Cat Deck The Halls

24

L UCINDA GREENLAW, leaving the house earlier that morning with the pottery shards safe in her pocket, smiled again thinking of Pedric wandering down the hill like some distinguished-looking mushroom hunter, kneeling among the neighbors’ wet leaves and digging out the plastic bag of broken shards; as soon as he returned, she’d called Chief Harper. Her call had just caught him, he’d just come in and was about to leave again. She’d hurried down to the station, parking hastily among the courthouse gardens. As she headed in through the heavy glass door of the police wing, Mabel Farthy looked up from her realm of electronic communications.

“Lucinda!” Mabel swung out through the little gate to give her a hug, the pudgy blonde laughing, her dark uniform a bit tighter around the middle, Lucinda thought, not unkindly. “It’s been a long time.” Mabel sniffed at the white plastic bag that Lucinda had laid on the counter. “What did you bring? Some of your good Christmas cookies?”

Lucinda laughed. “Not this time. This is…” She did her best to look embarrassed. “I think it might be evidence. Well, fingerprints,” she said hesitantly. “This is so…so busybody of me, Mabel. I…”

Max came up the hall as they were talking, took the bag she offered, and led her back to his office. The tall lean chief poured her a cup of coffee and made her comfortable on the couch, sitting down beside her. She opened the plastic bag, still trying to appear embarrassed when, in fact, she wasn’t at all, she was having a fine time. But her story required a certain shy reluctance, she was not in the habit of bringing in evidence, and she had to make this look good.

Well, she thought, amused at herself, she’d always wanted to do a little acting. As she laid out her story, she knew she was letting the three cats off the hook-Joe Grey was right, the timing would have been way too pat if the snitch had called about this evidence: The cats are in the office, the chief says he’d give a lot for Betty Wicken’s fingerprints, and not an hour later the snitch calls, telling him where to find those prints. “With that scenario,” Joe had said, “everything would hit the fan.”

“I know it’s meddling,” Lucinda said now, looking at Max shyly. “But that woman in the rental, the woman our housebreaker was spying on? You said last night, if you could get information on her…Well, I was afraid if I didn’t slip right over there when I saw her break this flowerpot, if I didn’t snatch up the pieces before she threw them away…I don’t even know if a flowerpot can hold fingerprints, but…Am I making any sense…?”

Max looked into the bag, didn’t touch the broken shards.

“When she dropped it on the drive…She looked in such a hurry…It shattered and she just left it there, got in her car and drove off. Can you take fingerprints from this? Will that help find out about her?”

Max was silent for so long that Lucinda began to get nervous. She looked at him uncertainly, and sipped the coffee he’d poured for her. “Those photographs of the children, Max. I worried about that all night, I find that really frightening.”

“As do we,” Max said. He watched Lucinda so intently that she grew increasingly uneasy. She knew she was gushing, and that wasn’t like her. Max put his arm around her as if, she thought, he meant to humor her, to tell her kindly that what she had done was very clever of her, and then send her away.

But instead, he had beeen interested in what she told him about Evina Woods.

“If we can lift some prints,” he said, “and if we can get anything from AFIS on them, if the woman turns out to have a record, we’ll have something to work with.”

Max rose to refill their coffee cups. “So far, on those three tenants, we have false names, false IDs, falsified car registration. That in itself might give us reason to bring them in for questioning, but it leaves a lot of holes.” He picked up the plastic bag. “We have a call in to Arkansas, to check on Evina Woods’s story. I’ll take this back to Dallas, see if he can lift clear prints. If not, we’ll send it along to the lab, where they have more sophisticated equipment.”

“I feel so sure,” Lucinda said, “that Evina was telling the truth.”

Max took her hand, helping her up. “You were bold to go down there and talk with her, Lucinda-I won’t say foolish.”

“She didn’t threaten me, Max, she seemed really scared. When she saw I wasn’t going to call the police, she calmed down. I know that could all have been an act, but…Call it a gut feeling. I think she’s telling the truth.”

She looked intently at him. “I’m not a soft touch, but once in a while, you have to take a chance on someone. This is one of the times…If I’m wrong, I expect I’ll pay for it. This gamble,” she said, “is one I choose to take.”

I N THE DIM garage, as Betty Wicken and Leroy Huffman sorted tools at the workbench, packing them into a canvas bag, Joe approached the blue Chevy van. Slipping up onto a stack of cardboard boxes piled between the van and the wall, he balanced with a forepaw against the van’s window, peering into the dim interior, his nostrils filled with the stink of automotive paint, from the amateurish blue paint job.

Pressing against the tinted glass, he saw not the pristine interior of Charlie Harper’s van, no neatly built-in cupboards, no polished worktable running down one side. Only bare metal bracing and raw composition walls. This ancient, neglected interior had never had any care; it was stripped and ragged, only an empty hulk.

Dropping down to the garage floor, he studied the lettering painted on the van’s side-the hasty, unprofessional logo, an amateurish copy of the more finely spaced CHARLIE’S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT.

Somewhere, the Wickens had found another old Chevy van and had treated it to a home paint job on a par with what any active five-year-old kid could accomplish.

“Not Charlie’s van,” Kit whispered, narrowing her eyes and lashing her tail.

But Dulcie smiled with relief. “Charlie’s safe, and Mavity’s safe. But why would anyone copy Charlie’s van? What do they mean to do?” Her green eyes flashed. “Setting Charlie up,” she hissed. “But for what? For some burglary?” she said softly. “Or…could this be the missing vehicle that hauled away the dead man?” Her eyes widened. “Did you smell death in there?”

Joe slipped under the van, Dulcie and Kit beside him, and they reared up, sniffing among the axles and brakes. Trying, over the stink of grease and hydraulic and brake fluids, to detect the faintest scent of death; but there was nothing else, no foreign smell.

Dropping down again, they fled among the boxes as Leroy opened the side door of the van and tossed in two bags of tools, some cans of paint, and then ladders, drop cloths, everything one would need to renovate a house, or repair it.

“Are they horning in on Charlie’s customers?” Dulcie whispered. “Pretending to work for her?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Joe said softly. “And there’s no cleaning equipment, just the repair stuff.” The tomcat frowned. “Doesn’t make sense, unless…Unless they’ve staked out Charlie’s wealthy regulars, meaning to rob them-that would set Charlie up, big-time.”

They looked at one another, feeling sick. Law enforcement families were prime marks for any scam to embarrass or compromise them, to put them on the wrong side of the law. The cats remembered too painfully when Captain Harper had been framed for a double murder.

“That won’t happen again,” Joe said.

But Kit shivered, pushing closer to Dulcie.

“Nothing has happened yet,” Dulcie said. “We won’t let that happen!”