Angry growls make low thunder throughout the gathered hordes.
“Some may think I refer to the dreaded days of the witch hunts, during which cats of my color were burned along with our cherished human companions. For five hundred years, my friends!”
A hundred tigers seem to roar back at me.
“That is right. Our people—a loving, peace-loving population—was demonized and almost destroyed for being the color of ‘evil’ and the mythical ‘Devil’ humans hate and fear, black like me.”
I raise a mitt with the shivs curled into my pads.
The answering roar makes me flatten my ears to my skull.
“Torture,” howls the multitude.
Whew. Rabble-rousing is hard work.
“Now to these humans, who were so handy at torturing their own. Sometime in the 1500s they tired of their own limited antics and looked for entertainment toward tormenting their fellow creatures.
“I will not go into all the hideous sins of those days, some of which persist today, as this is a family audience, and I hear many kits squalling among you.
“A popular diversion, especially for bored royalty and, apparently, Germans, was playing the klavier. The word meant ‘keyboard’ in German, and it resembled the piano we see everywhere in Las Vegas on billboards and signs and on stage.”
Heads nod in the dark, their reflective irises winking gold and green. A pervasive Hmmm indicates their rapt attention.
“So someone put cats selected for the tone of their mews into boxes with their heads and tails sticking out. Then they attached the boxes to a piano keyboard so that when a key was hit, a sharp spike speared the appropriate cat’s tail to produce a full-bodied meow.”
“And that is not all. Three hundred years later, in 1803, the German who invented the word ‘Psychiatry’ (could have used one, I think), prescribed that chronic daydreamers—who probably would be described as ‘catatonic’ today—should hear a fugue played on a cat organ “so that the ill person cannot miss the expression on their faces, and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.’”
The patchwork in the moonlight shivers like one moving mass as yowls and screams and shrieks of sympathy and rage ascended to the small cold stars in the night sky.
When rage had exhausted itself, a mass sigh seemed to drift over the desert floor before every cat assembled went silent.
“Now,” I say, “you saw that I reassembled this heinous ‘cat organ’. Only here and now you were not confined or injured, but brave volunteers willing to surprise and bring down evil men.”
I take a breath. Not all these feral cats have had the experience of seeing a piano keyboard or understanding the sequence of the centuries. Not many had begun life as a library cat as I had when very young and impressionable. But cats do not survive as ferals without being curious and clever and they certainly can channel each other’s emotions.
“In conclusion,” I say, “I salute your unique and amazing voices of varying range and timbre, and how you scared the evil humans out of their skins and into very long jail sentences. And for moving as quietly as church mice to arrive and depart and, especially, for not snacking on church mice on the job.
“Go forth as proudly as a pride of lions, and the appetizers are on me.”
Tailpiece
Midnight Louie Sums up
I so hate doing math, even though I have many more toes to do it on than most people.
Sixteen toes and sixteen shivs, which is the number four squared, which is fifteen more razors on my person than “Big Bad Leroy Brown” had in his shoe. No wonder I am such a successful, and respected, private investigator. They do not call one variety of cactus “Cat Claw” for nothing.
Yet, no matter how tough a guy is there are some things he cannot say, or change.
I have come to a sad parting. My days as an “alphacat”, as depicted in this sequence of twenty-eight mystery novels, are over.
Be warned, though. I am still an Alpha Cat in capital letters, and have not hung up my snap-brim fedora for good. That is a metaphor, folks. It means I still do not like wearing human hats unless very well paid. And it looks like I will be with my new TV commercial contract.
I have had quite a time shepherding my human crew on their way to a reasonably happy ending, or a dead end, in the case of the bad and the murderous. And they say cats are hard to herd.
I am expecting to see all of my friends and acquaintances around Las Vegas in the future, as you may do if you pay a visit to Chez Louie again.
Farewells should be short, but sweet.
I am short, but not sweet.
And that is one thing that will never change.
Very Best Fishes,
Midnight Louie, Esq.
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Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas on Getting There
and Back Again
Well, who thought we’d all live this long?
This is the 28th and final title in Midnight Louie’s alphabet mystery series.
Back in 1994, after writing the first two Midnight Louie mysteries, I knew I could not abandon this charming, swaggering, politically incorrect big guy of a stray cat.
So I committed to an “alphabet” title series that would eventually expand to 28 titles. What a rash leap of faith. There was no guarantee that publishers or sales would keep the series (or me) going that long, twenty-four years.
The thick and thin of the publishing industry is legendary, but Louie and I are both stubborn survivors, and I knew that Louie had “legs”. And, thanks to the support of readers expressing love and support from the days of notes and letters to thousands of emails, we made it through.
I “met” Midnight Louie in a newspaper feature I wrote in 1973 about a homeless black motel cat a woman flew two thousand miles home to rescue. The lodgers called him Midnight Louie and he lived off the motel’s expensive koi fish and the kindness of strangers. A trip from the fish pond to the pound’s Death Row was imminent. As a newspaper reporter, I was intrigued when the woman wrote a three-inch-long Classified ad that cost $30 to give him to the “right” home for a dollar. I defied journalistic custom to let him tell his story in his own words.
And he paid me back when I decided to make him a self-appointed Las Vegas PI whose narrative first-furperson chapters framed an innovative four-book “miniseries” inside a category romance line. That started a miniseries trend for trilogies and linked books that spread like wildfire through the many romance lines then, propelling many superstar careers of this day.
Not Louie and me. The editor “gave” the idea to the “real” romance writers she was pushing and kept us from publication for four years, then drastically cut the four books to fit into two volumes and buried them on the publisher’s list. Being done wrong only drove this twenty-pound, hard-boiled, alley-cat charmer into the mystery genre. That’s why I call him “Muscle in Midnight Black”. Louie’s adventures account for 32 of my 63 published novels and he stars in several short stories to boot, including an appearance with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.