Cat In A Golden Garland

Prologue

This Star is Not in the Sky

Have you ever noticed that those who practice the mantic arts are not happy unless they are telling you about it?

In fact, they are happiest when they are telling you about you. Whether you want to hear it or not. Especially when you most particularly do not want to hear it.

This is my very situation with Karma, our landlady's more than somewhat strange resident cat. I do not deny that Karma has a certain "talent," I simply am not sure that it is psychic. True, our recent Halloween adventure at the haunted-house attraction did seem to produce a presence that could have been Karma. Still, I am not ready to agree that the will-o'-the-wisp of light that I saw on those occasions was some incendiary projection of a Birman cat with pretensions to prognostication.

I have been thinking long and deep on the situation (that is what I am really doing whenever I appear to be "resting") and I have concluded that the dancing dollop of candle power I saw could have as easily been a spark from the pipe of the English gent who turned up in the Ghost Parade. That Doyly dude in tweeds and overgrown eyebrows with the checkered cap. The British do like their patterns.

Their preferences in that direction even run to calico and tiger-stripe cats. I of course am like Jackie O when it comes to fashion taste: I never wear patterns. Being born with a superb coat of shiny black hair that needs only an occasional shake and the lightest of licks now and then is another advantage. In case my moniker of Midnight Louie has not tipped you off or you have been in Tibet for the first half of the nineties, my appearance is a symphony in subtle black, with the white in my whiskers and the truly elegant green of my eyes keeping the rich simplicity of my daily garb from being a tad dull. Not that an undercover operator like myself would not stoop even to dullness to guarantee a low profile when I am investigating a case.

But I am off duty now for the holidays, and enjoying the simple life: loafing about the Circle Ritz apartment I share with my little doll, Miss Temple Barr. Not that she is any good at loafing; she is too young, in human years, to appreciate the pursuit. No, she is all bustle on her three-inch shivs--those high heels she prongs around on. I must admit that she is a bit deflated since the death of Darren Cooke. It was ruled a suicide, but I can tell that Miss Temple is not happy with that likelihood. I can only describe her as moping. In fact, she is so unnaturally sober and quiet these days that I would welcome a nocturnal admission of Mr. Mystifying Max. He is a magician whether he works at it or no, and likes to make surprise appearances, usually in the dead of night.

Ordinarily, I do not cotton to interlopers, and Mr. Max Kinsella is a territorial guy on top of it. I doubt that we would get along if forced to associate for any period of time. Miss Temple Barr is my roomie now, since Mr. Mystifying ran off like a scalded alley cat with no notice or explanation a year ago. What you leave is mine, if I want it. And I have nothing to complain about in the accommodations Miss Temple Barr has put at my disposal. The bathroom window is always ajar, a narrow, burglarproof invitation to the open road. (Though with Las Vegas's growing resident population and almost fifty mil of tourists ankling through day in and day out, open roads are pretty hard to find around town.) My bowl is always piled high with the latest tempting garnishes to the plain Jane Free-to-be-Feline health food lurking--untouched--beneath. And I have an emergency facility under the bathroom sink should I care to get clay litter under my nails, instead of the sandy desert dirt of Las Vegas.

Since I am recuperating from some minor surgery incurred in my last case, I am not minded to hop out the window for a night on the town. (Luckily, thanks to a bizarre twist of fate and despite extreme attempts to pare me down to the size of these petty, ultra politically correct times, I am still the same larger-than-life macho dude you know and love.) And Miss Temple Barr is out for the evening. I hope that she is out with Mr. Matt Devine. Him I could put up with, if he did not hog the covers. Unfortunately, I do not believe that even Miss Temple has explored Mr. Matt's sleeping habits. These humans are annoyingly slow with their mating rituals!

I understand the need for maturity and caution nowadays, as felines are subject to AIDS also, but I could give Mr. Matt Devine a tip or two about courting the female of any species. First, you show up and refuse to go away. Then you put up with the customary repeated brush-offs. Persistence is the name of the dating game. Finally, you wait until she is not looking and jump her, sinking your fangs into her neck . .. well, maybe human dudes can forget the fangs unless the lady is partial to vampires. I must admit that it is all over in a few seconds, which is why we feline dudes try again . . . and again . . . and again. Persistence wins lady fair every time, although she may yowl and slap your face when it is all over. Dames!

I am musing on the dating game when I hear one of the several French doors to the patio rattling. We are on the second floor and safe from all but the most agile cat burglar. Still, I am home alone and all my senses go on alert. In my invalid condition I am not ready for fisticuffs. Might pull out my stitches in a delicate area.

So I wait and watch, ready to make some really nasty noises if an unauthorized party breaks in. I am not worried that it might be Mr. Max Kinsella; he never announces his imminent arrival with any vulgar noises. Actually, we have a lot in common when you come to think of it--black hair, a way with the ladies, slightly felonious intent and a possessive nature--which is probably why I cannot stand the guy.

While I wait I speculate on who, or what, might be broaching my retreat. This is how to keep an active mind even when the body is in full sloth. I have ruled out: the seasonal overnight delivery service with Christmas presents for Miss Temple; the pizza guy; the big ole palm tree outside dropping one of its leaves with an anticlimactic shudder like a stripper doffing her last pastie.

Now I hear a not inconsiderable weight launched at the door. Or kicking the door. The force was applied very low to the ground. A door-stomping burglar. This could be serious. Guys with no regard for the delicate fretwork of a fifties-vintage glass-and-wood French door would do anything, including stomping the petals off the begonias on poor Miss Temple's patio. I recall when my little doll was assaulted in a parking garage by some thugs the size of Godzilla. Are they paying my lovely mistress a midnight call? They will get more Midnight than they planned on.

I snick out all four sets of shivs, hearing the satisfying rip of surgically sharp nails into the canvas covering of Miss Temple's sofa. My recuperation has meant that I have not been wearing my feline edge down to a dull nub with street wanderings. I am twenty pounds of thorny, snarling, growling pussycat, and if I am not quite as formidable as Kahlua, the magician's panther, I am a close second. I prepare to leap high when the door is broached, and go for the eyes.

Finally the door pops ajar. I know how rickety those old locks are from my own surreptitious comings and goings.

I leap into the air like a heavyweight butterfly, prepared to sting like a manta ray, a big black winged shape at one with the darkness, yet darker still than night, and out for blood ... the Hooded Claw!

It is an imposing attack, and it is launched at empty air. Nothing. Nada to a Chihuahua. Nil. The Big Nothing. Nowhere.

I twist to make sure I land shiv-first, and snap my switchblades to "safety." I return to earth like a sack of potatoes with bunions.

On top of the intruder.

Which is pale and soft like some huge spider-creature.

And which has blue eyes.

Uh-oh.

And which is hissing and cursing me in some very ripe language.

"Louie, you obnoxious unbeliever!" she finishes up. "Why did you not help me open the door? I have ruined my best nails trying to break in."

I roll away as fast as a dude in my delicate condition can manage it. "I thought you could just sort of. . . leak in, like mist or daylight."

"Only under special circumstances, like psychic emergencies. And the stars are not right. All Hallows' Eve is long past."

"I can read a calendar all by myself, Karma. So what brings you out of your hidey-hole in the penthouse suite?"

Her blue eyes blink and water at the faint night-lights Miss Temple leaves around the place for my nighttime convenience, though I think it is mostly for her own peace of mind.

"You do this all the time?" the Birman babe asks, in tones that are either admiring or disbelieving. "Fighting the plant life and the railing and then ... leaping to the lower balcony. Oh, it was too awful. And however shall I get back up again? Miss Electra Lark will be so shocked to find me missing."

"If you are missing, how is she going to find you? Do not worry, I will escort your Psychic Self back up. You should avoid the physical world like the plague, and stick to the hoodoo-voodoo stuff, doll. Your coat is a mess and you look a little wobbly on the pins. You definitely are not dressed for breaking and entering."

She shakes out her cafe-au-lait fur coat, then smooths her white gloves and gaiters into apple-pie order before deigning to answer me.

"If you knew how difficult it was for me to leave my refuge and find you . . . gratitude is not one of your virtues, Louis."

"Cut out the 'Louis' stuff. You are trying to make me sound like an uptown cat when I have always been a downtown cat. My name is Louie as in King Louie the Umpteenth and in Crab Louie and in the rock 'n' roll classic song 'Louie, Louie.'"

"The various kings of France called 'Louie' spelled their names 'Louis.' The French merely drop the last consonant when pronouncing the name."

"No wonder the French beheaded their kings! Poor old Louie the Sixteenth! If the French are that careless about dropping the terminal s on a classy moniker like Louie, what difference will chopping off a reigning monarch's head make? At least they had the pronunciation right, and in my book that is a lot more important than getting the spelling perfect."

"Getting the spelling right is very important in arcane matters," she retorts with a sniff, one of those effete little purebred sniffs that implies access to a gourmet brand of catnip. "And that is why I braved the awful out-of-doors and performed a most dangerous balancing act to come down and tell you my latest news hot off the crystal ball."

I shake my head. A five-week-old kitten could make its way down two floors at an old building like the Circle Ritz, which drips with "architectural details"--stepping stones to my breed--like a black marble Christmas tree decorated in bric-a-brac.

"I cruise the Internet with Miss Temple myself," I put in with a yawn. "That is where all the real action is these days. So what tricks is Miss Electra Lark's big green-glass globe up to?"

Karma settles onto her haunches, tucking her forefeet under like a yogi, or a swami or some Oriental pundit from Siam. (I understand that we are supposed to say "Asian" nowadays, but "Oriental" has a ring to it I cannot give up, and I do not see why political correctness must edit the language of words that make a nice singsong yowl in the conversation. Certainly my usage has ruffled the ineffable Karma's fur, for the pale hair-tips seem to glow in an unseen aura.)

"I am channeling a new ancient. Ever since my psychic exposure, through you, to the forces at the doomed Houdini seance, someone impossibly old has been trying to come through."

I shrug, and her enormous blue eyes whip to my twitching shoulder blades. Blazing out from the dark brown that masks her face, them there eyes are pretty potent.

"I have finally found out who I am dealing with," she announces. "Someone incredibly old. Unfathomably powerful."

"Bob Dole?" I quip, the recent election having been decided by a landslide for Socks Clinton, a personal buddy of mine, on account of I saved him from running away from the will of the people and abdicating his First Cat status. And he was the First Cat in the White House in a long, long time. It sets my mind at ease to know that Bill Clinton's ear is purred into nightly by the real power behind the presidency--Socks himself. Hillary is just there as a front-woman to take all the flack.

Karma waits for me to stop grinning, then says, "Bast."

"No need to swear at a little political humor," I say.

"Bastet," she adds, using the ancient deity's full, formal name.

"Sssst!" I hiss. "You do not wish to take that particular honcho's name in vain. Or honchette, I guess I should say. I have met the lady, and this is one goddess you do not wish to hiss off."

"I know. Bast and I have had many conversations about you."

"Me? What is there to talk about, except my ancient lineage that goes back all the way to the Pharaohs? Through the maternal line, of course."

"Bast was most pleased to hear that you have reformed your alley-cat ways. The choice may not have been free but at least the neutering operation was."

"Listen. There is nothing neutered about any part of me. I did not have your usual back-alley procedure, you know. This was a VIP-level operation in every respect. This doctor dude has worked on Schwarzenegger and Stallone. I have not lost a thing. Not one thing! And not even two. It was all done with lasers and lipo. You want to see my scars?"

She shuts those blue-lightning eyes for a weary moment. I suppose that when your soul is older than the Hollywood hills, the concerns of ordinary beings are paltry things. But then, my concerns are never paltry, b.o. or a.o. (Before Operation or After Operation).

"So you have been rendered sterile but remain virile. Interesting, but hardly the coming thing. I understand you still leave your odorous 'marks' around the place, still get into immature fisticuffs and still play the Romeo. You will have to undergo many more lives before you can progress to another level of development."

"I do not want to progress! I want to stay right where I am, doing what I am doing. Eating, drinking and making whoopee."

"I am afraid that this is exactly what you will not be able to do for the immediate future. That is why I am here, to warn you."

She shakes her sagacious Birman head. For the first time I notice a tiny gold ring against the brown of one eartip, and I admit I get the shivers. The last cats I have seen so decorated were mummified models wrapped up in gauze so tight that they resemble two-thousand-year-old bowling pins.

Her head tilts so the earring catches and ricochets back the night-light glow. "A mark of favor from Bastet. Poor Electra is quite confused about when she took me to the mall for a piercing. Mine, unlike yours, was a psychic procedure, and performed by the goddess herself with her own Sacred Fang."

I swallow. I am glad that I am not in Bastet's favor, if she is going to staple-gun my ears for the privilege. Besides, I do not wear any sissy earrings. I even disdain a simple leather collar, and certainly those new, Day-Glo jobbies that are elasticized like a brassiere or something. Supposed to be a safety feature, but I personally think they are designed to make a normal dude look like an idiot.

"So what is going to happen to me? Nothing like knowing the future to give a person a nasty sense of impending doom."

"Oh, it may not be doom in store for you, Louie. Merely a sudden, long trip to a far, alien place more strange than any you have seen before."

"I am going to be kidnapped by extraterrestrials? Those bug-eyed grasshopper guys who haven't heard about needle safety regulations? They might mess with my altered state. No way. Besides, the only saucers I like are filled with brandy Alexanders, not grasshoppers."

"Such an imagination." Karma almost smiles, save I have never seen a cat smile yet. Maybe grin a little when no one is watching. "But you have been earmarked for a great role in the affairs of the day."

I do not like that "earmarked" idea and feel one of mine twitch. Ever since my involuntary surgery, various extremities have developed nervous tics. I know, I know. Nothing was lost. But it was close. If Miss Savannah Ashleigh had not been so dumb as to take me to her personal surgeon, I could be singing falsetto with the rest of the "retired" boys in the band right now.

"Do not growl, Louie." Karma stretches her limousine legs, then arches her back and rises. She is big enough to tower over me. "Change is not necessarily loss, but opportunity. See that you take advantage of the ones soon to come your way. Now. Can you see me up to my room?"

She makes it sound like a little gentlemanly escort duty, but it is more like baby-sitting. Turns out this babe is afraid of heights, and going up is a lot worse than coming down. Our return is supposed to be discreet, but that is hard to achieve when it takes an occasional claw-prod in the posterior to keep her moving up the facade of the Circle Ritz, which has suddenly become as black and slick and smooth as a frozen lava wall. But she bites back any yowls of protest at my herding technique and I finally goad her over the patio railing into Miss Electra Lark's territory again.

"Even Bast's psychic surgery was kinder than your ministrations, Louie. Was such rudeness necessary?"

"Rule One in Advanced Climbing Technique: keep moving or drop dead."

With that blunt summary I leave her.

Bast's earring winks at me as I turn to head back down.

Maybe the goddess--a pretty hip chick two thousand years ago, after all--is wondering if I am fully recovered from my operation.

Chapter 1

An Offer Not to Be Refused

"Don't move! Just listen. You've got to get an agent, pronto!"

Temple listened to the voice on the phone, still numb from the import of the previous call, one made to her, not like this one that she had made immediately afterward.

"It's such short notice, though," Temple answered the urgency on the line's other end. "I'd been thinking about visiting you for the holidays--"

"Don't think. You can hire someone to do that for you. This could be very, very big."

"Not at one hundred and fifty a day."

"That was last week. This is . . . this week. From what you said, they said, this is a whole new ball game."

"I hate ball games. I hate that expression. Could you try something less cliched?"

"You're concentrating on trivia because the Big Picture is too new to take in. Look. I must know Someone who knows Someone. This is New York City, after all. Everybody's a specialist. Let me call around and get you a reference. Then we can talk housing arrangements."

"Yes, but I don't see--"

Yes, but. You don't see. That's the problem. Just hang up. Sit tight and let Aunty Kit handle it. I'd love to see you for Christmas, sweetie, but I'd much rather see you with a decent contract in your hand. Cheerio."

Temple couldn't tell if her aunt was under the influence of a food craving or simply wishing her good-bye. But she did as instructed; she hung up and looked at Midnight Louie, who had actually exchanged his comfy sofa for the hard kitchen countertop when the call had come half an hour ago.

"Looks like we'll be seeing Kris Kringle at Macy's this year, Louie. You know, Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street Macy's. Except they might not let you in. Oh, golly, I hope Aunt Kit knows what she's doing. If she blows this deal... but she's a novelist and she used to be an actress, and they both use agents, so I guess she's my nearest expert, besides being a contact in Manhattan. Just think, Louie! You and me, living it up for the holidays in New York, New York."

I yawn. I have interrupted my nap, after all, to rush over and eavesdrop. The first call was a lot more interesting, because it was mainly all about me.

"Poor fella! You're so pooped from your medical nightmare, and now I'm supposed to whisk you off to New York and all the performance pressure, in pursuit of mythical beasts: cruel chimeras of Fame and Fortune. I wonder if we need another agent to look after your interests alone? Like in messy divorce cases. You are going to be a 'party of the first part,' after all."

I got a late-breaking headline, doll. I have always been the Party of the First Part, especially now that I still have all my parts--by some miracle and a dopey blonde's mistake. And they call us dumb beasts!

"I do not know." Miss Temple kicks off her magenta suede high heels so I can read the label. Some dudette named Nicole Miller. It is nice to see the little dolls coming up in the world nowadays and becoming majorettes of industry and design.

She wiggles her toes, a gesture I can appreciate, and I do not even wear shoes, much less skyscraper shoes. I wonder if she will take her designer stilts to New York, New York. It is an either-way call: heads she wears 'em and is not fit to flee a mugger, and tails she does not, and is therefore unarmed with a sharp instrument when attacked in Broadway daylight.

"Will any hotels let you in? Maybe the Algonquin. It has always had a 'house cat,' after all, along with a house tie for errant gentle-men in too-casual attire. Kit says we could stay with her, but I hate to impose."

Say, this Indian joint is my kind of place. I am always dressed in formal black. As for staying with Miss Temple's aunt, one Miss Kit Carlson, that is okay with me. Impose, impose! I am the only "house cat" on any premises I choose to honor with my presence.

She sighs. "I would consult Matt, but he has left for work, and Electra is officiating at a wedding downstairs ... why does good fortune always strike when all your friends are AWOL?"

I am here. She must have heard me because she starts stroking my ears. I wonder if I am destined for the Mr. Clean earring. Well, all the rock stars have them. I suppose I could have something tasteful. Like a sterling-silver carp. Or eighteen-karat gold, if I am a star.

She jumps so high when the phone rings again right in front of us that I nearly leap off the countertop. Get a grip, girl! If you are going to be a big-time manager, you will have to be as cool as Ice T.

"Hello? Yes, I heard from your account exec and I'm giving it serious thought. Of course I have to consider all the ramifications-- that is a lot of money, but I need to discuss it in person. Oh? On your tab? And the cat? Well, he has to fly too. Only in the cabin. I won't have him in the cargo area. All those horror stories--"

Cargo area? What does the geek on the other end of the line think I am, chopped liver? I woul d not confine Miss Savannah Ash leigh to a cargo area, and after what she had done to me, that is a severe indictment indeed of cargo areas.

"I'll call you as soon as I know something definite. Yes, I realize it's eight p.m. in New York. You work awfully late there, don't you? Oh, everyone does. We work hard in Las Vegas, too, only we get done three hours earlier. I'll call tomorrow. Yes, it has to be tomorrow."

She holds her hand over the receiver and finally asks me something. "Who can Kit dig up at eight on a Friday night?"

Beats me. Elvis, maybe. Or an out-of-work vampire. Now that's an agent after my own heart, a genuine bloodsucker.

Miss Temple hangs up and continues what she thinks is a monologue. "Oh, Louie! What a strange turn of events. You, a corporate mascot. I wonder if they know what they're letting themselves in for?"

Temple stared at the phone. Like a watched pot that never boils, a watched phone never rings. Public relations rule number one. Public relations rule number two: never work with children or animals; they're too unpredictable and they'll steal every scene.

But that was all right if scene-stealing was the name of the game, and Louie was a natural.

"I wonder if they know your proclivities for crime?" she asked her only audience.

My proclivities for crime? The only proclivities for crime that I have in these latter domestic days of my lives are your habits of tripping over dead bodies. Maybe if you gave up high heels you would trip over bodies a lot less.

"Maybe my strange affinity for murder only works in Las Vegas. Maybe in New York everything will be different. I sure get a high-pressure feeling from that vice president. I thought this town thrived on hype--"

The phone trills again. I cannot take this Grand Central switchboard act. I leave Miss Temple to her fate and jump down to inspect my Free-to-be-Feline bowl. Still pretty uninspiring. The couch calls.

"Yes!" Temple was relieved to hear her aunt's hauntingly husky voice. It was like eavesdropping on an aural doppelganger. Temple cleared her throat, though it never helped to banish the fog from her voice. Why it should work by proxy, she didn't know.

"Got someone," Kit said. "Does this sort of thing all the time."

"What sort of agent?"

"An odd sort. Not an actor's agent. More like a personal-appearance agent."

"Is this person working for me, or Louie?"

"You, You're the only one who can sign a contract. Presumably you own the cat, not vice versa."

"Have you ever kept a cat?" No.

"Then you don't know how wrong you are. But I assume Louie will press his paw on the Jotted line if I make him do it. The trip to New York will be the test. If he doesn't like traveling, it's no deal. I'm not going to cart a twenty-pound feline protestor around."

"This could be a major opportunity for you as well as the Cat, T0emple. Quince tells me big money should be in it. You could become like . . . Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop."

"Louie's no Lamb Chop. If I want to make like he's a hand puppet, he'll probably eat my hand."

"Are you saying the animal is vicious?"

"I'm saying he's determined; there's a difference. He was a street cat for Lord knows how long. He went his own way and still does to some extent. At least Savannah Ashleigh has made sure that he won't father any inconvenient kittens, but he'll still be interested in any available girl-cats he comes across."

Any? I think from the other room. Does she believe that I exercise no discretion in these matters? What does she take me for, an alley cat?

At this point Miss Temple launches into a dramatic description of my recent kidnapping and stint as an involuntary subject of a mad plastic surgeon. I doze off, having heard this story before, in person.

I know all the important stuff anyway. We will fly to New York City. We might stay at a tony hotel, or we might stay at the aunt-doll's digs. Miss Temple will take me places to see people neither of us know, who will give us lots of money. We will have an agent. We will be big shots. We will have to watch our hindquarters. So what is new?

Chapter 2

Sofa, So Good

"When do you leave for New York?" Matt asked Temple.

The December sunshine refracted from the pool as they passed it on the way to the Circle Ritz's minuscule parking area.

"Day after tomorrow."

He stopped dead. "And this can't wait? Don't you have better things to do?"

She had stopped too, and stood jingling her key ring, which dangled a lot of hardware besides keys to jingle: police whistle, pocket flashlight, pepper spray. For a small woman, Temple's accessories were usually king-size.

"Can't wait," she explained. "It's my Christmas present to you, and I won't be here for Christmas."

"Believe me, I can get along without this at least until the New Year."

"But I can't! What do you gel the man who has nothing?"

"Nothing."

"You don't get off that easy. Come on. This'll be fun."

He doubted it, but once Temple made up her mind about something insignificant, she was as hard to stop as a Sherman tank. On significant matters, she was as two-minded as anybody else.

Matt followed the muted click of her high heels over the asphalt, the winter sun surprisingly warm on his sweatered back.

"You drive," Temple suggested, digging in her tote bag for the actual keys to the car. "I'll navigate."

"You're the expert."

He was glad to get into the Storm, small as it was, to adjust the seat, shut the door, take the wheel, after an exclusive stint on the Hesketh Vampire.

A motorcycle was an antisocial vehicle, he had found. You rode alone, even with a passenger behind you. A car was not only weatherproof, but a portable parlor as well.

"I know you probably hate this," Temple was commenting, "but it's a good lesson in everyday life." She nourished a fist of scrunched Yellow Pages torn from her phone book. "The best route would be The Bee's Knees first, then hit Leopard Alley. We can save Indigo Albino for last, or even swing past the Goodwill and Saint Vincent de Paul's."

"Sounds like a list of speakeasies." He started the car, amused. The expedition rather intrigued him, this innocuous hunt so unlike the genuine track-down on his mind.

"Just aim me toward the right part of town," he told Temple.

"That's the problem. Most of these shops aren't in the 'right' part of town, but in the iffy side. Rents are cheaper."

She directed him north to Charleston Boulevard, away from the Strip. Matt liked tooling around town on weekday noons, when everything was less crowded. It reminded him of Saturdays off from school when he was a kid, when his mother took him shopping in downtown Chicago for clothes.

And that reminded him of less pleasant plans.

"Some of this stuff'--Temple was studying her battle plan marked in ballpoint pen--"is pretty wild. Or far gone. But gems are still out there. A lot of it is fifties or sixties; you may not like that."

"I don't know what I like yet."

"Really?"

Matt shrugged, floating the Storm through a left turn. No sideways slippage, like on the Vampire. No charge of excitement either.

Matt could finally tell the difference, but didn't know which he liked better. Yet.

"What was the house you grew up in like?" Temple asked next.

"Built in the nineteen twenties. Our neighborhood was brick and stucco two-story, two-family places crowded together. Two-flats, they called them: small, dark rooms; small, mostly dirt yards, because that's where the kids all played."

"We had one of those bland blond fifties ramblers, one-story, everything rectolinear, like a railroad car. That's why I love the Circle Ritz. No room is square!"

"Our furniture was forties stuff. Saw tons of it in the rectories later, only that was rich parishioners' mahogany hand-me-downs. Every rectory looked like a set for The Bells of St. Mary's."

"Missed that one. A movie?"

"Forties movie with Bing Crosby as a priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun." He hummed a bit of the title song.

"Wow. A real golden oldie. And old Ingrid running off to have an out-of-wedlock child, too."

"That was later. Here's Burnham. Where do I park?"

"Anywhere along here."

The lot was sand and stones. Matt had glimpsed a psychedelic sign and display window out front, both radiating color and clutter.

"I'd never set foot in a place like this in a million years," he said as they left the car.

"Good. Stretching your boundaries already. Honest, no illegal drugs and naughty adult toys sold here. Just funky old stuff."

He still felt he wouldn't want Lieutenant Molina catching him going into this place. They wove past unmatched pieces of furniture set up outside the shop, Temple stopping to squint seriously at a wicker rocking chair. "Be nice on the patio, maybe."

Inside was more of the same. Matt studied the chrome glitter of vintage appliances, the bright secondary colors of orange and turquoise dishes, the wire-framed chairs. Suitable for furnishing a clown academy, maybe, but not for his mostly empty five-room apartment "Oooh. That's a nice dinette set."

Temple zeroed in on a chrome and gray table surrounded by four chairs pneumatically upholstered in silver-flecked gray plastic.

"Great condition." She ran her hand over the plump plastic, her

silver-blue nail polish making her hands seem armed in stainless steel.

Dinette sets gave Matt the willies, for some reason. "I'm not about to start serving guests."

"No, but the odd neighbor might drop in."

"Very odd, if she frequents this place."

"You've got to look past the bizarre stuff to the treasures."

"Sounds like a motto for visiting the risque establishments along Flamingo Road and Paradise."

But Temple was already engrossed in exclaiming over a chrome thingamajiggy with attractive pierced panels on either side. With a razor-tipped fingernail she demonstrated that the panels flipped down. "Twenties toaster. Will clean up like new. Twelve bucks. Sold." She picked it up. "Rule number one: if you see anything you like, hang on to it."

"What for?"

"You're eyeing my treasured toaster dubiously."

"It can't still function."

"No, but it'll make a great letter-holder. 'In' mail on one side, 'Out' on the other."

"Never would have thought of that."

"That's why you have rooms full of nothing."

"I don't think twenties toasters are on my 'most urgent acquisition' list."

"You don't even have a list. Just look. See if anything catches your eye. Don't worry about what it used to do. Just think how you could use it now."

His hands slid into his pants pockets as he wandered the crowded floor. Maybe if he didn't touch anything, he wouldn't have to buy anything.

Temple streaked from area to area like a butterfly cruising honeysuckle vines. She had to touch, lift, tilt, study a dozen pieces. And then she was paging through the clothing racks. Except for the somber shadows of old tuxedos and worn leather jackets, the racks were a kaleidoscope of women's clothing. Weird women's clothing. Or maybe that was a redundancy.

Matt found himself staring down at a fifties-model black telephone, its brown cords trailing like rat tails. Funny. He'd forgotten the old phone number in Chicago, before the exchange was altered when phone usage exploded in the sixties. They'd had a word as an exchange, not three little numbers. Exchanges back then had sounded classy. Very British. Very WASP Madison, not Mahoney. Kent, not Kaplan. Wentworth, not Waschevski. Emerson, not Effinger.

"A phone?" Temple's voice was so close it startled him. "You work on phones all night and now you moon over one in a vintage store?"

"Hadn't seen one like this in a long time."

"What a difference three years make," Temple mused. "I was born after everything went from black and white to color--appliances, sheets, telephones and even television."

Matt smiled. "We didn't keep up with the latest trends on Sofia Street. Black and white, and a few good shades of gray, were good enough for St. Stanislaus parish."

"No wonder you have virtually nothing in your apartment. Come on. Except for the toaster, this place is a bust."

"But ... I haven't looked at everything."

"I have."

Temple swept out, toaster in the crook of her arm, along with a small yellow paper, the receipt.

"What's next?" Matt asked when he was behind the wheel of the car and the toaster was stashed on the backseat. "Leopard Lane?"

"Alley," she corrected. " 'Lane' is far too upscale for a vintage store. The name should be a little tawdry. Leopard Alley. It's only twelve blocks away. Take a right at the next corner."

Leopard Alley lived up to its name. It was inside an aging strip shopping center that had been converted to an antiques mall. The interior was a maze of cubicles allotted to various dealers. In one booth glassware dominated; in another, kitchen and garage tools.

Leopard Alley announced its imminence with a painted canvas path of faux leopard spots.

"Look at that footstool! Isn't that wild?"

Matt regarded the wrought>>iron stool upholstered In fuzzy fake Leopard skin, Wild, and not his style. At least he was learning something on this expedition, Perhaps he was hopelessly addicted to Rectory Rococo - Something convoluted and diocesan in Ash Wednesday mahogany, reeking of incense and parish politic's,

"oh! What do you think of this?"

Temple had donned a leopard skin pillbox hat from the fifties, that sat as uneasily upon her springy red hair as Bob Dylan's "mattress on a bottle of wine."

"Not your color," Matt said.

"I guess I'm not built for exotic." She lifted a long black plastic cigarette holder dotted with rhinestones. "Thirty-eight dollars! Give me a break."

"Louie would look like the king of the jungle on this pillow," Matt pointed out.

She studied the huge furry leopard-pattern pillow. "Yeah. Poor Louie. He doesn't know he's in for a major dislocation."

"It's a long time away from home."

"Not so long, ten days. I added the holidays so I could see my aunt. Louie will only be on call for business for three or four days. You'd think this could wait until after New Year's, but apparently when they're hot to trot in advertising, they don't waste a millisecond."

"You'll have a great time."

"But you're not having one now." Temple eyed the pillbox. "You sure I shouldn't invest in this piece of nostalgia? It's only eighteen dollars."

"When would you wear it?"

"I don't know. Maybe for Halloween."

She replaced it on the time-battered bald head of the mannequin bust that wore a matching stole. "I'll think about it. Maybe, if it's still here when I get back ..."

"What's next on the list?"

"Indigo Albino might be too . . . kicky for your taste. Tell you what, I'll take you to lunch at the Monte Carlo as a Christmas present, and on the way we can stop by the Salvation Army. You never know."

"Antique-hunters are eternal optimists, like detectives. I can see where you got your sleuthing instincts."

"Well, you're passing out class pictures of Cliff Effinger all over Vegas. Is it cockeyed optimism or dogged footwork? Anything turn up on that, by the way?"

"Nothing," said Matt the pessimist. "Yet," added the optimist that Temple brought out in him.

"Hey, this Effinger dude could be hanging at the Salvation Army," she suggested playfully as they returned to the car. "You did say he was dressed like a seventies midnight cowboy."

"More like a midlife-crisis cowboy. Okay, a prelunch gander at the Goodwill. I'm beginning to see that hunting anything is ninety per-cent persistence and ten percent damn foolishness."

"Damn foolishness is the best kind. You owe yourself a little."

Matt mulled the alien concept of owing himself anything but angst as they drove to the Goodwill building, a low, bland bunker of green-painted cinderblocks with a few dusty display windows near the entrance.

Inside, it was a warehouse crowded with racks of wilted clothes on twisted wire hangers, homemade shelves of abandoned dishes and household whatzits and a weary odor of must, stale cigarette smoke and dust.

Temple's pale eyebrows rose. "Never been here. I didn't know they had a rack of vintage clothes."

he was off like a racehorse interbred with a bloodhound.

Matt felt a benign, avuncular amusement as he watched her page expertly through the sorry castoffs looking for buried treasure. Men hunted furred and feathered creatures in the woods, and then killed them. Women hunted inanimate things, expressing the same instinct in a bloodless way. Men proved their virility with limp, frail legs and dead antlers on a car hood; women announced their feminity with a fake leopard-skin pelt draping a footstool.

Matt strolled the naked concrete floor through cluttered aisles, watching the people here as if they were in a casino. Many Hispanics, mostly women, a lot of children in tow. Fussing, sharp Spanish reprimands, whining. They needed these fifty-cent jars and two-dollar baby rompers. By the register, a woman was checking out. Some dirty beige acrylic gloves for the Las Vegas "winter," a few navy-blue towels in still-good shape, a child's plastic toy in Crayola colors. A small pile of children's clothes.

She had a one dollar bill on the counter, and was doling Out coins from her purse for the rest. Her face was the pinched, unlearned mask of Depression-era photographs. The poor could wax fat or lean on malnutrition, depending on their metabolisms, and this wizened mother had thinned with want.

"Twenty-five cents'" She gazed at a child's orange jacket, then counted out pennies. Meticulous. One. Two. Three. Right down to the last penny, which was coming fast.

"I guess I'll leave the rest." She said, shutting the worn wallet.

The woman at the register knew better than to argue with the face of the bottomed-out. Or to extend the too-obvious magic wand of charity. This charity cost. Not much, but enough for self-respect.

"Here" Matt extended a ten-dollar bill to the cashier. "Merry Christmas."

"Oh." The woman wanted to say no. Her eyes rested on the toy pushed away at the last moment.

The cashier rang up the abandoned goods with swift efficiency, before the woman could protest.

"Thank you." She barely looked at him. She barely spoke aloud.

He said nothing more, because it would be too little, and too much.

And he accepted the change the cashier solemnly counted into his hand. Offering it to the woman would have been insulting.

So little had been needed of the ten. Two dollars and thirty-five cents.

The woman snapped the coin section of her wallet shut, gathered up the recycled brown grocery-store bag, and left, with one more murmured "thanks" over her shoulder vaguely in Matt's direction.

"That was nice." Temple stood beside him, chastened. "I never even noticed her."

"Tis the season."

He shrugged to avoid the eyes of the clerk, as she avoided his. Face-to-face charity was always as delicately negotiated as international treaties. It did not "blesseth he that giveth and he that taketh," as Shakespeare promised that mercy would via Portia the Wise, the "Daniel come to judgment" in female guise and guile. It embarrassed them both.

Temple took his arm. "I'm sorry I took you out on this wild-goose chase. I just wanted to help you get something for that empty apartment of yours."

"Why?"

"Nest instincts. Maybe I just wanted to make sure you're staying."

"Oh, I'm stuck here--not at the Circle Ritz, per se, but in the real world. At least they tell me it's real."

"It is." Temple's eyes narrowed with the vigilance of the huntress. She skittered away toward the far wall, through a weary, grazing herd of melamine end tables and crooked lamps and dirty lamp shades.

"Oh, God!" she said.

And to his embarrassment, he paid attention and followed her.

"Will you look at that."

"That" was apparently a long, long sofa, an overstatement in curves and upholstered in red fabric that stretched perhaps eight feet along a wall.

"Real suede," Temple pronounced, stroking the surface to verify the diagnosis. "This is custom. From the fifties. Can you imagine custom-ordering an eight-foot sofa?"

"No. I can honestly say that I absolutely cannot imagine ordering an eight-foot sofa."

"How much do they want for it?" She was patting along the sinuous length, looking for tags. "Aha." She held up a card on a string from behind the back. Her voice lowered. Matt had to come closer to hear. "Only three-twenty. This thing was thousands when it was made! And it's in perfect condition. You can tell granddaddy died and they pulled it out of the den after forty years of placid use."

She squeezed behind the sofa and began trying to push it away from the wall.

"Temple."

"Heavy." Temple was not usually one to state the obvious. "Can you push out the opposite end? I want to see the backside, because of course it's made to sit in the middle of the room ... good, good-- ah, something happened here, but... you could lay something over the back. A leopard skin or something with a little kitsch. Or have just this section recovered. Look at these seams. Perfect. This is hand-sewn." Temple straightened, fire in her slate-gray eyes. "Matt. You've got to get it."

"Three hundred dollars, I don't think so."

"That's nothing! You could buy junk at the warehouse furniture stores for that amount. This is the real thing. It's a classic. Pure design, pure materials, almost unused. You'd never find this in a million years."

"Especially if I weren't looking for it."

"It's made for the Circle Ritz. Don't you get it? It's in the period and it's of an equal quality."

Temple raced over to the cashier, Matt, bemused, followed.

"That sofa over there. Yes, the big red one. When did it come in? Two months ago? And where did it come from? Uh-huh. Oh, sure"

Matt heard the masterful inflection of mere curiosity in her comments as she wheedled every detail available about the huge sofa from the clerk, all the while acting as if her interest was merely . . . academic.

"Such an interesting piece," she finished up. "Too bad it's so big. I mean, where would you put it if you didn't have some huge recreation room in the basement, and so few houses here have basements ... it sure is something, though."

She ambled back to study it, Matt her obedient servant coming up behind. He understood that an entire scenario was being enacted here.

Temple grabbed his sweater sleeve as soon as they were out of earshot. "You could offer two-ninety for it. Easy. I'd hate to go lower, and lose all chance of negotiating."

"You could offer two-ninety, Temple. You're obviously in love with the piece. You should have it."

"But my place is built around that stupid hide-a-bed sofa. It's hemmed in with furniture and accessories. Your place is a blank slate. Matt, you could build a whole room around this wonderful piece. Imagine it sitting on that lovely old parquet, warming as burgundy wine. It would save you buying a love seat and two chairs and this and that. Hey, you could sleep someone over on it."

He eyed the slow but definite curves. "If they had scoliosis. How would we get it moved out of here anyway?"

"Electra's a landlady. She must know dozens of reliable outfits that move stuff. Couldn't cost more than . . . fifty bucks."

"I'm on the third floor--"

Temple shook her head impatiently. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime find, trust me. You need to put something in your living room. With this as an anchor, the job's three-quarters done. You have to get this, or you're absolutely crazy!"

"I'm absolutely crazy," he said deadpan.

Her face fell, but even in defeat a new argument was marshaling in the back of her mind. He saved her the trouble.

"But I'm going to get it, okay? Sold by the lady in the leopard-skin pillbox hat. Almost."

"You know, maybe we should swing by afterward and get that--"

He took her elbow and hustled her to the checkout table.

"I'll take the sofa. The one the size of Godzilla's grandmother, but first I have to see about arranging to have it picked up."

The clerk was in seventh heaven. "We have a list. Check, credit card or cash?"

"How about half now and half on pickup?" He pulled out his new Discover card.

The clerk snapped it up like a gator grabbing a guppy.

Beside him, Temple writhed in swallowed agony. "Matt, you didn't deal," she whispered when the clerk was absorbed by punching in numbers.

"It's already a good deal, so you swore. Besides, it's almost Christmas. Consider it a donation."

"Donations are donations. Dealing is dealing. You could have always sent them the donation later. Paying sticker price like a rube ruins it for everyone else."

"I'm getting it, right? Aren't you happy?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm ecstatic. It really is... wonderful. It deserves a good home. I'm so glad you got it."

"It's not a living thing, Temple. It doesn't know it'll be the star of the Circle Ritz."

"Yes it does," she answered fiercely. "Yes it does."

Chapter 3

Escape from New York - Please!

Temple sat in her aisle airline seat, as queasy as Midnight Louie probably was feeling right now.

Louie was invisible. All Temple could see was his new airline -approved Kit-Karrier, tucked under the seat ahead. Temple herself was all too visible in the getup she decided was necessary for this hasty jaunt to New York. Looking down in disenchantment, she saw clunky, well-padded high-top tennis shoes. Black leggings. (She expected to be doing a lot of bending over to tend to Louie. And black wouldn't show cat hair. Much.) A loose, almost knee-length sweater over a heavy turtleneck. All black, so as not to show Midnight Louie hair.

Her usual tote bag was stowed overhead. Her valuables--wallet, ID, credit cards and the directions to Kit's place on Cornelia Street, plus sundries--were crammed into a weensy boxy patent-leather purse, also black, that made Temple feel like an eight-year-old showing off her new Easter bag. She loathed impractical purses almost as much as she despised practical shoes. Inconsistency, she believed, is the hallmark of a discriminating mind.

But . . . anything for Louie.

At least he was being quiet. Ominously quiet. Too-angry-to-spit quiet. Wait until he saw the new CatAboard Seat Temple had purchased at the pet store before they left. It even came with one of those despised diamond-shaped yellow signs first used to announce "Baby on Board," now adapted for anything portable, including "Cat on Board." Temple had tried to peel it off, but the glue proved too tough and too disfiguring. She had considered covering the noxious sign with a real "Baby on Board" badge. She figured she might get more respect in transit, but doubted it. Especially when she shoved the carrier under the seat. Pride of portage didn't count for anything anymore. Not even "My Cat is an Honor Student."

"How about 'My Cat is a Star'?" she bent down to ask Louie in a whisper.

The businessman in the adjoining seat flashed a look that was half annoyance and half alarm. He had arrived after she and Louie were installed, and had whipped out a laptop computer as soon as the pilot announced passengers could get plugged in and turned on.

Everybody talked to their under seat luggage, Temple told herself with a haughty shrug. Mr. Laptop was clucking away on the small keyboard, grim and concentrated.

Since her feet seldom reached any floor, Temple usually propped them on her underseat bag. But the lightweight Kit-Karrier was too flimsy to support a pair of massive high-tops. She

wrestled her paperback book from under the carrier strap and sighed. This was a four-hour flight, with nothing to munch on but an air-swollen bag or two of pretzels as dry and appetizing as matchsticks.

She opened the guide to New York City and began reading.

More than three droning hours later, Laptop Man had absconded to the rear restrooms. Temple shook her wristwatch, moved the dial ahead three hours and wriggled her legs. Landing soon. She lifted the middle armrest in the tandem seats, then cozied up to the window and railed the shade Laptop Man had kept drawn tight all through the flight. It was sixish in Manhattan, winter twilight time when the sun takes its own sweet time in letting. The whole visible world basked in a bruised burnt-orange afterglow.

She caught her breath. Below the plane was the East River, a glitter of beaten copper ripples in the dying light. Manhattan landmarks, strove to stab the pale sky in the twilight's last gleaming. The Statue of Liberty, a tiny dot in the black water, flashed the slow-moving plane overhead, the lit torch flaming like a match head. Temple could just make out the wakes of tiny boats wrinkling the water like irons gone amok.

The World Trade Center's twin towers, wrapped in glass, reflected the sunset in a plaid of windows lit from within and without. Dozens of other modern building-block towers also resembled glitter-wrapped packages under some cosmic Christmas tree. Accidental autumn warmth sparkled everywhere like gold foil. The sun's tangerine lightning galvanized the Empire State Building's familiar spire. The Chrysler Building's graceful fluted cap shone as silver leaf turned gold. From up here, the Chrysler Building was undeniably much lower than the Empire State Building. Temple had pictured them as non-identical twins, matched in size if not style. Now she saw that the Chrysler Building was a squirt. An illusion about New York City shattered already, and she hadn't even landed!

The plane, an ocean liner of the air, dropped altitude at a dignified rate.

"Excuse me."

She looked up to find Laptop Man standing beside her empty seat, managing to look both impassive and annoyed. Oops.

Temple scrambled back to her seat and out into the narrow aisle to let him enter.

He replaced the retracted armrest as if reinstalling a security system, glanced out the window at the shimmering scene, then snapped down the shade. Under the reading light's singularly narrow, yellow stare, he jotted figures onto a notepad.

Temple preferred a taciturn traveling partner. With landing imminent, she felt like a marathoner about to enter a race. Mentally, she ran the rush to retrieve her bags and the dash for the terminal, then the rapid, long walk to the baggage area, with a ladies' room stop for her (and Louie too). Then she would have to wrestle her huge bag off the luggage return and get out to the cab area without being waylaid by a gypsy cab driver. Kit had warned her against those con men. Then would come a traffic-choked entry into downtown Manhattan during rush hour. Lord, she hoped she got one of the few cab drivers who still spoke English so she could tell him where to go.

After that came seeing Kit, meeting all the ad agency people and the pet-food company executives . . .

Temple leaned her head against the seat, concentrating for a moment on what she had left behind instead of speculating on what lay ahead.

She'd told Electra Lark, her landlady, first. Gone for ten days over Christmas. Back by New Year's. Left Kit's address and phone/fax number. Asked Electra to make sure that Matt Devine wasn't alone for Christmas ... Then she had called good neighbor Matt, who still seemed stunned that she would fly off like this, on such short notice. He had promised to keep an eye on her place. She had debated calling Max Kinsella, but he was prone to drop in on her without warning, and she didn't want him to think she'd been kidnapped by the thugs who were after him for mysterious reasons he refused to explain. She'd left a message on his answering machine, which still answered in the dead Gandolph the Great's voice, wondering where he'd gone. Max the magician was like that: there and not there at the same time.

Then she'd told Van von Rhine and Nicky Fontana at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, the closest thing she had to a regular employer. They thought the reason for the trip was a blast and told her to have a good time.

I will, Temple told herself.

Temple's seat back was hit from behind, suddenly.

"Oh!" She sat forward with a start.

The plane was landing. The pilot had just applied the brakes, and Temple found an irresistible force plastering her against the upholstery. Just landing.

"You must have dozed off," her seatmate finally commented. "We're here."

As soon as the seat-belt-sign light deadened, people jumped up. Temple was among them, in the rat race of the present and future, lugging, tussling, jockeying for position, inching forward, tote bag slung' over one shoulder, book and handbag stowed inside, Louie's carrier held before her with both hands, so he wouldn't jostle against the scats bracketing the narrow aisle. Better bruises on her legs than a howling dervish on her hands.

Louie gave one piercing yowl as they exited the plane. The flight attendant smiled indulgently, no less than he would have done at seeing the last of a bawling two-year-old.

Temple huffed up the exit ramp into the terminal. Laptop Man had been right behind her. Now, with only a briefcase and a small bag to carry, he sprinted ahead. Temple studied the faces that flowed past her, recognizing no one. And no one recognized her.

The entry-into-New-York-City scenario unreeled as her mind had played it.

Except for an unforeseen circumstance. In the women's restroom she attracted a circle of admirers when she heaved Louie's Kit-Karrier to the baby-diaper-changing shelf and brought him out for water and a snack. He drank the water, sniffed disdainfully at the Free-to-be-Feline and looked put-upon for the admiring ladies.

"What a handsome animal! Do you travel with him often?"

"This is the first time. If it works out, who knows? Say, could one of you watch him for a sec while I, you know--"

"Sure," said several voices.

Temple hastened to a cubicle, uneasy about leaving Louie even with his own groupies.

When she returned and pulled the CatAboard Seat out of her tote bag, they oohed with interest. Temple wriggled into the contraption and latched it shut over her chest and stomach.

"The idea is," she explained, panting, to the bemused audience, "he rides up front in this carrier, I fold away the airplane carrier and now have both hands free for the rest of my luggage."

"Marvelous," said a glossy blond career woman who at first glance had looked too cold to care.

"Like with a baby," added a Hispanic woman with grandmotherly certitude. "Much better to carry the weight in the front."

A rawboned woman with a Swedish accent actually lifted Louie into the bag. Temple winced as his weight pulled on the shoulder and waist straps. She felt like she was en route to the booby hatch, and was properly trussed up for the journey. But the Forbes woman put her expensive eelskin briefcase on the baby platform to tighten the drawstring around Louie's neck.

In the mirror Temple looked like a demon-possessed mountain climber. The nylon Cat Aboard looked like a backpack in reverse whose disembodied head had made a one-hundred-eighty-degree rotation.

The Hispanic woman chuckled.

A college girl with a glossy brown braid down her back grinned. "He looks pretty disgruntled with just his head sticking out."

"Disgruntled I can handle." Temple was still reeling from the unaccustomed weight up front that pulled her off balance. Must be what being pregnant felt like.

She thanked the fan club and reentered the slipstream of jostling people in the concourse outside.

Of course she--or Louie, rather ... or rather Louie's disembodied head--drew the kind of constant comment that becomes harder and harder to accept gracefully.

By the time they were bumping along in the back of a cab that smelled like the cockpit of a World War II troop transport plane, or what Temple thought such a locale would smell like, she was too exhausted to make sure the driver was taking the approved route: the tunnel, not the bridge. Temple didn't know which tunnel was preferable to which bridge, but Kit had sternly instructed her to recite this secret phrase, and so she did. If it cost her an arm and a leg, heck, her extremities were going numb anyway! And this was all on the advertising-agency tab.

The driver and the drive into Manhattan were as expected: curt, fast and jerky. Temple fought nausea from long, idling waits in carbon-dioxide-clogged air while the engine trembled before vaulting forward with a snort.

The driver broke a long silence finally to growl something that sounded like Kit's address followed by a question mark.

"Yes. Cornelia Street."

More lurching down side streets, wheel-well to wheel-well with parked trucks. Temple's eyes closed at every imminent collision, which meant she spent the last leg of the journey in almost total darkness. She- could have been diverted to New Jersey and would have never known the difference. Then the cab stopped in a dark, ruirrow street.

"This is it.'" Temple wondered aloud.

No comment. But the driver was looking impatiently over his shoulder at the choked tide of cars, cabs and trucks.

"Couldn't you pull up to the curb? There's an empty space."

His head shook vehemently. "Out here."

"I'll need a receipt," she called through the smudged Plexiglas between them.

She could read the meter, but not the name on the driver ID card, just a vowel-laden string of foreign syllables.

She paid and tipped him, struggled out with Louie's significant weight shifting wildly against her stomach ... he kicked her! Yup, just like being pregnant. Which she might never be able to be now, not unless aliens kidnapped her to accomplish it. She could barely tilt herself out of the low backseat. The driver had thoughtfully used the internal lever to loosen the trunk latch for Temple.

Temple trotted around the huge yellow cab, amazed to see no blatant scrapes, reached in to heave her monster bag over the high trunk lift over. Horns performed a hoarse hallelujah chorus around her, probably at her. Temple gritted her teeth. Let them honk! She hated luggage. She hated New York. She slammed the huge lid shut so hard it startled Louie into a loud growl.

"Shut up!" she told him through her teeth. "People will think my stomach is growling."

As if the people milling past on the sidewalk had time to think of anything besides where they were going and how fast.

At least the big suitcase had rollers. Temple finally wrestled it to the walk, hooked her tote bag on for the ride and began scanning the building fronts for an address.

She was aware of a carpet of crushed refuse on the sidewalk, of men who could only be described as "loungers" leaning against the buildings and closely watching her struggles, of narrow doorways that seemed to be numberless, of cramped shop fronts that looked crowded and jumbled and sleazy. Was this even the right street?

Temple hoofed it to a corner, people colliding with the bag she towed behind her, and searched for street signs. Standing and looking was not a safe activity in New York City, she decided, taking shelter against a wall herself near the entrance to a drugstore.

She finally went in, waited in line, and asked about the address.

The female clerk didn't even look up, so she missed seeing Louie on his maiden voyage as a floating head. "Block down. The other side. Left."

A block! Why had the cabbie dumped her and Louie a block and a half away? And on the wrong side of the street? Couldn't he count?

Read? "New York, New York," she muttered as she dragged herself and the luggage back into the mob.

Nobody noticed.

She could have been carrying the decapitated head of Alfredo Garcia and no one would notice, she thought grimly. She could be mugged, murdered, taken by aliens and nobody would notice. Except the men hovering by the buildings, watching the passing women and shouting nasty things they fortunately couldn't quite hear. No one shouted anything remotely nasty at Temple. Being pregnant with a cat was not altogether a bad thing, she decided.

By that time she'd gone too far, and had to retrace her steps, cross at a green light a street that everyone else had already crossed on the previous red light. Finally, squinting in the dark at absent or illegible numbers, she found the right one. But could this narrow, dingy entrance possibly house a respectable apartment building?

By the time she'd entered and found the small elevator and wondered at the wire crisscrossing the glass in its small window, and had gone up to the proper floor, she was ready to walk all the way back to Las Vegas, en famille.

She rang the doorbell. This had better be the right place!

Chapter 4

A Ticket to Ride

Some may be wondering at my saintly conduct during the trials and tribulations of my transport to New York City. Is it possible that they take Midnight Louie for a prima donna of some kind?

But no; I am the most laid-back and genial of dudes. Why should I object to being cooped for several hours within a purple nylon Kat-Karrier with sexy peek-a-boo black mesh ventilation areas, much resembling the fishnet stockings on the legs of certain damsels of an

exhibitionist nature?

Should I take umbrage at my public transfer to the purple nylon CatAboard Seat in a ladies' room of a major metropolitan airport?

Does any of this detract from my macho dignity?

Not at all.

Purple, after all, is the color of royalty, and we all know just how royally I am descended. My great-great-great-etcetera grandma (Oh, mighty Bastet; I bow to your female feline superiority) was Pharaoh's favorite gumshoe. Or perhaps it was gum-sandal. And sometimes footstool. They also serve who only sit and accept weight.

And at least these portable devices are modern and lightweight.

There is nothing worse to rattle around in than the plastic shell of an old-fashioned carrier with a steel grille. The newfangled products at least use zippers (and those who have followed my adventures know that my way with a zipper is almost as smooth and sassy as my way with females--of any species). The amusing and inventive CatAboard Seat even offers the prisoner--I mean the passenger-- a view. If said passenger is not inadvertently throttled by the neck-area drawstring. Also in this front-tote device, I am kept close to the heart and best interests of my little doll, Miss Temple Barr.

Did she think no one saw the nasty dudes ogling her from the building walls? Had one ruffian dared to approach, I would have huffed and puffed my way loose of the drawstring (or, if unable to burst free fast enough, bitten anything tender within reach).

Besides, one other fact explains my extreme docility in being dragged from pillar to post at forty thousand feet high and six hundred miles an hour fast: I like to travel. I got around quite a bit before deciding to honor Miss Temple with my cohabitation.

I have even been to the previous Inauguration in Washington Dee Cee, where I saved the president-elect from an embarrassing moment involving a saxophone and a hidden stash of grass as in illegal tender, aka marijuana. In fact, if there is any justice in the world, I should be invited as a special guest at the next Inauguration. So I have flown before, and not on catnip. Hence my calm demeanor during this whole expedition. I understand that one's dignity suffers dearly going from one place to another. Just look at Miss Temple Barr as she stands here huffing and perspiring in front of a pretty nondescript door on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in lower Manhattan.

She is a mess. I, however, travel well. I do not even have a hangnail. I can hardly wait to get out and about to explore what some have named Baghdad-on-the-Hudson, the Big Apple, the Naked City. None of these nicknames makes any more sense than what my kind call it: the Mother of all Hairballs.

Chapter 5

Ho! Ho! Ho!

The door opened at last.

Temple braced herself for a stranger, for a snarling New York City apartment-building superintendent, the legendary "Super" of sitcoms. She would have been prepared for one of Santa's errant elves, for who-knows-what, but anything other than her aunt Kit. This had not been her day and there was no reason for the evening to start playing into her expectations.

She retained her cool when Santa Claus himself stood there, white beard and long curled hair flowing, wearing nothing but red long Johns that matched his cherry-red button nose, and Rudolph's, for that matter.

A stubby crystal tumbler of amber liquid in one hand might explain the red nose.

"You must be Temple Darling!" he exclaimed in a deep baritone that belonged to a Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera.

He was also as thin as a cat's whisker. Did Santa have a secret eating disorder? Bulimia might explain how he dealt with having to consume all those cookies on Christmas Eve.

Temple Darling was uncharacteristically speechless. Clearly, she was expected. Clearly, this was not her aunt.

"Come in, Little Merry Christmas!"

Santa stood aside, a grand welcoming gesture perilously tilting the glass and its eighty-proof contents. "And bring your little cat too," he added with a cackle that was far from jolly. "Oops, sorry! Just did the matinee witch at the Children's Museum. Wrong part."

Wrong place, Temple thought.

But she was unwilling to lug a single thing, especially Midnight Louie, anywhere else for a while. Besides, they knew her name here.

Coming in surprised her.

The polished oak floors were glossy enough to see your underwear in, if you were wearing skirts, and neither she nor skinny old Saint Nick were.

High, white and handsome walls intersected at unexpected angles, creating the feeling of an ultramodern maze, or a blank theater set.

"Kit Darling," Santa called over his red shoulder to the Great Unknown beyond the current cliff of albino wall. "Mother and Child are here, seeking a room for the night. No guy, and no donkey, unless I'm to be dragooned into the part. Probably the ass." He slugged down a fat finger of booze in one gulp that made his Adam's apple prance.

"Must whip up the reindeer and run, Temple Darling. Got to do the whole boring nine yards: boots, belt, hot red felt fat-suit, everything. Not to mention the Mae West underneath for the proper avoirdupois. But anything for the kiddies and an honest buck."

He vanished around one white wall at the same moment her aunt, Kit Carlson, rounded the other wall like an ingenue in a Sardou farce.

"Did our Father Christmas pull his vanishing act? I wanted to introduce you formally. How are you, Kid? "

Kit, draped in a caftan of a far more sophisticated cut and color than an Electra Lark muumuu, swooped open her arms in the proper pose for a ballet third position. The resulting butterfly effect wrapped Temple in a cocoon of muted earth-tone silk and some spicy, expensive and thoroughly decadent perfume.

"He'll pop off in a couple of minutes. He has a Macy's gig tonight, and I let him change here. I'll introduce you later, when he comes back."

"I didn't know Santa Claus made return engagements. And should he have Cutty Sark on his breath for the kiddies?"

Kit laughed. "One lowball to help face everything from pathetic Tiny Tims to greedy little monsters will hardly ruin Santa's reputation. Besides, he'll use a mouthwash chaser. Leave your luggage here by the door. You look like you've been lugging it long enough. Rudy can take it to your room after he gets back."

"Rudy?"

"Seasonal, isn't it? One of those outre coincidences that happen so often in a city this large. Come on. Sit down. Kick your shoes off. Unfasten your cat. Hello, Louie! Holding up, are we?" Kit laughingly surveyed the carrying device.

"Temple, I'm sorry, but you look like a candidate for a freak show, going to a job interview with your cat-headed Siamese twin attached."

Louie responded to Kit's greeting with a long drawn-out meow of disapproval.

"He is not Siamese anything," Temple translated more accurately than she could know.

"Sorry." Kit's husky voice had gone small and wee. She beckoned them around the white wall, and Temple went. An ajar door on the right tantalized with a slice of a powder room with black fixtures and malachite-design wall paper. Potpourri scent teased through the opening.

Midnight Louie sneezed.

The hall was really a kind of gallery. Uncurtained windows on the left offered a broad sill trailing pink camellias and poinsettias. On the right they passed an open kitchen done in butcher block counter tops, white appliances and stainless steel everything else, and un-doubtably as efficient as a Danish Jack the Ripper.

All along the hall, faint reflections in the night-dark windows followed them like ghostly Siamese twins.

These unshrouded canvases of glass, blackened by the night beyond so it was impossible to see out, but acting as display windows into the apartment's well-lit warmth, unnerved Temple. They violated her cautious Midwestern sense of privacy, even safety. Anybody could look in and see every detail as easily as a child spying into the secret world of a snow dome.

"Doesn't New York City sell blinds or curtains?"

"Temple," Kit chided, "we're eight floors up. Plus, even all those distant office towers are closed for the night."

"So you assume."

Kit stopped, her caftan an autumnal flutter around her slight form. She was an older (and one would hope, wiser) edition of Temple herself, down to the slightly foggy voice, the oversize eyeglasses and her petite size.

"Temple. Trust me. I know New York. You're not in Las Vegas now. Everything is not a peep show. The sad fact is that damn few people in Manhattan have the time, inclination or elemental curiosity to pry into other people's lives, much less their windows. We are hives of worker bees, each on our own buzzing mission, with no time to sightsee. So relax."

Temple made a face behind her when her aunt resumed walking. Kit's assessment sounded depressingly true. Only rank newcomers-- tourists was the demeaning description--would be as curious, or as cautious as she.

Then the white wall on their right ended with a column and a brick wall. Before them, the wide, welcoming main room narrowed to a point as sharp as a pencil's.

And the focal point framed by the converging window-walls from both sides of the apartment was Manhattan glittering in all its towering Christmas glory, the illuminated lightning-rod tips of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings as thin and elegant as lit candles on a birthday cake.

Only it wasn't Temple's birthday, and getting here had been no piece of cake.

'This feels like we're on the prow of a ship," Temple began, "but--"

"Goodness, Temple! You live in a round building in Las Vegas and think nothing of it. Don't be so square. This building is shaped like a flatiron."

"The guidebook said the Flatiron Building was uptown from here--"

"It is. We're in the Village. But the building is similarly shaped, although smaller."

Temple edged into the unusual space, feeling doubly watched by the windows streaking to meet in a vanishing point of midnight cityscape just thirty feet In front of her.

"The view is magnificent."

"Too magnificent to cover with curtains or blinds. I'm glad you like it. I bought this place dirt cheap in the mid-eighties, before Reagan-era greed really got prices going skyscraper-high."

"Dirt cheap?" Despite the tawdry street-level neighborhood, Temple couldn't believe that any domicile in Manhattan was cheap.

"A hundred and thirty thousand." Kit shrugged. "Now close your jaw, take off your cat and coat, and sit down for a while."

"That was mondo money over ten years ago."

"I'd written a lot of historical romances by then, and the place has at least tripled in value since. I guess when it comes to retirement plans, you could say I'm sitting on it."

Kit plunked down on the black leather tufted sofa that faced straight into the nexus of New York, New York. "Can you really get out of that straitjacket solo? Do you need help?"

"No. I just unfasten these side latches, open the sack drawstring, pull Louie out and then gracefully shrug out of the, uh, straps."

The pulling out of Louie and ungraceful shrug that divested Temple of all encumbrances took three minutes.

"Let me get you a drink." Kit jumped up.

"I worry about Louie's claws on this leather--"

"Don't. I've had Russian wolfhounds on that couch. Louie is a fine example of a gentleman compared to them, I'm sure."

Kit returned with brandy in small snifters, sharing a tray of crackers and various spreads that looked gooey and foreign.

"Bye, Darlings!" a short, jolly fat man's voice shouted from the foyer.

"Knock 'em dead!" Kit hollered back, lifting her glass in a toasting gesture.

"Isn't he going to be dealing with hopeful little children expecting comfort and joy?"

"It's only one of those black-humor theatrical expressions, like 'break a leg.' "Kit looked Temple up and down from over the rim of her glass. "Are you in mourning? Did one of the Divine Mr. Ms kick off since I was in Las Vegas? Tell me it isn't so!"

"I wore black traveling to minimize cat hairs."

"You look like you're dressed for an expedition to Macchu Pichu high in the Peruvian Andes. No high heels, however, a wise move."

"I brought 'em along, so I can change off when I arrive where I'm going."

"Which is Madison Avenue. We're not right on top of it, but you can always catch a bus uptown if the cabs are all busy. I don't recommend the subway, even in running shoes. A lot of women use it, but they're residents stripped down for battle. You're going to be handicapped by toting a feline passenger around."

"I know. I know." Temple sipped some brandy. She was no judge of fine-anything alcoholic, but whatever the brand, blend or vintage; the liquor melted away the day's anxiety like a velvet blowtorch.

"We can have dinner out around here, or in, if I dive into my astounding selection of deli take-withs."

Here is fine. I'm worn out. And I have a nine a.m. appointment at Colby, Janos and Renaldi tomorrow. Louie and I do," she corrected as he paused in settling beside her on the couch to place a forefoot on her thigh, claws lightly extended. "I imagine he's tired too. I didn't have time to tell you about the recent Atrocity."

"Oooh. An Atrocity and a fresh one too! As if the newspapers didn't run enough news of that ilk on a daily basis. I'll sprint back to the microwave and warm up something starchy while you kick off those tennis shoes with the glandular problem and prepare to tell your tale. I don't suppose we can call it an 'Old Wives' Tale'. 7 " she caroled from the kitchen.

"More like a 'New Knives' Tale.' Or 'Tail' as in attached to the rear end of an animal."

"Not Louie's end?"

"Indeed. And almost unattached."

"Oh, dear." Kit peered intently around the kitchen wall to inspect Louie's extremities. "He looks all there. Oh. He hasn't lost something invisible? Did you have him fixed? "

"I didn't have to." Temple explained how the cat was kidnapped by an enraged Savannah Ashleigh, certain that Louie was the Unfortunate part of the Condition that afflicted her purebred Persian, Yvette.

Kit was scurrying back on her velvet holiday mules to see Temple's full performance as the infuriated aging starlet playing Cruella de Vil.

"And furthermore, she told the finest plastic surgeon in Las Vegas,' and she oughta know, "I want this beast fixed so that he will never leopardize a female cat's breeding potential again!"

"She ought to have been thinking of a jaguar. She abducted your cat just to have him neutered? Without your knowledge and against your will? Incredible. And she took Louie to a plastic surgeon?"

"I'm afraid Savannah was running on her Energizer bunny batteries again, instead of the usual brain power. Actually, it turned out fine. The dazed doctor performed a vasectomy on Louie. That was the only 'neutering' procedure he knew anything about. And he threw in a free tummy tuck."

"Oooh!" Kit's eyes momentarily turned envy-green as she admired the lounging ex-tomcat. "You couldn't get me an appointment for something similar? I don't need surgical contraception at my age, but I sure could use all the tucking I can get."

"You look trim as a paper cutter, Auntie dear, act twice as sharp and look half your age."

Kit almost purred in time with Louie. "Children are so sweet. . . when they're all grown up. And if you expect me to confess my age after all that buttering up, forget it, Niece."

"I wouldn't dream of asking. Besides, my mother is sixty-seven or -eight, so--"

"Never mind. I can tell you that I was a wisp of forty-nine not nearly as long ago as it seems. What a demented bimbo!" Kit had returned to the subject of Savannah Ashleigh. "How anyone would let that attempt to act is the biggest mystery of all."

"No, the biggest mystery about Savannah Ashleigh is what she'll do when she finds out what I did."

"And that is?"

Temple coddled the brandy snifter in both her hands, as if warming them at a private fire. "I filed suit against her. In small-claims court."

"In Las Vegas?"

"That's where the crime took place."

"But... isn't there an anti-roaming cat law there? Wouldn't Louie be in the wrong just for being available for catnapping?"

"The issue is the willful alteration of a cat she knew was not hers. And, besides, Louie was wrongfully accused of parenthood."

"He didn't do the wild thing with the nubile Yvette?"

"Not long enough to produce four yellow-striped offspring. I understand that kitty litters can result from more than one tomcat, but a black sire would always produce at least one black cat."

"Who do we know that is yellow-striped?"

Temple allowed a smug expression on her face as she stroked Louie's satin-furred ears. "Maurice."

"Maurice? Chevalier is dead. I think. Yvette's name is the right nationality to appeal, but the species is wrong, even for a Frenchman."

"Haven't you seen those Yummy Turn-turn-tummy ads on TV? The big yellow cat that comes running?"

"Not often. Oh. That's Maurice? The British pronounce it 'Morris,' you know."

"Well, over here we pronounce it 'Maurice,' as in Father of the Pride:'

"Then that's the cat that Louie bounced to get the commercial job that's brought you both to New York to visit the ad agency? I'd say Yvette's indiscretion was lucky for all concerned."

"I sure hope so. This has come up so fast I haven't had time to consider if a show-business career is the best thing for Louie and me. I'd have to be away from home, traveling, and Louie's no lightweight."

"But he's obviously star material. Look at him lolling on black leather as if to the limo born! You can't deny the thespian talent. Louie deserves his time in the spotlight."

Chapter 6

Phantom of the Wedding Chapel

Just because it seemed so perversely inappropriate, Matt played the theme from The Phantom of the Opera on the small Hammond organ.

At three in the morning five days before Christmas, the Lover's Knot wedding chapel was deserted except for the attentive, softsculpture presence of its constant "congregation." Not that the Christmas holidays weren't a popular time to get married; they were. So popular that Electra had to schedule weddings for the holiday period and used her new drive -by service for the overflow.

Like Santa, she'd taken on a few seasonal "elves" to help with the nuptial overload, and had even inked in time off for herself.

Oddly, Matt had never cared much for performing weddings. Despite the picture -perfect look to the grand day, behind-the-scenes involvement revealed all the familial cracks in the united front produced as lavishly as a Broadway show for one day of pomp and

circumstance.

The high cost of contemporary weddings, even modest ones, only upped the stakes.

Beyond the in-law tensions, the money squeeze and open warfare over who should pay for what, beyond tiffs about who was in the wedding party, the bridesmaids' dresses, the music or the flowers, Matt most hated the hypocrisy so common nowadays.

The Charade, he called it privately and contemptuously. This was the prewedding dissolution of a common household, when bride and groom who had been cohabiting, as the sociologists called it, for months, or even years, established separate addresses for the few weeks before the wedding . . . before they showed up at the rectory, parents in tow, to discuss the ceremonial details.

Matt was supposed to counsel them, ignoring the unspoken awkwardness of the true situation. He was supposed to publicly endorse a fruitful union, and privately assume that of course they would not resort to artificial means of contraception . . . when they had been using such means for months, or years. Now, though, in his office, they would be born-again virgins, presumed innocent of unworldly ways, baptized in the church's desperate desire to pretend that mores were what they had used to be.

Older priests, proud to be known as die-hard conservatives, used the prenuptial period as an opportunity to thunder like Moses come down from his mountain with his shalt-nots carved in stone: "You will," the priests would force eager-to-wed couples to agree, "be open to all the children that God gives you."

Obviously, they had not been open to possible children while living together, and would not gladly accept the possible nine or twelve now, not with college costs sky-high, and women planning on careers. But they pretended conformity, needing the communal blessing. Words were as crooked as runes, begging interpretation. "As God gives us (despite contraception)."

So everyone on both sides of the unspoken equation lied to each other, or to themselves.

Matt didn't blame the couples or the families. They believed in the vows and the sacrament. They also believed in the ideal of a lasting marriage, so much so that "trial runs" had become almost universal.

He just hated to see marriages launched so dishonestly. In prenuptial conferences, he avoided flat pronouncements, Instead encouraging the couple to be mature, considerate, aware of the seriousness of a lifetime commitment.

And Matt had to admit that twenty-something couples who had lived together (as everybody in the parish knew) were better prepared for the realities of life together than the old-model ignorant teenage lovers rushing to the altar to formalize their untried mutual infatuation.

Mixed feelings like these had forced him to reevaluate his vocation. They weren't the only reasons, but they remained with him, months after his priesthood had become past tense.

His attention came back to his playing. His fingers had slipped into the familiar chords of "Silent Night, Holy Night," that most placid of Christmas carols.

He smiled, and glided into "Jesu Bambino," one of his favorites.

He played by heart, in the near darkness, his fingers finding the familiar chords as they read the oversize Braille of the ivory and ebony keys.

Overhead lights switched on in a crashing chord of utter illumination, flooding the blinding, wedding-white walls and furnishings. Matt blinked, feeling the equivalent of an optical migraine.

"I thought I heard the Phantom playing." Electra's voice was a bit breathless. "I expected a blank white half-mask, at least, or--even better--a hideous visage. You're quite a nice surprise."

She wore one of her eternal muumuus that bloomed like hibiscus against a white stucco wall.

"Maybe I do have a mask on. I came down to search for the Lost Chord, not operatic revenge, and not for a pretty soprano to dominate."

Electra smiled, plopping down on the butt end of a pure-white pew, next to a Madonna-as-Evita clone in a mothball-scented pair of politically incorrect silver foxes that looked utterly sad drooping over a fashionable shoulder.

"Quite a repertoire you've got there, Matt. What are you playing now? It's catchy."

"Now? I don't know. Your arrival shocked me out of the 'Jesu Bambino.' "

"Yeay-zoo what?"

Matt's smile broadened, but his hands kept cajoling the keys. "This is a melody Temple asked about once. She thought it was a wedding march."

"Kind of is, at that, although I run canned music now. The organ is for atmosphere or media opportunities if celebs drop by. Everybody wants speed, not mood. So what's the tune?"

"I'm embroidering it pretty freely, but the bones are Bob Dylans 'Love Minus Zero--No Limit'."

"Bob Dylan? Hey, that's my era, not yours. You were barely born in the folkie heyday. How'd you hear about him?"

"I'm not sure how anyone finds word- and mind-benders like Bob Dylan and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but we do."

"Who's this studly Hopkins fellow? A folkie?"

Matt laughed. "A monk. English. Late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Wrote poetry with an invented style, something he called sprung rhythm."

"Honey, I got something you could call sprung rhythm in my back, but I take pills for it." She sighed and braced her hands on her flower-trellised knees. "I could use a different wedding march, in case I ever decide to marry again. Don't want to hear the same old tunes that marched me to disaster before."

"You've been married more than once?"

"Oh, yeah." Electra sounded nostalgic. "See, I'm from the Liz Taylor generation. Think you're in love and want to sleep with a guy? Marry him. You can always get divorced. And we did. Liz and me, I mean. Not from each other."

"Serial divorce. I don't know if that's admirable or insane."

"I'm betting you'd say 'insane.' You strike me as a pretty straight arrow for these times."

"You don't know how right you are. I'm so straight I'm not sure the earth isn't flat, because otherwise people would be slipping and falling off, wouldn't they?"

"Maybe the earth is round, but people need to slip and fall once in a while. You never know what you find down the rabbit hole. Like that Max Kinsella. You never know where he'll turn up next."

"So I've noticed."

"I remember when those two first moved in." Electra grinned nostalgically. "All that energy and expectation. They were the cutest couple. You could tell they were waiting for their second AIDS tests. Temple was checking the lobby mailboxes for an envelope from up north twice a day. And then one day . . . well, I didn't see hide or hair of them for days on end. Oh, sorry. Guess tales of Love's Young Dream aren't going to cheer you up."

Matt had segued into a funeral man h without even noticing. "I was just thinking, none of the old songs celebrate getting your 'papers' certifying that you are plague-free."

"AIDS is a plague, isn't it? That sexual free lunch I saw all around me when I was just a little too old-fashioned to take advantage of it; I felt like such a square. That's what we called being a straight arrow in my day. Me and my marriages. And now it's all over, the sexual free-for-all. Or it should be. People want safety and longevity in relationships."

She nodded in time to Matt's increasingly upbeat dirge.

"Do you have children from any of your marriages?"

"Oh, sure. Adult children, although sometimes I'm not so certain about that. They move, I move. I write, they call. Now they wanta E-mail me. Can you imagine?"

He nodded, not in time to the soft organ chords. "I'd have a computer if I could afford one."

Electra shook her head. "To me, E-mail is like safe sex. Something's not quite all there."

"I suppose a couple, once they've established that each of them is disease-free, has quite a stake in the relationship, even if they're not married."

"I hope it makes 'em think that way, if they're sensible."

"Have you seen marriage rates go up, since AIDS, I mean?"

Electra was startled. "Gee. I don't usually think like a pollster. And I've haven't been here with my little wedding chapel since the Ice Age, lad. I just opened it five years ago, so I have no basis for comparison. I see a bunch of folks who shouldn't get married going right ahead and doing it, though. But what the hell? I shouldn't have a few times and I did."

"I grew up Catholic." Matt paused to consider if he really did grow up. "Anyway, staying married mattered a lot. Divorce was anathema."

"Oh. Catholic. What's 'anathema'?"

"Seriously forbidden, almost blasphemous."

"Honestly, Matt! Those big, bad words. A lot to heap on a child."

"They're a lot to heap on an adult."

"So you really expect to get married once, and that's it? Is that why you're still single? Waiting for a sure thing?"

"I don't know that I expect to get married, but if I did, I'd have to think that."

"Everybody thinks that, when they're on a hormone high. But that's just Nature making sure more people get born to ride the real-life roller coaster and then check out. That's a pretty big gamble: to think you'll get married and stay married forever."

"That's what I'd have to do."

"Hey, I don't knock anybody's religion, but to this old broad, that's either admirable ... or insane."

"Maybe the admirable is often insane."

"You got it! We drive ourselves crazy trying to live up to other people's concepts of how we should live. That's why I don't take marriage seriously. It's a party that often turns into a funeral, but more often into pure habit. So I had five husbands, so what?"

"Electra . . . five?"

Hey, Liz had eight or something. I've changed a lot in the last forty-some years. Wasn't always a plus-size. Wasn't always a real-estate magnate and prominent justice of the peace either.

"That's why you spray your hair all those colors, isn't it?"

"Sure. Punk Senior Citizen. Hey, if you can't go wild in some little area that's all your own, what's the point of being here?"

Matt stopped playing. He let his hands fall to his knees. "Maybe that's my problem. I don't have a wild little area."

"Your problem is you're a nice young man who thinks too much." She rose, came behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck in a bear hug. "Why don't you plan on coming up to my place for Christmas Day? I don't cook the whole turkey and stuff, or stuffing, but I scramble some goodies together, and a couple of my 'adult children' are coming. You'll dig my daughter the herpetologist. She's not too much older than you--"

"I don't want to--"

"Intrude! Go ahead, Matt dear. You need to intrude more. Walk right in. Break down a few doors if you have to. Come as you are, Leave as you want to be, Smile. And sing some for me before I go back to bed. You do sing?"

I used to, but not exactly pop tunes."

Maybe he should say he's into Latin rhythms, Matt thought, realizing that Electra had improved his mood. Hmm. Latin rhythms with hymns. Church music is seldom heard elsewhere, unless a monk's choir becomes an international novelty act for a half note on the endless scale of media fads.

Churches are made for music like vases are made for flowers. His mind and fingers revisited some of his favorites. Attending high mass at a major cathedral, high, heavenly voices filling the eaves. Visiting the small wooden playhouse of a neighboring black Baptist church on Sunday, where the Gospel choir can clap their way into high heaven. He'd always gone on these informal ecumenical expeditions in Roman collar. So blond amid all that black, he understood the isolation of oppositeness.

Afterward, the congregation spurned the polite distance toward line-crossers that you found in white urban churches. They beamed and called him "Reverend." "Fine day, Reverend," they'd said, nodding on the way out.

The minister would pump his hand at the simple single doorway, cheered by a visit from a brother clergyman. Matt would say, "Fine sermon, Reverend. Great choir." "Thank you, Father. Thank you very much," the other Reverend would say, meaning it.

Matt didn't visit non-Catholic churches now. He felt he had no right. No instant brotherhood wherever he went.

His hands finally found something secular Electra would know. "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," mellow and made for the organ. He found his voice again, not intoning measured responses but searching old, mysterious words for new meanings and emotions.

Electra's arms tightened on his neck when he was finished. "Terrific, hon. You should sing more often."

She bent to give him a motherly kiss good night, then left him to the dark and the melancholy organ notes.

Matt always welcomed spontaneous affection, but found it startling. Affection was something left unsaid rather than demonstrated in his life. But Electra, with her five husbands and earthy attitude, was too outgoing to skirt his reticence, or even notice it. Affection. Matt liked it.

And then his willful hands were playing Bob Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident," a romantic song the title belied, as Dylan's titles often denied any romantic contents of lyric or melody. Somehow the flamenco-dancing, fortune-telling gypsy girl the songwriter celebrated reminded Matt of Temple. Or maybe he just identified with the singer longing to warm himself at the errant flame of the eternal female.

Dylan's songs about male-female relationships could be bitter, or cynical, or playful. And even Biblical. His moving "Sara" was a wail of Job to his lost wife as they separated. Matt wondered if the recording field was capable of supporting constancy. Then he wondered if that would matter more than the changes Electra mentioned.

Break down doors, huh? Suppose Matt started doing that? How many new doors would Max Kinsella materialize to stop him? How many doors had Matt himself slammed shut over the years to barricade himself against chance, and change?

Chapter 7

An Elevated Experience

Strapped into Midnight Louie's carrier, with Louie in it, Temple set forth early Thursday morning to catch a cab to Colby, Janos and Renaldi.

With her various burdens, flat-footed boots and bulky down-stuffed jacket, she felt (and probably looked) like a Sherpa guide enroute to an assault on Mount Everest.

Catching a cab was enough of a challenge. The first step was crossing the street. She had to flag down a cab pointed in the right direction: uptown. The next step was spotting a free vehicle. In the gray December daylight, telling whether the milky light topping each cab like a button on a beanie was off or on was a toss-up. The greatest challenge, though, was luring the empty cab to her.

Apparently neither she nor Louie had cab magic. She watched seasoned New Yorkers arrive Johnny-come -lately on the block she had been firmly planted on for minutes, then spy, call and snag cabs that by right of being there first should have been hers, dammit!

What did she have to do? Throw herself and Louie into midtraffic?

Actually, that finally worked, although some rude drivers made a point of swerving away at the last minute and trying for a world's record horn-honk.

But at last she had trapped one of the wily Yellows. She collapsed into the backseat on her tailbone, feeling relief if not comfort. The only position she could take in a cab with Louie weighing her down was the slightly reclining one of a partially upended turtle. At least it kept her too low to see out of the window, which meant that she didn't have to witness the thousand close shaves that New York cabs are heir to.

The address she gave the driver had gone down smoothly. Madison Avenue was a major street that caused cabbies no gray hairs, and Kit had said the building Temple wanted was in the "Larry block," so named after a long-standing, celebrated watering hole called Larry's on one corner. In what seemed like a wink, the cab jerked up short and stopped.

Temple struggled upright to glimpse the meter, before pulling out the right amount of money. Then she had to wrench the door open and tumble out. Louie growled softly during all the maneuvers; her exiting position resembled a jackknife in gym class, and his boyish girth was the only part of the equation that could give.

Safely upright and on the sidewalk again, Temple adjusted the straps on the twenty-one-pound carrier-with-cat, pushed up her jacket sleeve and slid down her glove to bare enough of her wrist to check the time. Fifteen minutes early. She'd have to stroll the rest of the way to avoid arriving embarrassingly early.

A search of the building's stone facade revealed the very numbers she sought, their tall aluminum dignity mimicking the skyscraper.

Temple joined the people scurrying through the chrome revolving doors into an echoing lobby as busy as all outdoors.

"Does everybody know where they're going?" Temple muttered to Louie. His head was twisted so his big green eyes could study her soulfully. He produced a silent meow of protest to her transportation arrangements so far.

Temple had memorized the office number: 3288. She threaded through the humorless crowds, hunting for the elevators, for a while, it looked as if there weren't any. Only when she had penetrated the building's interior to an alarming degree, worried about exiting shortly on the opposite street, did she spot briefcase beaters hurtling around a corner like zombies caught In a speed warp.

Temple scrambled to follow. In a few steps she had entered a granite-paved narrows between two opposite banks of the most gorgeous examples of Art Deco elevator-door metalwork that she had ever seen. Shangri-La-La land.

Naturally, she came to a dead stop to gawk.

Naturally, no one else would stop dead here even to view the dead, were anyone so unlucky as to be laid out before them. If Temple didn't get moving, she would be laid out beneath them.

Clutching cat and tote bag, she headed for a pair of elevator doors opening like the beaten-gold temple doors in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic. Just in front of them, she stopped dead again. Must be a death wish. People parted behind her like an angry Red Sea and flooded the elevator car.

Temple jumped back just in time to keep Louie from being ground to death in the closing jaws of classic Art Deco style.

Temple edged away from the next wave of people clogging up behind her. She stared at a set of tall, elegant numbers, these arranged in a semicircle, with an ornate golden hand lazily gliding past them: one to twenty-two.

Not thirty-two. Was this the wrong building? The wrong address? She turned and studied the numbers above the five other golden doors. The same numerals: one to twenty-two. She dislodged her clothing, feeling unbearably hot in the crowded lobby, to examine her wristwatch. Now she was only six minutes early.

Holy cowabunga! Holy Howdy Doody! Now what was she going to do? Find someone who had to stand still in this mess, that's what, and answer a simple, heartfelt question: where's the thirty-second floor? What on God's green earth is wrong with people in Gotham City? Hasn't anyone ever noticed that half of this building is missing in action?

Temple turned against the crowd's lemming like rush to the elevators. No one even noticed her literal figurehead, the face of Midnight Louie eyeing each and every one of them. Struggling upstream, she craned her neck to see over the mob, a fruitless effort in the best of situations.

here must be a newsstand somewhere. A shoeshine stand. A fruit stand. A stolen goods stand. She'd even ask Frankenstein's grandmother if she were here selling something, like Tickle me, Igor dolls!

In despair, Temple noticed that she had steered back between the flanking elevator doors. This must indeed be a circle of Dante's Hell.

"Louie, we're going to be late for a very important date! What do we do?"

He knew what to do. He twisted, snapping at the drawstring that hemmed his head in. The effort, though futile, didn't do Temple's precarious balance any good.

She stared glumly at the heavenly Art Deco elevator doors and their frustrating lofty numbers. The only thing missing was the legend, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

She could almost see those fatal words etched in living flames above the floor pointer.

Which now read . . . twenty-three to forty-six.

She accelerated forward like a New Yorker-born and squeezed herself onto the next departing car. Louie's head protruded past the dark slit between elevator and shaft.

"Baby on board," Temple caroled loudly, backing shamelessly into whoever was behind her. In this mob, who could see what really was in her carrier? From behind, Louie looked like a black-haired baby, nice little Italian baby, maybe, future Al Pacino of cat-food commercials . . . who's to know?

She didn't notice a mass making-way, but as the doors slid shut, Louie's white whiskers bent at their pressure, then sprang to full width again after the doors had shut.

Oops, Temple thought. How to reach the distant control panel to punch in her floor? No way in this sardine factory. No way to lift an arm to check a watch either. Crammed jacket to jacket and boot heel to boot toe with a phalanx of native New Yorkers, Temple resigned herself to shooting past the thirty-second floor and catching it on the way down.

No way would she be on time for their appointment.

Her luck finally turned. Someone else wanted the same floor, for the doors cracked their gleaming twenty-four-carat smile and the mob shifted, and someone behind her elbowed his or her way out. Temple let the natural riptide action pull her and Louie out after the dear departing one. She could kiss him/her.

Actually . . . no, Temple reconsidered as the elevator doors shut behind her, stranding her in an almost empty hall. She would rather kiss a Tickle me, Igor doll.

The man was Nosferatu in a trench coat, cadaverously thin with blue veins mottling his temples and a Grim Reaper look on his face that did nothing to relieve the initial impression.

Temple let him go ahead, feeling she'd be trailing a hearse otherwise. More gilt numbers cast narrow shadows on the grass-cloth-covered hall walls. Probably the plaster was old and cracked, and grass cloth made an elegant camouflage.

She noted that the number she sought was well within the awesome range indicated to the left, 3262-3298. She would have to tread in the creepy gentleman's footsteps, after all.

"He'd probably be scared white if you crossed his path, Louie," she whispered to the patient cat. Carrying an animal up close and personal like this encouraged conversation, however one-sided. This was the way eccentrics were made, Temple thought, the pathetic folks who wander the streets discoursing with fire plugs and such. One day in New York City, and to this she was reduced!

Just outside the double frosted-glass doors labeled Colby, Janos and Renaldi, Temple battled her outerwear for a condemned woman's glimpse of the time.

One minute to 10 a.m. Well, she certainly wasn't embarrassingly early . . .

She walked in. A small foyer, crowded with the usual people, awaited her. Incurious eyes looked up from magazines like Advertising Age, then dropped to the slick pages again. She marched up to the receptionist's desk, where a chic young black woman in beautifully sculpted dreadlocks drummed her mandarin fingernails on the desktop while she cradled a phone receiver on her shoulder.

She looked up and actually noticed the cat. When she hung up, unsuccessful in reaching her party, Temple announced, "Temple Barr and Midnight Louie to see Kendall Renaldi."

Much to the astonishment of everyone in the room, with the possible exception of Midnight Louie, Esquire, they were shown right in.

Chapter 8

A Killer Xmas Present

By late afternoon, the gray collar of concrete surrounding the Circle Ritz pool like a homely pewter bezel hoarding an aquamarine had warmed in the December sunlight. At least the blue plastic exercise mats strewn over the surface didn't quite freeze -burn the soles of Matt's bare feet.

The fifties-vintage pool was more decorative than functional these days. Thirty feet the long way cramped exercise fanatics. Devout sun tanners still thrived in Las Vegas, gauging by the dusky leatherwork on many faces. They would disdain the old-fashioned tables and chairs, not one a lounge model.

Matt gazed at the deserted site, unable to concentrate today.

He jerked the tie of his roomy white cotton gj tighter, as if deceiving himself about finally getting down to a serious workout. He really should do this at Jack Ree's gym during what passed tor winter months in this climate. He had started with tai chi, which looked like shadowboxing to Westerners. And he had stopped when he realized whose shadow he was boxing.

The shadow wasn't very tall in person, but in absence it stretched into a long, thin tether of memory. Intended in flame, like a match.

Like red hair. Temple was out of town for the holidays, gone for Christmas, and that irritated him for some reason.

Come on! he coached himself, not sure if the voice he imitated was Jack Ree's or Kyle Menninger's back in Chicago. Or Frank Bucek's in seminary.

Matt hurled into a machine-gun burst of lunges and positions, punctuated by the ritual yells, his irritation striking its real target at last: himself. His sense of being stalled. Because Temple was gone, a niggling reason that shamed him. Because he couldn't find the always shadowy figure of his stepfather that he had pursued through Las Vegas like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. That was a more legitimate reason that didn't shame him as it ought to.

Moving through the martial-arts positions, he felt more like a hunting hound and less like a moping water spaniel. Sometimes his anger took him; he always performed better when it did. Yet anger was the least desirable quality in a martial-arts exercise. The art came in the control, in the seemingly artless control, of oneself, and thereby of others around oneself. That was the paradox so beloved of philosophers and religious leaders the world and ages over: to give up the self is to gain for oneself.

"Impressive force."

Was the voice a mere echo of a past master in his head?

Matt had been so concentrated, body and soul, that he couldn't tell momentarily if he had heard a real voice. Wasn't that how those beautifully dangerous Old Testament angels had appeared to the poor humans chosen by God to marry a certain woman to sire a certain son, or later to sacrifice that son on a mountain top? Or to send their daughters into the streets to be raped.

He turned slowly, knees bent to spring in any direction, at any enemy, even an invisible one such as delusion.

He saw an angel, maybe, but no Old Testament emigre. Matt straightened, feeling a stranger had caught him enacting one of his fierce internal fantasies.

"Do you teach?" She approached him with harsh, measured steps like a flamenco dancer just warming up.

He shook his head.

"The woman inside--housekeeper, I think--said I could find you here."

"You were looking for me?"

"You sound like no one ever does."

"I guess I more often do the looking."

He was looking now. He had seen women more beautiful, but none more arresting. Beauty's remote perfection repelled him, if anything. She didn't need it. The only thing medium about her was her height. Her Snow White coloring invited fairy-tale comparison: coal-black hair with a hard sheen that seemed lacquered, but wasn't. Skin white as department-store-window snow. Lips black-red, like a cherry split by its own ripeness, and not nearly as natural. Her eyes were the only compromised feature in her face, a changeable blue-green color that recalled the "aqua" eyes Temple raved about in Midnight Louie's lady friend, the Persian cat Yvette.

This visitor obviously expected all action to stop while her bold palette of features was assessed. Her cool eyes returned the favor, but revealed no conclusions, or even presumptions.

What she wore was a frame, no more. Matt was learning Temple's character-reading through accessories. A simple, expensive pantsuit in an exquisite shade of jade green underlined her unusual eyes. He was aware of pointy-toed, low-heeled boots or oxfords that gleamed with a halo of excessive cost. And though Lieutenant Molina might wear this rigorously gender-neutral suit, in this case Matt saw/sensed that it only added intrigue to a men's-magazine figure. She might be ten or fifteen pounds heavier than the ideal woman her height, but that was only another unfair advantage she had over her sex; an inescapable lushness lurked beneath the suit's severe lines.

She didn't speak until she was close enough to extend her left hand, but not for an introduction. Something was in it.

He reached for the expected business card, then froze. She held out one of the laminated sketches of his stepfather he had been plastering all over Las Vegas casinos for the past month. On the back he'd typed estimated height, weight and whereabouts, as well as his own name and phone number. But not his Circle Ritz address.

"Friend of yours?" she asked.

"Not exactly, Friend of yours?"

Not exactly. But he's bought me a drink or two when he's won for a while, or just wants to feel like a winner. He doesn't stay a winner very long, because he never stops playing. I work at one of the Strip casinos." She had seen and answered the question that was forming in his mind, and maybe his mouth and eyes.

"It's true." She laughed, as if the questions and reactions were always the same, and always in the same order. "I don't talk or dress like one of the sleazy sisterhood men expect to find working in a casino."

"I have no expectations," he said abruptly.

She studied him, her smile something she put on easily, like a jade-green pantsuit. "I guess you don't. You're not what I expected. And do you even expect to find him?"

"Not really."

"Still, you look."

He shrugged. " 'A man's reach . . .' "

She laughed, extending her right hand. "Kitty O'Connor."

A heavy square ring impressed his fingers. He stared at the culprit, a huge emerald-cut aquamarine embedded in a rope-of-gold setting, as her pale hand withdrew.

Ambidextrous, he thought, with the attention to detail a counselor brought to bear on all new personalities. Unusual in a woman. Wonder which hand she writes with.

She considered the homemade wanted poster again. "I've seen him, should see him again."

"And?"

"And what?"

"I didn't mention a reward."

"I didn't ask for one, did I?"

"I thought you might expect one."

"You don't expect anything, why should I?"

"Maybe you're more optimistic than I am."

"Don't bet on it."

Kitty's cool smile turned unexpectedly mischievous. He found himself grinning back, and resented the manipulation. "If you don't want anything," he suggested, "you might as well tell me where he's turned up."

"Oh, darlin'. I just said I didn't want a reward. I didn't say I didn't want anything."

She took a slow turn around the five exercise mats, a tour that would have honored sensitively placed sculptures in a Japanese garden.

The "oh, darlin' " had that sleazy saloon sound Matt would expect from a woman who worked at a casino, but her speaking voice implied a foreign tinge. Maybe something as incongruous as finishing school, maybe just the theater.

He realized late that her tour of the mats had become a turn around Matt, singular. He turned to confront her, meeting a gaze of such candid calculation that the sun-warmed afternoon blanched as if now aware it had come out without a coat in the dead of winter.

"I'm not an Iscariot," she said, her smile and eyes as chill as blue aquavit, that thin Nordic firewater so strong it's served in tiny narrow glasses like test tubes.

A Finnish-descent monsignor had held a New Year's gala: innocent rounds of northland hors d'oeuvres alternating with blue aftershave bursts of potent aquavit. Certainly helped the oily sardine sandwiches go down.

"Iscariot," he repeated. "An odd expression. Most people just call him Judas."

"I don't turn anybody--even a deluded old drunk--over to parties unknown until I'm satisfied as to why he's wanted."

"He isn't wanted, that's the irony. Only I want him, and I hate his guts."

Matt was beginning to find secular overstatement as effective as sudden anger on the exercise mats. It wasn't how he'd been taught to fight, but he'd never been taught to fight anyone but himself. He sensed that she required struggle, this furiously self-contained woman. She needed to regard him as a possible opponent for some reason, and he had to reassure her that he was up to her mettle, whatever that was.

She could be a professional seductress. The lurid thought almost made Matt flush, not a good thing in this game of hidden moves.

"What a great little hideaway." Now she was studying the apartment building as avidly as she had gauged him. "Nouveau Trendy."

"Electra, the lady you took for housekeeper, owns it, by the way."

"And the tacky wedding chapel out front?'"

"And the wedding chapel out front."

"Oh, come now. You're not going to defend pink and blue neon bows. Really."

"You have no idea what I'd defend. I'm standing on royal-blue oversize place mats."

"Yes. Dreadful color, for that material, at least. But I bet it keeps your feet warm."

He nodded, tempted to bring her back to the subject, but resisting it. Women liked to shop. To see everything, and test-drive most of it. She hadn't pinched the produce yet.

"If I'm going to turn a man over to you, I've got to know your . . . credentials. I can't have something . . . unjust on my conscience."

"I can understand that."

"Can you really?"

"You sound incredulous, but I do understand."

"Why are you looking for this Effinger man? You're not a policeman--"

"I could always grow a mustache."

She smiled at that, the unspoken facial badge of many young patrol officers, especially of fair-haired Anglo officers.

"You can't pass as an urban cowboy," she objected. "You're not from these parts."

"How did you know?"

"I'd say Illinois. Chicago. The South Side. Out in the boonies. An immigrant community originally. I hear voices in your voice. A foreign trace. Don't look so startled, Mr. Devine. The name is Anglo-Saxon, but the voice says. . . German?"

"Polish," he corrected unhappily.

"Should have said my first guess! Effinger could be a German name."

"I don't know the man's national origins, and I don't care. No blood relation, if that's what you're really getting at."

"Sorry. I'm being circuitous again, aren't I?"

The word "circuitous" evoked her slow tour around him. Matt realized that he was the object of her interest for some reason, and that her interest was usually, if not always, somehow sexual.

He was used to straightforward women: nuns until now; now Temple the wayward public relations specialist, who always told the truth as best she knew it; Carmen Molina, the homicide detective who allowed no gender nonsense to compromise her professionalism or her single-parenthood.

Kitty O'Connor was different. She played games, and she liked to win them. She was always testing, especially strangers, especially strange men.

As a priest, he'd encountered lonely women, parishioners even, who were tantalized by the untouchable, who swooned over Mr. Spock of Star Trek or another woman's husband or even the friendly neighborhood Catholic priest. He'd come to recognize the type instantly, and to ignore its temptations no matter how attractively packaged.

Compared to those sad, delusional groupies, decent women with compulsively self-destructive hankerings, Kitty was a pro. She knew something he was desperate to know (and she knew it). To gain her confidence, he would have to play on her field with her terms. He would have to tease, to flirt back. Not exactly taught in seminary.

He thought of Max Kinsella, the Mystifying Max, blast him! Temple had said he was good with women. The magician. Max always acted as if he had a secret, and maybe it was about you. Always acted as if he knew more than you did. Maybe that had something to do with it.

"I can't tell you why I'm looking for Effinger. The information isn't mine to give."

She nodded, looking more interested. "Can you tell me a reason in general?"

"Family business," he said curtly. He gave up the words with a wrench of self-disgust. It wasn't anybody's business but his. "I am about my Father's business" Not in this instance, although maybe his real father, his genetic father, would want this unworthy replacement dealt with too.

Perhaps his emotions as much as his words reassured her, because she understood what he meant.

"Family business is hell, isn't it?"

He nodded, relieved. "And Purgatory thrown in for good measure."

But once dealt with, it's the Heaven of a job well done, a job that needed doing."

Their eyes were steady on each other now, as it they spoke the same unspoken language, with the slightly "foreign" accents of their lone, cautious outsider voices. Foreign to what?

"This means a lot to you."

She put her hands on her lips, sweeping the open jacket to either side, emphasizing the hourglass of her figure almost as a weapon.

She reminded him of an Old West gunfighter with her pointy-toed boots in a wide-legged stance, her challenging eyes that were only green now and hard as laser light.

"What would you do, if you found him?"

The pass/fail question. He had nothing to fall back upon but his own bitter truth. "I don't know. Kill him, maybe."

She was impassive. If she chose to shoot him down now, she would never help him, even if she was the only soul in Nevada who knew the creep's whereabouts.

"The Gilded Lily. You'll have to look it up in the Yellow Pages under 'Dives.' Try about nine p.m. He likes to start in the bar."

The capitulation left him breathless, confused. "You work there?"

"Not as of tonight. You might give me a day or two before you come calling. Don't want to dash off the very day Mr. Effinger might have a big fall."

Like Max Kinsella at the Goliath and the first casino dead man.

Matt felt a dizzying sense of deja vu. He almost felt like Max, or a waxwork imitation of Max. He managed a knowing smile, a nice trick when he knew nothing.

"And if I want to find you again? Tell you what happened?" he asked.

"I'll know." She had turned and was leaving.

He realized that she carried nothing--no purse, no sunglasses. Maybe she had been a visitation . . . from somewhere.

Hard heels clicked the concrete. Beneath Matt's feet, the blue plastic felt damp. He had grown no mustache but his upper lip had materialized a dewy pencil-thin line of sweat.

"I'll find you," she threw behind her in farewell.

She sounded happy. No . . . content.

He wondered . . . what a priest could . . . should never wonder.

His hands were as cold as his feet were hot. He made fists to warm his fingers in the waning afternoon light. Nine p.m. Not a good time. He'd have to take time off, or change his schedule. Maybe change his schedule. Then he'd have an alibi.

Dear God, why had he let her glimpse his raw vengeance? And, worse, why had that one factor, or failing, put whatever fears she had to rest? He hoped he never found out, never saw her again.

He doubted that he'd be that lucky.

Chapter 9

Cat in a Gray Flannel Suite

Despite the cavernous lobby downstairs, the offices were a maze of cubbyholes arranged along a wall of windows that looked out on other windows, in which small moving figures of worker bees could be glimpsed buzzing soundlessly in a concrete hive.

A tall tawny-haired woman younger than Temple was waiting beyond the foyer door to greet her.

"I'm Kendall Renaldi, and I see you have something to get o({ your chest."

"I have twenty pounds of something to get off my chest."

"So this is Midnight Louie. Love that name."

"He came with it. I probably would have called him 'Blackie' or something totally unoriginal."

"I doubt that, judging from the materials you sent us. You're in the same game as we are."

"Well, we're kitting cousins, anyway," Temple demurred, flattered to have been symbolically accepted on Madison Avenue, the pinnacle of advertising; promotion and public relations.

"We are it you work tin- hours we do," Kendall added, rolling her

"You can unload Louie in my office."

"What I'd most like to do is lose the outerwear for a while. It's best if I keep Louie close to my heart where he can't get into trouble."

"But he's so big, and you're so small. If we did tour you, we'd have to send a handler along."

"That's why I bought the baby-bag for cats. It's supposed to balance the weight. If only I could find a Papoose on Board' decal.

" 'Don't Kitty Litter' would be a nice touch too."

"If Louie's going to be a media cat, I suppose he'll have lots of messages to bear, poor baby."

Once inside Kendall's office door, Temple demonstrated getting out of the carrier's waist and shoulder straps. "It's really simple if you get the hang of it."

" 'Hang of it' is right. I'd really get hung up in all that harnessry."

"Try it," Temple suggested. "Somebody has to hold Louie while I undress anyway."

She slung her tote bag down on the paper-piled chair beside a small desk mounded by an avalanche of paperwork. Kendall's office was one in name only, Temple noticed as she struggled out of her down jacket and mukluks and put them on the . . . the--

"There's a hook on the back of the door," Kendall suggested.

Temple hung up what she could, then straightened the short fuchsia wool skimp dress she wore (very sixties) and rummaged in the tote for her shoe bag. She leaned against the desk edge while pulling on black suede chunky heels. Presto, from Nanook of the North to something a bit more citified.

Kendall had managed to buckle Louie on sideways, despite risking her long, manicurist-abetted, bronze-enameled fingernails. She shrugged, but eyed Temple with approval. "Thank

goodness the male ad execs didn't see you in that marshmallow outfit. They would have ruled you out as too fat to go on TV no matter what you looked like underneath."

"Decisions are made that fast around here?"

"Decisions are made like lightning. Good thing I was a rock-climber in college and learned to think on my feet and hands. That's why we're moving on this over the holidays. You do know that you and Louie are not the only candidates."

Temple did not know, and did not like hearing about it now, but she kept a polite smile on her face and said nothing.

"Maurice is still under consideration, and we do have a film pro who's anxious to take this on, although it's a bit awkward with what happened with her cat."

"Film pro?" This is Christmas, Temple implored (and possibly, in her heart, threatened) whatever gods may be. Don't do this to me!

All this way, and it was a beauty contest.

"Don't worry. I've seen her, and you'll do fine. But, ummm .. ."

Kendall's narrowed hazel eyes stared at Temple.

"Yes?" Temple asked anxiously. Gosh, did she have a snag in her smile or something? A run in her fingernail polish? Her hose had to be all right because they were opaque black, so as not to show black cat hairs.

"It might be to your advantage to meet everybody without an addition of twenty ugly pounds. You're so petite, why hide it? Why don't I tote Louie in this getup, and prove even a dunce can don a cat carrier? You know, the manufacturer might be interested in of-fering the carriers as a premium."

Temple nodded. She was beginning to understand the corporate culture at Colby, Janos and Renaldi. Everything had an angle. Everyone was always thinking. Something positive. Something negative. She hadn't been under this kind of magnifying glass since high school gym class, when they'd been subjected to a harridan who was part marine drill sergeant and part Marquis de Sade. Everyone had a use. Everyone had no excuse.

She eyed Midnight Louie, who eyed her right back.

Act sharp, she told him mentally. This place may look disorganized, but so do shark tanks when the itty-bitty fishes school past.

Louie blinked in that solemn way cats have. He was all eyes, and all ears. He acted as if he understood every word, but cats don't read minds. Do they?

Temple appreciated Kendall's concern, but wondered why she was its beneficiary. Right now she was being shepherded toward the inner offices, being briefed on who was who in the firm's hierarchy.

Usually a quick study, Temple was befuddled by the roster of Colby, Janos and Renaldi. Apparently all were founders or scions of family Company, by all appearances, but the family was not necessarily all happy.

Kendall Opened the unmarked walnut door before them, and Temple waltzed confidently through, pretending to make a stage entrance as Joan Crawford.

She was glad she had chosen to come in six feet tall, because she walked right into a set change as drastic as from rural Kansas to downtown Oz. Temple faced a huge multimedia conference room muted with upholstered gray-flannel walls. It was filled to the giant, built-in film and TV screens with men in, yes, Brooks Brothers suits. Here and there Temple glimpsed patterned suspenders as a racy, individual touch. One man even wore a bow tie. None cultivated mustaches or other facial hair. The women in the room, few but fierce, were Stepford wives: impeccably groomed clones wearing the latest version of the corporate woman's power suit.

Except for one woman. Temple's rival. The film performer, and Louie's blond bete noire . . .

Savannah Ashleigh.

Chapter 10

Cacaphoney

A long, shocked silence that slowly became a long, hostile silence prevailed while those previously acquainted sized each other up.

Unfortunately, only two people present were previously acquainted, and it hadn't been a success.

The shivers at Temple's nape eased once she realized that Savannah Ashleigh had arrived for this key East Coast conference in full Hollywood Babe regalia.

A television spokesperson must be neat, clean, thrifty, brave and conventionally attired at all times. Savannah's champagne -colored leather jumpsuit with brass studs interlarded with festive, cashew-size red rhinestones might work for a Country Western singer, or a reincarnation of Elvis, but it did nothing for a cat-food rep. Not to mention what cat claws would do to that butter-soft Rodeo Drive hide on camera, either the leather jumpsuit's, or Savannah's.

And the shoes! For once Temple was conservatively shod in closed-toe suede pumps. Savannah Ashleigh's feet, however, were a playground of metallic leather and clear plastic straps on four-inch heels. Even at their highest, Temple thought from her new, lofty prominence of subdued taste, her own high heels never surpassed three inches.

It was also obvious that Miss Ashleigh had been a fashion victim in too many B movies of late, as well as in too many plastic surgeons' offices.

She wore a shoulder-dusting clatter of earrings, an overpopulated gold charm bracelet and several large cocktail rings of dubious ancestry. All that armament would chime against microphones and rattle on paper and batter the on-set furniture.

Temple knew her fashion style was a happy-go-lucky hybrid of her theatrical and television-news backgrounds, and the one immutable, her petite frame. In casual clothes she looked like a thirteen-year-old, hardly a serious spokeswoman for a television news program. So on camera she'd resorted to stylish suits and very little jewelry. Jane Pauley used attractive pins as a riveting signature: very visible but also very out-of-the-way when hands and head had to literally be plugged into a national network.

As for Temple's shoe-thing, it had always been there, like her freckles, from her earliest years. And female TV reporters, invariably shot from the waist up, sometimes expressed their real off-screen personality in footwear. Temple remembered a pioneer Twin Cities female reporter whose legendary pair of hot-pink pumps were never seen on screen, but were well-known and discussed witnesses to numerous juicy trials and other utterly serious news-making events.

So Temple straightened her shoulders and prepared to go head-to-head with Savannah Ashleigh. If she felt intimidated by competing against a semi-movie star, she need only glance at the actress's lips. Miss Ashleigh's plastic surgeon had taken the suggestion Temple had impishly planted in retaliation for Savannah's altering Midnight Louie's personal plumbing only weeks ago.

The Ashleigh lips were so collagen-inflated that they could pass for the Goodyear Blimp. Too, too, too much, dahling, Temple thought cattily. Hopefully, you now lithp!

hat Savannah Ashleigh thought she was not actress enough to keep off her face. Dismay and shock jousted with fury. Apparently neither woman had been advised that this was to be a gladiator event, not a job interview.

"Et tu, advertising?" Temple murmured.

Kendall had the grace to color.

Meanwhile, Midnight Louie had assessed the room and its occupants from his royal-purple perch on the person of Miss Renaldi. He finished with a final sweep of his head from corner to corner, and then released a low, loud meow with a nice vibrato of sheer rage under it.

"He does 'talk,' as advertised," a florid-faced man at the table replied.

"I'm afraid Louie has been confined to carrier for most of two days," Temple said. "He's feeling a trifle cramped."

The red-faced man patted the long wood-veneer conference table.

"Then let him out. Here, let's take a look at this wildcat."

"Here? Now?"

The others apparently heeded the man who spoke, for heads nodded all around the table.

Kendall leaned close to Temple. "Brent Colby, Junior."

Temple nodded and accompanied Kendall to a break in the chairs. In a moment the carrier straps were loosened and Louie himself was about to be loosed upon the eminences of advertising.

"Be good," Temple whispered as he tumbled out of the bag and rolled upright.

Oh, he was good. Very good.

First he stretched, starting at his front legs until his belly polished the conference table, then reversing the motion until he stretched out one back leg after another, his tail sketching a perfectly executed S in the air. This introductory maneuver elicited polite applause.

Then he sat, glanced around to ensure their full attention, and began fastidiously grooming a paw.

"Mick Jagger," murmured one advertising scion to another, an apparent compliment to the length and agility of Louie's tongue.

Louie flicked the commentator a glance, then yawned very slowly to display an extraordinary array of teeth.

"More like Jaws," said a neat, dark-haired man with a permanent five-o'-clock shadow as well as worry lines in his forehead.

"Victor Janos, Junior," Kendall whispered to Temple. She hastily pointed out the other figures at the table, Tony Renaldi was tall, dark and lean, quite handsome, but maybe Temple was biased. She was surprised by how many junior Colbys, Janoes and Renaldis populated the table, either founders or offspring. Apparently keeping it in the families was a priority among the high-level executives with the advertising firm.

Meanwhile, Louie worked his feline magic up and down the table, doing the Las Vegas Strip strut. Savannah Ashleigh was not too dumb to know when she was being upstaged. She fidgeted on her leather-upholstered conference chair until her clinging pantsuit squeaked.

"I really think Maurice has superior stage presence," she put in at the moment Louie appeared to be mesmerizing the entire group.

"Maurice." The name rolled off the tongue of the firm's president like a stale breath mint. "Perhaps he's been overexposed."

"Would you call Tom Cruise 'overexposed'? " a man leaning against a gray-flannel wall put in. Maurice had acquired a new handler, a crew-cut-haired man with the arms of a staff sergeant and the blunt red hair and freckles of a Tom Sawyer gone to beefy and unimaginative middle age.

"It's true that Maurice is established as a film personality," began an advertising guy, a still-perky youngster with a very discreet ear stud that glimmered like the Mark Cross automatic pencil parked behind the opposite ear.

A number two yellow pencil wasn't good enough for a copywriter at Colby, Janos and Renaldi? Temple wondered. She did some of her best thinking while doodling with disposable felt-tip Flairs.

Louie had taken advantage of the distraction to rise and stroll regally around the conference table, pausing frequently to ingratiate himself with the seated executives.

Before one, he sat to inhale the aroma from a ceramic mug.

"Hey, he wants my coffee!"

Louie moved on to stop before the head man himself. His lifted forefoot patted approvingly at a tiny tack on the boss's dull navy rep tie. It was shaped like the Empire State Building.

"We're about to get one of those in Las Vegas," Temple noted.

"I doubt he's into the tie tack. He likes my old school tie!" The boss looked flattered. "Sorry, cat. You'll have to put in four years to earn one of these."

Too much for Louie. He ambled toward the table's opposite side to toy with one woman's expensive pen (he was an equal-opportunity brownnoser), then to chew experimentally at the edge of a man's notebook. He strolled back to rub his chin on Colby junior's Rolex band, with impeccable taste, of course, in both executives and watch brands.

Kendall thought his conduct worth another sotto voce comment. "Temple, your cat sure knows who to cozy up to. Did you bribe the bosses' dry cleaners to put sardines in their breast pockets?"

"Say, what a dynamite idea! Grease their palms with fish oil. No, Louie just has It."

"Just what does Louie have? That's a serious question. How would we position his personality?"

Temple considered. "Mystery and distance. Yet an in-your-face charm when he wants to use it. He can be very affectionate in private, and aloof as a Dalai Lama at other times. He comes and goes as he pleases, shows up where and when he's least expected. Sometimes I think he reads minds. At other times, I think he's just a con man at heart."

Temple realized that her description also matched a certain missing-in-action magician of her acquaintance.

"He's the eternal male," she finished. "Fancy-free, but capable of being domestic when least expected. He's every man you knew who walked away, and every man you'd give your eyeteeth to have back."

"Wow. Is this a tomcat or a model for Lounge Lizard aftershave? Guess Louie doesn't shave, huh?"

"Oh, he's had quite a few close shaves, but they were purely metaphorical."

"That's right. He's been involved in real crimes, hasn't he? And so have you."

Temple nodded cautiously. She wasn't so keen on her crime-solving past now that she knew a murderer and had let said murderer go free.

"What a great double angle. You can discuss safety for cats and owners. Everybody loves personal-safety issues nowadays."

Speaking of personal safety, Temple didn't trust Louie to restrain himself with the women who had abducted him with the intention of neuter.

But Louie did enjoy a particular affinity for Savannah Ashleigh's cat Yvette, the shaded silver Persian who advertised Free-to-be -Feline, a feline health food that the portly Midnight Louie would not touch with so much as a whisker tip.

If Yvette were anywhere near her mistress, Louie might forgo revenge for a romantic reunion.

Temple looked high and low, but couldn't spy Yvette's pink canvas carrier, although Maurice was captive on the sidelines, looking fiercely lion-like in a cat carrier with a wire grille.

"I thought this was a done deal," Temple told Kendall, trying not to whine. "Now I find out there's competition not only for my role, but Louie's."

Nothing's certain in advertising but the uncertainty. Three weeks ago, the Allpetco account was firmly in the pocket of Sloan Van Eck and Associates. Now we get a swipe at it, and Christmas or not, peons labor overtime alongside the brass to make sure we meet the deadline with our best shot."

"Swipe. Deadline. Shot. Sounds. . . murderous."

"Advertising is murder." Kendall's statement sounded unnervingly sober. "We work twenty-hour days, sometimes, on a major account. Deadlines, and doing our darnedest until we drop. But we have fun too." She grinned. "Successfully selling your idea, yourself and your client's product is an incredible high."

Keeping an eye on the table, Temple saw Louie approach Savannah Ashleigh. He came to a full stop, lofted his tail and waved it like a scepter of office. Then, slowly, deliberately, he turned to show her his business end. The very spot she had intended to irrevocably alter

Temple could swear he shook his fanny at her before mincing in a manly fashion back down the shining lemon-waxed walnut to Mr. Big, whom he honored with a purring rub on the outstretched hand.

"He likes you best, B.C.," said a junior executive identified by a non-navy suit.

The boss chucked Louie under the jet-black chin. "He knows who's Santa Claus around here at Christmas bonus time. All right. Let's see Maurice in the flesh."

Temple took advantage of the changeover to retrieve Louie's carrier, and approach the table to claim Louie.

"Have a chair." A man stood to pull back the heavy armchair he'd been occupying.

Temple hesitated, then took it, establishing Louie in his carrier on her lap. That would prevent any sudden lunges at Maurice, whom Louie did not appear to care for one tiny bit.

But Louie was on supernaturally good behavior, almost as if he understood what was at stake. Still, Temple could feel his big body tremble with excitement when Maurice vaulted from the open carrier atop the conference table.

"Yellow photographs better than black," the handler noted as Maurice strutted his stuff.

Tony Renaldi doodled on his personalized notepad. "Film technology today can overcome that old shibboleth. We need a charismatic cat here, whatever the color."

"And a dashing one. Kevin Costner in fur," Colby added.

"One who makes the ongoing romance with the A La Cat feline fatale credible," a young woman said, upping the ante from the sidelines.

Brent Colby, Jr., frowned into the half-glasses resting on his nose like an odd see-through bug. His regular features, softening with middle age, were hard to read. "Not too credible. Makes the damn cat too hard to handle. Animal rights people find tomcats politically incorrect."

"Ahem." The handler cleared his throat. "I'm sure that we're all aware that somehow Maurice slipped past the scissors." He smiled nervously. "A little play on words: slipped past the censors."

Savannah Ashleigh ground leather on her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

"Are you saying that the rape of my darling Yvette was just a little slip of the tongue? Actually, of something a lot worse than a tongue! My adorable girl's bloodlines have been wasted on a worthless litter. I'm told that the publicity in the tabloids about her litter of little yellow . . . bastards has the cat-food manufacturer reconsidering her spokescat role."

"Now, Miss Ashleigh." Brent Colby was obviously the tone-setter at the firm. "We'll talk to the representatives of Allpetco tomorrow, all of us, and iron our any little differences. How are Yvette and the little, er, children doing?"

"Yvette is shattered, but tries her best to be a good mother. She refused to travel without the miserable little half-breeds, so they are all back at my hotel room. I can bring her out on her own, though her coat is sadly dulled by the strains of motherhood. A lawsuit is in preparation." Savannah glowered under white-blond brows at Maurice and his handler.

"There is," Victor Janos put in suddenly, "a morals clause in her contract. We don't know if the company will wish to invoke it."

"She was raped!" came Savannah's soprano wail. "While my attention was misdirected to that green-eyed Lothario Midnight Louie--even the name would make a careful parent suspicious!-- that yellow-bellied molester in prison stripes was sneaking up on my undefended baby, who is, by the way, underage for recommended breeding. So if there is a morals clause in Maurice's contract, as there should be unless sexism is at work here and another suit is in order, he should be liable for losing his job too."

"He was not the one pictured in the Las Vegas Scoop with the unsanctioned offspring," Janos said. "And the photo was reprinted in Vegas Voyeur, then went national in the Animal Inkquirer and National Noses. When it hit the human tabloids, the kitties were really snoot-deep in some pretty unpalatable litter."

Savannah sunk lower and lower into a despondent pose with every journal cited. "Those are all gossip-mill rags!"

"What about the photographic evidence?"

"A rotten paparazzo broke into my private Malibu grounds and used a long-range lens to photograph Yvette in famille while I was busy sunbathing in the nude. Who could imagine that some pervert was photographing her at such a time?"

While male eyes glazed at the scene Savannah portrayed, Temple thought it was time to remind them of her own clothed presence. And Louie's advantages.

"Obviously, Midnight Louie is free of any tabloid taint," she said. "He could not have sired the kittens in question. I am willing to have all and any DNA tests recommended, and, in fact, due to a false and premature accusation of fatherhood, Midnight Louie is not quite a tomcat any more. He was forcibly altered at the behest of Miss Ashleigh."

"No!" Men all up and down the conference table blanched in synchronization.

"Yes!" Temple stood as if making a speech, as indeed she was. "But... thanks to a small confusion on Miss Ashleigh's part in spiriting Louie to a plastic surgeon, he is now the proud possessor of a vasectomy. In case you gentlemen don't know the results of such a procedure on a cat, this means that he has lost none of his masculine charm--and dare I say swagger--but may exercise it with responsibility to all and malice toward none. Except, perhaps, toward Miss Savannah Ashleigh, the mastermind of back-alley neuterings."

Damp brows the table over were dabbed by Bill Blass silk squares.

"Then Midnight Louie is. . . intact as a male, but politically correct as a progenitor?" Tony Renaldi asked, one fine Italian hand smoothing the wings of dove-gray at his temples.

"Exactly."

"Interesting. Might it start a trend?"

"I don't think so." Maurice's handler stood away from the fabric walls, erect for battle. "Maurice has been fixed the old-fashioned way since this unfortunate incident. Had Miss Ashleigh kept her cat kenneled as professional animal trainers recommend in the high-tension circumstances of a commercial film shoot, no doubt Yvette would still be as pure as the driven Dreft today. But she didn't, and all the world saw the result."

Louie hunkered down on Temple's lap, and hid his face in his tucked paws. Was he guilty about something? she wondered. But he didn't accost Yvette. He liked her, all right, but theirs was a platonic relationship, wasn't it? At least none of the contested kittens had come out with a spot of black on it, and were, in fact, all long-haired yellow stripes.

"So Maurice is neutered now, as he was not before?" Victor Janos looked as stern as a Salem judge.

"As he should have been all along, but it was overlooked," the handler answered. "Most trainers don't spend their time examining rear ends. And he came from a shelter, so we assumed--"

Savannah also had risen to plead her case. "As a matter of fact, I had Maurice's early history investigated by a private detective in my employ. My private dick found the original intake papers on this so-called Maurice, and they were very revealing."

"How so?"

"He was accepted into the shelter as one 'Maurine, a fixed female. This revelation caused another stir up and down the conference table. Being a Hollywoodite, Savannah clearly did not realize the sensation that any suggestion of a sex change might have on Middle America. She plunged on as carelessly as her cleavage.

"Clearly, the shelter made an error."

Now she was playing a lady lawyer on TV Carrie Mason. Wonder if she carries a hatchet in her briefcase? Temple thought.

"An error that those who acquired Maurice, and turned him loose as a media cat, never adequately looked into. Did you?" Savannah asked the handler. "You admit that you never looked. How could you be sure?"

"Despite the intake error," the handler returned, "we were assured that Maurine was now a fixed 'he,' but we didn't know until the unfortunate birth that he had a small congenital defect. An undescended testicle. The busy shelter vet noted a testicular anomaly, but must have assumed that what was only hidden, was actually missing in action. And since animal training does not involve that kind of probing touchy-feely--"

"Too bad that rape does!" Savannah was furious.

Brent Colby, Jr., was not amused. "Lady, Gentleman. This discussion is becoming, ah, heated. Perhaps we should adjourn for the day, since all parties have met and made their cases on this unfortunate matter. Colby, Janos and Renaldi invites all of you, cats included whatever their state of, er, gender, to attend our annual Christmas party here tomorrow night. No gifts required, save that of your presence. Santa Claus will be the usual guest of honor, with tokens for employees and guests. Thank you all so very much for coming. Now, my children. Take up thy cats, and walk."

"What a smooth brush-off, huh, Louie?" Temple asked as she stroked him awake. "Makes you feel as slick as satin when you've really been handed the back of a boar-bristle brush. Santa and sacks of presents tomorrow night. Tomorrow, more cat spats."

Louie yawned hugely, then stared unblinking at the departing admen and women.

"Come on." Kendall had materialized at Temple's shoulder. "I'll get you two swathed and swaddled for the cold. I hope you can get out, Temple, for some New York fun tonight."

Temple smiled at the departing executives, then skedaddled before she'd have to acknowledge Savannah Ashleigh, who was still arguing with Maurice's handler.

"What do you think?" Temple asked Kendall under her breath as they hurried down the narrow maze to her office.

"Louie is a hunk and you've got that breathy-voiced witch beat by an Epsom Downs mile."

Temple appreciated Kendall being such a quick study. "Any advice for tomorrow?"

"Same time, same act, only with the client present. Just be yourselves and let us figure out the packaging."

"Speaking of packaging, what's with the Christmas party? Surely that's a company affair; we visiting cat people aren't needed."

"Ah, don't tell anybody, but the boss man loves to play Santa, and the bigger the audience, the better. Plus, he believes that people show their true colors under pressure. Maybe animals, too."

"Great! Another 'test' in Santa guise. Will Louie get a lump of coal in his cat-sack if he's not good? And is something solid really going to come out of this? It seems so . . . hasty."

"That's when advertising really gets cooking--on the run. Yeah, we're gonna snag that account, by hook or by crook, and we'll do it best by coming up with the most attractive package of cat and human. I kind of doubt it'll be Savannah Ashleigh and Midnight Louie, or Temple Barr and Maurice."

"But... if it is?"

"Everybody had better learn to live with it, and each other. Or the deal dies right there in front of us all."

Chapter 11

Red, Red, Whine

"And then she said--"

Temple perched on the rolled rim of Kit's leather couch and crossed her legs somewhere near the hip. Her diction was the over articulated prattle of the amateur actor. "Are you saying that the rape of my darling Yvette was just a little slip of the tongue? Actually, of something a lot worse than a tongue!"

Temple's laughter after delivering this line almost tumbled her sideways into Midnight Louie, who was disguising himself by sprawling on the camouflaging black leather upholstery as if to the Naugahyde born.

Kit finally finished laughing. "Do you think the Tramp of Savannahhas a prayer at getting your spokesperson job?"

"Thanks for the loyalty of that 'your' but advertising is just theater in a multimedia guise. Anything's fair, and anything's possible. Savannah's self-parodying ways may be just the shtick the client and the agency settle on."

"I can't believe they'd want that floozie, as we used to say before World War Two, to flog their products."

Temple dug in her tote bag. "Want to see a family portrait of my new maybe-bosses? They put together this jazzy booklet on the company."

Kit's burnt-auburn eyebrows rose as she fanned through the heavy glossy pages. "Spent a fortune. Looks like an annual stockholders' report for a two -hundred- dollar-a- share company."

"I wouldn't know, Auntie, the only 'stock' I've got is Louie, but I do know that this brochure showcases their graphic capabilities as well as the staff."

"Smart. An uptown audition book. What's this in the back? A family tree?"

"That's their real angle. Three generations of advertising-industry excitement.' They're so family-oriented that with that Italian name in their letterhead I should be reporting them to the FBI."

"Snitch, huh? Remind me not to trust you with my cannoli recipe." Kit flipped to a new page and frowned. "Looks like the family of man is running the place, though. I haven't seen such a collection of prosperous middle-aged white men since I attended an audition for the revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Talk about an aging script showing its sexism . . . These guys could really go for a Central Casting bimbo like Savannah Ashleigh. Better tease your hair tomorrow and wear violet lipstick."

"Well, yeah, it does look like the typical middle-aged WASP operation, but then look at the firm's melting-pot names, and that family tree listing all the women, and the intermarriages. Even divorced in-laws seem to stick with the company."

"Profit is thicker than blood?"

Temple reclaimed the brochure, fanned through it again, then tucked it back into her tote bag. "Don't want to forget this. Might need to do a quick review in the ladies' room tomorrow. And I have to bring along a change of clothes for the Christmas party tomorrow night. No way am I going to tote Midnight Louie and all his stuff back and forth during rush hour."

Temple absently stroked Louie's solid girth. "Umph. Between toting His Majesty all over Manhattan and the tension of filming those mock interviews all afternoon, my shoulders feel like Atlas is standing on them, with the world only a little blue bonbon on the top."

"Poor baby! I forgot bow rough improvising can be. If you were trying out for a real play, you wouldn't have to make up your own lines over and over again. Try this."

Kit, attired in one of her elegant floor-length at-home caftans that were the antithesis of Electra Lark's blowsy muumuus that only reached the most unflatteringly wide part of the calf, bent over to fiddle with something under the couch.

A moment later she straightened, a weird small appliance in her hands.

Temple ducked defensively. "Don't tell me. You're an alien spy, and all that's left of my brain waves has been sucked into that demonic machine for E-mailing to Rigel Three. Good luck, traitor! All that's on my mind now is natural nutrition and the ash content of cat food."

Relax. It's just a Shiatsu machine. Put it behind your head like a pillow, turn it on and your sore muscles are being kneaded by the twin bouncing balls."

"Ooh. Weird feeling!"

"Hang in there. It'll feel good in a second. And you can reverse the action."

"First we rub the left brain, then we rub the right brain . . . Yeah, that does feel better. Maybe Louie would like to try it."

"He's as relaxed as a rubber glove. Cats don't sweat the small stuff."

"Cats don't sweat, period. No sweat glands. That's why dogs and cats pant in severe heat; they release all the poisonous stuff via their tongues."

"And don't people, my dear? Especially nasty critics. You are an animal expert! Bet Savannah Ashleigh doesn't know that. Here's an ottoman for your feet. We might as well stay in for a deli dinner. I want to hear all about what's been happening in your life since I saw you. I'll get a bottle of wine to start us off."

"On dinner? Or on catching up?"

Kit was already invisible around the corner. "I hope you don't mind a decent screw top, Temple. These small, arthritic hands can't manage impediments like corks."

"I know what you mean about impossible corks." Temple raised her voice to carry around the corner. Kit's apartment, like her own, encouraged shouting from room to room. "That's one thing I miss since Max has been gone."

Her aunt's head popped around the corner like a disembodied talking mop. "That's all?"

"I was speaking of minor advantages."

"Here." Kit scurried into the main room, two wine glasses filled within an inch of their brims. "I know, full glasses are gauche, but I loathe hopping up and down to refill glasses that could have held a decent amount to begin with."

Kit curled into the couch's tapestry pillows that turned a corner into a comfy curve, her slippered feet tucked under the hem of her caftan.

Temple suddenly noticed the soft brittle rhythm of a CD echoing off the hard windowpanes like insect wings beating a mass retreat. Temple recognized swing music from the forties, the mellow, jazzy jounce of the Big Bands.

"If only you had a fireplace." Temple sighed, rolling her head so the machine's circling cue balls massaged a different hot spot.

Kit gestured to the illuminated city panorama. "Consider it cold fire."

"I do love this place. I could write here. I mean, write something wonderful, maybe even fiction, gazing out the windows on Manhattan, it's great, unseen engine churning industrious cogs beneath the city's imposing architectural mantle . . ."

"Maybe I overfilled our glasses, after all. The wine is supposed to be red, but not florid. Don't glamorize cosmopolitan life. I pay a mortgage like everyone else. The super's never there when you need him or her, a self-protective woman needs to wear running shoes on the subway and sometimes we have garbage strikes, which in a city like this means it piles up on the curbs."

"No alleys with little cans for everybody, huh?"

"No alleys. And writing fiction for a living sometimes feels like you're in a dead-end alley and there's a garbage strike on all around you. The publishing business is addicted to turmoil and the outlook is always bleaker than last year somehow."

"Still, you can't say you haven't achieved something."

Kit nodded and sipped. "But I'm not what I came here for."

"An actress?"

"That game is even worse than writing. At least nobody can 'can' me because I gain ten pounds.

And that hasn't been easy, even with the edge of good genes. The years have a way of turning on you and all your dietary sins, and ticking out a tongue. Before you know it, you've gained ten pounds, and then another, if you're not careful."

"That's what I was afraid of. I'm seeing the weight issue front and center at the advertising agency. They're even looking a little askance at Louie."

"Of course, looking askance is the only way you can see all of him." Kit, hands held up like a moving frame, mimed a camera pan of the cat in question. "What a lug! A full yard stretched out from claw to shining claw, with his front feet flopping over the couch edge. Such a gigolo at heart!"

"Careful what you say. If anyone heard, the agency might invoke Louie's morals clause."

"Morals clause! For a cat? Claws I can buy. Morals? No."

Temple nodded soberly, quite an achievement considering that her glass was half empty already. She hadn't realized that she had been stressed out enough to chugalug a fine vintage screw-top like this.

"Same clause actors and athletes have to sign when they become national spokespersons, Auntie. If even a cat gets bad press, it could terminate the contract."

"If you sign up with these people, will there be a morals clause in your contract too?"

"I suppose so, although I'm not famous enough to be pilloried in public." Temple smiled wickedly. "But Savannah Ashleigh is. Her cat Yvette's already in hot water for an unplanned pregnancy."

"By a cat?"

"The father of the quadruplets is rumored to be Yvette's last leading man, previous to Louie."

"No! Stop the presses. Cats Shack Up in Las Vegas Love Nest. I can see the headline now."

After they stopped laughing, and Temple restrained the sleeping Louie from sliding right off the sofa, Kit retreated to the kitchen, returning with the wine bottle and a coaster.

"I'm beat too. Baby-sitting Rudy last night wasn't a piece of cake."

"The guy who played Santa needed baby-sitting?"

"Not exactly. But not too long ago he was a street person. It's easy to slide back into that life. That's why me and a few old acting friends try to keep him gainfully employed."

"Boy, acting must be worse than publishing, if you've got out-of-work thespians panhandling."

"It's not just that. Rudy's a Vietnam vet, and sometimes the nightmares come back. I mean, he won't hurt anybody, and never kids, but we have to keep him focused, especially around the holidays. Playing Santa seems therapeutic. I guess that's what Rudy did with the kids in Vietnam. Looking after them helped him forget the horrors of war. My pal Mitch got him an elf gig at a kids' party, and he's got more for the holidays."

"Vietnam! Kit, that was ages ago. I'm surprised he's not in retirement."

She looked amused. "Temple, darling, Vietnam was still going strong when you were in diapers. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it happened before your lifetime."

"No, but it seems like such ancient history. International terrorism has become the preferred conflict of the eighties and nineties."

Temple held her glass with both hands as Kit leaned forward to refill it.

"You seem so hip," she explained to her aunt, "compared to Mom. I guess it's hard to realize how old you are."

"Thank you. I think. I'm several years younger than your mom, and I'd like to believe that living in a cosmopolitan city has polished off some of the hayseed hulls."

"Kit, I didn't mean to insult you. I was actually thinking about international terrorists."

"Commendable."

"Fighting them isn't such a bad thing, is it? "

"No, but how do we do it?"

"Not us. Someone. Maybe someone who has to do it clandestinely."

"Speaking of clandestine, let's forget terrorists and focus closer to home. You're edgier than when I saw you in Las Vegas, and when I last saw you in Las Vegas, you were almost the second victim of a murderer."

"Ooh, yeah. And then Max himself almost strangled me for getting into that onstage pas de deux with a murderer."

"Max is it now.'"

"Sometimes."

"Hmm. That what's making you edgier?"

"I'm not edgier. I'm . . . just burned out from my last case."

"Your last case."

"The Darren Cooke murder."

"I saw the Times obituary, but the death was ruled a suicide."

Temple shook her head mournfully.

"The official version is suicide," Kit tried again, "but murder is still suspected?"

Temple's solemn head shook again.

"Temple, for heaven's sake! I'll think you have palsy soon. Well?"

"The official version is suicide. The case is closed. That's all there is."

"But--?"

Temple shrugged gingerly. The shiatsu machine had done its work well. It still buzzed off target, slipping down the couch back.

"But the officials don't know what I know," Temple admitted.

"Which is?"

"Cherchez la femme."

"Your French accent gets comedic when you drink."

"Don't laugh. La femme could be cherchez-ing me now, because I know too much."

"So. You're looking over your shoulder for a female killer. And that's why you're edgy."

"Maybe. If I am edgy. I'm not sure I endorse your diagnosis."

"What about the divine Mr. Devine?"

"Matt? He's not edgy. Au contraire. Although he did sound a bit hyper for him when he called me after I got in."

"He called you. I've been wondering about that. Are you two--?"

"Oh, stop making that matchmaker wiggle with your hand, as if my love life could go either way with either guy. It's all at a standstill. Them, me, it. We are all stuck in the mud. Up to our fenders in snowdrifts or sand dunes or self-delusion. Mired."

"I can think of worse men to be mired with."

"How do you know?"

"I've been mired with them. The worse men, that is."

"It's so . . . serious nowadays. With AIDS. Max and I have a tremendous investment in our relationship. Almost two years of monogamy, if you count our six months in Minnesota waiting out the AIDS tests, and the six-month honeymoon in Las Vegas and then another six months of separation."

"Two years? Tremendous?"

"It is! If you want to be real and don't want to take risks."

"And while he was mysteriously away?"

"He says he was faithful. I know I was."

"You believe him?"

Temple stared into the wine's garnet depths. A wine with body seemed thick, like blood. Certainly thicker than water. The wine left a viscous slick on the glass if you tilted the container, then leveled it again. Playing with your drink was always a sign of indecision.

"I don't know what to believe about Max Kinsella nowadays, even what he tells me himself. But fidelity? That I believe. I'd stake my life on it."

"Temple, you're being seriously inconsistent!"

She shrugged. "C'est la vie"

"How do you know Max is that reliable?"

"Because I never even considered telling those creeps who were beating me where he was, and wouldn't have, even if I had known, and I'm no . . . Joan of Arc. There are some betrayals neither of us is ready to make yet."

"This is not logical."

"No, that's how I can be so sure. But just about that."

"What about Matt Devine?"

"Oooh, worse conundrum even than Max."

"Temple, you're obsessing over this stuff. This stalking woman, and the two men in your life. You're young. Go with your heart."

"You can't nowadays, Kit. You don't know. You didn't grow up in the age of AIDS, when you knew all about it by junior high school. Half the men in the U.S. who die between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four die of AIDS. Think of how many 'eligible' guys are exposed, and arc out feeling immortal, exposing new partners. Just because you're from an older generation who's pretty much out of it--"

"Oops. Beg your pardon. I'm not entirely out of it. I have hopes, even at my advanced age, which you'll see when you get there."

"If I get there."

"I had no idea you kids were taking this so seriously."

"This one is. That's why I'm hamstrung. Reason says stay with Max, where we've both invested ourselves. But there's so much he's hidden from me . . . and Matt--"

"Matt you don't know well enough to trust when he reports his safety record." Kit nodded sagely.

"That's just the trouble. I do know his background all too well."

"And he got around pretty thoroughly. Well, that's natural with his looks--"

Temple laughed bitterly.

"That laugh would do so well in Private Lives," Kit, the casting director, said. "But you're not brittle enough to play Amanda yet," her aunt added. "Wait till you're thirty-five."

"You don't understand."

"Maybe not. But I understand more than you think about all this." Kit leaned over to refill her glass.

Perhaps they were getting a bit sloshed, Temple thought, but it was just us girls ... we girls? And Midnight Louie, and he didn't seem to be listening to a darn thing they said "Just how damn old do you think I am?" Kit's eyes were schoolteacher-stern over her incongruously kicky metallic-framed half-glasses.

"Mom's nearly seventy." Temple idly rotated her ankle until one bedroom slipper lived up to its name and floated to the floor. When she felt Kit had been held in suspense long enough, she added, "you've got to be sixty-something."

"That's right. And that's not the end of the world for the libido either. Sixty doesn't look so bad once you've managed to get there. And I didn't get here the same way your mother did. I'm not your mother, Temple, but I'm going to give you a crash course in Life 101A."

Temple swallowed, but not wine. Somehow she'd irritated her aunt, without meaning to. Now here came the lecture that was one of the few perquisites of age.

"You know I left Minnesota for New York to become an actress. Just nod or shake your head, and I'll fill in. You don't have to say a thing. This is my monologue. Well. Here I am in the Big City, my Midwestern cheeks rosy, my miniskirt not nearly as short as the ones on the streets of New York, my hair blowin' in the wind and long enough to touch the bottom of my miniskirt."

Kit took in the tribute of Temple's widened eyes and settled back into her pillows, her foggy-bottom voice growing more reflective.

"It was the sixties, the age of rebellion and rabble-rousing. Make love, not war. A revolutionary concept, and my own generation's invention. We appeared nude in Hair. Some of us burned flags. Some of us burned pot. Some of us burned the candle at both ends, usually ours. Can you imagine what it was like to plunge into this sociopolitical-sexual insurrection away from home? The city was our circus, our arena, our life. We were young and we were going to star on Off-Broadway and drink ouzo at four in the morning and walk alone at midnight through Central Park and smoke dope in front of a TV camera and make love with whoever we felt like. So we did."

"We? You mean the generation, not you personally."

"Do I?"

"I mean, Aunt Kit, you weren't, uh, promiscuous?"

"Not in my own mind. I was in the forefront of a revolution, a happy campaigner. I was smashing taboos, stamping out repression, having fun."

"You couldn't have had that kind of fun! You were from the Midwest."

"Honey. Big-time repression brings big-time rebellion. It isn't a coincidence that the Times Square area with the most underage hookers was known in the seventies and eighties as the 'Minnesota Strip.' "

"I heard about that. I mean, in high school. But I didn't really believe it."

"Nobody believes reality. That's why there are-- ta-dah! --actors."

Temple frowned and sipped judiciously from her glass, thinking that it was about time she sipped judiciously.

"But women then weren't that careless--"

You know Garrison Keillor's hallmark description of Like Wobegon?"

"Lake Wobegon! That name is such a priceless satire--'where the women are Strong and the men are good-looking...' "

Kit shook her head, "The women in my day were never strong. They were just well controlled."

"You're saying you were--"

"Taken for a revolutionary ride. Used. Again. I was too busy being an artiste to get in the protest movements more than superficially, but when women started waking up from the sexual revolution and took a look at what they did during the civil-rights and Vietnam-protest wars, Mommy, it was manning the coffee and mimeograph machines--a primitive sixties duplicating device, kid--worshiping at the feet of the male gurus who made the speeches and smoked the dope, and scrubbing the floors with their backs. Why do you think women's lib was the last liberal movement of the trio to come along?"

"I didn't think about any of this. They never taught it in school, except very generally."

"These are not things that are taught in school."

"But now you're writing historical romance novels. Isn't that a tad unliberated?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. What women do is always labeled unimportant unless it's in imitation of what men do. Then it's labeled ball-busting."

"Kit, you shock me."