2
Three-Cat Night
From the faint, first siren call of the police cruisers, I knew that my role was not to remain on the ground among the powerless gawkers. I eyed the limp victim being lifted onto a gurney for a rough ride in an ambulance that may finish him off for good and immediately hit the Palm Tree Trail up to the penthouse balcony from whence he had come.
I regret to say my Miss Temple is as bloodthirsty as any one of these eight-to-eighty-year-old onlookers treated to a crime scene in their midst. Besides, she has the able support of a Fontana brother who is far too fastidious to allow any random blood drop to decorate his lapel. He will restrain her from giving too many pieces of her mind to the local police, given her worry about Miss Electra Lark’s brush with a soon-to-be-dead guy.
I am not a sentimentalist, though, and wonder if our free-spirited landlady has flipped her lid. Not that she wears hats. She prefers to use her snow-white hair as a canvas for bright temporary colors. I fear that I have seen a few white Persian cats and poodle dogs so styled, and it is the height of silliness, but at least Miss Electra has free will in the matter.
Now she has no freedom at all. I did not exert all my efforts to save her so recently to give up now. Even if I must encounter her “psychic” Birman cat, Karma, here in the penthouse. Karma is by nature reclusive and I expect she is hiding by the back wall under the couch after the hullabaloo of a burglar turned falling missive.
I complete a leap from a limber palm frond onto the balcony without the sound of even a pad landing. (I am the strong, silent type.)
A flurry of feline boxing punches, shivs out, and a panther-level battle cry from another cat greet my subtle approach.
Meeowwwgrlllphtttt!
Could my would-be daughter, Miss Midnight Louise, be up here, cussing me out? She can be snarky, and considers me a deadbeat dad, but I have allowed her to help out in my Midnight Investigations, Inc. business. Also, I outweigh her by twelve pounds so it is impossible that she could give me a shellacking.
Backackackdowwwn-invading-vermin is spat at me in fluent alley cat. Louise may be a lot of things, but she rarely swears.
“Karma,” I plead, while blocking a continuous sharp-clawed pummeling with my front mitts. “Tell me you are not channeling a performing Big Cat black leopard from a Strip magic show.”
I am convinced my foe cannot be the wimpy Karma, a fluffy buff-colored lady with pretensions to calm Eastern mysticism, unless she has shape-shifted. We contenders here are both a part of the night’s darkness, black of coat and born to be bad to the bone if we have to.
The frequent blows pause. “Grasshopper?” a raw voice questions.
I am too aghast to answer, but back off, dodging a finishing swat.
“Ma?” My voice trembles, but not from emotion. I am still mad about those double-paw smackdowns she gave us kits when we did not obey, even if she was right.
“You are already short of wind,” Ma is muttering, as I see her pink tongue in the moonlight, wiping off a bloody claw. “Too many gourmet meals from a can.”
“What is with the head wounds?” I counter. “I could have been an innocent bystander.”
“A crime has been committed here. There are no innocent bystanders.”
I search for a comeback while licking my own wound. Single. She got me only once.
Another voice interrupts. “I am the innocent bystander.”
We both turn to the open balcony door. Framed by moon-silvered white-painted wood, Karma sits as calm as a show cat on a photographer’s background. Her Serene Highness has tucked her white-gloved paws under her soft, long coat like a monk’s hands into his sleeves. Not a hair on her pale head is mussed, and by night her heavenly blue eyes are mere sapphire rings around her enlarged black pupils.
I am struck dumb.
But, then, Karma would say I had been born that way.
The Sacred Cat of Burma seems to radiate light, and in that glow I see Ma Barker clearly, her scruffy, raccoon-ravaged, rusty-black best coat, her half-mast left eye and moth-eaten ear edges, her scarred muzzle.
That is what one gets for nine years of running the biggest, toughest feral cat clowder in Vegas. She is one awesome dame.
“Sorry, Ma,” I mutter under my tongue as I smooth a ruffled jet-black front spat. “I did not expect to see you here. Must be major clowder business to bring you from the police substation.”
Karma emits an almost inaudible spurt of purring, always happy to hear me eat crow. Or that abominable health food, Free-to-Be Feline, Miss Temple lavishes on me. Luckily, the clowder loves the stuff and I see they get all they can eat. I am quite the philanthropist when it suits me.
“This is most convenient, Louie,” Ma says, settling into her bony haunches like a granny into a rocking chair.
I am sure that she would like grandkits from my superior line of her younger genes, but Miss Midnight Louise, if she is my daughter, is “fixed” and proud of it. And I suffered a certain neutering procedure, not usual, that disabled my ability to reproduce, but left all my working parts intact, known among people as a vasectomy. (For graphic details on how I managed to get what I call “a license to thrill” for life, you will have to consult an earlier volume of my adventures, Cat in a Flamingo Fedora. Yes, there was a flamingo-pink fedora involved that I momentarily was forced to wear. Every freedom has its price.)
“So why are you here at the Circle Ritz penthouse, Ma?” I inquire casually, working a torn sheath off a rear toenail.
“Karma called.”
“She has a cell phone? You do too?”
“Do not be silly. You know she is the best psychic hotline in Las Vegas.”
I turn a suspicious green peeper on Miss Serenity. “So what is the message, sweetheart?” I ask in my best Bogart.
“It is all too intuitive and revolving around celestial spheres for the likes of you, Louie,” Karma says. “That is why I called on your more sensitive mother.”
Ma Barker? Sensitive? She would have half of my second-most valuable member if I called her that.
Ma modestly tucks her chin into her ratty neck ruff. “I do think I am sensitive to certain vibes, such as danger and evil-doing.”
Well, sure, that is her job. One does not need an advanced degree in Psych 101 to know that.
She leaps to the balcony rail and down the palm tree to the parking lot with practiced ease as I follow.
I escort Ma to the oleander bushes that ring the Circle Ritz parking lot. “I agree that something wicked this way comes.”
“What is ‘this way comes’? Did I not teach you proper grammar? It is ‘comes this way’.”
“Seriously, Ma. What brings you away from the clowder? Do you want to extend your territory, is that it?”
She sits and massages her muzzle with a forepaw. “My territory has been enlarged, Louie. I now see the big picture.”
“How big.”
Her head gestures up to the starry Nevada night sky, which is not very starry because all the lights on the Strip outshine real star power.
“I have been…up there. Higher than high. Higher than a security fence.”
“Up…to the top of the Stratosphere Hotel?”
I did introduce Ma to stairs recently when I had to smuggle her into the rooftop suite of the Crystal Phoenix to consult on a case. That was only twelve stories but one humungous giant step for her.
Think about it. She has been a feral urban cat all her life in a desert city. Why would she have to climb service stairs in a hotel, or even four or five steps, when all those acres had been spreading outward since before Howard Hughes bought them? And she would avoid the hurly burly of the Strip except for ground-level Dumpsters for quick raids.
“So, Ma. You dreamed you went to the stars.” She is getting loopy in her old age.
“Not the stars, son! I would never breathe a word to the gang, but the aliens got me. Their hovering craft landed and sat there camouflaged until I was enticed inside by Free-to-be Feline over Sardines Almandine, and I was whisked up into their alien mother ship.”
“No!” I say, quite sincerely.
“I am sorry, son, but it was your introducing us to that succulent Free-to-Be-Feline that enslaved us.”
“‘Enslaved’ is a harsh word.”
“Oh, one or two clowder mates here and there have been kidnapped before. They return sleepy, having lost interest in, you know, what he’s and she’s do. I assume you know the facts of life by now without me telling you.”
“Ma…! For Bast’s sake.”
“Anyway.” She leans near enough to lick the inside of my ear, which was very pleasant when I was a kit and remains so. I lean away as she resumes her tale. “I have undergone the swift abduction into a suddenly hovering alien vessel, strange bright lights in my eyes, the needle in the naval, the entire alien operation.”
“You do not say.”
“I do. And I have the scar to prove it. And now, well, let us just say that I am not as much in demand among the youthful swinging set as I used to be. There will be no more Midnight Louies,” she adds mournfully.
“Thank Bast!”
She gives me the eyebrow whiskers-raised look of imminent wrath.
“I mean, thank Bast you were returned and remain healthy.”
“Well, my right hip has a hitch in it still…”
“Relatively healthy.”
“And I did get a tummy tuck, which you got from your abduction.”
I remember Ma Barker desiring such an alteration. I suspect it is a natural side effect of the neutering process and not an “extra” thrown in, as in my case.
“I was not abducted by aliens, Ma, but by something even scarier.”
“What?”
“A hair product-addled D-list starlet who ordered her plastic surgeon to make it so I cannot father kits. She mistakenly believed her Persian and I had gotten together, but when the kits all came out yellow-striped…”
“So that mincing, yellow-bellied house cat, Maurice, your rival for the cat food commercial assignment, did the dirty deed with the purebred who is now no longer so pure.”
“I will not hear a bad murmur against the Divine Yvette. It is not her fault she was in the throes of a hormonal condition.”
“Hmm.” Ma purrs thoughtfully while cleaning between her toe pads. “It is not like you to miss such an excellent opportunity. Nevertheless, you did our coat color proud.”
“I am touched, Ma. When would you, in your vagabond life on the streets, chance upon a television set on which to see your son make good?”
“Phtttt! You split for the neon-lit twenty-four-hour air-conditioned areas as soon as you could hold your tail, and other things, straight up. You settled for a diet of fast food in tissue wrappers, but I have lived on really fast food in wrappers of—”
I cut her off quick, before she can get to the gory part. I myself prefer to lead an eco-friendly, green life with people food that is supervised by government agencies to be wholesome. Mostly.
“Ma, I know the urban diet is lacking compared to free-range vittles. How does that mean you can glimpse a TV set when you and the clowder are on the move?”
“Through windows, clodhopper.”
(Clodhopper is my pet name when she is annoyed with me and “grasshopper” is too affectionate for her current mood.)
The purring behind us has been strengthening and now it is a full-bodied Oooom, which is a common syllable used in Eastern-style human meditation.
Except now it alternates with the one-syllable word Dooom.
Which is not an encouraging word in any context.
I lower my vocal timbre to put a flea in Ma’s ear. “What are you doing consorting with a penthouse pussyfoot whose pads have only touched walnut wood parquet, marble tile, and patches of carpeting her entire life?
“Karma was doing my horoscope.”
“What!” I can barely keep my voice a raw whisper. “You put any stock in what this pseudo-psychic house pet whose pampered pads have never touched hot asphalt might say?”
“You seem a bit obsessed with manufactured floor and ground coverings, Louie,” Ma observes. “I am the natural, organic type. And I will have you know I have been inside this penthouse, and any carpeting is one-hundred percent virgin wool. Karma’s faculties best operate in an unadulterated environment.”
“‘Unadulterated environment’, that is hogwash. Karma is an unabashed member of the one percent and we are street folks.”
“You have profited from her prescient advice a time or two.”
“She has volunteered her prescient advice more times than I can remember, but we make our own futures, and our own decisions.”
Ma fruitlessly washes her crumpled vibrissae—whiskers to you. She is sensitive about them being called “whiskers” now that she is older.
“Well, I have some prescient advice for you, sonny. You know that some of my police substation clowder also monitor your Circle Ritz parking lot gratis.”
“Not exactly gratis, Ma. They come for the delicious Free-to-Be Feline health kibble I provide.”
“After you refuse to eat it. I know your game, Louie.” She may be winking at me or it just may be her battle-worn eyelid twitching.
She lowers her voice to barely above a purr. “You should know that the gangster clowders on the rough side of town have reported seeing recent suspicious back-and-forths between your precious human associates around here with some of the known criminals and cat-kickers on their turf. They watch those bad guys around the clock and know what is fishy.
“I have had them do freelance surveillance on this site since I heard that, and the guy who broke in here tonight is one of their ‘Most Wanted to Catch a Case of Cat-Scratch Fever’.
“Not only that, when I interrogated them, they reported vehicles and persons of interest at the Circle Ritz are now frequenters of their turf.”
“So who from here is taking a walk on the wild side?”
“Descriptions vary. They have followed some tall, dark-coated men back to this area.”
Mr. Max Kinsella comes immediately to mind, but also my Miss Temple’s acquaintance, Mr. Rafi Nadir.
“And most recently, another one. Yellow coat. I believe your favorite ginger-haired roommate has something to do with a yellow-blond someone who is always out nights and free to go slumming on the dark side.”
“Not Mr. Matt!”
Ma shrugs. “You might want to keep a sharper eye on your Miss Temple Barr and her latest mate so he is not her last mate.”
Ma has a point, which she drives home by bestowing a fond four-shiv tap on my shoulder before she makes like an oleander bush and leaves.
I choose to think the gesture is fond.