Looking down, I notice ladders leaning against some deserted cubicle walls. S-shaped trails through the dust show they have been moved and replaced.
Meanwhile, Ma and Louise contemplate the ragged ski slide to death from their perches atop the stairs.
“My Bast-blessed side whiskers,” Ma mutters under her breath, “this manufactured mountain deathtrap has my head whirling worse than playing on the giant Jungle Jim at the Neon Graveyard museum. No wonder this Jay Edgar person with his pathetic, useless, slippery soles skidded right into the Clark County Morgue. I could strike the killing blow myself with one good leap at the back of his knees with all claws out.”
“He must have been inspecting the property,” I muse as I circle the disturbed dust at the top of the stairs. A jerking plunge to one’s death should produce some blood, though, even if it is only the artistic dribble out the side of mouth TV crime shows excel at creating. And I smell no blood at all, which means I smell a rat.
I must admit that my girl assistants have treaded carefully around any human traces, leaving plain imprints of their neat little feet.
Then I spy a strange symmetry in the stair-top markings. Parallel lines here and there, some brushed across, others clear as ice skate blades. Skates up here? Was some daredevil human so stupid as to attempt to skateboard down the staircase of an abandoned building?
I leap atop the newel post at the top of the stairs, confident I am disturbing no evidence.
“Louie!” two yowls reprimand me.
It does not matter. From my higher perch I have spied evidence for my unique and undoubtedly correct theory.
Poor Ma. Poor Louise. Their vision is limited by their born-feral perspectives.
Mr. Jay Edgar Dyson did not fall to his death.
He was not pushed to his death.
I nod my head at the dull, dust-coated glass chandelier hanging above us and disappearing into the high cathedral ceiling above. Random glints on one of the chandelier’s giant, strong, curved branching arms indicate where a rope or heavy drapery cord rubbed the glass clean.
Mr. Jay Edgar was hung. Hanged? Whatever. He was strangled, ergo no blood. And ergo the several straight marks of a ladder’s feet, made by the killer to string him up…and made by the authorities to bring him down.
“Our guy,” I tell the ladies, “was turned into a human chandelier pendant.”
“Then your keeper’s clowder chief cannot have done it,” Ma says.
“For once and for all, Ma, get it right. My roommate, Miss Temple Barr, is a client of my detective business. Miss Electra Lark is a landlady for the Circle Ritz residents. I deign to live there and also to provide personal protection for Miss Temple. For the last time, I am not a kept cat. I rule my own roost. And I am an independent private investigator. I will not compromise any investigation. As for Miss Electra, I must consider she could have done this killing if she had a coconspirator.”
“She could have made someone do it if she had a gun,” Louise says. “And by the way, Ma, I am a full partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc.”
“Junior partner,” I say.
She huffs and puffs. “A female cannot be a ‘Jr.’, although you certainly are a senior citizen.”
“No quite yet, you little ingrate.”
“How I put up with your senile maunderings, I do not know.”
She waps me across the nose. I wap her across the nose.
Wait. That nose-wapping was not us. It was Ma Barker doing a one-two rowdy-kitten slap-down. I have not felt the like in years.
“Sit down and shut up,” Ma growls in a disciplinary basso that lives up to her canine name. “If this is the way you two run your business, you will soon be pulling guard duty for those pesky alien abductors. I suggest if these so-called abettors to a hanging are a real possibility, you start looking for, and finding them.”
I fear that Ma Barker is right. With Miss Temple’s private life all in a lovers’ knot wad lately, I fear she has forgotten me and my crime-solving prowess. Hopefully, her affairs will get much simpler post haste and finding the murderer will be number one on the menu.
24
Counting Sheep
“I’ve been in a bar, now I want to go into the convent.” Kathleen announced as Max steered the Honda out of Dublin on the busy M1. “Is that what you’re hoping, Michael? That I’ll finally ‘find religion’, as you put it in the States?”
“No, but you badly need to find a new mania, a new cause,” he said.
“Do I? I don’t need to find anything you might think I would.” She sure knew how to pout, looking kittenish with her chin pointed down and her unearthly aqua eyes gazing up at him. The fading pink scar tracks looked like she’d run a pale lipstick tip over her cheek for some punk-style look. “I know about That Damn Movie.”
“‘That Damn Movie’ doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Phil-o-meen-a.” Her bitter, twisted lips mocked the title and herself.
Max nodded. “The Little Indie Film That Could. Dame Judi Dench playing the title character got the film a lot of notice for a biopic. Oscar nominations.”
“I’m amazed you and the Circle Ritz crowd are so au courant about films. Particularly that one. Always thinking of me and my sad orphaned history.”
Max shrugged. “And it’s a great detective story.”
“Not solved by Philomena. That woman was a sheep. Her toddler was taken from her, sold to American adoptive parents for two grand, and the Magdalene ‘asylum’ for fallen women would never tell her where he was sent. She only found where he was after he was middle-aged and dead, and after he’d had himself buried at that damnable place in case his birth mother ever came looking for him. The nuns knew they were searching for each other and kept them apart. Philomena did nothing but accept that she deserved the disdain and pain the Church handed out to her and her despised unwed mother cellmates. Sheep. Meek sheep.”
“I see Philomena’s quest as one of being reconciled with the past,” Max said. “A horrible past, but she accepted that she couldn’t have changed it.”
“She could have taken the baby and run.”
“You did that, Kathleen. You owe your plucky past self more than rage and bitterness in the present.”
“And what about your past? You clutch your guilt like a talisman. It’s a way to ward off people from getting close, isn’t it? Father Matt would say that. Poor Michael. You can’t leave your young self behind either.”
“Don’t call me Michael.”
“I’ll call you what I want to call you. Is Michael the Martyr any better or saner than Kitty the Cutter?”
“No,” he said. “The punishing world you fled now has been exposed and has changed, but women and children are still being treated as badly, or worse, in much of the world elsewhere today.”
“Screw foreign atrocities. I only care about my world. My IRA work helped end the daily brutal rule of the English over the Irish in Northern Ireland.”
“And it was for the Irish Catholics you fought.”
“Sheep, but now that they’re not distracted by centuries of ethnic discrimination, perhaps they’ll become more critical of their goddam religion.”
“Or, their religion will become more critical of itself.”