Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

Tailpiece

Carole Nelson Douglas Strikes Back

First of all, Louie’s description of our relationship should be called a “Tall Tailpiece.” He owes his current fame and good fortune solely to my literary efforts. In fact, Midnight Louie was on the auction block for a dollar bill when I found him in 1973 in the fine print of the classified ads.

This “big, black Tomcat” was obviously a handsome fellow, and just as obviously had been a discipline problem. His current custodians described “a con artist and eighteen pounds of cuddly pussycat, very versatile and equally at home on your new couch or in your neighbor’s old garbage can.” They admitted that he’d been reared on “purloined goldfish” and claimed that he “understood,” but didn’t speak, English.

All they asked was that Louie’s new keepers allow him roaming room and that he remain the ladies’ man he (also obviously) always was. Unsure where a roué like Louie would fit in the Family Life section where I wrote feature stories, I called his foster parents for an interview.

They were frank to a fault. At two a.m. one morning, Louie had attached himself to the wife near the Coke machine at a respectable Palo Alto motel where Louie was copping carp when he wasn’t playing gigolo with the female guests. The motel manager was about to change his place of residence from goldfish pond to city pound. So the infatuated wife air-freighted Louie (in a borrowed puppy transport he much despised) to St. Paul.

Once there, Louie accosted her lawyer husband; tried to molest their altered Siamese female, Pooh; engaged in a rumble with the resident Hoover vacuum; and decided that the litter box was the nearest route to China but no place to commit an act of personal hygiene.

Soon the couple noticed that domestic security had reduced Louie to a mere fifteen pounds, as well as their apartment to rubble. They advertised, at length. Readers were shortly clamoring to adopt the disreputable feline. Louie graduated to an obscure, bucolic existence after I wrote my feature story. My first mistake was letting Louie loose in his own words for most of the piece.

I began writing novels in my off hours within three years, but Midnight Louie didn’t sneak into my mind again until 1984, when I began writing fiction full time. I then persuaded him to relocate to the bright lights of Las Vegas to narrate a quartet of romances with an ongoing mystery that was solved in the last book, published as Crystal Days and Crystal Nights in 1990. Louie took to Vegas like a duck to bottom-dredging. He also took umbrage when the romance editor unilaterally lopped forty percent of his... er, pride and joy—print time—out of the books. Readers clamored for more, not less, just as Louie predicted.

Louie done wrong is not a civil or pretty sight. I had no peace until I agreed to let Louie get his claws into the real thing: Mystery with a capital “M” for murder. (Given his editorial truncation, it’s no coincidence that Louie’s first foray into crime fiction involves the icing of an editor at a booksellers’ convention.) Louie is fond of saying that there are eight million stories under the naked neon of Las Vegas. This has been one of them. He intends to tell them all, at length and in his own words, as long as his “mouthpiece” lasts.

Collaborating with Louie has been exhausting but fascinating, and, what the heck, some soft-hearted dame somewhere is destined to play patsy for the big lug. Oh, lordy, it’s catching....

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Carole and the late Midnight Louie Jr.

ML III appears in the chapter windows

Excerpt from Cat in an Aqua Storm