Cat on a Blue Monday

"I'm not what I was," he said. Even he could hear the strangled tension in his voice.

"I know," she said, sudden, warm, sad compassion in hers. "I know," she repeated, without using the old name again. "None of us are.

Chapter 8

A Close Shave

Temple had never seen so many cats. Temple had never seen so many cats in cages. Temple had never seen so many different kinds of cats.

She stood north of downtown in the middle of one of the Cashman Convention and Sport Complex's loftiest, sparest exhibition halls, a vast concrete-floored vault echoing with excited human and feline voices in ear-splitting counterpoint.

Rows and rows of tables bore rows and rows of steel-mesh cathouses, so to speak. These were not the pastel canvas carriers allotted to the likes of Savannah Ashleigh's pampered Persian, Yvette. These were outright cages of metal mesh, but the proud owners and breeders had added homey touches.

Blue-gingham curtains swaged the first cage front that Temple paused before. Within, a matching gingham-covered pillow harmonized with a powder-blue plastic litter tray in the cage's opposite corner.

Amid this gingham glory reclined a huge, snub-nosed, vanilla-haired cat with chocolate-brown fur frosting the tips of its muzzle, legs and tail. The creature lay in slit-eyed feline repose on the bare space between the pillow and the litter box, its plumy tail lashing the water dish now and then like a languid, furbearing metronome.

Temple pulled her glasses from her ever present tote bag to read a card affixed atop the cage: LAZY H Farms, Home of Champion Himalayans. Stud Service Available.

The comatose cat opened eyes as breathtakingly azure as . . . oh, Lake Mead, or maybe even Paul Newman's electric baby-blues. Then it yawned hugely with slow and practiced expertise. Presumably this was a recumbent stud from the appropriately named Lazy H. It certainly resembled a sultan of the cat world. Even Midnight Louie had not mastered such studiedly sublime hauteur.

Temple cringed interiorly. One look at these purebred pussycats and Louie's mongrel origins were too obvious to overlook. These cats had class, had pedigrees, and had price tags high enough to require life insurance.

Temple left the unruffled tomcat and strolled down the aisle, peering into cages and studying cards. Some cages were shimmers of royal purple lame draperies; a few favored organza in the color orange. Pink tulle dusted the harsh grid of many a steel cage, while the pussums within displayed a blase feline resignation to captivity and competition that Temple couldn't imagine Louie adopting for one moment.

Cleo Kilpatrick, Electra's cat-breeding friend who had obtained Temple's visitor's pass, rushed over after attending to her row of cages. "What do you think?"

Temple gazed around and shrugged. "Impressive. But I haven't seen one . . . human-looking cat, if you'll pardon the expression, since that little black one in the cage at the entry."

Cleo, a fortyish woman smartly attired in a T-shirt with a spangled leopard rampant across her substantial chest, shook her carefully frosted head. "That's the Humane Society stand. They try to place their more attractive homeless cats at the shows. We give them free space."

"Terrific, Uh, What kind of . . . cat? . . . is this?"

Cleo leaned inward to study the animal in question. "Oh, that's a very rare cat, but it's not a recognized breed."

"It does look ready to be sauteed or something. I've never seen a cat look so much like a plucked chicken."

"It's supposed to. That's a Sphinx."

"It looks more like a naked lunch." Temple shivered in sympathy. "Isn't it cold without any fur?" she asked sensibly.

"No . . . a Sphinx's body temperature is four degrees higher than the ordinary cat's. Most owners keep them in sweaters when they're not on show."

Temple gingerly bent to study the creature's hanging creases of greige skin at flanks and chest. "That furrowed forehead is so sad. Seeing a naked cat is awfully shocking. And the ears are so big. I keep thinking of Dumbo."

"Have you ever seen your own cat wet? He might look as spindly as this one."

"Not Louie," Temple swore with conviction.

"Anyway, the Sphinxes are here just as a curiosity. They don't breed true."

"So they're a genetic freak?"

"An anomaly," Cleo said quickly. No negatives to anything feline were permitted anywhere near a Fancy Feline fancier. "That's how some of today's most prized breeds began, with one oddball kitten in a litter that was carefully bred and cultivated."

"I certainly can cultivate some print exposure for this poor, overexposed kitty," Temple said. "Where is the woman Electra told me about, the one who got the threatening phone calls before the show opened?"

"Threatening?"

"Hisses sound pretty sinister, absolutely viperish."

Cleo just laughed. "You haven't been around cats much, have you? Cats hiss plenty if provoked. I think Peggy is imagining things, or else someone she irritated recorded a cat fight and is playing it over her phone."

"This Peggy irritates a lot of people?" Temple asked, dutifully following Cleo as she wove between tows to the big central aisle.

Cleo stopped, allowing Temple to stare pupil to pupil with a huge, long-haired white cat that resembled a snowy owl with great gold eyes. She expected it to cry "Who?" at any moment.

"Everest Sweet Snowball Heavenly Hash," Cleo rattled off automatically as she gazed fondly on the gigantic feline.

"Champion Persian male. Two years old, great doming, they call him 'Hash' for short."

A cartwheel of stiffened lace circled the animal's neck like an Elizabethan collar, no doubt to keep it from licking its lavish ruff. Temple examined this mound of powdered and blue-rinsed fur and found a face that was short on nose but big on eyes. "It looks like a white Pekinese."

"They breed Persians for that flattened nose, but frankly, that makes the animals prone to breathing difficulties. A more natural nose may now be permissible with some judges."

"Hooray for Hollywood," Temple said sardonically, Cat breeders were beginning to get on her nerves almost as much as unearthly purebred cats did. "Have they resorted to giving these cats collagen to ensure the proper profile?"

Cleo eyed Temple as if she were crazy, or worse, a heretic.

"That would be strictly forbidden. The point is to breed for the look. Any breeder who physically tampered with a cat would be barred from competition."

"What would that mean?"

Cleo grew even more incredulous. "That person's cats would be as dead as dodoes. No one would buy them, no one would covet a mating with that source, the kittens would be worthless and the breeder would go out of business."

"These shows are that important?"

"They are if you aren't just running a kitten mill. Listen, Temple, our breed standards are serious and are rigorously applied. We may not get rich selling purebred cats, but we certainly take it seriously. It's an achievement similar to nursing along a bonsai tree. Years go into forming the proper line to produce a champion.

"We slave over these cats, we primp and pamper them. If we're very, very lucky, sometimes we get a kitten that can go all the way in its class. lt's like owning the winner of the Kentucky Derby, only there are no roses and not much money in it, unless you count all we spend on our animals."

"But it's not a hobby--a pursuit--worth intimidating anybody for?"

Cleo considered that while running her admiring eyes over Hash's immaculately indifferent body and soul. "I suppose people can get wrought up over lesser things. This isn't just what you call a hobby, you know. Cat people are passionate on the subject."

"Then a rival might want to unnerve Peggy Wilhelm to get her to withdraw her cats from competition?"

Cleo puckered her lips and seemed to consult the Oracle of the magnificent Everest Sweet Snowball Heavenly Hash. The great yellow eyes blinked, and Cleo shook herself out of her reverie, turning her full attention on Temple.

"Might," she said, nodding, "Might go to any length. I tell you, people get crazy about these cats. Sometimes you'd think they were their children. You ever hear about the Texas cheerleader mom's murder attempt? It made time on 'A Current Affair.' "

"The only current affairs I know about are my own, I'm afraid," Temple said with a grimace, "and sadly lacking."

Cleo shook her parti-colored, fine-coated head. "Some people get too competitive for their own good--and anybody else's. In that Texas case, a stage mother tried to hire a killer to ice the mother of her daughter's cheerleading rival, figuring the rival would be too broken up to try out for the squad. Over cheerleading! Anybody who fixates on any kind of competition can go over the edge. I'm afraid your friend who's worried about Peggy's cats has good reason."

"Then let's go find Peggy and talk to her," Temple suggested.

They moved into the main aisle, a perpetual-motion melee of people carrying cats. Temple eyed perfectly groomed Persians dangling limp-legged from the hands of their breeders, who held them at arm's length on the way to the judging area to avoid ruffling a single hair.

She tried to picture herself carrying Midnight Louie that way. All she could see was four flailing black legs and a sprained, if not broken, wrist for her.

Temple gawked at lean, short-haired oriental breeds being whisked to and fro in the same fashion. The Siamese, in particular, were so attenuated from narrow head to hindquarters that they looked like something from an El Greco nightmare.

She and Cleo paused to watch a judge rate a cat--a fluffy white one with gorgeous blue eyes--that looked half-normal.

"Oh," Temple said, instantly enamored.

"Turkish Angora," Cleo explained. "They're long-haired but much rangier than the Persians, which are a cobby kind of cat."

While they watched, the judge sprayed the tabletop with disinfectant, and then fetched a snowy beauty from its cage.

Temple tensed at the no-nonsense way the man handled it--like an inanimate object. He posed it on the table, examined its head, legs and tail, all the while making loud and personal pronouncements for the benefit of the people occupying the folding chairs arrayed before the table.

"No cat I know would put up with that," Temple remarked, although she knew only one cat, which maybe was the point.

"These are show cats. They're used to it, and they're ranked on how well they respond to handling."

"Sounds like white slavery to me."

Cleo Kilpatrick stared at Temple. "You could be right. That attitude could be the problem."

"Huh?"

"Peggy Wilhelm could be hearing from animal-rights activists. Some are such Fanatics that they don't even feed their dogs and cats meat, fish or dairy products. Some local types could have decided that cat shows are cruel."

Temple nodded. That made sense. "Where is Peggy's stand?"

Cleo paged through a sheaf of papers. The locations of the various breeders were indicated by microscopic numbers on a layout sheet that had to be checked against a separate list.

An exasperated Cleo hissed like a cat----or a snake----and pulled her half-glasses, dangling on a pearl cord around her neck, up to her nose. "Looks like . . . row L, numbers sixty-six to sixty-eight, or eighty-six to eighty-eight."

The two women hurried in the direction Cleo indicated, Temple's purple Liz Claiborne high heels on concrete drawing frowns from breeders intent on calming their animals.

Temple's eternal curiosity kept slowing her to a Crawl. In covering two rows, she made the acquaintance of Japanese Bobtails, which sported the kind of tails they were named for; Manx, which had no tails; and American Curls.

"Those ears are far-out." Temple paused to study the crimped appendages on an otherwise normal feline head.

"Mr. Spock, I presume? Any relationship to Scottish Folds?"

"Oh, you know about Scottish Folds," Cleo commented with some surprise.

"Know about 'em? I personally know the two most famous Scottish Folds in the country--Baker and Taylor, the corporate kitties, Bookish types."

Cleo shrugged, a gesture that made the leopard emblazoned on her chest seem to snarl. "That's right. The cats that were kidnapped at the booksellers' convention were Folds, weren't they? American Curls are a newer breed, but they're being developed in the same way."

Temple took in this particular American Curl's name, which reflected paternal and maternal forebears-Earesistible Curly-Q-Tip of Cuticurl--then moved on. A moment later she was pausing to examine the paperback book splayed open atop a cage. The cover was tracked with little red cat paw prints and titled "The Cat Who--" something.

Then a cat of another color caught Temple's attention: a short-haired calico animal with calm hazel eyes. "Cleo, this cat doesn't look any more special than my own Midnight Louie."

Cleo perched her dangling glasses on her nose and leaned near to examine the feline. "Ordinary housecat," she pronounced.

"What's it doing here?"

"There's a housecat category."

"Really? Just for ordinary cats?"

Cleo smiled. "But only the extraordinary ordinary cats win. They're judged like the rest, though not against breed standards."

"Hmmm," Temple strolled along a row of seemingly common cats. None had Everest Sweet Snow Heavenly Hash's air of aristocratic disengagement. "This one's almost as big as Louie. How come he merits the red-satin hangings?"

"That, my dear, is not just any ordinary house cat. Don't you recognize him?"

Temple eyed the outsized tiger-striped animal. It was big enough, and blase enough, to be a male used to cat competitions, but why should she recognize some cat-show regular?

Cleo burst into sudden, and vapid, song. "'If it's whisker-lickin' yummy, it's Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.' "

Temple looked at her as if she had momentarily succumbed to cat-scratch fever.

"You know, the TV cat-food ads, For the Yummy tum-tum-tummy brand. Maurice is the spokescat. We're lucky to have him here in person."

"Right," Temple eyed the dignified animal again. The only thing she could picture him doing with a bowl of Yummy Tum-tum-tummy was burying it. She bent down, bringing her fuchsia framed glasses right up to the cage. "He looks almost as big as Louie," she observed.

Maurice blinked and twitched his large pink nose.

Temple had never cared for tiger-striped cats, but this one had a tiger-sized nose. Louie's nose, on the other hand--or head--vanished into the unremitting black of his expression, against which the tracery of his snow-white whiskers was as delicate as the strokes of Chinese lettering.

"Hey, my cat's cuter than this one," Temple concluded, unbending.

Cleo smiled with weary recognition. "That's why we have a household-pet category; everyone says that. This fellow was a stray under a death sentence at the animal pound when his trainer picked him up. Temperament's the thing when it comes to on-camera cats. Would your cat do well under lights?"

"I don't know. He's pretty laid-back when he wants to be, especially on my best silk dresses." Temple eyed the catatonic Maurice again. "Do they give them tranquilizers?"

"Strictly forbidden," Cleo said, shocked, "At least at cat shows, I don't know what they do on camera."

"Probably coax this fellow to perform for pellets of Free- to-be-Feline," Temple speculated glumly. "That's probably what Maurice, the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy cat, does cartwheels over. My cat won't touch the stuff."

"Free-to-be-Feline is a lot better for him," Cleo said sternly, moving on down the row.

A shriek of alarm halted both women in their tracks, Cats' ears flattened all around them. A second shriek--this one more a horrific wailing--echoed through the concrete vault.

Cleo was running toward it.

"What's happening?" Temple asked breathlessly, her tote bag banging against her ribs and hip and her high heels as brittle on the concrete as sleet.

Cleo turned as she ran, her half-glasses pummeling the glitzy leopard face on her chest. "l hope it's not-- Golly, that's the direction of Peggy Wilhelm's setup!"

Other people were rushing toward the screams. Cleo and Temple were at the head of a pack. Temple glimpsed cats milling in their ruffle-draped cages, cats crouched in cage corners, giving low, eerie growls. Cats . . . hissing.

It wasn't hard to tell who Peggy Wilhelm was. She was the buxom, brown-haired woman clutching a semi-naked cat, pacing like a tiger in front of her cages with a face frozen in shock and outrage.

"What happened?" Cleo demanded as soon as she and Temple made an abrupt halt.

The distraught woman thrust the animal toward her and Temple as mute evidence, then just shook her head.

"Oh, my . . ." Cleo's face wrinkled in consternation and denial.

"What's wrong with her Sphinx?" Temple asked in a low tone.

"That's the problem," Cleo said. "Her cat isn't--wasn't --a Sphinx, it's been--"

"Shaved!" Peggy Wilhelm wailed, pacing like a bereaved mother cradling her lost child.

Temple studied the strange form. Along the hairless backbone and midsection, the cat resembled the Sphinx she had seen earlier, but it also reminded her of a Siamese with blanched paws that had been given a one-two pass with a U.S. Army hair clipper.

"What . . . was it?" she asked Cleo discreetly.

Not discreetly enough to escape Peggy Wilhelm's outraged ears. "A Birman," she wailed. "She was perfect. She could have been a contender, Grand champion."

Crooning cat people gathered around, their faces studies in helpless sympathy.

"Has she been hurt otherwise?"

Peggy hadn't thought to look. She had only seized her violated car and clutched it as close as possible. She examined the narrow legs, the stomach, and the face. The shaving job was not impeccable, leaving ridges here and there reminiscent of what Temple had been told was a curly-coated Rex.

A two-inch-wide swath denuded the top of the head to the tail tip; another crude slash narrowed the cat's middle like a cinch belt.

"No cuts, thank God . . . but she's out of competition for at least a year."

"Sounds like spite." Cleo said reluctantly. "Or rivalry."

"When did it happen?" Temple asked.

Peggy slowly replaced the cat in its cage, latched the door, and then regarded the cluster of people. Temple's interrogation seemed to have a calming effect.

"I don't know," she answered. "I set up at seven this morning, then brought Minuet and the others in. After that, I had to leave to help my aunt with her morning feeding--"

"Your aunt has a baby?" Temple couldn't help interrupting. Peggy Wilhelm herself looked well past fifty.

"Feeding of the cats, of course," Peggy explained irritably.

"She's too old to handle it herself. Anyway, I just got back and . . . that's what l found."

"What are they supposed to look like?' Temple wondered.

Peggy stepped away from the cage behind her to reveal a blue-eyed beauty with long, cream-colored fur, pristine-white feet and the soft, lavender-gray markings of a lilac-point Siamese on muzzle, tail and legs.

"Oh." Temple was in love again. It was a good thing she was already committed to Midnight Louie, unpedigreed nobody that he was, or she'd go home with a cat breeder's ransom in exotic purebreds, at least the long-haired variety.

"Such a shame," she said with new understanding.

Peggy Wilhelm just shook her head. "I had that coat brushed and powdered to sheer magic."

"Then the . . . assault had to have happened after you left at--"

"Eight or so,"

"--and now." Temple consulted her wristwatch, then the onlookers. "How many people were here between eight and ten-twenty this morning?"

Scattered answers came.

"A couple dozen, but we were all involved at our cages."

"Most of us were coming and going."

"Who was closest to Peggy's cages?" Temple asked. An awkward silence held while folks figured this out, and also figured out if saying anything would incriminate themselves or a neighbor.

"I was grooming my Smoke Persians at the end of the row," a large woman in an orange-velour sweat suit volunteered.

The vast majority of breeders were women, but not all of them.

"Are the cats' cages arranged according to breed?" Temple wondered next.

"No," Cleo said. "It's more interesting for visitors if the cats are intermixed."

"And probably more diplomatic to keep direct competitors from seeing each other's animals," Temple added.

"Would anyone notice someone who shouldn't be here messing with the cats?"

Heads shook in concert. Cleo took it on herself to explain again. "Everybody's focused on their own cats, their own cages, on getting everything ready. An astronaut in full gear could walk in here and de-whisker every untended cat in sight. We'd never notice."

Temple sighed. "Wouldn't the cat cry if it was being suddenly shaved by a stranger?"

Peggy Wilhelm shook her grizzled, tight-curled head. "These animals are trained to be groomed and handled--both by owners and strange judges."

"What can we do?" a tall, thin young woman in a red knit sweater asked.

"Nothing," said Peggy. "Now, just watch each other's stands so it doesn't happen again."

"Great." A tall man in a plaid sports shirt grimaced. "We don't even open until five P.M. tonight. Maybe we should start a crime-watch patrol, any volunteers?"

"Good idea!" Cleo seconded.

Cat people moved away in an animated clump, discussing self-defense plans.

Temple eyed the skinny, shaved cat in the cage. "Somebody must really hate cats to do this."

"Or me," Peggy Wilhelm put in bitterly.

"It does look like a rival, doesn't it?" Cleo asked.

Peggy nodded. "Those phone calls were a warning. Maybe I should have stayed out of the show. Now I'll have to be here all the time the cats are present. I don't know who will take care of Aunt Blandina's cats."

All three shook their heads in downcast contemplation of the quandary, and its cause.

The abused Birman lifted a pale, unshaven forepaw and began to lick it.

"Maybe I could do it," Temple was horrified to find herself saying. She abhorred a vacuum in volunteering. "Just twice a day all right?"

Peggy Wilhelm was less than ecstatic. "Who are you? What do you know about cats?"

Cleo made a hasty introduction, and then added. "One reason I specifically wanted Temple to handle the cat show publicity is that she's been involved in crime at similar events before. She found the corporate cats that were kidnapped at the American Booksellers Convention last Memorial Day, not to mention a dead editor and several dead strippers at the Goliath competition last month--"

"Look," Temple interrupted in the interests of not sounding like the Typhoid Mary of murder, "I didn't 'find' the strippers' bodies; just the editor's, and that was enough."

"But can you feed cats?" Peggy Wilhelm wanted to know with the severe face of a wet nurse handing over a charge.

"I've got only one, but he's nineteen pounds, so I guess I do all right."

"What kind is he?"

"Alley,"

"Oh." So much for Louie, "I guess you could do it. I'll call Aunt Blandina and tell her you'll be over this afternoon.

She lives only a few doors from me, on Sequaro."

Temple pulled her fat organizer clutch out of her tote bag and wrote down the aunt's address and phone number, as well as Peggy's.

"Maybe we can talk later about the phone calls," she said, putting away her arsenal of information.

Peggy Wilhelm nodded while eyeing the new, punk-look Minuet at her pathetic grooming ritual. "I've got to find a sweater for the poor dear before she catches her death." Her eyes narrowed with fervor. "If I ever find out who did this to her, I'll shave them where it hurts!"

Chapter 9

Nunsense Call

Our Lady of Guadalupe was what its name implied: an aging parish in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Matt watched skin tones on the street deepen as he neared the pale adobe tower he had steered by for the past few blocks.

Oleanders and rose bushes bordered the fronts of little old houses not much bigger than shotgun shacks. He hadn't heard that term until he had left Chicago for sunnier regions. It specified homes so small that a shotgun fired from the front door wouldn't expand its pattern enough to scratch so much as a sill before it exited the back door.

These sleazy, peeling constructions of slat board, along with the occasional stucco, wouldn't have survived a Chicago winter, nor would their residents. But warm climates allowed substandard housing to stand longer than it should; heat couldn't kill as easily and obviously as cold could.

Black wrought iron underlined a house here and there, usually in the form of burglar bars, though it was often for looks rather than for security. One enterprising homeowner had upended a claw-footed porcelain bathtub in his front yard, painted its inside the saccharine shade of bright blue that can never be found in nature and represents the Virgin Mary for some reason, and installed a plaster stature of her, head and eyes downcast modestly to the left, hands folded prayerfully over her flat breast. Despite the cheapness of the plaster icon, the sun carved graceful shadows into the folds of her long, gathered gown.

Yard ornaments--pots and vases and birdbaths and donkeys burdened with baskets of geraniums---scattered over the gravel and dirt like a pecking flock of gaudy, migrating terra cotta. Huddled under the dubious shade of ramshackle carports or a stand of scraggly trees stood hulks of Detroit's best---past tense. Twenty--year-old red Monte Carlos bleached rust-pink rubbed fenders with jazzed-up brown or Yellow Firebirds. Some newer-model cars tricked out with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror had been restyled into bad-looking low-riders.

Matt heard the distant squeal of kids--lots of them. This grade-school playground would not be the vast, open area of asphalt he remembered from his Chicago school days, but a shaded, dusty patch with kids in clusters under the tree bordered edges, where the worn swing sets and jungle gyms creaked and shook to lazy users in the becalmed desert heat.

His walk had worked up a light sweat that evaporated as soon as it appeared. He paused before he came to the church, a low, cream-painted structure with a rusty tile roof, its single, square bell tower rising three stories on one side.

The church was planted deep in the neighborhood. Houses stretched away from it with hardly a demarcation line. The school and playground must sit on the other side, Matt decided as a harsh bell clanged and the screeching voices softened into giggles that cooled to faint laughter, then silence.

The houses nearest the church were obviously the oldest and largest in the neighborhood. Matt studied them, trying to pick out the convent and failing. In Chicago, churches were as obvious as dump trucks: large, lumbering edifices that called attention to themselves, established ted brick or gray stone behemoths with naves that aspired to cathedral heights. Rectory and convent were built to match, impressive structures that parish children passed with hushed giggles.

Here there was no institutional signal, just a lot of vaguely mission-style little houses, and then, the Big House. Matt nodded as he stared at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a low box with a pointed roof and that one plain tower. More churches should be built in such proper proportion to the people they serve.

Sister Seraphina had given him the address, but he headed to the two-story adobe building that he figured was the convent, and then looked for a number. It would be interesting to see if his Catholic grade-school instincts were intact after all these years.

When the address numbers got large enough to read, he saw he had been right. Matt smiled to himself. Maybe the lack of yard bric-a-brac had given the place away. It was too neat, too stripped down to the essentials. No matter the architectural style, every convent had that in common, that bare, clean, dustless feel. Rectories, on the other hand, no matter how modern, always broadcast an air of fusty, bachelor disorder on the brink of becoming unmanageable.

He entered a small courtyard edged in sun loving, white-and-magenta periwinkles and rang a doorbell.

Despite its modest exterior, the place was large enough to swallow all sound of the bell. Waiting at a convent door always felt like waiting for the Wicked Witch to open the Halloween portal: which nun would come? Grade-schoolers at St. Stanislaus all had their favorites--and their mortally feared.

The broad wooden door swung open with an energetic swoosh that sucked hot air past Matt. A figure was framed in shadow.

"Matthias, Sister Seraphina greeted him with robust delight. "Come in."

Just before he stepped over the threshold, an unseen lurker darted past, a dusty yellow cat big enough to tap his knee with the tip of its tail.

"Peter!" Seraphina admonished in a fond tone no thirteen-year-old hardened case would heed. "You're a pretty pushy gatekeeper. Did he get hair all over you?" she asked Matt. She turned to conduct him to the visitors' parlor, and

Matt found himself expecting something: the billiard-ball click of oversizcd rosary beads. But that memory came from his earliest grade-school days. Nuns no longer wore robe and rosary and wimple. Still, Sister Seraphina had been in uniform--a black habit with white touches at the headdress---when he had made her acquaintance in the fourth grade. He secretly dreaded seeing her without her charismatic costume.

He had more than twenty Years to bridge; seeing her aged would be bad enough.

The dim hall was paved with quarry tile. She led him to a small room floored in the same dull red color, with interior wooden shutters drawn against the heat.

"Sit down. Would you like some lemonade? Iced tea?"

"The tea would be great."

She was gone before he'd had a good chance to look at her. Perhaps she felt the need of intervening props as much as he did. Her voice's sprightly tone had been familiar, but forced.

He looked around, and then sat down in a carved wooden chair of mismatched Queen Anne-Hispanic style, upholstered in maroon velvet. Convent furniture was never new, if a convent had been constructed in the fifties or sixties; its furnishings had once been new: blond, uncompromising lines that hinted at the Scandinavian but were too plain to pretend to a style that required a capital letter. If the convent was older than thirty or forty years, it was filled with hand-me-downs from the wealthier parishioners or some ecclesiastical rectory.

This chair appeared to be an escapee from the latter, but in one factor it was the quintessential convent chair, whatever its age: it was bare-armed and -legged, and hard-seated to sit on.

Still, it suited this warm climate and this Spanish atmosphere. Sister Seraphina did not.

She returned quickly with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses, a saucer of fresh-cut lemons and a sugar bowl with spoon. Matt rose to help her install it on a desktop, then captured a lemon slice for his tea. The small wooden table next to his chair had no such frippery as a coaster, but it did have a doily with a solid center and an elaborate, airy edging that stood up like a clown's ruff. On this he placed his sweating glass, which now echoed his own condition, and confronted the past in the person of Sister Seraphina O'Donnell.

She was summing him up as well, he saw, so they simply sat and did so until her mouth folded tight to avoid a laugh, and he sipped his tea, Strong as shellac. He squeezed more lemon into it.

"You haven't changed," he began.

"All my ex-students say that," she noted complacently.

"They assume I must be ninety by now."

"You look great," he said.

"How do you know? How could you tell what I looked like before with the habit?"

"Do you miss it?"

She paused, and then shook her head. At least she still wore glasses, the frames as effacing as ever. Her hair was white with accents of gray, permed and cut into the modest Social Security, old-ladies' style that is easy and inexpensive to maintain.

She wore a silver crucifix inset into a largish wooden cross on a thin chain around her neck. Other than that, her dress was ordinary, though Matt thought he detected a thrift-shop look; A-line khaki cotton skirt; short-sleeved, blue-striped polyester blouse; low-heeled, sensible shoes that might not be real leather; no rings, no earrings.

For a moment, the outfit seemed oddly familiar. He puzzled to place it, and then smiled: a dead ringer for Lieutenant C.R. Molina's low-key, workaday garb. Trust a nun to find another uniform when her order did away with the dramatic medieval habit she was used to.

He took two more sips from his sweaty glass, and then set it down on the circle of doily for good. "So, Our Lady of Guadalupe isn't as tranquil as it looks. How did you get here?"

"Retirement," she said with a curl of her mouth.

Matt was startled to note the faint, pale sheen of lip gloss. As happened to many older women, white hair brought out the color of her eyes, hazel-green. The deep-rose lip gloss complemented the new color scheme. It wasn't vanity, merely a desire to look reasonably healthy at an age when everyone wrote you off.

"So many parochial schools in Chicago have closed," she went on. "The convents have become old-nuns' homes. At least here I can do 'community organization' work. But I'm out of the teaching game, and high time."

"Is Saint Stan's school closed?" Matt asked.

"Not yet. But there aren't nuns enough to staff it. All lay teachers nowadays, and even though they still accept substandard wages, it costs so much to keep it going . . ." She shifted on her chair, a hard-seated side chair with faded brocade upholstery. "Our Lady of Guadalupe is in the midst of a major fund drive to underwrite some renovation, and the grade school. It's vital to the parish, to the neighborhood?'

He nodded. His thigh muscles were beginning to feel the strain of the demanding chair. Catholic churches depended on their parishioners to underwrite everything --~if the parish were poor, it was endangered. St. Stan's served a large, working-class neighborhood, but everybody who was Polish was Catholic back then, and the widows' mites poured in until the statue of the Virgin loomed above a mass of shining candles.

"What's the problem?" he asked.

She fidgeted again on her chair, "I know you work nights and getting you out in the afternoon is an imposition, Matthias--"

"It's no trouble," he assured her, adding, "and I go by just 'Matt' now."

Her face froze. The ex-teacher was about to insist that the student would be called by his full and formal name. But those days were gone with the habit and the wimple.

"Matt," she repeated meekly. He wasn't fooled. "Well, Matt-- she enunciated the terminal t's like a machine gun spitting bullets "--some very odd things are happening since our fund drive began."

"Odd?"

"Disturbing," she corrected herself. She folded her hands on her lap--khaki-colored hands, plain, the nails virtually unnoticeable. "There have been noises outside the convent at all hours, even lights in the neighborhood, flashlights, all of it bright enough or loud enough to awake us, and alarm us."

"Kids," he diagnosed quickly. "Probably just hanging out, but it could be gang activity, or drug deals."

"Right next to the church?"

"Sorry, Sister Seraphina, but kids these days would do drugs in the sanctuary if they thought it was a safe place."

"It used to be." she commented sadly, "All those adorable little altar boys, growing up to be lookouts or drug runners."

"Not all," he said.

She smiled at him, then sobered. "That's not the worst. We've been getting strange telephone calls, At night."

"You mean the harassment may be specific?"

"It is now." She paused for emphasis. for dramatic effect, a teacher making sure her most sluggish student was getting this. "Sister Mary Monica has been receiving obscene phone calls for five days."

Matt winced. Nuns, especially old nuns, really were elderly innocents. Reared in a day when proper young girls were spared even the mildest oath, much less four-letter words, they had lived in a world that kept modern cruelties at bay. That did not mean they were completely naive, for most of them were wise and worldly enough to survive change, even to their ancient orders. But obscenity and its effects were not dulled by modern usage. It was a weapon among them, it amounted to attack. That made Matt wonder who would be sick enough to bedevil--and that was the right word--these old women in this particularly savage way.

"A random caller," he suggested.

Sister Seraphina shook her curly, poodle-like head.

"Again and again, often several times a night?"

"Sometimes these people like the reaction they're getting.

The first call is random, and then they have your number."

"Sister Mary Monica is . . . somewhat deaf." Sister Seraphina conceded. "She doesn't have her hearing aids in at night, so she was slow to realize the nature of the calls. That might have . . . encouraged the caller. She hung up as soon as she realized that she didn't understand the conversation, of course, but he still calls back," Seraphina went on.

"Is anyone else at the convent getting these calls?"

Seraphina shook her head as she rose. "I'll get her so you can ask her any questions you might think of." She hesitated on the threshold. "It will take a while. Mary Monica isn't as fast on her feet as she used to be."

Seraphina was. She whisked away, leaving Matt to inspect the mostly bare walls. A crucifix was impaled to the plaster above the desk, on which the pitcher--not opaque green plastic, but real glass--sweated profusely. He heard the distant drone of an air-conditioning plant and reflected that it must have been installed after the place became a convent, for surely it had begun as a private house, a large private house, almost hacienda size.

Hard to imagine the raucous shriek of a perverted phone call disturbing this place of prayers and domestic calm, this last oasis for lives of long service. Yet Matt smiled at the notion of a misguided obscene phone-caller fixating on a deaf, elderly nun. It revealed the act for what it was: so unsexual, so pathetic.

Rustles and shards of sentences down the hall announced the stately arrival of Seraphina with the elderly nun. He really didn't want to meet Sister Mary Monica; he had nothing to ask her. Apparently Sister Seraphina had thought he should see her, and what Sister Seraphina thought--now as then--was what was done.

He stood and went to the threshold to assist her.

The first thing across it was the faded red-rubber tip of a wooden cane as plain and solid as a church pew. Black, lace-up shoes followed with a floor-hugging shuffle. He wondered for the hundredth time where on earth old nuns got those ancient oxfords nowadays; there must be a Perpetual Supply House of Sisterly Shoes, similar to salvage stores that stock an eternal supply of military mufti.

Swollen ankles and shapeless calves were encased in the elastic pumpkin-tan of support hose, the opaque kind that looked like a mask used by a burn-victim burglar with an I.Q. of twelve.

Matt suddenly realized that he had never paid such close attention to a nun's legs before--no matter her age--and quickly brought his eyes to her face, blurring past an expanse of tiny navy and yellow flowers, a cotton duster with a snap front.

Her face was even more seamed than he had expected, though unrealistically flesh-tinted plastic was affixed to her ears like Silly Putty. The hearing aids. She was stooped, one gnarled and liver-spotted hand curled around the sturdy curve of the cane's handle. A large but flat wart rested near one eyebrow, whose thin, rakish gray hairs sprang every which way. Her eyes were the pale, gray-blue of great age, as tremulous as moonstones underwater, a late-life shadow of baby blue.

The anger that rocked him nearly blasted him back a step.

He was used to voices on the phone, long-distance victims, never viewed, and only heard. He never had to face them.

Afraid to say anything lest his voice shake with fury, Matt bent to take the old woman's elbow and lightly guide her along the uneven tiled floor. She arrived safe at his former chair and settled gingerly on the edge of the velvet seat, as if afraid that she might stick and never rise if she settled more fully into anything at her age. Which was--? He glanced at Sister Seraphina, who smiled.

"Sister Mary Monica is ninety-three," she said without his asking. "She can't understand when we speak in normal tones, which is just as well. She's vain about her age and would be in quite a pet if she knew I'd revealed such personal information. ' '

"This man--it is a man!"

Sister Seraphina shrugged. "One would think so, yet Sister can't really hear well enough to tell."

"How does he call only her?"

"We don't number enough to have a convent switchboard; there are only six of us here. Each nun has her own number on the phone in her room. We'd run ourselves ragged otherwise, and it seemed a modest luxury."

"Of course," Matt stared perplexedly at the tiny old woman. He bent down to make sure she could see his face, his mouth when it moved.

Sister Seraphina introduced him, her tones bellowing deep from the diaphragm with the ease of a nun who had been able to call an entire hollering playground to silence after a recess.

"This is Matthias, Mary Monica, my former student."

Sister Mary Monica tilted a hearing aid toward her friend, but kept her watery eyes on Matt. "A darling lad," she pronounced at the top of her lungs with the merest lilt of Irish brogue. "Are you a detective?" she asked him with great interest.

Matt almost laughed. Her deafness was an invisible cloak of defense the caller could not penetrate. His "victim" was pleased by the attention the incidents brought her way.

"No. I'm a counselor," he said, producing his own loud but deepest voice.

He watched her eyes read his mouth and her own mouth pantomime the right word. Coun-sell-or. She paused for a moment. "Like Perry Mason? I like Perry Mason. But I don't like Hamilton Burger."

Good old Ham Burger, the guy you always loved to hate on the oldest Perry Mason reruns. Matt smiled.

"Not that kind of counselor," he said slowly. "I work over the phone."

Her eyes were blank.

"Telephone," He pantomimed a rotary movement, then realized that most phones nowadays were push-button.

Still, she was old enough to get the idea. Her head nodded in long, slow swoops and rises. "Telephone," She pointed to Matt. "You call?"

"No! People call me for help."

She nodded and smiled again. "Maybe I should give your number to the one who calls me. Seraphina says he is a bad man, but he has never hung up on me."

Matt realized another thing. Her poor hearing had made telephone conversation difficult. Only family or close friends would have the stamina to try it, and she would have few of either left. Here was a caller who refused to go away, no matter how much of the conversation she missed. In a way,

Sister Mary Monica and her obscene phone-caller were a match made in heaven.

He straightened and turned to Sister Seraphina. "How did you figure out the nature of the calls?"

ln answer, she bent down to the old nun. "Tell Matthias about what the man says, Sister."

"Such a nice name, Matthias," Sister Mary Monica beamed at Matt, "The disciple who replaced Judas. A very fortunate and redemptive name, young man, Man. Oh, yes. Well, he must be very fond of philosophers."

"Philosophers," Matt didn't have to think to raise his voice; shock did it for him.

She nodded and gazed at her cane handle, "Always talking about philosophers, Mainly, Immanuel Kant. Kant this and Kant that. A learned young man."

Matt, puzzled, gazed at Sister Seraphina, who met him with a limpid look. He was about to repeat the philosopher's name--Kant--when . . .

"I see," said Matt. "And how do you know that he is a young man, Sister?"

Her head reared away as she gave him a don't-kid-me look.

"All of them are young men to me now, Matthias." Her laugh was high and thin, but much relished.

"What else does this caller talk about?"

"Oh . . . animals."

"Animals?"

She nodded. "He is a great animal lover, which is fine, because we have Peter and Paul here, you know. And many cats next door as well. He is always speaking of the pussies."

She paused. "And I believe-it is too bad you are not a detective, young man, because I think this is a clue! Like on Perry Mason." She invoked the name of Perry Mason as another nun would St. Peter's. She leaned forward and fixed him in the glare of her watered-down eyes, now fierce with conviction. "I think that he is a breeder of dogs by trade, because he is always talking of bitches."

The last word, loudly uttered, hung in the quiet convent air. Matt, appalled with himself, choked the desire to laugh.

Then he turned sober. True innocence was a weapon that could confound the sickest evil.

Sister Seraphina smiled as she had used to when a pupil performed with stunning excellence. "That was splendid testimony, Sister, worthy of a witness for Perry Mason. Now you must rest."

Sister Mary Monica looked at Matt. He knew he made an excellent audience. She pursed her lips, reluctant to leave the witness box, this fine, carved chair so judicial-looking.

"Come along." No one resisted Sister Superfine at her most persuasive--and her most commanding.

Once again the snail-slow progress was made; once again

Matt cooled his heels. While Sister Seraphina escorted her charge back to her room, he mused on the silence and respected it, respected a place whose clock kept the time of its oldest and most frail resident. Outside, in the distance, the Strip was heating up for the four-o'clock traffic jam, when it turned into a slow-moving river of hot metal and hotter tempers, while neon by the mile and the million candle watt was warming up in the wings.

Here . . . here was a million miles away. He sipped his ice-cold, strong tea.

When Sister Seraphina returned, he almost started.

"She's lucky," he said.

"No," she returned, "Saintly, I think, in the old sense of true innocence. I wish I had it; I wouldn't know what you asked, or that these calls are indeed obscene."

"I'm surprised you do," he admitted.

She was too old to flush, but he sensed the impulse. "Oh, Matthias, you would be surprised at what old nuns know nowadays. At least the very oldest are spared. We are a dying breed, you know, an extinct species. I wonder that anyone would bother to harass us."

He frowned, "Perhaps another of a dying breed. What about changing the number?"

"We did. Three days ago."

"And--"

"The calls continue. And they're from someone who knows our routine. They invariably come after final prayer."

"Maybe someone in the neighborhood can see your lights go out."

"Not the way these old houses are constructed, to keep out the day's heat. They tend to be shadowed inside."

He glanced to the heavy wooden shutters at the window and nodded. Just then, a thump sounded outside the window. Seraphina leaped up from her chair, a grim look of teacherly discipline on her face. She had never resorted to the ruler, but her voice could be equally as sharp a weapon.

He moved quickly to the window and jerked the shutters wide. A pale yellow cat sat on the wide adobe sill, blinking sagely.

"Oh . . . Paul!" Seraphina bustled over to crank the window ajar enough to admit a fairly fat cat. "He is such a roamer, you know. Off on ecclesiastical missions, no doubt, to the mice and lizards instead of to the Romans and the

Ephesians,"

"Peter and Paul," Matt noted. "I don't suppose you allow Peter to go by 'Pete'."

She quashed a smile. They watched the cat loft to the floor with a soundless grace, then stalk over to the desk where the beverages reposed.

Matt saw Sister Seraphina crank the window tight again, and draw the shutters. Non-Catholics often envisioned convents as mysterious, cloistered, closed-up places. The reverse was true, but not here at Our Lady of Guadalupe lately. Sister Seraphina O'Donnell, that formidable teacher and now community organizer, was scared.

"I'm not the police," he said suddenly.

"We don't need the police," she said with swift repudiation. "We dare not have the police," she added more softly.

They stood by the sealed window like coconspirators, their voices softer than shadow.

"Is there a reason?"

She nodded, her face utterly grim, all business. "A good reason, Matthias." He didn't challenge her unconscious reversion to the old form. Besides, she was invoking the boy he used to be, or perhaps the man he had become, and had ceased to be.

"A very good reason," She repeated, real grief in her sharp eyes. "Father Hernandez, our pastor. There is nothing he can do."

"Of course the parish priest must be upset by this sort of thing, but surely' "

"Nothing, He is not . . . fully competent."

"What do you mean?"

"He does nothing lately but sit in his office at the rectory."

"How old is he?"

She laughed, a bit bitterly, "Oh, not so old. Not like us in the convent, Perhaps forty-seven. And he was fine, and functional, until two weeks ago."

"How could a man decline so completely in such a short space?"

"You ought to know, Matthias."

Her eyes probed deep, spoke volumes, chapter and verse, more than her mouth said. He felt as if he reared back from her words, but he had moved only mentally, into the past.

"I see," Matt said in a flat, nonjudgmental voice. "He drinks, a whiskey priest."

Black humor lit Sister Seraphina's pale green eyes.

"Tequila," she corrected primly. "He is, after all, a proper Hispanic."

Chapter 10

Cat Heaven

Temple sat in the Storm at the curb, gazing past its sleek aqua nose at the neighborhood.

This was one of the oldest parts of Las Vegas, so old that it had slowly ceded to becoming a Hispanic enclave. Most of the homes here didn't even have central air conditioning.

Ancient, wheezing, window models hung askew along the sides of the battered old houses, looking as abandoned as the cars stripped down to bare metal that lay marooned with empty fender sockets.

Temple sighed and gritted her teeth. Perhaps her Girl Scout tendency to volunteer had taken her too far this time.

"P.R." was not short for "Pet Reliever." What had she gotten herself into? The sun would soon be slinking behind the Spectre Mountains, and this neighborhood probably wasn't even safe for stray cats.

She studied the house again: a sprawling, distinctive, two-story Spanish place with a Hollywood twenties air, its pale stucco walls etched with the shadows of ancient bushes and pines planted when the only neighboring structures likely had been the church down the block and scattered houses on half-acre plots. The home had been expensive before all the ticky-tacky, ramshackle post-war housing had sprouted up just as Bugsy Siegel was doing gross things to the Strip, like opening a hotel as flashy as its name, the Flamingo.

A promise is nonreturnable goods, Temple reminded herself, fanning her Pink Panther sunscreen over the dashboard, gathering her tote bag from the passenger seat and springing open the driver's-side lock.

She emerged into still, searing heat, locked the door and slammed it. The street was quiet, almost too quiet. She began the long stroll up the flagstone walk outlined by a fringe of weeds that scratched her bare ankles.

"Merow."

The demanding voice belonged to a beige cat with a ringtail, who materialized beside her and began soothing her weed-whipped ankles with its furry sides as it wound past her calves.

"You must be one of my hungry customers," Temple speculated. "Come on down!"

It followed her, whether by invitation or inclination, one could never tell with a cat.

An overgrown courtyard--desert scrub--led to a shaded, coffered front door. No doorbell. Only a cracked wood sign warning: "No Solicitors."

Reluctant, she lifted the heavy black-iron knocker of vaguely Spanish design and let it fall on the metal back plate. She never knew how hard or how soft to bang a knocker, or if she could trust it to be heard, especially in these large, rambling houses. Now she had to decide how long she could wait in good conscience before trying again.

Waiting, something she was never good at, she changed her weight from foot to foot. At her ankles, the cat purred, drooling intermittently on her instep; luckily, the Claibornes had an indecently low vamp. At least Louie, no matter how hungry, didn't drool.

She finally gripped the knocker's smooth, warm metal--it was that hot on a Las Vegas September afternoon----again and had just lifted it when the door cracked preparatory to opening.

Clank! A feeble, interrupted knock. So she was announced to the suspicious face revealed by a sliver of Open door.

"Hi. I'm Temple Barr. Your niece, Peggy Wilhelm, asked me to come over and help you feed your cats."

"Why isn't Peggy here?" an elderly, suspicious voice asked.

"She had a . . . problem with one of her cats at the show and can't leave."

"Those dratted show cats. Not worth the powder they put on 'em, a shame to pamper those creatures when there are plenty of homeless cats to go around. Do you have a cat?"

"Sort of, He comes and goes."

"What's the name of Peggy's sick cat?" the old woman asked suddenly.

"Minuet!" Temple answered with alacrity, as if she were standing by a blackboard and someone like a teacher had demanded a right answer and she had better give it as if her life depended on it.

Open, Minuet, The door yawned almost wide enough to admit her. The yellow cat slithered through.

"Well, come in, then, Paul, too. No, Peter! We've got an extra mouth to feed, I see, so I can use help. I guess you're not a scam artist trying to bilk an old woman."

"No, I'm a P.R. woman."

"P.R., huh?" In the dim entry hall, the old lady turned to regard her and lifted an incredibly carved cane from the floor. It almost seemed that a long, thin totem was admonishing Temple. "Let's hope that stands for 'Pretty Reliable.' "

Humbled, Temple followed her guide deep into the bowels of the house. She had an impression of massive, old-fashioned furniture jousting the walls and each other, of magazines in table-high piles. Area rugs scattered hither and yon raised wrinkles to trip Temple's high heels, but not her hostess, who clumped through the clutter like a safari guide in darkest Africa.

Another impression took Temple by the shoulders and shook her. Pet odor: a thick, heavy aura composed of cat, litter box, shed fur, dander and sour milk--and a whole ozone layer somewhere near the ceiling of Tuna Breath, big time.

Temple struggled to breathe through her mouth and talk at the same time without sounding asthmatic. "How mandy cats do you have? I mean--" breath "--many."

"Oh, I don't know." A switch clicked. Overhead fluorescent lights flickered like heat lightning, then burst into artificial brightness.

They stood in an ancient kitchen that had battered wooden cupboards and a dangerously heaving quarry-tile floor. Newspaper clippings and notes covered every cupboard, and all of them fluttered from their Scotch-tape anchors like tattered sails under the lazy rake of an ancient ceiling fan. No expensive, computerized Casablanca models here. No Humphrey Bogart in a sweat-stained ice-cream suit, either, just counter-tops cluttered with bags and boxes of cat food, and cats, just cats on the floor. Cats atop the cupboards, Cats in the sink, Cats on the old olive-green refrigerator, Cats probably inside the old olive-green refrigerator.

Temple sneezed. "Oh, excuse me."

"You're not allergic to cats?" the old lady asked with even more suspicion.

"Not that I know of," Temple said, taking advantage of the light to study Peggy's aunt, Blandina Tyler. Never married, never sorry. Now eighty-four and still upright except for the aid of her cane. Canvas open-toed shoes over fish belly-pale white feet--oops! She was doing it again. Conducting a look-see from the feet up instead of vice versa. Bad habit.

Okay. White hair that had been that way for so long that it was tinged yellow as well as gray, gathered into a loose braid clown her back. One of those shapeless plaid cotton zipper-front housedresses old ladies who are not too svelte always wear. Comfortable and suitable for the mailbox out front or the nearest convenience store. Miss Tyler's hands were ridged with veins, but capable looking. Right now she had the cane hooked over one sinewy wrist and was tearing open a Yummy Tum-tum-tummy box.

"Stupid manufacturers, always make these boxes harder than Capone's safe to break into. And this is nothing compared to an ordinary aspirin bottle. I swear, it's a conspiracy to get old people off Social Security by having them get heart attacks trying to open these child-safe bottles. You can see who everybody cares about, and it isn't the 'aging population.' "

Temple hurried over to help, tripping on an assortment of rag rugs and lazy cats, but not fatally. She could tell that Blandina Tyler wasn't big on home safety.

"Say, kid, you can't do a thing with those fancy nails."

"You'd be surprised." Temple punctured the box's dotted line with a lacquered crimson thumbnail and ripped the top off, much to the amazement of Blandina Tyler, and perhaps to the round-eyed litter of Siamese kittens pictured in full yowl on the box cover.

"Put 'em in the foil pie tins you see around," Miss Tyler ordered gruffly.

To fulfill this simple instruction took about half an hour and many trips back to the kitchen to wrestle open other boxes. Miss Tyler took to leaning against a counter and watching Temple trot back and forth while eluding outstretched cats. For all the old lady's grumpy refusal of assistance, Temple guessed that she needed it.

Certainly a twice-daily run around the Tyler house--up- stairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber, bending and stooping, carrying and pouring--would match any aerobics routine in the city. Then came litter detail; in a word, box dredging. Miss Tyler used the clumping kind of litter, from which waste was removed with a slotted spoon. Carrying an empty plastic garbage bag like an out-of-stock Santa, Temple then made her obeisance at the foil roaster pans scattered as lavishly through the house as the feeding stations. By now, her nose was numb to all scents, and she was sneezing liberally from litter dust.

"Are you sure you haven't got a cold?" Miss Tyler asked narrowly on one of Temple's many unhappy returns to the kitchen. "l don't want my cats catching anything."

Temple studied the assembled felines, ranging from milling, meowing gangs to complacently dormant lay abouts. She blew out a stream of warm air to lift her short curls from her damp forehead, and then took another clattering run through the house. At least the rooms were air-conditioned. She spotted ventilation grilles in the old plaster walls and figured that Blandina Tyler, who apparently had lived here forever, had gone to the expense of having the house cooled.

"That's a good girl," Miss Tyler said in the tone a person uses to a docile animal when Temple returned to the kitchen, food box empty and all pie tins filled. "Sit down and have a ginger cookie." She indicated a table piled with magazines, and cats, that was draped in a yellow-checkered piece of vintage oilcloth.

Temple pulled a fifties' dinette chair over a tag rug as wrinkled as brain coral and three inconvenient cats' tails, and sat down gratefully. These shoes weren't made for walking, and especially not for running in the Feline Feeding Marathon.

Miss Tyler came over, limping a bit now that her cane was still swinging from her wrist, and offered an open cellophane package of those oblong store cookies with a lush layer of white icing. Temple hadn't had one since she was . . . well, knee-high to a kitchen stool.

"Thanks," she said, trying not to think of how many cats had been slobbering over the open bag.

Yet, as far as she could see, the house had been cleaned and dusted, if cluttered.

"Have you always had cats?" she asked.

Blandina Tyler leaned a weary hip against a chrome kitchen stool. With the weight off her feet, her hands were free to roam the Braille of the hand-carving on her cane, which they did with absent familiarity. Temple could tell that she loved that cane, that carving, almost as much as she must love her cats.

"No," the old woman startled her by saying. "I never intended to have a single one. I'd lived alone in this house for many years and was content to do so forever. Then some boys down the street came by one night making a racket to wake the dead, and they . . . threw a litter of kittens on my doorstep. Kittens they'd gotten drunk on beer."

Temple winced. She didn't want to hear what boys could do to cats--and kittens--because she'd always suspected it.

"A couple of them died." Miss Tyler said, her gnarled hands strangling the cane where it curved around to the head. "But four lived. After a while, the girls would come with their rescued strays. 'Please keep it, Miss Tyler, or with whole litters. 'They will go to the pound, Miss Tyler.' 'My brother is giving them marijuana, Miss Tyler.' 'She was hit by a car on the Big Street, Miss Tyler."

Temple looked around in awe. "All these cats were foundlings? Just by opening your door, you got so many?"

Miss Tyler nodded. "I was lucky. There were no relatives on my father's side, so I inherited this house and some substance. I could afford to take mangled cats to the vet. I could afford to have them neutered. I could afford to feed them. Motel cats that live on room-service trays; half-wild cats dumped in the desert scrub, Abused cats with cigarette bums on their bodies, with cut-off tails and ears and put-out eyes."

Temple winced again. She didn't think she could stand to hear what this old woman knew about boys' inhumanity to cats. Man's inhumanity to man, woman and child was bad enough.

"I took in a stray," she said, as if to prove she was doing her part. "He's a big bruiser-----over nineteen pounds. I can't keep him in, though. Sometimes I worry . . ."

"You should. Eat your cookie."

Both comments were stem. Both were to be obeyed. Temple nibbled on the cookie and her conscience. "I guess l should have him fixed."

"You should keep him in," Miss Tyler exhorted. "It is not safe out there." Her voice lowered to a crackling hiss of warning, "Particularly in this neighborhood, particularly around this house."

"Miss Tyler, you don't mean to say that someone could have it in for you because you rescued these cats?"

The old woman shrugged, letting her age-shrunken eves disappear into the sagging pouches of her skin. "I'm old. I live alone. I don't approve of how they like to entertain themselves. They resent me, and my cats. Sometimes someone calls and threatens to inform Public Health. Other times, someone just calls."

"Threatening phone calls?" Temple perked up. "You can report that."

"They can report me for too many cats. It all comes to nothing. The police won't believe either of us, they don't want to mess with a crazy old woman and her cats."

"But you don't have to just wait here like a sitting duck!"

She smiled and caressed her cane. "Too bad cats are not good watch dogs, hmm? But I couldn't bring a noisy, enthusiastic dog into their refuge. They prefer quiet and the company of their kind."

Temple looked around. Were so many cats kept so close happy together? They didn't look unhappy. And they were safe, as they certainly had not been just beyond these sturdy old doors. She could no longer smell the strong animal presence; it had become natural. This was their safe house, and they had a right to leave their scents upon it.

"That's a wonderful cane," she told the old woman.

Miss Tyler held it out into the cool, bright light. "Mexican made," she said proudly, "By an old wood-carver near Cuernavaca. I used to get around before I got so old, before I had all these cats. My last trip, he carved it for me, for luck."

Temple studied the strongly colored figures carved into the cane: parrots and donkeys, wagons and cacti, sombreros and coyotes. No cats. "The colors are hand-painted?"

"All hand-carved, hand-painted, No one does handwork like this anymore. If time must handicap me, if I must limp and lean, at least I will have a magical cane."

"And cats." Temple looked around again, smiled and finished the last of her ginger cookie. "You will have magical cats."

"Oh, don't let Father Hernandez hear you say that. He's down on my cats as it is. He is a serious man. He has no time for magic."

"Father Hernandez? Oh--from the church down the street. Does he object to having so many cats neat the church property?"

Miss Tyler snorted. "How could he? Do I object to the kids playing and yelling at recess day in and day out?" She pounded the cane tip on the floor for emphasis. "No. we have had a parting of the ways on theological grounds, Father Hernandez and myself."

"Theological grounds? You mean matters of dogma or conscience?"

"No, I mean matters of cats."

Temple looked down. Perhaps in theological circles, cats had become a subject of grave debate, such as how many cats could pirouette on the head of a pin.

Miss Tyler looked down--and around---to her sprawling, meowing pride of pussycats. "Father Hernandez," she said in dire tones, "will not concede that my cats will be waiting for me in heaven, and vice versa."

"Oh. Isn't that the standard position in most religions?"

"I don't know about most religions. I am a faithful Roman Catholic, always have been. My house has stood here longer than the church. Until now," she added grimly, "l planned to leave most of my estate to Our Lady of Guadalupe, with a bequest for the care of the cats, but since Father Hernandez has revealed his foolishness on the issue of pets in heaven, I changed my will. Everything goes to the cats now. If they can't be guaranteed passage through the pearly gates, I'll see that my house remains a paradise on earth for them."

"I'm sure Father Hernandez feels he must adhere to the letter of the law. Maybe adults tell children that their dead pets will go to heaven, but I don't think even kids believe it nowadays, any more than they believe in the Tooth Fairy."

"I don't care what kids believe in." The cane rapped the floor again. "All the animals were in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Why would God separate us from the very creatures He created with us--in heaven, where He can have everything just the way He wants it? If a sparrow cannot fall without His notice, how can He let so many cats suffer without any hope of an afterlife? Besides, there is no one I'd want to see in heaven, except these."

She surveyed her collection with approval.

Temple wasn't getting embroiled in a debate on cat heaven. She discreetly checked her watch. "My gosh, it's late, I've got to go!" jumping up was a bad idea.

Something underfoot squalled in protest. Obviously, the cats in this house weren't used to sudden movement, just then the phone rang. Miss Tyler sighed and began to push away from her stool.

"I'll get it," Temple offered with Girl Scout quickness.

But where was it? Follow the trail of the telephone trill. Miss Tyler was making sputterings of protest behind her, but they slacked off.

Temple found a supple phone cord emerging from behind the refrigerator, and traced it for the space of two more rings through tendrils of hanging ivy to the actual instrument's lair: atop the refrigerator. She grabbed the receiver and pulled it down to her ear.

"Hello," she answered a bit breathlessly, realizing she should have prefaced that with "Tyler residence" in case some elderly phone mate of Blandina's was puzzled by a new voice.

Apparently she sounded enough like Miss Tyler on that one hasty word to reassure the caller.

"S-s-s-sorry," he, she, it, whispered, the esses sharp and sibilant. "You'll be s-s-s-sorry."

Temple tore the phone from her ear as if scorched. She had just heard Peggy's famous Hissing Caller; only, Peggy hadn't said anything about outright threats.

Temple brought the receiver close and listened again.

Nothing to be heard now but the sinister ssssss on the open line, Either Miss Tyler was getting calls from an asthmatic masher or a defective radiator, both of them elderly.

"Hello?" Temple repeated in a high, breaking voice, making herself into a querulous old woman who didn't hear too well. Playing that sweet, elderly poisoner in the high-school class play, "Arsenic and Old Lace," hadn't hurt.

But the caller would not be lured into further words. The hiss continued, interrupted by a slurping, breathing sound.

Temple stretched up to hang up the phone, and then turned to poor Miss Tyler, who was watching her with sharp eyes.

"What did they want?" she asked.

"Not much. Peggy said that you'd been getting odd phone calls, just hissing on the line."

"You heard it, then!" she crowed. "I am not crazy. I have a witness. They've never called before when Peggy was here, or Sister Seraphina."

Temple checked her watch again, past seven. "When does Peggy come for the evening feeding?"

"Five or six, at the latest, I've never told her about the calls; no point, she wouldn't believe me. Nobody does."

"Then you've never had company this late before?"

Miss Tyler smiled. "You're right. Sister Seraphina is careful not to walk back to the convent after dark, though it's only a few doors. This neighborhood has changed." she added in disgust. "But the phones have never hissed before."

"Does it stop?"

"Only when I hang up,"

"Has . . . the caller ever said anything?"

Miss Tyler shook her head and used her cane to shoo away from her ankles the big cream tiger-stripe that had come in with Temple. "You've mooched enough, you big galoot. Gone over to the enemy, haven't you, Peter, even though they won't make room for you in the afterlife? And you with nine of 'em to go through, too!"

"What about the caller?" Temple repeated patiently. "Has he spoken?"

Miss Tyler shook her head again. "Nope, don't even know if it is a 'him,' though the phone people said most of these callers are. Hims, or kids. But I've never heard a word, just that strange hissing sound. I've heard noises, though, and seen lights at night, outside the house."

"You need to notify the police," Temple advised, wondering whether to mention that brief, unsettling phrase, you'll be s-s-s-sorry.

"Huh. I did, Many times. They ignore my calls now. They never find anything outside and I don't want 'em inside.

They might take my cats. No one believes me. NO one believes a crazy old woman who keeps a lot of cats."

"I believe you," Temple said stoutly--or was that Girl Scoutly? "I heard the hissing with my own ears. Do you have good locks on the house?"

The woman came slowly across the uneven floor, her cane prodding the yellow cat ahead of her. "Go on, go on. Usually it's his partner Paul who visits. Go on, Peter, you traitor. Just as in the New Testament, yellow through and through, until the cock crew thrice. And then they make you gatekeeper. Huh. No justice, not even in church." She eyed Temple as she came even with her. "Good locks and the windows are nailed shut. Still, it's scary, alone at night. And no one will come."

Temple waffled. Should she offer to stay? Here, with all these cats? Blandina Tyler wasn't her aunt; her problems weren't Temple's responsibility. She was already doing far more than she should. And the police were probably right; old ladies alone heard things, saw things, worried about things. Many became slightly paranoid, or even clinically so. Still, it was eerie that both the aunt and the niece were being methodically hissed at . . . or not so odd if you concluded that the aunt had been included in the harassment of the niece, or that it had something to do with a shaved Birman cat at the cat show.

Temple stood on the threshold with the ejected Peter and waited to hear Miss Tyler turn her lock and deadbolt. She spun to face the street, which was dark now. Her Storm was a huddled shape blacker than the evening. Only Peter by her legs was a reverse shadow, a beige pool of motion.

Then he took off, trotting around the side of the house.

Curious, Temple followed his pale form in the dark. Had she heard a dry twig snap? The ground was sandy and uneven. Her heels sank with every step, and she imagined them getting scuffed beyond repair. The oleander bushes clinging to the side of the house loomed as tall as Max Kinsella and scratched gently on the screens as she passed.

This was hopeless, she thought, stopping. The cat was no longer visible, and Temple felt lost in an unknown stretch of underbrush.

She retreated, coming at last to the front flagstones and clicking down them as softly as she could. Neighborhood kids--even gang members--could be tormenting Miss Tyler. She had taken their living toys away, hadn't she? Such kids, if you could call them that, would be coming out for the night now that it was dark, to hang out, drag race, do drug deals.

Scary stereotypes, but not unrealistic, Matt's self-defense instructions started droning in her head as she trotted for the safety of her car. Somewhere a sinister-sounding car motor throbbed, its muffler growling in the empty night like a lion roaring out a challenge over the African savannah.

Why were there so few streetlights along here? She glanced up to see the church's square tower black against a still backlit, charcoal-gray sky. Old neighborhood, that's why; now a poor neighborhood, with no clout for civic improvements.

She had her keys out before she reached the Storm, had unlocked it and hurled herself inside, locking the door again. Relieved, she started the car. The loud churn of the engine was an answer to the idling lion's roar down the block. Her headlights stabbed the night, announcing her presence. But she was secure in her metal island and, rolling into gear, glad to get away and now inhale--ah, air that was not cat-clogged.

She turned on the radio for the company of its lighted dial as much as for any music. But before she turned up the sound on Rod Stewart's latest hit cut, another, less upbeat sound replayed in her head: You'll be sorry.

Would she?

Chapter 11

Prize Pussycat

Here is my problem. I must find many cats. Normally, this is a piece of catnip for me. I am a first-class finder with a world-class sniffer, particularly if the subjects in question are cats. However, I have no desire to hit the most conspicuous locale for a surplus of cats, which is the animal pound.

The deliberately mysterious Karma has indicated that a large portion of Las Vegas's cat population is in danger of a blanket snuffing. The animal pound is too obvious a site of feline slaughter. Karma is anything but obvious. So, where do scads of cats gather? I do some walking around, which is conducive to thinking, and come up with nothing but the Cat's Meow retail establishment, a clearing house where wandering strays are promptly seized and made into other than what they were; that is, eunuchs. Some of the more successful products of such experiments end up as window-dressing, not for sale, but for display in their diminished state.

I am the first to admit that the feline gene pool is more than somewhat vast, not to mention mathematically staggering. Still, some sense must be used in determining who to turn off and who to leave free to turn on. I am not about to put my particular genes lower on the evolutionary ladder than any other dude's of my acquaintance. In fact, I have been thinking of making a sacrifice for my community by offering a donation to one of these sperm banks that specializes in providing material of a superior sort. My kind of street smarts is just what the species needs, but there is a foolish prejudice against dudes of a free-wheeling background.

I say nature, not nurture, makes the feline. These pampered purebred pussurns are not worth one of my used-claw sheaths. Where and when have they demonstrated their survival suitability? Dudes of my sort, of which there are damn few, excuse moi franpais, are just what the doctor ordered for my besieged and rapidly degenerating species.

Speaking of which, I encounter a bit of unforeseen luck. I have returned to the Circle Ritz and my dear little doll's apartment, and am reclining on one of my favorite spots, the latest edition of the day's newspaper (before Miss Temple Barr has had a chance to read it), when I begin to knead my powerful front limbs in the Sports Section of the Las Vegas Sun, which is my form of aerobic exercise these days.

In the process of this exertion, I inadvertently crinkle back the top pages. What to my wandering eyes should appear but the Classifieds section, the "Pets" part in particular. And what do I see advertised but another of these disgusting auction-block debacles for my kind: a purebred cat show at the Cashman Center. Now there is where a cacophony of cats could be found! What if some demented soul, some mad bomber, perhaps, was to strike while the clans were gathered, so to speak? Such a scenario would fit Karma's vague predictions of death on the grand scale.

I rise and go now, to enter an arena I hold in the greatest of contempt: a cat show. Let no one say that Midnight Louie does not give his all for his kind.

Within an hour after making my noble resolution, I am inside the Cashman Convention Center, crouching under an avalanche of empty cartons once home to bags of Pretty Paws scented, clumping cat litter. I do not know many cats, not even the clumping kind, that enjoy the aroma of mentholated grass, which is the after sniff that Pretty Paws leaves in its footsteps.

One would think that a prime specimen of rampant felinity like myself would be in-like-Flynn when it comes to crashing a cat show. I regret shattering any such delusions, but a cat show is perhaps the one venue most closed to one of my sort, for a very simple reason. These precious pussums--and I do mean "precious" in both senses of the word--are too valuable to be let loose on these vast premises. Hence any cat present is either caged or carried. Since neither condition appeals to me, I will indeed have to make like a feline Errol Flynn to storm this castle of kittydom without getting tossed into the nearest dungeon, i.e., a cramped cage with sanitary facilities that are much too conveniently close for one with my supersensitive sniffer.

So I peek out from under a Pretty Paws box and plot my course. At the moment, I shelter under the admissions table, where two-footed individuals are paying a pretty penny to get in and gawk at the creme de la creme of catdom. I eye the jungle of table legs surmounted by rows and rows of common cages hidden beneath enough pouts, swags and drapes to clothe Little Bo-Peep for a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta.

I am not fooled for a moment: froufrou does not transform a steel-mesh cage into a pleasant site for Midnight Louie. But speaking of pleasant sights, I notice one such resident not too far away: a long-haired platinum blonde who has nothing better to do than yawn, with no one in attendance. l decide to begin my interrogation there. During a lull of passing shoes, I tippy-toe over the concrete floor and hurl myself behind a drapery intended to conceal the under-table clutter. I shudder to see a basket brimming with torture equipment: combs, brushes, powder and--my nemesis--nail clippers. Nobody gets near these retractable shivs unless I am forced to use them. I also spot something I recognize only from my brief sojourns in various veterinarians offices: a battery-operated clipper equipped with jagged steel teeth. Such an instrument is frequently applied to dogs, who, through thousands of years of domestication, have allowed humans to modify their body hair like topiary trees, and to some unfortunate feline souls who found themselves in circumstances where they could not attend to their daily grooming and ended up in one solid snarl. If you have never seen a clipped cat, you have been spared a terrible sight; most of my kind look best in their dress coats.

Since l dislike spending much time in the vicinity of these fiendish so-called grooming instruments. I slink out from under the cloth and vault atop the table.

I find myself lace to lace with the strangest creature I have ever seen: it is long, lean and the color of a nice dollop of kidney-and-liver pabulum--a taste bud-terrifying brown-gray shade. And it is wrinkled all over. I would take it for a shar pei, an ugly customer of the canine persuasion that looks like everything but its skin shrank in the wash, except there is no mistaking the scent of a feline.

It hisses at my sudden appearance, and the sentiment is mutual. I feel I am looking in a mirror and seeing the image of a ghoul. If it were a girl ghoul, I might be tempted to linger, but this is definitely a dude, and nobody so naked should be gawked at without somebody collecting a tee, usually at a side show.

I return unceremoniously to the cool concrete floor and resume my two-yard dashes from tablecloth to tablecloth, avoiding human feet----and eyes--with my usual subtle and almost super natural skill. I told you that these genes were A-1!

Never have I encountered so many weird-looking members of my species. The people on parade here are no prizes. either, but luckily they are oblivious to ordinary dudes engaged in surreptitious spying when they have so many extraordinary dudes and dolls, to whose every sneeze and sniffle they are attuned.

I do encounter one rather ordinary, albeit famous, face. This is a big, brown-and-black kisser of the variety called tiger-striped. I have paused to admire the solid-brass nameplate on the cage when I glimpse the inhabitant, who is almost as large as I am.

"The notorious Maurice, I presume," I say.

His ears perk up. "What do you know about my notoriety?" he asks in a throaty growl.

"I have seen your television ads. Is that Yummy Tum-tum-tummy stuff any good?"

"Naw," says Maurice, yawning. "They have to spice it with tuna fish in order to get me to look like I'm eating it. And with all the time those commercials take, the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy is half rotted anyway."

I wrinkle my nose as it smelling a rat. "That spokes cat gig pay pretty well?"

"Perhaps, you would have to ask my trainer."

"You have a personal trainer? What is the matter? Has the Hollywood life made you forget how to leap, look and listen?"

"Fame---even without fortune----is better than warming a cage floor at the Big House."

"You have been on Death Flow, too?" I ask, impressed. Not too many of us end up with a commuted sentence, and our own series of television commercials to boot.

"Plucked from the jaws of death," he affirms in a bored tone.