He seemed to nod as he licked away at one forepaw, head bobbing up and down.
It was pretty bad when she was discussing her emotional state with a cat. A large, intelligent, amazingly handsome cat, but a cat nonetheless.
A knock came on Temple’s door. Her eyes streaked to the clock on the portable stereo. Eleven-fifteen. Who on earth … Max had already been by.
She rose and clicked over to the door, peering through the tiny peephole.
The hall was dark and the sidelight only distorted the view.
She opened the door but kept her chain lock fastened. “Matt!”
The mechanism resisted her fingers for a moment, but then her door was wide and he was hesitating on her threshold like a Fuller Brush salesman, if there still were Fuller Brush salesmen.
“What is it?”
“I’ve got to get to work,” he said, “but do you have a minute?”
“Sure. Come in. What’s going on?”
“I had to tell you some good news.”
He was checking out her apartment, spotting Louie still on the sofa—looking most annoyed at losing his lap pillow—hunting for signs of Max, she supposed.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“No. Louie and you are here. That’s all.”
He paced a little in the entry hall. “I just wanted to let you know, so you wouldn’t worry.”
“What, me worry?”
“You’ve been doing it. I can tell. I’ve just seen Molina.”
“This should stop me worrying?”
“At the Blue Dahlia.”
“Worse and worse.”
“And I told her that I heard from a counselor of Vassar’s, who was on the phone with her and probably heard her fall. After I left. It was an accident, Temple. Molina knows that now.”
“An accident. How … great. I mean, not great that she fell, but … for you.”
“Yeah. For me. For Molina.”
He stopped, ran a hand through his blond hair, turning into a punk bedhead. Looked at her.
“Vassar … died … planning to reinvent her life. Oh, God.”
“A happy death,” Temple said, remembering the phrase from somewhere.
“A happy death,” he repeated. “I’ve got to get to work. I can’t be late … what am I now, some kind of White Rabbit? Oh, Temple.”
“Aren’t you glad? If I understand all this, no one’s to blame for Vassar’s death and even she was upbeat at the time. That’s the way I’d like to go, that everyone would, fast and happy.”
“Fast and happy. Better than slow and sad, that’s right. Temple.”
“Thanks for telling me, Matt. I won’t worry now. Not much.” She didn’t lie well.
He glanced down, and frowned. “Why are you wearing those shoes now? It’s almost midnight.”
“Maybe I was expecting Prince Charming.” She didn’t know why she’d said that, except that she was mistress of the flip quip and she was feeling a very confusing need to be inappropriately flip at the moment, her and her tiny feet and big mouth …
Matt put a palm to his forehead as if he was trying to play mind-reader, or hold his thoughts in. But it didn’t work, because his next words came out of left field, the left field of his inner anxieties.
“I didn’t sleep with her.”
“You don’t have to tell me this. I mean, it’s none of mybusiness. Except … maybe it’s relevant to the case.”
“What case?”
“Well, all of them. The unsolved cases. The things that are none of our business. Except Molina’s. So … who?” Temple wanted to be very precise on this fact.
“Who what?” Matt was looking more confused now than she was.
“Who didn’t you sleep with? Besides anybody in the past seventeen years.”
“Seventeen? How do you get seventeen?”
“Well, from since you went from high school to the seminary.”
“You’ve been keeping track of my non-sleeping-with timeline?”
“Well, I just have a mind for these details. So you were going to tell me. Who.”
Matt shook his head, sufficiently distracted that the information no longer felt so horribly personal. It was about a “case,” after all.
“Vassar. It didn’t work. Molina’s plan. Not for me. Not .for Vassar.”
“Oh. But she didn’t kill herself.”
“No. Not that. Not because of me. Someone still could have … but it’s not likely. It was all an accident. An accident, Temple. All of it.”
She nodded, continually. “I understand. You’d better go now. The show.”
“The show.” He joined her in nodding and stepped into the hall.
“Drive carefully,” Temple caroled after him like her irritating Aunt Marge, whose cautionary tones she had not heard in twelve years, thank God.
“I can’t believe I said that,” she muttered to Louie, who had risen and was now rubbing his black satin legs against the rough Austrian crystal sides of her shoes.
Temple had never wanted to know, and not know, something so much in her life. Now that she knew, she didn’t know what to make of it, what to make of Matt thinking it was important to tell her what had happened, and not happened between him and Vassar. As a friend, she was glad he hadn’t been forced to go against his conscience. As a neighbor, she was glad he felt free to confide in her, although he had seemed somewhat constrained to talk just now.
As … whatever, she was relieved. And scared.
She leaned over and gazed hard into the Emerald-citygleam of Midnight Louie’s eyes.
“And have you anything momentous to confess concerning your sex life, or lack of it, and any recent involvement in violent death you might have had?”
The cat gazed solemnly back, and kept the usual mum.
Tailpiece
Midnight Louie
Picks a Bone
I am flabbergasted.
Appalled.
Outraged.
Imagine my very own collaborator springing such a surprise on me.
I refer, of course, to the untimely death of Kathleen O’Connor.
I grant you that Miss Carole let me be first on the death scene, but I am not that crazy about inspecting the corpus delicti, especially if it is nothing I can eat.
Ultimately, not even a coyote was willing to pick Miss Kitty’s bones, which I suppose is something of an epitaph. Too bad nobody will write it on her tombstone, though I doubt she will have one.
A mystery woman to the end. And that is another good epitaph gone to waste.
I am really coming up with them.
At least I do not have to compose any final words for my partner, Miss Midnight Louise. It would really shrivel her whiskers to know I had the last word.
I must say that the kit has benefitted from her association with an older, wiser mentor, as no doubt Mr. Max will from the return of Gandolph the Great. She is a little distraught about causing a human death, though who is to say that a minor cat scratch really tipped the balance. I have had to explain to her that we are predators by nature, despite living on the handouts of human cuisine, in these, our latter decadent, domesticated days.
Still, she shows an oddly unspecieslike regret about her role in Kitty the Cutter’s demise. Perhaps she has caught something from Mr. Matt, with whom she briefly resided when she first showed up on the scene.
My one regret is my longtime resolution never to speak to humans. It kills me to know how Vassar died and not to be able to set assorted consciences at rest. But it is too late for me to lower myself at this late date. And, in fact, I do not know if I could talk to them anyway. I have never tried and have always found other means of communicating my druthers.
Sometimes, I believe, it is good for humans to not know the answer to every question. Life, and often death, as I tell Louise, is like that.
Very best fishes, She is not impressed.
Louise is like that too.
Midnight Louie, Esq.