Cat Striking Back

13

WILMA GETZ’S FLOWERING front garden was in fact Dulcie’s garden, where the tabby liked to hunt gophers and moles, and she would challenge with tooth and claw any neighborhood cat who coveted her tangled territory. The tabby might exhibit all the subtle intelligence of the rare, speaking cat, but she was a primitive little fighter when it came to her hunting ground. The feline passion for independence, just like the human passion for liberty, she believed included a right to one’s own place, inviolate against all intruders.

The one-story stone house she considered hers and Wilma’s together, it was just the right size for Dulcie and her silver-haired housemate. When Wilma retired from her job as a U.S. probation officer, she had moved from San Francisco directly to her dream home in Molena Point. That was before she ever met Dulcie; she had been well settled when she brought the small tabby kitten home to live with her. The slim, energetic woman hadn’t known, then, what kind of cat this was with whom she would share her life. She didn’t discover until Dulcie was grown the extent of the young cat’s talents. That first conversation between woman and cat had been a milestone that cat lovers everywhere would envy but few would ever experience.

Charlie and Joe Grey arrived at Wilma’s house, coming straight from tailing the man in the white car. They watched Dulcie leave the living room window, and then saw Wilma at the kitchen window, waving to them. They hurried across the garden, surrounded by the rich scent of apricots cooking, Joe racing ahead to disappear through Dulcie’s cat door.

Because of the steep hill that rose close behind the house, both the front and back doors faced the street, one at either end of the cottage. Charlie and Joe preferred the back door, which led through the laundry room and into Wilma’s blue-and-white kitchen.

Wilma stood at the kitchen counter crimping a pie crust, her long gray hair tied back crookedly with a silver clasp, her pale blue T-shirt protected by a faded apron. Dulcie had already leaped to her chair at the kitchen table, waiting for them, her tail switching, her eyes alight to see Joe. As the tomcat jumped up to join her, Wilma set a saucer of milk before them and half a dozen cookies, and stood looking at Joe. “You found a body this morning? You found where a body was?”

Joe looked up at her questioningly.

“Ryan called. They were to look at some houses, and she told me. I gather Clyde wasn’t enchanted.” The older woman turned away to finish crimping the crust, then set the pie in the oven. She poured two cups of coffee and sat down at the table across from Charlie.

“Makes me shiver,” she said. “A body in that empty swimming pool. I’m surprised the city hadn’t made the Parkers cover that hole so a child wouldn’t fall in.”

“This was no child,” Joe said. “From the scent, I’d say a grown woman. Her blood was barely dry.”

Dulcie shifted impatiently. “Tell us from the beginning.”

Joe, and then Charlie, filled them in from the time Joe had first approached the empty pool in the predawn dusk until he and Charlie, and Ryan and Clyde, tried to follow the eavesdropper.

“If Kit and I had known what you were going to find this morning,” Dulcie said, “we’d have come back with you from the hills.”

“I didn’t plan to find it. You didn’t have to go off chasing the wild clowder. What gets into Kit?”

“She saw a little cream-colored cat,” Dulcie said. “It was so strange, Kit felt an instant rapport with her, an instant friendship. She seems totally possessed by the little waif.”

“Kit gets possessed,” Joe said. “Some wild idea takes hold of her and she can think of nothing else.”

Charlie and Wilma exchanged a look. There was no turning Kit aside when she got her claws into a new passion.

Dulcie said, “She got as excited as if she’d discovered a long-lost sister. And the young cat seemed just as fascinated.”

Wilma said, “Maybe no one will ever understand Kit-and isn’t that half her charm?” She looked at Joe. “This meeting between Kit and the little waif happened at the same time you came on the murder scene?”

“It did,” the tomcat said. “So?” He scowled up at Wilma, his white-tipped paws kneading irritably at the chair cushion. “You’re not saying there’s some connection!” Wilma was no more given to flighty imaginings than was he.

Charlie watched her aunt. “What are you saying?”

Wilma looked back at them blankly. “I don’t know. The thought just popped into my mind.” She shook her head, frowning. “I don’t know what I meant. It just flashed into my thoughts that, somewhere down the line, you’ll find there’s some kind of connection between the two events.”

Dulcie looked at Wilma uneasily, and nudged the subject back to Kit and the cream-colored waif. “Since the weather warmed, Kit and Lucinda and Pedric have been walking in the hills, and they’ve glimpsed this cat more than once. Every time she sees them she stands up on her hind legs, staring yearningly at them.” Dulcie laughed. “Until Sage hazes her away, forces her to turn back up the hills to the clowder, away from Kit.” Dulcie licked milk from her whiskers. “Looks like Sage has chosen another female who’s just as wild and willful as Kit. Why can’t he find a nice, docile, matronly young cat who will be content to do as he says, and who will be happy to give him lots of kittens? Poor Sage. Where will it end? He’s so…He’s so…”

“He and Kit weren’t well suited,” Charlie said. She didn’t say that Sage was a wuss, that he wasn’t the macho tomcat who should be destined to love and cherish Kit. But then she looked embarrassed. Who was she to criticize, even in her thoughts, anything about these rare creatures? Finishing her coffee, she rose and picked up her car keys. “I need to stop by the station. I’ve put off telling Max that my clients may have had a break-in. Now, with what may be a murder just two blocks away, I’ll have to tell him.” Leaning down to give her aunt a hug, she headed for the back door. “You cats want to come?”

“To the PD with you?” Joe said. “We stroll into the station escorted by the chief’s wife? Oh, right.”

“I’d let you off down the street,” Charlie said, laughing. “But I guess, with the noon traffic, you’d make better time over the roofs.”

“I guess we would,” Joe said, “and create a lot less interest.” But the tomcat was eager to sneak a look at Juana Davis’s report, and as Charlie headed for her Blazer, he and Dulcie lapped up the last of their milk, shared the remaining cookie, galloped out Dulcie’s cat door and across the garden, headed for the rooftops.

The detectives wouldn’t have much, yet, on the scene at the Parker house, not until they got some kind of match on any prints they’d been able to lift. But all the same, Joe wanted to see what was happening. Without some kind of official departmental input, he felt at sea about the case, felt left out of the loop. It was this contact with the officers of MPPD and his snooping access to the department’s investigative tools and information sources that served the cats as essential backup for whatever information they were able to discover. Without that supporting data and interdepartmental communication, a cat could work his paws off for nothing. Side by side, Joe and Dulcie leaped to the roof of Molena Point PD, their ever hopeful thoughts fixed on Detectives Dallas Garza and Juana Davis who might, with luck, already have information available for their covert attention.