“I was not abducted by aliens, Ma, but by something even scarier.”
“What?”
“A hair product-addled D-list starlet who ordered her plastic surgeon to make it so I cannot father kits. She mistakenly believed her Persian and I had gotten together, but when the kits all came out yellow-striped…”
“So that mincing, yellow-bellied house cat, Maurice, your rival for the cat food commercial assignment, did the dirty deed with the purebred who is now no longer so pure.”
“I will not hear a bad murmur against the Divine Yvette. It is not her fault she was in the throes of a hormonal condition.”
“Hmm.” Ma purrs thoughtfully while cleaning between her toe pads. “It is not like you to miss such an excellent opportunity. Nevertheless, you did our coat color proud.”
“I am touched, Ma. When would you, in your vagabond life on the streets, chance upon a television set on which to see your son make good?”
“Phtttt! You split for the neon-lit twenty-four-hour air-conditioned areas as soon as you could hold your tail, and other things, straight up. You settled for a diet of fast food in tissue wrappers, but I have lived on really fast food in wrappers of—”
I cut her off quick, before she can get to the gory part. I myself prefer to lead an eco-friendly, green life with people food that is supervised by government agencies to be wholesome. Mostly.
“Ma, I know the urban diet is lacking compared to free-range vittles. How does that mean you can glimpse a TV set when you and the clowder are on the move?”
“Through windows, clodhopper.”
(Clodhopper is my pet name when she is annoyed with me and “grasshopper” is too affectionate for her current mood.)
The purring behind us has been strengthening and now it is a full-bodied Oooom, which is a common syllable used in Eastern-style human meditation.
Except now it alternates with the one-syllable word Dooom.
Which is not an encouraging word in any context.
I lower my vocal timbre to put a flea in Ma’s ear. “What are you doing consorting with a penthouse pussyfoot whose pads have only touched walnut wood parquet, marble tile, and patches of carpeting her entire life?
“Karma was doing my horoscope.”
“What!” I can barely keep my voice a raw whisper. “You put any stock in what this pseudo-psychic house pet whose pampered pads have never touched hot asphalt might say?”
“You seem a bit obsessed with manufactured floor and ground coverings, Louie,” Ma observes. “I am the natural, organic type. And I will have you know I have been inside this penthouse, and any carpeting is one-hundred percent virgin wool. Karma’s faculties best operate in an unadulterated environment.”
“‘Unadulterated environment’, that is hogwash. Karma is an unabashed member of the one percent and we are street folks.”
“You have profited from her prescient advice a time or two.”
“She has volunteered her prescient advice more times than I can remember, but we make our own futures, and our own decisions.”
Ma fruitlessly washes her crumpled vibrissae—whiskers to you. She is sensitive about them being called “whiskers” now that she is older.
“Well, I have some prescient advice for you, sonny. You know that some of my police substation clowder also monitor your Circle Ritz parking lot gratis.”
“Not exactly gratis, Ma. They come for the delicious Free-to-Be Feline health kibble I provide.”
“After you refuse to eat it. I know your game, Louie.” She may be winking at me or it just may be her battle-worn eyelid twitching.
She lowers her voice to barely above a purr. “You should know that the gangster clowders on the rough side of town have reported seeing recent suspicious back-and-forths between your precious human associates around here with some of the known criminals and cat-kickers on their turf. They watch those bad guys around the clock and know what is fishy.
“I have had them do freelance surveillance on this site since I heard that, and the guy who broke in here tonight is one of their ‘Most Wanted to Catch a Case of Cat-Scratch Fever’.
“Not only that, when I interrogated them, they reported vehicles and persons of interest at the Circle Ritz are now frequenters of their turf.”
“So who from here is taking a walk on the wild side?”
“Descriptions vary. They have followed some tall, dark-coated men back to this area.”
Mr. Max Kinsella comes immediately to mind, but also my Miss Temple’s acquaintance, Mr. Rafi Nadir.
“And most recently, another one. Yellow coat. I believe your favorite ginger-haired roommate has something to do with a yellow-blond someone who is always out nights and free to go slumming on the dark side.”
“Not Mr. Matt!”
Ma shrugs. “You might want to keep a sharper eye on your Miss Temple Barr and her latest mate so he is not her last mate.”
Ma has a point, which she drives home by bestowing a fond four-shiv tap on my shoulder before she makes like an oleander bush and leaves.
I choose to think the gesture is fond.
3
Midnight Stalkers
“Matt, my man!” Letitia enfolded him in her cocoon of warmth and bright silky color and soft, generous flesh the moment he entered the tiny radio studio.
They were both bumping the desk and equipment, but Letitia would not allow herself to be contained, in any way. In every way, including temperament, they were utter opposites, and he envied her for it.
He immediately checked the clock high on the wall. 11:50.
“I’m closing the show with a medley of most-requested songs, Matt,” she said, catching his gesture. “Relax. We have a few precious minutes to ourselves.”
And the days dwindle down to a precious few.
He could hear the muted lyrics of regret and longing expressed in “September Song”, now massaging the airwaves in the dark Nevada almost-midnight.
“You always read me from ten miles away, I swear, Letitia.”
“I’m psychic, didn’t you know? It takes a worried man to sing a somber song. Now you sit your handsome, worried self down in the soft swivel chair, all its joints oiled and cushy smooth, and unfret that telegenic brow and tell me all about it.”
He couldn’t help laughing as her strong black fingers with the inch-long French manicure false nails shaped themselves around an invisible crystal ball.
“You’re the one who should get her own television talk show,” he said.
As “Ambrosia” she dominated the late-night radio audience, playing just the right song to comfort the lost, the lonely listeners who’d tell their sad stories and be encouraged to move on past their woes.
“No, no. No! No TV.” She waggled those Chinese Empress false fingernails at Matt. “I must be mysterious. I must just be a Voice. I must possibly be assumed to weigh a hundred-and-twenty pounds.”
She was a voice. A seductive, velvet voice, but she weighed maybe three times that imagined weight. Matt worried about that. He worried about diabetes. He worried about cardiac issues. Yet Letitia was the most comfortable-in-her-own-skin person he knew. His boss, the mysterious, the intuitive, the amazing Ambrosia.