Cat Pay The Devil

4

R acing home, Dulcie couldn’t get Mandell Bennett out of her mind, a vision of the strong, dark-haired, soft-spoken man falling beneath a blaze of gunfire-and she imagined Wilma falling…falling…But that had not happened! She had to stop this, she mustn’t think this…Courting bad luck, Lucinda would say.

Wilma’s car was not in the drive, and there was no scent of exhaust as if she had pulled into the garage. Dulcie pushed resolutely through her cat door into the service porch then into the kitchen.

Crossing the blue linoleum, there was no scent of Wilma. She padded into the dining room, stood beneath a dark, carved chair, her paws on the Persian rug, looking through to the living room. There was no one there. The vivid oil painting over the fireplace, with its red rooftops and dark oaks, seemed faded; the blue velvet love seat, Wilma’s cherrywood desk, the potted plants, the bright books in the bookcases-all seemed abandoned without Wilma, diminished and forlorn.

She knew she was being melodramatic, overreacting. Turning away, she hurried down the hall to Wilma’s bright bedroom, stood looking in at the cheerful flowered chintz and white wicker, the red iron woodstove-then she fled back to the living room, leaped to the desk, and again pressed the message button.

Nothing, no message. Punching the speaker button, then the one for Wilma’s cell phone, she recorded a few listless words. The effort seemed useless, she’d already jammed Wilma’s cell phone with messages. Shouldering quickly out through her cat door again, then through Wilma’s wildly blooming garden, she leaped once more to the rooftops and raced through waves of rising heat across the hot shingles and tiles, straight to Joe Grey and Kit. Above her, the sky was deepening into evening, the gleam of the low, slanting sun glancing golden across the roofs ahead of her. She found Joe and Kit atop a little penthouse where the faintest breeze fingered their fur. The kit was curled on the high roof, dozing, but Joe Grey paced, now as restless as Dulcie herself. As if, having had a restorative nap, he could no longer stay still.

She knew it wasn’t Wilma that Joe was fretting about-he was yearning to get back to Molena Point PD, to the dispatcher’s desk and its rich sources of information. Joe’s whole being was focused on last night’s break-in murder; something about this shooting had deeply puzzled the tomcat, had taken hold of him from the very beginning. He’d been grumpy and preoccupied all day, waiting for the lab reports, waiting to cadge a look at whatever information might come in over the wire.

Joe was indeed growing grumpy. The murder had occurred at around three A.M. There had been no sirens, and he hadn’t learned about it until that morning over the radio while Clyde made breakfast-an omelet for the two of them, the usual canned feast and kibble for the three family cats. Halfway through the news, Joe had pawed the morning paper open across the breakfast table, and there it was.

While Linda Tucker’s husband, a real estate agent, was in Santa Cruz at a training conference, Linda had been shot once in the forehead, with a small-caliber bullet, while she slept.

Clawing the page over to read the rest of the article, Joe had quickly devoured his breakfast omelet and taken off, up to the roof and across the rooftops to Molena Point PD, where he slipped in on the heels of two officers coming on duty. Leaping to the dispatcher’s desk, he had rolled over and purred, making nice, picking up what news he could-and when that source dried up, when no more information seemed forthcoming, he had headed for the murder scene.

He had found Dulcie and Kit already there, having heard the news when Kit’s humans, Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, turned on the TV before breakfast to see if the weather might cool off.

No such encouraging weather report was at hand, but when reports of the murder came on the screen, and before Lucinda could stop them, Dulcie and Kit had fled out the dining room window and across the oak branch to Kit’s private tree house, where they scrambled backward to the ground, claws raking the oak bark, and headed for the murder scene. There, Joe and his tabby lady, and Kit, had waited, hidden and watching, until Detective Garza and three other officers had secured the scene and left, at around ten A.M.-and quickly they had slipped into the house, past a uniformed guard and under the yellow tape, to search for scents that the police had no way to detect, and for any tiny, hidden items that the officers might somehow have missed.

The Tucker house had been torn apart, drawers pulled out and dumped, furniture turned over. And yet, for the first time in all the crime scenes the cats had prowled, they’d found nothing of value that the law hadn’t already photographed and bagged as evidence; they had detected not even the scent of the intruder, a clue that human officers would, of course, miss. The house reeked so of the husband’s cigar smoke that they could smell nothing beyond it. Even the scents of the three other cops and Detective Garza, laid back and forth across the house, were muddied by the stink of cigars. The only other notable smells were a spoiled onion in the kitchen cupboard and the unpleasant odors associated with the death of the deceased.

Later in the day, Joe had returned to the PD twice to prowl the dispatcher’s desk and then the chief’s office. He knew it would take a few days to get the ballistics report. As far as the cats knew, the police had not found the gun; the bullet was from a.22 fired at point-blank range. It had made an ugly, torn wound at the back of the head. Not that the deceased cared; if Linda Tucker was looking down from heaven, she probably cared only that she was dead and wanted to see her killer apprehended and punished.

Joe Grey wondered sometimes about the dead. Did they look down, watching the investigations? And if they did, why couldn’t they, one way or another, give a sign? Why couldn’t a murdered woman point a ghostly finger? How convenient that would be-if a cop knew how to read those unearthly signals.

The ransacked Tucker house was a mess in the crime photographs, which Dallas Garza studied later at his desk, going over and over them. Yet, for all the mess, according to the bereaved husband only jewelry had been taken, and some cash from Linda’s purse. Tucker had arrived home about five A.M., an hour after the Santa Cruz police located him asleep in his hotel room in that small coastal town. There had been some mix-up at the desk about his reservation, and he had been moved from one hotel to another because of overbooking, so it had taken officers a while to find him. When he did arrive home, and when at last he pulled himself together sufficiently to go through the mess in the house, he was certain that nothing else was missing. Linda’s body had been taken to the county morgue, where it would remain until disposition of the case.

It seemed a cut-and-dried case of break-and-enter; perhaps when Linda woke up she had made some move that caused the thief to think she was reaching for a gun, perhaps she had slipped her hand under the pillow or toward a drawer, and in panic he had shot her.

And yet, the murder bothered Joe Grey. As, he thought, it seemed to bother Detective Garza and Captain Harper. Now, sixteen hours after the killing, the tomcat paced the shingled roof, his mind totally on the dead woman.

“Something isn’t right,” he muttered, turning a narrow yellow gaze on Dulcie. “Garza missed something at the scene, and we missed it, too.”

Dulcie knew Joe hated to muff a case, but it was all she could do to pay attention, her own mind on Mandell’s brutal shooting and worry over Wilma. Joe looked at her intently.

“Why would a real estate agent go to a training conference?”

“I don’t know, Joe! To learn something new. Or maybe to train others. How would I know? I just saw the afternoon paper, and-”

“Garza’s report said Tucker was certain nothing else had been taken. Very certain. Garza watched Tucker go through the house, through all the junk dumped out of the dressers and her jewelry box and the desk. He-”

“Joe, I-”

Joe’s short gray fur gleamed like silver in the falling light of evening. “Garza said Tucker was very certain nothing else was taken, and that’s what bothers me-just like it bothers Garza. No hesitation, just a steady reassurance that nothing else was missing.”

He looked intently at Dulcie, his yellow eyes blazing. “Is that normal human behavior? How many people can tell right away that nothing is missing, no little bauble, a forgotten necklace-his wife shot to death and the house a mess, he should have been all at loose ends, confused and uncertain, unsure of anything.” He was so wound up that Dulcie gave up trying to tell him that Mandell had been shot.

“After the death of a loved one,” Joe said, “most folks are totally befuddled, all rage and grief, and their senses go bonkers. Their perceptions are all unhinged, they can’t remember anything clearly. But not Clarence Tucker,” the tomcat said, hissing. “He seems to have a total grip on reality.”

“He’s a real estate agent,” Dulcie said softly. “And a very deliberate kind of man. Precise. I’ve watched him, in restaurants. Hardly ever looks at a menu. Knows what they have and exactly what he wants.”

Molena Point’s patio restaurants welcomed well-behaved village cats just as they welcomed leashed dogs; and it was amazing how much information a cat could pick up along with the bits of lobster and steak that might be proffered by cat-friendly diners. “Such a man might act logical and have his wits about him, Joe, but still be hurting bad inside.”

Joe just looked at her. He wasn’t buying that. “Garza’s report…Garza thought there was something off about Tucker.” The tomcat reared up, staring away over the rooftops in the direction of Molena Point PD. “Maybe something more has come in, a fax or an e-mail. Maybe Dallas has something more. Come on, Kit, get a move on.” He looked hard at Dulcie. “You coming?”

Dulcie turned her back on him. “You go,” she said shortly.

“Wilma’s fine!” he said, frowning so hard the white strip down his forehead was a narrow line. “She’ll be home soon, tired, will probably stop at Jolly’s Deli to pick up supper for the two of you. Come on, we’ll only be a few minutes.”

Dulcie sighed. She wanted badly to tell him about Mandell; she longed for Joe’s help, but he was too preoccupied. And the fact was, how could a cat stop Cage Jones? If Jones was set on…“Oh!” she said suddenly. “Oh! The sheriff’s office!” And she fled for home, chagrined that she hadn’t thought, sooner, of the Santa Clara County sheriff.

Watching her race away, Joe shook his head. Cage Jones, if he had a lick of sense, would be miles from the Bay Area by now, probably on a plane, under an assumed name. Why would he hang around where every cop in the state was looking for him? And dismissing the escaped prisoner, his mind fixed on the Tucker murder, Joe headed for Molena Point PD and its electronic world of fast information. He assumed Kit was behind him-but Kit followed neither Joe Grey nor Dulcie.

No one seemed to care where she went. Looking from one fleeing cat to the other, both deep in their own concerns, she felt hurt and abandoned-and disappointed in Joe. She knew Joe’s mind was on the murder-burglary, but Dulcie was so upset, and Joe Grey didn’t see the dark tabby’s distress-or did he just not care? Frightened and unsettled, her heart filled with Dulcie’s fear for Wilma and with Joe Grey’s disregard, Kit leaped after Dulcie, racing to catch up, her mottled paws flying over the shingles, her yellow eyes huge and anxious.