Cat Deck The Halls

7

C LYDE DAMEN LAY prone on the bed, trying to get his breath despite the twenty-pound weight solidly planted on his chest. “What the hell, Joe! What are you doing? I can’t breathe. Your feet are as hard as pile drivers.” He lifted his head enough to stare eye to eye with the gray tomcat. “It’s the middle of the night! What the hell do you want?”

Joe Grey narrowed his eyes, and tried to keep from smiling.

“This is the third time this week, Joe! Third time you’ve jumped on me in the middle of the night, nearly cracking a rib. What the hell’s with you?” Despite the hindrance of the heavy tomcat pressing down on his solar plexus, and despite Joe Grey’s yellow-eyed smirk, Clyde managed to struggle up on one elbow.

He looked, heavy-eyed, at the bedside clock. “Four thirty-five.” He lay down again, sighing. When the tomcat smiled and began to purr, Clyde raised a threatening hand.

“You wouldn’t,” Joe said complacently.

“Nothing in this world, Joe, could be so important as to warrant your behavior. Your rude and thoughtless behavior. You’re not a lightweight kitten anymore. You weigh in about the same as a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler loaded with concrete.”

“Muscle,” Joe said in a rough tomcat voice. “How could I be heavy? I’m only a little cat, not a German shepherd. Whatever infinitesimal weight I might possess is pure muscle. If you were in better shape, if your stomach muscles weren’t so flabby, you wouldn’t even feel my delicate feather ounces.”

“Might I point out that it is still pitch-dark. That it is not yet dawn, that it is not even five o’clock, and that I-”

“It’s winter,” the tomcat said. “December. This time of year, it stays dark until-”

“Can it, Joe! Shut up and get the hell off my stomach and let me go back to sleep! You know damn well I have to go to work in the morning to support your prodigious appetite. If you had one ounce of consideration, you…”

But now Joe’s expression changed as if by magic, from amused and mildly sadistic to bewildered hurt. Clyde’s eyes widened as the tomcat turned his back, dropped cringing off the bed, and fled to the far corner of the bedroom, where he curled up on the cold hardwood floor, his back to Clyde, his white nose tucked under and his eyes closed, breathing out a soft sigh of wounded resignation.

Staring at the tomcat, Clyde swung out of bed. Shivering in bare skin and Jockey shorts, he padded across the room and knelt beside the gray tomcat.

“I’m sorry, Joe. What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong,” he said softly. With Joe curled into a miserable ball, Clyde couldn’t see the cat’s expression, couldn’t see Joe’s sly grin, his yellow eyes slitted in amusement. When, gently, Clyde turned Joe’s sleek silver face toward him and looked into his eyes, there was, again, only a pitiful look, an expression so wan and lost, so filled with desperate hurt, that Clyde could think only of the starving, fevered stray kitten Joe had once been, when Clyde found him abandoned in that San Francisco gutter.

Clyde had rescued Joe then, gently picking up the sick kitten and taking him home to his small apartment, where he fed him rare steak and milk, and then took him to a vet-who treated Joe for a broken and infected tail, and duly removed most of that appendage. Clyde had nursed Joe back to health, and they had never been parted since. Now, studying the suffering look on the tomcat’s gray-and-white face, Clyde was overwhelmed once more with pity. “Do you hurt somewhere? What happened?”

The tomcat rolled his eyes.

“Do you feel sick? Are you feverish? Is your stomach upset?”

Silence.

“Or could it be,” Clyde offered, “that you are weak and faint from hunger?”

Joe Grey smiled.

Clyde uttered another long-suffering sigh and, dispensing with shower and shave, pulled on his pants and headed downstairs to get breakfast.

The kitchen was cold and silent. No shuffling doggy sounds getting out of bed, no clicking of doggy toenails on the cold linoleum, no glad panting. The room was hollow with an emptiness that neither Clyde nor the tomcat could get used to. Even when Clyde threw on the light and turned on the radio and spoke to the three sleeping cats in the adjacent laundry, the silence pressed in. No glad huffing, no doggy yawn and whine, no doggy mumbles of greeting. Old Rube was gone. Buried out at the back of the patio, with a little flat headstone marking his grave, right next to Barney’s marker.

How long would it take, Joe wondered, until he and Clyde learned to live more equitably with the death of the old black Lab? It had taken a long time of grieving after golden Barney died, and he knew that the aftermath of Rube’s death would be no different. He peered into the laundry at the three household cats who, despite Clyde’s greeting, still slept, the two older cats twined together in the top bunk among their blankets, Fluffy’s head resting on Scrappy’s flank-Scrappy, through several name changes, had finally settled in with the name that had fit him best when he was young. Now that he was in his later years, that name didn’t seem to fit very well, either.

Only Snowball, the younger, white cat, slept on the bottom bunk. In Rube’s old bed. Grieving. Snowball had mourned deeply since Rube died.

She looked out at them, now, with only a sad expression, then curled tighter and squeezed her eyes shut.

Joe spent a long time licking and grooming her, but she didn’t respond much. Even when the smell of frying sausage and then scrambled eggs began to fill the room, Snowball remained in bed. As did Scrappy and Fluffy-the older cats letting Clyde know that it was too early, and too cold and dark, to get up. They would come yawning down later, stretching, and then hopefully Snowball would follow.

The aromas of sausage and eggs sent Joe Grey up onto the kitchen table, where he stretched out on his own side, impatiently waiting. Clyde set a place for himself, then went to get the paper, which they’d just heard hit the step. The time was 5:10. Clyde got up at six anyway, Joe thought unsympathetically. This would give him more time to read the paper.

Returning, Clyde shook open the paper and stood at the stove with his back to the tomcat, making toast as he read the headlines and sipped his coffee. Joe hated when Clyde hogged the front page. Rearing up on his hind paws, on the table, he could just see over Clyde ’s shoulder, the headline above the fold.

So there had been a reporter on the scene last night, slipping around, keeping out of the way, quietly pumping an officer or two for information. The guy had had to hustle, to get his article in this morning’s paper. Joe wondered what “important” story they’d pulled off the front page at the last minute, to make room for the more sensational headline:

COPS CONVERGE ON PLAZA CHRISTMAS TREE POSSIBLE MURDER? NO BODY FOUND

Clyde put their plates on the table and sat down, continuing to read, leisurely finishing the article-payback for the early wake-up call. Watching Clyde fork in scrambled eggs, Joe wolfed a few bites of his own breakfast. It tasted bland. “Do we have any kippers? Or a can of those imported sardines that you so carefully hid behind the canned beans?”

“You’re getting fat. No one eats sardines with sausage and eggs.”

“I do. You know perfectly well that I like a little fish condiment with my breakfast, it makes the eggs go down.”

“I didn’t know you had trouble making anything edible go down.” But Clyde rose, reached deep into the back of the cupboard, and withdrew a can of sardines. “I’m just lucky I have a strong stomach.” He twisted the little key to open the lid. “No one wants to smell sardines with their eggs at five in the morning.”

Dishing sardines onto Joe’s plate, he looked intently at the tomcat. “So that was what last night was about! When Kit came barging in and woke me up and then made that phone call. She reported a dead body that wasn’t there! I swear, Joe…”

“Woke you? How could we wake you? You never stopped snoring.”

Clyde looked hard at Joe. “The department got a phone tip, caller reports a dead man. Cops arrive, nothing. No body. A little blood-they don’t know, yet, if it was human blood.” He studied Joe. “What are you cats trying to pull? Cops search the plaza and find nothing. Nothing, Joe!” He laid aside the paper. “You want to explain this?”

“What’s it say about the child?”

“What child? There wasn’t any child. The paper doesn’t mention a child.” Trying to curb his temper, Clyde scanned the last column more carefully, then shook his head, still looking hard at Joe. “What did you tell the cops, you and Kit? What are you cats up to? What have you done now?”

Joe just looked at him.

Clyde laid down his fork. “You didn’t…Oh, hell! You didn’t mess with a crime scene? You didn’t lure away some witness? Some kid who saw a murder? Why, Joe? Why would you do that?”

“Do you suppose,” Joe said patiently, “that the law didn’t give the reporter the whole story? That they found something last night that they decided to keep quiet and didn’t share with that reporter? Is it possible for you to imagine, in that hidebound brain, that that child could be a holdback? A witness they don’t want the public to know about? That maybe they’re trying to protect her?”

Clyde concentrated on finishing his last bite of sausage. Then, “Was there a body? And who’s the kid? Why is a kid so important? You want to tell me what happened?”

Joe licked sardine oil from his whiskers. “Maybe Harper figures the kid’s safer if he keeps her under wraps, if the killer doesn’t know where to find her.”

“Will you start from the beginning? What child? Who is she? And,” he said, fixing Joe with a keen stare, “if there was a body, where is it?”

“Strange, though,” Joe mused. “Strange the guy didn’t kill her when he had the chance. She had to be a witness, she was right there in the dead man’s arms when Kit found her. Except, maybe the shooter didn’t have time, maybe he heard something, and hurried away dragging that heavy body-maybe he plans to go after her later.” The tomcat sat thinking about that, then returned to his eggs and the bright little sardines, which, along with the sausage, certainly did enhance the eggs’ bland flavor.

Only when he had finished his breakfast and licked his plate and cleaned his whiskers and methodically washed his front paws, a procedure that took some time and left Clyde fidgeting impatiently, did Joe fill Clyde in on the events of the previous night, on as much of the story as Joe himself knew. He described the body that only Kit had seen, and then the little girl they had found. Who the child was, and who the dead man was, and where the body was now, no one yet knew. The fingerprint reports might help. Or not, Joe thought. The killer could have no previous record, though that didn’t seem likely.

“So what happens,” Joe said, curling down on the want-ad section, which neither one of them read, “the way I see it, the killer knocks this guy off. Shoots him right there under the Christmas tree, maybe even while he’s holding the kid. He’s about to get rid of the body when something startles him, some noise or maybe some late passerby, maybe a car slowing out in front of the plaza. Noise scares him, and he runs.

“I’m guessing he hides somewhere close by. At about that time, Kit comes along over the roofs, smells blood and death, looks down, and there’s the body and the kid. Who knows, the guy might even have heard Kit herself scrambling up to the roof, maybe that’s what scared him off. Anyway, Kit sees the dead man and the kid, and takes off to get help.

“Now,” Joe said, “the plaza is quiet again, and the guy returns. Maybe he means to knock off the kid so she can’t ID him, but meantime, the kid has run. Vanished. Found a place to hide. Have to give her credit that she got the hell out of there, she’s only five or six. Kid took care of herself the minute she could, and she had to be scared witless, still scared when we found her. Some kids would just fall apart screaming.”

Joe took a last lick at his plate, then had to wash his whiskers again. “With the kid gone, the guy starts to get nervous. Maybe he looks for her, maybe not. He’s in a hurry to get the body out of there. Maybe figures she’s too little to give the law a coherent description. Figures if he gets the dead man away, maybe no one will ever know there was a body. Fat chance of that. Anyway, he…”

Clyde was fidgeting again. “This is really…”

“I’m not totally guessing here,” Joe said. “ Dallas found tire marks coming into the plaza, up over the flower bed, along the sidewalk, and out again where someone had backed down over the curb. Eleanor made a dozen casts where tires went over the flowers and dirt, and she made casts of a man’s footprints, someone besides the corpse.

“Guy brings his car around, drives into the plaza, loads up the body, and takes off-while Kit is racing to our house and waking me and calling the dispatcher, and then we’re scorching back there. Then the sirens, and that had to scare him and make him hustle.

“We get back, the cops are on the scene, but no body and no kid. Blood. Footprints. Tire marks. The samples and fibers and stuff that Dallas collected for the lab.” Joe scratched his ear with his hind claws, looking across at Clyde. “So, except for the little girl, Kit was the only one to see the victim.”

“This is making my head ache.” Clyde glanced at his watch and rose. Stacked their dishes in the sink and started to rinse them. “Does it occur to you, Joe, that if that child-”

“Kit and I found her,” Joe interrupted, “in the pump house behind the dog fountain. Little shed the size of a doghouse. We were in there with the kid, trying to calm her, when Brennan found her-and found us.”

Clyde spun around, glaring at him. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just the kind of caper I like to hear about. That’s the very kind of stupid move I keep warning you cats about. What the hell did Brennan think?”

“How do I know what he thought? You think I’m clairvoyant?”

Clyde shrugged. “How the hell do I know? You’re everything else unnatural.”

Joe let that pass. “She wouldn’t come out for Brennan, so he called for a woman.” He smiled. “The kid came out for Davis, nice as you please. Scared as hell, but she snuggled right up to Davis. She wouldn’t say a word, though. Not a sound. Davis took her to the hospital for a look-over, told Harper she’d take the kid home with her, that she didn’t want to leave her among strangers. God knows what happened to her,” Joe said darkly, not wanting to think about the possibilities.

But Joe’s sudden sick look of concern so touched Clyde that Clyde came around the table and, in a rare show of gentle affection, picked Joe up and cradled him against his shoulder, much as Detective Davis had cradled the little, silent girl. Moving to the window, Clyde stood holding the tomcat, the two of them looking out to where the sky was still dark. It would be several hours yet until dawn, and even then they wouldn’t be able to see the rising sun, for the high wall that defined the back of their patio and ran on behind their neighbors-but they would be able to watch a brightening streak of light finger up along the top of the wall, heralding the coming of dawn, and they had learned to live with that.

But while Clyde stood holding Joe, feeling ashamed of doubting the tomcat, Joe’s mind was on the vanished murder victim and on the little girl. Wondering where the man and child had come from. Strange to have such a young child out in the middle of the night-unless they had just arrived in the village.

“So the department was able to lift prints?” Clyde said.

“Prints from the decorations and toys,” Joe said. “It’ll take a while to get everyone who worked on decorating the tree into the station for sample prints-take time to check for missing children statewide and then national, check the airlines, go through the missing adult lists…”

“No description,” Clyde said. “And no one saw the car. They’re asking in the paper for witnesses.”

“There was no one on the street to see a car. Not a soul, Kit said. With the storm, the whole town was deserted, except for patrol cars.”

“And the victim and his killer.”

“It all takes time,” Joe said. “That’s what makes you want to claw and yowl, the damn waiting. Dulcie and Kit and I know the blood was human, but the department has no proof until the coroner’s lab tests it. The cops only know what Kit told them. Though I have to say, they didn’t hesitate. Moved right in, on her word-on the word of a tortoiseshell cat,” he said, smiling. “But the blood…Depends on how backed up the lab is, how soon the coroner gets to it.”

“Maybe the child will tell them something when she recovers a little from the shock.”

“If she can talk at all,” Joe said. “She didn’t say a word last night, but maybe she’ll open up for Davis. Maybe…” He twisted around on Clyde’s shoulder, his whiskers tickling Clyde ’s cheek. “It would be pretty neat if the kid did ID that bastard. To shoot a man like that while he’s holding a little child. That experience will sour Christmas for that little girl for all the rest of her life. I hope that little girl nails him good,” Joe hissed. “I want to see that guy burn.” The tomcat’s yellow eyes blazed at Clyde -and this was one time when Clyde Damen and Joe Grey were in perfect agreement. If they had their way, that killer would burn slowly and forever, with unthinkable agony and pain.