Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

4

New Boy in Town

The cat carrier banged Temple’s ankle in four-four time as she plodded through the late afternoon sunlight softening the Circle Ritz’s asphalt parking lot to the consistency of a half-baked Toll-House cookie.

Her high heels sank in and stuck at each step, making her feel like a prospector trudging through a desert of hot fudge. She set down the carrier, unlatched the stockade gate, moved the carrier inside, and relatched the gate.

Temple paused to soak up the indigo shade of an overarching palm tree and eye the cool blue apartment pool flanked by yellow calla lilies. Her favorite lounge chair sat empty near the water, just waiting to cradle her weary physique and frazzled psyche in the shade of a spreading oleander bush.... Home, sweet home.

Temple had nearly reached the lounge chair before she spotted the stranger six seats over.

“Oh.”

He looked up from a Las Vegas guidebook. Born-blond hair, caramel-brown eyes, light tan, bright green short-sleeved shirt, muscles subtle enough to be interesting, and a quizzical look—mostly at the cat carrier. “Help you with that?”

“Nope.” Temple resented any deference to her petite size. She deposited the carrier on the flagstones and sat primly on the edge of the lounge instead of collapsing full-length as usual. “I wonder if I dare let the poor thing out.”

“What kind of poor thing is it?”

“I’m not sure. Black. Feline. Heavy. Has a fearsome yowl.”

“A stray?”

“More like an unauthorized intruder. God, what a day!” Even a handsome stranger could not forestall Temple’s long-anticipated collapse. She groaned, then wriggled way, way back on the lounger, putting her feet up.

The man came over, encasing her briefly in cool shadow before he crouched beside the carrier. “Take a look at it?”

“But don’t lose it. The contents are a material witness in a murder.”

“You’re kidding!”

Temple shook her head. She debated removing her sunglasses to study her new acquaintance in full living color, but restrained herself.

“You weren’t kidding.” The man hauled a long black boa of fur from the cramped carrier. “He must weigh close to twenty pounds.”

“He?”

“Definitely.”

“You a vet?”

“I spent a few weekends on the grandparents’ farm,” He cautiously released the cat to extend a tan hand, accompanying it with a smile that would blind a mole. “Matt Devine. I’m staying here now—I guess. Mrs. Lark was cordial but a little vague.”

“Only a little? You must have made a real impression on her. Hi, Temple Barr. I’ve lived at the Circle Ritz for almost a year. You’ll love it, but you’ll have to like ‘a little vague’ a lot. Say, he is a big galoot, isn’t he?”

Temple sat up to inspect the cat, who sniffed long and intently at the heel of her shoe, the aluminum tubing of the lounge chair and Matt Devine’s hand.

“Did you mean that,” Matt asked, “about him witnessing a murder?”

Temple sighed. “I was exaggerating, a mortal sin for a public relations specialist.”

Matt flinched a bit at her words. Maybe he had something against PR people, Temple thought. A lot of ordinarily nice folks did. PR people as a group were often stereotyped as devious, shallow and phony.

“Actually,” she admitted, “Boston Blackie here should get a medal. If he hadn’t been AWOL at the convention center, I wouldn’t have found the body when I did, chasing him.”

“That must be rough, finding a body.” Matt had moved to chaperon the cat’s explorations of the landscaping.

“It’s not in my job description, for sure. Now I’m supposed to downplay the murder before it ruins the whole convention. Darn! This is my first assignment for the convention center. Booksellers sounded so stuffy; who’d have guessed? I need a drink.”

“Sorry.” Matt displayed empty hands and ranged toward the calla lilies, where a black tail was vanishing. “Try Mrs. Lark.”

“Didn’t she tell you to call her Electra?”

“Yes, but—” Matt bent into the chest-high leaves. “I bet she doesn’t want this guy taking a dip in her lily pond, whatever she’s called.”

“God, no! Back in the hoosegow for him. I gotta get to my apartment and find out if I’ve got any tuna fish; he can have the run of my place then.”

An ungentlemanly yowl from the lilies indicated the cat’s capture.

“What does Mrs. Lark—Electra—think about pets on the premises?” Matt Devine wondered.

“It’s only for the night. Somebody had to take him, and I was the one unlucky enough to catch him. Lieutenant Molina of Sex and Homicide is looking at me with a goldarn evil eye. That is not a comfortable place to be, if you’ve ever met Lieutenant Molina.”

Matt smiled at something that amused him, patted the cat’s sleek black head and stuffed it through the carrier door despite four black paws and a tail all lashing like octopus arms.

“Don’t hurt him!” Temple warned.

“Me, hurt him? Have you seen the size of the claws on this kitty-cat?”

“Yoo-hoo!” came a yodel from the apartment building’s back door. Electra Lark—or rather the Day-Glo muumuu she wore—soon followed it. She was one of the last living women in America to holler “yoo-hoo” and wear muumuus, separately or simultaneously.

“Either of you play the organ?” The landlady stood panting before them, her hair a picturesque postpunk patchwork of lime-Jell-O green, old-lady lavender and fire-engine red.

Temple just shook her head. Matt looked too dazed to shake anything, which was a real shame in Temple’s opinion.

Electra Lark was checking a California Raisin watch on her chubby wrist. “Euphonia’s home sick and I’ve got to do a can’t-wait wedding at seven-thirty. earlier? It won’t seem legal without a march.”

“I play—a little,” said Matt. He was standing with his hands in his khaki pants pockets, looking adorably diffident.

“Really, Matt? You can play the organ?” Electra vibrated with relief. “Why didn’t you say so? I can give you a deal on the rent if you can back up Euphonia. She has four kids.” Electra rolled her eyes. “Emergencies are built in.”

“I only play by ear, and I don’t know Lohengrin,” he warned.

“Not to worry.” Electra’s amethyst crystal ear cuffs flashed as she drew Matt’s tanned, gilt-haired arm through her freckled, plump one. “Just so it sounds solemn and churchlike.”

Temple watched them stroll around the circular building, envying women of a certain age—say sixty-something—who could commit certain liberties with men of a certain attractiveness without anybody thinking anything of it.

Then she kicked herself—figuratively. (The Weitzmans were far too pointed for literal admonishment.) What was she doing—more to the point, thinking?

Here one man had left her flat and friendless in Vegas just three months ago; why’d she care if Prince Charming himself moved into the next apartment? Sure, Matt seemed friendly and low-key, but Max Kinsella had seemed a lot of things, also—including too serious about her to leave without warning. Max, who’d coaxed her out of the best PR job—position—she’d ever had, the Guthrie, for heaven’s sake. Three days and she’d jilted common sense to follow him to Vegas like a Pacific-bound lemming deflected to Sand Central. Max had found the Circle Ritz and charmed Electra into giving them a corner unit. He’d even charmed Temple into envisioning a someday-ceremony in the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel.... That had been Max, an unlucky charm from first to last.

Resurrecting the memories of their intemperate romance and Max’s cool departure always pureed Temple’s emotions; Temple had been considered sensible until Max. If her Guthrie compatriots could see her now, flacking hither and yon, too ashamed to crawl back to the city she’d forsaken, too stubborn to give up on Vegas and herself just because a man had stranded her there.

Temple concentrated on the pool area’s deserted serenity, on putting the past back where it belonged. The Lover’s Knot Wedding Chapel was a long block off the Strip’s twenty-four-hour hullabaloo, but the Circle Ritz gardens, set back from the fevered honky-tonk action, were peaceful and secret.

Temple picked up the cat carrier and went indoors, where a vintage air conditioner kept the lobby temperature a steady 74 degrees during the long, torrid summer. Curiosity overcame her at the elevator doors. She left the case there to dash through the breezeway to the Lover’s Knot, trying not to let her staccato heels disrupt the wedding in progress.

The tiny chapel exploded with flowers (mostly recycled from Sam’s Funeral Home on Charleston Boulevard; Sam was either an ex- or a would-be beau of Electra’s). The happy but hurried couple stood poised in the trellised archway. Ranks of hatted heads filled the pews, but they covered brains of discarded pantyhose and Poly-fil, for Electra had fashioned this soft-sculpture congregation one figure at a time with her own talented fingers.

Dwarfing the little Lowery organ on one sideline, Matt Devine sat in his emerald-green shirt and khaki pants, looking like a PGA pro dragooned into musical servitude. Electra’s muumuu was concealed by a rusty black graduation robe that gave her a properly clerical look. She nodded once and smugly to the waiting Matt.

The organ huffed into life. Temple listened, first curious, then surprised. Music, marchlike and softly sensuous, swelled into the cathedral-ceilinged chamber. The couple advanced with the traditional nervous stutter of measured paces. Hat brims on the gathered mannequins seemed to nod in approval.

Temple blinked. It had been a rough day. She’d found a dead body, earned a long-distance record for carrying the world’s heaviest cat, met a devastating new tenant of the male persuasion just when she was terminally down on the opposite sex, and now she was melting to the spell of a wedding march she’d never heard before. In a minute, she’d be hallucinating the “congregation” humming along in chorus.

She got the hallelujah out of there.

“Okay, kitty,” Temple told the cat on the last leg of her journey. “This is a very special place. It’s round, see, the whole building. What we have here is my front door— shhhh; just a minute while I find my keys!—solid coffered mahogany. They don’t waste wood like this anymore. Not since the fifties. This was some ritzy place until it hit the skids in the seventies and Electra came along to gentrify it. Now you get to call it home in the nineties.”

The door hushed reluctantly open on solid brass hinges; it was that heavy. Temple lugged the carrier over the threshold. Then she was inside, and any of her Minneapolis friends who might have wondered why Temple stayed on in Las Vegas when Max vamoosed would know.

“Nice, huh? I’ll let you out, you look around, and then we eat.”

This agenda apparently suited the cat. He emerged cautiously from the carrier, putting one massive paw before the other as precisely as a chorus girl at the Tropicana.

To the left was the odd wedge-shaped kitchen, but after one long whisker-quivering sniff, the cat turned toward the living room, padding silently across the walnut parquet floor.

Temple loved her place, with or without Max. Its decor was a concoction of imagination and serendipity rather than of money and time. The major rooms were pie-shaped wedges widening to curved exterior windows. Vaulted white plaster ceilings seemed to ripple like sand dunes to meet the walls, generating a soft, aquatic play of light. No wonder Electra was a bit mystical after living here for almost twenty years.

The black cat was not interested in mystical or aquatic unless a tasty finned morsel was involved. He headed for the French doors, paws braced on the struts, to size up the triangular garden patio beyond the living room.

“No outside,” she told him, setting her apartment thermostat a bit lower for the evening. “That reminds me; I’d better round up a roaster pan or something. Yeah, that’s the bathroom, my bathroom, so don’t get any ideas.”

The cat was poking his jet-black nose behind the toilet. He stretched like a ladder against the inch-square tiles of the bathroom walls, reaching for the lone, small window. “Too high for even you, smarty!”

He agreed, for shortly he was in her bedroom, inspecting her piles of clothes—“So I’m untidy; so what. We’re not married or anything.” He leaped atop the California king-size bed to recline in the exact middle—“Off! If you’re lucky you’ll get a pillow in the corner. That’s what I tell all my male sleepovers.”

His paw edged the louvered closet doors open to reveal a treasure trove of shoe soles. “Sniffing? No monkey business! I’ll get you the proper facilities in a few minutes.” The cat stretched up the inside of a closet door, his extended forelegs playfully patting a poster taped to the door.

“Yeah, you got it, bud. My dirty little secret. You are looking at one of the last remaining vestiges of ‘The Mystifying Max’ in Vegas. Right, worth a good long yawn. What a bore. So predictable of a magician to just vanish, for heaven’s sake.”

Temple regarded her memento. The Mystifying Max had a look both puckish and lethal, hair so black you’d expect to find it in your stocking on Christmas morning and strong, bony, clever hands. He wore a navy turtleneck and a “now you see it, now you don’t” expression, which pretty much summed up their relationship.

She picked up the cat, an intemperate decision. He still weighed a ton. But his eyes were almost as green as The Mystifying Max’s.

“I hope you’re not two of kind,” she murmured into his thick ruff, “and aren’t gonna run out on me, too. You I need. Somehow, some way, you’re gonna defuse this murder thing at the ABA for me; I know it.”

The cat, for all his bulk, remained complacently cradled in Temple’s arms, although his green eyes were roaming the Dairy Queen ceiling as if searching for a way out.

Temple tightened her grip. “Don’t you do that to me! Don’t you dare!”