Cat In A Midnight Choir - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Unknown (ч. 4)

Once I have convinced Midnight Louise that family ties are more important than suicide missions, we rocket up the stairs.

As we pass through the broken-into door, though, my super-sleuth senses go into red-alert. I crush my curled shivs into Louise’s shoulder.

She would squeal protest, but I slap a spare mitt over her face. “Shhh! We are not alone.”

The kitchen is less dark than the cellar, but not by much.

It takes a few moments for our cellar-dampened senses to reassert themselves, but I can tell by the way Midnight Louise stiffens next to me that she too is taking the measure of the several unseen foes surrounding us.

Among the alien scents, I detect the ineffable perfume of the lady known as Hyacinth.

Midnight Louise turns her head to me, though her eyes remained focused on the smothering dark.

“If we close our eyes for an instant, and run, they will lose track of us,” she breathes into my ear.

It is a good stratagem. I nod so she can feel my vibrissae give assent, then shut my eyes and call the fury of Bastet down upon all our enemies.

Then I run.

I hear the soft pound of pads beside me…and behind me…and ahead of me on an angle.

The thump of meeting bodies erupts into an Etna of scalding hot fury and tufts of soft underfur floating like ash against my nose and pads.

Then I am galloping through the house, following a path of sheer memory and the glint of night lights on the suits of armor.

Something pounds along beside me up the hall stairs.

I head-butt the wall in the dark, eager to find the heat register exit.

Finally my muzzle pushes out and finds air instead of plaster and wallpaper.

I wiggle through, Louise on my tail.

Behind us the dislodged grating scrapes, and scrapes again and again, as a torrent of pursuers pours through the aperture.

I hear claws scrabbling on aluminum pipe.

Either Louise has surged ahead of me, or the rats are deserting the house to avoid the panting, slavering tide of unknown creatures that is on our trail.

It is too dark and confusing to worry about whether Louise is ahead or behind. I must boost myself into the confining vent pipe, then wriggle through it as if my life depended on it. Which it does.

Popping out into the night air gives me no rest. I hurtle down the thorny hedge to the grounds below, my own ingrown thorns out and snagging wherever they can to break what is more of a free-fall than a downward climb. Uh…never mind.

Something plunges earthward beside me. In the artificial night light of Las Vegas, I am happy to see that Miss Louise has managed to keep up with me. Or down, depending on how you look at it.

Once we hit terra firma, we leap up. A long sweep of lawn stretches between us and our hidden allies.

The whimpering and growling coming from the rock-park midway between the house and the gate tells me that the Rottweilers (whimpering) have been cowed by the Big Cats (growling).

However, even the best-laid plans of the trained operative can go awry, and my current awry comes plummeting down behind us: a ninja brigade of Havana browns as fresh from Cuba as a fine cigar.

Anyone who has not tangled with the breed known as Havana brown is unaware of the Bruce Lees of catdom. They are all muscle and silent, stalking pads. They wear their hair in a battle-ready buzz-cut and do not waste time on hollow boasts or warning howls.

So they are on us like tobacco-spit shadows, dark and almost liquid of motion.

I box one away, and then another. Beside me, Midnight Louise is similarly occupied.

We manage to work our way a few feet toward where our compadres await, but the Havana browns keep on coming, and those we knock down roll over and leap up again.

I do not know about Louise, but I am trying to head for a sheltered garden construction with vine-twined pillars and a latticed roof dripping hibiscus.

We will have more of an advantage against these numbers there than on open ground.

It is slow progress when you have to pause to repel another onrushing Havana brown every time you take one down for the count.

I am panting like a bellows as we near the edge of our island of safety.

“I have these three, Pop,” Louise hisses between pants. “You hide on the porch while you catch your breath.”

“It is not a porch! It is a pergola. And my breath has not run anywhere I cannot chase it down and get it back.”

After this speech, I do indeed seem to be out of steam.

Louise does some fancy footwork to come alongside of me. There are still about eight Havana browns circling tighter and tighter, their vibrissae lifted in mutual snarls, their canine fangs in doglike evidence.

I would say that it looks black for us, except that they are brown.

And before I could say that, we are suddenly attacked from above.

I see a huge tarantula spider — ten times the size of the big road-runners you glimpse in the desert — all fuzzy brown legs in a noxious cluster as it swings down from the roof above on an invisible rope of spider-silk.

Even Midnight Louise cannot keep a ladylike “Eeek!” from escaping her lips as the creature swings past us and to the ground.

I have been doing a rapid count and realize that I have only toted up five legs on the monster. It is handicapped! Spiders are supposed to sport eight legs.

Still, I shudder at its beady red eyes glimmering from the center of its bloated, pale body, at the dark furry legs churning as it rights itself and reveals….

“Why, Miss Hyacinth, I believe.” I am happy to see that while paralyzed with fright I managed to get my breath back.

Now I get it. When the evil Hyacinth leaped down her dark, dangling legs and tail looked like icky unshaven spider gams. Such is the coloring of the Siamese breed, dark at the extremities, light at the core. I wonder if there is any hope that this pattern might pertain to Hyacinth herself. I am immediately disabused of any such notion.

“Back off,” she hisses at the gathered Havana browns. “I will handle these intruders myself.”

She draws herself up until her back is an arch and prances at us sideways, her narrow face a mask of hatred and death.

Something slaps me in the solar plexus — Miss Midnight Louise’s right rear foot in a karate kick.

I rock over, gasping for my recovered breath, which is again AWOL.

“Outa my way, dude,” Miss Louise spits. “If this is the hussy that locked me up in the Marquis de Sade’s basement apartment, I need to have words with her.”

“Louise.” I can barely speak yet, and watch with horror as the two circle like prizefighters within an outer ring of Havana browns.

“Louise.”

Well, no one is listening but me, of course.

Hyacinth goes up on her toes, up on her razor-honed shivs that glint gangrene-green.

“Her nails,” I pant.

“I plan to nail her.”

“No. C-curare.”

It is too late, they abruptly stop circling and dash toward each other with earsplitting battle cries. Black and cream and lavender-brown are a blur in the moonlight. Fur floats like feathers to the ground.

Then they are separate again, heads lowered beneath their sharp shoulder blades, glaring, circling, stalking.

“Louise.” I do not expect her to take her gaze off her opponent to so much as glance over her shoulder. But she must listen. “Her nails are painted with curare. You cannot let one pierce you.”

“Now you tell me,” Louise snarls unjustly. I have been trying to tell her all along. “No problem. This chick will not have nails to paint when I am through with her.”

Brave words, but how can one engage in a duel to the death without suffering a single scratch?

Although my kind, and even humankind, have always recognized that the death duel of two individuals must be left up to them, for the first time in my life I consider interfering with this untouchable ritual.

Louise did not know her opponent had a secret weapon. Although no one would thank me for it, especially Midnight Louise, I could jump Hyacinth from behind and pin her down. Unfortunately, I doubt Louise would take advantage of my self-sacrifice and run. So I would end up paralyzed spider meat for nothing.

While I am figuring out how to save Midnight Louise without her or me losing face, I notice, speaking of faces, that the Havana browns have turned a beiger shade of brown. Say…milk chocolate.

They are retreating, their ring growing wider and sparser.

I decide that my dilemma must have put a fearsome expression on my face, then decide to look over my shoulder.

It is a sight to uncurl the hair on a curly-coated Rex. Even I momentarily consider a craven retreat.

They come stalking up on us like Old West gunfighters: Osiris and Mr. Lucky and at their head Ma Barker.

The Big Cats place one deliberate foot in front of the other. Each pace covers two feet of ground.

“That is our cub,” Mr. Lucky growls with a sound like they use in movies to represent demons talking.

Even the evil Hyacinth pauses, her spiked hair wilting a bit.

Midnight Louise has not paid a moment’s heed to any of the action around her. The minute Hyacinth backs off, she is on her like a black tornado, feet whirring, fur flying from her shivs.

Hyacinth screams with fury and pain, twists like a pretzel, and rockets across the lawn to the house, driving the craven wave of Havana browns ahead of her.

Midnight Louise sits licking fiercely at her chest ruff, surrounded by tufts of cream fur.

I rush over. “Did she nick you? If we get you to a vet fast enough, and if I can figure out a way to tell Miss Temple you are a victim of curare poisoning — which I will, somehow — we can get you an antidote. If they have antidotes to curare in Las Vegas.”

“Relax,” says Miss Louise. “She did not lay a lavender-point glove on me. Besides, you are old enough to know that you cannot believe everything that a feline fatale says.”

She looks up from her grooming at the Big Cats. “Thanks, boys, but I had her on the run even before she saw you.”

Not one mention of my contemplated desperate dash to sacrifice myself! Talk about ingratitude.

Ma Barker stalks forward. “Very impressive, young lady, but you could interrupt your bath to give your elders a nod of thanks.”

“Are you claiming to be an elder?” she asks.

“Only if you are claiming to be a descendant of my son.”

Here they both glance at me.

“I do not know about that,” Miss Midnight Louise says with a hard look at me, “but I do have a partner who had the smarts to break me out of prison so I had a chance to whip the vibrissae off that witch, so I will say thank you very much to all concerned. Now I really must wash that purported curare out of my hair. Although, according to my connoisseur’s tongue from a life of attending Dumpster sales, it is no more toxic than Revlon’s Mean Green Glitter nail enamel that is available at Wal-Mart.”

While my jaw drops, everybody does not quite laugh, but would have, had they been human enough to indulge in such bizarre expressions of amazement.

The Morning After

Max awoke, still dressed at three A.M., in Temple’s bed, with Midnight Louie.

He felt stiff all over, in all the wrong places.

The night lights plugged into outlets on all four walls for Master Midnight’s nocturnal convenience cast a moonlit glow on the room.

Midnight Louie blinked reflective amber irises at him — proceed with caution — then the black cat assumed one of those show-offy, impossibly limber cat positions — hindquarters stretching in one direction, extended forelegs reaching in the other, torso torqued in between like a twisted rope.

The black cat yawned, wide and long, flashing white fangs and crimson mouth. He almost seemed to be sticking out a tongue at his crippled human littermate.

Max refused to rise to the bait.

He had earned his strains and bruises, and Temple had tended his scraped face last night with wincing care while they exchanged war stories.

“So my pepper spray was ready for the rescue?” Max asked, glad he had been there to defend her in absentia, somehow. “And Nadir finished that guy off? I would have been there to do it if not for that damn Molina.”

“Rafi was a real little gentleman about the whole thing…other than decking the Tyler kid. What would make a teenager into a crazed killer?”

“Rafi?”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sure that the newspapers will dig up the usual background predictors, as the sociologists say. Abusive family situation. Antisocial history. Assumption that women are there to be used and knocked around. Rafi!”

“He actually was kind of okay to me…or Tess the Thong Girl, even before the parking lot incident.”

Max just shook his head. Which hurt. So he stopped. “Crime and punishment make for strange bedfellows.”

“Speaking of which, I can’t believe you and Molina duked it out. I mean, she’s a cop, but she’s a woman.”

“Barely. She is a pretty good sparring partner, though.”

“It must have killed you to let her handcuff you.”

“Being handcuffed is second nature to me. Letting her do it…yeah, that stung. But I couldn’t have put her away without getting pretty rough, and I knew you were in trouble and it’d be easier to get out of the handcuffs and custody than a felonious assault charge on a cop, so….”

“Poor Max! Sacrificing your pride for nothing, when you heard over the radio that ‘Pepper Tess’ had bagged the baddie. I’d give anything to see Molina’s face when she heard that the stripper killer had been stopped by yours truly.”

“The incoming news bulletin certainly made my rapid exit from the handcuffs and the car easy.”

“That must have fried her fajitas! I not only get the killer, but you get away. She was left with nothing. Nada!”

“It’s not becoming to gloat, Temple.”

“Since when?”

“You’re right. It’s most becoming. I’m glad one of the three of us is in a position to gloat, and that it’s you, and that you’re all right. And when I’m feeling better — ow! That stings!”

“It’s hydrogen peroxide. It’s supposed to sting. Things that heal you are supposed to sting.”

Max didn’t say anything more about what he’d do when he felt better, lecture her or love her. He just took her hand and kissed it.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

Lieutenant C. R. Molina tossed and turned in her old double bed at home. Three o’clock in the morning and she couldn’t sleep.

She had worked late enough to know that the gathering reports on Tyler Dain did not give her the sense of closure she had hoped for in finding the Stripper Killer. A kid had done it? He was old enough to try as an adult, but that never quieted the unease a young perpetrator brought to the surface in society, all the way through the police and courts structure, like an ugly undertow in the ocean showing its hidden power. He had confessed to the strip club attacks, including the Cher Smith murder. He was cocky, proud of it.

That still left Gloria Fuentes’s parking-lot killing unsolved, and a lot of other questions unanswered, most of them pertaining to magic. Fuentes had been a magician’s assistant years ago. Magic also clung to the apparent ritual murder of Jefferson Mangel, the university professor killed among his collection of great magician posters. Missing from the collection? Any trace of the Mystifying Max’s admittedly spectacular career. Max Kinsella was the missing link, all right, behind a lot of unsolved crimes in Las Vegas over the past year, and who knew where else, when?

Magic was a boyhood hobby that offered the illusion of power and secret knowledge. Some boys never grew up. Kinsella was one, always hinting that his mysterious past had some clandestine purpose.

Boys could be so dangerous when they reached that cusp between adolescence and adulthood cherishing a secret sense of power. Like Tyler Dain in his sound-proof Peeping Tom booth, who played the music the strippers danced to and came to consider them puppets who should dance to the needs of his immature lust. Girls that age also were walking time bombs, but usually because they often harbored a secret sense of helplessness.

She pictured Mariah, asleep with the tiger-striped cats in her bedroom and surrounded by Technicolor stuffed animals, visions of boy bands dancing in her head. Almost twelve and already hormones were erupting like invisible pimples. A sudden yen for pierced ears. Belly button next? Sass and backtalk becoming common household static. Sending her to Catholic school retarded the inevitable, but didn’t stop it.

What would it do to Mariah if she discovered the father her mother had always said was dead was alive and was a loser like Rafi Nadir? What would it do to Mariah’s mother, she thought wryly, if she had to ’fess up herself for a change? To admit to lying to her daughter. No. Why couldn’t Rafi have crashed and burned completely? Died or stayed in L.A.? She had never pegged him as a killer, just as a controller. She would never have tried to keep him out of the stripper cases otherwise. So she wasn’t surprised that Tyler Dain and not Rafi Nadir had killed Cher Smith. No, Rafi was only a danger to her. And Mariah. And he didn’t have to raise a fist or lift a little finger to be a threat. Just existing did the job nicely.

Molina pictured having to face him again after all these years. The thought made her insides writhe, her hands into fists. Just thinking about him brought back a younger, dumber, weaker version of herself. She didn’t fear facing Rafi so much as reverting to a state of vulnerability she’d struggled to escape for many years.

And if they ever met face-to-face, she would indeed be weak: a police officer who’d cut all the corners off procedure to bury a link to a personal issue. Rafi Nadir could ruin her, as he’d tried to do thirteen years ago, and failed. Now, after what she’d done to ensure he stayed out of her and Mariah’s lives, he could ruin her utterly.

She spent a few minutes savoring the bitter fact that she’d have been better off confronting the problem directly.

She turned over in bed again, her mind moving with her body into yet another uncomfortable position.

Her encounter with Max Kinsella had been a complete failure too, a humiliating downer.

Everything the man said and did was calculated, like that attempt to eroticize their conflict. What an amoral human chameleon! He had to be guilty of something, and she would find out what and then she would nail him for good.

Meanwhile, she had a souvenir of the evening: the memory of how he’d ducked those handcuffs and left her chained to her own steering wheel. Of course she’d whomped him good first, but she had an ugly feeling he’d let her because it would be easier to escape her in a moving car than in a parking lot. He’d been right in insisting that Temple Barr needed help, but he wasn’t the one who should have been giving it.

She mused for an another really ugly moment on where they’d both be now if Temple Barr had not fought free of Tyler Dain to use her pepper spray but had been found dead the next morning.

Hell. In hell. And hating each other even more, if that was possible. It reminded her of the infernal, eternal triangle in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hell-set play, No Exit.

Things, Molina decided, could not possibly get any worse.

At least that was one ray of hope in a dirty world getting grimier every day.

She hoped to hell that Kinsella had as hard a time getting some shut-eye tonight as she did.

Max left Temple at 3:20 A.M., sleeping like the dead, which she almost had been.

Magicians can do that, slip away and not be noticed. He intended only to be gone for a couple of Temple’s deepest sleep-drenched hours.

Midnight Louie apparently never slept. The black cat watched Max go through slitted green eyes. He wasn’t about to squeal on a fellow creature of the night, but he just might judge him.

The early-morning air kissed Max a cool fifty-five degree hello as opened the French door to the patio and then worked his way down the Circle Ritz’s conveniently stepped exterior. Art Deco had a lot to recommend it. To a second-story man, its step pyramid tendencies were the most pleasing.

The Maxima purred like a panther as he started it. He idled silently past Temple’s new red Miata and the silver blob of Electra’s Elvis-edition VW bug, glided beyond the white Probe Matt Devine used now. They were all in transition, he realized, changing emotional models and personal identities like cars.

The Hesketh Vampire, chained in the shed like a lone wolf, called to him with a howl higher than human sound as he exited the parking lot.

In mere minutes he was parked outside the bone-white walls of Los Muertos.

The presumed dead remained still beneath their ersatz tomb-stones. This was Disneyland Macabre, this phony cemetery designed to hide the residence of a magician whose career was built on mocking other magicians. Max would defend the Cloaked Conjuror’s life to the death, but he didn’t have to like the way he made his living, on the harvest of an honorable land of dead magicians and their once-spectacular illusions.

Magicians were like spiders: you had to keep spinning or the web would fracture and fall. And you with it.

He climbed and leaped down from the wall, thankful for a cushion of expensive sod. He noted the absence of the guardian Rottweilers he’d been prepared to deal with.

Odd, but now he could cross the grounds like a shadow, on foot.

Soon the plink of water on carefully arranged stones told him he was where he wanted to be.

With the big cats.

Mr. Lucky came forward first, rubbing and purring like a housecat, his muscular black-panther side hard enough to knock over an unprepared man. Max was never unprepared among the big cats.

Osiris the leopard kept a wary distance at first, then he too swaggered closer, making a soundless snarl that Max understood was not a threat but a greeting.

Max crouched like the big cats and they rubbed closer, leaving their scents on his shoulders and face. The dogs, if they were loose, would stay away from him now.

The big cats were show-biz veterans and magicians’ familiars, used to the spotlights and the long, deep well of darkness before and after. They understood Max as he understood them. Domesticated and wild. Social and asocial. Caged and free. Life was a compromise. So was death.

They permitted him to stroke their furred sides as they paced back and forth, wrapping him in acceptance as if he were a domestic cat, welcoming him to the litter, the cage, the spotlight.

He stood, caressing their wide-cheeked faces, lulled by their high-volume purring, more a rumble. He had come only to see that they were well housed, happy, living as they wanted to live after their various captivities, both benign and malign. That they were themselves, that he had been right to choose the Cloaked Conjuror as their best hope for long, content lives.

Their rhythmic greeting dance paused.

They lifted throats and eyes to the edge of the rock garden that was their home.

A small cat stood there, under the glare of a security light.

Max stared, expecting it to be Midnight Louie, though how he would have gotten here…

But this cat’s coat was pale, as were the eyes that shone sky-blue in the spill of sodium iodide rays from above.

The darkness beyond the shower of light, behind the cat, turned into a figure as Max’s vision adjusted. The form was curlicued like a silhouette portrait cut with manicure scissors from stiff black construction paper. This thing was more solid, more like paper-thin wrought-iron, a creature of razor-sharp extremities…gown, nails, the curled ends of hip-length tresses as dark as night would be without security lights.

Shangri-La.

Max templed his fingers, drew himself into one long line of watching black, an impassive vertical of stasis and potential.

Behind him, leopard and panther pushed against his legs, their massive throats growling gently.

He was taken aback that his presence had the capacity to surprise her, but she clearly was shocked. Perhaps she overestimated the estate’s security measures.

“You violate this place,” she said at last. Her husky soprano trembled slightly with some strong but undecipherable emotion.

Shangri-La was nothing if not feminine, but like many Asians, had a throaty intonation. It reminded him of Temple’s voice, so charmingly rough for such a small, smooth package.

“This place is inviolate,” he answered. “At least to the cats, and I am their guest.”

She stood unmoved, her fluttering pennants of garb frozen as still as the carved draperies on a black jade statue of Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion and mercy.

Shangri-La, he was sure, neither possessed nor desired either virtue.

“Guest?” she repeated, outraged by the term.

He offered the truth as a pretext. “I procured them for the Cloaked Conjuror. I wanted to see how they were doing.” He’d also wanted silent but amenable company after the night’s extreme stresses: almost losing Temple, almost losing to Molina.

“The cats will not always come when you call,” she warned him.

But they would. That was his gift.

The small Siamese in the spotlight hissed at him and retreated to her side, to the dark side. Its blue eyes flashed stoplight-red from the night.

Max studied Shangri-La. She reminded him of something. Something lethal.

Medusa.

That’s what her spiky, trailing tendrils of hair and gown recalled. Medusa, the snaked-haired Gorgon whose very glance was fatal poison.

Perseus had needed a mirror to defeat Medusa; he had needed to slay the image to destroy the monster. To see her face was to glimpse your own death, even as she in turn saw your future.

They stared at each other through the dark. Max wondered why this alien magician had allied herself with the Cloaked Conjuror and against him…against Temple, for Shangri-La had stolen the ring he gave to Temple and she must have allowed the ring to find its way, for some reason, to Lieutenant Molina.

Was she a professional rival of his in her own mind? Perhaps the intervention was even personal. Perhaps Shangri-La had left Temple’s ring…his ring…on the scene of Gloria Fuentes’ murder. But how could this woman know who had given Temple the ring, know of their connection?

What else might she have left, where, for others?

The ritual dagger on Professor Mangel’s killing ground?

And why?

Was she an agent of the Synth? One thing was certain. Like him, she was a magician, and she would keep her secrets to the death.

While he had been thinking about her, she had been thinking about him.

“Come here again,” she said, “and it will not be worth your life.”

She put a period to her threat by choosing to disappear in a fountain of fireworks. And her little cat too.

Max and the big cats were not impressed. They had made such exits many times themselves.

He massaged the sharp shoulder bones behind their heads.

The night held one immutable boon. Cher Smith’s killer was finally identified and captured. She had been a child, and her murderer was a child. It was an answer, but not a solution.

Max sighed as the cats pressed closer, as if cold.

At least he could put one lost soul to rest, even if only in the cemetery of his mind. At least he could reduce by one the number of lives on his conscience.

No one could take that away from him, not even Molina.

Matt woke up.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

Woke up early for a man who worked a night shift. Only 9:00 A.M. It must have been a dream, he thought.

Then he thought, This must be how people who get drunk feel the next morning. The classic Morning After.

And he thought, finally and with the dawning shame of honest recollection, with horror, No, it’s not a dream. It’s history. My history now. And forever.

Life’s Little Addenda

The lieutenant slapped the flat of her hand down on the desk, hard.

Between her gritted teeth came a murmured mantra like the shshshshsh of waves stroking the beach, only fast and furious.

She rose and stalked out of her office, still shshshing under her breath like a demented librarian.

“Sheesh.” Detective Merry Su’s nervous sideways glance met Detective Morris Alch’s. “This is bad, Morrie. Triple bad.”

“That wasn’t some, ah, Chinese curse? Well, I couldn’t quite make it out.”

“It wasn’t Latin, and unless you tell me it was Yiddish —”

“Yeah, I was hoping it was some kind of prayer, too.”

“Homicide lieutenants don’t pray.”

“At least not in public.”

“Especially not in public.”

They were quiet for a long moment. Morrie Alch was still stunned, like the first time he visited his mother in the assisted care facility and she’d screamed a string of obscenities at him. Alzheimer’s will do that to you, to you and your mother.

There could be no doubt. Molina’s unprecedented mantra had been ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit.

This would be nothing new in the rough-edged world of cops, except that Molina’s management style had been to avoid the obvious, including cuss words.

Hearing her violate her own inviolate rule was surprisingly shocking, like catching your parents having, um, sex.

“She takes these particular murders hard,” Su said.

“So hard that I heard from a pal in Vice and Narcotics that she looked into the last case personally, on her own time.”

Another meeting pair of sideways glances. Molina was the ultimate delegator. She gave her detectives the widest latitude, expecting them to put it to good use and answer for it any time she asked.

“I suppose,” Su said, “after having just solved that stubborn stripper murder case, this new one makes it seem like that never happened.”

“This case is nothing like a stripper murder. No, really, it’s not. No connection, believe me. A high-end call girl named Vassar, of all things, killed at the Goliath? It’s a different class of victim, different venue, different murder weapon. Everything is different. I don’t get why the lieutenant should flip at the mere mention of the case.”

“She’s really put all of our, and her, efforts into nabbing this stripper killer. Having another dead woman turn up the very same night the stripper guy is nailed is discouraging.”

“The lieutenant doesn’t get discouraged.”

“She doesn’t swear either.”

“It wasn’t swearing, really, kinda more like a —”

“Like a whole string of swear words. I’ve never heard one from her.”

Another long silence.

Morrie shuffled his feet and creaked in his chair. Sitting here was like waiting for the principal to come back, only the principal had just gone off cawing like a crow.

“Years ago,” he said in a nostalgic vein, “I had the very first woman to make lieutenant for a boss.”

“Poor Morrie. You can’t get away from us.”

“Not that I haven’t tried. Anyway, she was from Texas. Stringy woman. Face you’d put a mud fence around to improve the view.”

“So what were her other advantages in the job?”

“Other than being as tough as barbed wire, she did one thing that told the guys she meant business.”

“Yeah?”

“It was f-word this and f-word that, and freaking f-word in every which way.”

“I’m free, yellow, and twenty-one, Morrie. You don’t have to sugar-coat it.”

He looked away. “I got a daughter your age.”

“I suppose that could be Molina’s reason for never talking the talk. Her daughter’s pretty young yet.”

“Kids you take seriously. You don’t want the toilet-mouth of the block. Monkey hear, monkey do. You let go at work, you can’t hang it up at home.”

Su crossed her arms. “A lot of cop talk is pretty sexist.”

“It’s something a guy’s gotta do to make sure the other guys know he’s a guy.”

“I can take it. Dish it out too.”

Morrie shrugged. “Some women overcompensate. You don’t. Molina neither. I didn’t realize how much she didn’t until just now.”

“So it’s bad.”

“She’s been working overtime, real overtime.”

“You think she’s cracking?”

“Naw, but she ain’t happy about this last killing. Responsibility will get to you if you let it. We’re not here to save anyone, just to find the guilty.”

“I can’t believe I heard Molina say that.”

“Nothing shocks you, remember?”

“That’s why I hate it when something does.”

Morrie nodded. “I know what you mean. My daughter?”

“Yeah.”

“After all that, she grew up to be a real toilet-mouth.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do?”

Su shook her head sympathetically. “Shit.”

Midnight Louie Sings the Blues

Give a dude a dame, and you might as well carve “Finis” on a block of marble bearing his name somewhere, hopefully not at Los Muertos.

I have seen enough of that place to last an entire one of my nine lives.

Here I spend half the case worrying about the welfare of my so-called “partner,” and she gets to show up at the curtain call and kick ass.

I get to watch.

This is not the sort of claws-on action I am used to providing.

I can only conclude that this revolting denouement is due to a surfeit of females in my life. There is the errant Miss Temple, who is always getting herself into as much hot water as another infamous redhead, Lucy Ricardo. There is my newly discovered mater, the unfortunately named Ma Barker. There is the vicious Hyacinth herself. There is the unforgettable and lethal Kitty the Cutter. There is the relentless Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

And there is my partner in crime writing, Miss Carole Nelson Douglas, who appears to revel in showing us guys in a less than flattering light.

Is there a hidden message here? Is this some feminist, humanist tract that I have innocently become entoiled in?

I get to do the dirty work! Do you hear me? Little dolls are supposed to stand on the sidelines and cheer me on. Or swoon at my approach when I deign to make it.

From now on, it is sheaths off.

I am the alpha element here, not to mention the titular hero.

(I like that word “titular.” It means the whole enchilada is named after me. Not literally. Aw, now it is getting complicated. Dames must be at work again.)

Of course, when I think about it, that only means that someone else did the naming, and what can be bestowed, can be taken away.

Still, it cannot hurt to reestablish my territory.

I am feline, hear me roar!

Hark? Is that an echo?

Oops. It is Osiris, joining in from across town.

I guess we Big Guys did our part, and we have to give the little ladies a solo bow now and then.

It does not really mean anything.

Unless the little ladies take offense.

Very best fishes,

Midnight Louie, Esq.

For information about getting Midnight Louie’s newsletter and/or T-shirt, contact him at Midnight Louie’s Scratching Post-Intelligencer, PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163, by e-mail at cdouglas@catwriter.com. or visit the Web page http://www.catwriter.com.

Carole Nelson Douglas Joins the Choir

I totally agree with you this time, Louie.

Don’t look so surprised. We are in this together.

Frankly, you underestimate your achievements. You’re the one who finally tracked down the connection between the murder of Professor Jeff Mangel and the symbol of the Synth. You’re the one who found the hidden nest at Los Muertos and Hyacinth and who-knows-what other connections to ongoing villainy.

You managed to call help to Temple’s aid, even if it was pretty unappetizing help, and you sprang Midnight Louise from durance vile. She was pretty helpless until you came back on the scene, you know. Just because she and Hyacinth got into a little cat fight at the end doesn’t steal your thunder, Louie.

Besides, I thought you macho guys got a kick from watching girls go at it in the ring.

Honestly. Dudes. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.

BUT WHO WOULD WANT TO? LIVE WITHOUT THEM, I MEAN.

I THINK.

eBook Info

Title:

Cat in a Midnight Choir

Creator:

Carole Nelson Douglas

Date:

2002

Type: