Very Best Fishes,
Midnight Louie, Esq.
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Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas Strikes Back
First of all, Louie’s description of our relationship should be called a “Tall Tailpiece.” He owes his current fame and good fortune solely to my literary efforts. In fact, Midnight Louie was on the auction block for a dollar bill when I found him in 1973 in the fine print of the classified ads.
This “big, black Tomcat” was obviously a handsome fellow, and just as obviously had been a discipline problem. His current custodians described “a con artist and eighteen pounds of cuddly pussycat, very versatile and equally at home on your new couch or in your neighbor’s old garbage can.” They admitted that he’d been reared on “purloined goldfish” and claimed that he “understood,” but didn’t speak, English.
All they asked was that Louie’s new keepers allow him roaming room and that he remain the ladies’ man he (also obviously) always was. Unsure where a roué like Louie would fit in the Family Life section where I wrote feature stories, I called his foster parents for an interview.
They were frank to a fault. At two a.m. one morning, Louie had attached himself to the wife near the Coke machine at a respectable Palo Alto motel where Louie was copping carp when he wasn’t playing gigolo with the female guests. The motel manager was about to change his place of residence from goldfish pond to city pound. So the infatuated wife air-freighted Louie (in a borrowed puppy transport he much despised) to St. Paul.
Once there, Louie accosted her lawyer husband; tried to molest their altered Siamese female, Pooh; engaged in a rumble with the resident Hoover vacuum; and decided that the litter box was the nearest route to China but no place to commit an act of personal hygiene.
Soon the couple noticed that domestic security had reduced Louie to a mere fifteen pounds, as well as their apartment to rubble. They advertised, at length. Readers were shortly clamoring to adopt the disreputable feline. Louie graduated to an obscure, bucolic existence after I wrote my feature story. My first mistake was letting Louie loose in his own words for most of the piece.
I began writing novels in my off hours within three years, but Midnight Louie didn’t sneak into my mind again until 1984, when I began writing fiction full time. I then persuaded him to relocate to the bright lights of Las Vegas to narrate a quartet of romances with an ongoing mystery that was solved in the last book, published as Crystal Days and Crystal Nights in 1990. Louie took to Vegas like a duck to bottom-dredging. He also took umbrage when the romance editor unilaterally lopped forty percent of his... er, pride and joy—print time—out of the books. Readers clamored for more, not less, just as Louie predicted.
Louie done wrong is not a civil or pretty sight. I had no peace until I agreed to let Louie get his claws into the real thing: Mystery with a capital “M” for murder. (Given his editorial truncation, it’s no coincidence that Louie’s first foray into crime fiction involves the icing of an editor at a booksellers’ convention.) Louie is fond of saying that there are eight million stories under the naked neon of Las Vegas. This has been one of them. He intends to tell them all, at length and in his own words, as long as his “mouthpiece” lasts.
Collaborating with Louie has been exhausting but fascinating, and, what the heck, some soft-hearted dame somewhere is destined to play patsy for the big lug. Oh, lordy, it’s catching....
P. S. If you enjoyed this novel, please consider putting a good review on Amazon.com, Goodreads and other online bookselling sites. :)
Carole and the late Midnight Louie Jr.
ML III appears in the chapter windows
Excerpt from Cat in an Aqua Storm
Book 2 of the Midnight Louie Mysteries
1
The Life That Late He Led
Even the darkest day begins with a dawn.
This one starts with me lounging on the third-story patio of my pied-à-terre as the sun rises over Muddy Mountain. Clouds shift against the distant peaks like Sally Rand’s famous ostrich fans teasing the notorious, apparently naked foothills of her form.
Fading shades of pink and blue reveal the sun’s naked red eye opening to scorch the already-browned sands. Good old Sol has been up all night, just like the folks on the Las Vegas Strip, only he did his usual disappearing act while smiling on the other side of the world. Smart fellow.
It is early July, and soon the sands will be hotter than a sizzling lucky streak on a craps table. I allow my eastward-gazing mind to picture Lake Mead as a bright London-blue topaz in its dusty desert setting. Hundreds of carp glitter like sunken gold along the shoreline, carp a-pant for the daily influx of tidbit-bearing tourists. I have never seen this treasure hoard of panhandling goldfish in person, but I hear plenty about them. I share the tourists’ fondness for carp, although my tastes run more to feeding on than feeding to.
I expect a tranquil day. Miss Temple Barr, my doting roommate and a freelance public relations specialist, is between assignments. While I dream of vistas of wild game, my civilized heart awaits the grrrr of the can opener. This happy sound precedes the dollop of some rich aquatic concoction into the banana spilt dish that my little doll has deemed fitting for, and large enough to accommodate, my healthy appetite.
It is not a bad life I lead of late, during this age of Aquarius. Much is to be said for domestic bliss, especially by one who not four weeks ago languished on Death Row in the local animal pound. It is true that my presence there was by design: I went undercover as a common homeless dude, a transient as the sociologists put it, in order to solve a murder at a booksellers convention. Yet this environment in which I now bask—a ray of not-yet-searing sun, a dry desert breeze and Miss Temple Barr hovering with the can opener—appeals far more nowadays than the edge-treading loner’s life-style I have been wont to lead.
So I slip into the languid snooze my kind is famous for, a happy laid-back dude expecting no more at the moment than the attentions and comforts I have earned over the course of several of my lives.
My personal sun-spot has shifted into shade when I next come to, awakened by the click-click of two dainty high heels arriving at my side. Gastric juices begin doing a tap dance on my rib cage as I lazily cock open one green peeper. I do not wish my famous, devastating stare to bedazzle my little doll before she is completely awake.