Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Dead Man Falling

It is always a pleasure to watch My Miss Temple talk her way into—or out of—any situation.

Unfortunately, talking is not an option for me.

So, I follow her as discreetly as I can, past growling guards who would be neutered overweight Dobermen in other lives. I cling to the walls and the concealing curtains of the costume racks, etcetera, until she vanishes into the Caped Conjuror’s dressing room.

I am perfectly content to trust her to handle a seven-foot-tall icon. She has managed Mr. Max Kinsella for these two years, and he is only six four, not to mention way more challenging than poor old CC in his dead Big Cat mask.

My role here is to investigate the hidden underbelly of the act.

Which underbellies may be decidedly feline. I am thinking of the evil Hyacinth, with whom I have crossed nail sheaths before, and the new kid on the block, this seemingly innocent “Squeaker.” Both, however, are Siamese, if you please (and if you remember the song from the classic Disney dog fest, The Lady and the Tramp.)

I would never call a lady a tramp, but then I am talking felines here, not dogs.

I know why my Miss Temple is so disturbed by the recently dead dude in the webbing above the exhibition site. There was a dead man falling at TitaniCon, where both she and I were active in allowing Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina to capture a murderer on site.

Both air-borne murders link to our mutual acquaintance, the Cloaked Conjuror. I have nothing against the dude. He is the usual Larger-Than-Life Las Vegas attraction. It started with Elvis, or maybe Frank. No, Elvis. That guy is so much more larger than life that many folks think he is still living.

Me, I would like to think that too. We have a passing acquaintance, Elvis and me, and he was always first and foremost the “Memphis Cat.” We share a certain misconception with the public. I had a dead twin myself, as a matter of fact. Not everybody knows that, thank you verra much. We back-alley cats do not have a high survival rate.

But Elvis has left the building and the New Millennium was not even here when he strode the old town. I will have to deal with the younger generation, which is alarmingly female. Not that I am alarmed by the female. Au contraire. Still, these New Age babes do make me rush to relevance. I remain convinced that they know more than they are telling me.

So. Where are they likely to be housed? I slink past CC’s dressing room, where My Miss Temple is handling things in her own inimitable way. I am looking for the ladies in the case.

My nose does its duty and soon it is snuffling under the door of another dressing room. Perfume, smerfume. Pheromones, share-mones. I can track my species anyplace on earth, and especially among a tsunami of humans, who generally stink, in my view, most often of preparations intended to make them not stink.

I must duck under a frill of peasant petticoats on a neighboring costume rack when an attendant busts open the door to the dressing room to deliver an anchovy pizza. But I slither in on his departing heels to find myself alone with the nuked fish, the sodium overload, and a distinct odor of feline femininity.

Which wench is it, though? Hyacinth and her curare toenails, or Squeaker and her strained high notes?

“Louie?”

Her voice was ever soft, sweet, and low . . . for a purebred Siamese. I ankle up to Squeaker and settle beside her to dispatch a selection of previously dispatched anchovies. I do love fast food.

She says not a discouraging word, but nibbles on fish and cheese as if to-the-pizza-oven born. You would never know she was recently a shelter cat.

“So,” I ask after washing my whiskers, “are you alone by the xylophone?”

She giggles charmingly. “There is no xylophone in our act, just a lot of New Age music.”

“The same sort of thing. Where does the headliner, Hyacinth, keep herself these days?”

“Oh, I am not allowed to room with her. She is a star. Plus, she might nail me with her poisonous claws. Stars are very insecure, did you know that, Louie?”

“Not being one, no. And I am not sure those claws are as lethal as advertised.”

“Have you never been a performer, then?”

“I did some commercial TV work for a while, but I am mostly employed as a dude-about-town. An . . . investigator, as you know. Death. Crime. Conspiracy.”

Miss Squeaker furrows her blond brow, her blue eyes crossing slightly with concentration. What a charmer! “Are you now investigating the dangle toy on the exhibition floor?”

“Above the exhibition floor,” I point out.

“I saw the workers take him away on a stretcher with wheels. I recognized him, having seen him out and about.”

“Part of the crew?”

“I do not think so.”

“So.” I dust off the itsy-bitsy spidery tail of an anchovy; these are squinky critters, let me tell you. “Where did you see him?”

Here, Miss Squeaker settles down on her haunches to play with her food. One delicate nail-tip hoists an anchovy over to my side of the cardboard circle. I love a dainty eater, especially when she is not eating but letting me hog it all.

“What do I know?” she says listlessly. “I am only worth anything for my resemblance to the great and powerful Hyacinth.”

I bite my tongue. The great and powerful Hyacinth is one hot chick but not an empowering role model, I fear.

“Louie,” she goes on, “I cannot sleep a wink at night, dreading our opening, my debut. Fearing that the web of lines we must work upon will fail and cause me to fall. So, I go up alone to walk the wires.”

“Without a safety net?”

“There is no safety net for this show. In rehearsal, yes, but once the run begins, it will be naked claws.”

I shudder despite myself. This is no way to introduce an amateur to a circus act. “I admire your devotion to your job, and survival. So. No one knows you are up there putting in rehearsal time?”

She ducks her head, then nods. “If I am to do well, I must seem to be a ‘natural.’ ”

“Which is why you are.”

She flashes her fangs. This is the equivalent of a feline smile, nothing predatory. “Have you ever hung sixty feet above a concrete floor, Louie?”

“Just on a case, and then not happily. The only thing I think should be hanging that high is a piñata.”

Squeaker blinks wryly at me. “And those are usually made in the form of donkeys. A very meek and mild creature.”

“I often thank Bast that our kind does not have four hooved feet for then we would all be enslaved.”

“Some of us still are.”

I cannot argue. Squeaker was “rescued” but into servitude.

“What did you see up there that no one was supposed to see?” “I see why you are a prime investigator,” Squeaker says, hunkering down.

What sexy, sharp shoulder blades she has! A born sweater girl.

“There have been,” she says, her whiskers tickling the vibrissae near my ears most lasciviously, “several mysterious humans up there with me.”

“Humans are always mysterious.”

“But not always . . . sneaky.”

“No. ‘Sneaky’ is a word often applied, unjustly, to our breed. So. Who was hanging out under the ceiling with you?”

“Two men.”

“Not part of the crew?”

“No. Strangers in black.”

“Suspicious. Not my natural kind of black, I take it?”

“Not fur, no. That second skin that humans wear.”

“Spandex?”

“Yes. I had not heard the word until I left stir for show biz.”

“Understandable. What kind of men?”

“Men. They are big, clumsy. They speak, smell. They would easily trod upon one’s tail and never notice if one fell at forty miles an hour to the concrete below.”

“They would easily never notice that one had a tail.”

“Exactly.”

“So, they are not part of the crew?”

“Many men who are not part of the crew hang around the set and exhibition.”

“You mean hang around but not lethally. Did you see the victim?”

“I cannot be sure. He was a man and wore black spandex. Some call it a cat suit, and now that I have met you, I see why.”

She bats sea blue eyes at me.

Merrowphhh, I do recognize when a nubile doll is making cow eyes in my direction. Squeaker makes her slinky sister Hyacinth look like a hooker on Zoloft.

“Tell me, my acrobatic charmer”—can I help it if she giggles with a sort of throaty purr?—“how could that cat-suited man have managed to die when you have been able to survive, and thrive?”

We nose the dressing room door open and she leads me through a circuitous backstage route and up into the flies via a webbing lattice that only those of us gifted with claws might manage.

The setup is clear once we are high above the exhibition area. The magic act is laid out on an invisible web. You always knew every illusion comes with strings, did you not?

A single tightrope stretches straight and strong across the chasm below. It is steel cable, a half-inch circumference of metal filaments, both flexible and taut. If one has the impeccable balance for the job, it is a royal road of stability. A human foot, trained to curl, can toe dance across . . . as long as the body above those feet is lean, schooled, and attuned for infinite balance. No magic, just rosin and gutsy skill. The feline foot, clawed by birth, is even more flexible and clingy.

That is not to dismiss the heart and skill it takes for any living thing to perform sixty feet above the ravening crowd.

Black bungee cords are all over the place, swagged against the side walls like anorexic curtains. The way they are arrayed, you could grab one and swing down from any point on any of the four walls, which narrow into a funnel at the very top.

There is a ledge about twelve feet from the top. Squeaker (I will have to find a pet name for her, and soon!) points out black sliding panels that allow humans to enter and exit the scene and the black platforms where the Big Cats perform.

Of course, from a vantage point far below, all the machinery blends into a solid firmament of black, against which any wires, cords, platforms and escape hatches become invisible.

“So,” I ask myself as much as my guide, “the dead man had to have come out here, willingly or not, before he could get entangled in a bungee cord and garotte himself.”

“Or before someone could ensnare his neck in a bungee cord and push him off one of the launching platforms.”

I study these platforms. They are built for strength. The act’s Big Cats are of the leaner, smaller variety: black leopards. They weigh maybe a petite 250 to 300 pounds. The Cloaked Conjuror in all his gear runs perhaps 250 himself. Shangri-La, 110. Hyacinth, maybe 7 or 8. I am a bruising 20 pounds myself, and not even the tightrope trembles at my few steps upon it.

“Louie! Do not toy with the tightrope. It takes a trained professional to walk it.”

“I am a trained professional.”

“On the high wire?

“When this joint was brand new, I busted into it through the neon planet sign on the roof.”

“Really!”

“Really, S. Q.”

“S. Q?”

“A nickname, compliments of Midnight Louie. Short for ‘Cute-with-a-Q.’ Or the more common ‘Susie Q.’ Do not thank me, S. Q.”

“I was not about to, M. L.”

She is especially cute-with-a-Q when she is mad. “Tell me,” I ask again. “How do two black cat dudes, no matter how outsize, show up against all this black matte paint when they perform?”

She uses her elegantly pointed tail to indicate the doused stars in our artificial sky. “Pinpoint spots. Plus, their coats are dusted with iridescent powders. Kahlúa with black diamond, and Lucky with rainbow platinum.”

I nod. Such serious shimmer will keep all eyes on the cats while their human partners do-si-do with illusion and misdirection.

“What does Hyacinth do during the show?”

“Her personal brand of acrobatics. She even has a fur-colored harness and does several high dives from a bungee cord.”

If I could whistle, I would. Instead I manage a high-pitched wheeze. “That Hyacinth is no shy violet.”

Squeaker sighs. “Do not remind me. They want a stage name for me, even though, as a body double, I will get no credit in the program.”

“You mean that will be you bungee jumping your little heart out?”

“I hope not, Louie. It is more than possible that Hyacinth will be strong enough and will not require a substitute. But if she does, I need my heart right where it belongs when I do these stunts.”

I look down, eyes narrowed. Human workmen in white painters’ overalls blend with the pale travertine floor below.

“So, you’re the bungee cord expert up here?”

“Along with Shangri-La herself. She did not want to risk her treasured companion in rehearsal.”

“The Cloaked Conjuror?”

“Hyacinth.”

I should have known. “So what does CC do here?”

“Stays safe high above, on the platform. He has never been an acrobatic performer.”

No, not weighed down with those height-enhancing boots, that heavy face-concealing, voice-altering device that makes him into the magician in the iron mask.

“Wait a minute! Have you seen the whole act?”

“Of course not. None of us has. Only bits. It is secret until the grand opening.”

“Then maybe . . . just maybe, CC needed a secret body double himself. Maybe the double needed secret practice. Maybe that was the guy who got a little too friendly with a bungee cord coil and dove. And died.”

“Maybe.” Squeaker’s big blue marble eyes light up, even in the shadows up here. “So . . . CC might need a replacement. Who could he get on such short notice?”

I put a testing foot on the high wire again. Something in me would like to prove I could still give Death a run for my money. But I am older and out of practice.

I wonder if Mr. Max Kinsella faces the same dilemma.

Only one man—magician—in Vegas could step into the dead man’s shoes on short notice. That is a pun. Mr. Max Kinsella is six feet four of muscled tensile nerve. This would be a perfect way to secretly swing his way to a comeback if he wanted to.

And did someone else figure he could, and would, want to? Did someone want the incomparable Mystifying Max up here for some reason? Did CC’s body double, if he was one, die to make room for Mr. Max?

I look down. My poor Miss Temple’s common blond head is again on the scene with no idea that her faithful roommate is up here, above it all, watching her back and ruminating and contemplating risking his neck. Mr. Max Kinsella and I have way too much in common nowadays for me to be entirely comfortable with it.

“Louie?” S. Q. sounds sweetly uncertain, but she is another one being forced into a situation where risking her neck is the only way to save her hide.

“Yes?”

“What do you think of Fontana?”

“Which one?”

“The one. For my performing name. ‘The Flying Fontana.’ ”

I am picturing the Flying Fontana Brothers as a trapeze act and work so hard to smother a laugh that I almost overbalance into instant oblivion. But this will be the only comic relief I will have for some time, I fear.

“Great,” I tell her. “Whatever makes you happy.”

What I have learned up here does not make me happy. I sigh and step back from the hypnotic highway of the upper air. No tightrope walking for Midnight Louie. I am here to stand on solid ground with the Big Cats, and find out who is playing fast and loose with illusions and fine lines and fine art and lives. Both human and feline.