Cat Telling Tales

23

The wind had stilled as Joe and Dulcie prowled outside the house looking for a way into the dank cellar, to the source of the dead smell. The thin rain was sullen, and colder, hiding any hint of moon or stars. It was strange, fitful weather, its penetrating cold made them shiver and move closer together beneath the dense bushes; and even under the wet bushes the smell of death clung in their nostrils. Easing around to the far side of the house where they hadn’t yet explored, where the land dropped down, they at last found a small door into the basement, a crude affair built of matching wooden siding and crowded by early-budding mock orange bushes whose sweet scent blended strangely with the stink of decay. The door was locked.

Leaping up, Joe pawed at the rusty hasp and padlock hoping the screws might be loose. He knew that, in his desire to get inside, he was destroying fingerprints with his grasping paws, but it couldn’t be helped. He was fighting the lock when Dulcie said, “Wait, Joe. Come this way.”

He could see only her backside, she was halfway under the house where the siding had rotted, leaving a ragged slit barely high enough for her to wriggle through. Joe dropped down, and joined her, pushing under, the wood so soft that pieces of desiccated siding clung to their fur as they bellied through into the dark, earthen cellar.

Drooping cobwebs hung down from the floor joists, so thick and long they brushed their ears. The dead smell led them into the blackness toward the front of the house, where the ground rose.

“If it is a human body,” Joe said, “there’s not much room for a cop to crawl back in there.” In most of the cellar, there was hardly belly space for a cat. Only where a swale ran along between the rough wooden wall and the earth, was there room for a human to move, bent over. The thought of a human body stuffed up into that claustrophobic crawl space made Joe’s fur rise along his back. Hard clods of dirt bit into their paws. Splintered scraps of wood and bent nails cut their pads, and the longest cobwebs clung to their whiskers like sticky tape. “This is what we do for entertainment?” Joe said.

“No. This is what we do because we can’t help ourselves. Because we’re cats. Because we’re cursed with too damn much curiosity.” She moved ahead of him into the blackness like a stalking tiger, every fiber honed to the quarry. He could see the ancient furnace deep in, a hulking black box sprouting fat pipes that led up through the floor, a squat, low affair beyond which Dulcie vanished.

Soon he could hear her digging. He picked out her dark shape, half hidden, clawing at the earth. How could she stand the stink? When she gave a sudden squeak and flew backward, he jumped nearly out of his skin.

When he pushed up against her, she was shivering. When he nosed at her, her paws smelled so bad he backed away. Hastily she pawed at fresher earth, trying to wipe the smell off, unwilling to lick her paws and force the taste into her mouth. “Fingers,” she said, looking at him.

“Fingers?”

“Human fingers, Joe. A hand, an arm. I left them half buried. Let’s get the hell out of here. We need to call the station.”

They fled for the crack where icy air wafted in together with the clean cold smell of rain. This wasn’t the first body they’d dealt with, they’d reported plenty of deaths over the years, but this one smelled the worst, sent them scrambling out beneath the rotted siding sucking fresh air and then racing straight up a juniper, inhaling its sharp, clean scent.

Only high in the branches did they stop, looking down, and consider the implications if they called the department. To report what appeared to be a murder, to report those frail skeletal fingers and arm—to try to explain how the department’s two best snitches, supposedly human snitches, had “just happened on” a body buried in a space hardly high enough for a child, half hidden behind a furnace in a pitch-black cellar that could be entered only through a padlocked door.

Whatever they said, or didn’t say, was going to generate any number of unanswerable questions. Queries to which they couldn’t even imagine a believable reply. Uncomfortably they looked at each other, trying to figure out how to handle this new level of deceit, this even more complicated web of lies, to the very officers they wanted only to assist.

The rain had all but stopped, the drops seeming to have slowed until they were almost floating. The midnight village was wrapped in a strange silence, even the rhythm of the sea hushed. High in the hills, Kit could hear not even a passing car; no sound at all until suddenly a great horned owl boomed, too close to her. From her tree house she watched him descend above her and on down over the village gardens; he would be sensing the warmth of some small creature. Not me, Kit thought, you won’t take me, you daren’t come in my tree house, you’d snatch nothing in here but a beakful of pillows—and my claws in your face.

She and Lucinda and Pedric had been home from the Firettis’ for nearly an hour but she couldn’t sleep. She’d started out in the house on the bed between the old couple but she was too restless, too warm, her blood pounding too hard. Slipping down off the quilt to the floor, she’d trotted through the house to the dining room, leaped to the table, across to the sill, and pushed out through her cat door along the twisted oak in the icy night and into her tree house, where she’d burrowed deep beneath the pillows.

She listened in the silence until another owl answered from farther up the hill; she thought about Pan, and that was why she couldn’t sleep and her claws kneaded sharply into the pillows. She thought how the firelight glanced off his red coat, thought about his travels, thought how she and Pan had listened together to Misto’s tales. Pondering the stories and adventures of both tomcats, she grew so restless that at last she left her warm cushions, too, scrambled down out of her oak tree, and raced across the neighbors’ yards until, where the houses rose closer together, she hit the roofs again. Putting the call of the owls behind her, farther and farther behind her, she prowled the roofs above the village shops, scrambled over peaks and dormers feeling bold and wild, looking into second-floor penthouses, trotting, racing, stopping again to peer into the rooms of strangers. She looked into Erik Kraft’s elegant penthouse, slipping under the terrace wall. It still looked neat and unlived in, the bedroom elegantly furnished and totally unused. Quilted black bedspread made up just so, thick black towels folded perfectly on the shelf in the master bath, one black towel perfectly aligned on the rod, as neat as if a decorator had placed it there. Even the white ceramic drinking glass and tray by the basin were placed just so.

It hadn’t been so neat when he was in town; then, looking in, you’d see his clothes dropped here and there, and often a woman’s things, sleek nightgown, satin slippers tossed under the bed, a mess of jars and tubes on the bathroom counter—Alain, she supposed, or maybe some other woman; human men were so fickle.

She prowled until her paws felt like ice cubes and then she spun around and headed for home. She was freezing when at last she clambered up her own oak tree and back under her own soft pillows, just her nose and face sticking out where she could see the street and yards below. From her high vantage she sighed once, purred twice, and was nearly asleep when she saw, down on the street, Emmylou’s old car moving slowly along. What was she doing out at this hour? Looking for a place to park for the night? Somewhere the cops wouldn’t hassle her?

Strange old woman, Kit thought, very independent even with the law. She guessed Emmylou didn’t like the cops or anyone else telling her what to do—didn’t like to be bossed around, any more than a cat did. Maybe in ancient times, Kit thought, letting her imagination run, maybe Emmylou would have been a homeless loner then, too, always at odds with the world, an outcast faring no better, then, out in the cold looking for a place to rest and get warm.

Rambling along in her old Chevy, with the heater turned on full blast, easing along beside the village shops looking in their softly lit windows at wares she couldn’t buy, Emmylou at last turned up into the narrow residential streets, to find a place to park. But she stopped now and then where a living room light burned, sat watching the flicker of firelight against drawn curtains, imagining the cozy room within. Then, moving on, she tried to think what she should do; she had to find a job but she so hated the regimentation. She’d tried, at three groceries, to get on as a bagger, had filled out applications, left her name, but no one needed her. Maybe, like others down on their luck, she should steal just a little, just enough to get by, if she could do it without getting caught.

The cops were right, she had meant to stay at Sammie’s. Until she saw the mess, until she thought someone had been in there—or something. Something she didn’t want to share a bed with. She’d hidden the metal box there earlier, but then had gone back to retrieve it. The trashed house had frightened her so that, even if the cops stopped watching the place, she wouldn’t go back inside.

Earlier in the evening, driving around looking for Sammie’s cats as well as for a place to get warm, she’d stopped outside Dr. John Firetti’s clinic, thinking about her own cats. Wondering if they were still there, if she could get them back when she did find a place, or if he had already found homes for them.

Maybe better homes than she could give them. He’d known when he questioned her that she was lying about their shots, but he’d been willing to help them anyway. She liked him for that. The clinic complex was a hodgepodge affair, the two small cottages joined by the big solarium and then, across a little patch of lawn, the doctor’s own small cottage. Two outdoor lamps burned in the yard, their glow smeared by rain, lighting the way between the house and clinic. Neat flower beds flanked the front door, and through the shuttered windows the undulating light of a hearth fire gave her a sharp jolt of loneliness. Listening through the car’s open window, she caught soft laughter, a happy sound that twisted at her and made her move on, feeling left out, knowing she wouldn’t be wanted there.

Chilled by loneliness as much as by the icy night, she headed up among the winding hillside streets where the cottages were crowded close and the streets didn’t have parking limits, where if she could find an empty spot among the residents’ own cars, she could safely stay the night. She was searching for a parking place, thinking the cops didn’t usually bother a person up here, when a black-and-white approached her from the rear, startling her, coming fast, its tires throwing up sheets of water. Slowing, she pulled over. What did they want? They had no reason to follow her, no reason to hassle her.

But the squad car didn’t slow, it sped on past, and another behind it, and then two civilian cars, all of them heading straight up the hill—in the direction of Sammie’s neighborhood. She looked after them with unease.

But hundreds of people lived up there, in those little pocket neighborhoods separated by ravines or outcroppings of boulders too rugged to build on. Why would she think they were headed for Sammie’s? They had no reason to go to Sammie’s, she was worrying for nothing.

She was just tired, exhaustion always left her edgy and nervous. Turning onto a short dead end, she found a parking place no one else had wanted, really only a swale, a runoff that directed rushing rainwater down into a little ravine, sheltered by a dripping willow so her car would be nearly hidden.

She backed parallel into that portion of curb, her front and back wheels straddling the low dip. She locked her doors, rolled up her windows to just a crack. Crawled over into the backseat, stacked the bags and boxes on the floor as she did every night, to make a flat surface. Shook out her blankets and quilt and pulled them around her. The backseat still smelled of ashes from Hesmerra’s metal box. Hesmerra had called it her safe, and she’d been partially right. It wasn’t insulated like a fire safe, but the metal had been enough to protect the papers from the dampness of the earth where it was buried; and the earth in turn had protected it from the fire.

The problem now was, should she take it to the police, or keep the papers to herself as Hesmerra had done? Maybe at some future time, she thought uneasily, the papers would serve as a payback? A payback for Hesmerra’s death?

“And what,” Joe said, stretching out along the juniper branch where the rain didn’t reach, “what do I tell the department? I just happened to crawl under Sammie Davis’s deserted house? I, a grown human, just happened to squeeze through a space not big enough for a miniature Chihuahua?”

“Tell them . . . that the cellar door was standing open and you smelled something. I can’t call, they might think it’s Emmylou. She’s been in that house, nosing around. That would sure make her a person of interest.”

“Maybe she is a person of interest. I have to tell them the cellar door was open, how else would the killer, or the snitch, get in? So how come it’s locked now? What, I tell them I locked it when I left, after discovering the body? Oh, right.”

“We’ll have to unlock it,” she said sensibly.

“You’re going to pick the lock. Like some trick movie cat? Jimmy the lock with your clever little claws.”

She narrowed her green eyes at him, the tip of her tabby tail twitching. “Maybe that’s what the key in the kitchen was for. You think? It looked like a padlock key.” Scrambling backward down the tree, she disappeared around the corner, was up the back steps in an instant and in through the cat door, leaving the little square of plywood banging in Joe’s face.

This was a long shot, but who knew? Joe watched her leap to the counter and open the cupboard, watched her ease the key off its hook with a delicate paw, trying not to smear any existing fingerprints. Maybe the killer had used this key. Or not, Joe thought. Maybe he had a key of his own. Either way, they didn’t need paw prints. Cat prints might be just as unique as human fingerprints, if any of the three detectives decided to follow a hunch and check out the markings they found.

So far, they had been lucky no one had thought to compare paw prints found at a scene, with prints an officer could lift within the department itself. Joe imagined Juana or Dallas offering them little treats, and then restraining them long enough to ink their paws, to produce a set of fingerprint cards that would go into the office files. The idea gave him chills. Could he get used to wearing gloves? Pulling on little cat mittens?

Dulcie, taking the key carefully in her teeth, dropped to the floor looking smug, and they beat it out again, down the steps and around to the cellar door. Carefully Joe took it from her, and climbed up through the brittle branches of the nearest bush, trying not to drool, not get the key wet and slippery. Clinging within the bush, he found a steady position and pulled the lock to him with a careful paw.

Holding it steady, turning his head at an angle, he tried to ease the key in. Just a little finesse, and he’d . . .

He dropped it.

Silently Dulcie retrieved it, and climbed up through the bush; he took it, and tried again, but it wouldn’t go. He turned his head, adjusted his balance. Another try, but it didn’t fit. This wasn’t the right key. Ears back, he tried forcing it, but still it wouldn’t go. He turned around in the branches, poised to leap down.

“Try again, Joe. Is the lock rusty?”

Of course it was rusty. This baby’d been out in the weather since locks were invented.

“Take your time,” she said. “Try just once more.” In the female mind, any impossible problem can be solved with sufficient patience. Ducking lower, he tried again, bowing his back so the key wasn’t angled, giving it a straighter approach.

Nothing. Nada.

“Turn it over.”

He’d already tried that. It wouldn’t fit. He couldn’t talk with his mouth full, couldn’t even hiss at her. He was fighting it, the metal hard against his teeth, when he dropped it again. Dulcie gave him a look, dove into the bushes, rustled around, and came out with the key safe between her teeth.

Motioning with her head for him to get down, she climbed, silent and quick. Around them, the rain had quickened again, they were both soaking wet, the raindrops on Dulcie’s back pale and icy. His paws felt like blocks of ice. Above him Dulcie was fiddling and fussing as she eased the key up to the lock. Females were so nitpicky, not direct like a tomcat.

Within minutes she had it open. With a quick paw she pulled the padlock off, let it fall, the key still protruding, a rustle and dull thud as it dropped to the ground among the bushes.

She didn’t brag or tease him. “What shall we do with it?”

“Lose the key, keep the lock. If anyone else knows the key was inside the locked house, that leads right back to Emmylou. Maybe she’s innocent,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe she’s not.” He watched Dulcie remove the key and, with it safe between her teeth, they scrambled up the nearest pine and headed across the roofs.

They carried it six blocks away where two steep peaks angled together, and tucked it down beneath the overlapped shingles. Then shoulder to shoulder they headed for Dulcie’s cottage, and a phone.

“I just hope Wilma’s asleep, we don’t need to drag her into this, in the middle of the night.”

“You don’t want to listen to her scold,” Joe said, grinning. Though, in fact, Dulcie’s housemate was as tolerant of the cats’ involvement with the law as a human could be. Wilma had been, for twenty-five years, a federal parole officer, she knew very well the intense fascination of sorting out a crime, she knew how it felt to be deeply involved with a case.

But that didn’t stop her from worrying, she knew the disasters, too. She worried because they were small and vulnerable, and because they were, in her opinion, far too brash and bold. Worry made her overprotective, and so she fussed at them. Joe followed Dulcie in through her cat door, stopping midway to ease the plastic flap down along his back, to keep it from swinging, thump, thump, and waking Wilma. She slept attuned to that sound, to any small noise that would herald Dulcie’s return home.

Crossing the laundry, they left wet paw prints on the blue kitchen floor, left a wet trail across the oriental rug in the dining room, and when Joe leaped to Wilma’s desk, again a damp row of prints incised across the blotter. As he pawed at the phone’s speaker, pressing the arrow down until the sound was as soft as it would go, Dulcie slipped down the hall to the bedroom, peering in, to make sure Wilma was asleep.

Yes, she slept, breathing deeply, her back to the phone on the night table. Dulcie, watching her, decided she really was asleep and not faking, that she wouldn’t see the phone’s flashing light. Trotting back through the dim house and leaping to the desk, she watched Joe key in 911 and prayed, as she always did, that Wilma’s ID blocking was working as it should. She’d heard a number of stories where the service had failed, incidents too alarming to bear thinking of, at that moment.

The night dispatcher came on, a young man they didn’t know well. Joe asked for the chief or whichever detective was on duty.

“If this is not an emergency, you—” the dispatcher began.

“It is an emergency. Do it now. Max will be mad as hell if you fool around. And no, I won’t give my name. Just do it!” There was a short silence, then Kathleen Ray came on. She knew his voice, she didn’t interrupt as he described the location and probable condition of the body.

“In the crawl space of a dark cellar? How did you find that?”

“I was walking my dog, he smelled something. The body must be pretty rank.”

“You crawled back in there, to look?”

Joe went silent, and clicked off. “Does she have to be so damned nosy?”

“She’s a police detective. That’s her job.”

He hissed at her companionably and they waited, listening, looking out at the cold night. The raindrops had turned suspiciously white and slushy. Dulcie said, “It’s going to snow.”

Joe turned, gave her a look. “Snow. Right. Since when did it snow on the central coast?”

But even through the glass, the night felt cold enough to freeze the rain solid. They were peering out when a lone siren cut through the silence from the direction of the station: one whoop, like a squad car clearing traffic as it sped away. They imagined the black-and-white moving fast through the village followed by another and maybe by Kathleen’s white Ford two-door. Dropping from the desk, they slipped quickly out of the house, scrambled to the roofs again through the rain, which was heavier now, almost sleeting, and they followed where they knew the cop car was headed. The immediacy of the police response took precedence over the cold, over their sharp hunger, and over their need for sleep—even over their caution to remain unnoticed at the soon-to-be-busy crime scene.