Cat Under Fire

7

The cats could hear from the apartment below a series of thumps, as if Detective Marritt was opening and closing cupboard doors. They heard crockery clash-perhaps he was moving dinner plates, looking behind them-then a metallic crash as if he'd dropped the saucepans. Dulcie smiled. "He's really good at this, very smooth." She shifted impatiently from paw to paw, then rose and began to pace, her ears swiveling with nerves.

"Settle down. He'll be gone soon." "If he finds the diary, we'll never see it." "It'll make a bulge in his pocket. So what's the alternative, go down there, snatch it out of his hand?"

She cut her eyes at him. "If I were alone, I'd charm him until he laid it down to pet me, then grab it and run like hell."

She shook herself, scattering ashes. Curving round, she tried to lick ashes off her coat, but that was like eating out of the fireplace. She spit out flecks of ashes and cinder. Beyond the heaps of ashes that had been raked up by the police, the charred garage door lay across the drive. The police had hauled away the remains of Janet's van.

"I wonder if her diary will have anything about the museum opening," Dulcie said softly. "I wonder if she wrote in it that night when she got home from San Francisco. It would be interesting to know her version of the weekend, after the testimony her friend Jeanne Kale gave."

Janet's friend from San Francisco had testified that Janet arrived in the city around seven Saturday morning, checked into the St. Francis, leaving her van in the underground garage, and the two women had breakfast in the hotel dining room.

"Imagine," Dulcie said, "breakfast at the St. Francis. White tablecloths, cut glass bowls, lovely things to eat, maybe French pancakes. And to have a beautiful hotel room all to yourself, with a view of the city. Probably a turn-down at night, with chocolates on the pillow."

He nuzzled her neck. "Maybe someday we'll figure out how to do that."

She opened her mouth in a wide cat laugh. "Sure we will. And figure out how to go to the moon."

Ms. Kale told the court that she and Janet had shopped all day Saturday, using public transportation, had ridden the cable car out to Fisherman's Wharf for lunch. "Cracked crab," Dulcie said, "or maybe lobster Thermidor." Her pink tongue licked delicately.

"I get the feeling your major interest here, is in the gourmet aspects of the case."

"Doesn't hurt to dream. They must have had a lovely weekend."

Late in the afternoon the two women had stopped at an art supply store, where Janet bought oil paints, four rolls of linen canvas, and a large supply of stretcher bars. She had had the supplies delivered to the St. Francis, where she gave a bellman her car keys, directing him to put the supplies in her van, in the underground garage. That night, Jeanne said, Janet had dinner with Jeanne and her husband and with the couple for whom Janet was doing a huge sculpture of leaping fish, the sculpture she had meant to finish the morning she died. They had eaten at an East Indian restaurant on Grant, walking from the hotel, taking a cab back to the St. Francis afterward.

Nancy and Tim Duncan had been friends of Janet and Kendrick Mahl before the divorce. Over dinner they talked primarily about the sculpture; Janet meant to deliver it to San Francisco early the following week. The Duncans owned a popular San Francisco restaurant, for which the ten-foot sculpture was commissioned. Janet had not taken her van from the parking garage that night, as far as Jeanne knew. After dinner she said she was tired, and had gone directly to her room.

Jeanne said that she and Janet spent Sunday sketching around San Francisco. Sunday night was the opening at the de Young, and Janet had dinner with three artist friends, not Jeanne. Jeanne had given their names. She said that Janet and her friends went directly from dinner to the de Young, in one car. There Janet received her two awards. They stayed at the reception until about ten, then drove back to the St. Francis. Janet changed clothes and checked out, put her suitcase in the van, and headed back to Molena Point. Jeanne said she saw Janet just before she left. That part of Jeanne's testimony was corroborated by the bell captain and several hotel employees. There was nothing in any of the testimonies to implicate Jeanne, or to imply that Janet had been worried about any aspect of her personal life, or that she was afraid to return home.

Dulcie tried again to wash off the ashes, but gave it up. The sounds from below were faint now-they could hear only an occasional thud, as if Marritt had retreated to the far end of the house. "We could slip in now, he'd never see us."

"Cops see everything."

"He's not a cop, he's a fraud. He shouldn't…"

"He's a cop. Good or bad. Cool it until he leaves."

She moved away among the burned rubble, pawing irritably at the ashes, nosing at pieces of burned wood and twisted metal. The police had gone over every inch of the site, had bagged every scrap that looked promising, even straining some of it through cheesecloth. They had taken Janet's burned welding tanks and gauges, Dulcie supposed those went to the police lab, too. The Gazette said the Molena Point police used the county lab for most of their work. The police had taken prints from the sculpture of leaping fish before Janet's agent took the piece away for safekeeping; it had been badly warped by the fire. The police photographer had shot at least a dozen rolls of film, must have recorded everything bigger than a cat hair.

Warily, she approached the hole in the center of the rubble-strewn slab, where the stairwell led down to the apartment. The steps, beneath fallen ashes and debris, were charred and eaten away, and the upper portions of the concrete wall were black. The lower part of the stair was relatively untouched, the door at the bottom hardly smoke-stained. She had investigated down there days before, finding nothing of interest. Now as she turned away, something sharp jabbed into her paw, causing a quick, burning pain. Mewling, she shook her hurt foot.

A blackened thumbtack protruded from her pad, with a bit of burned canvas clinging, the tack stuck so deep that when she pulled it out with her teeth, blood oozed.

She licked her pad, staring down at the tack and at the half-inch strip of blackened canvas, at all that was left of one of Janet's paintings, a pitiful fragment of burned metal and cloth. Dropping it, she crept back to Joe, to press forlornly against him, mourning Janet.

This summer, when she became aware for the first time of the riches of the human world, of music, painting, drama, and then when she discovered the Aronson Gallery, she had been so intrigued that she trotted right on in, and there were Janet's landscapes, a dozen huge works as exciting as the canvas that hung in Wilma's living room.

There had been only a few patrons in the gallery, and they were fully occupied looking at the exhibit and talking with Sicily, so no one noticed her. She prowled among the maze of angled walls, keeping out of sight, staring up at Janet's rich, windy scenes. She was thus occupied when a patron saw her. "Look at the little cat, why the cat's an art lover…" And the gallery had filled with rude laughter as others turned to stare. She had fled, frightened and embarrassed.

She didn't go into the gallery again for a long time, but she would slip up onto the low windowsill and lie looking in, pretending to be napping, but fascinated with the rich paintings. Strange, they gave her the same high as did the bright silks and velvets that she liked to steal. Until this summer, stealing had been her only indulgence; she'd had no notion that anything else in the world would so excite her.

She wasn't the only cat who stole; Wilma had saved a whole sheaf of clippings about thieving cats. Some cats stole objects inside their own homes-fountain pens, hair clasps-but others stole from the neighbors just as she did. Their owners said that stealing was a sign of intelligence. Maybe-all she knew was that from kitten-hood she loved things, and she stole them. Before she was six months old she had taught herself to leap up at a clothesline and slap off the clothespins, taking the brightest, silkiest garment, had taught herself to open the neighbors' unlocked screen doors, and she could turn almost any door knob. Once inside a house she headed directly for the master bedroom-unless there was a teenage daughter, then that room got top billing. Oh, the satin nighties and silk stockings and little lacy bras. Carrying her treasures home, she hid them beneath the furniture, where she could lie on them, purring. When Wilma found and returned the purloined items Dulcie felt incredibly sad, but she hadn't let Wilma know that.

Joe nudged her. "He's leaving. He doesn't have the diary. Not a lump in that tight uniform." Marritt's jacket and trousers fitted him as snugly as a second skin.

Bang, bang, bang. The concrete vibrated under their paws as Marritt nailed up the plywood. The moment he was gone they fled down the hill and clawed their way underneath, ripping off hunks of the burned door, widening the hole Dulcie had started. She slipped under, flicking her tail through in a hurry though there was no one to grab her; her sense of helplessness at leaving her tail vulnerable was basic and powerful. Joe's short stub was not a problem.

Despite the bright sun outside, most of the room was dark. Blazing stripes of sunlight shone through the closed shutters, sharply illuminating a frosting of dust and ashes which coated the Mexican tile floor. The large living room must have been handsome before smoke and drenching water dirtied the white couch and white leather chairs, the white walls and white rugs. The floor was cold beneath their paws, but when Joe stepped onto a thick rug expecting a warm respite, he backed off fast; the rug was soaked with sour, stale water.

Marritt's footprints were everywhere incised into the dust, back and forth across the kitchen, and between the couch and chairs, as if he must have searched for the journal beneath the upholstered cushions. Six rectangles of clean white wall shone where Janet's paintings had been removed after the fire, the bare picture hooks clinging like dark grasshoppers.

The newspaper had said the paintings were being restored, that Janet's agent had taken them. Joe wasn't into the art scene, but he knew the monetary value of Janet's work. According to the Molena Point Gazette each of the forty-six paintings destroyed by fire was worth twenty to thirty thousand dollars. That added up to a nice, easy million.

He watched Dulcie sniff at the sodden chairs and couch, then leap to the counters of the open kitchen cube to paw at the cupboard doors. On the kitchen floor stood a bowl of cat kibble and a bowl of water, both scummed over with ashes and dust. Surely they hadn't been touched since the fire. And how could they be, unless Janet had had a cat door.

The stairwell door, just beyond the kitchen, had been boarded up though it did not seem burned. From beneath it came the smell of wet ashes, and a chill breeze sucked down. Beyond the stairwell, the door on the far wall was closed but not boarded over. Marritt's intrusive footprints led to it, ripe with his scent, a combination of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. The crack beneath the door was bright with sunlight. The smell from within was not of ashes but of a woman's delicate perfume. Dulcie sniffed deeply at the bright space, then leaped up, grasping the knob between her paws. Swinging, scrabbling with her hind feet against the molding, she turned the knob, kicked against the doorframe. The door swung in. They were struck in the face by glaring sunlight, blinding them.