Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Holy Kowabunga. Temple had a vintage surfer T-shirt to wear around home that paid tribute to that catchword from Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody kiddie TV show in the ’50s. Like slang that kept on reinventing itself for future generations, Kathleen O’Connor and Cliff Effinger were old nightmares that kept recycling again and again, both supposedly dead and both surprisingly potent up to this very minute.

“Call me an obsessive compulsive amnesiac,” said Max, “but I think this all adds up. Somehow.”

“Who’s called you an obsessive compulsive amnesiac?” Matt asked. “That sure sounds like a gripe.”

“Nobody important. Just an amateur psychoanalyzer like you.”

“If you mean I can analyze psychos—”

“You know,” Temple said, “I don’t think I’m comfortable riding here in the backseat like the distant top of a pyramid with you two guys in the front driver’s seat.”

Sometimes Temple didn’t realize the full meaning of things she said until her own voice stopped. Not often. It was not a good habit for a successful PR woman and in the personal arena it was a sound example of clunky, size 5 wedgies firmly inserted in mouth.

Describing a functional triangle at this point was not productive. Something jammed her in the hip. Louie was rocking his carrier over onto its side and into her space.

Oh. Right. They were a dysfunctional quadrangle, not a triangle.

How comforting.

Chapter 32

Bad Mews

Naturally, I have used my incisive incisors to spring the zipper on my new low-end carrier. The less time spent in Miss Krys’s truly ucky idea of a cat carrier from hell, the better.

By the time Mr. Max drives his exceedingly boring rented minivan into the Circle Ritz parking lot, I am free, black, and pushing twenty-one pounds of muscular male physique out of the first opening vehicle door. (My layabout lifestyle in the Windy City has added a tad of avoirdupois around my middle, but that is a French condition and cannot help but be an attractive addition.)

I make a four-point landing on the still-warm asphalt of my native soil: the mean streets of the country’s loudest and liveliest entertainment jungle, and inhale the hot, heavy air.

Aaah. Tar so melt-in-your-mouth sizzling, it could trap a brontosaurus; pad-searing sand; and egg-frying-hot concrete. I am back in civilization! Not for me dank, deserted warehouses down mean streets so dark, not a ray of ultraviolet neon can penetrate those Bastless byways.

Not for me petty thugs who cannot even make an effective and grammatical threatening phone call.

Here in Vegas, style rules. And I am just strutting my stuff toward the parking lot fringes when I come up nose to nose with one of the city’s least famous fixtures.

“Huh,” I say. I do not want to admit that I have hit a wall of pretty impenetrable fur and chutzpah. I am the expert at that. “Louise!” I cry.

I was about to make a pilgrimage to the Crystal Phoenix, but she pops out of the large oleander bushes ringing the Circle Ritz parking lot as though to pounce upon me.

“Where have you been?” I inquire.