"I'll get it," Matt said, since he was the only one who really could.
After he opened the door there was a moment's silence.
"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," Matt said loudly.
Max eeled out the patio doors so quickly he seemed like merely a passing s un shadow.
Temple sneaked another swallow of the awful vodka, then Matt led Molina into the room.
"I never dreamed you'd come yourself," Temple said, pulling herself together. "How nice you're worried about Midnight Louie too."
The lieutenant and Matt exchanged a significant glance.
Temple could have screamed, but she didn't want to be mistaken for a crazy woman, although it was a little late to worry about that.
*****************
"I should have called you in the first place," Temple told Electra when Molina had left, and Matt had left and Temple had finally called someone who was fascinated instead of appalled by her story.
"You just go to bed, dear. Gracious, talking to that poor girl would have been like watchin g five years of soap-opera plots on fast-forward. Such a lurid tale! And so interesting."
"But what about Louie?"
"You're right. It's not like the big black bozo to be off so long. Do you have the phone numbers of the people connected with the film commercial anywhere? Maybe he returned to the places they were working. You know Louie, always likes to be at the scene of the action."
"Yes, Electra! You're the only one who's been able to handle my story without hysterics or to see that something must have happened to Louie. Let's see ... the numbers are on the Rolodex on my desk under 'A La Cat.' Would be right after Alabama'... if I had such a category on file, which I don't, but I can't remember what would be ahead of or behind it. Maybe I'm not making sense."
"Understand you perfectly, dear. I'll go hunt, and then call around. Now you just settle down. I'll call everybody I can about Louie."
At last, a woman of action!
Temple edged down in the bed covers, too weary to wonder at the fact that her living room had almost hosted Matt Devine, Max Kinsella and Lt. C. R. Molina all at the same time. Now that was really frightening!
Electra had figured that out too, because when she came back to report that the film crew had been inactive that day, she sat on the bed's edge.
"I know you're tired, but what did Matt have to say to Max when he showed up?"
"Nothing much. They were too busy making faces over my head."
"And then the lieutenant came?"
"In person," Temple mumbled from under a warm roll of sheet and blanket. "Max was outta there like . . . like Louie. Then Matt and Molina made faces over my head, as if I were some certified idiot."
"They just don't have much imagination." Electra pondered for a bit, while Temple flirted seriously with sleep.
A nice warm, white silence hovered everywhere.
Electra hovered in that vague cloudy limbo too, present but unintrusive. Temple was finally slipping back into the flamingo land from which she'd awakened this morning when--
Someone rang her doorbell.
Oh, it was loud! Oh, it had jerked her back to reality. Who had the gall to be at her door now?
She heard Electra trying to rush quietly to answer the doorbell before the offender could ring again. Temple was still too dopey to move.
Until Electra screamed.
Temple sat up, scrubbing her face to brush away the cobwebs.
She stumbled out of bed, lurching in Electra's footsteps. When she got to the main room, she found her landlady, her back pasted against the closed apartment door, her muumuu looking like a floral stick-on decal.
"Who's out there? Electra, is somebody bad trying to get in?"
"Don't look. Let me call Matt. You don't want to see."
Of course, nothing would have snapped Temple into full, alert consciousness just then, except the assertion that there was something she shouldn't see.
"It's my doorstep. Although there's no step, really. So ... step aside and let me see," Temple ordered with all the articulate authority of a drunken sailor.
"Really, no. I'm terribly afraid--it's just better to let a man handle this."
Another set of fighting words. "Stand back, Electra, or I'll--"
Temple grabbed the doorknob, leaned back and pulled with all her might.
The door gave not a whit, but Electra was intimidated enough to move away.
"You'll wish you'd listened to me. I'm calling Matt."
She was at the kitchen phone punching in the number before Temple had opened the door enough to see a white bundle lying on the floor of the dim hall cul-de-sac.
"Laundry?" she asked. "Somebody wants me to do their laundry? It had better not be male!"
She heard Electra blathering behind her.
What was so horrifying about a pile of dirty clothes?
And then the bundle moved.
Or something inside it did.
Temple would have screamed, but choked it off. Anyone who had walked away from an incestuous psychopath only hours before was not about to be spooked by a post-Halloween ghost.
She crouched down. The bundle was really only one pillowcase. A white satin pillowcase, as a matter of fact. The contents stirred again. Frankly, Temple was thinking . .. snakes!
But as the pillow shifted, she saw that something dark sprinkled the white surface . . . Oh, boy. Blood. In nice fat droplets.
What kind of a sadistic prank was this?
She found the pillowcase's open end, tied into a pucker by a . . . pink velvet headband? She was about to try the knot when Matt's footsteps came pounding down the muffling hall carpet.
"Don't do it!" Electra urged hysterically behind her.
"I wasn't going to open it. I know it might be snakes."
"Snakes!" Electra wailed. "Oh, I do dearly hope so."
A hiss from within the bag appeared to answer her prayers.
Temple jerked her hand back, and cocked her head at Matt as he knelt down.
"Better get a bucket or something in case it is snakes," he said, looking at Electra.
"Who would leave a bag of bloody snakes on my doorstep?" Temple asked.
"Maybe some of the snakes you've been stirring up lately." Matt was grim. "You'd better brace yourself--"
He was working loose the velvet band, and stopped only to take the plastic bucket Electra had found.
"Use these," she said, tossing him a pair of rubber dish-washing gloves. "All I could find."
He hesitated, then donned them awkwardly. They really were too small, but fairly thick rubber in a protective sense.
Then he opened the mouth of the pillowcase wider and wider. Something came writhing and slashing out, hissing to high heaven.
Temple, startled, jumped back with an indrawn breath.
"I was afraid of that." Electra began a soprano wail that went up and up the scale.
It was Midnight Louie, reeking of chloroform, twisting and turning like a black tornado, his claws making coleslaw of Matt's rubber gloves.
"What have they done to him?" Temple wailed.
Matt finally released the cat. The hisses subsided to a long aria of dull growl. Louie lay twitching and blinking in their midst, his eyes wet and shut, his fur matted and unkempt.
"He's alive," Matt pointed out. "We need to examine him in the light. Get a towel, Electra."
She raced for the bathroom.
"Louie." Temple reached a hand to his disheveled head.
He snarled, and she snatched it back.
"What have they done to him?" she asked, whispering.
"He seems disoriented. I think he's been knocked out."
"But why? Just to ... scare me?"
"Whoever did this was sick." Matt took the two thick bath towels Electra offered. "Talk to him, Temple. We don't want him any more agitated than necessary."
Matt dropped the towels over Louie's huddled form, then gently tucked them under the cat and lifted the whole package.
Black feet flailed as the growls rose to another deafening shriek.
"Get the pillowcase," Matt yelled at Temple as he rushed inside.
She snatched it up and followed. Electra, on the phone, nodded as she listened. Her mouth pantomimed the word "vet."