Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 21

A Little White Lie

While I relax at Mr. Matt's digs, my mind returns to my recent epic effort in stage-managing the scene of the crime, entering instant rerun mode: Although our impromptu burial detail has been exhausting, Midnight Louise and I still have a busy day ahead of us.

We are headed downtown, and the only regular transportation in that direction between here and there is the animal control vehicle, and we do not particularly wish to be on the scene when it arrives to find the advertised body in absentia.

We stake out a likely intersection that otters the cover of some oleander bushes, which are even better for concealment than the potted palm of hotel-lobby legend.

When a white pickup truck idles at a red light, we leap as one into its empty bed.

Well, it's almost empty bed. Luckily, the sleeping dog that is lying near the cab has a collar and short chain on to keep it from jumping out of the truck when the vehicle is red-balling it at seventy miles down the freeway. (Dogs are dumb that way.) The chain also keeps it from lumping two hitch hiding cats not three feet away, although the dog, a Doberman-Rottweiler cross that would give pit bulls a bad name, stands up to curse us mightily for several blocks.

"Shaddupl" shouts the driver from the open front seat window.

Midnight Louise and I hunker down so the dog will look like he is kicking up the usual fuss over nothing, and do not so much as fluff our fur over the commotion.

So we provide good cause for this chained-down Rover to broaden his vocabulary for some three miles, before I spot the tarnished lady-with-a-red-lamp of downtown Les Vegas, the fish-tailed sweetheart of the Blue Mermaid Motel.

We are fleet shadows over the truck-bed side at the first red light to stop the vehicle in the downtown business area.

I head away from the spectacularly roofed mall over the major hotel and casinos here, toward the older side of town, which is to say seedier, which is to say the more interesting.

Here is where one can find Reprise, an establishment devoted to used records. So l tell Miss Midnight Louise when we arrive before its old-fashioned, narrow glass door with a big wooden frame.

A paper streamer slashing across a display window filled with dusty album covers announces

"Vinyl Clearance."

"I thought we needed a nose, not ears," Miss Louise carps.

"You need to keep your mind open and your mouth shut. Let me handle the negotiations."

A brick holds the door slightly ajar. The scratchy tones of some golden oldie album watts out the crack like the soundtrack of something in which Peter Lorre is murdered, or should be.

Inside, a subtle veil of dust motes drifts in air that is scented with stale cigarette smoke.

A couple customers stand in the aisles, paging through ancient album covers.

I weave my way through the display cabinets toward a doorway to the shop's rear, in which a beaded plastic curtain hangs.

"Quaint," Midnight Louise notes as we slip through the shimmying strands of grass-green, orange, and yellow.

No one seems to be around back here, but I am not worried.

I am not looking for the proprietor of this recycled record emporium, one Earl E. Byrd by name.

"There he is!" I announce, as my sharp eyes spot a familiar profile.

Midnight Louise's skeptical look sweeps up and around the room. "You need assistance in the eye department as well as the nose, Daddio."

I shake my head. Kits these days. They think they know it all.

"Try under the desk."

Louise lets the airy hairs above her eyes do a doubtful hula.

"You mean that dust bunny by the right front leg?"

I walk on over, and bend down to sniff the scrap of white fuzz on its wet black nose. lck!

That is another thing about dogs. Their snouts are always cold and waterlogged. Luckily, Nose E.'s eponymous schnozzola is as petite as the professional sniffer himself.

He yawns, showing rows of teeth the size of nine-day-old kitten claws. "Who's the babe?"

I lean low enough to flip back one of his droopy ears. "That is no babe, that is my, er, temporary assistant. She is very up on politically correct forms of address and such, as well as equipped with itchy trigger fingers."

Nose E. peers at Louise through the fringe of white hairs that has escaped the little red bow on his noggin--a bow that pulls his facial hair into a perky fountain of long topknot. I prefer to think of it as something a Japanese warrior might do to keep his coif battle-ready, but the fact is that Nose E. is Maltese, not Japanese. Although he descends through the noble wolf-spitz clan which boasts such big-boned members as malamutes and huskies and the Samoyed, oh my, Nose E. is the wart on the end of the family line: about four pounds of silky white hair over three pounds of ridiculously small body.

But while Nose E. is asking about the identity and purpose of Midnight Louise, she is pawing at my back and not keeping her nails in either.

"Sssst! Pops. Gotta talk."

I excuse myself to Nose E. and accompany Louise under a chair for a hasty consultation.

"I hate to tell you this," she begins, "but if that dust bunny is not second-cousin to a long-haired guinea pig, I will eat it. And I could, very easily. That shrimp must weigh less than a squirrel."

"Nose E. is not one to throw his weight around, that is true.

But he has the best nose in the business."

"Nose? I have known dust mites with proboscises that were bigger."

"Size is not everything, at least in this case. Nose E. is the primo dope-and-bomb--sniffer in the country. He and Earl E. have attended gigs from movie openings to presidential inaugurations. Nose E. goes undercover as a lap dog, but this lap dog is never napping. He may look cute nestled up to some starIet's implants, but one wrong perk of his paw and the undercover cops are all over anyone carrying illicit drugs or incendiary devices."

"That . . . Mite E. Mouse?"

"When will you learn that appearances can be deceiving? You thought at first that I was a big lazy galoot, and took how wrong that was."

"How wrong was that?"

"Plenty," I growl. "Now let me deal with Nose E."

So I ankle over to the little halt-pint and till him in on the problem, laying it on heavy about the widow in the window. Dogs are always a sentimental sort.

Soon l have him whimpering into his paws, but l do not want to overdo the shtick, as too much sentimentality will clog up Nose E.'s main asset.

He scoots out from under the desk, shakes himself oft, and declares himself ready to follow the scent at the some of the crime to the ends of the earth.

"An inspiring number of prepositional phrases," Midnight Louise purrs sourly in my ear, "but how far can this cross between a feather duster and an effusion of Fool Whip walk?"

"He is a dog, nonetheless," I growl sotto voce. "Unlike our kind, they like to walk for the sake of it."

"Ready'?" Nose E. asks sharply.

"Do you not have to ask permission to leave?" I wonder.

"Naw. Earl E. never expects me to wander any further than the curb-service latrines. Let us go."

With a Lilliputian yap, the Maltese bloodhound is whisking across the floor like an animated toy, stirring up plenty of dust behind him for Louise and me to swallow and spit out. Before we can exit, though, we hear a Brobdingnagian step outside the shop. I take one look at those size-nine loafers coming through the door and yank Nose E. back by his tail. "Cheese it! The cops." We three dive behind the counter, aware that ours is an undercover mission and cannot be shared with the local law enforcement types, even if it is. . .

"Lieutenant C. R. Molina," I tell Nose E. and Louise in a throaty growl. "Homicide. Bet she is on the same case that we are."

Nose E. peeks around the counter end to eyeball those formidable clodhoppers. He whimpers under his breath and scurries back to our sides. "I am not used to operating at less than human shoulder-height," he confesses. "One misstep and that cop could turn me into a doll-house rug."

"Shsssst," l caution. "I am trying to hear what she is after. You may be the nose, but I am the ears of the operation."

"What does that make me?" Midnight Louise demands in a hoarse mew. "Chopped liver?"

"Loose lips sink ships," I return.

"What do ships have to do with anything?"

"Er, nothing."

Above us, I hear C.R. Molina's voice making inquiries.

First, though, they have to make with the small talk.

"What can I do for you, Carmen?" Earl E. asks.

My eyes widen, why is he calling her after the name of an opera?

"l am looking for some old music, what else?" she says. There is a smile in her voice I have seldom, if ever, heard.

Huh? Old music. Could that be a criminal type, as in "old Muse ick?"

"Recorded or sheet music?"

I grow even more-than-somewhat confused.

"I am really looking for some lyrics. Do not have much. Just something about 'she left,' Ring a bell?"

"There is that seventies hit, 'She's Gone'."

"No. It has to be 'she left.' "

"Where did you hear this fragment?"

Lieutenant C. Ft. Molina's laugh is uneasy, like all lies. "Did not hear it. Saw it . . .

somewhere."

"Well, heck, Carmen, a lot of those old torch songs are about 'she left' or 'he left' or it you want to update it, 'he, she, or it left.' "

This time her laughter is genuine. "It you think of anything let me know."

"Must have been mighty haunting lyrics."

"Oh, yeah. Mighty haunting, Earl E. Thanks."

I hear her flat-footed retreat; no snappy little pitter-patter like my gal Temple makes on her high heels. I feel a stab of regret that I am not able to work this case with Miss Temple, as we have so often done in the past. But there are times when a guy has to go it alone, and this is one of them. Well, as good as alone.

I hear Earl E.'s deliberate soft-shoe scrape back to the used instruments area. He is not so young anymore, and moves to a slow, stately time, unless he is jamming on one of the many musical instruments he plays like a hyperactive young maniac.

"The coast is clear," Nose E. announces. He spends too much time lolling on household furniture watching TV.

He scurries for the door and out into the Big World Beyond.

"This guy may know how to use his sniffer," Midnight Louise warns me, "but he has the street smarts of a tire plug. And you know what they end up covered with!"

"Do not worry. That is why we are here to protect him."

"If he gets us into major trouble, you will have to protect him from me." On that note of carefree camaraderie, we three set off on the trail of the lonesome scent.