Cat in an Indigo Mood

Chapter 65

Case Closed

The next morning before anybody is up, I sneak out my usual point of egress and hightail it to the scene of the crime. I must transfer to various transportation modes several times, but finally the neighboring bungalows are in sight, and I hasten my weary steps when I view a blur of white behind a certain window.

Miss Fanny Furbelow welcomes my appearance by sashaying back and forth against the glass, whipping her white plumy fantail from side to side in a most graceful and inciting manner.

What a shame that I will have to report that Wilfrid's death was just a hoax.

I mean, it is such a shame that I had to mislead her as to the state of his health.

But I had to hide the only witness to the killing next door, even to digging a false grave in the yard. (Luckily, Wilfrid had dispatched a rat in the house shortly before his mistress was killed, which added an aura of animal death to the premises. And the late rat admirably "filled in" for Wilfrid on the grave site.) Besides, I was not sure Wilfrid would recover from the murderers wallop, despite Miss Midnight Louise bathing his brow and dragging a McDonald's carton-bottom of water from the hose tap to keep him sprinkled, not to mention the unmentionables she dug up to keep him fed.

Miss Fanny is out of the window and through the front door faster than you can say "Sally Rand." Her white coat sparkles in the sunshine as she sidles down the steps like the showgirl she was.

Louie, I am so lonesome."

"Well, you will be lonesome no more."

She stops on a dime and pirouettes saucily to face me. "Oh?"

Hmmm. The widow appears nearly ready to ditch the weeds and go for the deeds.

"You have something to tell me, Louie?"

But a private eye is a private eye, and he has to adhere to code, just like an electrician. I sit down, and don my most serious expression.

"Are you ill, Louie?"

"No. But you will be unless you too sit down and take this like a, er, lady."

So I tell her of the deception I had engineered at her expense.

Her gold and blue eyes flash with anger and the tip of her fan flutters furiously, but she says nothing.

I describe Wilfrid's excellent home nursing care and his slow but steady recovery. I throw pride to the four winds and reveal how we used Nose E. to trail the distinctive odor of the killer and how I concluded what that devilishly elusive stuff that gave him away, at least to a connoisseurs nose, was: vanilla-pudding-scented pipe tobacco. I finish up with Wilfrid's triumphal attack on the man who killed his mistress and who tried to kill him. When I am done, I sit back and wait for the usual hysterics.

There are none.

"It was cruel of you, Louie, to leave me in the dark. I understand that you feared I would give away Wilfrid's true condition, but you forget that I was a performer in my youth. I could have been trusted." Her tones are distant and severe.

I feel my ears lowering, more in sorrow than in anger.

"But," she goes on, "you did as you thought best, and you have indeed rescued my darling Wilfrid. How soon do you think the police will let him go?"

"They may want to run his blood type; I saw the detective take some scrapings from his nails last night. Your mistress may have to identify him as the neighbor's cat. I do not believe you will be bothered to testify. The usual red tape."

She shakes her head and straightens her ruff. "So Wilfrid is a hero."

"Er, l suppose you could say that."

"He not only came to his mistress's defense, marking her attacker, but he returned from the dead to stalk, confront, and again claw the killer. What a magnificent fellow! And to think I thought he was only a domestic. He must have been working undercover the entire time."

"I think it is more a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time."

"Nonsense! Wilfrid obviously is far more than you or I ever dreamed he was. You must finish your assignment by seeing that the authorities return him here, and I will work upon my companion to bring him into our establishment."

"I cannot speak for the authorities. I do not think my Miss Temple would let them put Wilfrid into some shelter."

" 'Think!' Then there is a possibility they would separate us by such heinous means! You must go immediately and see to it. Your task is not done until my hero is home with met"

"But, gee, lady, you have not even paid me for the work I have done so far--"

"Paid you! What kind of ignoble opportunist are you? Have you so little interest in the law of the land that you would let a genuine American hero languish in a homeless shelter? Go on!

Find out what is to become of him immediately. Tell him Fanny will be waiting for him." I back away down the walk.

There is no reasoning with a dame bent on deluding herself. It looks like I am to be Wilfrid's keeper until l can dump him off at home for good and all. And the way she is carrying on, my role in the recent events have been reduced to a walk on, or a prop boy.

I was hoping for a tender, Casablanca-style parting scene before I produced the little wimp again, but no go.

So much for the movies. All deception, lies, and videotape.

Tailpiece:

Midnight Louie Frets About the Future

It is certainly not flattering, no matter how well intended.

Here I sit, the star of my own mystery series, my name on everybody's lips and e-mail and snail-mail list, and what do they want?

What do they want?

Do they want to know what mean streets l will be impressing with my stealthy footsteps in my next adventure?

No.

Do they worry about the sinister forces gathering on all fronts?

The magical Synth, the international terrorists, the lethal Siamese conspiracy?

No.

Do they worry if my midlife energies will be drained by the onslaught of my darling daughter (maybe), Midnight Louise, who seems bound and determined to elbow in on my detecting business?

No.

Do they worry if my human acquaintances will come out of the next episode with their respective epidermis intact?

No.

No, the inquiring public wants to know what only your hairdresser should know, and a private dick should be hired to find out, and then well paid to keep quiet about.

Who is steeping in whose bed.

This is not Goldilocks, folks. This is not even Puss in Boots. This ls My Life!

Can you imagine? There is even lascivious speculation about whether I will end up with the silver sweetheart, the Divine Yvette, or the Sublime Solange, her golden soul sister.

Granted, my amatory exploits would make a good book. Perhaps I will write it one day: Midnight Louie tells all, names names.

There may be some household names in the roster, like you remember that sleek little black number on the "Gary Seven" episode of classic Star Trek? Well, so do I. Not that I am claiming anything a gentleman should not, but you are free to draw your own conclusions. Those who are good with numbers will realize that there is a considerable age difference. Not that this ever stopped a determined dude. It one will examine the careers of such silver-screen mainstays as Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, and Warren Beatty, one will see that as the dudes go silver, the dames go jail-bait.

So who ends up with whom is still very much in the air. No doubt there are dames as yet unmet who would be perfect partners for a suave dude such as I. On the other hand, I would not mind tangling with that witch-goddess Hyacinth again, or winning that spokescat position and reuniting with Solange and Yvette, the stunning Ashleigh sisters. I am open to all possibilities, it is just that the humans should get their acts together and settle down to a nice predicable domestic life, one that will not distract from my doings both predatory and amatory.

Of course, that is asking a lot of mere humans.

So, all I can say is, do not despair. I will work things out to my best advantage in the end, and everyone else will be all the better for it.

Very best fishes,

Midnight Louie. Esq.

P.S. You can visit Midnight Louie on the intemet at:

hflp:}lwww.catwriter.oomIcdouglas

To subscribe to Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-iniemgoncar newsletter or for information on Louie's T-shirt,

write: PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163.

Carole Nelson Douglas Ruminates on Doing Time

For once I think that Louie has a legitimate complaint.

His feline hijinks have been upstaged by the human gavotte.

That is what happens when one species out numbers another, even in novels. Natural selection.

The observant reader (and aren't we all?) will have noticed that after Louie's debut in Catnap and Pussyfoot, the series developed a title pattern with Cat on a Blue Monday. Cat, and a color, and also an internal alphabet, beginning with B as in Blue Monday, continuing with C as in Crimson Haze etcetera.

Louie, being a sensitive soul (and also being a midlife male) is worrying about longevity these days, but l want to reassure him that his adventures in this incarnation will last for a total of twenty-seven books (one longer than Sue Grafton's alphabet series, because Louie's third novel started with "B"). Louie likes that hit of feline one-upmanship, but since Sue Grafton likes cats, she shouldn't mind too much.

The passage of time in a mystery series is a subject worthy of study, or at least of a few scholarly monographs.

Some series characters abide in an Eternal Now. No names, places, or brand names date the setting. Think Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason dwells in a generic landscape (except for things never expected to change, like men wearing fedoras).

Now that mystery series are able to indulge more fully in the pleasures of character development and setting as well as puzzle and plot, time has bent, warped, become a thing of mystery and magic.

Sue Grafton has pointed out that Kinsey Milhone began in 1982 and, because of the time between books, remains anchored in the eighties even as the author and the rest of us approach the millennium. Grafton is now writing recent-historical novels.

The opposite is true in the Midnight Louie landscape. Because of the Las Vegas background, something every tourist can check for veracity every day of every month of the year, time has gone schizoid. While the first Midnight Louie novel came out in 1992, and while the ten so fat document the cataclysmic and constant changes on the Las Vegas map, the time elapsed for the characters is only nine months.

Think of it as an early film: the main characters are shown conversing in the foreground roadster, while behind them the background of passing scenery reels by at a cosmic speed.

When a hardcover Midnight Louie book comes out saying New York-New York Hotel and Casino is opening, that is exactly what is happening in the real-time world on the book's first appearance. This is the only way to handle an endlessly evolving setting like Las Vegas: make the physical setting as contemporary as possible; let the characters develop at their own, slower pace.

Time for a pregnant pause: Although ten Midnight Louie books have passed through our hands and before our eyes since 1992, the actual time passage in the books is only nine months.

I didn't plan this; like Topsy, it "just growed."

Yet, while writing these books, I've become aware that -our culture is becoming Omni-Eratic. The television shows and film reruns l grew up seeing as a child are still running on cable and overseas, enticing today's and yesterday's children. They are being remade into major film releases for a new generation, a next and Future generation of rerun-watchers. Star Trek. Zorro.

We are all fluid and coming to share a culture devoid of time- lines. So any status quo in any of the Midnight Louie books is bound to change. Except for Louie, of course.

As he knows (and we always suspected), cats are too good just the way they are to change, very much at least. No matter how much time elapses.

Remember. It isn't over until the fat cat sings. Stay tuned.

CND