Cat Laughing Last

6

The kitchen counter was cold, the tile icy beneath Joe Grey's paws. Beyond the closed shutters, the glass radiated a sharp chill. Turning his back to the night, he watched, beneath the yellow kitchen lights, as Clyde worked at the table laying out the snacks for a poker game. Clyde's muscular frame showed clearly his addiction to the weights and bench press. His dark hair was freshly cut, sporting a thin line of pale skin around his ears. At forty, he might pass for thirty-five, Joe thought, if the lights weren't so bright.

The tray he was arranging was impressive: thin slices of roast beef and turkey, three imported cheeses, and deviled eggs done up fancy with ruffled tops and sprinkles of paprika. No grocery store deli tonight, served up in their paper wrappings. Joe studied his housemate. "Who's coming? How many ladies?"

Clyde laid out slices of imported Tilsit fanning one atop the next. "What ladies? Poker's a man's game."

"Right. And for a couple of guys you're wearing a new polo shirt and freshly pressed chinos? New Birkenstocks instead of those grungy jogging shoes?" Joe reached to snag a slice of Tilsit from the open wrapper. "Smoked Alaskan salmon instead of sardines? George Jolly's world-class shrimp salad instead of grocery store potato salad? Hey, for Max Harper, you serve from cardboard cartons. So who's coming?"

Clyde fixed a small plate for Joe, heavy on the roast beef. "This is to avoid problems later in the evening." He fixed Joe with a look. "To keep your big feet out of the platter."

"That is so rude. When have I ever touched your fancy buffet-in front of guests? So who's coming?"

"Charlie and Detective Davis are coming, if it's any of your business."

"It's my house, too. Charlie's my friend as well as yours. What's the big deal?"

Charlie Getz was, in fact, Joe's very good friend, one of the four humans who knew his and Dulcie's secret and with whom the cats dared speak. Until recently, Joe had hoped that Clyde and Charlie would marry, but then she got cozy with Max Harper.

Joe had briefly considered Detective Kathleen Ray as a wife for Clyde. It was time Clyde got married; he was getting reclusive and grouchy. And Kathleen was a looker, slim and quiet, with nice brown eyes and sleek dark hair. But then Kathleen had taken a detective's job in Anchorage, where her grandfather had grown up. She'd packed up and moved practically to the north pole, surprising everyone.

"I miss Detective Ray," he told Clyde, slurping up shrimp salad. "She was a real cat lover. You think she's happy in Alaska?"

"How do you know she's a cat lover? I never saw her make over you and Dulcie, or even notice you."

"No one said you were super-observant. Kathleen had her moments-a pretty glance, a gentle touch, a little smile."

"Well, aren't you the ladykiller."

"She's happy in Alaska?"

"Harper says she loves it. She sends him e-mail messages every few days telling him how great it is. I think she has talked him into going up there on vacation."

Joe snorted. "Max Harper hasn't taken a vacation from Molena Point PD for as long as I've known him."

"Harper and Charlie. They'll take the cruise, spend a month with Kathleen."

Joe stared at Clyde. "You are so laid back about this. Charlie was your girl. Your girl! I never saw you as serious about anyone. Now Harper takes over, and look at you. Couldn't care less. You actually seem pleased with the idea. What, were you glad to dump Charlie?"

Clyde glared.

"Well, of course, now that Kate Osborne's in the picture…"

"Kate is not in the picture, as you put it. We are merely friends."

"I like Kate all right. But I like Charlie, too. I thought you and Charlie might get married."

Clyde stopped dishing up shrimp salad into his best porcelain bowl. "Why do you always go on about my getting married? What earthly business is that of yours? Why do you always have to-"

"Keep in mind," Joe said, "that Kate can't repair the roof or fix the plumbing. Charlie can do those things. I don't even know if Kate can cook."

Clyde wiped the rim of the bowl, licked half the spoon, then held it out for Joe. "Who I marry is my business. If I get married. And in case you're interested, one doesn't marry a woman because she can fix the plumbing."

"You have to admit, it's a nice perk. With the cost of plumbers and carpenters, Charlie's skills shouldn't be sneezed at."

"If I get married, I will pick the woman-without quizzing her on her skills as a handyman and without any help from a cat."

Joe licked shrimp salad from his whiskers. "Your face is getting red. Have you had your blood pressure checked lately?"

"Marriage is serious business."

Joe gave him a hard, yellow-eyed stare. "Has it occurred to you that Charlie Getz knows all about me and Dulcie?"

"So does Kate."

"But Max Harper doesn't."

"So?"

"If Charlie and Harper are as serious as they seem to be, and if they get married, what then?"

"What what, then?"

"It's hard to keep a secret when you're married. Every time Harper gets an anonymous phone call from me or Dulcie, he gets edgy. If the tip is something no human could easily know-like when we found that killer's watch way back in that drainage pipe where no human could have seen it, he gets really nervous. If he finds cat hair at the scene of the crime, you can see him wondering. That stuff really upsets him."

"So? What are you getting at?"

"So, how is Charlie going to handle that? Seeing him upset like that, when she knows the truth? Don't you think she'd want to let him in on the facts, so he could stop worrying?"

Clyde turned hot water on the spoon, dropped it in the dishwasher, and turned to look at Joe. "You think that would stop Max Harper from worrying? Charlie tells him that a cat is the phantom snitch? That Clyde Damen's gray tomcat is messing with police business and placing anonymous phone calls? That is going to ease Harper's mind?"

"If she explained it to him, if he knew the truth…"

Clyde's look at Joe was incredulous. "That information, if Charlie could prove it to Harper, could make him believe it, could put Harper right over the edge. Drop him right into the funny farm."

"Come on…" Joe said, trying to keep his whiskers from twitching. Clyde did rise to the bait.

"Cops are fact-oriented, Joe. Harper couldn't deal with that stuff!" He looked hard at Joe. "Anyway, Charlie has better sense, she knows what that would do to Max."

"Pretty hard to keep her mouth shut when she's crazy in love and sees him suffering, and when she wants to share everything with him."

"Who said she's crazy in love?"

"She would be, if she married him. Don't you think-"

"I think you should mind your own business. I think that would be a nice perk in my life. And for your information, Max Harper is not constantly puzzled, as you seem to believe, about a few anonymous phone calls."

"More than a dozen arrests and convictions," Joe said, "thanks in part to our help. Harper's record of solved crimes has made a big impression on the city council."

"Talk about an overblown ego. You take yourself way too seriously."

"Such a big impression on the city council that the one bad egg on the council tried to ruin Harper's career, set Harper up to be prosecuted for murder. Tried to get him off the force big time- get him sent to prison on a life sentence."

Clyde slid the platters of meat and cheese into the refrigerator, with the bowls of salad, and busied himself arranging crackers.

"Who found young Dillon Thurwell when she was kidnapped-when all the evidence pointed to Harper? Who helped her escape?"

"Harper would likely have found her."

"Right. After she was dead. That woman was going to kill her."

"All right," Clyde said. "I have to admit you and Dulcie saved Harper's skin on that one, and maybe saved Dillon's life. But you two have come to believe that Harper can't solve a crime without you, and I call that really insulting. You two cats think-"

"I never said he can't solve a crime without us. I said we've helped him, that we've offered some positive input-the way any good snitch would do. Why can't you enter into a simple discussion of the facts without getting emotional? Without getting your back up, to use a corny and inappropriate colloquialism!"

Clyde sat down at the table and put his face in his hands, shoving aside the rack of poker chips and two new decks of cards. He didn't say, What did I do to be saddled with this insufferable, ego-driven animal? But it was there, in his silence, in the slump of his shoulders.

"And," Joe said, "when you do marry, you'll be in the same position as Charlie is with Harper. You marry anyone but Kate or Charlie, marry a woman who doesn't know what kind of cat you live with, you try to hide the truth from her, there's going to be trouble. It would never work. I'd have to move out, find another home-or you'd end up telling her about me! Sharing my fate with a total stranger. Compromising and endangering my life, and Dulcie's. Putting us-"

Clyde swung around in his chair, his face decidedly red. "If you don't get out of this house now, and stay out until we're done playing poker and everyone has gone home, I swear I will not only evict you and nail your cat door shut, I will take you to the pound. Shove you in a cat carrier and leave you at the animal shelter. See you locked in a metal cage forever-because no one would want you. No one would adopt such a bad-tempered tomcat."

Joe Grey smiled, leaped to the center of the table, and lifted a gentle white paw to Clyde. "You are becoming very creative. If you even tried such a thing, I would spill it all to Max Harper. I would break out of the pound-no trick for yours truly. I'd go straight to Harper. Sit down face-to-face with him and tell him my entire story. I would lay it all on him, every corroborating fragment of proof, every tip, every detail of past phone calls. Proof that I-I alone, not Dulcie-am his phantom snitch."

He thought Clyde would laugh, but Clyde's brown eyes blazed with anger. "If you ever did such a thing, I swear, Joe, I'd kill you."

Clyde shoved his face close to Joe's. "Do you remember the night at Moreno's Bar, after Janet Jeannot was murdered, when Harper tried to tell me his suspicions about certain cats being involved in the case? About certain mysterious phone calls? And you were eavesdropping under the table? Do you remember how shaken Max was?"

"Come on, Clyde…"

Clyde glared. "You so much as whisper to Max Harper, and you're a dead cat. Finished. Comprende?"

"You are so grouchy. You really need to get your life in hand."

Joe dropped down to the linoleum, stalked through to the living room, pushed out his cat door, and crept under the front porch. He'd never seen Clyde so irritable.

He really did have to blame Clyde's mood on pretty, blond Kate Osborne. Clyde and Kate were old friends, but now that Clyde had really fallen for her, she'd turned standoffish. Wouldn't come down from San Francisco, hadn't been down for over a month, didn't want Clyde to come up. Something was going on with her. Clyde didn't know what it was, and as a result, he'd been fierce as a goaded possum. Maybe it was Kate's search for her unknown family, maybe she was totally wrapped up in that, didn't want to think of anything else. Though that project, in Joe's opinion, could lead her into more grief than she'd ever wanted.

Looking out through the cracks between the porch boards, he saw Charlie coming down the street, walking the few blocks from her apartment-and looking very pretty, her kinky red hair tied back with a calico ribbon, her blue-and-white striped dress as fresh as new milk. When she had hurried up the steps above his head and gone inside, he slipped out of the musty dark to the porch again and sat down beside his cat door, his face to the plastic flap to listen.

"Hi! Clyde, you there? Am I the first one here? You in the kitchen?"

Her cheery greeting met silence. Joe heard the kitchen door swing. "Hi! There you are. I brought some chips."

No answer.

"What?" Charlie said.

"Can't you knock? Since we're not dating anymore, you could at least-"

"Well, pardon me."

Again, silence.

"Where's Joe?" she said. "You two have a fight?"

A longer silence.

"Well?"

"No, we didn't have a fight!"

"So where did he go to sulk? And you're sulking in here, in the kitchen. Were you fighting about the house again, about selling the house?"

"No, we weren't fighting about selling the house."

Charlie said no more. Joe heard one of them open the refrigerator and pop a couple of beers. Charlie knew how to handle him; Clyde's moods didn't bother her. And she was partly right. The problem about the house did make him cross.

Ever since construction had begun on Molena Point's new, upscale shopping plaza-ever since its two-story, plastered wall had risen at the boundary behind Clyde's backyard, blocking their view of the sunrise and the eastern hills, Clyde had been entertaining offers from realtors. The mall hadn't affected the property values, not in Molena Point, where village lots were so scarce that a buyer would pay half a million for a teardown. And this latest offer to Clyde had topped all the others. It was not from someone wanting a home or vacation cottage, but from a restaurateur planning to open an upscale cafe-a perfectly understandable plan, in a village where the businesses and cottages were mingled, many shops occupying former residences.

The offering realtor said the house would remain, along with the house next door, which the buyer had already purchased. The two buildings would be converted into dining and kitchen space and joined by a patio whose tile paving would run back to the two-story plaster wall, with outdoor tables and umbrellas and potted trees.

Dulcie thought it would be charming. Joe thought there were enough patio restaurants in the village. Clyde vacillated between outright refusal and considering the offer; he couldn't make up his mind. But he was as angry as a maimed wharf rat about his view being destroyed. Joe could understand that. The wall made Joe, too, feel like he was in a cage.

But what if Clyde did sell? Where would they live? The idea of moving upset Joe and seemed nearly as unsettling to Clyde.

Joe thought maybe his own distress came from his kittenhood, from the time when he'd had no real home, just an alley and a few one-night stands, then for a while a stranger with a shabby apartment and a bad disposition-until he met Clyde.

His and Clyde's move down from San Francisco, when he was still a half-grown kitten, had left him nervous for weeks afterward, distraught at losing the only real home he knew. Even Charlie's recent moves had unsettled him, first from her aunt Wilma's and Dulcie's house into an apartment, then into another apartment. Places that he'd liked to visit, gone before he got used to them. And now Mavity Flowers was about to be evicted, closing another door to him-and Mavity's cottage held some rare memories.

It was there that he had spied on the black tomcat and his human partner in crime, Mavity's no-good, thieving brother. It was there that Joe had routed some of the evidence that convicted the killer of Mavity's niece. Besides, though Mavity's cottage was just an old fishing shack, it was all Mavity had-he felt, too sharply, the little woman's distress at her own impending loss.

If all those houses along the bay were destroyed, who knew what the village would do with that land? The city council was still arguing the issue. And now, with Mavity's friends planning to sell their houses too, and buy some big old house where they would rattle around, everything was changing. All these moves and prospective moves made the whole world seem shaky under his paws.

And to top it off, the entire Molena Point Police Department was being renovated, Harper's officers taking up temporary quarters in the courthouse while Harper remodeled the building.

Already Joe missed the big, casual squad room with all its desks and clutter. Now the space was full of lumber and Sheetrock and carpenters with loud hammers and louder power tools. The department that Joe thought of as the heart of the village was going to be totally different. He had no idea whether, with the new design, he'd even be able to get inside. When finally the renovation would be complete and everyone back together again, who knew what the offices would be like? Harper might make the building so secure that no cat could breach the locks to slip in to hide under the first handy desk.

What was he going to do then? It was hard enough for a cat to get police intelligence. Imagining the new setup made him feel like he was walking on a broken tree limb that hung shattered and ready to fall. As if there was nothing secure left in the world, nothing steady that he could count on.

When two cars pulled to the curb in front of the house, he dropped off the porch into the bushes. Watching Detectives Dallas Garza and Juana Davis and Captain Harper thunder up the steps, laughing-likely at some rank cop joke-and bang into the house, Joe felt for an instant incredibly lonely. Quickly he slipped through his cat door, following them inside. Slipping behind the couch, he heard beer cans being popped and the cards shuffled. He listened for some time, staying out of sight as Clyde preferred, and feeling put upon, but the conversation didn't touch on the break-in at Susan Brittain's house, it was just light banter. He had nearly dozed off when the phone rang.

Clyde answered, then Detective Garza took the phone. It was apparently a personal call, from the tone of Garza's voice. Yes, he was talking to his niece, Ryan, a young woman who was as close to Garza as if she were his own daughter.

"You what? You're kidding!" Garza sounded pleased. But Joe could hear the faint echo of a tight, angry female voice from the other end of the line.

"You're leaving him?"

Ryan was Garza's youngest niece. He had helped raise her and her two sisters after their mother died. Likely Ryan was calling from San Francisco, where she and her husband ran a building construction business-or apparently had run it. Sounded like they were splitting. For an instant Joe sensed what Garza must be feeling, deep parental distress for a young woman who had apparently decided to pull up stakes, chuck everything, and start her life all over again.

The foolish mobility of humanity, Joe thought. People abandoning families, racing off in every direction-it's a wonder the world itself doesn't fly apart.

"That's the best news I've had in ages," Garza said, laughing. "Where are you now? You have your key to the cottage?"

Garza listened, then, "Of course I understand. Guess I'd feel the same. But the cottage is there if you want it-when you want some company."

They talked for some time, something about a job Ryan had just finished. Interested, Joe trotted into the kitchen and leaped to the counter. When Garza hung up, he was grinning. He sat down at the table between Clyde and Juana Davis, where Clyde was counting out poker chips.

"She's left him. Packed up and moved out. He's been cheating on her for years. She came on down to the village, she's in the Turtle Motel up on Fifth. Wants some time alone. Wants to look for a house. Sounds like she means to stay."

Joe couldn't remember when he'd seen Garza looking so pleased. Stretching out, he waited to hear how the scenario would develop-and waited as well for the conversation to turn, as it inevitably would, to police business. Did the department have a make on Susan Brittain's burglar? Had they found him? Surely by now they would have a record of his prints. Joe waited patiently to pick up whatever tidbits the officers might toss back and forth over the poker table-until he felt Clyde's gaze on him. Then he closed his eyes and tried for a soft, rhythmic snore-not to fool Clyde, but to keep his relationship with the department as untainted as a sleuthing cat could manage. No point in enraging Clyde further, and making Harper edgy; though it was hard to resist the urge to taunt them both.