Sometimes Temple didn’t realize the full meaning of things she said until her own voice stopped. Not often. It was not a good habit for a successful PR woman and in the personal arena it was a sound example of clunky, size 5 wedgies firmly inserted in mouth.
Describing a functional triangle at this point was not productive. Something jammed her in the hip. Louie was rocking his carrier over onto its side and into her space.
Oh. Right. They were a dysfunctional quadrangle, not a triangle.
How comforting.
Chapter 32
Bad Mews
Naturally, I have used my incisive incisors to spring the zipper on my new low-end carrier. The less time spent in Miss Krys’s truly ucky idea of a cat carrier from hell, the better.
By the time Mr. Max drives his exceedingly boring rented minivan into the Circle Ritz parking lot, I am free, black, and pushing twenty-one pounds of muscular male physique out of the first opening vehicle door. (My layabout lifestyle in the Windy City has added a tad of avoirdupois around my middle, but that is a French condition and cannot help but be an attractive addition.)
I make a four-point landing on the still-warm asphalt of my native soiclass="underline" the mean streets of the country’s loudest and liveliest entertainment jungle, and inhale the hot, heavy air.
Aaah. Tar so melt-in-your-mouth sizzling, it could trap a brontosaurus; pad-searing sand; and egg-frying-hot concrete. I am back in civilization! Not for me dank, deserted warehouses down mean streets so dark, not a ray of ultraviolet neon can penetrate those Bastless byways.
Not for me petty thugs who cannot even make an effective and grammatical threatening phone call.
Here in Vegas, style rules. And I am just strutting my stuff toward the parking lot fringes when I come up nose to nose with one of the city’s least famous fixtures.
“Huh,” I say. I do not want to admit that I have hit a wall of pretty impenetrable fur and chutzpah. I am the expert at that. “Louise!” I cry.
I was about to make a pilgrimage to the Crystal Phoenix, but she pops out of the large oleander bushes ringing the Circle Ritz parking lot as though to pounce upon me.
“Where have you been?” I inquire.
“If you wish to sit your unprotected rear down on the sizzling hot asphalt, I can remain in the shade and regale you with a long and winding journey through Vegas hot spots more noted for sin than fever.”
Aaah. I have bounded onto the cooling dirt and sand surrounding the oleanders.
“How was Chicago?” she asks.
“All right. There is a lot less street-level action and entertainment value there. I could get all my exercise jumping up to hit elevator buttons in the high-twenties and up.”
“Home is the hunter, home from the five-star hotels and the lure of hot studio lights,” Miss Midnight Louise observes. “At least you managed to keep your two fragile human charges in one piece.”
“Them? Fragile? Yeah, they were facing family matters more incestuous than Ma Barker’s clan, aka clowder, but, Louise, you have no idea how imperiled I was in life and limb and carrier in Chicago.”
“Where is that leopard-spot carrier fit for a reality TV Chihuahua, by the way?”
“I left it as a headstone for a couple of Chicago gangsters.”
Miss Midnight Louise’s airy whiskers lift above her censorious features. (This censorious features stuff means she has a scowl on her puss that would sour a Green Appletini. Not to mention a decent dude who has only been doing his guard duty out of town.)
“Were they dead or just happy to get you out of their nightmares?”
“Let us simply say that, thanks to me, they knocked themselves out to commit mayhem and got snagged by the cops.”
“Meanwhile,” she notes, “Mr. Max has been out on the town performing acts of derring-do that threaten to undo his precarious healing process. Can you say the same?”
“My acts of derring-do have threatened to undo other entities’ healing processes. It is the Chicago Outfit, zero; and Midnight Louie, two.”
I push closer, not to get cozy, mind you, but to exchange privileged information.
“I am happy to hear you have been sticking closer to Mr. Max than a coat of black graffiti spray paint while I have been transported across state lines to eavesdrop on some amateur episodes of The Old and the Restless. My Miss Temple and Mr. Matt are a done deal, whether you or I like it or not. What would occasion Mr. Max to greet the network-approved lovebirds on their return to the nest? He does not live here anymore.”
“He is lucky to be alive and not-living somewhere six feet under after last night.”
“Last night? There was some more hot homicidal action in town while I was gone? No!”
Miss Louise takes this moment to admonish a possibly verminous intruder on her back forty. Or she could be allergic to something, like me.
“Well?” I demand, gently tapping her shoulder.
She responds to my friendly overture by swatting my mitt to the pavement. “First tell me what went down in Chicago.”
“The usual. We prepare to fly. I am the VIP of airport security in Miss Temple’s admittedly sissy poodle portage bag.”
“‘Portahge’?”
“That is French for ‘transportation,’” I respond airily, waving my posterior plume de ma tante for emphasis. It always distracts Miss Midnight Louise when I talk à la the Divine Yvette, my Persian petite.
“I am the object of a kidnapping attempt at the moment of our arrival in O’Hare,” I say vehemently, nipping at the vermin that left her for higher-end pastures.
At this she hoots. Well, she rolls over on the ground exposing her soft underbelly with no fear, as if I were a bunny rabbit instead of Chicago muscle.
“They were obviously after your carrier,” she manages to mew between rude snorts.
“Actually, that is too true,” I admit. “Airport security suspected I was acting as a mule for smuggled celebrity fine jewelry. Unfortunately, the only fine jewelry my Miss Temple owns is the engagement ring on her finger and an MIA opal ring in her notorious scarf drawer. No, Louise,” I add. “They were after me as a means to information hidden by Mr. Matt’s louse of a late stepfather, Mr. Cliff Effinger, in goods held by his widow, Miss Matt Mama in Chicago.”
By now she is again upright and skeptical. “So these Chicago hoods believed someone would give up valuable info to save your hide?”
“Not ‘someone.’ My Miss Temple.”
“That I can believe. You have become a kept cat on her account, so I do not doubt some schmaltzy unnatural link holds you two together.”
I am not about to defend my personal life to one who scorns the human–feline bond while maintaining quite a crush, if you ask me, on Mr. Max Kinsella.
Meanwhile, Miss Midnight Louise is chewing on my revelations, suiting word to act by gnawing on a loose nail sheath, reminding me of my brilliant ruse with the rusted carpenter nails and the crooks.
“I am afraid,” she finally admits, lifting her head to spit out the sheath, “that Mr. Max has seen plain evidence this very weekend that Mr. Cliff Effinger’s bizarre death by drowning on the old Oasis Hotel pirate ship attraction is not a closed case, but one of interest to various sinister elements around town. I followed him on two expeditions to the Oasis to check on the Effinger drowning site and the last one was nearly fatal to him, if not Mr. Rafi and me.”