Cat Breaking Free

14

Clyde liked to fix a big Sunday breakfast for himself and Joe and the household animals, preparing special, vet-approved treats for Rube and the three cats, who could not eat the exotic foods on which Joe Grey thrived. This morning he cooked, but his heart wasn't in it. Rube was not in his usual place on the throw rug before the kitchen sink, drooling as he waited; he would never be there again.

Sitting on the breakfast table in the middle of the Sunday paper, Joe looked sadly at Rube's empty place on the rug, which the cats had left between them. Despite Clyde's presence at the stove and the good smell of scrambled eggs and bacon and sauteed chicken livers, everything in the kitchen seemed flat and off-key. Joe felt so low that he hadn't even clawed the funnies and front page to enliven Clyde's morning.

He looked at Clyde hopefully. "Will Ryan be coming for breakfast?" Ryan could always cheer them up.

"You can see I only set two plates," Clyde snapped. "She's working up at Harper's, getting the barn roof ready to lift." Joe looked at Clyde and shrugged. He looked at the nicely prepared breakfast plate that Clyde set before him, the bacon artfully arranged between the scrambled eggs and the golden chicken livers. Clyde had even grated cheese on his eggs, a nice morning start with plenty of comforting cholesterol.

But he didn't feel like eating.

Setting his own plate on the table, Clyde put the cats' dishes aside to cool, then set them down on the rug. The cats looked up at him, then the two older cats turned away, headed back into the laundry, and crawled up into Rube's lower bunk. Snowball just sat, hunched and miserable.

"He's out of pain," Clyde said. "You wouldn't have kept him here when he was so tired out. When he looked at you, he was all but saying he was ready."

Joe nodded. "I know. I know he's better off. But they don't understand. We all miss him."

Clyde looked hard at Joe. "You're down about more than Rube, too." He looked into Joe's eyes. "When you went out early, I thought… What happened? You're ready to claw the world apart."

Joe didn't usually share with Clyde the early stages of an investigation. Clyde could be so judgmental. And talk about worry, talk about overprotective. But this morning…

"That woman…"Joe began.

"What woman? What woman would you see before daylight, before… Chichi? What?" Clyde set down his coffee cup. "What did she do to you?

"Or what did you do to her? What have you done, now?"

That was the reason he didn't share crime investigations with his housemate. "Eat your breakfast," Joe said. "Then we'll talk."

Clyde reached into his shirt pocket and produced a slip of paper. "Message," he said. "Almost forgot. You had a message."

He said this with that bemused expression that drove Joe up the wall. Joe waited, trying to be patient.

"Lucinda called. Early, before they picked up Wilma at the hospital and headed for Charlie's." Clyde glanced at the scrap of paper. "These are Lucinda's exact words, exactly as Dulcie told her. 'The prints haven't come in yet, on either man. Harper and Garza both think the high school was a diversion.'"

Clyde sat looking at Joe. "You want to fill me in? I heard the sirens last night, I saw the fire, but I… my mind was on Rube."

"It's part of what I have to tell you," Joe said. "Eat your breakfast." He knew he'd have to give Clyde the whole story. The minute Clyde picked up the paper he'd see it-the high school fire and the jewelry store burglary were smeared all over the front page. Pawing at the front section, Joe turned it around and shoved it over in front of Clyde: color pictures of the broken store window and showcases; and spectacular, bright flames licking up from the high school.

"Read it," Joe said. "Then I'll tell you about Chichi."

Clyde glanced at the headlines then quickly skimmed the articles, giving Joe an incredulous look. "You're telling me Chichi was part of this? Come on, Joe. The woman might be…"

Joe licked cheese from his whiskers. "She might be what? Only a small-time thief because she only stole five hundred bucks from you? She wouldn't do anything worse?" He sat looking at Clyde, one paw lifted. "Some people will just steal a little, but not a lot? Is that what you're saying?"

"Well she didn't exactly steal the money from me, she…"

Joe stared, silent and unblinking.

"Well," Clyde said. "Well… maybe she stole it." He returned his attention to the front page. Joe returned to his breakfast. Clyde could be annoyingly argumentative and opinionated, but if properly directed he usually managed, after a little time, to face facts and be reasonable.

”So,” Dulcie said when Ryan's visitor had gone, spinning out of the yard in his black Alpha Romeo, leaving a cyclone of dust clouding the kitchen windows. "What did he want? Who is he? Why did he come here and force himself on Ryan?"

Charlie shrugged. "Roman Slayter. Ryan and her husband knew him in San Francisco before their marriage broke up; their construction firm did some work for him. Remember what she said at Lupe's that night? She thinks he'd like to get his hands on her money from the sale of the firm."

Dulcie rolled over among the cushions, her peach-tinted paws waving idly in the air, her dark, ringed tail lashing. "Or maybe he wants something even more than money?"

"Like what?" Charlie said, coming to sit on the window seat beside the two cats.

"I don't know," Dulcie said uneasily. Beyond them, out the window, all that was left of the Alpha Romeo was a long snake of dust hanging over the yard like a murky jet trail. "That man's up to no good," the tabby said. "He gives me the twitches. I can't believe Rock would make up to him like that! Rock's only a simple dog, but…"

Charlie wanted to tell Dulcie that sometimes she imagined too much, let her imagination run wild; but Dulcie's speculations, and those of Joe and Kit, were too often on target, their perceptions about humans as keen as the instincts of a seasoned detective.

"She told me this morning," Charlie said, "that he called her last night, she'd hardly gotten in the door after dinner. Insisted she go out for a drink, was really pushy." Charlie grinned. "She hung up on him.

"When Ryan was in the city, when Slayter showed up at the construction office… Well, she says Slayter can smell money like a bloodhound." She glanced at the phone pad where she'd written his license number; and they watched Ryan storm back up the ladder, scowling.

"Ryan says he worked in real estate for a while, but she thinks he was into a lot of things, most of them shady, including some questionable stints as a private investigator of sorts, probably unlicensed.

"I guess, though, the men he represented in the real estate ventures paid their bills, if the firm kept building for them." Charlie shrugged. "If I know Ryan, he'd play hell getting any of her money." She looked at Wilma. "Are you getting tired, ready to tuck up in bed for a while?"

Wilma laughed. "I don't need to be in bed, I won't heal lying in bed, I need to walk." Refusing more coffee, she rose, her long silver hair bright beneath the glow of the soft overhead lights. Charlie and her aunt looked a lot alike, with their lean, angled faces and tall, lean figures. Only their coloring was different: Charlie's red hair vivid against Wilma's pale silver mane. Wilma had wrinkles instead of freckles, and her eyes were dark where Charlie's were green; but their comfortable, reassuring smiles were the same.

Though Wilma's career had been in federal probation, her master's was in library science. She had, just out of college and before she went with the federal courts, worked two years in state probation. During that time she'd gotten her master's degree, taking courses at night. Her plan, which she had made early in her life, had been to fall back on her library degree when she was forced to retire from probation work, a retirement that then had been mandatory at fifty-five. "Way too young," Wilma had told Clyde, "too young to stop working."

Ever since Dulcie came to live with Wilma as a kitten, Wilma had worked in the library, and Dulcie was glad of that; the little cat had had wonderful adventures among that wealth of books, to which she would otherwise never have had such easy access.

Wilma and Clyde had been friends since he was eight, when she was his neighbor; she had been his first love, Dulcie knew. A beautiful blond graduate student. Now, Wilma was the only family Clyde had left, Dulcie thought sadly.

Wilma had her niece, Charlie. But of course Wilma and Charlie and Max, Clyde, and Dallas and Ryan and Hanni, had one another, so close that they were like family.

Dulcie glanced out to the back patio where Wilma, walking briskly in her robe, knew she would not be seen from the front drive. At the moment Dulcie was more interested in the yard by the stable, where Roman Slayter had stood harassing Ryan.

Slipping out, the two cats wandered the yard where Slayter had walked, picking up a distinctive medley of shoe polish and musky aftershave that masked subtler scents. But then both cats caught a whiff that made them laugh.

Somewhere, on his shoes, Roman Slayter had picked up the scent of female dog, female in heat.

That was what Rock had been making up to! Dulcie looked at Kit and smirked. What a timely accident…

Or was it an accident?

Dulcie sat down, staring at the dirt beneath her paws.

Had Slayter acquired that scent on his shoes on purpose? Though the aroma was partially destroyed by shoe polish, it had certainly been strong enough to charm the young Weimaraner.

But now Rock, having found no lady dog to go with the distinctive message, lay in the sun, watching Ryan tear off shingles. Approaching him, Dulcie sniffed noses with him in a friendly way and lay down beside him. She so wished he could tell them what had gone through his thoughts when he'd snarled at Roman Slayter. As Kit uselessly chased a bird, Dulcie lay considering the accumulated puzzles of the last twenty-four hours: The jewelry store robbery, the high school fires, the dead cyclist, the return of the feral cats and their capture.

She thought how deeply afraid Kit was of that wild band, and how cruel they had been to her. Kit still had scars under her fur from their teeth and claws. In the car this morning, while Lucinda and Pedric went into the hospital to get Wilma, Kit had sat silent and worrying. "They haven't come back looking for me," she had said. "They wouldn't want me, Dulcie! Why would they?"

"They wouldn't want you, Kit. They didn't want you before, when you ran with them!" But Dulcie wondered.

Would the leader want to prevent any speaking cat from being out in the world, a cat that might give them away, might let someone know their secret?

She didn't want to consider such matters. Why would they wait until now? Kit had been in Molena Point for nearly two years. Dulcie tried to force her thoughts back to the fire at the high school, and the broken store windows. But it was hard not to worry and not to be frightened for the kit.

She made herself think about what they had learned at the PD, trying to tie the scattered facts together. Except that nothing wanted to go together. Too many pieces were still missing, so nothing made much sense. And it was not until that evening when the chief got home that they learned any more about the investigation-or, for that matter, about the feral cats.