Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Electra!” Temple was shocked to find that her friendly neighborhood sixty-something landlady owned the right jab behind the doorbell abuse. “What’s happened?”

Electra’s floor-length cotton chintz muumuu, apparently a nightgown, rustled as she hurried in. “Now I know why that black-haired rascal hasn’t been sleeping here nights.”

“Louie likes to go out on the town, but he’s home now.” Temple nodded to her living room loveseat, on which the midnight black cat in question lounged like a sphinx who had been tarred, if not feathered, his forelegs stretched out magisterially.

“Midnight Louie nothing,” Electra said, sitting beside the large cat with a nod of greeting. “No offense, Your Highness.” She eyed Temple fiercely. “You know I meant Max.”

Temple crossed her arms over her chest, a gesture meant to lend stern authority to her five-foot frame, which looked particularly lacking with stuffed bunny-head slippers on her feet. “No, I don’t know any such thing. And why are you keeping track of where Max sleeps?”

“You two used to share the unit, remember?” But Electra’s good-humored face was looking sheepish. She patted the confetti-colored ringlets that matched the flora fluorescing against the muumuu’s black background. “Anyway, now I understand why he didn’t move back in when he came back from, from wherever he disappeared to. Death threats! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Maybe it was none of your business.”

Electra’s ovine expression grew owlish.

“And maybe I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Temple added, “so I can’t tell you.”

The landlady flourished the rolled-up news section in her hand as if jousting with a fly.

Beside her, Louie’s ears came to attention as his green eyes began searching the room’s upper air.

“Well, all Las Vegas knows about it now,” Electra said.

Temple went to take the paper and unroll it, turning to avoid Louie’s big black paw batting it as if begging for a look-see.

She studied the inside feature-section page. The text in question was some show biz interview continued from the section front. Words like “audience” and “popular” leaped up at her. And then, “Max” and “Kinsella,” preceded by the oft-repeated phrase “death threats.”

Temple sat on the sofa arm, eyes still glued to the Roman type, her rear almost mashing the end of Louie’s now twitching tail.

Before she could make much sense of the context, a knock sounded on her door.

“You must have jammed the bell pounding it,” Temple accused her landlady as she went to answer the summons.

If she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the article, she would have figured out who it was. The blond man who stood in the private hallway, reading his folded copy of the morning paper by the faint glow of Temple’s entry wall lamp, always knocked, not rang.

“Did you know about—?” He stopped as he saw past her to Paula Revere on the couch.

“I do now,” Temple said. “Come in and join the pajama party.”

That seemed to be his first clue that Temple was indeed attired in something skimpy and cotton knit.

“I should have called,” Matt said, hesitating on the threshold.

“Why? Electra didn’t. I can’t believe you two got to the morning paper ahead of me. I’m an absolute news junkie. Oh, wait! Don’t tell me it was on the early TV news.”

“Well—” Matt looked sheepish, just as Electra had only minutes earlier.

Temple closed the door after him, wondering why Matt seemed a little punch-drunk this morning, and why a professional night owl was up so early anyway. Wondering also what full frontal news coverage would do to Max’s cover.

While Electra leaped up to greet her favorite tenant, Temple took a side trip into her tiny black-and-white kitchen to see what she could offer her surprise guests.

“Coffee, tea, or cranapple juice?” she asked, sticking her head around the barrier wall.

“Coffee,” they caroled obligingly. If Temple could cook anything, it was coffee. She filled the coffeemaker higher than she had since Max had inadvertently moved out a year ago by vanishing from the Goliath Hotel, and pulled a trio of mugs down from the cupboard.

“Does it say anything else?” she yelled into the other room. Cooks were always kept busy in the kitchen and had to miss all the good conversation, another thing she had against the culinary art.

“Just that,” Electra yodeled back in the fruity register of late middle age.

“Isn’t that enough?” Matt put in.

“You’ve got it.” Temple shuffled out on her cozy but Disneyesque bunny slides. Her mother had sent them one Christmas, and they were too small to pass along to anybody else along the bunny trail on the gift chain. Temple wondered what Freud would make of the mother of a thirty-year-old daughter who still shopped in children’s and junior departments for her daughter. Probably that the daughter was a shrimp.

“You two rip that article to shreds while I go change,” Temple suggested. “And if the coffeemaker makes strange choking noises, go to its aid.”

They nodded, the blond and multicolored heads lowered over Max’s first ink in over a year.