Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 24

A Tale Untold

Temple had never before had a full-house audience for eating crow in her career as a public relations specialist.

She did now. Matt and his mother were seated at the small kitchen table, rapt with unspent tension. First the Effinger revelations, then this. Louie had lofted atop the kitchen counter to suddenly lick at a twitchy shoulder blade when he wasn’t staring implacably at Temple.

His long tail dangled over the counter side, swinging back and forth, untouched by anything but his grooming tongue when he occasionally swung it up as if to reassure that it was all there, every last black hair.

Temple clutched the old-fashioned kitchen wall-phone receiver in both hands, backpedaling while her audience eavesdropped on a desperate monologue.

“No, it was not a kidnapping. Well, technically, yes. I mean, no! No, it was not a ‘catnapping.’ The cat is back and is fine. A neighbor lady returned him. It was a prank call. Not mine to the police! The call to us about the cat being kidnapped was a prank call.

“Yes, ‘malicious mischief’ would describe the incident.” Temple nodded and sent a relieved glance at her audience.

“Is the cat … licensed, by the way? Ah, not here. He’s visiting from out of town. What kind of cat visits? He’s, ah, he’s worked as a commercial cat. TV commercials. Yes, you could say he is valuable and that is why I, we, were so concerned. Yes, I do understand that legally a pet is considered property and can only be worth a small amount of money. Oh. I might get something in civil court.

“But that’s not necessary now, Officer. He’s back and all right.

“No, sir, there’s no way to identify what kids may have called. They were older kids. They sounded very serious. We’re all mostly visitors here, and we’re most impressed by the Chicago PD’s sharp response to small cases as well as large ones. I’m sorry we’ve been a bother, but this is Chicago. I’m sure another call for a crime—or three—in progress has already come in that is right on the dispatched officer’s way.

“Oh.”

Temple eyed the others and nodded, gratefully, at the phone. “Thank you. No, he’s not the yellow-striped one. No, not the fancy fluffy white one. Black hair, green eyes, as my first call mentioned.”

Temple finally hung up and stared back at Louie. “We’re off the hook with the cops, but how’d you escape the crooks?”

Louie wasn’t talking. He jumped off the counter, flourishing his untampered-with tail behind him.

“Not a hair out of place,” Matt commented. “We might succumb to mass apoplexy but Midnight Louie rocks on.”

That made his mother laugh ruefully. “I hope his opinion of Chicago after this incident doesn’t change your mind about considering moving back.”

Temple rejoined them at the table, which was covered with old papers of no apparent value from the fireproof file box.

“Where’s Krys been since Louie got back?” she asked.

“In her room.” Mira watched Matt rise, retrieve the wine bottle Krys had gone out to buy the previous night, and take the dry glasses from the dish drainer. He handed them around, filled again.

Mira shrugged. “Krys is always on some ‘device’ or other, cruising the Internet, working on her Web site. She’s a mature girl in some ways and in some ways—”

“Not,” Temple said. She sipped from her wineglass. “I suppose we’ll never know what happened to Louie, or his carrier.”

“Adios, carrier,” Matt said with a toasting gesture. “Small loss, unlike Louie. I wonder if it’s a good idea to call the police off. Those phone threats meant business.”

“It’s especially disturbing that the creeps knew we and Louie were here,” Temple agreed. “There must be something explosive in these papers.”

“That would be silly.” Mira flicked her nails at the yellowed array of paper. “Except for the first manila folder with official documents in it—Cliff’s grade school report cards, high school graduation certificate, and driver’s test results, things his late mother must have kept, poor woman—it’s all tax returns, as I feared.”

“What about the high school yearbook?” Temple flipped through the worn booklet, attracted to the vintage hair and clothes on the cover. Dorky. Compared to now, teens dressed like forty-year-olds.

Yellowed newspaper clippings thrust between the pages memorialized meaningless athletic games and the usual horrific teen-driver car crash that seemed to plague every graduating class, even today.

Matt pulled the book toward him. “Somebody who died, maybe? Could that have been significant to Effinger?” He pulled out a couple tattered pages covered with crude doodles and cartoons.

“That’s nothing extreme,” Temple noted. “Just the usual superhero comic sketches along with endless outlines of cars guys in my high school class drew. What did you draw?” she asked Matt.

“I don’t know. Jet planes and angel wings.”

“Escape,” his mother said, pretty perceptively.

Mira was threatening to get teary, so Temple jumped in with a comment. “Technological and spiritual. That’s our media guy, Mr. Midnight.” She shuffled through the high school yearbook again. “These sketches aren’t bad. Captain Marvel fighting off the octopus is pretty anatomically correct. I mean muscle-wise.”

“Why would Captain Marvel fight off an octopus? That would be Aquaman.”

Temple was amused to see Matt grabbing the page and turning it his way to study the raw pencil sketches. She exchanged a knowing “boys will be boys” look with Mira.

Matt was frowning even more once he had the sketch right side up.

“This is … this is traced. It’s a copy of that classical sculpture in the Vatican collection.”

Mira was astounded to the point of laughter. “Clifford? Drawing a classical sculpture in high school? Matt, maybe he was just a regular boy once, but he got caught up in the gangs once he got out. He concentrated on dressing sharp and getting jobs he could hang out on street corners to do.”

“You married him graduation summer,” Matt reminded her, and himself. “Maybe you saw the boy who drew.”

“I was one of ‘those girls’ who graduated with whispers, not hope and celebration. Clifford didn’t seem so bad at first. No one else would have me.”

Temple looked down, finding her fingers smoothing the slick cover of the old yearbook. The same whispers haunted her high school graduating class. This girl. That condition. And then she vanished. It never ended. Odd about the Vatican preserving all those old Greek and Roman statues, most naked and anatomically correct, and all revived in the age of Michelangelo. Comic book supermen were modeled on those muscular ancient gods and heroes.…

Temple grabbed the sketch Matt was regarding with an expression half puzzled and half repulsed.

“I know what statue you’re thinking of,” she told him. “It was the man who angered the gods and they sent a sea serpent to kill him and his sons. It’s an amazing evocation of sheer human struggle and agony … and it’s also—wait for it—very similar to the man fighting a serpent constellation that was just in the news recently.”

“Serpent. Constellation?” Mira was confused. “Isn’t Constellation a jet plane name, like those you drew when you were a kid, Matt?”

“Not in this case,” Temple said. “I mean the constellations of stars in the sky the ancient Greeks named, just as they sculpted the ‘man versus sea monster’ statue. Matt.” She eyed him in triumph. “This is not the star map, but the full, founding image of the constellation called Ophiuchus.”

“Oh-fee-you-cuss?” Mira was seriously confused. “Or ‘Oh, fie! You cuss?’”

“The accent is on the ‘you’ part,” Matt said. “And nobody cusses.”

“It’s ancient Greek,” Temple explained.

“It certainly is to me.” Mira’s smile was bemused.

Temple spelled it out for her. “Just think of it rhyming with ‘mucous.’”

“I’d rather not. You kids.” Mira was chuckling now. “Krys, and now you two. I think the younger generations speak in code.”

“This may have been used as a code by some very bad people,” Temple said. “Ophiucus is the lost thirteenth sign of the zodiac that a secret society in Las Vegas called the Synth took for its signature. Matt’s tracking Cliff Effinger to Vegas might have kicked off a sequence of crimes tied to the conspiracy of magicians and … other worse elements.”

“The mob?” Mira asked.

“Those two catnappers sure were.” Temple was also thinking of the international terrorists Max had been tangling with half his life.

“Whatever is going on,” Matt said, “Effinger must have salted away something in these memorabilia that will shake Las Vegas to its criminal roots.”

“Clifford was still using me,” Mira said, furious and showing it. “That ends here and now.”

Krys came charging in from the depths of the apartment … the two hundred private square feet of it otherwise known as her bedroom.

“Squee!” she shouted. “People! Where’s that so not-Manx cat? I’m gonna make him a YouTube star.”

“You don’t like him,” Temple pointed out. “Or me.”

“That’s before I saw the local TV news hot flash on the Internet. That is so cool what he did. A major piece of pussycat performance art. And the centerpiece is that totally shallow materialistic icon, the leopard-pattern purse-pet bag! All the scene lacks is a stiletto heel, so if you’ll leave one behind, Tempie dear, I’ll immortalize it in 3-D.”

Temple rose, trying not to overturn her kitchen chair. “If I leave it behind, it’ll be implanted in someone’s shallow, competitive irreverent rear end.”

“Tush,” Krys said. “All’s forgiven. You rock. You all have to come into my room and get a load of Five News footage.”

Temple opened her laptop on the kitchen table. “Show us right here and now.”

“O-kay.” Krys commandeered Temple’s seat and moved the laptop cursor to a browser, then a news page. Listed along the right side were the local items.

She clicked on one reading CHICAGO HOODS NAILED AND JAILED and clicked the video arrow to show a slow pan of a warehouse that looked as if a Die Hard movie had been filmed there just last week.

A voice-over told the tale.

“Police alerted to gang activity zeroed in on an abandoned warehouse on the south side today, finding two long-wanted criminals bagged and snagged in a trap of crating materials studded with rusted carpenter nails, apparent victims of assault via nail-gun, something new for the mayhem crowd.

“Benny ‘the Viper’ Bennedetto and Waldo ‘the Weasel’ Walker were found unconscious and suffering from numerous ‘packaging’ wounds in a scene of chaos. Abandoned in the middle of the mess was what police describe as a ‘high-end cat carrier.’ The conclusion? These would-be mobsters must have been trying to round up rats and got caught in their own trap. Call Paris Hilton’s abused designer bag rehab center. The petty crooks come free for the taking.”

The video’s last image showed the incongruous leopard-pattern carrier sitting untouched in the middle of the scene perhaps stage-managed by Spielberg’s Industrial Waste and Wreckage spin-off company instead of Industrial Light and Magic.

Temple ID’d the artifact in tones evoking a blend of bereaved mother and indignant shopper.

“Oooh, that’s the cat carrier I got in the Treasure Island shopping mall. This accessory in the wilderness shot reminds me of my last.… actually, my first official case, which included Louie’s discovery of the marooned Boots Benson concrete-encased cowboy boots found high and dry in the drought-revealed bed of Lake Mead.”

“Imagine what your cat could find in a real lake,” Krys said. “Lake Michigan is almost the size of West Virginia. There are whole big ships down there.”

“Louie doesn’t like water in larger than drinking bowl quantities,” Temple said, quashing Krys’s plug for her hometown. “And, apparently, he really doesn’t like low-level mob functionaries.”

Louie kept his druthers to himself, maintaining his lofty sagelike position on the kitchen counter. Only the very tip of his dangling tail switched back and forth like the tuft on a lion’s terminal appendage, demonstrating that neither Viper nor Weasel had touched Hair One.

“Louie isn’t much mourning the loss of his high-class carrier,” Matt said.

“We’ll never get it back. I’ve found the police to be very high-handed about stowing irrelevant evidence in their lockers,” Temple said, musing on Molina’s unwarranted custody of Max’s promise ring, only recently returned. Maybe that was the only way Molina could get and keep one of her own.

Everyone’s intent gaze awaited the source of her assertion about police behavior. Temple was not going to back up her comment in this crowd with that example.

“But I suppose,” Temple went on quickly, “the police would not exactly welcome me calling again, anyway, asking for a personal favor. And I couldn’t bring up the carrier without … letting the cat out of the bag that my cat really was kidnapped and at the center of that whole scene. It was a one-of-a-kind accessory, though.”

“Krys,” Matt said, “would you be a doll and pick up a new carrier for Louie? Temple and I have lunch and dinner dates tomorrow and fly out first thing Tuesday.”

“Sure.” Krys sounded stunningly unenthusiastic. “Why shouldn’t I shop and schlep for the cat? I’m an artist. I have no money, but all the time in the world.”

Matt’s hand lighted on the briar rose tattoo on Krys’s right wrist. “We’d really appreciate that, and it’s in a good cause: to get the cat out of your hair and apartment.”

That was the magic touch. She melted. “He’s all right. Just the usual spotlight hog.”

Temple did not miss noticing it was much easier for Krys to accept her cat than to accept her as Matt’s fiancée.

Family matters! She and Matt were getting a double dose of it tomorrow and finishing up the day by dining with network executives.

All Temple wanted was to get her boys back from Chicago and on the trail of Cliff Effinger and a shopping list of other Las Vegas cold cases that would finally get those she loved out of clear and present danger, including Midnight Louie.