"Sure. We Poles are as p.r.o.ne to depression as the Irish anyday. Our homeland has been trampled under by centuries of invaders, we've been forced into exile and immigration, and beyond that, we're the b.u.t.t of Pollack jokes. At least Irish humor is always warm beneath the barbs."

"I'll give you that." Kinsella touched gla.s.s rims with Matt. "Pollack jokes are meaner than Irish jokes. It's d.a.m.ned unfair."

Matt let the whiskey that was likely older than himself trickle down his throat. He was surprised that Kinsella would concede anything to him, even something as trivial as the denigrating ethnic humor sweepstakes, when Kinsella surprised him even more.

"Speaking of which, I don't usually revert to ethnic stereotype," he said, eyeing the bottle.

"And you don't usually come looking me up."

"No. This case seems to call for it. I have, after all, a confession to make. I think I killed Kathleen."

Chapter 45.

Cherchez La Femme So I hear this tapping as of someone gently rapping on my . . . chamber pot, not my chamber door!

I open my snoozing eyes. I am resting in Miss Temple's office, where I can get some peace and quiet of a night instead of enduring constant tossing and turning in the bed, my dear roommate's specialty of late.

My litter box is only a few feet away, and someone is clawing the heck out of it.

No one is privileged to use Midnight Louie's privy but Midnight Louie!

I am up and hissing like a radiator in an instant.

"Mine!" I yowl, advancing on the equally instant high heels of my fighting shivs.

"Relax," comes an all-too-familiar drawl. "It is a long walk over from the Crystal Phoenix and I needed a pit stop. It is all in the family, right?"

"If you are speaking of a professional family-"

"Any other relationship involving you would be unspeakable," Miss Midnight Louise responds.

"Our spats aside, what are you doing up and about after your recent six rounds with the Mojave Desert? Do you forget the extreme difficulty I had dragging you to the highway, then hitching a ride back to town in the back of a squad car, no less? Talk about a risky undercover a.s.signment, that was my top job, mitts down."

"I am as stiff as Miss Kitty the Cutter at the moment," she admits, "but pampering will only delay my recovery. If I had been hit by a car near Twenty-fourth Street where the wild things hang out, no one would have stirred a whisker for me. Up there in Feral Country it is move or die."

"I got you safely back to the Crystal Phoenix, did I not? And speaking of 'knot,' that is what all my muscles were in after squiring your semiconscious form around half of Clark County."

She p.u.s.s.yfoots over and sits beside me. "You are the usual unsung hero, Pops, but that is the lot of an undercover operative. Speaking of which, I have been thinking."

"Apparently this is such a rare occasion that you must get up in the middle of the night and hotfoot it over here without even remembering to use your own facilities."

"Everything is such a territory issue with dudes. If you all could get over it we would have world peace."

"Then what would there be to do? Sit on our a.s.sets and clip coupons?"

"Whatever." She yawns.

I stifle a comment that such a young thing should be in bed by now. It sounds too solicitous and I would never like to be mistaken for solicitous. It ruins my image.

"So what is so earth-shaking that you need to ankle over here and play Oriental sand painting in my executive bathroom?"

"Something in Blues Brother's testimony has been bothering me. I think we should visit the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel."

"And risk all those bird droppings again?! They fly around unfettered up there, you know. I personally do not think your looks would be flattered by a bird p.o.o.p chapeau."

"Please, Pops! No need to get vulgar. We have dodged the airborne missives so far. There is something I really think you should know. Unless, you believe the savvy operator prefers to remain in the dark about some things."

"Of course not. I am only in the dark if I know it." Wait! That did not make sense. Oh well, no need to tip off the kit. "So you want me to hike back to the Goliath on a whim of yours?"

"Who knows?" she asks coyly, buffing her fingernails with her tongue. "You might thank me for it."

Well, that does it. The chit is insinuating that she knows more than I do. I will not sleep the rest of the night worrying about that possibility anyway.

So it is that Midnight, Inc. Investigations creeps out of the well-lit comforts of the Circle Ritz, down a callused palm tree trunk, and out into the warm and well-populated Las Vegas streets.

By now we have made breaking into the Goliath and its bank of elevators an art form, if I do say so myself.

Miss Louise snags a fallen gaming chip in the casino and carries it by mouth to the elevator area.

I lurk behind the ever-popular ashtray, here an embellished column mimicking beaten copper.

"Look at that!" cries the obligatory tourist. "A cat with a chip in its mouth."

Better than a cat with a chip on its shoulder, lady. Those are called lions and tigers and leopards.

So little Miss Louise trots into the elevator car, the object of all wonder and admiration, and I slip in after her and cringe in a dark corner where even the security camera can't see.

"And what floor do you want, little lady?" the man tourist asks Louise with a wink at his wife.

She sits solemnly and stares straight ahead, but I realize that she is meditating deeply, mentally intoning the desired floor number like any superst.i.tious gambler silently pleading for a roulette number to come up. With us cats, it works.

The man winks again at his wife while his forefinger taps "Yvette!" I cry, stunned by her beauty and presence yet again.

She weaves herself around me, her black-tipped silver fur coat and mascara'ed aquamarine eyes weaving me into their spell. Hyacinth who?

"What have you been up to?" I ask, thinking of her pet food commercial contract.

A sardonic voice interrupts my idyll. Miss Midnight Louise.

"Up on the railing, I think? So, Miss Yvette, did the pretty lady try to pet you, did she try to lift you down and fall over the edge herself?"

"Pretty lady?" Yvette fluffs her ruff, which surrounds her piquant little face like an Elizabethan lace collar. "I do not know what you mean. I have been out of the room when my mistress is sleeping or gone. She often forgets to lock the deadbolt, ugly name! She leaves the bigger bra.s.s p.r.o.ng set inside the door to keep it ajar when she goes down the hall for ice, which is frequently. Thus I am free to slip out and take the air."

"Did you 'take the air' on the railing a week ago?" Louise demands in her usual surly tones.

The Divine Yvette answers with her usual sublime patience. "I may have. I like to watch the sushi on the wing. This is not the People's Court, miss, I am not obligated to answer. Is that not right, Louie, mon amour?"

Well, what can I say to that? "Enough of this grilling, Louise. Miss Yvette is not a suspect in anything."

"If enticing a human to her death is not a crime, then I suppose she is not."

"Yvette?" I growl. "Not Yvette."

"A 'pale cat with attractive dark feathering' on the railing. Sounds like a shaded silver Persian. You heard the bird. Eyewitness testimony and he even talks so humans can understand him."

"Yvette, did you see the pretty lady seven nights ago?" I ask in my turn.

"What is time to me? I did take the moving box four floors up, where someone did pick me up and got their naked oilyhands all over my recently laved fur. I was able to leap away, like mist. These humans are so clumsy. I remember that mindless mimic of the air, that morsel on wings, crying "Pretty bird!" As if I were chopped liver! I escaped back into my room to restore my garb to proper order. What wrong is there in that?"

I cannot speak.

The Divine Yvette is the feline femme fatale who apparently lured the ill-fated Va.s.sar into her penultimate act of mercy that became an inadvertent dive.

It was an utter accident, of course. On both their parts. But I cannot deny that Va.s.sar acted from the n.o.bler intent, my admired Yvette from the baser one.

Still, one can understand that an oft-pawed beauty might naturally rebuff even an attempted rescue.

I glance at Miss Louise, who is sitting by offering the sour demeanor of Judge Judy to the proceedings.

"The human female only tried to rescue you," I tell her. But the Divine Yvette is as blind in her fashion as her self-absorbed mistress.

"I did not need it," the Divine One says pointedly. She flounces back to her door, where she begins to paw with her declawed right mitt, making a nerve-grinding shwshshs shwshshs shwshshs sound.

I sit bemused. Then I hear a thump behind me.

Miss Midnight Louise is now balanced on the railing board, looking down.

"Off!" I order.

"There it is."

"What?"

"Miss Va.s.sar's cell phone. It had to have fallen with her, but it caught in the fork of that potted Norfolk pine tree on the level below."

I jump up beside her. Two can play at this game, which some would call "chicken."

Sure enough, I spot a small oblong of dull silver metal, a cell phone in a pine tree. If that cell phone could talk . . .

but of course it cannot. And of course the police will never discover it up here.

"Get down from there, Louise. We have seen our job and done it."

She obeys me, leaving me momentarily speechless. Behind me I hear Miss Savannah Ashleigh's door open. "You naughty kitten!" she admonishes the Divine One.

"How did you slip out?"

The door closes, and I realize I have neglected to turn to capture a last glimpse of that vanishing plume of fur, of summer and smoke.

Miss Midnight Louise is shaking her head as if a flea, or two, were cohabitating in her ear. Perhaps witnessing the Divine One's sublime indifference to her own role in a recent death has shaken my partner, for she says to me out of the blue, "I did not mean to kill her, Pop. Just to distract her from taking out Mr. Max."

"You are discussing a woman nicknamed Kitty the Cutter. Not only that, in this instance she was a rogue driver. Innocents could have been killed. And do you think she would have hesitated to run you over if you had gotten between her and Mr. Max's car? You were the backseat driver on that 'cycle. She was out of control. You did what you had to do."

"Still ... I have never killed anything that big before. And humans are supposed to be the superior breed."

"Every breed is superior in its own mind. There are inferior humans just as there are inferior cats, hard as that is to believe. But none of that matters when it comes down to an issue of life and death. Mr. Max"-here I swallow my territorial pride for the first time in my nine lives-"is a dear friend of my Miss Temple, and I should hate to have my roommate in mourning for the next millennium if anything untoward should happen to him. You did the right thing. You did what I would have done."

"Gee, thanks." She gives me the skeptical green-eyed slit. "I have never before considered 'what you would have done,' to be any standard worth aspiring to."

Before the terrible import of those convictions quite clear the hurdle of my overworked brain, Miss Louise gives me a quick lick on the chops.

"But I may have to reconsider my standards," she says. "Such is life and death, I see, on the mean streets of Las Vegas. Thanks for the buggy ride, Daddy-o Dearest."

I shudder to think what Miss Louise's memoirs will have to say about me. I had better get started on my own, p.r.o.nto.

Chapter 46.

Callback The phone rang. His phone rang.

Matt stared at Kinsella. Max had killed Kitty? Was it possible?

Yes. They were old enemies.

"Better answer," Kinsella suggested, seizing the Bush-mill's bottle by the neck for a refill.

As if Matt, a Polish beer man according to Kinsella, would hog Irish whiskey.

He got up and went to the bedroom phone, the only one he owned. Yet. He could smell a cell phone in his future, but at least now he still had a very unportable model and could use it as an excuse to escape the unthinkable. Was he entertaining a confessed murderer in his living room? Wouldn't Carmen Molina be enchanted to know that?

"h.e.l.lo."

"Matt. Am I calling too early for out there?" asked Frank Bucek's vibrant ex-teacher voice.

"No. We're awake and at 'em out here."

"That three-hour time difference is annoying. I have toremember not to call at the crack of dawn when it's midmorning here in Virginia."