Cat Laughing Last

12

Whether you're a cop with a search warrant or the weekly cleaning person come to scour the bathrooms and vacuum the rugs, if you peek through someone's private papers you can stir matters you might wish you'd let lie. The more bizarre the results of such prying, the more compelled one may feel to keep searching, to see what else might come to light.

Charlie Getz had no idea, when she let herself into the Traynor cottage at nine on Monday morning, of the bloody mess she'd have to clean up or of what she would find later in Elliott Traynor's study.

The cottage the Traynors had rented was one of the most charming in the village, with its pale stone exterior and winding brick walk through a lush and tastefully planted garden. The high roof, above tall clerestory windows, was sheltered by an ancient oak. The front porch was laid with pale stone. The hand-carved front door opened into a handsome foyer brightened by a skylight and by a floor of cream-toned Mexican tiles. From the high-ceilinged living room to the tile-floored kitchen, the interior was filled with light.

The furnishings were casual and well designed, the copies of antique Persian rugs well made and rich in color, every detail planned for a tasteful but durable upscale rental. The owners had only recently refurnished, storing their antique pieces in the insulated attic among chests of outgrown children's toys and personal mementos.

Unloading her grocery bag, Charlie rinsed the salad greens and the pound of Bing cherries she had bought for Vivi, put the cherries into a flat plastic container, and slipped them in the freezer-frozen cherries for Vivi to suck on during the day, a childish habit that seemed to Charlie to have weird sexual connotations.

Moving into the living room, she watered the plants with a specially prepared plant food that was kept in a gallon plastic bottle under the wet bar. It was when she returned to the bright kitchen to get the vacuum from the cleaning closet next to the pantry, that she smelled something sour and metallic, a vile stink like spoiling meat, seeping out around the pantry door. Had some food gone bad, or a can of something exploded?

That didn't seem likely. She had stocked the shelves herself, only three weeks before, with freshly purchased staples, following instructions from the rental agent. Reaching for the doorknob, she hesitated, filled with a strange apprehension.

Slowly she pulled the pantry door open-and slammed it closed again, trying to catch her breath.

Her first thought was that some kind of meat had been butchered in there and been flung around, then left lying in globs on the floor. Who would do such a thing? And there were hanks of hair on it, pieces of fur.

Dark fur, mixed with gore and blood.

Fur mottled like…

Terrified, ripping open the door again, she expected to see tortoiseshell fur mottled black and brown. Those cats roamed everywhere, they were likely to slip into anyone's house. But who would…?

Oh, not the kit. Please, not the kit.

Having flung open the door, she forced herself to look carefully.

Relief flooded her. This wasn't the kit's tortoiseshell fur, nor Dulcie's tabby-striped coat. This fur was coarse and rough-black and gray, not brown.

Raccoons?

Raisins and crackers were mixed with the blood. From the shelves, the contents of burst cans of corn and fruit salad dripped down. Raccoons couldn't do that-the cans had been blown open by some tremendous force.

She turned away, her breakfast wanting to come up. What kind of horrible prank was this? What sick joke? She stood holding her hand to her mouth, trying to mask the smell, trying to keep from heaving. Trying to construct a plausible scenario.

Chill air touched her from above, a cold draft. Looking up at the pantry ceiling, she saw the access door had been tampered with, the plywood cover apparently pulled aside, then pushed crookedly back again into place, its unpainted parts marking its altered position. Would raccoons be able to pull aside an attic door, would they know how to do that?

Certainly raccoons had broken into several village houses that were supposedly vermin proof. She remembered when a dozen of the beasts got into the Carvers' house through the attic and down into an upstairs bedroom, terrifying old Mrs. Carver nearly to apoplexy. And that wasn't the only bizarre tale of the damage raccoons could do. When two of them got into the high school by shoving aside an acoustical tile, they took over the principal's office and quite effectively rearranged his filing system before they could be evicted. As she stood studying the bloody mess, trying not to be sick, she realized she was looking, among a pattern of dark splatters, at a ragged hole in the Sheetrock.

A bullet hole? Was that what happened, had these animals been shot? She thought the bullet would have to have been a hollow-point, to tear the beasts up like that and to make that huge ragged hole in the wall.

She imagined the animals breaking in, making a racket as they attacked the food, then Elliott flinging open the door and shooting them. Afterward, he must have pushed the plywood back over the ceiling opening, maybe thinking that more of the beasts were up there.

Couldn't he have thought of some other approach than killing them? The police carried animal nets for this kind of emergency. Or the police would have called a specialist. There were several services in the area that had humane traps to deal with such cases. She felt rage that he had called no one, that he had shot the them. And then, to top it off, he had left the mess for her to clean up.

Swallowing back her anger, she fetched rubber gloves from her tote bag, and put on one of the surgical masks she carried for use when she didn't want to breathe caustic fumes. Tying a dish-towel over her hair, she cursed the Traynors. She was a cleaning professional, not a dead body disposal service. Not in this situation. This wasn't the aftermath of police business, to which she had been summoned. She felt like walking out, telling them to clean up their own mayhem.

With a roll of paper towels and a dustpan to use as a scoop and several heavy garbage bags, she cleared out the spilled food and scrubbed away the blood where it had splattered on the walls and shelves. She dumped the undamaged cans in a bucket of hot, soapy water and scrubbed each one. As she cleaned, she found three other holes. From one, she dug out a soft-nosed bullet smashed like a mushroom. The other was too deeply embedded. When she had finished scrubbing and disinfecting and carried the bags out to the garbage, she saw that her work wasn't finished.

The yard around the back door was covered with garbage- empty cans, soiled wrapping paper, all kinds of household refuse. Strange that the garbage can itself was upright, with the lid secured.

After pitching the scattered garbage piece by piece into a fresh plastic bag, she opened the tall can and saw that two bags were already there, heavy with something, and smelling of gore; and she felt disgust all over again. Traynor had put the bodies here. That sickened her. Couldn't he have given them a decent burial? This was going to be her last day working for Elliott Traynor. It took a really colossal nerve to leave such a mess, not only in the pantry but in the yard, not even to pick up the garbage, no matter how famous he was.

When she'd finished cleaning, she threw her mask and hair cover and gloves into the garbage, fetched a clean uniform and shoes from her van, and, in the Traynor's guest bath, washed her face and hands and arms, washed every exposed part of herself, dropping her soiled garments and shoes in a plastic bag to be discarded. She'd bill Traynor for replacements. Cleaning up after a murder didn't hold a candle to this.

Returning to the kitchen to fetch the vacuum, the thought struck her that not only raccoons but a man could have been shot in there.

How silly. Did she always have to imagine more than was possible?

And yet…

If there had been a man, she thought, panicked, she had destroyed the evidence.

Hurrying out to the garbage can, she hauled out the plastic bags she had filled and opened the two at the bottom.

Raccoons. Badly mangled. Surely that accounted for the blood and gore.

Tying up the bags again and stuffing everything back on top, she closed the lid tightly and went inside to scrub herself all over again-and to call the police department. Her feelings about Elliott Traynor, which had before today deteriorated from admiration to puzzled unease, had turned to disgust.

She supposed she was too inclined to see her heroes as giants above reproach. She expected Elliott Traynor to be without any possible fault.

Though she didn't suppose that it was illegal to shoot raccoons, under the circumstances, she thought she ought to tell Max of the incident, thought there might be some reason that he would need to know this. When she'd placed the call, the dispatcher told her Captain Harper was in court. She left a message for him to call her, she didn't want to tell the dispatcher why. She felt tired, enervated. Felt used and unnaturally defenseless-not her usual state of mind.

She wanted to see Max and feel the strength of him holding her, wanted to hear some wisecrack, some wry comment about murdered raccoons, some twisted cop humor that would make her laugh.

But then when she went to dust the dining room and mop its tile floor, she found Traynor's note. It lay on the table beside a hundred-dollar bill.

Ms. Getz:

Raccoons got in the pantry. No time to call anyone. I shot them with a target pistol. Sorry for the mess. Here's an extra hundred. Appreciate if you don't mention this. Embarrassing scene I’d not want talked about.

Not a graceful communication. Short and abrupt. Well, what did she want, a eulogy to dead raccoons? She felt inclined to leave his hundred-dollar bill. Surely Traynor had intended this as a bribe.

But she had more than earned the hundred, cleaning up his mess. If she didn't take it now, she'd be billing him for the extra work. Likely the money was intended as both payment and bribe.

She called it earned, slipped it her pocket, and got on with the vacuuming. She did the living room and front bedroom, emptying the wastebaskets with distaste, where Vivi's cherry seeds stuck to the plastic liners. Only when she started on Traynor's study did she slow her pace.

When she wheeled the vacuum into Traynor's study, it was as neat and tidy as ever. Nothing on the desk but his computer and the freshly printed chapter he had written the night before. He always left the new chapter on the desk, possibly to go over the next day when he and Vivi returned from their walk or from the theater. They went often to approve the sets that Cora Lee was painting, then had breakfast out.

Tryouts were tonight. Charlie supposed that when rehearsals began they'd be at the theater for longer periods. It seemed a rigorous routine for someone being treated for cancer. Traynor had told her, when they first arrived and were discussing her work routine, that he worked late into the night. He said that was when the juices flowed. She remembered the amused look in his eyes, some private joke-or maybe his faint smile was simply juvenile humor at the off-color connotation. A strange man. He still interested her, despite her anger this morning.

He was far more stern in real life than he looked in the promotion picture on his book jackets. Long before this morning, Traynor had made her uncomfortable. He seemed to analyze and weigh a person far too closely-maybe a writer's penetrating observation, she supposed, as he tried to see beneath the surface.

Did she, when she was sketching an animal, stare like that at her subject? Did she make her animals uncomfortable? With Joe and Dulcie, she'd seen them both wince when she was drawing them. And despite the kit's bright disposition, several times when she'd looked too hard at the kit, she'd gotten a hiss in return or a striking paw that surprised her and made her draw back.

Who knew what an animal felt when you stared at them? In the animal world, a stare meant the threat of attack. One was supposed to stare at a mountain lion, to keep him from attacking first-to show superiority. But one was not, while hunting, supposed to look a deer or rabbit in the eye, that only alerted them.

Joe and Dulcie and the kit were sentient cats, not instinct-driven wild beasts. Most of the time, logic drove those three-but a logic overlying the same deep feline nature as any ordinary kitty-they weren't any less cat, they were simply more than cat.

Vacuuming beneath the fine walnut desk and along beside the walnut bookshelves, she reached to try the desk drawers and file drawers. As usual, they were locked. Hesitantly she reached for the new pages of Traynor's book that lay before her.

All week she had been sneaking looks at Traynor's manuscript. Last Friday, reading his earlier pages, she had been shocked and deeply upset. She'd been so excited to have a look at his work, had told herself that after all, it was written for public consumption, and it was right there on the desk; she only wanted to see how he developed his prose, from the beginning. In school she had been interested in writing fiction-though far more fascinated, always, with drawing, with the visual images she wanted to create. But Traynor had always been a favorite; she had loved reading some of his passages over and over, simply for their poetry.

She'd heard him tell someone on the phone that this new book was set in Marin County, above San Francisco, at the turn of the century. She liked the title, Twilight Silver. She had stood with the vacuum paused and roaring, reading the neatly printed pages.

They'd been dreadful. The words stumbled, the paragraphs didn't make sense. She had started again, thinking her lack of comprehension was her fault. She had skipped ahead several pages, but had found no improvement. She'd decided this must be a first draft, a rough beginning. Surely a writer was allowed a flawed first draft.

But why print it out so neatly? Why bother, until it was the way he wanted it-why print out these garbled pages, this lack of clarity with not a hint of his lucid style?

Being an artist herself, with a duly accredited degree-for whatever that was worth, she thought wryly-she felt that she had some sense of how a work of art, a drawing or manuscript, grew to fruition. But those pages, despite the promise of an exciting plot, had been so clumsy they embarrassed her.

Had the illness done this to Traynor? Was it slowly taking his mind as well as his body? The thought deeply distressed her.

Well, she didn't know much about how writers worked. Maybe from this draft he would construct the smooth prose that she so loved. Still, she'd thought that writers edited on screen, didn't print until they felt they had something of value. But maybe not. Surely they didn't all work the same.

That morning, aligning the pages as she had found them, she had felt a deep disappointment, almost a loss.

But now, this morning, maybe these pages would be better. Watching the driveway through the study window, she picked up the current chapter. She read hopefully, but only for a moment. His words were just as inept, just as off-putting. She read two pages, then tried again, but it was no better. She stopped when she heard a car pulling in, and laid the chapter on the desk.

But the car appeared in the next drive, parking before the house next door. Aligning the pages, she glanced up into the bookshelves-and caught her breath.

Joe Grey stepped out from behind the row of books, his yellow eyes wide with amusement. "I'm surprised at you, Charlie. I didn't dream you'd take the Traynor's money as a trustworthy professional, then pry into their personal business."

"What are you doing here? What are you up to?"

Joe smiled. "Does he always lock the drawers?"

Charlie grinned. "Why would you snoop on the Traynors?"

The tomcat shrugged, a tilt of his handsome head, a twitch of his muscled gray shoulders.

"Where's Dulcie? And what," she said, fixing Joe with a deep scowl, "did you have to do with that mess in the pantry?"

"You think I shot those beasts? That I've learned to use a pistol? Come on, Charlie."

"What did you have to do with those raccoons getting in the house?"

His gaze was innocent.

"Besides the raccoons-besides that gruesome mess that I had to clean up, what are you up to? There's not enough crime in the village? You've been reduced to idle snooping?"

"And what about you?" He lifted a white-tipped gray paw. "You sound so much like Clyde it's scary. No wonder you stopped dating him-before you turned into his clone."

"That is really very rude." She reached up to stroke Joe's gleaming gray shoulder. "Come on down. Were you looking for Traynor's research about Catalina's letters?"

Joe twitched an ear.

"I saw how interested you were, that night at Lupe's Playa. So, did you find it?"

He smiled. "It was right here in this stack. I pulled it behind the books, to read it while you vacuumed-while you snooped."

"And?"

"Catalina's letters to Marcos Romano are worth something. Two of them sold recently at Butterfield's for over ten thousand apiece."

"You're kidding me."

He pawed the sheaf of research from behind the books. "Between pages six and seven."

The auction notice lay there with Traynor's receipt. Joe showed her the notation at the bottom.

She raised her eyes to his, their faces on a level. "How many letters were there? How many did she write?"

"I don't know, Charlie. Maybe no one knows."

"If they're that valuable, why did he write a play about them- or why is he letting it be produced? Already, apparently, people are looking for them."

"Maybe he couldn't resist. Maybe, despite the wisdom of keeping them secret, the letters kept bugging him. The way you get bugged, wanting to draw something. The way you stare at a person, your fingers itching for a piece of charcoal."

"Aren't you perceptive this morning."

"My dear Charlie, cats invented perceptive. If some of Catalina's lost letters are still out there, and if Traynor thinks he can find them, maybe he figured he'd come on out to the coast and search for them while the play was still in rehearsal, before anyone saw the play, before anyone else thought of looking for them."

"But…"

"Maybe it was thinking and thinking of the letters that made him write the play in the first place. But now he's sick and dying, he's in a hurry. He wants the letters now. Once he's dead, he won't care who finds them."

He looked at her steadily, his yellow eyes wide and appraising. "What do you think of his work in progress?"

Charlie only looked at him.

"I'm no literary critic," Joe said. "But in my humble feline opinion, that stuff stinks."

Charlie laughed. She stepped to the window, to check the street, then sat down in Elliott's padded swivel chair.

Dropping down from the bookshelf to the desk, Joe patted the new chapter. "Right now, there are more questions about the Traynors than answers. Why did Vivi want to avoid Ryan Flannery? And why did she come in here early this morning and print the pages?" Joe shrugged. "Maybe he didn't feel like it last night after all the excitement. Makes you wonder how he does feel, despite what she tells people about how well he's doing with the treatments."

"She printed out his work this morning?"

"She did. And don't you wonder," Joe said, "why he packs a gun? Why he brought a gun out here from New York? He must not have declared it, must have hidden it in his luggage, with New York so strict about gun ownership."

Charlie sat frowning. "For a rotten-tempered tomcat, you come up with some interesting questions. What… Here they come."

As the Traynors' car turned in, Charlie snatched Joe from the desk, tucking him under her arm like a bag of flour, forcing an indignant snarl from the tomcat.

"Shut up, Joe. Hold still." Lifting the vacuum with her other hand, she watched the car pass the window, heading for the back.

"Wait," Joe hissed. "The research. Put it in the stack, on the bottom."

She dropped both Joe and the vacuum, hid the research, and they headed fast for the front door. "Where's Dulcie?" she whispered. "Where's the kit?"

Dulcie and the kit flew out past her as she jerked the door open. Picking up the doormat, Charlie stepped down into the yard to shake it. Already the three cats were gone, vanished among the bushes.