Cat On The Edge. Cat Under Fire. Cat Raise The Dead

“How can I be ready, if I don’t know what you’re up to?”

“Don’t miss morning coffee,” he said softly.

She gave him a puzzled look.“I’d better go, before they untie the monster.”

Joe trotted across the tile counter and looked out the kitchen window.“He’s still on the front porch, sitting under the light. I can see the rope. Stupid thing has himself wrapped up again.”

She trotted over to look. The dog was a black lump, huddled miserably against the porch rail.“Let him rot.” She gave Joe a long, loving look. “Thanks for the supper. It sure was better than Mama’s leftover carrots.”

“Take care.” He licked her ear. “I’ll be watching. Don’t forget, morning coffee.”

She gave him a whisker kiss, jumped down, and slid out beneath the door. She was back at the Blankenships’ and through the laundry window before the dog knew she had passed. When belatedly he scented her, he fought his shortened rope, roaring. Inside, she dropped to the laundry room floor. Padding toward the kitchen, she paused in the shadows of the hall.

In her absence two more poker players had arrived, the room stank of cigarettes and beer and reverberated with loud voices. Hurrying on past, she headed for the old woman’s room. She’d hear no more secrets now.

Another night in this house didn’t thrill her, but maybe, if Joe did have a plan, tomorrow she’d hit pay dirt.

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As Frances opened the back door, airing the kitchen of stale beer and cigarette smoke, Dulcie trotted out to crouch on the threshold. Sniffing the fresh morning air, she was just getting comfortable when Frances nudged her with her an impatient toe.“Go on out, cat. You’re in the way.” She hunkered down, gluing herself to the floor, then leaped over Frances’s offending foot, back into the kitchen. She had no intention of going out; she wasn’t going to miss a lick this morning. Whatever plot Joe had hatched for Mama and Frances’s coffee hour, she meant to be right there, cat on the spot.

Impatiently Frances returned to the table, fussing around, restoring the salt and pepper shakers and potted fern, the pig sugar bowl and cow-shaped cream pitcher to their rightful places, her movements abrupt, sharply agitated. Maybe her anger was the result of Varnie’s loud poker party. Dulcie watched her with interest.

Last night, as Dulcie crouched behind the stove listening to Varnie and Stamps, Frances had been listening, too. Dulcie had been so intent on the conversation, she’d hardly paid attention, thinking that Frances was just passing.

But she hadn’t been passing, she’d been standing in the hall, very still. Then, in a moment, she had turned away again, back to her office.

Now, as Mama came wandering into the kitchen, shuffling along in her soft slippers, Frances poured the coffee and set the pot on the table beside a plate of day-old cookies. Mama sighed and settled into her chair. The room had begun to smell of baking, the hot, peachy scent of turnovers from the oven soon overpowering the barroom stench. Dulcie sniffed appreciatively and leaped up to Mama’s lap, prepared for a little snack. Whoever said cats didn’t like sweets didn’t know much.

Curled up against Mama’s fat tummy, watching Mama nibble a cookie, she shuttered her eyes against the likely event of spilled crumbs. Interesting that Frances seemed to have no compunction about loading the old lady up on sugar and fat-but maybe Frances had her reasons.

She curled into a little ball, hoping Mama wouldn’t spill hot coffee. Mama herself seemed irritable this morning. She nibbled her cookie, sipped her coffee, but said little. Dulcie was drifting into sleep when Frances said, “Mama, you’re going to have to make up your mind.”

“About what?”

“You know about what; about what I told you at breakfast.”

Dulcie was wide-awake. Shehadmissed something when she went out earlier.

“I have made up my mind. Made it up long ago.”

“Mama, all you’ve done is avoid the issue. You know the right thing to do.”

“Not going to the police.”

“You have to go, Mama. You know the police think someone is withholding evidence. They’ll search until they find out who.”

“Nonsense. Where would they get such an idea?”

“It was on the local news, I told you. The seven o’clock news.”

Mama sat up straighter, jamming Dulcie against the edge of the table, forcing her to change position.“You’re making that up.”

“They think one of the neighbors saw something that weekend-didn’t report it.”

“What would make them think such a thing?”

“I don’t know, Mama. I don’t know how the police get their information.”

“This is rubbish.” Mama stiffened. “Or else you told them,” Mama said warily.

The timer made a small ding, and Frances rose. Standing at the warm stove, she removed the baking sheet of bubbling turnovers, placing two on a plate for her motherin-law, totally unconcerned that she was feeding Mama enough calories to keep a young hippo. She took one for herself, setting the rest by the window to cool. Dulcie wondered if that rich smell of baking would waft across the street to Joe. Frances sat down again and refilled their cups. She cut a small bite of turnover, taking it on her fork.“If the police think you saw something and withheld evidence, they’re going to make trouble.”

Mama tried to eat a turnover with her fingers, but it was too hot. She kept juggling it from one hand to the other. At last she broke it in two, dribbling hot peach down Dulcie’s ear.

Dulcie licked her paw and swiped at her scorched ear. The hazards of investigative work. Hungrily she licked her paw, making Mama smile. Mama blew on the half turnover, broke off a small piece, and held it for Dulcie to nibble.

“Mama, don’t feed the cat and then handle your own food-you don’t what diseases it has.”

Ignoring Frances, Mama broke off a bite for herself with the same hand, gobbled it greedily, and offered the last crumb to Dulcie.

“Mama, you never listen. About hygiene, about that cat-about the police?”

“Varnie says I don’t need to go to the police. Varnie says I don’t need to go through such indignity at my age, going down to that police station and being cross-examined and then up in front of everyone in that courtroom. I’m too old and frail to get up in front of all those people; my badheart would never stand it.”

“It will be far worse for your heart, Mama, if the police arrest you.”

“Why would they arrest me?”

Frances sighed.“For withholding evidence,” she said patiently.

The old woman snorted, scattering crumbs.

“They put people in jail every day for less than that, Mama. It won’t help your bad heart if they put you in jail.”

“Put an old woman with heart trouble in jail? Don’t be silly. Varnie wouldn’t let them do that.”

“Varnie can’t?”

The ringing phone startled them. Mama gave a little jump, unsettling Dulcie so she nearly scratched Mama as she tried to hang on. Hastily she retracted her claws, watched Frances reach to the counter, pick up the phone and set it on the table.

“Blankenship residence.” Her voice was cool, impersonal.

She listened a moment, frowning, then put her hand over the mouthpiece, looked at Mama for a long moment. She started to hand Mama the phone, then seemed to change her mind.

Speaking into the phone again, her voice was pure ice.“Mrs. Blankenship isn’t feeling well. I’ll speak with her. May she return your call?”

She reached for a pad and pencil, and jotted down a number. She repeated it back, then hung up. She looked helplessly at Mama.

“It was an attorney, Mama. I told you this would happen. He’s connected with the trial, and he wants to talk with you.”

“I don’t know any attorneys. I don’t have to talk with anyone.”

“You will if he gets a subpoena; you won’t have any choice.”

“Call him back,” Mama told her. “Tell him I’m too sick. He can’t get a subpoena for a sick old woman.”

“You want to tell him that, here’s the phone.” Frances pushed it across the table.

“You have to tell him, Frances. I’m not calling anyone. Who is this lawyer-what’s his name? What business does he have calling me?”

Dulcie could feel her paws gripping at Mama’s leg.

“I don’t know anything about him, Mama. His name is Grey-Joseph Grey. Grey, Stern, and Starbuck. I don’t recognize the firm, but that doesn’t mean anything. He? “

Dulcie’s claws went in before she could stop herself; Mama yelped and shoved her to the floor.

She crawled contritely under the table, trying not to laugh. Attorney Joseph Grey. Grey, Stern, and Starbuck. She wanted to roll over screaming with laughter.

“J never heard of him,” Mama said. “You’re making all this up. Why would you lie to an old woman?”

Frances rose and came around the table to stand beside Mama’s chair, putting her arm around Mrs. Blankenship’s shoulders. “I wouldn’t make up that phone call, Mama.” She looked pale, her thin face was drawn. “I told you, you should have gone to the police.”

Mama just looked at her.

Dulcie sat under the table grinning. Joseph Grey, Attorney at Law. Joseph Grey, Feline Jurisprudence. She could just picture Joe sitting in the window over at Janet’s, laughing his head off.

Frances pulled out a chair and sat down close to Mama.“We have to call him back, Mama. We have no choice.”

As Dulcie leaped up into Mama’s lap, Mama began to cry, her soft flesh shaking. Oh, this was too bad. This was really too bad. The poor old thing was coming all apart. Gazing up at the frightened old face, she reached up a soft paw and patted the old lady’s cheek.

Mrs. Blankenship clutched her close, hugging her, squeezing her hard, burying her face in Dulcie’s fur. “I don’t know what to do, Frances. Tell him I’m not here. Call him back and tell him I’m in the hospital.”

“He knows you’re not in the hospital. You have to talk to him, Mama.”

“Anyway, it’s too late now. They’ve already put that young man on trial,” Mama said. “How could it make any difference what I say? No, it’s too late for that.”

“No, Mama. That’s just the point. If Rob Lake is innocent, you could save him. Hadn’t you thought that you might save his life?”

Frances rose, fetched the pan of turnovers from beside the window, and shoved them across the table where Mama could reach them.“Without you, Mama, Rob Lake could be sentenced to death. If he’s innocent, Mama, his death would be your fault.”

“But that white van the night before the fire could have belonged to anyone. I don’t know that it was Janet’s. Maybe if I told the police, that would just confuse everyone.”

“The police will sort that out. That’s their job. You can’t choose what the court should know, Mama, and what it shouldn’t be told.”

Frances sipped her coffee.“Trust me, Mama. The sooner you go to the police, the gentler the court will be with you. Just tell this Mr. Grey what you saw. Tell him you’re not sure the van was Janet’s. Tell him what time it was-2:00 A.M. Saturday night when the van pulled into her garage and shut the door. Two-thirty when it left again.”

“He’ll want to come up here, want me to sign papers. Want me to go to court. I told you, Frances, my heart won’t stand that.”

“I’ll explain to him, Mama, that with your heart so bad you’re afraid to testify. I’m sure they’ll make special arrangements.”

Dulcie was so wired she couldn’t keep still. She started to fidget, then began to wash, trying to calm herself. She might get annoyed at Joe sometimes, might call him an unimaginative tomcat, but this-this was a stroke of genius.

Mama reached for a turnover and crumbled it between her fat fingers.“I wish that young woman had never moved over there; I knew she’d cause trouble. Who in their right mind would build a welding shop in a residential neighborhood, and right on top of their own house? The city should never have allowed it. All that fire flashing around, it’s no wonder? And that bang, bang, bang of gunfire going on for hours. Probably one of those indoor target things. Why would a young woman want one of those things. I don’t?”

“It wasn’t gunfire, Mama. I told you, it was just a staple gun. One of those big commercial staple guns. You know she used it to stretch her canvases. You know what she said, that putting in thumbtacks made her thumbs ache for days. Please, Mama, I’ve got to return this attorney’s call.”

“You’ve got a stapler right in there on your desk, Frances. It don’t sound like that. You know I’m right. That crazy artist set the whole hillside on fire. I always knew she’d do that. Burn up the whole neighborhood. If not for my prayers to save this house, we would have burned up, too.”

“Oh, Mama, she didn’t?”

“Anyway, you don’t need to argue. I won’t do it. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

“But Mama, don’t you see? Youarea part of it. If you don’t testify, they could convict the wrong person.”

Dulcie crouched, very still. The morning was full of surprises.

A staple gun.

Janet had stapled her canvases. She hadn’t used thumbtacks.

Then what was that thumbtack that had gotten stuck in her paw? That thumbtack with the burned wood and blackened canvas sticking to it? What were all those thumbtacks scattered among the ashes? There were hundreds of them, many with scraps of canvas clinging. Hundreds of fragments of paintings?

She caught her breath. Mama stared down at her. She pretended to scratch at a flea. Those tacks were not from Janet’s paintings they were from someone else’s canvases.

Those were not Janet’s paintings that had burned. Janet’s paintings had not been in the studio when it burned.

“It wouldn’t hurt your heart, Mama, just to talk to Joseph Grey. If I call him back, won’t you just speak to him? He could take your deposition right here. And even if you did have to go to court, they’d make it easy for you. A special car, probably a limo with a driver. Get you right in and right out, not make you wait. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take forty-five minutes. We could stop for ice cream afterward.”

“Don’t you patronize me, young lady. Besides, someone else must have seen her van besides me. Why don’t they go to the police?”

“It was two in the morning, Mama.”

“It was Saturday night. Young people stay up late.”

“Our neighbors aren’t that young, Mama. At two in the morning they’re asleep.”

“Yes, and no one cares if an old sick woman can’t sleep. No one cares about an old woman sitting alone in the night-except to get information out of her.” She stroked Dulcie so hard that static sparks flew, alarming them both. “Call him back,” Mama said. “Tell him I won’t.”

But when Frances tried, she had the wrong number. It was not an attorney’s office, and no one had ever heard of Joseph Grey.

Frances looked totally puzzled.“I know I wrote it down right. You heard me, I repeated it back to him.” Frances was not the kind of woman to record a phone number wrong. As she dialed again, Dulcie jumped down, trotted into the laundry room, and leaped to the open window.

And she was out of there. Racing across the yard straight for Janet’s house. She could see Joe in Janet’s window: Felis at Law Joseph Grey, his ears sharply forward, his white markings bright behind the glass, his mouth open in a toothy cat laugh.

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The cats fled down the black, burned hills, down into the tall green grass careening together, exploding apart, wild with their sudden freedom. Four days hanging around the Blankenships’ had left them stir-crazy, dangerously close to the insane release people called a cat fit. Flying down, dropping steeply down, they collapsed at last, rolling and laughing beneath the wide blue sky. Dulcie leaped at a butterfly, at insects that keened and rustled around them in the blowing grass; racing in circles she terrorized a thousand minute little presences singing their tiny songs and munching on their bits of greenery, sent them scurrying or crushed them. “I wonder if Mama gave in-if she let Frances call the police.” She grinned. “I wonder if Frances tried again to phone Attorney Joseph Grey.”

She stood switching her tail.“If that was Janet’s van that Mama saw, the Saturday night before the fire, what was she doing? She drove up to San Francisco that morning. Why would she come home again in the middle of the night, load up her own paintings? Take them where? If there’d been a show, her agent would have said.”

She looked at him intently.“Those weren’t Janet’s paintings burned in the fire, so whose paintings were they?”

“Could Janet have hidden her own paintings, to collect the insurance?”

“Janet wouldn’t do that. And there wasn’t any insurance.” She lay down, thinking.

“Of course there would be insurance,” he said. “Those paintings were worth?”

Dulcie twitched her ear.“Janet didn’t insure her work.”

“That’s crazy. Why wouldn’t she? How do you know that?”

“Insurance on paintings is horribly expensive. She told Wilma it costs nearly as much as the price of the work. The rates were so high she decided against it, said she tried three insurance agents and they all gave the same high rates. Wilma says a lot of artists don’t insure.”

“But Wilma?”

“Wilma has that one painting insured, with a rider on her homeowner’s. That’s a lot different.”

She was quiet a moment, then flipped over and sat up, her eyes widening.“Sicily Aronson has a white van. Don’t you remember? She parks it behind the gallery beside the loading door.”

“So Sicily took the paintings, at two in the morning? Killed Janet and took her paintings, to sell? Come on, Dulcie. Why would she kill Janet? Janet was her best painter, her meal ticket.”

“Maybe Janet planned to leave her. Maybe they had a falling-out. If Janet took all her work away?”

“You’ve been seeing too many TV movies. If Sicily tried to sell those paintings, if they came on the market, Max Harper would have her behind bars in a second.

“And Beverly wouldn’t take them, she inherited Janet’s paintings.” He licked his paw. “And if there wasn’t any insurance, Beverly had nothing to gain.” He nibbled his shoulder, pursuing a flea. Even with the amazing changes in his life, he still couldn’t shake the fleas. And he hated flea spray.

“Maybe,” she said, “Sicily could sell them easier than Beverly. If she did, she’d keep all the money, not have to split with Beverly. With Janet dead, and with so many paintings supposedly destroyed, each canvas is worth a bundle.”

“Whoever has them could sell them. Beverly. Sicily. Kendrick Mahl.”

“But Mahl had witnesses to everything he did in San Francisco.”

Mahl had gone out to dinner with friends both Saturday and Sunday nights, leaving his car in the hotel parking garage. Mahl lived in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge. He had driven into the city Saturday afternoon and checked into the St. Francis; the hotel was full of artists and critics. In the city he had taken cabs or ridden with friends.

Dulcie scowled.“I guess anyone could have rented a van. When we know who was in that van, we’ll know who killed her. I’ll bet Detective Marritt didn’t take one thumbtack, one scrap of the burned paintings as evidence.”

“Or maybe Marritt took thumbtacks but didn’t bother to find out how Janet stretched her canvases. You’d think someone would have told him. Wouldn’t Sicily?”

“Unless she didn’t want the police to know.” Dulcie examined her claws. “It’ll take a lot of phoning, calling all the rental places, to find who rented a white van that night.”

“Dulcie, the police will check out the rental places, as soon as they know about the van, and about the missing paintings.”

“Where would someone hide that many paintings?” she said speculatively.

He sat up, staring at her.“You thinkwe’regoing to look for those canvases? You thinkwe’regoing to find two million dollars’ worth of paintings? Those paintings could be anywhere, a private home, an apartment, another gallery? What do you plan to do, go tooling up and down the coast maybe in your BMW, searching through warehouses?”

She smiled sweetly, cutting her eyes at him.“We could try Sicily’s gallery.”

“Sure, Sicily’s going to have those big canvases right there under the cops’ noses. And don’t you think Captain Harper deserves to know that the paintings are gone, that they weren’t burned?”

“It would take only a few minutes, just nip into the gallery and have a look. If we find them, we’ll be giving Captain Harper not just a tip, but the whole big, damning story.” She grinned. “Not just a sniff of the rabbit but the whole delicious cottontail.” Her eyes gleamed green as jewels. “We can slip in through the front door just before Sicily closes, stay out of sight until she locks up.”

His eyes gleamed with the challenge. But his better judgment-some latent natural wariness-made his belly twitch.“If we do that and get caught, I hope it’s the cops and not Sicily.”

“Why ever not? She wouldn’t know what we’re doing. And Sicily likes cats.”

He couldn’t, in his wildest imagination, picture Sicily Aronson liking cats. The woman put him off totally. With her dangling bracelets and jiggling earrings and tangles of clanking chains and necklaces and her blowing, layered clothes, she was like a walking boutique. Dulcie practically drooled over the expensive fabrics Sicily wore, the imported hand-dyed prints, the layers of hand-painted cottons drooping over her long, handwoven skirts. Her handmade sandals or tall slim boots smelled of the animals they came from; and her dark hair, bound up in intricate twists secured with strands of silver or jewels, was just too much. She did not look like Molena Point; she looked like San Francisco’s bordello district, like some leftover from Sally Stanford days, when that madam was the toast of the city.

And the fact that Sicily could amortize interest in her head, so Clyde had told him, and could accurately compute every possible tax writeoff while making light banter or a sales pitch, made her all the more formidable.

“She only dresses like that for PR. It’s part of the gallery image.” She reached a soft paw to him. “She’s really nice. If she catches us in the gallery, she’ll probably treat us to a late supper.”

“Sure she will. Braised rat poison.”

She looked at him, amused.“I’ve been in the gallery a lot lately, and she’s been nice to me.” And suddenly she looked stricken. “Oh dear. I guess? I hope we don’t find the paintings there, I hope she didn’t do it. I was thinking only of proving Rob innocent. But she has been kind to me.”

“I didn’t know you went in there.”

“I’ve done it for weeks, sometimes at noon when court breaks for lunch, just to listen.”

“You suspected her?”

“No, I just wanted to find out what I could. After all, she is Janet’s agent.”

“So what did you learn?”

“Nothing.” She licked her paw. “Except she’s a sucker for cats. But I guess most people in the art world like cats. Last week she fed me little sandwiches left over from an opening, and twice she’s shared her lunch with me; and she folded a handwoven wool scarf on her desk for me to nap on.”

“With that kind of treatment, Wilma may lose her housemate.”

Dulcie smiled.“Not a chance. Anyway, if Sicily catches us in the gallery, just roll over, curl your paws sweetly, and smile.”

“Sure I will. And nail her with twenty sharp ones when she reaches down to grab me.”

She turned away, snorting with disgust.

But in a moment, she said,“I wish we knew what to do about Janet’s journal.”

“It’s evidence, Dulcie. We have to tell the police where to find it. We’ve been over this.”

She sighed.

He moved close against her, licking her ear.“The diary is Captain Harper’s business.”

“But her diary is so private, it’s all that’s left to speak for her-except her paintings.” She looked at him bleakly. “Why did that terrible thing have to happen? Why did she have to die?”

“At least Janet left her work. That’s more than most people leave behind them-something to bring pleasure to others.”

“I guess,” she said, touching her paw to his, half-amused. Joe did have his tender side, when it suited him. “I guess that’s better than poor Mrs. Blankenship. She won’t leave the world anything but a house full of china beasties.”

Earlier, when she and Joe departed Janet’s house, slipping away in the shadows so Mama wouldn’t see them, she had looked back across the street and seen Mama sitting at her window eagerly waiting for her.

“It was cruel to make her think I loved her, then to leave. Now she’ll be more lonely than ever.”

Joe brushed his whiskers against hers.“You could get her a cat. An ordinary little cat who would love her. A kitten maybe.”

“Yes,” she said, brightening. “A little cat that will stay with her.” Her mouth curved with pleasure. “A sweet little cat. Yes, maybe a kitten. Or maybe the white cat. He’ll need a home when we find him.”

He did not reply. In his opinion, the white cat was long dead-except, if he was dead, then what were these strange dreams? Did the dreams arise, as he hoped, only from Dulcie’s active imagination?

They headed down again watching the hills for Stamps’s dog. The wild rye and oats on the open slopes was so tall and thick that the animal could easily crouch unseen. They did not see it on the streets below, among the gardens and cottages, did not see it near the gray house, or around the old black pickup. Dulcie studied the ragged house with narrowed eyes, and a little smile curved her pink mouth.

“What?” he said.

“Looks to me like Stamps’s window is open.”

He said nothing. As they drew near where the pickup was parked, they saw the dog, a shadow among shadows, asleep in the truck bed.

But even as they looked, the beast came awake and sat up and shook himself. Staring up the hill, he either saw them or smelled them, and he suddenly exploded, leaping from the truck straight up the hill?

? and was jerked to a stop by a chain attached to the bumper.

The cats relaxed, their hearts pounding. The dog fought the chain, rattling and jerking the truck, lunging so violently they thought he’d tear off the bumper and come clanging after them.

But the chain held. The bumper didn’t give; it seemed to be solidly bolted. “Come on,” Dulcie said, “he can’t get loose. If we can get in, get the list, we can be out again before the beast stops bellowing.”

“What makes you think he isn’t home? His truck’s there. And why would he leave the list?”

“He left it the other night. And he’ll be at work. Charlie told him if he took any more time off, he was through.”

“Why would he leave the truck and dog?”

“She told him to lose the dog. She hates that dog. Maybe he had nowhere else to leave it but tied to the truck. He can walk to the job, it’s only a few blocks. Look at the window, Joe. It’s cracked open. What more do you want? It’s a first-class invitation.”

Joe grinned.“Sometimes, Dulcie?”

“It won’t take a minute. Snatch up the list and out again, home in time for breakfast.”

He stood, studying the house, then took off running, a gray streak. They fled past the truck and the dog, straight for Stamps’s open window.

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The back lawn of the decrepit old house was brown and moth-eaten. Two dented garbage cans leaned against the step beside the sunken, unpainted picket fence. The cats, slipping along through the weeds beside the added-on wing, crouched below Stamps’s window, then reared up to look.

They could see no movement beyond the black screen and dirty glass, only the warped reflection of hills and trees. Leaping to the sill, they pressed their faces against the wire mesh, looking in.

“No one,” Joe said.

“He can’t be known for his housekeeping. What a mess.”

The bed was unmade, sheets drooping off a stained mattress. Stamps had left most of his clothes discarded in little piles across the floor. One could imagine him undressing at night dropping garments where he stood, stepping away from them. The open closet revealed only two hanging shirts and a lone shoe. A bath towel hung over the doorknob. The stink beneath the double-hung window was of stale cigarette smoke, dog, and Stamps’s laundry. Probably Stamps had sneaked the dog inside when the landlord wasn’t looking. The dog himself, behind them on the street, rattled and clanged and bellowed, his pea-sized brain fixated on dreams of cat flesh. The window screen was securely latched.

Tensing her claws into little knives, Dulcie ripped down the screen, efficiently opening a twelve-inch gash. Joe pushed through the hole and shouldered the window higher, and they slipped through, leaping from the sill to the back of an upholstered chair. Its ragged, greasy cover smelled of hair oil. One could imagine him sitting there all evening, smoking and drinking beer among the heaps of clothes. Dulcie made a rude face, ears down, eyes crossed.“Can’t he even drive to the laundromat?”

An open bag of potato chips stood on the floor beside a muddy boot. Wrinkled jeans and Tshirts hung out of an open dresser drawer, and the top of the dresser was a tangle of junk. Joe, leaping up, met his reflection charging at him from within the dusty glass.

The refuse dumped on the dresser must have come from Stamps’s pockets, emptied out each night over a long period. He could envision the pile growing until it overwhelmed the dresser, cascaded to the floor, and eventually filled the room. He nosed among half-empty matchbooks, odd nails and screws, a broken pocketknife, dirty handkerchiefs, two crushed beer cans, a rusty hinge, bits of paper, a folding beer opener, a broken shoelace, and a scattering of coins. He pawed open each folded paper, but most were gas receipts, or store receipts, or hastily scribbled nearly illegible lists for hardware supplies and plumbing supplies. At the bottom of the pile lay several wrinkled fast-food bags and flattened, nearly empty packs of cigarettes.

“Why would he leave the list in this mess? What’s in the nightstand?”

She stepped around a full ashtray wrinkling her nose.“Greasy baseball cap, a sock with a hole in it. Three candy bars, some half-empty cigarette packs, a paperback book with no cover. Lurid stuff. Just what you’d expect from Stamps.”

She jumped down to nose beneath the mattress. She was pawing the sheets away when Joe said softly,“Come look.” He stood poised very still, staring at a wrinkled white paper. She leaped up beside him.

Beneath the nails and coins, beneath the tangle of gas receipts and McDonald’s bags and wadded paper napkins, lay Stamps’s list. Joe smoothed the wrinkled paper and fold marks where he had pawed it open. They crouched side by side, reading Stamps’s nearly illegible script.

He had recorded the addresses of the targeted houses, how many people lived in each, the times of normal departure for each individual, and whether they left the house walking or by car. The list might be messy and hard to read, but Stamps’s information was admirably detailed. He noted the make and model of each car in each household, noted whether the car was kept in the garage or on the street. He recorded whether there were children to be gotten off to school, underlining the fact that the school bus stopped at the corner of Ridgeview and Valley, at five after eight. He identified any regular cleaning or gardening services, and what days they would appear, and he noted whether there were barking dogs in residence at each address. He had listed what kinds of door locks, what kinds of windows, and whether there was any indication of an alarm system.

“Nice,” Joe said. “Messy but very complete.” He shook dust from his whiskers. “Too bad we can’t take it with us.”

She got that stubborn look.

“Dulcie, if he finds it missing, they’ll scrap their plan or change it. We’ll have to memorize it; we can each take half.”

“We really need a copy for Captain Harper, not just another anonymous phone call. Don’t you get the feeling that telephone tips make Harper nervous?”

“Of course they make him nervous. They drive him nuts. They have also supplied him with some very valuable information. And we don’t have any choice. What’re you going to do, type up a copy?”

“Even better. We’ll take it up to Frances’s office, it’s only a few blocks. Run it through her copier and return the original, put it back under the junk.”

“And of course Frances will invite us right on in to use her copier. After all, look at the comfort you’ve given Mama.”

She hissed at him and cuffed his ear.“You can distract her. Fall out of a tree or something. While she’s busy watching you, I’ll nip inside through the laundry window, it won’t take a minute. Her copier’s pretty much like Wilma’s.”

“She’s sure to have left the window open, thinking you’ll be back.”

“Of course she’s left the window open. Mama’s probably fit to be tied, waiting for me. It’s nearly noon, and I’ve been gone since ten-thirty. I’m always there for lunch, so she’ll be nattering at Frances to make sure the window’s open.”

He just looked at her.“Dulcie, sometimes?”

She gave him a sweet smile and nuzzled his cheek. Nosing the list closed along its folds, she took it carefully in her teeth, leaped to the chair, and slid out through the partially open window. Joe followed, keeping an eye on the dog. They scorched past him as he bellowed and streaked away up the hill.

“Maybe he’ll hang himself on the chain.”

He glanced at her.“You’re drooling on the list.”

She cut her eyes at him and sped faster. It was impossible, carrying the paper in her mouth, not to drool on it. She held her head up, sucked in her spit, but despite her efforts, by the time they neared the Blankenships’ the paper was soaked. She was thankful Stamps had written in pencil and not water-soluble ink. The Blankenships’ brown frame house stood above them plain and homely. They approached from the side yard, where the spreading fig tree sheltered the back porch.

At the tree they parted, and, as Dulcie slipped around to the laundry room window, Joe swarmed up into the branches. Situating himself as high among the sticky fig leaves as he could, he looked down between them, straight into the kitchen window. He could see Mama sitting at the cluttered table, sipping coffee. Frances stood at the counter, and she seemed to be making lunch. He could smell canned vegetable soup. He could hear them talking, but their voices were just mumbles; he could not make out the thrust of the conversation. Clinging among the twiggy little branches, he took a deep breath.

Filling his lungs so full of air he felt like a bagpipe, he let it out in a yowling bellow. His screams hit the quiet street loud as a siren. He hadn’t sung like this since adolescence, when he fought over lady cats in the San Francisco alleys. He sang and squalled and warbled inventive improvisations. He was really belting it out, giving it his full range, when Frances burst out the kitchen door.

She stared up at him, incredulous, and tried to shake the tree, then looked for something to throw. Joe yowled louder. She snatched up a clod of garden earth, heaved it straight at him. She had pretty good aim-the dirt spattered against the branch inches from him. He ducked but continued to scream. The next instant the back door swung open, and old Mrs. Blankenship pushed out, waddling down the steps in her robe.

“Oh, poor kitty. My poor kitty, my kitty’s up there. Oh, Frances, she?”

When Mama saw that it wasn’t her kitty, she sat down on the steps, made herself comfortable. As if prepared to watch a good show. She seemed highly entertained by Frances’s rage, and it occurred to Joe that Frances might have reached her limit with stray cats.

Frances heaved another clod.“Shut up, you stupid beast. Shut up, or I’m getting Varnie’s shotgun.”

“He’s frightened, Frances. The poor thing can’t get down.”

“Mama, the cat can get down when it wants down.”

“Then why would he be crying like that? He’s terrified.”

Joe tried to look frightened, warbling another chorus of off-key wails but watching Frances warily.Come on,Dulcie, get on with it. I’ll have to skin out of here damn fast if Frances goes for a gun.In order to hold her attention, he pretended to lose his balance. When he nearly fell the old woman yelped. But Frances smiled, and threw another clod.

The moment Joe began to yowl, Dulcie leaped in through the laundry window. Streaking down the hall for Frances’s office, she sailed to the top of the file cabinet and hit the on switch of the copier.

She hoped it wasn’t out of paper, she didn’t think she could manage a ream of paper. She was greatly cheered when the machine’s sweet hum filled the room and no panic lights came on. How long did it take to warm up? Seemed like the ready light would never turn green.

But at last the little bulb flashed. She lifted the lid, laid the list inside, and smoothed it with her paw.

Lowering the lid, she pressed the copy button and prayed a beseeching cat prayer.

The machine hummed louder. The copy light ran along under the lid. In a moment the fresh copy eased out into the bin, and she slid it out with a careful paw. Joe was still singing, his cries muffled by the house walls. She thought she heard Frances shout.

Stamps’s handwriting looked better on the copy than in the original. The oily stains and the wrinkles had not reproduced. She retrieved his own list from inside the machine and managed to fold the clean sheet of paper with it, using teeth and claws.

Joe’s cries rose higher, bold and reassuring. She patted the little packet flat, gripped it firmly between her teeth, and switched off the machine.

Trotting back down the hall, she was almost to the laundry when she heard footsteps hit the back porch and the door open. She started to swerve into the bathroom, but there would be no way out. That window was seldom opened. She bolted down the hall for the laundry as Frances’s footsteps crossed the kitchen.

Frances loomed in the doorway, saw her.“The cat? What’s it got?” She ran, tried to grab Dulcie. “Something in its mouth?” The look on her face was incredulous.

Dulcie sailed to the sill and out.

“Damn cat’s taken something?”

She dropped to the side yard, crunching dry leaves as Frances shouted and banged down the window. Scorching away from the house, Dulcie prayed Joe would see her and follow, but as she hit the curb and dived beneath a neighbor’s parked car, he was still yowling.

16 [????????: pic_17.jpg]

Late-afternoon sun slanted into the Damen backyard, warming the chaise lounge, and warming Joe where he slept sprawled across its soft cushions. He did not feel the gentle breeze that caressed his fur. He was so deep under that the termcatnapcould not apply-he slept like the dead, limp as a child’s stuffed toy. He didn’t hear the leaves blowing in the oak trees, didn’t hear the occasional car passing along the street out in front. Didn’t hear the raucous screaming above him where, atop the fence, six cow birds danced, trying to taunt him. Had he been lightly napping, he would have jerked awake at the first arrogant squawk and leaped up in pointless attack simply for the fun of seeing the stupid birds scatter. But his adventures of the morning, breaking into Stamps’s room and his creative concert in the Blankenship fig tree, had left him wrung out. Only if one were to lean close and hear his soft snores, would one detect any sign of life.

He had parted from Dulcie at Ocean Avenue, had stood in the shade of the grassy median watching her trot brightly away toward the courthouse, carrying the photocopy of Stamps’s list, the white paper clutched in her teeth as if she were some dotty mother cat carrying a prize kitten; and she’d headed straight for the Molena Point Police Station.

He had to trust she’d get the list to Harper without being seen. When he questioned her, she hadn’t been specific.

“There are cops all over, Dulcie. How are you going to do that?”

“Play it by ear,” she’d mumbled, smiling around the paper, and trotted away.

And Stamps would never know the list had left his room. What were a few little dents in the paper? Who would imagine toothmarks? Certainly by the time Stamps got home from work the list would be dry, Dulcie’s spit evaporated.

And once Dulcie had delivered Stamps’s game plan to the authorities, she’d be off for a delightful day of court proceedings.

For himself, a nap had seemed far more inviting. Arriving home famished, he had pushed into the kitchen, waking the assorted pets, had knocked the box of cat kibble from the cupboard, and wolfed the contents. He’d gone out again through the front-there was no cat door from the kitchen; Clyde controlled the other cats’ access to the outdoors. Two of the cats were ancient and ought to be kept inside. And the young white female was too cowardly to fend for herself.

And in the backyard, moderately fortified with his dry snack, he had slept until 4 P.M.

He’d awakened hungry again, starved. Slipping back into the house, he had phoned Jolly’s. When, twenty minutes later, Jolly’s delivery van pulled up in front, he allowed time for the boy to set his order on the porch as he had directed and to drive away. There was no problem about paying-he hadput it on Clyde’s charge. When the coast was clear he slipped out, checked for nosy neighbors, then dragged the white paper bag around the side yard to the back and up onto the chaise.

Feasting royally, he had left the wrappers scattered around the chaise and gone back to sleep, his stomach distended, his belch loud and satisfied.

But now, suddenly, he was rudely awakened by someone poking him.

He jerked up, startled, then subsided.

Through slitted eyes he took in pant legs, Clyde’s reaching hand. He turned over and squeezed his eyes closed.

Clyde poked again, harder. Joe opened one eye, growling softly. Around them, the shadows were lengthening, the sunlight had softened, its long patches of brilliance lower and gender. The cool breeze that rustled the trees above him smelled of evening. Joe observed his housemate irritably.

Clyde was not only home from work, he had showered and changed. He was wearing a new, soft blue jogging suit. A velvet jogging suit. And brand-new Nikes. Joe opened both eyes, studying him with interest.

Clyde poked again, a real jab. Joe snatched the offending fingers and bit down hard.

Clyde jerked his hand, which was a mistake.“Christ, Joe! Let go of me! I was only petting. What’s the matter with you?”

He dropped the offending fingers.“You weren’t petting, you were prodding.”

“I was only trying to see if you’re all right. You were totally limp. You looked dead, like some old fur piece rejected by the Goodwill.”

Joe glared.

“I merely wanted to know if you’d like some salmon for dinner.” He examined his fingers. “When was your last rabies shot?”

“How the hell should I know? It’s your job to keep track of that stuff. Of course I want salmon for dinner.”

Clyde studied his wounded appendages, searching for blood.

“I hardly broke the skin. I could have taken the damned fingers off if I’d wanted.”

Clyde sighed.

“You jerked me out of an extremely deep sleep. A healing, restful sleep. A much-needed sleep.” He slurped on his paw and massaged his violated belly. “In case you’ve forgotten, cats need more sleep than humans, cats need a higher-quality sleep. Cats?”

“Can it, Joe. I said I was sorry. I didn’t come out here for a lecture.” Clyde’s gaze wandered to the deli wrappers scattered beneath the chaise. He knelt and picked up several and sniffed them. “I see you won’t want the salmon, that you’ve already had dinner.”

“A midafternoon snack. I said yes, I want salmon.”

Clyde sat down on the end of the chaise, nearly tipping it though Joe occupied three-fourths of the pad.“This was a midafternoon snack? I wonder, Joe, if you’ve glanced, recently, at my deli bill.”

Joe stared at him, his yellow eyes wide.

“Ever since you learned how to use the phone, my bill at Jolly’s has been unbelievable. It takes a large part of my personal earnings just to? “

“Come on, Clyde. A little roast beef once in a while, a few crackers.”

Clyde picked up a wrapper.“What is this black smear? Could this be caviar?” He raised his eyes to Joe. “Imported caviar? The beluga, maybe?” He examined a second crumpled sheet of paper. “And these little flecks of pink. These wouldn’t be the salmon-Jolly’s best smoked Canadian salmon?”

“They were having a special.” Joe licked his whiskers. “You really ought to try the smoked salmon; Jolly just got it in from Seattle.”

Clyde picked up yet another wrapper and sniffed the faint, creamy smears.“And is this that Brie from France?”

“George Jolly does keep a very nice Brie. Smear it on a soft French bread, it’s perfection. They say Brie is good with fresh fruit, but I prefer?”

Clyde looked at Joe intently.“Doesn’t Jolly’s deliveryman wonder, when he brings this stuff and no one answers the door? What do you tell him when you call?”

“I tell him to leave it on the porch. What else would I tell him? To shove it through the cat door? I can manage that myself. Though this evening I carried it around here, it’s so nice and sunny. I had a delightful snack.”

“That, as far as I’m concerned, was your supper.”

“You might call it high tea.”

“And where’s Dulcie? How come you didn’t share with her? She loves smoked salmon and Brie.”

“She planned to spend the afternoon at the courthouse. She said she was going home afterward, for some quality time with Wilma. Dulcie is a very dutiful cat.”

Clyde wadded up the deli wrappers.“You were taking a nap pretty early in the day, so I presume you’re planning a big night.”

Joe shrugged.“Maybe an early hunt, nothing elaborate.” He had no intention of sharing his plans for the evening. This proposed break-and-enter into the Aronson Gallery was none of Clyde’s business. It would only upset him. He looked Clyde over with interest. “And what about you? Looks like you have big plans. Is that a new jogging suit? And new Nikes? They have to be, they’re still clean. And you just had a haircut. What gives? You going walking with Charleston?”

Clyde stared.

Joe bent this head and licked his hind paw.“Simple deduction,” he said modestly. “I know that Charlie likes to walk; Dulcie says she’s learning the lay of the village, learning the names of the streets. And you told me yourself, she doesn’t like fancy restaurants and doesn’t hang out in bars. And a movie date is so juvenile. Ergo, you’re going walking, and then for dinner either to the Fish Market or the Bakery.”

“I don’t know why I bother to plan anything about my life. I could just ask you what I’m going to do for the day. It would be so much easier.”

Joe lifted a white paw, extended his claws, and began to clean between them.

Clyde glanced at his watch and rose. In a few minutes Joe could hear him in the kitchen opening cans, could hear the two old dogs’ nails scrabbling on the kitchen floor in Pavlovian response to the growl of the can opener, and the three cats begin to mewl. Annoyed by the fuss, Joe rose, leaped to the top of the fence and up into the eucalyptus tree. There he tucked down into a favorite hollow formed by three converging branches and tried to go back to sleep.

But within minutes of his getting settled and drifting off, the back door burst open and a tangle of dogs and cats poured out into the falling evening. The dumb beasts began to play, driven by inane, friendly barking and snarls and an occasional feline hiss. Joe climbed higher.

He wasn’t to meet Dulcie until eight-thirty, but he needed to be fresh. It would take some quick maneuvering to slip into the gallery unseen just before it closed, find an adequate hiding place, and remain concealed until Sicily locked up and went home. He had a bad feeling about tonight. But Dulcie wasn’t going to rest until they took that gallery apart looking for Janet’s paintings.

He supposed if they didn’t find them, she’d want to search Sicily’s apartment next, and who knew where else.

What they should do, of course, was inform the police. Let Captain Harper know about the missing paintings-make one simple, anonymous phone call so Harper could start looking for them.

But try to tell Dulcie that. She’d got her claws into this and was determined to do it her way, to come up with the killer unaided, like some ego-driven movie detective.

Yet he knew he was being unfair. The excitement of the hunt stirred his own blood. And he knew Dulcie was driven not so much by ego, as by her powerful hunting instincts and an overwhelming feline curiosity. Her tenacity in tracking the killer was as natural to her as stalking an elusive rabbit.

But now, of course, one crime wasn’t enough, now she’d honed in, as well, on Stamps’s early-morning burglary scheme.

Harper should be delighted. Why pay all those cops, when he has us?

But, to be honest, his own curiosity nudged him just as sharply. And what the hell? Breaking into Stamps’s place had been a gas. He liked nosing around other folks’ turf.

Anyway what choice did he have? What else could he do when Dulcie flashed those big green eyes at him, and extended her soft little paw? Might as well relax and enjoy an evening of burglary. What harm-what could go wrong? What could happen?

17 [????????: pic_18.jpg]

High above the alley, as Dulcie crouched to leap, the oak branch shivered beneath her tensed paws. She gathered herself, staring across to the narrow brick sill of the courthouse window. She sprang suddenly, flying across-hit the sill, scattering pigeons, driving them up in an explosion of thundering wings.

But even as she clung, steadying herself by pressing against the glass, they circled back, dropping down again into the oak, the bravest ones returning to the ledge to strut and eye her sideways with simpleminded bravado. If she hadn’t been otherwise engaged, she would have had one for a little snack.

Hunched on the narrow sill, she peered down into the courtroom, wondering why the windows were closed, why the room below was dark. No lights burned, the long rows of mahogany benches were empty, the jury box abandoned, the judge’s big leather chair deserted, the shadowed courtroom as lifeless as a time capsule sealed away to be opened a thousand years hence. Surely they hadn’t concluded the case. Visions of Rob Lake being pronounced guilty and sentenced filled her with panic.

But it was too soon for a verdict, there were still witnesses to be called. There had been no time for a summing up, not nearly enough time for the jury to deliberate. Puzzled, she turned away, leaped back into the oak tree, sending the mindless birds scattering.

She sat among the branches, licking pigeon soil from her paws. In her haste she’d forgotten the hand towel, had left it stuffed high in the tree among the smallest twigs. She had to know why court was closed.

Maybe theGazettewas out early. Maybe it would tell her. Sometimes, when there was an unusual event, the evening edition hit the streets around midday. She gave her paws a last disgusted lick, backed down the rough trunk, and headed for the post office, where the nearest paper rack stood chained to a lamppost.

At least she had delivered the list, had deposited her copy of Stamps’s itinerary safely at police headquarters. She hoped it was safe. She’d thought of faxing it to Captain Harper, a safe and direct route, but she’d have to use the library fax when no one was watching, a feat nearly impossible. Besides, the fax still unnerved her.

The Molena Point Police Station occupied the southern wing of the courthouse just across the alley from the jail, from Rob Lake’s cell. The station’s main entrance opened onto Lincoln Street. A second door, inside the police squad room, opened directly into the courthouse. At the back of the building a third entrance, a locked metal door, led to the police parking lot.

She had arrived long after the change of shift. The fenced parking lot was full of officers’ personal cars and a few squad cars, but there was no one about, no officer passing through the lot, no pedestrian in sight at that moment. The brick wall of the jail, across the alley, was blank except for very high windows. No prisoner could see out. Certain that no one was watching, she had tucked the list under the metal door, praying that some officer, coming out, wouldn’t let it blow away.

Now, leaving the courthouse, she glanced down the alley to the back of the station, looking for the little white folded paper. She couldn’t see it beneath the door. Maybe Harper already had it. She had started over to take a look when a squad car pulled in.

Hurrying on by, she left the court building heading for the post office news rack. Trotting around to Dolores Street, she sprinted north a block, galloping up the warm sidewalk. The day smelled of green gardens and the sea; the shop windows were bright with their expensive wares; the gallery windows brilliant with an assortment of painting styles. Next to the post office, the Swiss House smelled of sweet rolls and freshly brewed coffee. Pink petunias bloomed beside its door, in ceramic pots. She sniffed at the flowers as she passed, approaching the news rack.

But the rack was empty-no early paper. Strange that the court postponement hadn’t generated enough excitement for theGazetteto make an extra effort. And even if, at home, she were to push the buttons on the TV, there’d be no news this time of day, only the soaps, every channel busy with degrading human melodramas written by disturbed mental patients.

But at least at home there would be something nice to eat while she waited for the paper. Wilma always left a plate for her in the refrigerator. She hadn’t had a bite since breakfast with Mama, a disgusting mess of oatmeal, and then that nibble of peach turnover-more peach on her ear than in her stomach. Breaking into a run, swerving around pedestrians, she nearly collided with an old man and an elderly dog wandering along in the sunshine; then, turning the corner, she was almost creamed by a fast-moving bike. She jumped back just in time as its rider swerved, shouting at her. But soon she turned up her own stone walk between Wilma’s flower beds. Slipping in through her cat door, she made a round of the house to be sure she was alone. Charlie could be unusually quiet sometimes, not a whisper of sound, not a vibe of her presence.

No one home, the rooms were still and empty. But trotting back through the dining room she caught the scent of Charlie’s drawing materials. Maybe she’d left her sketch box on the table.

In the kitchen, crouched on the counter, the instant she forced the refrigerator open she smelled fresh crab. Leaping down before the door could shut, she snatched the plastic plate in her teeth, set it on the little rug.

Beneath the clear wrap, the soft plastic plate held a generous portion of fresh white crabmeat arranged beside a small cheese biscuit of her favorite brand, and an ounce of Jolly’s special vegetable aspic, heavy on asparagus just the way she liked it. For desert Wilma had included a small plastic cup of Jolly’s homemade egg custard. She ate slowly, enjoying each small bite, puzzling over why Judge Wesley would have recessed court.

Maybe Mama Blankenshiphadgone to the police, maybe the recess was until they could arrange for her testimony. Maybe what Mama told the police had been important enough to put a whole new face on the trial. Musing over that possibility, she finished her main course, licked her plate clean, and licked the last morsel of crab off her whiskers. As she started on her custard, she knew she had to call Captain Harper, that she wouldn’t rest until she was sure he had the list. Why was she so shy of the phone? It couldn’t be that hard. Just knock the phone off its cradle and punch in the number.

Finishing her custard, she headed for the living room, for the phone. But crossing the dining room she was aware once more of the scent that didn’t belong in that room, the sketching smell-charcoal, eraser crumbs, fixative.

Wilma’s guest room had taken on Charlie’s personality, overflowing with Charlie’s personal tastes and passions, her sketch pads, her easel, her hinged oak sketch box, and a larger oak painting box. Drawings stood propped against the furniture and the walls, stacks of art books crowded every surface and were stacked on the floor. This clutter was a product of Charlie’s deep interests, very different from the dead, dormant clutter of the Blankenship house. Charlie Getz might have left the art world to make a living, but her heart hadn’t left it.

Now in the dining room, smelling Charlie’s drawings, Dulcie reared up to sniff at the buffet, then leaped up.

Landing on the polished surface she slammed hard into a large drawing, nearly knocked it off where it leaned against the wall. Backing away, she paused, balanced on the edge of the buffet.

There were three drawings. Her heart raced. They were ofher.Life-size portraits so bold and real that she seemed ready to step right off the page.

The studies were done with charcoal on white paper, and neatly matted with pebbly white board. When had Charlie done these? She hadn’t seen Charlie drawing her. She leaped away to the dining table to get a longer view. Looking across at the drawings, she could almost be looking into a mirror, except that these reflections were far more exciting than any mirror image. Charlie’s flattery made her giddy. Her tail began to lash, her skin rippled with excitement.

She’d had no notion Charlie was drawing her. And who had known Charlie could draw like this?What is Charlie doing cleaning houses and grubbing out roof gutters, with this kind of talent?

She did a little tail chase on the dining room table, spinning in circles, and for a moment she let ego swamp her, she imagined these images of herself hanging in galleries or museums, saw herself in those full-color glossy art magazines, the kind the library displayed on a special rack. She saw newspaper reviews of Charlie’s work in which the beauty of Charlie’s feline model was remarked upon. But then, amused at her own vanity, she jumped down and headed for the living room. Her mind was still filled with Charlie’s powerful art work, but she had to take care of unfinished business.

Leaping to Wilma’s desk, she attacked the phone. Joe did this stuff all the time. Lifting a paw, she knocked the headset off.

The little buzz unnerved her. She backed away, then approached again and punched in the police number. But as she waited for the dispatcher to answer she grew shaky, her paws began to sweat. She was about to press the disconnect when a crisp female voice answered, a voice obviously used to quick response.

Her own voice was so unsteady she could hardly ask for Harper. She waited, shivering, for him to come on the line. She waited a long time; he wasn’t coming. She’d sounded too strange to the dispatcher; maybe the woman drought her call was some kind of hoax. She was easing away to leap off the desk, abandon the phone, when Harper answered.

When she explained to him about the list which she had tucked under the back door, Harper said he already had it. She told Harper the list had been made by James Stamps, under the direction of Varnie Blankenship, and she gave both men’s addresses, not by street number, which she hadn’t even thought to look at, but by the street names and by descriptions of the two houses, the ugly brown Blankenship house, and the old gray cottage with the addition at the back.

She told Harper that Stamps walked his dog every morning, watching when people left for work, when children left for school. She said she didn’t know when the two men planned the burglaries, that she knew no more than was on the list. Except that Stamps was on parole. This interested Harper considerably. He asked whether it was state or federal parole, but she didn’t know. He asked if she was a friend of Stamps, and how she had gotten her information. She panicked then, reached out her paw ready to press the disconnect button.

But after a moment, she said,“I can’t tell you that. Only that they’re planning seven burglaries, Captain Harper. I thought-I supposed you’d need witnesses, maybe a stakeout.”

She’d watched enough TV to know that if Harper didn’t have eyewitnesses, or serial numbers for the stolen items, his men couldn’t search Stamps’s room and Varnie’s house. Even if the stolen items were there, she didn’t think the police could get inside without probable cause.

She knew it was expecting a lot to imagine that Harper would set up a stakeout every morning until the burglaries were committed, that he would do that guided only by the word of an unfamiliar informant. Her heart was thudding, she was afraid she’d blown this. “Those are expensive homes, up there. It would be terrible, all of them broken into in one morning. I don’t know what vehicle they’ll use, but maybe the old truck in Varnie’s garage. It would carry a lot.” She was so shaky she didn’t wait for him to respond. In a suddenpanic she pressed the disconnect and sat staring at the headset as the dial tone resumed.

Then, embarrassed, she leaped to the couch and curled up tight on her blue afghan.Iblew it. Absolutely blew it. Harper won’t pay any attention. I didn’t half convince him.She thought about what she could have said differently. Thought about calling him back She did nothing; she only huddled miserably, disappointed in herself.

How was she going to tell Joe that she had failed, that she hadn’t convinced Harper, that she couldn’t even use the phone without panicking?

She wasn’t like this when she hunted; Joe said she was fearless. It was that disembodied voice coming through the wire that put her off. Feeling stupid and inept, she squeezed her eyes closed and tucked her nose under her paw.

She slept deeply, and soon the dream pulled her in, spun her away into that world where the white cat waited.

He stood high above her on the crest of the hills. He beckoned, flicking his tail. And this time he didn’t vanish; he turned and trotted away, and she followed. High up the hills, where the grass blew wild, he turned again to face her, his blue eyes burning bright as summer sky. Above him rose three miniature hills. Two were rounded, the third was sliced off along one side, sharp as if a knife had cut down through it. The white cat stood imperiously before it, his eyes glowing with a fierce light.

But as she approached him, a damp chill crept beneath her paws. She was suddenly in darkness, felt cold mud oozing beneath her paws, sour-smelling. They were in a cave or tunnel-blackness closed around them, and a heavy weight pressed in.

A thud jerked her from sleep. She leaped up in terror that the walls had collapsed on her.

But the dark walls were gone, and she was in her own living room, standing on her own blue afghan.

Glancing up at the windows, at the change of light, she realized she had slept for hours. She yawned, made a halfhearted attempt to wash. She felt lost, groggy. It was hard to wake fully. She thought the noise she’d heard might have been the eveningGazettehitting the curb.

Trying to collect herself, she trotted into the kitchen.

Pushing under the plastic flap of her cat door, she saw the paper out on the curb. Trotting down the steps, fetching theGazettefrom among the flowers, she dragged it back, bumping up the short stair, and pulled it endwise through her cat door. And why would any neighbor find her actions strange? She had always carried things home, had stolen clothes from everyone in the neighborhood at one time or another, had stolen not only from their houses but from their porches and their clotheslines and their open cars.

Dragging the paper into the living room, onto the thick rag rug, she nosed it open to the front page. She read quickly; her tail began to lash.

SURPRISE WITNESS IN LAKE TRIAL

Observers predict that new evidence which has come to light in the trial of Rob Lake may be so important that Judge Wesley will call a new trial. A new and unidentified witness is scheduled to testify this week. Neither defense attorney Deonne Baron nor the county attorney would release the witness’s name. Neither would speculate as to the nature of the impending testimony. Ms. Baron was not available for comment?

Dulcie rolled over, laughing.Mama did it, that old lady did it. Mama really came through-even if she was scared into testifying by the sudden interference of attorney Joe Grey.

She wondered if Joe had seen the paper.

The article speculated endlessly about the identity of the new witness, and recapped old facts just to make copy. A blurred photo of Rob Lake and a larger picture of Janet took up half the page.

Maybe I blew it with Harper, but we pulled this off. And maybe-maybe Mama’s testimony can free Rob.

And maybe after tonight there would be more evidence, maybe there would be forty-six of Janet’s paintings for evidence.

Carefully she folded the paper, carried it back through the kitchen, and pushed it out her cat door. She didn’t want Charlie to come home before Wilma and wonder how the evening paper got in the house. Quickly dragging it across the garden, she left it at the curb, then slipped back inside, and cuddled up again on her afghan. She’d just have another little nap, then go to meet Joe.Mama did it. Hope she doesn’t change her mind, get cold feet at the last minute.And she closed her eyes, smiling.

18 [????????: pic_19.jpg]

Moonlight touched Jolly’s alley; a little breeze fingered between the small shops, stirring leafy shadows; the potted trees shivered; the glow from a wrought-iron lamp mingled with moonlight washing across the many-paned shop windows, brightening the rainbow colors of a stained-glass door. The brick paving was warm beneath the cats’ hurrying paws.

Intent on their destination, neither cat spoke. Dulcie was all nerves. Joe was edgy with a need to run-to climb-to fight. They found it hard to stay focused, their spirits, their cat souls, wanted to be elsewhere. This was not a good night for measured discipline. The windy moonlight pulled at them, sought mightily to draw them away. They were filled with ancient hungers, with the moon’s wild power, with mysteries surfacing from a vanished past.

Just as the hills above them, so ordinary in daylight, changed under the moon to dangerous veldts and tangled black jungles, so the cats’ souls were changed. Ancient yearnings rode with them, drawing them like addicts toward lost times where medieval shadows fled.

Dulcie glanced at Joe and shuttered her eyes, trying to keep her thoughts on their mission. Slowing her pace, she padded demurely beside him. Leaving the alley, turning up the sidewalk, they put on civilized faces. Bland, kitty faces. With effort they returned to the domestic, became simple wandering pets, idle, dawdling.

Curving gently around planters and benches, duly sniffing at the shop walls, they stopped to investigate a bit of paper dropped at the curb. They scented mindlessly along a row of flowerpots. They meandered, working their way aimlessly in the direction of the Aronson Gallery, pretending vague inattention-but watching intently the gallery’s broad bay windows and glass door. The Aronson, occupying a quarter square block, was the most prestigious of Molena Point’s fifty galleries.

At the curb opposite the wide, low windows, Joe nosed at one of four huge ceramic pots planted with pink flowering oleander trees. Leaping up, he stretched out on the warm, potted earth; below him, Dulcie rolled on the sidewalk, both cats feigning empty-minded boredom as they studied the brightly lit interior, a montage of angled white walls and jagged, multicolored reflections more familiar to Dulcie than to Joe. A medley of colliding surfaces as intricate as the interior of a kaleidoscope, its maze of short, angled walls provided dozens of pristine white recesses flowing from one to another. Each niche accommodated a single painting, much as a jeweler displays one perfect emerald or ruby on a bed of velvet. The viewer could see each canvas or watercolor in isolation, yet had only to turn, perhaps take a step, to be immersed in the next offering. The snowy spaces blended so smoothly that gallery patrons seemed to wander in an open and airy world, surprised at each turn by a new and bright vista.

Now from deep within, three figures moved, approaching the front, their progress broken into crooked shadows. They seemed to be the gallery’s only occupants. Sicily floated theatrically toward the door, her loose, drifting garments almost ethereal beside the staid figures of the couple who accompanied her. The middle-aged man was nicely attired in a raw silk sport coat and pale slacks, the thin woman elegant in a sleek black cocktail suit, her shining black hair pinned into a chignon, her huge silver earrings dangling and flashing in the gleam of gallery lights. The three paused in the open doorway, stood discussing painting prices. The cats listened and watched narrowly, pretending to nap, but tensed for the moment when back would be turned, and they could dart inside. The couple seemed undeterred by the cash sums Sicily was mentioning, money enough to keep the entire cat population of Molena Point in gourmet abundance for the next century. One of the paintings they were discussing was Janet’s, a canvas the cats couldsee inside on the gallery wall, a painting of dark, rainswept hills.

But at last the man and woman stepped onto the street, and as Sicily turned back into the gallery the cats streaked through behind her. Racing for the shadows, they crouched between the zigzag walls. Looking out, they could just see Sicily as she moved away toward the back, unaware of intruders. Above them in the alcove hung a stark painting of a tilting San Francisco street, a work too austere for Dulcie’s tastes, and seeming to Joe hard and ugly.

And now, though Dulcie knew the gallery well, confusion touched her. As she peered away among the alcoves, searching for a better place to hide, she was riven with uncertainty. The gallery spaces seemed different tonight, the vibrant colors of the paintings seeming to shatter and converge in strange new convolutions beneath the dizzying lights.

They heard Sicily pick up the phone and punch in a number, listened to her arrange late dinner reservations for four at the Windborne, Molena Point’s most luxurious restaurant. This distracted Dulcie. She was able to calm herself with visions of a lovely, leisurely meal at a linen appointed table, waited on by liveried servers as she gazed down through the glass wall to the rolling sea below. Dreaming, she began to relax.

And at last she licked her paw and smoothed her whiskers, preparing for the night’s work.

As they crouched in the shadows, Sicily returned to the front wearing a wrap, an African-looking shawl thrown over her shoulders, and jingling her keys. She swept past them, carrying a briefcase and a string handbag, pausing at the door to turn out the lights.

The gallery dimmed to a soft glow from the streetlamps. Through the open door a cool breeze fingered in, then abated as Sicily pulled the door closed.

She locked the door with her key and swept away down the street; in a moment they saw her white van go by, and realized they had passed it a block away.

She was gone; the gallery was theirs. They came out from the shadows to prowl the pale recesses, studying each canvas, each glassed and matted watercolor, searching for Janet’s work, but by the time they reached the back of the gallery they had found only five of her paintings. And none of these was new; Dulcie had seen them all in the gallery, long before the fire. In the dim light, the life and color of the work was nearly lost. Only the strong dark and light patterns remained, as if the paintings had turned into photographs of themselves.

Deep in the interior, beyond Sicily’s desk, four closed doors were half-hidden among the oblique walls. They pawed each open. One led to a rest room smelling powerfully of Pine Sol, one to a closet with a red sweater dangling among a row of empty hangers. The third door opened on a cleaning closet: broom, mop, various cleaning chemicals in assorted spray bottles. The fourth door, to the storeroom, was open, as if perhaps Sicily left it ajar for air circulation.

And at the very back a fifth door, a broad, metal-sheathed loading door leading to the alley, was sealed by a bar and a padlock. Uneasily, Joe looked up at it.

This door was impassable. And Sicily had locked the front door with a key. There was no other way out of the gallery. The realization that they were trapped made him feel as helpless as when, as a kitten, he’d been chased into San Francisco’s dead-end alleys by packs of roaming dogs or by nasty little street boys.

He shivered as they slipped into the storeroom.“You said there were no windows?”

“None. If we can throw the light, it won’t be seen. The switch is there?” She peered up, then pawed the door closed behind them, so light wouldn’t be seen from the street.

Joe paced, tightening muscles, staring up. He leaped.

On his third try, scaling up the wall, his paw hit the switch. The lights blazed, three sets of long fluorescent bulbs burning in a white, blinding glow.

Four rows of open racks marched away, bins made of slats to allow for air circulation, and filled with standing paintings. But Joe, shut in, felt his paws grow damp. His brain kept playing the same theme. No way out of the storeroom except this one door. No way to escape the gallery. And this storeroom was like a coffin. In his heart, he was four months old again, cowering away from attacking boys, clawing up restraining walls.

He turned away, so Dulcie wouldn’t see his fear.

Hey, get a grip. This is not the behavior of a macho tomcat.But his paws were really sweaty, and he was beginning to pant.

He got himself in hand sufficiently to move with Dulcie up one corridor and down the next, looking at each canvas, searching for Janet’s work. They couldn’t move the big canvases out of the racks, but each group of paintings leaned against a slatted divider. As Joe pulled a painting back, Dulcie could slip in between, take a look. Their paws were soon abraded, scraped nearly raw by the rough linen canvas and cut where the rawends of picture wire had nicked them. They found only four of Janet’s paintings, all without frames, the raw edges stapled. No thumbtacks. Two were of village streets done from some high vantage.

“From the tower of the courthouse,” Dulcie said. “That’s Monte Verde Street below, those red blooming trees and the red roofs. And this other one, that’s the Molena Point Inn. Look, she’s put in a little cat asleep on the inn roof, a little black cat.”

She sighed.“You should come up the tower with me, it’s lovely. Up the outside steps to the second-floor balcony, then along the open corridor and up into the tower.”

Her eyes glowed.“You can pull the tower door open, they don’t lock it. Up the tower stairs to that open place near the top and there you are, a little jump up onto the stone rail, you can see all the town below, see the hills in one direction and the sea in the other. You can?”

“Could we hurry this a bit?” Her description of those seductive open spaces wasn’t helping; he hungered for space and air. “It’s about time for the patrol.”

The Molena Point police not only conducted tight street patrols, but they carried passkeys to most of the shops. Joe had seen, as he prowled the night-dark rooftops, uniformed officers entering restaurants and galleries, perhaps because they heard some noise or saw an unfamiliar light. The department provided a high degree of security for the small village; you wouldn’t find this kind of attention in San Francisco.

When they found no more of Janet’s work, when they had flipped off the light and fought the door open, Joe sat in the middle of the open gallery calming himself, getting himself together again; but only slowly did his heartbeat gear down. Beside him, Dulcie sat dejected. “I was so sure the paintings would be here.”

He washed diligently, soothing his tight muscles and shaky nerves, he’d never felt so edgy. The phrasenervous as a cathad taken on sudden new meaning. “Maybe they’re in a warehouse, maybe one of those around the docks.”

“Possible. There are plenty of warehouses down there. Remember the fuss in the paper about turning them into restaurants and tourist shops? That’s what defeated the last mayor. No one wants Molena Point to be so commercial.” She rubbed her face against his shoulder. “Yes, we can go down to the wharves, take a look Sicily?”

She stopped speaking, her eyes widening.“Or a storage locker.” She stared at him, her eyes black as polished obsidian. “There are storage lockers north of the village. Charlie keeps her tools and ladders there, all her repair and cleaning stuff. Wouldn’t the paintings be safer in a locker than in a warehouse? And at two in the morning, would Sicily go down into that warehouse area alone?”

“If Sicily has them.”

“If they’re in a locker, there should be some kind of receipt. Charlie got a receipt for her locker. I saw it on her dresser, stuck into her checkbook.”

“You just happened to be passing.”

“Actually, I was looking at her art books. She doesn’t care if I prowl.”

Trotting across the gallery, she leaped to Sicily’s desk, began to nose through the papers in an in-box, then through a little basket containing a tangle of small, handwritten notes and postcards.

She clawed open the file drawer. And as she searched, Joe prowled the perimeters of the gallery, nosing along the bay windows, hoping one would open.

When he turned, all he could see of Dulcie were her hindquarters and tail as she peered down inside the files.“Look for a duplicate key, a spare for the front door.”

She raised her head, watching him. His kittenhood must have been terrible. He couldn’t bear to be trapped though he would seldom talk about it.

Sicily’s files were filled with brochures and announcements of one-man exhibits, with newspaper clippings and reviews. Some contained, as well, glossy, full-color offprints of magazine articles featuring the artist’s work. In the front of each file was clipped an inventory listing by title, the medium and size of each painting received by the gallery, the date received, the dates of exhibits entered, and whether the work was accepted or rejected. There were notations of awards won, and of reviews.

The listing also contained the date a painting was sold, the price, and the name and address of the buyer. All the inventories were handwritten in small, neat script. There were three J folders.

Janet’s folder contained a list of her work taken by the gallery, but the dates were all months old. Two-thirds of the works had been sold. Dulcie could find no indication that a large number of paintings had suddenly been added to Sicily’s inventory-unless the dates had been altered. And when she clawed open the smaller desk drawers she found only office supplies-a stapler, pens, blank labels, stationery, and envelopes-and in one drawer, beside boxes of paper clips, a tangle of bracelets and a lipstick.

She was patting some restaurant receipts back into order when suddenly the burglar alarm screamed.

She shot off the desk straight into Joe, the siren vibrating in waves, exploding, shaking them.

Joe pushed her toward the back, into darkness away from the windows. Her fur felt straight out, her heart pounding.

“They’ll send a patrol car,” he said. “I was looking for an escape route and I broke the beam.” They stiffened as police sirens screamed up the street and Dulcie spun around toward the storeroom.

“No,” Joe hissed, “not there. There’s not even a window. Come on-under the desk.”

“But?”

Lights blazed in the street as a squad car slid to the curb. Its doors flew open. Two officers emerged, shining their lights in through the glass, and the cats shrank back beneath the desk.“Keep your face down,” Dulcie whispered. “Your white markings are like neon. Hide your paws.”

Joe ducked his head over his paws, turning himself into a solid gray ball. From the alley behind the gallery, a second siren screamed.

“If they see us,” Dulcie said, “try to look cute.”

“You think this is a joke.”

“Relax. What can they do? If they shine their lights under here, roll over and smile. You’re a gallery cat. Try to look the part.”

“Dulcie, those cops’ll know Sicily doesn’t have gallery cats. When they open the door, run for it.”

“How would they know she doesn’t have cats? And what if they do? So they think we got shut in here accidentally. What else would they think? What are they going to do, arrest us?”

“You left the desk drawer open.”

“Oh?” She tensed to leap up.

He grabbed her, his teeth in the nape of her neck.“They’ll see us.”

She shrugged, her dark eyes wide and amused.“What are you afraid of?” she said softly.

He was ready to fight, to claw any hand that reached for them, but he was scared, too.“They’ll think we’re strays and call the pound.” The pound had cages, locked cages. Having grown up in city alleys, he was far more aware of the terrors of the pound than was Dulcie. Far more wary of the powers of the police. Who could outfight a trained police officer? A cop knew all the tricks, knew to grab you by the tail and the back of the neck, putting you at an extreme disadvantage.

Those two cops were going to get some heavy claws if they tried that trick.

“They won’t hurt us,” she said gently. “We’re not criminals, we’re just little village cats.”

“Village cats don’t get locked in the stores; they have better sense.” He gave her a long look. “Get real, Dulcie. In here, we classify as a nuisance, and a nuisance goes to the pound. You think, at the pound, they allow you to call your attorney?”

He didn’t know what was wrong with him tonight; he was acting like a total wimp. Maybe he was sickening with something. He dug his claws into the carpet, watching the two officers let themselves in the front door, shivering as their spotlights swept the angled walls-and trying to talk sense to himself.

So they see us. Dulcie’s right, no big deal. We’re not strays, we’re respected village cats. People know us. Certainly most of the cops know us.

And if some of the cops knew them too well, so what? Though he had to admit, Captain Harper had enough questions about them already without provoking him further.

Harper was, in fact, too damn suspicious. And when Harper asked questions of Clyde, Clyde got upset. And Clyde lit into him.

No, if we’re going to snoop into police business, play PI and maybe step on a few police toes, then secrecy is our best weapon-our only weapon.

The cops’ lights glanced and paused, illuminating paintings, then running on across the zigzag walls, illuminating a sculpture stand holding a bronze head, flashing across a huge seascape, then onto the desk, blazing inches from their noses.

19 [????????: pic_20.jpg]

Spotlights hit the desk, focusing on the open drawer above Joe and Dulcie, and an officer approached. Black trouser legs and black shoes filled their vision. He smelled of shoe polish and gun oil, stood above them as if looking into the drawer and studying its contents. The cats barely breathed. But Dulcie’s dark eyes were slitted with amusement. She had that devilish look, as if any second she’d trot out from under the desk and wind around the officer’s ankles. Joe glared until she quit grinning and settled back into the blackness of the desk’s cubbyhole.

But at last the officer turned away, directing his beam on across the gallery, the officers’ two lights washing away each shadow, illuminating each niche. And talk about a small world. Lieutenant Brennan and Officer Wendell had been present up at the car agency when Captain Harper found the counterfeit money. The cats, wandering among the officers’ feet, had watched the result of their clandestine efforts with great satisfaction. Brennan was the hefty one. It was hard to tell whether his snug uniform concealed fat or muscle. Wendell was skinny, pale, his narrow face too serious. Joe could not remember ever seeing Wendell smile.

As the officers moved toward the back of the gallery, throwing the desk into darkness, Dulcie shifted her position, easing her tension. At the back, the flashlight beams picked out, one by one, the storeroom door, the three closed doors, the loading door.

But suddenly Brennan’s beam swung around, returned to Janet’s desk, and dropped beneath it. Hit them square in the face. They were pinned in the glare like moths against a window.

Brennan’s gun was drawn. When he saw them he lowered it, laughing. “Cats! Only a couple of cats.”

“Cats, for Christ sake,” Wendell said. “Could cats trip the alarm?”

“It’s at floor level. Anything moving could trip it.” Brennan approached the desk, but still scanning the room, keeping his back to the wall. He knelt, reached under. “Come on out, you two. Come on out of there.” He reached for Joe, gentle but authoritative.

Joe snarled.

Brennan drew his hand back.

“Okay, don’t come out. How did you two get in here-you don’t belong here. Sicily doesn’t have cats.” He rose. “We’ll let them be, maybe they’ll come out on their own.” He started away, then looked back. “You better not have left a mess.”

The two officers checked the padlock on the loading door, opened each of the other doors, then moved into the storeroom. Switching on the lights, they covered each other as they searched the three narrow aisles. Only when they had cleared the premises, had found no human intruder and nothing else that seemed disturbed except for the open desk drawer, did they return to rout the cats. And, of course, the cats were gone.

Crouched in a dark angle of wall near the front, Joe and Dulcie waited, hoping to escape, hoping one of the officers would open the door. But before they could streak away to freedom Brennan’s roving light found them again. Joe snarled into the dazzle. Dulcie gave Brennan an innocent smile, her eyes wide and loving, and raised a soft paw, all sleepy-eyed sweetness. As Brennan knelt to pet her, only Joe saw, only another cat would detect deep within her green gaze, a wicked feline guile.

Behind Brennan, Wendell frowned.“Could those be the two cats from Beckwhite’s? The cats that were hanging around when we found the counterfeit bills?”

“Looks like the same two. That gray one, that looks like Clyde Damen’s cat.”

Wendell nodded.“Maybe they wandered in before Ms. Aronson locked up-or when someone else came in, or left. That stripy one, I’ve seen a cat like that over around the dress shops on Dolores.”

Brennan shrugged.“Go call Sicily Aronson, use the phone on the desk. See if she’ll come down and check the place out before we lock up. Use your handkerchief, don’t smear any prints.” He knelt again and reached for Joe.

Joe raised a bladed paw, but didn’t strike; he studied the officer, considering.

Stupid move, really stupid. Bloody the hand of the law, Bucko, and you’re in big trouble.

He drew back his claws.

Brennan touched Joe’s ear with a gentle, unthreatening finger. He was reaching to stroke Joe’s back when a shout from the street sent the officer spinning around, his hand on his revolver.

The glass door rattled, shook under pounding fists.“What are you doing. That’s my cat!” Clyde beat harder, and Joe thought he’d shatter the glass. “That’s my cat, Brennan! Let me in.”

Brennan rose, unlocked the door, and switched on the gallery lights, illuminating Clyde and Charlie.

“What the hell is this? Put down the damned gun, Brennan. How did my cat-our cats-get in here?”

Joe sat very straight, his ears erect. He was mighty relieved to see Clyde. But he wasn’t going to let him know it. As Clyde moved into the gallery, Charlie stood in the doorway regarding the scene, looking from the officers to the cats with a puzzled, crooked little grin. Caught in a deliberate breaking and entering, Dulcie gave her a wide stare, then began to wash, as if all thisfuss was unspeakably boring.

Clyde scooped Joe up.“How the hell did you get in here?”

Joe regarded him coldly. Clyde clutched him with unnecessary firmness, gave him a deep, penetrating stare, then glared down at Dulcie.“What the hell were you two doing?” But he looked as if he didn’t want to know.

“They set off the alarm,” Brennan said, “there below the glass. Must have got ten shut in by mistake-no harm done.”

Charlie knelt and gathered up Dulcie, cuddling her. Dulcie lay softly against Charlie’s shoulder, cutting her eyes at Joe, highly amused.

Brennan had bolstered his pistol.“Sicily’s on her way down to check the place out” He nodded toward the open desk drawer. “Maybe someone was in here and left-but they must have had a key, no sign of forced entry.”

Clyde stared at the open drawer. He looked at Joe. He said nothing. His eyes said plenty. He took a firmer grip on the nape of Joe’s neck, his fist almost pulsing with anger.

“Sorry they made trouble, Brennan,” he said pleasantly. “Damn cats, always into something.”

But out on the street again, scowling into Joe’s face, he said, “What the hell were you two doing in there? Can’t you stay out of anything. Now what am I going to do with you? Turn you loose, you’ll be right back in there.

“And I didn’t plan to spend the evening baby-sitting a couple of snooping cats. I don’t know why you two can’t stay out of trouble. I don’t see why you can’t behave with some sense.”

Charlie studied Clyde, puzzled.“Aren’t you overreacting, maybe?”

Clyde glared.

She looked at Clyde and Joe, frowning, as if she were missing something.“We can take them over to Wilma’s, shut them in the house, then we can have dinner. I’m starved.”

Shifting Dulcie to a more comfortable position, she set off up the street, glancing back at Clyde.“You can’t expect a cat to think what might happen if he wanders into a shop. How were they to know they couldn’t get out?”

Clyde did not reply. Joe could imagine what he was thinking. Joe had a few things he’d like to say in return. He hated when he had to remain mute. It was grossly unfair for Clyde to read him off when he couldn’t answer back. He dug his claws into Clyde’s shoulder until Clyde drew in his breath.

As Clyde forced his finger under Joe’s pads to release the offending needles, a pale blue Mercedes turned onto the street and the driver waved. Clyde lifted his hand in greeting; just one of his customers. Then he pressed Joe’s pads, rotating the claws inward, releasing Joe’s lethal grip, and shifted Joe away from his shoulder.The tomcat was getting out of hand. It was going to be interesting to hear Joe’s explanation for this little escapade. Of course it had to do with the murder trial, he knew the single-minded compulsion of these two.

Whatever they were doing in the gallery, their adventure hadn’t helped his own evening. Half an hour ago he and Charlie had been walking along holding hands like kids, joking, laughing, discussing where to have dinner. He hadn’t intended to finish off the night playing free taxi to a couple of disaster-prone felines.

Having left his car at Wilma’s, he and Charlie had walked up through the village into the hills as the sun set, had climbed above the last scattered houses toward the eastern mountains gleaming gold in the falling light. High up the face of a steep hill among an outcropping of boulders they sat looking down on the village spread below them, watching the sky slowly darken, watching the cottage lights blink on in sudden bursts of illumination, the village quickly coming alive, preparing for evening. They could smell wood fires; the breeze was cool, their mood peaceful and compliant. Their mellow warmth, which had lastedall the way down the hills again and into the village, was shattered suddenly by sirens. They quickened their pace, curious, heading up the street to where the squad cars had careened by?

They saw the squad car parked in front of the Aronson, spotlights sweeping the dim gallery as they approached. Then they saw the harsh beams of light fix suddenly on the two cats, catching their eyes in a blaze of fire-and Joe and Dulcie looking as guilty as any two human thieves.

He supposed, overreacting, he’d roused Charlie’s curiosity, but it didn’t matter. Charlie was as ignorant of the cats’ true nature as the two officers.

Joe crept up Clyde’s shoulder to a more comfortable position, watched Dulcie cuddling in Charlie’s arms happy as a nesting bird. He kept his claws sheathed, and tentatively he rubbed his face against Clyde’s ear. Clyde ignored him. Clyde sometimes had an unreasonably sour disposition.

Charlie said,“We’ll drop these two off, then grab a quick hamburger. Five o’clock comes early, and tomorrow will be twelve hours or more, without Stamps. When he gets back from his little jaunt, he gets the ax; he’s out of here.”

Dulcie’s head had come up, and, her ears up, she turned on Charlie’s shoulder to stare across at Joe, her eyes wide with interest.

“Settle down,” Charlie said, stroking her. “We’re nearly home.” She looked across to Clyde. “Did you decide what to do with Janet’s diary?”

Both cats jerked to alert. Charlie frowned at Dulcie and shifted her to a more comfortable position. Clyde looked down at Joe, his grip tightening, his eyes narrowing to sudden realization.

Joe looked back innocently.So you found the diary. So now you know bow it got under Janet’s deck. So do you have to look so righteous?

But at least Clyde had the decency to offer some information.“We’ll have to give it to Harper. Good thing you went up to Janet’s after work to leave food for her cat. Good thing the kibble box was ripped and empty, and the bowl shoved on under the deck, or you’d never have seen that plastic package.”

“I still don’t see why someone would hide her diary like that. Why not just steal it? If that’s what they intended, why not take it with them?” She stroked Dulcie absently. “It had to be Stamps’s dog that ate the food. No other dog would leave pawprints that huge.

“Do you suppose Stamps took the diary from the house? But why would he want it? And why leave it there? I’ll be glad when I’m rid of Stamps. He makes me nervous.”

“You need workers pretty bad to be firing Stamps just because he’s taking a day off-and because his dog growls at you.”

“That dog’s growled at Mavity a dozen times. If he bites her, or bites anyone at work, I’m the one who gets sued. What if he bit a client? Stamps encourages that mean streak-he laughs when the dog snarls at me. Mavity’s terrified of it.”

Charlie sighed.“Until today Stamps has been tolerable, but today tore it. To wait until quitting time, then tell me he’s taking tomorrow off, just like that, no warning. No time to find someone else. He didn’t even have the decency to lie to me, to say he felt sick, just all of a sudden he had to run over to Stockton.”

Joe looked across at Dulcie. Her ears were back, her tail lashing, her eyes blazed.

This was it, tomorrow was hit day. Had to be. Burglary day for seven hillside residences. Stamps was taking the day off to tend to his real business. Joe licked a whisker, watching Dulcie. She was clinging tensely to Charlie, totally wired. Charlie looked down, frowning, and began to stroke her.

“What’s the matter, Dulcie? There’s nothing to be afraid of. You weren’t afraid in the gallery, not afraid of the police and their spotlights. Now all of a sudden? What’s gotten into you?”

But Dulcie’s tension wasn’t fear. She was primed. Every muscle twitched, her tail lashed and trembled. The little brindle cat was all nervous energy, set to explode, burning with predatory hunger to nail those two creeps-to see cold justice overtake Stamps and Varnie.

20 [????????: pic_21.jpg]

The cars that were parked along the curb hulked black in the predawn dark. Their bodies were beaded with dew, breathing out an icy breath radiating the night’s chill. Beneath the cats’ paws, the sidewalk was damp and cold. Only an occasional house shone with light. Most of the hillside residents still slept. A thin breeze nipped along the sidewalk, teasing the cats as they hurried upward toward the highest houses. Staying close to the curb, to the parked cars, they were tensed to dodge under if a marauding dog appeared out of the dark. The chill of the vehicles they passed made them shiver, but then, coming alongside a Chevy sedan, they were treated to warmth, sudden and welcome. They looked at each other and grinned. They sniffed at the rearwheel.

The metal was dry, the tire dry, the wheel so warm that when Joe touched his nose to the hubcap he drew back. The car smelled of exhaust and fresh coffee. They reared up, trying to look in.

The dark interior appeared empty, but they caught the faint scent of shaving lotion, too. Moving away into the bushes beside a stucco cottage, looking back, they could observe the Chevy’s windows at a better angle.

Two figures sat within, unmoving silhouettes poised in blackness. Stakeout car. Dulcie smiled and began to purr. Captain Harper had believed her. Harper had acted on her phone call. Just a few feet from them, two of Harper’s officers sat in their unmarked vehicle waiting for Varnie and Stamps to go into action.

They thought the time must be about five-fifty. The first mark would leave his house at six-fifteen. Trotting up across the dew-sodden lawns, soon they could see above them the steeply peaked roof of the first mark, the last house on Cypress, number 3920, a handsome white frame dwelling. Lights were on in what looked like a bedroom and bath, and as they hurried upward lights came on in the kitchen. They could hear a radio playing, an announcer’s voice; it sounded like the morning weather report. The human need for weather reports always amused them. A cat could smell the rain coming, could feel the change of wind. A cat knows immediately when the barometric pressure changes, by the state of his nerves. High pressure, zowie. Low pressure, nap time. The human paucity of senses was really too bad.

Drawing nearer to 3920, they could hear the faint rumble of water pipes as if someone were taking a shower. And they could smell coffee now, then could smell eggs frying and cigarette smoke.

According to Stamps’s list, Tim Hamry would leave the house in about ten minutes, in a white Toyota. His wife, June, should depart five to ten minutes later in an old black Ford sedan. The Hamry’s had no children. They had no dogs, and no electronic alarm system.

The cats entered the yard next door, trotting through a bed of dew-laden chrysanthemums, and skinned up a rose trellis to the roof, where they could observe the impending drama. Lying up along the peak, they commanded an unbroken view of 3920 and the surrounding streets. The narrow lanes were lit faintly by residential streetlights, a soft glow at each corner.

The Hamry’s bathroom light went out, soon they could hear cutlery on plates.

And as Tim and June Hamry enjoyed breakfast, four blocks down the hill a lone figure leading a large dog appeared, walking up toward the Hamry house. Stamps and the monster.

“Why would he bring the dog?” Dulcie said.

“I don’t know. Maybe they use him as a lookout? He barks loud enough.” Joe sat taller on the steep shingles, watching Stamps. “They’re headed right for the stakeout car. That dog will pitch a fit.”

“Oh, no. That will finish it.”

They held their breath.

The dog paused at the stakeout car jerking his lead, sniffing at the Chevy. Stamps swore and pulled him along, but the dog, sniffing at the car, let out a roar loud enough to wake the hillside.

Dulcie moaned. It was over. Stamps would see the cops and take off out of there.

But no, the dog stuck his nose to the sidewalk. He huffed and barked, and took off uphill, jerking Stamps along-following not Harper’s men but their own trail. He was headed straight for the house on which they sat.

Joe almost fell off the roof laughing, clawing at the shingles. They watched the beast jerk Stamps along for half a block before Stamps got him stopped. Then Stamps slapped him and whipped him with the end of the lead. The beast cowered and snapped at him, but he came to heel on a short lead, and Stamps led him across the street, not approaching 3920, but heading for Varnie’s.

No light burned in the brown house. The Blankenship dwelling was dark, but as Stamps approached, the garage door swung open. He moved quickly inside. They heard him speak to the dog, saw it leap into the truck bed. Stamps moved deeper in, toward the front of the truck, out of their sight.

They heard the truck door open and close. A movement in the darkened garage, beside the window, indicated that Varnie was looking up the hill, watching the Hamry house.

The darkened truck waited. The two men would be marking time until the Hamrys left for work. Dulcie yawned and settled more comfortably on the sloping roof. The predawn sky was beginning to gray, black tree branches to appear out of the night. Up beyond the black hills, the taller mountains of the coastal range stood dark against the steely sky.

The garage door of 3920 opened. Tim Hamry appeared, wearing a tan suit and black shoes. He turned away within the lit interior and slid into the white Toyota. They heard the engine start.

He backed out, leaving the garage door open, and headed down the hill, his lights picking out parked cars, flashing across the windows of the stakeout car. Its glass shone blank and empty, as if the officers had ducked down.

Joe studied the faintly lit streets, wondering if there might be a second police unit. Every dark, silent vehicle seemed totally abandoned; he could detect no movement within, no red glow of a cigarette-though no cop would smoke on stakeout. They’d chew, maybe, and spit into a paper cup. The officers would be sipping coffee, hunkered down against the chill, yawning as they watched 3920-and watched Varnie’s dark, open garage. Stakeout must be like any hunt. Wait for the prey to make a move, be sure you had him cornered, then nail him.

From within the Hamry’s lit garage they heard a door close. A woman in a dark suit appeared, slid into the black Ford, and started the engine. She let it idle for a moment, then backed out.

In the drive she left the car running while she went to turn off the light and close the overhead door. Interesting that they didn’t have an electric door. Maybe they had cats-automatic doors were death on cats.

The moment June Hamry drove away, her taillights disappearing down the hill, over at the Blankenships’ Varnie started his engine. He didn’t turn on his headlights. The motor rumbled unevenly, belching white exhaust. He backed out without lights, the truck’s slat sides rattling; its open rear end gaped. In the center of the truck bed, the dog balanced himself heavily, lurching as the truck turned uphill.

Beside the dog reclined four plastic garbage bags, heavily filled, and tied shut.“What’s with the bags?” Dulcie hunched lower against the rough shingles, looking.

The truck moved up the hill. Pausing before 3920, it backed into the Hamry’s drive as bold as if it belonged there, sat idling as, presumably, the two men watched the windows, making certain the house was indeed empty. Varnie had attached a hand-lettered sign to the side of the truck:Save our earth. Help recycle.

Who would suspect a couple of guys donating their time to collect recyclables? Maybe the bags contained beer cans for a touch of authenticity. The quickening morning breeze picked up a breath of old fish. Scanning the street, Joe saw a second stakeout car.

“There, across the street and down three doors. That old station wagon.”

Dulcie looked, wriggling lower against the shingles.“How can you tell? I don’t see a soul.”

“I saw a little movement behind the glass, just a shifting in the shadows.”

Stamps got out of the truck to open the Hamry garage door, and Varnie backed on in. Leaving the garage door open, the two men disappeared inside. The dog remained in the truck bed.

“I’m surprised he’d stay there,” Dulcie said. “Stamps didn’t tie him.”

“Maybe he’s not as useless as we thought.”

They heard a faint click from within the garage, then the sound of a door softly closing. In a moment a faint light swung across the kitchen windows, jiggling and darting, then disappeared.

“Come on,” Dulcie said. “Those windowsills are wide. We can see right in.”

“Hold on a minute. I saw car lights way down the hill, then they went out.”

The sky was paling toward dawn, the houses beginning to take on dimension, the bushes silhouetted stark and black. Down the street within the stakeout car a shadow moved again, then was still. The cats’ paws and ears were freezing. Their early-morning meal of fresh-killed rabbit, which had warmed them nicely for a while, had lost its battle with the chill. And then, glancing down the street below Janet’s house, they saw a third car moving without lights. It parked below her house, beneath a row of eucalyptus trees, under the low-hanging leaves.

They glimpsed something shiny through a back window, then the window went blank, reflecting the tree’s sword-sharp leaves. They could see, within the leafy reflections, only a hint of the driver’s profile. The car had parked just above the second mark, where the officers could look down into the backyard. “Harper’s doing it up fancy,” Joe said. “Three stakeout cars.”

“I can hardly believe he’s done this just on the list and phone call. Maybe it’s because Stamps is on parole.”

“Who knows? Maybe Varnie has a record, too.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” She licked a whisker, studying the arrangement of the three cars. “They can see every house on Stamps’s list.”

The burglars would have to move up and down the hill as they followed the homeowners’ individual schedules of departure. By the time they had finished, if the cops let them finish, they would be working in full daylight, in full view of the neighborhood. But what neighbor, seeing Varnie’s signs and perceiving the old truck’s altruistic mission to collect cans and newspapers for recycling, would question its presence?

Now, on the street below Janet’s, the car doors opened without sound. Two officers emerged and started down the hill into the backyard of the second mark. “They’re going to make the arrest down there,” Dulcie said. “After the second burglary.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s beat it down there. I want to see them nail those two.”

“If they make the arrest here, we’ll miss it. Once they have the evidence here, why would they let Varnie and Stamps trash another house?” Joe said.

“To make a better case? You go down. If we split up, one of us will get to see how it ends.”

He looked at her warily.“Will you stay on the roof, not go nosing around the windows?”

She smiled.

“Come on, Dulcie. It’s stupid to go over there.”

“Promise,” she said sullenly.

He studied her.

“I promise.” She lashed her tail and hissed at him.

He growled, cuffed her lightly, and left the roof, backing down the rose trellis. But she worried him. If she did go over there, and if the police moved in fast, she could get creamed.

But he couldn’t baby-sit her. He sped down the hill across the brightening yards, down past Janet’s. As he neared the second mark he glanced back to where Dulcie crouched. Yes, she had stayed put. He breathed easier. On the peak of the roof she was a small dark lump, a little gargoyle against the paling sky. He moved on, toward the stakeout.

The minute Joe disappeared down past Janet’s, into the yard of the second house, Dulcie crept to the edge of the roof. Crouching with her paws on the gutter, intently she watched the Hamry house, following the swinging glow of the burglars’ flashlight behind the dark windows. The men were taking their time. But why not? They had half an hour before the next house would be empty. Their flitting light was as erratic as a drunken moth. She could imagine them in there pulling open drawers and cupboards, collecting small, valuable items, maybe jewelry or guns or cash.

The shadowed bushes in the Hamry yard would make excellent cover. She was about to swarm down the trellis when she saw, in the bushes at the far side of the Hamry drive, a dark figure crouching. A man knelt there. She hunched lower over the gutter, watching.

His clothes were dark, but when he turned she saw the flash of something shiny. A gun? She watched intently until the gleam came again.

The object was round, very bright. Maybe it was a camera lens, reflecting light from the paling sky. The man half rose, moving forward in a crouch. He must not have made a sound, the dog didn’t turn-the mutt stood in the truck watching the house as if listening to the sounds of his master diligently at work.

From the bushes, the officer would have a perfect camera shot of the truck, and of the inside of the garage as the burglars emerged.

She wondered if this might not be considered entrapment. But Judge Wesley and Judge Sanderson were both old-fashioned jurists, strong-willed and not easily coerced into dismissing for such legal niceties. If a man was guilty, he was guilty.

Watching the photographer, she backed down the trellis, fled across a stretch of open lawn to the Hamry lawn and into the bushes, pausing only a few feet from the crouching officer. She hadn’t made a sound.

From this vantage, she could see deeper inside the garage, could see the door into the house, could hear from within, intermittent soft thuds, as if heavy objects were being moved. She heard Varnie swear softly, then the inner door opened.

The two men came out, Stamps carrying a television set, Varnie clutching a CD player and two speakers. Across the drive, the hidden officer raised his camera.

The photographer followed every move with his lens as the men loaded the truck. The soft click of the shutter was hardly audible above the men’s whispers and above the creaks of the truck springs. They returned to the house for a second TV, a microwave, and for several cardboard boxes and two plastic bags sagging heavy with unidentifiable objects. Watching, she crept out of the bushes.

The dog snarled. Dulcie froze. He came flying off the truck, straight at her.

But he flew past, leaped at the photographer. Knocked him backward, sent the camera flying. Before the officer could roll away, the dog was at his face. The officer beat at him and fought; the dog was all over him, it would kill him. Dulcie launched in a flying leap onto the dog’s back and dug in. Raking and clawing, she grabbed a floppy ear and clamped down.

The dog whirled shaking his head. Loosing the officer, he plunged and bucked, snapping at her. She clung, raking. His teeth gnashed so close she smelled his meaty breath. One more twist and he’d have her. Clawing his face, she leaped away, ran.

Speeding up the hill with the dog behind her, she heard Stamps shout,“Get back here, get the hell back in this truck.”

And Varnie screamed,“Leave the damn dog.”

The dog was gaining.Why did I do that?She fled in panic toward a stand of thick brambles, dived beneath the matted growth.What the hell did I do back there? Beg to be eaten alive. That young cop could have shot the damn dog.

Except the dog had knocked him off-balance, was at his throat, could have severed the jugular before the man drew his gun.

The dog plunged into the brambles behind her. She streaked away beneath the branches, and he crashed behind, breaking through-he couldn’t see her, but he could smell her. She ran, dodging.

The bushes ended.

She crouched, panting, at the edge of the open hill. He was nearly on her, panting, seeking.

There was nothing above her but a vast plain of short grass. No building, no real tree, only a few spindly saplings.

She bolted out and up the hill, racing for her life.

21 [????????: pic_22.jpg]

Her paws hardly touched the ground, skimming over the matted grass. Fear sent her flying uphill. There was no shelter above her, only a few tiny trees, hardly more than tall weeds. And behind her the dog gave a burst of speed, snatching at her tail. She jerked away, the tip of her tail blazing with pain. Scorched by terror, she desperately angled toward the nearest sapling, wondering if it would hold her. Leaping for the thin trunk, she swarmed up.

She was hardly above him when the dog hit the tree, bending it. She clung only inches above his snatching mouth, and the tree snapped back and forth under his weight, the little trunk whipping as if it would break She tried to climb higher but the thin branches bent. The bark was slick, the trunk too small to grip securely. The tree heaved. Its dry pods rattled, and the smell of bruised eucalyptus filled the wind. The dog leaped so high his face exploded at her, teeth snapping inches from her nose, and she could not back away.

She slashed him again, bloodied him good-his muzzle streamed blood, his ear was torn.

But she couldn’t stay here. And if she leaped away, out of the tree, there was nowhere to run. All was open grass. Except, up the hill, maybe fifty feet above her, a drainpipe protruded from the hill. She could see its open end, oozing mud. She couldn’t see inside very far, just the mouth of the drain, the slick-looking mud, the three smaller hills which clustered above it, probably grass-covered leavings of earth from when the drain was dug. The opening was plenty big enough for her, but maybe big enough for the dog as well. If she was caught in there with the dog crowding in behind her? Not a pleasant thought.

But she had no choice. The tree was going to break or bend to the ground under the beast’s lunging weight. Assessing the distance, she scrabbled among the thin branches to get purchase, praying she could hit the hill far enough ahead for a successful fifty-foot sprint.

She crouched, every muscle taut, adrenaline pumping her heart like a jackhammer.

She shot over his head out of the tree, hit the ground running. He was on her, lunging to grab her. She spun and raked his face and rolled clear. Streaking for the pipe, she bolted in inches ahead of him and kept running, didn’t look back, fled deep into the blackness, slipping in the mud, terrified he’d squeeze in behind her.

Deep in, when she didn’t hear him behind her, she turned around in the narrow tunnel to look back.

The end of the pipe was blocked. The dog had his head in and one leg. He was trying to roll his shoulder in.

But he wasn’t going to fit. If he pushed harder, he’d be stuck for sure. Smiling, she trotted back down the pipe toward him.

The sight of her sent him into a frenzy. He fought to push inside, his bloodied mouth slavering, his eyes blazing with rage.

She ran at him, hissing, raked him in the face, brought fresh blood flowing. Uselessly he fought to get at her, as she backed away. She turned, switched her tail at him, and moved deeper into the pipe.

Something was bothering her, a picture in her mind kept nudging for attention, she kept seeing the three mounds above at the base of the larger hill, two of them round, the third hill clipped off sharply, as if sliced straight down by a gigantic ax.

She shivered. Touched by images impossible to understand, she sat down in the mud, staring away into the darkness, seeing the hills from her dream.

Everything was the same, the dark tunnel, the sense of tight walls pressing in, threatening to crush her. Even the slime beneath her was the same, turgid and sour-smelling, just like the mud in her dream.

Drawing a shaky breath, she padded deeper in, drawn on shivering into the darkness.

Moving warily, ears tight against her head, tail low, she crept deep into the confining pipe, pulled in, swept by a powerful chill. And something lay ahead, something waited for her within the tunnel’s black reach.

Far ahead something pale lay in the mud. She could see it now, and she wanted to turn and run.

As she drew closer, trying to understand what she was seeing, the pale form began to take shape. It was absolutely still, a vague scattering in the mud. She smelled death. She drew nearer.

Before her lay a little heap of bones.

Thin little bones, frail fragments.

The little skeleton lay on a mound of silt that had gathered against a stone. The bones were gnawed clean, the legs and ribs disarranged as if rats had been at them. A few hanks of pale fur clung to the shoulder blade. The skull was bare of flesh. The curved cranium, the huge eye sockets, the brief insert of the nose were readily identifiable. Within its mouth the tiny incisors and daggerlike canines were unmistakably feline.

She stretched closer, studying the small, nearly hidden object which lay beneath the cat’s skull attached to its gaping collar.

The collar stood up like a hoop, circling the tiny vertebrae of the dead cat’s frail neck, a collar that had once been blue but was now faded nearly to the color of mud. Attached to it was a small brass plate, the three words engraved on it were smeared over by mud. With a shaking paw, she wiped the mud away. She read the cat’s name, and the name of its owner. Crouching over the skeleton, she studied the other object lying in the slime. As she leaned to look, her whiskers brushed across the cat’s skull.

A wristwatch had been buckled securely around the cat’s collar.

Even through the coating of mud she could see how heavy and ornate it was, could see a portion of the gold case flanked by two gold emblems like the wings of a soaring bird. She sniffed at it and backed away, stood looking at the pitiful remains of the white cat and at the last link in the puzzle of Janet Jeannot’s death.

She shivered, but not with chill. She was hardly aware of the tunnel and the slime and the dog that still fought to crawl in, struggling to snatch her. All her attention, all her amazement, was fixed on the white cat. He had led her here, to the last clue.

And not only had the white cat sought to show her this final evidence; he had, in coming to her in dream, told her far more.

He had reached out to her from beyond a vast barrier. From somewhere beyond death he had spoken to her. When she dreamed of the white cat she had touched an incredible wonder, had sensed for a little while a small part of a dimension closed to ordinary vision. She had glimpsed what lay beyond death.

She was so engrossed she didn’t realize the light in the tunnel had brightened. When she turned to look, the mouth of the culvert was empty. The dog had freed himself and had gone-or he was crouched outside licking blood from his face, waiting for her.

Feeling strong, almost invincible, she headed for the mouth of the tunnel.

Stepping from the pipe, she studied the bushes, the hills falling away below her. She reared up to look above.

The dog was gone.

She sat down just inside the mouth of the pipe, wondering. Strange that he would give up so easily. She cleaned herself up, sleeking her fur, thinking about the white cat. About Janet’s death. And about the wristwatch-Kendrick Mahl’s watch-that ostentatious piece of jewelry which matched exactly the watch in Mahl’s newspaper picture.

How did the watch get fixed to the white cat’s collar? Did Janet put it there, maybe just before she died?

The picture was taken only days before the opening; Mahl had the watch then. Did he lose it the morning of the fire? Was he waiting in the studio when Janet came upstairs? Did he let himself in as she prepared her work, laying out her welding equipment, filling the coffeemaker?

Or had he been there already, perhaps the day before, losing his watch then?

She licked the wounded tip of her tail, removing the congealing blood, smoothing the raw skin where hair had been pulled out-and puzzling over Mahl’s watch. He would not deliberately have left it in Janet’s studio; he had no business there.

Licking her tail, she found that none of her little vertebrae was broken. She was lucky, the way that dog grabbed her, that half her tail wasn’t missing, like poor Joe’s-though he seemed to get along fine with a docked tail, seemed as proud of that short appendage as if he were some kind of fancy retriever, an elegant feline bird dog.

For herself, she would be lost without her tail. She took great pride in that dark, mink-colored, silky, tabby-striped extremity. Before ever she could speak human language, she had talked with her tail as much as with her eyes and her twitching ears. Her repertoire of tail dances could convey a whole world of needs and emotions to a perceptive viewer. She’d detest some debilitating injury to that elegant appurtenance.

Well her dear tail was intact, her wound was only a scratch. It would heal, the hair would grow back.

Mahl killed her,she thought nervously.Janet’s last act on this earth was to buckle Mahl’s watch around Binky’s collar and somehow chase him away, make him run away from the burning building.

She thought about the white cat’s appearing to her in dreams long after he was dead, showing her things she could not know in any other way-extending to her a heady promise. The promise there would be something else, another life after her own small bones had shed their earthly flesh. Promise ofJoy,as Wilma had read to her once,Joy, different from ordinary pleasure. The brightness of another kind of light? from within another dimension.

She rose, stepped out of the pipe to the fresh green grass, sat down in the thin wash of sun fingering down across the hills behind her. Wrapping her tail around herself, she sat looking down the falling hills and up to the mysterious sky, and a deep, pure happiness sang through her, pulsing and shaking her.

It was there that Joe found her, sitting happily in the sun rumbling with purrs.

22 [????????: pic_23.jpg]

Under the hill, deep within the dark and slimy drainpipe, Joe crowded beside Dulcie, looking down at the little pile of bones, the frail skull, the faded collar and its metal plate, the mud-caked watch-Mahl’s watch.

He looked for a long time, said nothing. Then,“Too bad. Really too bad it can’t be used as evidence.”

“Of course it can.” Her green eyes blazed. “Why couldn’t it? Why else would it be on Binky’s collar unless Janet put it there before she died, unless she buckled it on during the fire, chased Binky away when she couldn’t get out herself. It has to prove Mahl set the fire, why else?”

“But Dulcie-

“If Mahl stole the paintings, he could have lost the watch then. He was in a hurry, he didn’t know it was gone.”

“But this is all conjecture.”

“That Monday morning when Janet found the watch, she knew Mahl had been there. She had to wonder what he was doing in her studio, but maybe she saw nothing disturbed. The racks were filled with paintings. Easy not to notice the edges had thumbtacks instead of staples. It was early, she wanted to finish the fish sculpture, was anxious to start work. Maybe she dropped the watch in her pocket, meaning to find out later what Mahl had been doing there.”

“But even if?”

“Let me finish. She made coffee and drank some. As she stood looking at the sculpture, she began reacting to the aspirin that Mahl had put in the pot. She didn’t know what was wrong, maybe she thought she was just sleepy. Maybe she drank some more coffee, trying to wake up. She turned on her tanks to get to work.

“The minute she turned on her oxygen, it exploded. By now she was dizzy and confused. As the fire blazed up, Binky ran to her, frightened.”

“But even if that’s the way it happened, we can’t?”

“She was weak, faint. Maybe she tried to crawl away. Maybe Binky came to her, he must have been terrified, confused by the fire. They clung together.”

“Dulcie?”

“Then she remembered the watch-Mahl had been there, he was responsible for the explosion. She was so dizzy, sick, maybe hurt by the explosion, too. She dug in her pocket, buckled the watch on Binky’s collar. With a last effort she chased Binky away; he fled out the window.”

She paused, searched his face, lifted a paw.“It could have happened that way.”

“But even if it did, we can’t tell that to the police.”

“Why ever not? There’s no reason?”

He laid his white paw on her small, brindle paw.“How does a human informant, talking to Captain Harper on the phone, tell him that the evidence is fifteen feet inside a drainpipe-a pipe no human could get into, or could see into?”

“But I? But we can’t move Binky’s bones and move the watch, we’d destroy evidence.”

She turned to lick her shoulder.“I could say I was walking my poodle, that he stuck his nose in the pipe and I? “

“And you-the human informant-could clearly see fifteen feet back in the dark, could see this little pile of bones.”

“Maybe I had a flashlight.”

“So with your light, you saw the bones. And you deduced from what you saw that this was Janet Jeannot’s cat. That it was wearing the killer’s watch attached to its collar, a watch invisible from the mouth of the pipe.

“With her flashlight, this human informant read the plate on the collar that isn’t visible. So of course she knew it was the skeleton of Janet’s lost cat.

“Don’t you see, Dulcie? There’s no way you can tell Harper this.”

“But we have to tell him. This is the only conclusive evidence that Rob didn’t kill her.”

Joe glanced away toward the mouth of the tunnel. Dulcie’s theory did make sense. What other explanation was there for the presence of the watch buckled around Binky’s collar?

“Maybe,” Dulcie said, “maybe if we could find the missing paintings, Mahl’s fingerprints would be on them. Maybe then we wouldn’t need the watch. But,” she said, “if the watch isn’t important, if it can’t be used for evidence, then why did Binky bring me here?”

He didn’t want to talk about that. The idea of a cat beyond the grave leading them here shook him; such thoughts thrust him head-over-tail into speculations far too unsettling.

Dulcie rose.“Come on, let’s go sit in the sun, I’m sick of the mud and stink and of having to look at poor Binky.”

But at the mouth of the drainpipe she paused, looking out warily.

“No danger,” Joe said, pushing on out. “He’s gone. By now that mutt’s locked in the pound.” He stretched out in the hot grass. “I was hoping one of those cops would shoot the beast, but no such luck.”

“So what happened? Tell me what happened.”

“I just got settled above the second mark, up in that eucalyptus tree beside the stakeout car, when I heard shouting up the hill.

“I could see out through the branches some kind of disturbance, and I figured you were in trouble, or soon would be. I took off for the Hamry house.

“When I got there, Varnie was in the truck, goosing the engine, and Stamps was running up the hill, chasing the dog.

“Varnie took off in the truck-it looked like he was going to leave Stamps to take the rap. But the other two surveillance cars were already moving. They whipped in from both ends of the street to block him. Cops jerked him out of the truck, there was a lot of confusion. They handcuffed him and locked him in a police car, and three cops took off running after Stamps.

“The young photographer was torn up pretty bad, his face and throat bleeding. Two cops were patching him up, trying to stop the bleeding. I didn’t hang around, I caught your scent mixed with the dog’s scent going up the hill, and I took off again.

“All the way up the hill his scent was mixed with yours, and I smelled blood. And then I found the grass all torn up, around that little tree, and the smell of you and the dog and the blood, and I thought the worst.

“I kept running, following his track, then way above me I saw that the cops had cornered Stamps and were cuffing him. There was no sign of the dog.

“I had nearly reached them, trying to stay out of sight, when down they came, forcing Stamps ahead of them and dragging the mutt by its collar. I heard one of them say something about rabies, about locking up the mutt for observation. Of course they’d do that after he mutilated one of their finest.

“There was so much blood on its muzzle I was sure you were dead meat. The higher I got up the hills, the more certain I was.

“But then I came up the next rise and here you were. Sitting in the sun purring like you didn’t have a care.”

She smiled, and licked his face.“So they’re all in the slammer. Varnie. Stamps. The dog.”

He grinned.“You did a number on the mutt.”

She smiled modestly, gave him a speculative look.“Joe, even if we could find the paintings and prove that Mahl took them, that doesn’t prove he killed Janet. Only Mahl’s watch, if Janet’s fingerprints are on it, could?”

“Mahl could say he’d given her the watch, maybe the night of the reception.”

“Why would he give her his watch? He hated Janet.”

Joe sighed.“There’s no point in talking about it, there’s no way we can get that evidence to Harper. Even if we could, what would he tell the court? He just happened to find a dead cat, and this watch was buckled to its collar? He just happened to look up that drainpipe?

“And why, if she was conscious enough to buckle the watch around the cat’s collar, couldn’t she get herself out of the burning studio?”

“You don’t want to see how it might have happened,” she said irritably.

“I’m just looking at it the way the police would, Dulcie. And the way an attorney would. Janet wasn’t trapped under anything heavy, and she had no broken bones. If she could buckle the watch on Binky, why couldn’t she get out-crawl through the window?”

“Don’t forget that when her van exploded, it turned that fire into an inferno.” She licked her paw. “Janet was weak from the aspirin, sick and weak, trying not to faint. Her doctor’s testimony-he said aspirin would make her pass out. She was just able to move her hands, buckle on the watch.”

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “But another thing-would Janet be welding, with Binky in the studio? Would she light her torch with her cat so close? His long fur? “

“I’m guessing she usually made him leave before she actually got to work. Maybe she’d taught him to go on outside, out the open window. But that morning he didn’t go out, he was there when the fire started. She was disoriented, maybe didn’t realize he hadn’t gone out until he ran to herafter the explosion.”

She shivered.“Janet sent Binky to safety with the evidence. And Binky-Binky came to me. Now,” she said softly, “now we have to help.”

The morning had grown bright, the sun warm on their backs.“If we can find the paintings,” she said, “then Harper will pay attention to the rest of the evidence.”

Joe just looked at her. She was so hardheaded.“And where are we going to look for the paintings? Don’t you think Mahl would have taken them back to the city that night?”

“He had to be in a hurry, he had only a few hours to get down here, switch paintings, load up Janet’s canvases, stash them somewhere, and get back to San Francisco, to the hotel. San Francisco is huge,” she said. “Would he have time to hide them somewhere in the city? Don’t forget he lives miles north, across the bridge.” She gave him a clear green look. “Maybe it would have been faster to hide them in the village.”

“Sure. Right here in his Molena Point condo.”

Mahl had kept the condo after he and Janet were divorced; he used it on weekends, and had seemed to enjoy running into her in the small village.

“If we can get into the condo,” she said patiently, “maybe we can find some receipt for a warehouse or locker. The receipt for Charlie’s rental locker has the name and the locker number on it. Coast City Lockers, up on Highway One.” She nuzzled his neck. “We could try. We got into the gallery, that wasn’t hard. So we can get into Mahl’s condo.”

Joe looked at her a long time, then rose and prowled up the hill above the buried drainpipe. Pausing on the tallest of the three little hills, he cocked his head, studying the mound and the way it nestled up against the big hill behind.

Below at the mouth of the pipe she sat in the sun watching him, curious-she had no idea what he was up to, but she could almost see the tomcat’s wily mind ticking away, turning over some wild idea.

From the little hill, Joe smiled.“Go up the tunnel, Dulcie. Stand beside Binky and yowl-scream like the devil himself is tickling you.”

“Do what?”

“Sing, baby. Make a ruckus, scream and wailsing like I sang to the Blankenships.”

She cocked her head, let her eyes widen. She smiled. She vanished within the tunnel, running.

And atop the little hill, Joe bellied down, his ear to the earth, listening.

He heard her, her voice louder than he’d imagined. Down there her yowling song echoing along the pipe must be loud enough, even, to wake poor Binky. He followed the sound beyond the little mound, where the earth curved down again, against the larger hill. Pausing to listen, he soon pinpointed her exact location, and there he clawed the grass away, inscribing a large ragged X.

When she joined him, racing up out of the tunnel, he was still picking up little stones from among the grass, carrying them in his teeth to drop them into the X. She helped him, pressing the stones down with her paw deep into the earth, constructing a sturdy hieroglyph.

And then, finished, they headed down the hills to pay an unannounced visit to the weekend apartment of Kendrick Mahl.

23 [????????: pic_24.jpg]

Kendrick Mahl’s apartment occupied the third and highest floor of a casual Mediterranean condominium three blocks above the ocean, on the west side of Molena Point. The complex did not have a locked security door as Joe had envisioned, but was a structure of open, sprawling design, with gardens tucked betweenits rambling wings. Against the pale stucco walls, flowers bloomed all year in blazes of orange and pink and reds, and at occasional junctures, trellises of bougainvillea climbed to the roof, heavy with red blossoms.

Each first-floor unit opened to a terrace, and the glass doors of the upper apartments gave onto walled balconies set about with redwood chairs and potted plants. At one end of Mahl’s veranda, a bougainvillea vine clung to the rail, providing from the ground below a comfortable vertical highway, an access tailored to the use of any inquisitive feline.

Joe and Dulcie, having checked the mailboxes in the open, tiled entry patio, headed for apartment 3C. Two floors straight up from 1C, Mahl’s balcony was an easy climb. There was no one on the surrounding balconies to notice them, no one in the gardens below. The condo compound, this late afternoon, seemed to provide no visible witness.

From high up the vine they could see a small parking area, down between the buildings, surrounded by trees and flowers. But as they dropped down from the vine onto Mahl’s balcony, they drew back. Classical music was playing softly, and the glass door stood wide-open. Deep within the bright living room, Mahl sat at a large, richly carved desk.

He was talking on the phone. They could not hear much of his conversation above the soothing music, something about delivering a painting. He seemed to be trying to arrange a suitable hour for his truck to arrive.

A skylight brightened the room, sending a cascade of sunlight down the white walls and across the whitewashed, polished oak floors. The room’s furnishings were a combination of white leather and chrome set off by several dark, carved antique tables and chests, and half a dozen small potted trees. The pillows tossed on the long white sofa were deep-colored antique weavings. A Khirman rug in soft shades of red and rust graced the sitting area, nicely mirroring the fall of red bougainvillea on the balcony. And on the pristine walls, seven large paintings provided brilliant pools of color. None, of course, was by Janet Jeannot. Nor were any of the works by Rob Lake.

As the cats watched, peering in through the glass, Mahl hung up the phone and bent to some paperwork. In the instant that he turned to pull a file from the desk drawer they slipped in and fled, swift as winging moths, across to a white leather couch and behind it. Crouching in the dark between couch and wall, they looked out, assessing Janet’s ex-husband.

Mahl was dressed in immaculate ivory slacks and a blue silk shirt, but the sleek clothes seemed too fine for his sour, owlish face, for shoulders hunched forward in an owlish manner. The cats grinned at each other, watching him, amused by his big, round, blank glasses. Even Mahl’s nose was too much like a beak; Dulcie found him so humorous she had to hold her breath to keep from laughing aloud. And though Mahl was large and wide-shouldered, he did not look strong. His oversize form seemed put together carelessly, perhaps in haste. One had the impression of a creature that might be nearly hollow inside, of a thin, frail, loosely connected bone structure without strength.

They waited impatiently for Mahl to finish whatever work occupied him. At last he rose and retired to the kitchen; they heard the refrigerator door open and close, the sounds of metal cutlery on a plate. As Dulcie leaped to the desk, Joe slid behind a planter, where he could keep an eye on Mahl. From his leafy cover Joe watched Mahl make a roast beef sandwich, piling on thin, rare slices from a white deli wrapper. The rye bread and beef smelled so good he had to lick drool from his chin. But soon the smell was spoiled by the sharp scent of mustard. He never would get used to humans spreading all that smelly goo on good red meat.

Atop the desk Dulcie pawed through Mahl’s in-box and stacks of papers, looking for some record of a rented locker or warehouse space. Most of the papers were letters, some about painting sales. She scanned them, but did not find them useful. None mentioned any kind of storage facility. None, of course, mentioned Janet’s work. She left a few cat hairs clinging to the papers, but one could not help shedding. Mahl used as paperweights a small bronze bust of a child, a piece of jade as round and large as a goose egg, and a small pair of binoculars. All were hard to move as she perused the papers, all were hard to put back again. She had just moved the binoculars back into position and was fighting open the top desk drawer when Joe hissed.

She leaped off the desk, leaving the drawer open four inches, and slid underneath into the dark kneehole. The desk was a heavy mahogany piece with ball-shaped, carved feet that left a three-inch space beneath the back and sides. If she had to, she could just squeeze under.

Mahl came to the desk, but didn’t sit down. His feet, inches from her face, were clad in soft leather slippers and cream-colored argyle socks below the creamy slacks. He grunted with mild surprise, and she heard him shut the drawer-the drawer she had worked so hard to open. She heard a paper rattle as if he had retrieved something from atop the desk, then he turned away, returned to the kitchen. She heard a chair scrape as if he had sat down at the kitchen table.

Leaping back to the top of the desk, again she worked the drawer open.

But it contained only a few desk supplies-pencils, pens, a plastic box filled with paper clips, a checkbook. She pulled out the checkbook and nosed it open. If Mahl found toothmarks in the leather, how would he know what they were?

Inside, besides the checks and check register, was a long, thin notepad. On the cover of the pad Mahl had written several phone numbers, an address, and on the lower left corner, in faint pencil, the numbers L24 62 97. The sequence looked familiar; this could be a padlock combination. It was the same pattern of numbers as Charlie’s padlock.

Joe would make some comment about her rooting into Charlie’s private possessions, but if Charlie didn’t want cats nosing in her stuff, she should put it away. And Charlie had never rebuked her for jumping on the dresser.

Of course the numbers on Mahl’s notepad could mean anything. There was no name of a locker complex, no number for the locker itself. She repeated the combination to herself twice, and then again. She could hear Mahl rinsing his plate. She searched the other drawers and looked beneath the blotter. She was down again, beneath the desk, searching up underneath in the best detective fashion, when Joe hissed once more, and she heard the soft scuff of Mahl’s slippers. Sliding out under the end of the desk, she crouched behind a white leather chair. The music had increased in volume and intensity, until it was very military. She was not well hidden by the chair’s chrome legs, but it was too late to move. Maybe he wouldn’t look in her direction. Crouching behind the cold, shiny metal, she considered the task ahead.

They’d have to check every locker facility in Molena Point and, once inside, have to try their combination on every lock. And how were they going to turn the dial of every combination lock in every locker complex, when, probably, they couldn’t even reach the stupid locks? She’d never seen a door for humans with a latch she could reach.

Crouching in Mahl’s apartment behind the chrome chair, the task seemed impossible. They had no proof the numbers were a lock combination, and no proof what a locker might contain-maybe nothing more exciting than old worn-out furniture or tax files. How many locker complexes were there on the outskirts of Molena Point? How many lockers in each one?

It would be no use to try phoning the locker complexes, making up some story to get information:This is Kendrick Mahl, I’ve lost the number of my locker, I need to send it to a friend?because certainly Mahl would not have put the locker in his own name.

When Mahl turned away she slipped out from under the chair and slid behind the couch, beside Joe. He lay stretched full-length, half-asleep, as if without a care. She crouched beside him, depressed.

But when the music on the CD player grew stormy, she began to fidget, her thoughts circling. There had to be an easier way to find the locker.

Joe woke and glared at her.“Cool it,” he whispered. “He’s bound to leave sooner or later. Curl up, have a nap. A few hours-then we can take this place apart.” He rolled over, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. She stared at him, unbelieving. Oh, tomcats could be maddening.

But she curled up against him, trying to think of a plan. The music progressed to the more powerful strains of Stravinsky, she knew that one from home. She could still smell that nice roast beef. Why did humans have to spoil everything with mustard?

She listened as Mahl made several phone calls. He ordered a grocery delivery of lettuce, some frozen breakfasts, a case of imported ale, and a loaf of French bread. He called his San Francisco gallery twice and talked to his assistant about some sales and about taxes. He made a date for an early dinner, before the local Art Association meeting.The Firebirdfinished, and Schoenberg’sTransfigured Nightlulled Dulcie into a little nap. The more familiar music eased her, soothed her jittery nerves. At five o’clock, Mahl put on a recording of theNew World Symphony,and went to take a shower. Dulcie could hear the water pounding. She heard, from the bedroom, drawers being pulled out, and hangers sliding in the closet.

The discs had finished when he returned to the living room. He was dressed in dark slacks, a white, turtleneck pullover, and a suede sport coat. And though his clothes were handsome, Mahl still looked like a bad-tempered owl. He turned off the CD player, locked the sliding door to the balcony, and left the apartment. Joe woke as Dulcie raced to the balcony and leaped to unlock the door again, slapping at the latch.

Outside, they jumped to the rail to look down, watched him cross the parking lot, get into a white BMW, and head out. Beyond the parking lot and beyond the red tile roofs of the condo complex, the hills and the mountains were burnished gold in the late-afternoon light. They could not see the ocean, to the west, or the setting sun. But off to their right, beyond the village rooftops, the bay looked like melted gold. Along the bay sprawled the warehouses and wharves.

“Rob’s studio is there,” Dulcie said. “I bet, if Mahl had binoculars, he could see it from right here.”

“And if he could?”

“I don’t know-a funny feeling.” She lay down on the concrete rail, batted at a bougainvillea flower. “Rob got home from San Francisco the morning of the fire around four. That’s what he told the court. He said he partied late, drove home tired, and went to bed.

“But then a phone call woke him around four-thirty. He said he answered and he guessed it was a wrong number, no one was there.”

“What are you getting at?”

She licked her paw.“It would probably have been easy for Mahl to get hold of Rob’s car keys, maybe when Rob was in the gallery unloading paintings. Pick them up, step out for a few minutes, have them copied.”

He waited, ears forward.

“Just assume Mahl did take the paintings. He might even have used Janet’s own van, taken it out of the St. Francis parking garage late Saturday night. Say he drove down to Molena Point, used his key to her studio, loaded up the paintings. Hid them in that locker?”

“If there is a locker.”

She flicked her ears impatiently.“He hid the paintings, drove back to the city, arrived before dawn Sunday morning. Put her car back in the garage?”

“So what did he use for a ticket, to get her van out in the first place?”

“Used his own parking ticket, for the BMW. Then when he drove her van back in Sunday morning, he got another ticket. Used that to take the BMW out, Sunday night.

“But somewhere along the way he realized he’d lost his watch.

“He couldn’t turn around and drive back to Molena Point-it was nearly dawn. He had to be seen having breakfast in the hotel, that was part of his alibi.”

“And then,” Joe said, “it was daylight, he didn’t want to be seen going into Janet’s studio in broad daylight. And that night, Sunday night, was the opening, he had to be seen there.”

Mahl had testified that after the opening he did not return to his home in Mill Valley, but had driven down to the Molena Point condo, intending to meet with two buyers on Monday morning. Both buyers, one a well-known collector, had testified that they did meet with Mahl late that Monday morning.

Dulcie leaped down and began to pace the balcony.“He must have been panicked about the watch. He wanted it back; he didn’t dare let it be found in Janet’s studio.”

She smiled, smoothed her whiskers.“He got here to the condo sometime after midnight. All he could think of was the watch. Maybe he sat here on the balcony, with the binoculars, watching the warehouse area, watching for a light to come on in Rob’s studio.”

“But when a light did come on,” Joe said, “maybe he couldn’t be really sure it was Rob’s studio. So he picked up the phone. That’s what the phone call was.”

“Yes. When Rob answered, Mahl hung up. Got in his car, drove down there, took Rob’s Suburban, and hightailed it up to Janet’s to get his watch.”

Joe nodded.“But Janet was already up, lights were on in the studio, he didn’t dare go in. All he could do was hope the watch would be destroyed in the fire, melted beyond recognition.”

“And when the watch didn’t turn up as part of the evidence, and when no one had testified to seeing him take Rob’s Suburban or return it, he thought he was home free.”

“Right. Except that this is all supposition.”

“It won’t be supposition if we find the paintings,” she said.

Joe sighed.“You’re imagining a lot. Talk about a needle in a haystack.” He scratched a flea, then rose, trotted back inside across the thick oriental rug toward the kitchen. “But first things first. I’m not going to search two or three locker complexes, all those miles of buildings, on an empty stomach.”

In Mahl’s kitchen they polished off half of the remaining roast beef, hoping Mahl would assume that was all he’d left when he made his sandwich. They enjoyed a hunk of Camembert, but left the remains suspiciously ragged. They smoothed it out as best they could with neat little nibbles. They split the last yogurt and hid the empty container in the bottom of the trash can. Who would guess cats had been at the refrigerator? They licked up a few stray cat hairs and then, strengthened, searched the condo.

Looking into the cupboards, the dresser drawers, the closet, and the nightstand, they found nothing of interest. But when Dulcie pulled out a briefcase from behind Mahl’s Ballys, they hit pay dirt.

The closet was neatly arranged. The hanging garments were sorted as to type and color with the help of one of those intricate modular systems designed for optimum space utilization. The white, wire mesh shelves beneath his slacks and suit coats held twelve pairs of perfectly arranged dress shoes and loafers, a leather overnight bag, a pair of golf shoes, and a small metal tool box. In the corner leaning against the wall was an expensive-looking golf bag and a three-foot-long pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters. The briefcase was on the bottom rack behind the shoes. They dragged it out, sliding the shoes aside.

The combination lock wasn’t engaged. The briefcase contained a stack of letters, and a sheaf of paid bills and receipts secured by a rubber band. Dulcie pulled off the elastic with her teeth, and they began to nose through.

“I don’t believe this,” Joe said when, halfway through, they found a receipt from Shorebird Storage, for locker K20. Dulcie said nothing. She only smiled. The locker had been rented four months ago, for an annual fee of twelve hundred dollars.

They put the bills back as they had found them, closed the briefcase, and slid it behind the shoes, straightening the Ballys to perfect symmetry, as Mahl had left them. And within minutes they were down the bougainvillea vine and headed for Highway One, the locker combination firmly engraved on their furtive cat minds.

The golden October evening was deepening, the sky streaked with indigo. As they trotted up Sixth Street, enjoying the warmth of the sidewalk beneath their paws, they sniffed the good village smells of fresh-cut grass, crushed eucalyptus leaves, and the salty, iodine smell of the sea. And at this hour the air was filled, too, with the aromas of suppers cooking in the houses they passed, the scents of baking ham, of hot cheese and beef stew. That snack at Mahl’s had been a nice first course; but who knew if there was anything edible in a concrete locker complex? Who knew how long they’d be occupied? Cats, as Joe had pointed out to Clyde on more than one occasion, needed frequent sustenance.

In an overgrown flower garden they stalked and caught a starling. The bird was tough, not tender and sweet like a robin or a dove, but it was filling. They finished their supper quickly, washed up with a few hasty licks, and trotted on into the deepening evening.

Crossing over the top of Highway One, where it tunneled under Sixth, they turned north. Traveling along through a string of cottage gardens, leaping through flower beds and watching for sudden dogs, Joe looked ahead lustily, his yellow eyes burning. Dulcie, watching him with a sideways glance, had to smile. He was all aggression now, hot for the kill-as if nothing would keep them from Mahl’s locker even if he had to claw through solid wood.

And now they could see, a quarter mile ahead where the highway came up out of the tunnel, the Shorebird Storage Lockers sign, its red neon glowing brighter than fresh blood against the gathering evening.

Their plan was to slip into the complex before it closed, wait inside until the caretaker locked up and went home, until they had Shorebird Lockers to themselves. And Dulcie shivered with anticipation. They could be coming down, tonight, on some heavy stuff. If the paintings were there, this would blow Rob’s trial wide-open. Detective Marritt’s sloppy investigation, his lack of investigation, would be clear for everyone to see.

She would not even consider, now, that they might be disappointed, that the locker might contain something very different from Janet’s paintings, she had put that unworthy idea aside. Dulcie felt success in her bones; she was afire with the same surge of blood, the same deep, sure excitement as when they trotted up into the hills on a fine hunting night-on a night she knew would be laced with some pure, hot victory.

24 [????????: pic_25.jpg]

Shorebird Lockers was a complex of twelve concrete buildings, each a hundred feet long, with wide aisles between. The roofs were of corrugated metal, and a six-foot chain-link fence enclosed the compound, its posts and bottom edge set securely into cement. The facility had all the charm of a concentration camp as seen in some old World War II movie, barren, chill to the spirit, hard to escape.

But there were no prisoners here, this camp was empty of humanity. The only life visible was the two cats trotting quickly up a wide concrete alley beneath the yellow glow cast by security lamps rising at regular intervals from the corners of the buildings. The cats avoided the center of the alley, where metal grids covered a six-inch gutter littered with refuse, scraps of paper, muddy leaves, bobby pins, an occasional lost key. The corrugated metal doors above them reflected their swift shadows flashing through shafts of harsh light. Some of the doors were narrow, some as wide as a double garage. Locker K20 was halfway up the last alley. The time was eight-fifteen. The complex had been closed for fifteen minutes.

Earlier, slipping inside the open gate, they had hidden behind a Dumpster, watching for the caretaker to come out of the office, lock up, and go home. The office occupied the far end of the building nearest the gate, and the lights were still on. They presumed the caretaker’s car was parked beyond the fence on the street, one of several at the curb in front of the adjoining hardware and tool rental stores. Both those shops were closed.

Soon the man appeared, heading for the gate, a small, silver-haired old fellow. They watched him pull the chain-link gate closed from inside, snap the padlock, and turn back into the complex. He made no move to leave. Entering the little office, soon those lights went out and lights at the back came on, in the room behind, accompanied by the sound of a television, the unmistakable canned laughter of a sitcom.

“He’s in for the night,” Dulcie said. “I hadn’t thought he might live here. But maybe the TV will hide whatever noise we make.”

“I’m not planning to make any noise.” He trotted away toward the back, following the numbers.

But when they had located locker K20, in the building nearest the back fence, they found there would be two locks to open.

One communal door led to a group of inner rooms, apparently small lockers sharing an inner hall. The outer door to lockers K17 through K28 was secured with a combination lock. This might be the lock Mahl’s combination opened, or it might not. There was bound to be another lock inside at his individual door. Maybe a keyed lock, maybe another combination. There was also the question of the keyed padlock on the front gate. Mahl, at three in the morning, had to have a key for that. And he would havehad to be very quiet loading and unloading the paintings, with the old man asleep so nearby.

They looked up at the communal padlock, its tiny silver numbers etched into a black circle. Crouching, Dulcie leaped at the heavy lock, clawing at the dial, grasping at it ineffectually with her paws.

She jumped six times and fell back. It would take both paws to turn the dial and would take a steady stance-she couldn’t do it, jumping. She tried balancing on Joe’s back but still she needed both paws and couldn’t stay steady without bracing herself against the door. “Stop shifting around. Can’t you stand still? Can’t you hold your back flatter?”

“My back is not flat. I can’t balance you unless I move around. This isn’t going to work.”

This was totally frustrating. Cats were masters at the art of balancing; any scruffy stray could trot casually along the thinnest fence. But trying to stand on Joe’s back she felt as clumsy as a two-legged dog.

Irritated, she began to pace. Joe hardly noticed her as he stared high above, toward the roof.

“There’s a vent up there.” He crouched. “Maybe I can get through the screen.”

Before she could comment he gave a powerful spring, hit the top of the metal door, clawing, digging into the wood frame. Hanging from the frame, fighting, reaching up, he was just able to hook his claws into the screen of the small, high vent. The screen ripped under his weight, and with one powerful heave he pulled himself in. Hanging in the rectangular hole, half in and half out, his belly over the sill, he kicked again and disappeared inside.

She crouched, wiggled her butt, and sprang after him up the side of the wall-and fell back, her claws screeching down the steel door so loudly she was sure the watchman would hear.

She tried again. And again. At the third leap she caught the bottom of the vent, clawing, scrabbling to hang on. Kicking hard, she pulled herself up through the screen, felt its torn, ragged edges tearing out hanks of fur.

Inside she stood in darkness, perched above the lockers just beneath the metal roof. It was warm against her back, the day’s accumulation of heat still radiating from the metal. The tops of the locker walls formed an open grid stretching away. The only light was from the vent opening behind her and a matching vent maybe forty feet away, at the back. In the locker directly below her, she could make out stacked furniture, tables, chairs, bedsprings, suitcases. Peering along above the walls, she could not see Joe. She didn’t call to him, she mewled softly.

“Come over the walls.” His voice sounded hollow. “The fourth locker.”

She crept along the top of the wall, brushing under cobwebs. The second locker smelled of mildewed clothes and was piled with cardboard boxes. Two bicycles hung on its wall beside several car parts: bumpers, fenders, a hood. The third locker was empty, emitting a chill breath that smelled of concrete. She found it mildly amusing that humans accumulated so many possessions they had to rent lockers to store them-or clutter the house to distraction, like Mama.

But why should she be amused? Was she any different, with her box of stolen sweaters and silk stockings and lacy teddies? Who knew, maybe if she was a human person she might have every closet and dresser crammed full, a compulsive shopper mindlessly dragging home everything that took her fancy.

But then, peering down into the fourth locker, she forgot human foibles, forgot her own acquisitive weakness. Looking, crouching forward, she caught her breath.

The locker was filled with paintings. Not a foot below her marched a row of big canvases, standing upright in a wooden rack.

Oh, the lovely smell of canvas and dried oil paints. Shivering, her heart pounding, she reached down her paw to pat their rough edges.

And the canvas was stapled. She could not feel any thumbtacks.

Then she saw, on the floor beyond the painting rack, Joe’s white face, white chest and paws, the rest of him lost in darkness. “Be careful,” he said, as she bunched to leap down, “there’s some?”

Too late. She landed on something hard that flew from under her, crashing to the floor loud as an explosion.

“Some wooden crates,” Joe finished. “Are you okay?”

“Damn. I’ll bet the guard heard that.”

“Maybe not, with the TV on. His room is clear across the complex. Maybe the crates contain Janet’s sculpture; that one rattled like metal when it fell.” The six wooden crates had no markings, but they were heavy and solid, securely nailed.

She reared up to look at the paintings, then hopped up into the rack between them, looked closely at a big landscape.

Yes, it was Janet’s, a splashy study of the Baytowne wharves, stormy sky, crashing sea. She pushed the painting back, to reveal the next, looked up at blowing white cumulus and red rooftops. She wanted to shout, turn flips. Pushing several more canvases to lean against their mates, she feasted on blowing trees, reflective shop windows, a view uphill of dark roofs against seething cloud, the rich colors dulled in the darkness, but the movement and bold shapes were unmistakably Janet’s.

They counted forty-six paintings.

“Then Stamps and Varnie didn’t take any, they’re all here.” She frowned. “But the way they talked, they must know where the canvases are hidden.”

“Maybe they plan to come back when things die down, maybe with bolt cutters.”

“Why would they think the paintings would still be here? That Mahl-if he wasn’t caught-wouldn’t move them?”

“I don’t know, Dulcie. I guess that’s why Stamps said, ‘Get ours while we can, and get out.’ Mahl had nerve,” he said, “stashing them nearly on top of the murder scene.”

“Maybe he thought this was the last place anyone would look, maybe?”

“Shhh. Listen.” He backed away from the door.

Footsteps approached down the wide alley beyond the communal door.

Metal rattled as the outer door rolled up. They leaped to the top of the crates, to the top of the standing paintings balancing on their edges. They were poised to spring up to the top of the wall when lights blazed on, the bare bulb on the wall of their unit nearly blinding them. And the yellow glare above, washing across the ceiling, told them the lights in all the units had come on, ignited by a master switch.

Footsteps entered the inner corridor, sending them flying to the top of the wall and away toward the back, through light as bright as day.

Below them from the hall the old man shouted,“Come out of there. You’re in the complex illegally.” His voice was raspy, very loud for such a small man. “Come out now, or I call the cops.” He began to pound on doors. “You won’t be arrested if you come out now.”

“How can he think anyone’s here?” Dulcie whispered. “The doors are locked from outside.”

“The empty ones wouldn’t be locked.”

“But?”

They heard him open one of the lockers, then another, heard him rattling padlocks; and warily they moved away again, along the top of the wall.“Let’s get out,” Dulcie said softly.

“Be still. He’ll be gone in a minute. If we go out the vent now?”

“What if he has keys?”

“He can’t see us; he’d have to climb to see us. And what if he did?”

She shivered.

“We’re cats, Dulcie. He’d just chase us out. I’ve never seen you so jumpy.”

She leaned against him.“I’ve never been afraid quite like this. I don’t know why.”

“Nerves,” he said unhelpfully. But then, as they crouched atop the wall, the lights went out and the footsteps headed away again. The outer door rattled as it was pulled down and they heard the padlock snap closed.

Alone again in the warm dark they relaxed, basking in the heat from the roof, feeling their thudding hearts slow, breathing more easily.

“He didn’t waste any time getting out,” Joe said. Stretching, he trotted away around the top of the wall, heading toward the vent. There he waited, listening. Dulcie followed. They heard a light scuffing along the alley as if the old man was shuffling away, but then silence, as if he had stopped.

“He’s up to something,” Joe said.

She moved to look out through the vent, but he pulled her back.

“Now who’s acting nervous?”

“Keep your voice down. He didn’t walk away-unless he took his shoes off.”

“We could go out the back vent.” But suddenly from below came the hush of tires on concrete, the soft rolling sound of a car pulling down between the buildings.

The engine stopped. They heard a second car, then the static of a police radio.

“He called the cops,” Joe said incredulously. “Before he ever came out here, he called the cops.”

“That crash, when I knocked the crate off. He called them then. Who knows how long he was standing out there-who knows what he heard.”

They listened to car doors opening, men’s voices mixed with the harsh radio voices. Again the outer door rattled up, and the overhead lights flared on like a gigantic third degree. Quickly they slipped away along the top of the wall toward the back. They heard the cops enter the little hall, hard shoes on concrete.

“Police. Come out now.”

Doors were flung open as officers checked the empty lockers. Locks rattled. But then at last, silence. A softer voice.“There’s no one in here, sir. The locks and hasps are all in place, nothing looks tampered with. You must have?”

“I heard someone talking. Not my imagination. Maybe they got locked in from outside. Maybe someone’s sleeping in here, got locked in? “

“If there’s anyone trapped here, they’re mighty quiet about it.”

The footfalls receded, the men’s voices became fainter. But the lights remained on, and the officers left the outer door open. The cats listened to a long silence broken only by the rasping crackle of the police radio.

Joe said,“They’re waiting for something. Or planning something.”

Dulcie had started on toward the back when a new sound froze them. The scrape of wood on concrete. Then a little click. They crept up to the front, to look.

Below them in the hall the watchman had set up a wooden stepladder, and an officer was climbing. They backed away and ran, heading for the back vent.

They were crouched by the vent when the officer rose above the wall of the first locker. Tilting his head sideways, pressing his forehead against a rafter, he managed to look over into the first little room, peering down through the six-inch gap.

“This one’s empty, some furniture but nothing to hide under.”

The minute he vanished again, presumably to move the ladder, they clawed a hole in the screen and pressed through. Poised on the sill, they stared down at the concrete walk nine feet below. They leaped together, landed hard, jolting every bone. And they ran, skirting along beside the fence. They were crouched to swarm up the six feet of chain link when Joe stopped and turned back.

“What?” She remained poised to leap.

“Idea,” he said, briefly trotting away around the far end of the building. She followed him, puzzled and excited, toward the alley where the patrol cars were parked. When Joe was silent, some wild plan was unfolding.

He crouched at the corner, listening to the police radio. Carefully he peered around, down the alley toward the patrol cars.

“They’re still inside. Come on.”

She sped beside him toward the two squad cars. The drivers’ doors stood open, maybe to give quick access to the radios. They slipped beneath the first car.

“Keep watch,” he said, and slid up into the driver’s seat, sleek and quick, a vanishing shadow.

She pictured him inside, stepping delicately among the cops’ field books and gloves and radio equipment, then she heard him talking, his voice soft.

But when he pressed the buttontotalk, the voices and static were silent. Those cops would hear him, they’d come charging out. She crouched shivering beneath the car’s open door, ready to hiss at Joe, ready to run like hell.

But the caretaker’s raspy voice filled the air, steady and loud, as he told the three officers some long involved story. No one glanced toward the squad car.

Joe went silent, slid out and from the patrol car, a swift shadow, and they streaked away up the alley. Around the corner they sat down and made themselves comfortable beside the wall, to wait.

The third patrol car parked beside Mahl’s locker. Not ten minutes had passed. They watched Captain Harper emerge. He was not in uniform but dressed in jeans and a Western shirt. Detective Marritt was with him, fully in uniform, his expression sour. As the two men moved inside, the cats approached, slipping down the alley close to the wall, crouching just outside the big open door, to listen.

Harper was puzzled, then angry. He went up the ladder for a look. Which officer had called in? No one had. Well why hadn’t they? Didn’t anyone wonder about those paintings? Didn’t anyone look at them? What was the ladder for, if you didn’t look at what was there? You could see two of the paintings clearly. Didn’t anyone wonder about those big splashy landscapes? Didn’t anyone recognize them?

When Harper sent the watchman to get a pole, the cats crouched under a squad car out of sight. The small, wiry man trotted by, looking half-afraid. He returned quickly, carrying a six-foot length of door molding.

They watched Harper climb the ladder and reach his pole to move the leaning paintings; he would be gently flipping them back one at a time, looking. Soon his voice, always dry, took on a quality of both excitement and rage.

“Didn’t any of you connect this locker to Janet? Did you forget there’s a case in court involving her death? Didn’t you think it strange that so many of her paintings are here?

“Don’t tell me that not one of you three recognized her work, after all the damned fuss and publicity. Didn’t any of you remember the Aronson testimony, that there are only a few of her paintings left?”

Dulcie and Joe glanced at each other. Harper was really steamed.

“Didn’t you think when you saw this stuff that it was worth checking out? What were you doing in here?

“And who called into the station, which one of you?”

None of the three had called.

Harper centered on the caretaker.“Did you use the police radio? Did you call in when you went to get the ladder?”

The old man swore he hadn’t. Harper said if none of them had called, then who did? Why did he have to rely on some anonymous informant, and how the hell did an informant get hold of a police radio? The cats could tell he was itching to get back to the station and get to the bottom of the puzzle.

When Harper began on the watchman, boring in, the cats felt sorry for the old fellow. Little Mr. Lent said the man who had rented the locker was a Leonard Brill, Brill had given a San Francisco address. Mr. Brill was, Lent said, extremely nice and helpful. When the compound had been broken into a few weeks ago and the outer gate padlock cut off, it was Mr. Brill who saved the day, he had happened by shortly after the occurrence.

One of the officers remembered the incident. Lent had put in a call when he had found the lock cut off, but nothing had seemed disturbed inside the complex. They thought the breakin had been an aborted attempt, that perhaps the burglar had run off when the watchman showed up, had never actually gotten inside.

“And then Mr. Brill happened along,” Mr. Lent said. “Just after the officers left. He’d seen the police cars, and wondered if there was trouble.

“Well it was dark, and most of the stores were closed. I didn’t know where I was going to get a lock for the night, and I didn’t want to leave the place open. Mr. Brill had a lock in his car, a brand-new heavy-duty padlock. He said I could use it. I told him I’d return it, soon as I got a new one, but he said, no need. Said he’d bought it for his garage down in Santa Barbara but then he’d changed his mind, had decided to put in a remote door opener. More secure, he said. Said he was always losing keys.” Lent laughed. “I know about losing keys. If I didn’t keep ‘em chained to my belt, I wouldn’t have a key to my name.

“I had to argue with him before he’d let me pay him. But after all, the lock had never been used, it was still sealed in its plastic bubble, still in the hardware store bag with the receipt. So of course I paid him. Management reimbursed me later. Nice man, Mr. Brill, a real gentleman.”

Lent’s description of Brill was large, hunched, and rather owl-like in appearance but handsomely dressed, a fine camel hair sport coat, and a nice car, a red sports coupe of some kind.

“Maybe a rental,” Joe said. This explained the bolt cutters in Mahl’s closet. Explained nicely how, at three in the morning, Mahl was able to get into the complex. No problem, before ever he gave Lent the “new” lock, to carefully open the sealed package, have the key copied, then seal it up again with its keys.

The men stopped talking, the ladder rattled. The cats nipped back up the alley, they were crouched below the chain-link fence when they heard car doors slam, heard the first car start. One big leap and they were up, clinging to the wire. Scrambling over, within seconds they were headed home, Dulcie purring so loud she sounded like a sports car slipping down the street.

“I’m glad her paintings are safe. I told you we’d find them.”

He brushed against her, licked her ear.“Without you, Mahl would have gotten away with it.

“And,” he said, “Rob Lakemighthave burned for Janet’s murder.” And trotting along through the night, Joe grinned.

So Clyde thinks we don’t have any business messing around with a murder case. So we ought to be chasing little mousies or playing with catnip toys.He could hardly wait to say a few words to Clyde.

25 [????????: pic_26.jpg]

Moreno’s Bar and Grill was a small, secluded establishment tucked along one of the village’s less decorative alleys, a narrow lane two blocks above the beach. The carved oak door was softly lit by a pair of stained-glass lanterns, the interior carpet was thick, plain, expensive. The music was nonthreatening, tasteful, and soft. A patron entering Moreno’s felt the stress of the day begin to ease, could feel himself begin to slow, to relax, to recall with deeper appreciation the small and overlooked details of an otherwise unpleasant afternoon. Moreno’s offered fine beers and ale on draft anda deep emotional restorative to soften the rough edges of life.

The interior of Moreno’s was comfortably dim, the walls, paneled in golden oak, were hung with an assortment of etchings and reproductions highlighting the history of California, scenes dating from the time of the first Spanish settlements through the gold rush days. Max Harper sat alone in a booth at the back, sinking comfortably into the soft, quilted leather.

He was not in uniform but dressed in worn Levi’s, plain Western boots, and a dull-colored Western shirt. The old, unpretentious clothes seemed to belong perfectly to Harper’s long, lean frame and dry, weathered face. He smelled of clean, well-kept horses; he had spent a leisurely afternoon riding through the Molena Valley, giving both himself and his buckskin gelding some much needed exercise. He tried to ride twice a week, but that wasn’t always possible. He was smoking his third cigarette and sipping a nonalcoholic O’Doul’s when Clyde swung in through the carved front doors, stopped to speak to the bartender, then made his way to the back As he slid into the booth the waiter appeared behind him, carrying two menus and a Killian’s Red draft.

Harper was not in a hurry to order. He accepted a menu and waved the waiter away with a brief jerk of his head. He had chosen the most secluded booth, and at this early hour there were only five other customers in Moreno’s, three at the bar and a couple of tourists in a booth at the other end of the room. The dinner crowd would be moderate; the bar would begin to fill up around eight.

Clyde sat waiting, fingering his beer mug, watching Max. Despite the bar’s soothing atmosphere, the police chief was wound tight, the lines which webbed his face drawn into a half scowl. His shoulders looked tight, and he kept fidgeting with his cigarette.

Harper eased deeper into the booth, glanced around the nearly empty room out of habit. Normally he wouldn’t share this particular kind of unease with Clyde or with anyone. He sure wouldn’t share this specific distress with another cop. He would have told Millie; they had shared everything. Two cops under one roof lived on shop talk, on angry complaints and on a crude humor geared to emotional survival. But Millie was dead. He didn’t talk easily to anyone else.

He had told Clyde earlier in the day about finding Janet’s paintings in the storage locker up near Highway One. Now he studied Clyde, trying to sort out several nagging thoughts. “I didn’t tell you how we knew the paintings were in the locker.”

Clyde settled back, sipping his beer.“Isn’t there a watchman? Did he find them?”

“Watchman made the first call, asking for a patrol car. He’d heard a noise in one of the lockers, like something heavy fell.

“But it was after the two units arrived, that the second call came in, about the paintings. That call was made from a unit radio.”

Clyde looked puzzled, sipped his beer.

Harper watched him with interest.“Caller told the dispatcher that there were some paintings I ought to see, that they had to do with Janet’s murder. Said I might like to go on over there, take a look for myself. Said the evidence was crucial, that the locker had been rented by Kendrick Mahl.”

He stubbed out his cigarette.“An anonymous call, from a unit radio. There is no way to identify which car the call was made from, dispatcher has no way to tell. I’ve been over this with every man on duty that night.”

He fiddled with his half-empty cigarette pack, tearing off the cellophane.“No one in the department will admit to making the call, and no one left his unit unattended except my men up at the locker, and they were right there, not ten feet away, with the big locker door wide-open. Anyone moved out in the alley, they would have seen him.”

“Sounds like one of your men is lying, that one of your own had to have made the call. Unless there’s some sophisticated electronic tap on the police line?”

“Not likely, in a case like this. What would be the purpose?”

“Could the caretaker have slipped out to the squad cars, and lied about it? But why?”

“The caretaker didn’t make the call. Only time he left my officers was when he went to get a ladder, and I told you, they were watching their cars.” He crumpled the cellophane, dropped it in the ashtray. “After we impounded the paintings we searched the locker complex. Found no one, nothingdisturbed.”

He shook his head.“I trust my people; I don’t believe there’s one of them would lie to me. Except Marritt, and he’s accounted for. And those paintings have blown Marritt’s investigation, so why would he make the call?”

“Well,” Clyde said, “whoever made the call did the department a good turn. And the paintings are safe in the locker?”

“We put new padlocks on the two doors and the gate, cordoned off that part of the complex, and left an officer on duty. It will leave us short, but we’ll keep a guard there until the guard Sicily hired comes on duty, and until the canvases can be moved. Forty-six of Janet’s paintings, worth?”

“Well over a million,” Clyde said. “But weren’t painting fragments found in the fire?”

“Lots of fragments-all with thumbtacks in the stretcher bars. We know, now, that Janet used staples. That’s the kind of investigation we got out of Marritt. He had no clue that Mahl substituted some other artist’s work. Sicily suggested Mahl might have used students’ paintings, bought them cheap at art school sales.”

“But wouldn’t Mahl have known about the thumbtacks? He knew Janet’s work too well to? “

Harper smiled.“When Janet and Mahl were married, Janet stretched her canvases with thumbtacks. It wasn’t until after she left him, when her thumbs began to bother her from pressing in the tacks, that she started stapling her canvases.” He fingered his menu, then laid it down. “But there’s something else.”

Clyde waited, trying to look relaxed, not to telegraph a twinge of unease.

“I told you we found Mahl’s watch, and that it could be conclusive evidence,” Harper said.

“That was when you said we needed to talk. I thought? What about the watch?”

Harper turned his O’Doul’s bottle, making rings on the table. “The prosecuting attorney examined the new evidence this morning. Took a look at the paintings and talked to Sicily about them. Mahl’s prints aren’t on them, surely he used gloves. We sent his watch to the lab, and we’ve had two men searching out photographs of Mahl that show the watch.”

Harper peeled the wet label from his beer bottle.“Late this afternoon, Judge Wesley dismissed charges against Lake.” He spread the label on the table, smoothing it. “And it looks like we might get a confession from Mahl. He’s lost some of his arrogance; he doesn’t like being behind bars, and he’s nervous. Shaky. If he does confess,”Max said, “it’ll be thanks to our informant.”

Clyde kept his hands still, tried to keep his face bland.

“It’s the informant that troubles me,” Harper said. “We don’t get many informants calling in cold, without previous contact. You know it takes time to develop a good snitch, and this woman-I don’t know what to make of her.”

Clyde eased himself deeper into the soft leather of the booth, wishing he were somewhere else.

“She has a quiet voice, but with a strange little tinge of sarcasm.” Harper sipped his beer. “A peculiarly soft way of speaking, and yet that little nudging edge to it.

“Her first calls seemed to have nothing to do with the Lake trial. She called to tell me she’d slipped a list under the station door, and to explain about it. I had the list on my desk when she called.” With his thumbnail he began to press on the wet beer label he’d stuck to the table, pressing at its edges. “It was her list that led us to that burglary up on Cypress.

“We made two arrests, caught them red-handed, impounded a truck full of stolen TVs, videos, some antiques and jewelry, ski equipment, a mink coat.

“The list of residences to be hit was very detailed, showed the times each householder left for work, kind of car, times the kids left for school, time the school bus stops. Right down to if the family kept a dog.

“But no indication of what day the burglaries would come down. She said she didn’t know, suggested I set up a stakeout, was almost bossy about it. She put me off, and I almost tossed the list.” Harper looked uncomfortable, as if the room was too hot.

“But then she called back, later that same night. Gave me the hit date, said she’d just found out.” Harper abandoned the label, lit a cigarette. He had shaped the O’Doul’s label into a long oval with a lump at one end. “That second call came maybe an hour after that fuss up at Sicily’s gallery, the night those cats got locked inside.”

Clyde grinned.“The night my stupid cat got shut in. You saying this woman made the call from the gallery? That the cats got in when she entered?”

“No, I’m not saying that,” Harper snapped. He stubbed out his cigarette and fingered the half-empty pack, then laid it aside, started in on the label again, working at it absently with his thumbnail. “I’m not saying that at all. Simply stating the sequence of events.

“And it was that same day,” he said, “midafternoon, when the new witness turned up. The one who saw the white van in Janet’s drive.”

Clyde watched the beer label taking shape, Harper’s thumb forming a crude, lumpy head.

Harper finished his beer, draining the glass.“You know I don’t believe in coincidence. But the strange thing is-that witness who saw the white van, she turned out to be the mother of one of the burglars.”

Clyde frowned, shook his head as if trying to sort that out. He had to swallow back a belly laugh. Despite Harper’s obvious distress, this was the biggest joke of all time on his good friend. And he couldn’t say a word.

Harper still hadn’t told him about the watch. It was the watch that was really bugging Harper.

“Yesterday the informant called, asked if we’d found Janet’s paintings. She seemed pleased that we had.

“She told me that when we found Kendrick Mahl’s watch, that could wrap up the case. She said it was in a drainpipe up in the hills, that we’d have to dig down and cut through the pipe. She thought if we cut straight down into the pipe, we wouldn’t disturb the evidence, could still photograph it before we moved it. She gave me the location of the marker where we were to dig, a little pile of rocks, up the hill from the mouth of the drain.”

He looked a long time at Clyde.“The drainpipe turned out to be just up beyond the burglarized house, and not fifty yards from where we arrested James Stamps. He’d run up the hill chasing his dog. Dog bit Thompson real bad.”

Harper grinned.“Thompson was crawling around in the bushes taking pictures of these two perps, and the dog jumps him.

“We got Thompson to the hospital, took the dog to the pound for observation. Don’t know what it got mixed up with, but its face was one bloody mess, Thompson didn’t think he did that. Long scratches down the dog’s nose and ear.”

Harper gave the head on the O’Doul’s label two pointed ears, pushed the wet paper again, starting to form a tail. “No one,” he said, “could have known what was in that drain. You couldn’t see a thing from the opening, not even with a flashlight. The watch was maybe fifteen feet back inside.

“But my informant knew. Knew where the watch was, knew whose watch it was. She described the stone marker exactly. Little pile of rocks pressed into the earth in the form of an X, where the grass had been scraped away.”

“Pretty strange,” Clyde said. “Makes you wonder. You don’t think she’s a psychic or something?”

“You know I don’t believe in that stuff. It was some job digging down into the drainpipe, and I didn’t believe for a minute we’d find anything. I thought this would end up a big department joke.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“There’s always that chance. Better to be the butt of a joke than miss something. We dug down seven feet to the metal pipe, then cut through the metal with an acetylene torch, kept the flame small as we could.

“Broke down into the pipe two feet above the skeleton of a dead cat.”

Clyde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“The cat had a collar around its neck with Janet Jeannot’s name on it.” Harper was very still, looking at Clyde. “Kendrick Mahl’s watch was buckled to the collar.”

Clyde shook his head, did his best to look amazed. He’d had to listen half the night to Joe bragging about the damned watch, and about the paintings.

“We photographed the watch and got it and the skeleton to the lab. Lab found Mahl’s prints on the watch, underneath Janet’s prints.

“We have photographs of Mahl wearing the watch a week before Janet was killed. And a shot of him the night of the museum opening wearing a different watch, a new Rolex.

“We found the store where he bought the Rolex, a place on the other side of San Francisco from the St. Francis, little hole in the wall. They sold it the day of the opening. The customer fit Mahl’s description. He paid cash.” Harper grew still as the waiter brought another round of beers, theround little man moving quietly, leaving quickly.

“After we arrested Mahl we searched his apartment. Found the bolt cutters he used to cut the lock off at the storage complex. Found the keys to Janet’s studio and to her van, under the liner of his overnight bag. And he had a set of keys to Rob’s Suburban. The way we see Mahl’s moves, he had already brought the substitute paintings down to Molena Point, sometime before that weekend, and put them in the locker. On Saturday he checks into the St. Francis and puts his car in the underground parking.

“Saturday night he uses his parking ticket to take out Janet’s van-he knew she was out to dinner with friends, probably had a good idea she’d make an early evening of it. He drives down to the village, gets the fake paintings, switches them for Janet’s, rigs Janet’s oxygen tank, and dropssome aspirin in her coffeemaker. Stashes her paintings in the locker and hightails it back to the city before daylight.

“He puts Janet’s van back in the parking garage, uses that entry ticket later to retrieve his own car. He’d have had to put the van back in the same slot. Probably he pulled his own car into her slot, to reserve it while he was gone. Counted on Janet’s not coming down at some late hour; he knew she didn’t like to party.

“Who knows when he missed his watch? We’re guessing he didn’t miss it until he was back in the city, and then it was too late to turn around and go back. He had to be seen at the St. Francis for breakfast, be seen around town that weekend, and, of course, at the opening Sunday night.

“But when he gets back to Molena Point after the opening late Sunday night he takes Rob’s Suburban while Rob’s asleep, goes to get his watch.”

“But he’s too late,” Clyde said. “Janet’s already up in the studio. And no one saw him switch the paintings, no one saw him around the locker?”

“Caretaker says there were two men nosing around outside the fence a couple of nights earlier. He didn’t see them clearly, didn’t see their car.” Harper opened his menu, looked it over. “There were some pieces of sculpture in the locker with the paintings, probably he’d put them in sometime before. Early work that, Sicily said, Janet hadn’t liked much, that she’d left behind when she split from Mahl and moved out. Maybe Mahl thought they’d be worth something now.”

He closed the menu.“Think I’ll have the filet and fries.”

Clyde grinned. This was Max’s standard order, filet medium rare, fries crisp, no salad. “It’s a weird story, Max. Don’t know what to make of it.”

Max shaped the wet label more carefully, its front paws tucked under, its long tail curved.“Informant sees a watch where it’s impossible to see it. Night watchman hears voices, but no one there. Call comes over a unit radio, and no trace of the caller.

“But we’ve got a positive ID of the handwriting on the locker file card and lifted a nice set of Mahl’s prints from it.”

“Then you’ve wrapped up the case,” Clyde said. “Mahl’s in jail. You have solid evidence. And you told me Marritt is off the case and in a bad light with the mayor.”

“You bet he is.”

“And a new trial pending. Sounds like you’re in good shape.”

“That watchman can’t have heard voices.”

“So if no one was there, was the old man lying?”

“One theory is, he was nosing around the lockers for his own purposes, maybe stealing. That when he looked over the wall into K20-or maybe picked the lock to K20-he realized the paintings were Janet’s and knew he’d better report it to avoid trouble, so he dreamed up the voices routine.

“Good theory.”

“But I don’t buy it. I’ve known old Mr. Lent for years. That old man wouldn’t steal if he was starving. And he was really upset by what he thought was a breakin.

“And there’s the vent,” Harper said. “Vent screen above those lockers was torn.”

“A vent screen?”

“Vent about four inches by eight inches.”

“So what does that mean? He hears voices through the vent and thinks they’re in a locker?” Clyde thought he was getting good at this, at playing dumb-it was little different than lying. Though he didn’t much like that skill in himself.