Cat Spitting Mad

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  "So what were we supposed to do?" Dulcie said. "Hold back information?"

  Clyde sucked at his coffee. "Crystal Ryder has been in town for maybe six months, living in that duplex. Why, all of a sudden, did she decide to buy it?"

  "She had a lease/option," Joe said. "Apparently she decided to move on it. My question is, why just two weeks before the murder? And it would be interesting to know, as well, why Helen owned a place in Molena Point, when she's lived for years in Santa Barbara."

  "I can answer that," Clyde said. "She had half a dozen rentals in the village. Max told me that. She had them with a rental agency."

  "A pretty shoddy agency," Dulcie said, "or they'd have insisted she paint the place."

  Clyde rose to rinse the dishes. "You three have an opinion on everything. You have an inside line to Garza's investigation. You have spied on Stubby Baker. You have tossed Crystal Ryder's apartment and tampered with critical evidence. And you-"

  "If you mean the tapes," Joe said, "if we'd left them there, and Crystal hid them, Garza might never know they existed."

  "And what about the barrette?" Clyde said.

  "We had no contact with the police over that," Joe told him. "Kate reported the barrette to the police, they told her they'd go right up there, photograph where they found it, and book it in as evidence. It's probably, right now, sitting in the lab being dusted for prints and particles caught in the setting. They-"

  "Probably they are going to find cat hairs."

  "Why must you always drag in cat hairs? Why must you always tell us we're messing up an investigation? Do I really have to remind you, Clyde, of the murders in the past, where with our help Harper has made a case?" He looked at Clyde sadly, hurt written in every line of his gray-and-white face.

  "The three of you are going to Charlie's. You're going now. And you're going to stay hidden."

  "Dulcie and the kit are going. I'm settled in with Detective Garza and I intend to stay there."

  Clyde slammed down the plate he was drying, nearly breaking it. "At least you won't be here in the house taunting Max Harper, making his life miserable."

  "We are trying to save his life. And when have I ever taunted Harper?"

  But then Joe said, more gently, "How is he doing?"

  "Not good. Won't talk about the case or about anything else much. He's quit going out with the search parties. Afraid he might taint some piece of evidence."

  "How would he…?"

  "If they find her-when they find her-someone might claim he tampered with evidence or slowed the search, maybe made counterproductive suggestions, that kind of thing. He's getting…"

  "Paranoid," Joe said. "That's not like Harper."

  "He talked last night about quitting the force. Retiring. After he's cleared, of course. Talked about going to Alaska."

  "Alaska!" Joe yowled.

  "Max Harper," Dulcie mewed, "leave Molena Point? I don't believe that."

  "There's more than that to believe." Clyde looked at the cats deeply. "I think there's something between Max and Charlie."

  The cats widened their eyes, trying to look amazed.

  "I wouldn't be surprised to see them, when this thing is over, take off together for Alaska."

  Dulcie stared at Clyde, then turned away, washing furiously.

  Clyde said, "Max had been talking, the last few months, about reorganizing the department. He has five new officers and a new clerk. They're getting crowded in that one-room setup. But now…"

  "He has basement space," Joe said. "Where they store the old files, where they have the shooting range and emergency operations room."

  Clyde nodded. "He's done some really nice plans to redesign the building, give officers more space and privacy. Add an up-to-date report-writing room, more room for communications, a bigger evidence lockup, more security.

  "But since the Marner murder, it's as if he never heard of a redesign. Has no interest. Seems like he doesn't give a damn about the department."

  "When this is over," Joe said, "he'll launch into it. Bounce back. Reorganize the space. That would be just the ticket, get his mind off what those buzzards are trying to do to him."

  "If we only knew which buzzards," Clyde said. "I don't know, I've never seen him like this. Years ago, in Salinas, after a bad bull ride when Max got gored in the shoulder, when he was all broken up and in the hospital-and didn't have a dime-he was still joking. Still on top of it.

  "His shoulder got infected, he had a high fever, three ribs broken. I was scared he was going to cash it in. But he hung in there-joking all the way, with that dry humor.

  "Even when Millie died, even though he's never gotten over it or stopped missing her, he was never like this.

  "You had the feeling, when Millie died, that no matter how destroyed he was, he knew things had to get better. That he knew that's the way life works-that we all take our bumps and keep ridin'. But now…" Clyde shook his head. "Now, he doesn't seem to believe that anymore."

  Joe just looked at him. Sometimes all these human problems were too much; sometimes he thought the household animals were the lucky ones. All they had to do was nap on their soft beds, gobble their three squares, enjoy lots of petting, and no worries over humankind's disasters.

  Except he remembered too clearly that other life, before he realized his ability to speak. He wouldn't want to return to that. He'd been bored out of his tomcat mind.

  As a young cat, it had been a big deal to invent some simple new entertainment-find some new diversion in one of the several shabby apartments he'd lived in, a new way to tease some human in one of the interchangeable families who'd taken him in. Stupid kitten stuff. He'd never had a real human friend until he met Clyde. Or he'd find some smaller, skinnier kitten abandoned in an alley, someone weaker than he, that he could tease and torment.

  When he moved in with Clyde, he'd graduated to intimidating Clyde's lady friends. How amusing, to terrorize those lovely young women, faking lethal claws, treating them to loud snarls and flashing teeth-all because life could get so yawningly, nerve-deadeningly, mind-numblingly dull.

  But now, with his newly discovered skills, there was no time to be bored. He hardly had time for a nap or a good rabbit hunt-the sleuthing life took every claw-clinging ounce of creativity he could muster.

  And now, as a pattern of clues was forming in the Marner murders, a morass as intriguing as a crisscross of fresh rabbit tracks, he had no time for discontented thoughts-except in terms of the final retribution for this killer.

  This case was more than a fascinating puzzle. This time, he wanted not only justice, he wanted revenge. Sweet, sharp-clawed revenge. This time, he was out for blood.

  19

  DRESSED IN the oversized T-shirt she'd slept in, Charlie Getz stood on a ladder in her small bathroom, removing the vent fan from the ceiling. She had gone up on the roof last night, removed the fresh-air grid and wiped out a quarter-inch of accumulated dirt from inside the vent pipe. The four-inch tunnel didn't allow much room-peering along its length at a small circle of sky, she went queasy at the tight quarters through which the cats must push. Six feet of claustrophobia leading from her apartment out to the village rooftops. She guessed Dulcie and the kit could slither through, but Joe Grey had better not try.

  Coming down the ladder, glancing in her bathroom mirror at the reflection of her milk-white legs, she had a sharp vision of Molena Point's pretty, tanned blondes in their tennis shorts. The only tan she had was what her grandmother had called a farmer's tan, brown only on her neck and hands and lower arms. Not a body to bring the men flocking.

  Not the face, either, she thought. But I have a warm heart. And I have nice hazel eyes, if anyone bothers to look.

  She wished Max Harper would bother.

  Lifting the disconnected ceiling fan from atop the ladder, she nodded to Dulcie and the kit where they crouched in the doorway peering up.

  "That should do it. Your own private tunnel. I'll leave the ladder for you to climb.

&n
bsp; "But I warn you, Dulcie. If a rat or a bat comes in through that vent-if so much as a wool moth comes in-you're dog meat."

  Dulcie smiled. Lashing her tail in reply, she leaped up the ladder into the hole and was gone through the ceiling. Charlie imagined her slipping along above the bathtub, popping out of the wall above the roof like a swallow from its hole. The kit followed her, her fluffy tail twitching as it disappeared, probably to race madly across the rooftops.

  She'd done a drawing once of Dulcie and Joe running across the roofs. But it wasn't a cheerful piece, it was dark and frightening. Though it hung in a prominent place in the Aronson Gallery, still it disturbed her.

  Clyde had brought Dulcie and the kit over last night, like a father bringing his children to stay with a favorite aunt. Clyde had treated her like an aunt, too, making it obvious that he knew how she felt about Harper. When he left, she'd been really down. Had she hurt him terribly? She'd queried Dulcie, but Dulcie had little to tell her.

  "He's… would the word be stoic?" Dulcie had said. "Understanding?"

  "Stoic, Dulcie?"

  "Max Harper is his best friend. You are, in a different way, his best friend. He's so caught up in Harper's problems just now…" Dulcie, sitting on the end of the daybed, had looked up quizzically at her. "You are asking me, your friendly neighborhood cat, about your love life?"

  "Come on, Dulcie. You sound like Joe."

  "What can I tell you? He loves you both. He knows Harper needs someone just now."

  "You're saying he's glad to dump me on Harper."

  "No, he-"

  "He's seeing someone else."

  "No! But-but when Kate called him that night, when she got into town…"

  Charlie had sat back against the pillow, hugging herself. Kate. Kate Osborne. That beautiful blonde. It seemed a hundred times harder to lose a man to a beautiful woman than to some pig. If her rival were ugly, she could tell herself Clyde didn't have any taste. But Kate Osborne…

  But why did she care? She'd been mooning over Max, feeling guilty that she was longing for him, that she was hurting Clyde.

  And now here she was green with jealousy because Clyde wanted someone who was more beautiful than she could ever hope to be.

  "Perfidy," she had told Dulcie. "Perfidy and capriciousness."

  Dulcie had smiled and turned away to wash.

  "It is all very well, Dulcie, to have a nonchalant wash-up when you want to end a discussion. But such behavior isn't very informative."

  Dulcie hadn't answered.

  The bottom line, Charlie told herself, was that she wanted what she couldn't have.

  And that didn't say much for her depth of character.

  And through this conversation, the kit had prowled the one-room apartment poking into every box and cranny-making herself immediately and totally at home. Taking over just as she had taken over Wilma's house and, before that, Lucinda and Pedric's luxurious RV Claiming every surface-Charlie's few pieces of furniture, the kitchen counters, the packing boxes Charlie used for cupboards, as her own feline territory. Leaving little face rubs and tufts of black-and-brown fur as fine as silk, to mark her conquests. Clyde said the kit was the greatest feline opportunist ever born, and Charlie believed it.

  But who could blame her? The kit had never had a home. Always on the move, tagging along behind a clowder of cats that didn't want her, never sleeping in a warm, safe house or knowing the friendship of a human, until she went to live with Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw.

  Charlie smiled. The kit had learned pretty fast.

  Stashing the ceiling fan in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she put her tools by the front door with her purse, nuked her cold cup of coffee, and sat down to finish her sweet roll, using her paper napkin to wipe Dulcie's and the kit's pawprints from the table. This business of having cat houseguests was like living in a dream straight from Lewis Carroll. It was one thing to take your meals with cats who could carry on a dinner conversation, one thing to go to bed at night with two kitties who said, "Good night, Charlie," like some feline version of The Waltons. But cats who peered over your shoulder at the pages of the latest Dean Koontz, one trying to learn to read while the other offered off-the-wall opinions of Koontz's writing style and baroque setting, was a bit too much.

  At least Dulcie was well read-and her opinions of Koontz, though wild, were always, upscale and positive.

  Finishing her breakfast, Charlie pulled off her T-shirt, showered, dressed quickly in jeans and a clean shirt and tennis shoes, and headed out the door. She had two houses to clean today, a garden fence to repair, and a roof to mend.

  But as she climbed into her old Chevy van, she took a moment to look up toward the roofs and say a silent prayer for Dulcie and the kit, and for Joe Grey. Her wish, as she turned out of the alley, consigned Lee Wark to a far more uncomfortable fate than incarceration in the Molena Point jail.

  And while Charlie's prayer coiled itself into the wind to be sucked up like celestial e-mail by the forces that rule the universe, one subject of her concern was quickly and stealthily pawing through Dallas Garza's papers, scanning a stack of police reports on ex-cons who, apparently, Garza considered possible suspects in the Marner murders. This turn of events was heartening: the tomcat was in a very up mood. The prospect of half a dozen additional contenders cheered him considerably. Maybe Garza was going to give Harper a fair shake.

  Unless these documents were for show, simply to make his investigation look good.

  The time was 8:15. The cottage was empty, Garza gone to work, Kate and Hanni headed for the Pamillon estate to make measurements and take additional pictures. This time they had a cell phone, two canisters of pepper spray, and, tucked in Hanni's belt, a.38 automatic that she intended primarily as a noisy deterrent to scare away the cougar.

  But was the cougar all they might encounter? Joe wondered if the old adage was true, that a murderer would return to the scene.

  Of the six ex-cons in the police reports, four were on parole and two were under house confinement. One of those on parole was Stubby Baker, who had served twelve years on seven counts of embezzlement and fraud. Garza had files on both Baker and Lee Wark. Joe was drawn to the information on Wark in the same way a rabbit is drawn to the mesmerizing form of a weasel that stands deadly still, waiting for his prey to approach.

  Wark was thirty-two years old, had brown hair and light brown eyes (muddy). He was five-ten, 160 pounds, pale (make that pasty) complexion, hunched posture. (They got that right.) He had no facial scars. He had been born and raised in Wales, had become a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty-three.

  In the photograph Wark wore his hair trimmed short and neat. Joe had seen it only shoulder length, always greasy. Wark's current legal address was San Quentin State Prison.

  Wark's interests while in prison had included reading lurid space operas, girlie magazines, and Celtic history. He took no more exercise than the prison demanded. He had socialized with only two other inmates: James Clayton Osborne, Kate's ex-husband and Wark's partner in the murder of Samuel Beckwhite, and Kendrick Mahl, whom apparently neither man had known before they were incarcerated. Both Osborne and Mahl were serving life without parole.

  Joe knew from the newspapers that the guard whose throat had been lacerated with the prison-made garrote was still hospitalized but that doctors now thought he would survive.

  At the bottom of the stack of files and reports was a document Joe had not expected. It was not a police report but a three-page memo from LAPD, on a witness in a seven-year-old fraud trial.

  He forgot to listen for anyone approaching the cottage. He forgot he was in the cottage. He did not realized he was digging his claws into the page. He read avidly, his stub tail twitching. The witness was Helen Marner.

  While art dealer Kendrick Mahl, now serving time in San Quentin, was married to Janet Jeannot, whom he later murdered, he had an affair with Helen Marner, a society reporter and aspiring art critic for the Los Angeles Times.

  Joe an
d Dulcie had helped Max Harper amass the evidence that would convict Mahl-including the decisive clue, which the police would never have discovered without the curiosity of someone small enough to crawl twenty feet through a mud-filled drainpipe.

  The memo said that Mahl saw Helen Marner whenever he flew down to L.A. to conduct business with clients. During this time, Helen realized that Mahl was accepting part of the sales price for each painting under the table, thus circumventing the artist. She had blown the whistle on Mahl. In the case that ensued, she had testified against him.

  Mahl had not been convicted; he had received only a reprimand and probation and had had to pay restitution. At about that time, as Joe remembered, Mahl's marriage to Janet had started to go awry.

  Later, when Mahl went to prison for killing Janet, he had not kept in touch with Helen Marner. But he had kept in contact with the woman he was then dating. Joe was so fascinated that he startled himself with his loud, intense purring. If ever he'd hit the jackpot, he'd hit it this morning.

  Or, rather, Garza had hit the jackpot.

  The question was, what was Garza going to do with this information? Mahl and Crystal Ryder had been hot and heavy when Mahl was sent to Quentin. Joe couldn't wait to hear the phone tapes-if he got to hear them.

  Joe was still on the desk chewing over the facts when a car pulled into the drive. Glancing through to the kitchen windows, he saw Garza heading for the back door. He was crouched to drop to the floor behind the desk, when he changed his mind-if Garza had come home to work, he wouldn't see much from the floor. Leaping to the mantel, he settled above Garza's desk in his classic improvisation of deep, deep sleep.

  The back door opened. He listened to the detective moving around the kitchen. Sounded like he was making a sandwich. Refrigerator door, sound of knife on cutting board, sound of a jar being opened, the smell of pickles. Lying limp as a rag, Joe considered the suspects, to date.

  Kendrick Mahl had to hate Helen Marner for blowing the whistle that he was ripping off his artist clients. Mahl was mean-tempered anyway, a vindictive sort who had made Janet's life miserable.