Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt
Prologue
Home for the Holly Daze
I know one thing about the forthcoming New Year's weekend. At least I am going to hit ye olde home town before they dim the Christmas glitz and glitter along the Las Vegas Strip. Not that you can tell much difference between the normal wattage and the extra icing the city establishments put up for the holidays. The usual blinding is the usual blinding on any occasion and in any season.
I am not sure jolly old Saint Nick could navigate his sleigh through this glitter-strewn sand-dome without embedding Rudolph's red-light nose into the tip of the Luxor pyramid or entangling the reindeer in the mane surrounding Leo's three-story head at the MGM Grand or, perhaps most amusing to imagine after my sojourn in the Big Apple, crashing King-Kong-level into the tip of New York-New York's downsized version of the Empire State Building.
The flight from La Guardia airport in New York to McCarran airport in Las Vegas is a three-hour some jaunt with the clockspringing back an hour to match each hour in flight. So I while away what passes for six hours hanging in the sky and controlling my bladder while hunched underneath a seat within a carry-case zipped tighter than a drug lord's lips. Jonah and his adventure with Moby Leviathan had nothing on me.
Like Jonah, I cannot say much for the view from within the belly of the beast.
But once we land and I am pulled out, slung over, bumped past and trekked through the airport, I am soon listening once again to the Lullaby of Broadway as it is played in this little town in the West: in the metallic hip-hop fascinatin' rhythm of the slot machines.
Once on the ground, I doze my way home. Luckily, my kind long ago learned the secret to travel without tears. We simply assume the fetal position and retreat into an appalled ball.
Some favor the piteous wail rigorously applied at forty-second intervals as an appropriate response to uninvited transportation. I go for the silent treatment. Let them wonder what you are really thinking! It is too easy for humans to ultimately ignore even the most piercing howls.
They have astounding powers of concentration when the situation requires--as the infant Homo sapiens has proven in experiment after experiment.
So why strain my throat merely to insure that the humans around me share my anxiety and discomfort? A vocalized grievance, no matter how just, ultimately becomes an annoyance. An unspoken rebuff is also inevitably magnified in the mind of its recipient until it reaches the proportions of a globe-trotting guilt trip.
"Oh, poor Louie!" I hear Miss Temple Barr croon under her breath above me, as I bobble against her body to the beat of her mush-soled New York City tennis shoes. You would think we were Fred and Ginger, could either one of us tap dance. "You are being so good. We will be home soon, I promise, and then everything will be back to normal."
I am not so sanguine. For one thing, in Las Vegas "normal" is never the norm.
For another, the Santa slayer on Madison Avenue may be identified and facing an interminable wrestling match with the long arm of the law in a Manhattan courtroom, but I suspect that other, less violent crimes were committed during our New York visit, and those too will have more personal consequences, although perhaps not legal ones.
For one thing, while I enjoyed my unauthorized trek to Midtown and the Divine/Sublime Girls' digs at the Algonquin Hotel, it was not lost on me in all the excitement that Miss Temple Barr was also Absent Without Leave to the tune of one entire night away from the sheltering roof of Miss Kit Carlson's impressive Greenwich Village condominium.
(Although it is quite expected that I have in the past, and may in the future, spend the night away from our shared accommodations, Miss Temple is not allowed that privilege, which is a male prerogative common to every species.)
But back to my abandonment in Miss Kit Carlson's fancy digs. I admit that I was busy catching up on some well-deserved rest during the "missing time" on Miss Temple's part, after the double strain of auditioning for television and detecting a murder and a murderer, but I do not believe that abduction by aliens would explain her strange behavior after the absence in question.
Throughout our last day in New York, she was nervous and distracted to the point of conducting an extremely banal telephone conversation with someone I cannot identify but I suspect was of the male persuasion. She and the delightfully nicknamed Miss Kit spent the rest of the visit with their heads together. Even during the farewell party that evening, which Miss Temple's thoughtful maternal aunt put on for her benefit, I caught my winsome roommate brooding while standing alone in the spectacularly pointed prow of Miss Kit's flatiron-shaped apartment, gazing upon the dark bulk of Manhattan lit up like a cruise ship on speed.
I rubbed against her wine velvet sleeve until it was nearly black with my stray hairs, and produced my most gently inquisitive murmurs, but she barely noticed me.
These humans are so delicate of feeling and difficult to read at times. Inscrutable would be the word, I suppose, rather like the statues of Bastet, the goddess of all things fine and feline.
Well, I am quite up to solving yet another problem in the always-puzzling realm of human behavior. Miss Temple need not worry! I will bend all my gumshoe skills to getting to the bottom of her bad mood as soon as we get home.
Chapter 1
Murder on the Home Front
Temple's recent holiday trip to New York City had convinced her of one thing: she would make a lousy undercover operative. (Although her five -alarm-fire -red hair should have tipped her off to that likelihood long before now.)
Today, on her return home, she was discovering how hard it was to scurry anonymously through the vast, gleaming Las Vegas airport while toting a twenty-pound black cat in a purple knapsack affixed like a baby- carrier to her decolletage.
Temple had no decolletage worth noticing at the moment (or any other moment, in her modest opinion), just Midnight Louie hanging limp as a sack of couch potatoes front and center.
If anybody tried to shoot her, she'd be more protected by feline flab and fur than by Kevlar body armor.
Of course, no one (that she knew of) wanted to shoot her at the moment, but someone might be hoping to spot her. She didn't want to see anything but the Whittlesea Blue cab that would whisk her home to the Circle Ritz.
No surprises, she thought, dragging her rolling luggage behind her through the hectic between-holiday crowds that besiege the Slot-machine City over Christmas and New Year's.
No Electra Lark checking the plane schedule Temple had left with her, then deciding to drop by McCarran Airport and pick up her returning tenant on some good-Samaritan whim.
No Matt Devine playing Boy Scout gallant. No Matt getting Temple's car keys and arrival time from Electra. No aqua Storm idling eagerly at the ground transportation curb to waft Temple home in its aging but game style.
And no, please God, no Max Kinsella appearing from behind a mirrored pillar to load Temple and belongings into his oh-so-discreet inherited ebony Taurus. No Max to transport the whole kit and caboodle back to the scene of the crime, the Circle Ritz, where they might encounter Electra Lark or, worse, Matt Devine and have to explain things. Or not explain things. Which was even more incriminating.
"Don't nobody even remember me for at least twenty-four hours," Temple whispered fervently to herself.
She was running on an emotional jet-lag high that the three-hour turn-back in time wouldn't help. She needed to get her feet on the ground, Louie off her back (or front, rather), her mind in the proper time zone and her emotions on some course resembling an even keel before she wanted to see a soul, or a soul to see her.