Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (31 page)

“Maybe it’s Cole Porter, honey.” The smile in Ambrosia’s voice was its own kind of lilt, clean, honest.

“No, something a lot more modern.”

“Who’s it for, someone you lost?”

“Maybe. Maybe more for someone I haven’t completely found yet.”

“He’s special.”

“Oh, yes. Rare, even. But rather elusive.”

“The rare ones always are. So have you thought of the song yet?”

“I can’t quite remember. It says something like ‘I know everywhere you go, I know everything you do’.”

The soft, seductive voice on the phone had become a mean-business monotone. “What is the group that does that?”

“The Police.” Ambrosia’s liquid voice curdled into hard candy. “I don’t play that one. It’s a stalking song. I don’t like to see anyone stalked, even a guy.”

“I guess you don’t mind hanging onto someone else’s guy when you strut out into your own parking lot,” the voice taunted.

That’s all it said, and the ominous words never made the air.

In the control room, through the glass picture window, Letitia made a horizontal chopping motion, her model’s face a mask of fury.

Matt nodded at her through the window. He had recognized Kitty’s cold, even tones. The trace of an Irish accent had only enhanced the sinister message. She whispered as if in a confessional, and her voice echoed in his ears though it had never reached the public, his audience.

Letitia, no trace of gentle Ambrosia in her face or figure, stood and motioned him into her seat. They had only two minutes before he would take over.

“That b-woman,” Letitia said. “She is beginning to get on my nerves.”

He sat down, the leather chair was still toasty, and set up the earphones, the mike, his big glass of water. “My nerves have been gotten to for a long time.”

“Well, we’ve got her vocal tone down. She won’t be able to call in here again.”

“It’ll only make her meaner.”

“You ain’t seen mean until you’ve seen me in action. Now forget her and do the show. Don’t let her rattle you. She’s just a spoilsport.”

Letitia left the room but took up a post on the other side of the glass. Guard duty. Nobody was going to mess with the mind, heart and soul of her prize find, Mr. Midnight, late-night advice guru extraordinaire.

“I’m so worried, Mr. Midnight,” came the shaky vibrato of a new female voice, a normal if neurotic female voice, through his headphones.

Funny how uncertainty made a female voice supposedly seem “normal.” Kitty O’Connor had ditched the presumed normal female role. But she had messed with the wrong woman in Letitia.

Letitia sat like an island idol on the other side of the glass. She no longer left after her stint as Ambrosia, the feel-good soothing music shrink, had ended. Instead, she sat guard over Matt and his callers, a grim powerful presence, more household god than producer, determined that Kitty should not mess up her concept,
The Midnight Hour
, or her on-air personality, Mr. Midnight.

Matt was beginning to feel like an airwave Frankenstein, the misunderstood creation of both his inventor and his worst enemies. A puppet whose strings were tangled between opposing forces. Even those who meant him well somehow became caught in a sick power struggle.

The Lady of the House

A quick scan of Miss Temple’s bedroom and her bedroom closet, both left in shocking disarray, tells me that she has decamped in full battle gear: high heels and Opium perfume. So I need not expect her back until near my midnight hour.

I would love to knead my nails in the piles of delicate feminine fripperies, but my timetable does not permit a self-indulgent lingerie fest.

So I rush to run a nail under the French door with the wiggly-waggly latch. In a jiffy it is sprung and I spring through the slit, pausing to pull the door shut behind me.

I am balanced on the patio railing and about to leap onto my escalator to the ground below, the trunk of the canted palm tree, when I hear a hissing from above.

I look around for snakes. Then I look up to see a familiar pair of red eyes gleaming down at me.

Some see signs and portents in the heavens. Ophiuchus, say. I see Karma.

Not mine. Miss Electra Lark’s. Karma is the name of her excessively self-confident Birman roommate.

“Louie,” she cries from her distant perch. “Come up and see me.”

Sometime!
I want to spit back at her, but I have found it bad luck to ignore Karma.

So I shinny up instead of down the rough palm trunk, and in a Las Vegas minute (which is about three, since people in Las Vegas lose track of time) I am hurling my fighting weight over her railing to land with an impressive thump.

“Oooh! You should join Flab Ferrets, Louie. Methinks that you have been spurning the Free-to-be-Feline of late.”

“It does not take a psychic or a Sacred Cat of Burma to figure that one out, Karma. I am not the health food type.”

“Obviously.”

She is a substantial lady herself, rather Victorian in her way, wearing a flounced ecru dressing gown and a set of snow white mittens and gaiters on her extremities. Her eyes are Prussian blue, but she is no Persian, despite her longish coat. The Birman is a very particular, I might almost say peculiar breed. A distant ancestor supposedly died to protect the life of a dalai lama, and they have never gotten over the honor. So the living ones like to lord it over inferior souls. Like me, for example. I am always handy as an example of an inferior soul.

“I am on my way somewhere,” I say. “What do you want?”

“I want to warn you.”

“Not that again! I do not need visions of lurking danger. I could use a good lookout at times, but you are a dedicated homebody, so that is out.”

I do not like to say it, but Karma, for all her superior spiritual gifts, is something of an agoraphobic, which does not mean that she is allergic to cats of the angora kind but that open spaces terrify her. That is why she never leaves the shadowed environs of Miss Electra Lark’s penthouse. I am sure Miss Electra likes light — why else would she be living and working in Las Vegas? — but assumes the shuttered existence in deference to her companion’s nervous tics.

“Louie, I must warn you. Forces assemble against you.”

“So what else is new?” I sit down and smooth an unruly eyebrow hair. “As long as you are interrupting my exit, I might as well ask if you have heard of a certain Ophiuchus dude.”

See, this is what the trained operator does. I do not just ask a simple question, I ask it in such a way that she could make all sorts of wrong assumptions, and from her answer I will learn what she is hiding, if anything. Or if she knows anything. Or if I should care.

“Ophiuchus,” she hisses, all the hairs on her housecoat standing straight up. “How do you know of such a sacred and secret sign? You are an unwashed unbeliever.”

An unbeliever I may be, but unwashed? Never!

“Listen, nobody runs the tongue concession as frequently and effectively as Midnight Louie. I do not get this black satin coat for nothing.”

“I mean that you have not been dipped in the font of eternal knowledge and wisdom.”

“I have been dipped in the koi pond at the Crystal Phoenix repeatedly, and can tell you that my wisdom quotient has gone up with each dip, also my nutrient level. Can this ‘font’ stuff and tell me what you know about Ophiuchus.”

“Ophiuchus is a Forgotten One.”

I nod. I have not heard of him before, so this must be tru.

Her blue eyes narrow. “He was beloved of the Ancients.”

“So are a lot of things that are kaput nowadays, like examining entrails.”

“As a matter of fact, several of our kind still seek signs in the entrails of birds. I speak of the hidden priestesses of the Raven Cult, for instance.”

Yuck! I say, eat ’em or leave ’em, but do not play with your food. These so-called “spiritual types” are the most bloodthirsty on the planet, if you ask me.

“So this Ophiuchus —?”

“Is the Sign of the Serpent Beaver.”

“Why is the constellation shaped like a house?”

“Louie, Louie. You have been corrupted by too much human contact. The constellation is not in the shape of a house but of a trap. The Serpent wraps around its victims, ensnares them in its coils. There is no escape.”

“This is just a bunch of hot gas jets in the sky, right? Not even the newspaper astrologists remember its name. That is fifteen minutes of fame minus fifteen in my book. Face it. Ophiuchus is the last millennium’s teen sensation. History. Forgotten history.”

“You are asking about it.”

“That is because I have weird friends.”

“The stars are eternal.”

“Not according to the latest wrinkle in the Big Bang theory. I watch the Discovery Channel.”

“I channel discovery.”

“My mama is bigger than your mama.”

“I do not think so. My mama is a snow leopard.”

“Mine is a…gangland leader.”

“A gangland leader? Surely you are not proud of that, Louie?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. This is the twenty-first century, Karma. Our kind need street smarts these days. Now, if you do not have any practical advice, I will be on my way.”

The news of my mama’s occupation appears to have tumbled Karma off her high horse. Or perhaps for her kind it is an elephant.

“I just wanted to warn you, Louie. The unseen planet of the hermaphrodite has entered the house of Ophiuchus, the Sign of the Serpent Beaver and thirteenth sign of the Invisible Zodiac. This is not a beneficent sign for you and yours.”

“Sure, sure,” I say, taking my leave.

In a minute I am down the palm tree trunk and into the foundation plantings.

I am in such haste to leave Karma and her dour rantings behind that I knock my noggin on the leg of an aluminum ladder some careless handy man has left standing.

A love tap on the brain-box does not slow Midnight Louie.

I dash through the parking lot, where my forefoot sends some round gold metal object spinning away like a Frisbee and crashing into a post.

Naturally, I cannot leave without investigating.

The object has split into two halves. My nose fills with a sickly sweet perfume as I accidentally inhale a cloud of fine dust.

Is this some druggie’s party kit? Have I taken a fatal dose of some disorienting, illegal, aphrodisiac hallucinogen?

Alas, no. It is merely a compact of ladies’ flea powder.

The rough journey, however, has shattered the mirror in the lid. I see my face reflected as in a microwave oven window, darkly, looking like a living jigsaw puzzle in the web of broken glass.

Who needs to linger in front of an unflattering reflection, other than a masochist?

I am quickly on my way again, leaving Karma’s silly predictions and bad omens behind like the insubstantial fairy dust they are.

Stripped for Action

“You!” Lindy Lukas snorted, inhaling cigarette smoke and coughing it out again with her foggy-throated words. “Nobody’d believe you as a stripper, honey. You’re too damn short.”

“If you only knew how much I hate to hear that,” Temple said.

“That nobody’d believe you as a stripper?”

“That I’m too short. That is blatant heightism. Aren’t four-inch heels part of the uniform? I’m an expert on spikes.”

“So are volleyball players, and they’re not stripper material. You can’t grab just any old girl and turn her into a stripper. It takes talent.”

Temple gazed at the ladies doing their thing onstage at Les Girls. It was the only stripper-run place in Las Vegas, but that didn’t mean the classic bump and grind was dead here.

“I suppose I could do you up as a twelve-year-old,” Lindy said through her smoke-slitted eyes. “That appeals to some customers.”

“I am not doing Alice in Wonderland in a G-string. That is really sick.”

“If you have to play a role,” Lindy went on, “I’ll get you a metal ring of thongs and you can be a costume hustler. You’ve seen how that’s done, I guess.”

Temple nodded. Her one backstage experience with strip shows had included a G-string of murders. Strippers were perennial targets for the demented. In a way, she was glad that Lindy had ruled out the role of victim for her. With what was happening to girls in strip clubs in the last few weeks, Temple might be mistaken for a real candidate. And that’s not what she wanted, to play decoy. She wanted to play detective.