Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 2

Bad Vibrissae

"Nice night," I greet Karma.

"Not really." She turns toward me, the moonlight silvering her turquoise-blue eyes in passing.

I admit that my salutation was not original, but that is no reason to turn contrary. However, I am well aware that Contrary is Miss Karma's middle moniker. I have no idea what her last name is; certainly it is not "Lark."

"I thought you did not take the night air," I go on.

"Evil intentions frisk through the dark like dust motes," she notes lugubriously.

"Yeah, the night is made for felony. Lucky for me, or I would not have a mission in life."

"And at this time of the year, evil turns blacker."

"Oh, come now! I happen to wear that much-libeled color."

"So?"

"So I am not so bad."

Karma is silent.

"At least you come when called," she says at last.

Before I can resent that comment, she turns tail on me--a long, bushy tail that rearranges my whiskers and tickles my nose--and plummets to the patio stones. I am expected to follow, so I do.

The French door is ajar. Once there, she gives me the flounder eye over her shoulder. Talk about cold fish! I am facing piranha on ice here.

"You will have to be silent within, and no clumsiness, Louie. I do not want Madame Electra awakened."

"Ninja is my middle name."

"Not in my address book." In she pads on her dainty white mittens and spats.

I eel through after her, only the door seems to have swung shut again, because my midsection forces it further ajar. As I pass through, the hinge gives a screech that would disconcert an owl.

"Sssst!" my guide hisses, pausing to slip a Dainty White under the French door and pull it shut.

I am sorry to report that she manages to close it without making a sound.

Not much light squeezes through the mini-blinds drooping shut on every window. Even the French doors have shirred drapes over their glassed sections. You would think Miss Electra Lark was practicing something illegal up here, given the blackout curtains.

"It is I," Karma whispers suddenly.

"I already know that, and then some!"

"I mean that it is for my sake that the mistress darkens the windows and doors. I am too sensitive."

Oh, Bast! (I should not take in vain the name of my kind's most ancient goddess, but I hate these dames that act as if they are made of mother-of-pearl and you are sandpaper.)

"Louie, please! Your negative emotions and Neanderthal attitudes rub my delicate psychic vibrissae the wrong way. You did not like it when my tail ruffled your whiskers. Please consider my spectral extensions, and contain your worst intentions, even mentally."

"Huh? You are saying that you got ghost whiskers?"

I see her fangy little smirk even in the dark.

"A primitive way of putting it, but then what else could I expect from one of your background and temperament? Yes, Louie, my vibrissae are sensitive to more than the mere corporeal."

More than the mere corporeal...It only takes me a minute to figure that out.

"You say you have a private line to dead things? Cannot do much for your appetite."

"My appetite has always been dainty."

That is a laugh. This babe is a long-fendered, cream-colored limo of a lady, even if her car radio is always tuned to the Spirit Channel.

"I think better without too much food," she adds. "You could do worse than to follow my example."

"No, thanks. Heretofore, I have had no wish to communicate with the hereafter, and I do not foresee that changing. So what does a highfalutin' High Priestess of Hocus-pocus want with a streetwise dude like me? Am I not simply too down-to-earth for the likes of you?"

"Indeed." She sighs. "But I cannot subject myself to outer infelicities, particularly at this hazardous time of year. I need an emissary."

"You need your furry little forehead examined! You think this is a hazardous time of year for you? How would you like to walk in my pads, wearing my--albeit handsome--risky cat suit every day? Popular as black cats are in holiday decorations, on the street they are bait for every sadistic kid and the occasional deranged Satanist. You should go out in my place these days, not vice versa."

"That lamentable bias against black may be real, Louie, but you have survived the dangers of the season for several years, though you have never confronted dangers of the spiritual sort before."

"Say you! You should know, my good feline, that I have seen the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson on more than one occasion."

"Oh, pooh! So have some humans who are barely psychic. A kitten could spot that tired old revenant at the age of two weeks with its eyes closed! I am not speaking of benign and paltry spirits, but of those too terrible to name. I am talking of an unholy conjunction of means, motive and opportunity. I am seeing death in the cards."

"Death? Or ... murder?"

"All death is the murder of hopes."

"All death is not against the law, not the law of this state anyway. People do it religiously every day. So all this staring at the moon and mooning about the penthouse in the dark is to say you think someone will be murdered? You could predict that every day in Las Vegas and be right."

"This will be a most... unnatural death."

"Are not they all? At least in my book."

"I see someone near to you involved."

"Miss Temple Barr? Another easy prediction. She has been up to her kneecaps in murder ever since I hid behind the corpse at the American Booksellers Association convention and helped her find her first body. Our association has been the same old same-old since then."

"Have you ever wondered why, Louie?"

"Why we formed our association? I got Miss Temple eating out of the palm of my pad, that is why. I saw a soft touch and I went for it. Call me manipulative, but it is a tradition with our kind."

"I know why you have come to reside at the Circle Ritz. You needed shelter." Before I can object to this humiliating review of the con job of the century, the sublime Karma goes on. "No, Louie. I was asking another question: do you know why your mistress encounters so many instances of murder?"

"For one thing, Vegas is not exactly known for a nonviolent lifestyle, at least on and around the Strip. Then, I guess that Miss Temple, being a publicist whose job it is to make clients look good, has no liking for untidy situations that attract bad publicity. Murder certainly qualifies as that. Miss Temple cannot help herself. She is a compulsive fixer-upper."

"No. The reason is you, Louie."

"Me? What do I have to do with it, other than saving Miss Temple's Bandolinos every so often, and solving the murder without ever getting any credit for my intrepid investigations? Call me the Deep Throat of catdom."

"You have always been a big eater, but it was not until you came in contact with someone whose job took her into the city's dark heart that crime became an avocation. You are the Jinx personified, the unlucky element that brings your mistress to the razor's edge of danger time and time again."

"Me?" I am shocked. I have always seen myself as a debonair, happy-go-lucky charming kind of dude. Now I am told that I am no more than an unlucky charm.

"You have an obligation to counter your unlucky influence."

"I do my own investigations, do I not?"

"Yes, but that is after the crime. Now I am asking you to anticipate a crime, a terrible miscarriage of justice."

"And what do I get for it?"

This relevant question the Sublime Karma ignores.

"The crime will not be obvious." Karma cocks her head and dark-tipped ears as if listening to someone... someone who is not present in the penthouse. Or, at least, someone who is not visible.

I follow the direction of her azure glance and see only the shy dance of stray light off reflective surfaces in Miss Electra Lark's eclectically furnished living room. There is the dull gray gleam of the picture tube on her blond fifties television console. A more lurid spark lights the huge green glass ball that sits atop a base formed from some brass elephants with hemorrhoids doing the lambada. On second thought, I am glad that I do not "see" anything. What is said to be invisible, I think, often has good reason for that condition.

Karma is strangely silent.

Well, Karma is always strange, so I should say that now she is more unlike herself, or anybody else for that matter. Still she freezes in that uncanny listening position, as if someone uncanny were nearby to do the talking.

I am getting that itchy-twitchy feeling all over again. Like all over my toes and ears and tail.

"Okay, Karma! You got it. I am your most obedient servant. Just cut out communing with the out-of-normal-range and tell me where to go and what to do, and I will be out of here."

Something I said got through to her Birman brain, for she abruptly snaps her attention back to me.

"Are you still here? Tell you where to go and what to do? That is nothing that I can help you with. You must find out these things for yourself."

Time for the Twilight Zone music, could I sing. Alas, I cannot, although I do hum up quite a storm on occasion.

So, bidding an unfond farewell to the resident High Priestess of this strange exotic land on the highest plateaus of the Circle Ritz, we prepare to plunge back down the black marble mountain to less rarefied spheres, knowing little more than when we came. At least it is evident that the Grand High Karma is on another plane.

Given that, I am glad that I rarely fly, but instead depend on my feet to do the stalking.