A clanking stop almost persuaded Temple’s heart to imitate it. She tore for the coffered double doors opposite, pounding them with both fists.
They sprang open. Electra Lark stood there with her hair in stiff peaks resembling properly beaten egg whites. Little papers pressed onto her scalp. One egg-white peak was stained blood-red.
“Temple! What is it? I’m doing my hair.”
“God! I thought you were being scalped.” Temple scampered over the threshold and shut the penthouse doors behind her. “Someone’s in the building—or was. My apartment air- conditioning is off, one French door is wide open and the cat’s gone.”
Electra whipped the hand towel from around her neck, thinking. “The maintenance man is gone for the night. It’s too bad that nice Matt Devine isn’t here.”
“He isn’t?” Temple hadn’t considered that there might be advantages to being a damsel in distress.
“Works nights.” Electra sighed. “We’ll have to be liberated ladies and do it ourselves. I’ll get a flashlight. We don’t want to give the intruder any more to see by than necessary, if he’s still there.”
Temple nodded, and Electra vanished into her kitchen. Temple had never explored the inner depths of Electra’s quarters, but she glimpsed an odd green crystal ball on a huge claw-footed brass tripod in the living room—atop a blond TV cabinet from the fifties. A shadow flitted away as Temple strained to see into the half-glimpsed rooms; probably a phantom of her unsteady nerves.
“This oughta do it.” Electra reappeared, waving an old- fashioned, silver-metal-barreled flashlight that reminded Temple of ancient Eveready battery ads. She just hoped a black cat of her acquaintance, her brief acquaintance, had the same nine lives the Eveready cat always did.
They rode down the three floors in silence; the elevator did not. Temple had left her door unlocked, so they entered immediately on a well-oiled hush of hinges. Electra switched on her beam; the click sounded like a cocking revolver in the silence. A sickly circle of light piddled on the parquet.
Electra and Temple followed the yellow ick road to the French door.
“Oh!” Temple’s gardenia plant lay roots up, its terracotta pot smashed. Otherwise, the patio was untouched and deserted.
“Better check out the other rooms,” Electra ordered. “I hold the flashlight out to the side, see, in case they’re armed. That way, they shoot at the light, but they don’t hit the torso or anything vital.”
“No, just me,” Temple hissed, walking as she did to the right and behind Electra.
Each room proved empty, even when Temple put on the overhead lights and they inspected corners and the shower stall.
“I’ll check these closets,” Temple said quickly as Electra was about to jerk the Mystifying Max poster into the hard glare of her flashlight. Temple poked the light into the interior nooks and crannies.
“Sure a lot of shoes in there,” Electra noted.
“But not much else. No Midnight Louie, either. Electra, he’s gone!”
“Now, now.” Electra Lark left it at that. She was not a believer in false sentiments.
Temple checked her watch. Only 10:27 p.m. She could hardly call the police about a door they would say she’d left unlatched, or an air-conditioner they’d assume she’d left off. Or a missing cat who’d never been domesticated in the first place.
Some of her belongings looked vaguely disarranged, but who was to say that wasn’t the vanished Midnight Louie doing some creative nesting? Who was to say that the wind hadn’t blown the door ajar, and that the vagabond cat had leaped out when opportunity knocked?
“What a shi—shazam of a day.” Temple locked the errant French door.
“Will you be able to sleep, dear? I mean alone.”
“I’ve managed it so far,” Temple said ungraciously, “although I turned down an offer tonight that begins to look better by the millennium.”
“You keep this flashlight tonight. I’ll have Mr. Marino check your thermostat and the door in the morning. We can reach you at the convention center these days, I suppose.”
“Not until almost eleven,” Temple said. “I’ll be running an errand first.”
Compared to this unsettling night, a rendezvous with a catnapper was beginning to sound like the answer to a maiden’s prayers.
16
The Ultimate Sacrifice
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
I quote, of course, from the immortal Who the Dickins. To which I say, baloney! There is one thing for certain that “it” indeed is... the biggest gamble of my career.
No, let me be utterly honest. It is the biggest gamble of my life. Perhaps I should say lives, though I cannot be sure how many of these I still possess, having never been one to keep count.
I can count days and hours, however. Where I am now, the sun does not shine, but the people provide a convenient reckoning of the passing hours by coming and going in eight-hour shifts around the clock, just as they do in the hotels and casinos and jails.
This is no hotel or casino, but that does not mean a guy cannot gamble his life away here in a very few hours.
It is dark now, which would be comforting were it not for the insistent whines of those loudmouth losers in the adjoining cell block. What a bunch of lily-livered squealers. I have never had much time for dogs.
Yes, you have apprehended correctly. Midnight Louie is in stir. Not only that, my cage is located on Death Row. Oh, it is not so labeled, but I am not born yesterday.
I have much time now to meditate on my past life, or lives, and my many sins of commission and omission. I am outside the Sirocco Inn when Gino Scarletti buys it—not the inn, the farm, otherwise known as six feet of dirt, downward. But the cops never hear a peep from me;
I am still light on my tootsies even if I acquired some pinchworthy inches lately, and I rabbit that one.
Did I ever mention how I single-handedly saved the Crystal Phoenix from utter destruction at the hands of a mob of crazed killers? No? Good.
I am also the silent type—it does not pay to know too much in this town, as I say before and will again. Mostly I mull how my last life now hangs by the fragile thread of a certain little doll's ardent regard. I am not the first dude whose well-being depended on some dame, and, frankly, the record is not good.
Some may wonder how a savvy sort like myself has landed in such a pickle. It is—like the foregoing Dickins's Tail of Two Kitties—a long, sad story, and no consolation to know that Baker and Taylor lounge not five ceils away, together still, but not for long.
How it all comes down is like this.
After I find that know-it-all Ingram and learn that the able Sassasfras believes a pair of Scottish type to be languishing in the city pound, I decide to check it out for myself. Sassafras is one sharp old doll, having been put in the pound—and been bailed out by her delinquent owners—more times than she has had kittens or conniption fits, which is to say a lot. If she says they are having scotch with their soda water at the pound these days, those fancy cats are there.
The first snag is when Miss Temple Barr, whose education on a gentleman-about-town’s needs is still in the formative' stages, locks me in her apartment for the night.
Now this is a swell place with many amenities, but a dude has gotta do what a dude has gotta do. As soon as she exits for what is obviously a hot date, probably with the snake-eyed Svengali on the bedroom closet poster, I hone my neglected housebreaking skills. Ingram tells me that many people nowadays are interested in what they call "polite procedure," so I will describe the method of my egress, since I am nothing if not polite.