Cat Laughing Last

30

The front page of the Molena Point Gazette was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped the Gazette, but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

AUTHOR ELLIOTT TRAYNOR MURDERED VISITING AUTHOR AN IMPOSTOR

The handsome gray-haired author living among us while his play, Thorns of Gold, was being cast, has turned out to be an imposter. The man whom villagers assumed to be Elliott Traynor is, in fact, a New York fry cook from Queens bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author. The real Traynor died six weeks ago on the New York streets, in a drama more bizarre than any of Traynor's many works of fiction.

The debonair and charming fry cook who impersonated Traynor was able to deceive the entire village, including director Samuel Ladler and musical director Mark King. Only Traynor's wife, Vivi, seems to have known the truth.

The body of the real Elliott Traynor was identified late yesterday by New York police after it had lain for six weeks in cold storage in the New York City morgue, tagged as a John Doe. Molena Point police are holding Vivi Traynor and the fry cook, Willie Gasper, for transport back to New York where they will face murder charges. Until this morning, Traynor's death was considered a possible suicide. Police now have a witness to the murder.

Traynor was found dead in early March, in an alley frequented by the homeless. There was no identification. He was dressed in rags. The fingerprints lifted could not be matched in any New York State or federal records. On Friday, Traynor's widow and Gasper were arrested and held for possible illegal disposition of a body, but early today a witness was located claiming to have seen the author's wife smother him with a pillow and dump him in the alley.

Early this month, Elliott and Vivi Traynor were thought by Traynor's publisher and his New York agent to have flown to the West Coast, where Traynor meant to complete his latest novel and oversee the production of his play. According to New York police, Traynor died the night the couple's flight left John F. Kennedy Airport. Gasper, impersonating the world-famous author, accompanied Mrs. Traynor on the flight to California using Traynor's identification, then posed as Traynor, even acting as consultant on the production of Traynor's only known play.

New York medical examiner Holland Frye told reporters that Traynor's body contained a large dose of Demerol laced with alcohol, a potentially lethal combination. Traynor had a legal prescription for Demerol, which is a powerful pain reliever. The pillow with which Traynor was smothered was hidden by the witness to his murder. Subsequently turned over to police, it was booked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab for identification of hairs clinging to the fabric and DNA testing of possible saliva stains.

Max Harper and Dallas Garza watched the evening newscast while standing in Clyde's living room. The three cats lay on the back of the couch behind Charlie and Ryan, pretending to doze but Joe was so interested he could hardly lie still. Both the Gazette and the newscasters had mentioned only one New York witness.

So, Joe thought, smiling, NYPD had been able to keep some of the details under wraps.

Besides Marcy Truncant, the bag lady who had awakened to see Vivi kneeling in the alley holding a pillow over Traynor's face, a neighbor of the Traynors, living upstairs from them in their mid-town apartment building, had come forward. She had told detectives that she saw Vivi and Elliott leave the building early the evening of his death, five hours before the Traynors' flight. She remembered the date because it was her wedding anniversary, the first since her husband had died. She saw the couple go out the front door of the building and down into the parking garage, then in a few minutes saw their car pull out of the garage. She told police she saw both of them inside the car as they turned into traffic and sat waiting for the traffic light.

She said that approximately twenty minutes after the Traynors left the building, Elliott returned, coming into the lobby through the front door, and that he was dressed differently. He had left the building dressed in a suit and tie and had returned wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a frayed denim jacket, attire devoid of the meticulous care that Traynor always exhibited. She didn't see their car return, but an hour later when she went down to the garage, the Traynors' black Jaguar was in its slot.

Joe imagined a scenario where Vivi and Elliott left in the Jaguar, then Vivi had somehow gotten Elliott into Willie's car, maybe had feigned car trouble. She had gotten some liquor into him and perhaps additional Demerol. When he passed out they had changed his clothes and dumped him in the alley, and apparently smothered him to make certain he was dead. Crude, Joe thought. But effective.

Willie had driven the Jaguar back to the building and put it away, so it would appear that Elliott and Vivi were at home. In Elliott's place, he had gone up to the apartment. He had changed clothes, called a cab, and headed for the airport to meet Vivi, to catch their red-eye flight out of JFK. Willie's car had not yet been located. Joe wondered what they'd done with Elliott's dress clothes. Had they been stained or torn when Vivi dispatched Elliott?

When the TV news switched to tensions in the Middle East, Harper turned the volume down. Joe could hear Clyde in the kitchen tossing the salad and stirring the spaghetti sauce. The house smelled of Italian sausage and garlic. Elaborately, Joe stretched, trying to get the kinks out. His whole body felt tense. He'd rest easier when the two detectives had arrived from New York, and had taken Vivi and Willie Gasper away with them. He kept thinking, without any logic, that all the confusion with the Spanish chests and Catalina's letters wouldn't end until Molena Point had seen the last of Vivi Traynor-as if Vivi's switch-and-bait game had somehow contaminated everything she touched in the village.

Catalina's hidden letters, if the ladies of Senior Survival had been able to buy all the chests and found all the letters in them, would have contributed nicely to their future security. But that hadn't happened. Too many people knew about the letters. Of the seven chests that Marcos Romero had carved for Catalina, five were now accounted for. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle, in which he found the hidden compartment; the three chests that the Iselman estate gave to the Pumpkin Coach; and the chest that Susan Brittain had bought on eBay. Susan had examined it carefully, but had found nothing inside.

Five chests. And nine letters-the one Casselrod found in the white chest and that Joe and Dulcie had returned to Cora Lee, and the eight letters taken from one of the chests donated by the Iselman estate, that Augor Prey took from the smashed chest in the Pumpkin Coach. Those would remain with the police as evidence until after Prey's trial, then would be returned to the Pumpkin Coach to sell. Eight letters, each valued at some ten thousand dollars, though both the curator at the museum of history where Susan inquired, and an official at Butterfield's, thought that at auction they would bring more. Forty to eighty thousand clams, Joe thought, for the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, and Meals for the Elderly-and maybe the local Feline Rescue. That would be nice, to see some of it go for indigent cats. After all, without a cat or two, Augor Prey might have slid out of Molena Point with the letters, as slick as a greased rat.

When Joe heard Clyde dishing up the spaghetti, he dropped off the couch and melted into the kitchen, rubbing against Charlie's ankles, then leaped to the far end of the counter beside Dulcie and the kit.

Curled up on the cool tile, impatiently awaiting their turn, the cats watched Clyde serve the plates. Charlie unwrapped garlic bread hot from the oven, as Ryan popped cold beers. The Italian feast smelled like the cats' idea of heaven, making them drool with greed.

Humans wind their spaghetti between spoon and fork, but cats slurp it-in this case while listening guiltily to Rube whining at the back door. The old dog's digestion could no longer handle spicy food. Clyde fed him a special diet about as appealing as tom burgers.

But hey, Joe thought, the stuff is good for him. He watched Charlie and Harper at the table, observing the sense of shared sympathy between them. And he had to smile, that Clyde and Ryan seemed to be hitting it off. Certainly Clyde was scrubbed and neatly dressed in a V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck and freshly washed jeans, and he hadn't grouched once-he was, in fact, observing impeccable behavior. That never hurt, Joe thought, amused.

"When is Augor Prey's arraignment?" Charlie asked. "Are you sure he'll be indicted?"

"Time and patience," Harper said. "You can never be certain of anything, but I see no reason why the grand jury won't hand down an indictment. We have the gun that killed Fern, with Prey's prints on it."

Charlie nodded. "Along with Willie Gasper's prints, and Vivi's?"

Harper nodded. "It was apparently Willie's gun or hers. There was no registration. And no way to know if that gun killed the raccoons. It was the same caliber weapon, but with a hollow point that spreads all over, you're not going to see any riflings. If it was the same gun, Gasper apparently wiped off the trigger. It showed only Prey's prints.

"Prey's story is that, the morning Fern died, Vivi followed Fern in through the broken window, into the back room, and pulled the gun on them while they were fighting over the wooden chests. That he snatched it from her and it went off, killing Fern. We have evidence that Vivi was in the back room at some point." Joe thought about the cherry pit that Garza had picked up, and about Prey's sworn statement putting Vivi there. The cats, playing up to the night dispatcher, had found a copy of Prey's signed statement that Garza had left for Harper. Easing the door of Harper's office closed and flipping on the desk lamp, they had crouched on the blotter, reading.

Not only had Fern tried to grab the chests from Prey-a real fistfight, as Prey had described it-but Prey said that one of the chests had been smashed, and that Fern managed to snatch up the letters that fell out of it.

Joe assumed there had been some gentle pressure from Garza or Harper to obtain the rest of Prey's statement. Prey said that when Fern ran toward the window he lost his head, went kind of crazy, as he put it, and shot her again, firing at her in a fit of confusion.

He said that Vivi had disappeared; and that when he saw he'd likely killed Fern, he jammed the gun in his pocket and ran for the back door, jumped in his car, and took off. He said that, driving away, he wanted to go back and talk to the police, that he heard the sirens and wanted to tell them what had happened, but he was afraid to. That had made the cats smile. Anyone who thought Prey was trying sincerely to make amends for an innocent mistake ought to think again. For one thing, both shots had been from behind, entering Fern in the back.

"It's interesting," Garza said, "that Vivi saw him shoot Fern, but didn't try to blackmail him. Likely she didn't want to call attention to herself at that point. Apparently she just went home and laid low, but then she got nervous and started to pack."

Harper leaned back in his chair. "Not too nervous to send those chapters she was writing off to New York before she and Willie tried to sneak out. Maybe she hoped that in the next few weeks, New York would dispose of Elliott's body and no one would ever know he was dead. She may have planned for Willie to keep right on being Elliott Traynor, she may have really believed that Elliott's publisher would think that what she wrote was Elliott's work. It takes," Harper said with a lopsided grin, "some kind of talent to write like Elliott Traynor."

The shadow of a smile touched Charlie's face; and she rose quickly to dish up more spaghetti. The cats watched her with interest; but it was not until the next morning that Joe was certain of what he suspected.

It was just after ten when Joe trotted in through Dulcie's cat door; she met him in the kitchen, her green eyes bright, her tabby tail lashing with excitement. He'd seen Charlie's van out front, and Gabrielle's and Mavity's cars. In the living room, Charlie and all the ladies of Senior Survival were gathered; all seemed to be talking at once. Joe sniffed the good smells of coffee and chocolate and sweet vanilla, and twitched an ear toward the animated female voices.

"They're celebrating," Dulcie said. "They got the house. They really got it, they're so happy they're almost purring."

"What house?"

"The last one they looked at, the one they've all been talking about, the one above the canyon. Don't you listen? Tomcats," she said, flattening her ears with annoyance. "It has a bad water problem, so that young couple didn't get their loan. Anyway, they didn't want to do the repairs. The ladies are so thrilled."

"Right. That's just what they need, a huge house with a water problem. Plumbing? Leaking basement? What? Do you know how much it costs to-"

"Ryan looked at it. She said she can fix it."

Joe narrowed his eyes. "Saying something and doing it are not always the same. The drainage on those hills-"

"Come on, Joe. They're so happy. It'll be all right-let's stay for a little while. Charlie's here. She will be one of the trustees. But she's-I don't know what's wrong with her. She's acting as nervous as a mouse at a cat show."

Heading for the living room beside Dulcie, Joe glanced up at the buffet. "Is that the chest Susan bought, the one that was in her car during the break-in?"

"Wilma's keeping it for her."

"Out in plain sight?"

"Since Augor Prey and Casselrod went to jail, why not?"

"I wouldn't leave it lying around. You don't know who else…" Exasperated with Susan and Wilma, he leaped up to have a look.

The box smelled just like the others, of old, seasoned wood. The geometric carvings were primitive and handsome, each side with a rosette in the center. Pawing the top open, he sniffed at the empty interior.

The walls and bottom seemed too thin for a false compartment. Likely this was just a nice collector's piece that would bring maybe four or five hundred dollars, he thought, dropping to the floor. Heading for the living room, the two cats slipped into the cave beneath Wilma's desk beside the kit, where she lay on her back playing with one of Cora Lee's slippers, holding it between her front paws, killing it violently.

Moving deeper in beside her, Joe and Dulcie listened to the ladies' plans, to Susan's decision to put her house on the market, and to their discussion of the legal aspects of a joint purchase that their attorney had outlined. All the numbers and percentage points made the cats' heads reel. Curled up together, they were almost asleep when Charlie's cell phone rang.

Answering, her face colored. She glanced around at her friends, then rose, heading for the kitchen, cradling the phone to her ear, her sudden excitement seeming almost to send sparks. Quickly the three cats slipped out to follow her, pushing through the kitchen door before she closed it. Leaping to the table, they crowded around her. The voice at the other end reached them like a bee buzz. Charlie listened for some time, going pale; absently she petted Dulcie.

Slipping close to her, Joe put his face next to Charlie's. She didn't push him away. The woman's voice at the other end was husky and familiar. "… totally unprecedented. There are a lot of well-known writers who would like to step into this contract. I can't make any kind of promise, but I have to say, I like this very much. Really, I find it difficult to separate your work from Elliott's. I'm hoping Elliott's editor will feel the same.

"I'm taking it over to her this afternoon. This whole thing has been upsetting to everyone-and you can imagine that several writers' agents have already contacted Kathleen Merritt and called me."

Nervously, Charlie hugged Joe.

"If she does like it, can you meet the August tenth deadline?"

"Yes," Charlie said, looking with panic at the cats.

"You said you're not a writer by profession?"

"I'm an artist. I do animal drawings. I'm represented in Molena Point by the Aronson Gallery. And I… I own a cleaning and maintenance company."

"So you work full-time?"

"I can meet the deadline. I have reliable crews. My time is my own." She didn't mean to sound defensive. Beside her, Joe and Dulcie were smiling and purring. The kit looked wide-eyed and puzzled. When Charlie hung up the phone, she grabbed the cats in a huge hug.

"Our secret," she said softly, glancing toward the living room.

Joe listened to the faint sound of the ladies' voices, preoccupied with loan points and interest rates. Strange, he thought, that loud, giggling Vivi Traynor, when she brought her ugly little secret to Molena Point, might have launched Charlie into a new and exciting venture.

Though if Charlie hadn't been so nosy, as curious as a cat herself, even Vivi's subterfuge wouldn't have made that happen. And it was Charlie's love of Traynor's work that had truly set her on this path.

"Not even Wilma," Charlie whispered. "Don't even tell Wilma. Not yet. Not until I see if this will fly."

"It will fly," Dulcie said softly.

Charlie looked at them uncertainly. "Maybe. And maybe this is all foolishness, maybe I'll fall on my face." She grinned. "But I've done that before, and gotten up again."

Joe twitched a whisker. He could imagine Charlie sitting up late at night, into the small hours, in her little one-room apartment, working on a borrowed computer at her breakfast table. Stopping work sometimes to stand at her window looking down on the rooftops as she formed, in her thoughts, her own kind of magic for the last chapters of Elliott Traynor's novel. And he rubbed his face against Charlie's, raggedly purring.