Cat Telling Tales

31

Looking down from the balcony to the crowded room, Joe cut a look at Dulcie. How easy to drop down onto the buffet table, right between the sliced turkey and the salmon mousse, grab a few bites before anyone even noticed.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dulcie said. Misto smiled, the older cat, too, envisioning a grand leap into the heart of the feast—what a stir they’d make in the crowded room.

People were still arriving, eager for the auction, and Joe thought about all the money CatFriends would raise tonight, to pay for cat food and medicine. Out through the tall windows on the patio, the rescue cats themselves, safe in their cages, were drawing as much attention as the treasures to be bid upon. They were of every color, every disposition. Some rubbed against the bars or reached out a friendly paw to whoever spoke to them. Only a few backed off, keeping their distance, still distrustful since their own humans had abandoned them. Sammie Miller’s two black-and-white cats snuggled together on a blue blanket looking up hopefully when anyone approached. Twenty-five unadopted strays, from the sixty-two cats that CatFriends had trapped and placed in foster homes. Those who didn’t find homes tonight were destined to become permanent members of their adopters’ families—but they didn’t know that. They looked out through the bars at a conflicted and perplexing world: They were imprisoned, but they were safe. Surrounded by kind hands and gentle voices, but yet crowded by too many strangers pressing against their cages. Frightened or friendly, they didn’t know what was happening to them. “Maybe,” Dulcie said, “they’ll all find new homes tonight.”

The auction would not be a silent affair with a prim sorting out of written offers, this would be a lively free-for-all of bidding, led by a volunteer auctioneer who had driven down for the occasion from Sacramento: a friend of Max Harper’s who presided over all manner of auctions including the horse sales, which was where Max and Charlie had met him. Among the prizes to be auctioned, besides various valuable maintenance services and luxurious vacation weekends, and Charlie’s drawings, and the decorative rugs and furniture, the bright blue ocean kayak stood upended in one corner of the gallery, crowded by handsome brass lanterns and other select items for the boat lover, a set of state-of-the-art golf clubs, a Stübben English saddle, a carved Western saddle, both saddles on racks, both valued at several thousand, and a locked glass case displaying ten pieces of diamond and emerald jewelry, all donations from various local shops for the abandoned cats. Joe had already spotted a number of MPPD officers among the crowd, all out of uniform, all enjoying the party but watchful, in the event unknown visitors were tempted by the high value of the jewelry and sports equipment.

As the three cats watched the auctioneer take his place on the podium, and the mayor join him to say a few words, they didn’t imagine that, away among the dark rooftops Kit and Pan had narrowly escaped an angry and desperate Erik Kraft—with evidence enough to put Kraft in the hands of the county DA and of federal authorities as well.

As Kraft raced up the front stairs to retrieve his suitcase, Kit and Pan crouched near the entrance to the underground parking garage waiting in the shadows to see the make of his car and his license number. Kraft was gone maybe ten minutes, then came hurrying down, two steps at a time, carrying the black suitcase, his black leather jacket slung over one shoulder barely hiding a shoulder holster and the butt of a handgun. Moving swiftly down the ramp, he disappeared into the parking garage. They heard a car door open and slam, an engine start, and in a minute a black, two-door Audi sped up the incline, Kraft’s profile sharp against the garage lights. Kit took one look at the California license plate and would remember it for life. The minute his car roared off, they raced around to the back steps and up to his condo, worried that he’d found the pebble and dislodged it, and locked the slider. Or, in his hurry, had he abandoned the faulty door and locked only the front door? Why bother with an apparently broken latch, when he must have taken everything of importance with him anyway? The money, the little cylinders of gold, the real estate papers or contracts? Up the back stairs they streaked, under the wall, and with frantic paws they scrabbled at the glass door.

Together they slid it open and bolted inside, Kit laughing at the resourcefulness of the red tomcat, and leaped to the bed beside the phone. Pan had never had so much fun. Nothing he’d ever done, from comforting the nursing home patients, to the edgy thrill of hitching rides with strangers, could equal the excitement of facing human evil head-on, of attacking this man who seemed so eager to turn humans’ lives to ruin.

It took Kit only a few minutes to make the call. By the time they fled the condo again, racing down the back stairs and around to the front, Kathleen was already pulling to the curb, Max in her car beside her. Two black-and-whites pulled up behind them, and on the side street two more police units moved swiftly past, heading in the direction of Highway One. They imagined more patrol cars setting out to comb the area, skimming the night as silent as sharks. Kit had told Max about the laptop and its counterfeit messages from Alain, she told him about the safe, the money, the holstered gun. The call had been a long one, never before had a snitch told an officer so much, or had stayed on the line to answer his questions. She couldn’t explain why she did that, why she didn’t back off.

“You took the laptop, from his apartment?” Max had said. “You broke in and—”

“I didn’t break in, I walked in. The back slider was wide open.” Her paws were cold with unease, she wanted to race away but she wanted, more, to keep talking.

“You went over the wall into his private patio?”

“Well, yes. I looked over, and saw the door was open.”

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“I went up the stairs, I knew the back of his condo was there and I was curious. I looked over, saw the door open, saw the lighted computer screen. Saw there were messages on it, and when I saw they were signed Alain, dated long after she left the village, I thought you might want it.” Now, her paws were sweating. “He was all packed and ready to leave. I thought, if I didn’t take it, he might erase those messages before you ever saw them.”

There was a little silence, as if he’d expected her to hang up. She said, “When he found the laptop missing he burst through the door looking for me, he came after me. I didn’t want him to catch me with it, he’s bigger, he’d have taken it. I hid it on the roofs, got rid of it where I didn’t think he’d find it. Then I ran, tried to lead him away from it, down the back stairs. It’s there now,” she said, and described the hidden well between the precipitous roofs. “It’s waiting for you to get it.” And she’d hung up then, worrying that, because the laptop was stolen, maybe that would taint the evidence it contained. What did the law say about that? Had she and Pan, in their hurry to retrieve the evidence, only destroyed it themselves?

But what other choice did they have? Once he was on the freeway, the minute he saw the first cop after him, he’d erase everything, Alain’s messages, whatever financial dealings were there. There’d be nothing left, all the proof vanished like smoke sucked away on the wind.

Kit thought later maybe she’d talked so long to Max because, without any explanation at all, their stealing of the laptop and hiding it on the roof, slipping it into that little niche that most humans would never notice, was too far out, too strange. Would create one more uneasy scenario to puzzle Max Harper, make him wonder just what kind of snitch would choose a hiding place that only a pigeon or roof rat might be aware of.

After they’d called Max, and had watched the police deploy after Kraft’s car, they watched Max Harper and Kathleen head for the back stairs, watched Kathleen climb in over the steep roofs and retrieve the laptop. Watched her and Max head for her car, saw them grin at each other as they locked the laptop safely in the trunk. As their car turned up toward the freeway, the cats heard gunfire. One shot, two more, and they seemed very close. They had no way to know what was happening, they could only pray Kraft had been taken without any cops getting hurt. Kit debated whether to race for the station where they could hear the calls coming in, could follow the action via police radio. But there would be cops at the auction with their radios. When Charlie heard sirens and gunshots, wouldn’t she get the news right away? And when Kit thought of the delicious buffet waiting, hunger won, she leaped away across the roofs for the gallery, Pan beside her, Kit worrying about her human friends, and both cats famished for supper.