesthetized." She ruffled the fur of a foreleg until she saw something. "An injection hole. He seems a bit touchy in the rear area, but t hat could have been the thermometer. I'd say that some do-gooder mistook him for a feral cat and picked him up for a quick neutering, but I did a quick check while he was flailing; all his equipment is present and accounted for."

"People would snatch and alter other people's cats?" Temple asked, incredulous.

"Animal-lovers would. You might consider neutering Louie now," she added sternly. "It would keep him from roaming and getting into trouble like this. And it would certainly keep more unwanted kittens from entering the world only to leave it in short order at a shelter, or after a harsh, unhappy street life."

Temple nodded soberly. So much had happened in her personal and professional life since Louie had showed up five months ago. She'd always meant to do the neutering business. ...

While she wallowed in guilt, Dr. Doolittle considered Louie from a safe distance. He was still snarling and thrashing.

"I can't find a thing wrong with him," the vet said, "except for being woozy from anesthetic and roughed up from fighting the bed linens. We'll keep him under observation overnight--"

"Louie will think I've abandoned him!" Temple fretted.

"I want him on an IV to make sure he gets plenty of liquid. You can visit him tomorrow."

"But there's no visible damage?"

"Not on first examination, under these less-than-ideal circumstances. I want to see how he'll act in the morning."

"Still mad as hell," Temple predicted.

She ventured to pat Louie's ruffled head as the tech carried him off, growling, wrapped in the terrible towels again.

"We'll call if there's any change," Dr. Doolittle promised. "Whatever happened on Louie's recent adventure, only he can say. "Now go home and get some rest," she prescribed for Temple, "with plenty of liquids and someone to watch over you."

She quirked a smile at Electra and Matt, then bustled off to wherever veterinarians go when they leave consulting rooms.

"I've got just the liquid," Electra muttered on their exit. "Bottle of cherry brandy I saved since my last husband."

"You'll have to watch over Temple," Matt told her. "I can't cancel out of work on such short notice."

Electra patted his arm as he opened the Storm's passenger door for her. "You just trundle off to your phone lines, Matt. We girls will sit at home sipping brandy and talking about you guys."

"No brandy for me," Temple said. "I want to find out if the police picked up Alison Darby.

Would she have been demented enough to take my snooping out on Louie? If she's still on the loose--" She picked up the satin pillowcase she had thrown on the shift console. "Something is crusted near the open edge. Ick!" She looked closer. "Embroidery! Initials. Who would be dumb enough to dump a kidnapped cat in a personalized pillowcase? Electra? Matt? Can either of you make out these letters?"

While Temple got the car in gear and going, Electra hunched forward in the backseat so the two could consult over the front seat back.

"Maybe it's a hotel insignia," Electra suggested. "An S. Don't you think, Matt?"

"An S could be the Sands."

"Torn down," Temple reminded them, turning onto the Strip.

"This middle initial is an I," Electra went on, deciphering as much with her finge rs as her eyes.

"And," said Matt, "the last one must be an A."

"SIA," Temple mused. "A sister organization to the CIA? Is that why the satin pillowcase? Just kidding. Usually the last name is in the middle, so it really should be SAL"

"Unless," she added, "the person who ordered this attack is so dumb that he or she --and I lean to a she--didn't know that."

She hit the brakes so hard her seat-belted passengers barely caught themselves from being hurled into something hard.

"Sorry," Temple said. "Speaking of dumb ... it just occurred to me to wonder what Savannah Ashleigh's middle name is."