Cat In A Topaz Tango

“Not spray-tan anything. I’ll let my agent handle it. Tony knows my bottom line is human dignity, even though I’ve played fast and loose with it lately. At least my dance gig exposed and stopped one very sick man from harming more people. I never dreamed my radio advice could get someone killed.”

“Your advice didn’t kill her. Her husband did.”

“He was insanely bitter about so much. He’d fit the Barbie Doll Killer’s stalker profile.”

“Hank Buck was a local problem. I think Molina got a lead on that Barbie doll case during this dance show stalking. She has to win that one. Her kid’s bedroom was targeted with one of the mutilated dolls.”

“Now that she knows her homegrown stalker isn’t Max.” Matt tilted his head to watch Temple. “You must be pleased about that. You always told Molina he wasn’t the villain she thought.”

“Yeah. I wish Max knew she was coming around to reason about him. If there’s a Max out there to know anything.”

“You think he’s . . . dead?”

“I hope not.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Oh, Mr. Radio Shrink! You are so not going to trick me into missing Max mode! Not now, when I want to go over the Temple tango moves as soon as you get out of that water, dry off, and dance me back to our lovely pied-à-terre.”

He laughed and let the flat of his hand hit an arc of sparkling water toward her chair. “You don’t like to swim.”

“Not in pools. Along the turquoise Riviera . . . that’s different.”

“You’re an expensive little sea nymph.”

“Darn right.” She sighed. “Rafi really wants a relationship with Mariah. He’s got a head start. I hope her mother will cooperate.”

“This injury has broken down her resistance to reality. Like Kitty the Cutter’s slash did mine.”

“Really? That was . . . liberating?”

“It’s liberating to confront that some people want to hurt you, for no reason you can see, and you don’t have to hurt back. ‘Hurt’ was too much a part of my so-called nuclear and extended family in Chicago. We don’t have to keep up the tradition.”

“We’re supposed to head north and meet your family and mine someday soon.”

“Someday soon. You don’t want to come into the water with me? It’s as silken and warm as unchilled wine.” He lifted a hand. “Come on.”

“I’m dressed.”

“Clothes dry.”

“My hair.”

“Is perfect, dry or wet.”

“I paddle like a springer spaniel.”

“I’m a merman from shining, sunken Atlantis. I’ll hold you up, and you’ll breathe underwater.”

“Really?”

“No. Don’t breathe underwater. But come with me.”

His hand pushed closer.

Temple sighed, stood, kicked off her slides, and went to squat by the pool’s edge. “You are a very metaphysical guy, you know that?”

He grasped her hand and pulled her down. “Shut your eyes and think two stars to the right and straight on till morning.”

He pulled her forward into the alien element. The water was tepid and as silken as he said. She sank in it until her chin broke water and he buoyed her up. She gasped with surprise at the buoyancy, the way cares seemed to float up from her like bubbles.

“Take a deep breath,” he said, “and don’t breathe after that.”

They sank down together to Atlantis, kissing until she saw its gleaming turquoise towers behind her eyelids. Her hair swirled like seaweed. They were no place on earth. It felt heavenly.

No Good Dude Goes Unpunished

“. . . and the food is vershtunken.”

I am sitting in the parking lot of the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, an elegant five-story fifties’ doughnut of a building wrapped in black marble, listening to my jet-black dam unleash a flood of invective about my home, sweet home.

I mean the word dam not as a water barrier or a swear word—cat heaven forbid!—but as the word that indicates the alma mater of myself, Miss Ma Barker.

I hasten to ease her aggravation. “Free-to-Be-Feline is highly regarded as an earth-sensitive, digestatory product, literally green, which you must admit is all the politically correct rage these days,” I say, not believing a word of it.

I am known to loathe the stuff by one and all, save my devoted roommate, Miss Temple Barr. Clever as she is, she has never tumbled to the fact that her favorite feline health food is—not to put too fine a point on it—“vershtunken.”

Meanwhile, Ma Barker, a pretty testy old dame who commands a feral colony, rants on.

“I led my loyal entourage all the way down from north Las Vegas to this so-called Promised Land to hand them bowlfuls of dried, army-green rabbit turds? Served in sterile plastic? Not so much as a fresh, grease-soaked fast-food wrapper for a napkin? Even the do-gooder brigade of homeless cat-trappers and ball-snappers did better by us than you, son.”

“They mean well!” I cry. That was ever the best, though weak, defense for ignorant humanity. “I, ah, find Free-to-Be-Feline in my own personal food bowls daily.”

I nimbly dodge admitting to actually eating it.

“You have gone over to the Dark Side, son. I understand. Mere security is a powerful lure.”

“Hey! I provide security, I do not crave it.”