Cat's Eyewitness

by Rita Mae Brown

  “This killer is too smart to leave a footprint,” Mrs. Murphy offered her opinion.

  Aunt Tally walked over to pet the cats, while Big Mim retrieved the mail, then joined her aunt at the counter.

  The door opened. BoomBoom and Alicia came in.

  “We just left Amy,” BoomBoom said.

  “How is she?” Harry liked Amy Wade, as did everyone in town.

  “Shaken.” BoomBoom’s face reflected concern.

  “But not stirred,” Alicia said, then added, “She’ll be back to work tomorrow.”

  “She sends her thanks.” BoomBoom studied the chalk outline. “Dropped like a deer.”

  “Between the eyes or, in this case, in the eye.” Aunt Tally ran her forefinger under Pewter’s chin, then repeated the pleasing stroke for Mrs. Murphy. “These cats have big motors.”

  “Purr machines.” Harry loved her cats. She flipped up the divider as well as opened the half door so Tucker could visit the people.

  Big Mim told BoomBoom and Alicia what Sheriff Shaw had told her.

  Alicia remarked, “Whoever committed the murder has to be quick as a cat.”

  “Why do you say that, darlin’?” BoomBoom casually called her “darlin’,” but then, Southern women rained “sugar,” “honey,” “honey pie,” and other sweet names upon their friends.

  “Didn’t Rick say there was no struggle? That Nordy’s body crumpled?”

  “Yes,” Big Mim replied.

  “Then the killer literally struck like a cat and Nordy had no time to react,” Alicia said.

  “If it was someone he knew, he might not have reacted quickly.” A vague notion was forming in Harry’s mind, something disquieting, still unfocused.

  “True.” BoomBoom nodded. “But even if he knew his killer, that person hit fast and hard. It takes a lot of force to drive an object into the human body.”

  “He didn’t hit the socket, either. If he’d hit the bone it would have been a real mess.” Aunt Tally allowed the cats to rub against her offered cheek. “Think about it. This killer knew what he or she was doing.”

  “What an awful thought.” Miranda shuddered.

  “You know, I spoke to him last night.” BoomBoom stepped back from the cordoned area. “Like most men, he was tragically transparent.”

  Alicia smiled. “That he was not, Boom. He may have been transparent sexually, but he could be opaque about other things or he wouldn’t be dead. The man was hiding something.”

  “Hard to believe.” Harry folded her hands on the counter, then remembered she had a lot more mail to put in the boxes. The disruption had put them hours behind. “He was arrogant. I didn’t like him, but I’m sorry he died like this.”

  “It is pretty awful.” BoomBoom walked behind the counter. “Do you two need help? I’m happy to stay here.”

  Miranda smiled warmly. “Boom, if you really want to help, we will use you.” She pointed to the overflowing mail cart. “Magazines.”

  “Boom, you are sweet.” Alicia walked behind the counter, too. “Many hands make light work.”

  Aunt Tally glared at her niece for a moment, since this wasn’t the type of labor Big Mim was likely to do. “Mimsy, I think we should at least help for half an hour.”

  “Quite right.” Big Mim sighed, removed her lush silver fox short-cropped jacket, walked behind the counter, and draped the jacket over the chair in the back.

  The six women worked well together, chatting, going over the dreadful event and then drifting away to other subjects like the college basketball season about to begin. They all followed the University of Virginia men’s and women’s teams.

  Susan blew through the door, stopped cold when she beheld the outline, then walked to the counter and, without a word, flipped up the divider, took off her coat, and attacked the large packages that had to be on industrial shelving. The shelves bore letters of the alphabet. If a person’s last name began with “A,” their large package would go on the “A” section.

  “Sorry I’m late. Brooks’s car died, so I had to run her to school. Took the opportunity to talk to her physics teacher.” She picked up a package to go to the “T” section. “Nordy’s death wasn’t on the early-morning edition but it ran as a ticker tape, or whatever you call that underneath the picture, by nine. Good God.”

  “It will all come out in the wash.” Aunt Tally sat at the kitchen table in the back where she sorted mail. “Why don’t I toss this junk mail and save someone the trouble?”

  “It has occurred to us many times.” Miranda rolled the cart over to Harry.

  “Thanks,” Harry said as she continued to shoot mail into the back of the boxes. She checked the clock on the wall. “We’re catching up.”

  The front door opened. A well-dressed woman who had parked her Mercedes SUV in the front came to the counter. Miranda reached the counter just as the woman placed a small, neatly wrapped package on the counter.

  “Would you weigh this please?”

  “Certainly.” Miranda lifted it, placing it on the stainless-steel scale. “First class?”

  “Yes.” She glanced around. “What’s going on here?”

  Since Miranda didn’t recognize the woman, she figured she either didn’t live here, was visiting for the holidays, or had moved in that second. “We’ve suffered an unfortunate incident.”

  “What kind of incident?” She removed one of her gloves to reach into her Bottega Veneta purse for cash.

  “The local news reporter, Nordy Elliott, was found dead here this morning.”

  “What?” Her eyes widened.

  “That’s all we know.”

  “Nordy Elliott, that terribly attractive young man who does the news?” She paused a moment. “I’m here visiting my son and daughter-in-law, so I watch the local news. Oh, that can’t be.”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “What’s this world coming to?” She fished out the amount, which Miranda told her was $3.20. “Before Christmas.”

  “Do you want this insured?”

  “No.” The woman noticed the gang in the back. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized Alicia Palmer, then they widened with pleasure. She leaned forward, whispering, “Is that Alicia Palmer?” Miranda nodded, and the woman continued, “Never forget her in War Clouds.” She snapped up her change.

  “No. Might I ask who is your son?”

  She smiled. “Dr. Trey Seddons. He’s just taken a position in the radiology department at Martha Jefferson, so I’ve come up to help him and Beth get settled.”

  As she left, Big Mim muttered, “Carpetbaggers.”

  “Now, now,” Aunt Tally reprimanded her. “Can’t be critical because she doesn’t speak the King’s English with the same perfection and lilt as do we all here. And carpetbaggers bring in money. Always have and always will.”

  “I don’t mind the money, Aunt Tally, what I mind is they come here and want us to be like them. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  “What’s so great about the Romans?” Pewter wondered.

  “Empire lasted a thousand years.” Mrs. Murphy loved history.

  “Because of the work of dogs, horses, cattle, and you cats. How could they have lived off the grains of Egypt if cats hadn’t killed the mice? And how could they have had herds of cattle and sheep if we dogs didn’t herd them as well as drive off marauders? And do animals get any credit?” Tucker shook her head.

  “I don’t want credit. I want tuna.” Pewter let out a meow.

  Harry knew that tone of voice. She handed her fistful of mail to BoomBoom, standing next to her with her own fistful of mail. “All right.”

  As Harry opened a can for the cats and a small one of beef for Tucker, Alicia and BoomBoom hummed and chatted. Susan talked to Big Mim, Tally, and Miranda as she shuttled packages to the shelves. Harry stopped for a moment and thought what wonderful friends she had, and then she noticed how Alicia and BoomBoom leaned toward each other; they glowed. Susan was right. She blinked, then thought to herself, “Lucky them
.”

  “These tubes roll off the shelf.” Susan stood on a small ladder in the “C” section, where Tazio Chappars’s blueprints were placed.

  “I know. There’s a rubber wedge there, an old doorstop. I put one on each side,” Harry informed her.

  “I would have thought all this was done by computers. Someone would send the blueprints to Tazio’s computer, she would print it and blow it up.” BoomBoom liked technology.

  “Can,” Harry replied. “But Tazio says for the clearest blueprints, you have to get them done the old way. Also, this paper, the stuff in the tube here, stands a beating at construction sites. She says printers, laser printers, can’t print out on blueprint paper. Anyway, I don’t mind dealing with these. Kind of excites me, thinking of buildings going up.”

  “You have the building gene,” Big Mim quipped.

  “Your grandfather had it, too.” Aunt Tally, long, long ago, had been passionately in love with Harry’s handsome grandfather. She was in her late teens and he was married. People didn’t divorce in those days.

  “Wish I had the money to indulge it.” Harry laughed. “But you know, being back here in the post office today is good for me. I know I’ve done the right thing. It really was time to move on, and I have got to make money.”

  “You will.” Aunt Tally encouraged her. “Set yourself a goal, stick to it. You’re smart as a whip.”

  “Thank you.”

  “See, she’ll listen to you, Aunt Tally. She doesn’t listen to me. I tell her how smart she is.” Susan placed the rubber wedges on either side of the tubes.

  “Ned have his team together?” Aunt Tally inquired.

  “He does. Another three weeks and he’s sworn in as our state senator and I will be truly married to an elected politician. I can’t tell you how many people he interviewed for the jobs. He needs to have the right people, people who know the drill in Richmond. People who can get along. That’s the problem, you know, in any office or wherever: can the people who work together get along? I worry about what this will cost us, too. He has an apartment in Richmond; the miles will pile up on the car when he switches back and forth from here to there. I didn’t want him to spend money on an apartment, but he reminded me what happened when both houses fought over the state budget: long, long sessions. He really needs a little place there. And like I said, he really needs a team that can get along.”

  “We always did.” Miranda patted Harry’s shoulder as she squeezed behind her and BoomBoom.

  “Easier when there’s two,” Big Mim said, then amended the thought. “If it’s the right two.”

  Big Mim and Aunt Tally worked for an hour. Harry and Miranda were grateful to them, because they knew how out of the ordinary this gesture was and the two women really did help.

  No sooner had the two climbed into Big Mim’s go-through-anything Range Rover, saved for bad weather, than Alicia pulled out her cell phone to call Patterson’s Florist.

  “More amaryllis?” BoomBoom raised her eyebrows, then turned to Harry. “She’s filled one room with red and white amaryllis, arranging them like a tree on this platform she’s had built. I’m not explaining this very well. Anyway, she’s placed all the pots, wrapped in foil, on the circular levels, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. She’s so visually creative.”

  “You are, too,” Harry complimented her.

  “Not like Alicia, but thank you.”

  They overheard Alicia. “Yes, one to Aunt Tally and one to Big Mim. Today, if possible.” She paused, smiling at BoomBoom and Harry, then her attention returned to her order. “Yes. Say, ‘With thanks from the girls at the P.O.’ Uh-huh. Put it on my account. Thank you so much.” She hung up.

  Miranda said, “We’ll divvy that up.”

  “No, you won’t.” Alicia waved her hand.

  “You think of everything.” BoomBoom finished her row of boxes.

  “You’re prejudiced.” Alicia returned to the mail cart.

  A beat passed, then Susan simply said, “You two make each other happy.”

  For a moment no one uttered a word, not even the animals. Then BoomBoom, who thought she’d be scared only to discover she wasn’t at all, replied, “We do.”

  And that was that.

  Within the hour they finished the mail. It would have taken Harry and Miranda past closing to do it themselves. Miranda made a fresh pot of coffee, dashed across the alleyway, and soon returned with a large basket filled with chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, and fresh gingerbread, a thin glaze of vanilla icing on the top.

  “Girls, I was in such a hurry to get over here after Pug called me”—she mentioned the postmaster of the area by name—“that I didn’t have time to throw together some treats.”

  An impromptu party followed, with either Miranda or Harry rising to take care of a customer. Miranda even thought to bring dried liver treats for the cats and dog.

  Harry bit into her second slice of gingerbread, then stopped mid-chew. Swallowing big, she said, “Know what?” The others looked at her. “The eye. Nordy was killed through the eye. The Virgin Mary is bleeding through the eyes.”

  The cats and dogs listened to this as they ate the treats brought for them.

  “If she could smell, she’d have caught that whiff of lanolin and beeswax when we came to work,” Tucker said. “Don’t know about eyes, but I know that lanolin odor.”

  “Virgin wool,” Mrs. Murphy replied.

  “From an unmarried sheep.” Pewter giggled.

  “From someone wearing a virgin wool sweater, or a robe like a Greyfriar.” The tiger ignored Pewter’s joke.

  23

  It’s a strange coincidence. Let that be the end of it.” Fair pulled off the thin, long, whitish latex gloves he’d used to check a mare.

  The gloves barely made a sound as they dropped into the garbage can in BoomBoom’s stable. At six o’clock in the evening the sun had set an hour ago, and the sky was filled with low, dense, tinted clouds, the remains of one of those sunsets that goes on and on, the last brushstroke of color dying after an hour.

  BoomBoom was holding the furry chestnut mare, a well-built animal by Lemon Drop Kid out of Silly Putty, a mare who broke down on the racetrack. BoomBoom, like Harry, Fair, and Big Mim, could pick a horse. The animal could be underfed, wormy, blowing its coat, or injured, yet she saw the potential. She was highly regarded by other horsemen, all the more so since this particular broodmare was by Lemon Drop Kid, a marvelous stallion who enjoyed a stellar career on the track.

  As Fair worked on the mare, BoomBoom and Harry filled him in on conversations at the post office, their ideas, Susan’s ideas, Miranda’s, and, well, everyone’s who flounced into the post office that day—which was everyone who could stand up. If you didn’t show up at the post office, it meant you were involved in a flaming seduction or too sick to walk. After recovering from both fevers, one was expected to divulge the details in as amusing a manner as possible.

  Harry bristled. “Oh, come on, I’m just tossing out theories.”

  “Your theories have a way of almost getting you killed.”

  “True!” the two cats and dog agreed as they sat on the stacked hay bales.

  Alicia appeared in the open barn doors, the fading light framing her. Winter sunsets at this latitude were one more joy of living in central Virginia.

  For an instant, seeing Alicia in the doorway, Harry could understand why BoomBoom had fallen in love with her. Then she looked at Fair washing his hands in the sink in the small tackroom, dirt on his coveralls, his green Wellies half brown with muck, and she thought he didn’t need a sunset. He was beautiful to her. A thin pang of desire and even guilt shot through her body. She’d made him pay and pay for his sins. Maybe they weren’t really sins. She said she’d forgiven him, and she had. She recognized at that very instant that she needed to forgive herself. She’d held on to the whip hand too long and she’d diminished herself in the process, as well as hurt a man who loved her more than life itself.

>   “How is she?” Alicia turned up the collar of her bomber jacket; the mercury was dropping faster than the New Year’s ball in Times Square.

  “Healthy. The infection cleared up.” Fair turned to BoomBoom. “I’d ship her out to Kentucky after Christmas. They’re so efficient and responsible at Payson Stud. They’ll put her under lights and, when she’s ready, she’ll have multiple covers by St. Jovite.” He mentioned one of the good studs standing at the farm. “I know those board bills ratchet up, but, BoomBoom, that’s the stallion you want for this mare. He raced for years and retired sound. You want that hardy blood. After she’s caught, ship her back. I’ll take it from there. If you breed your other mare, go to Tom Newton’s stud, Harbor Dean. But send this girl to Kentucky.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Are you breeding her for the track?” Harry liked the mare; she had clean legs but was retiring because she’d suffered a cracked vertebra in an accident in the shedrows.

  “Well, I know that’s better for Payson Stud, but, no, I’m breeding her for foxhunting. One of the great things about the people at Payson Stud is that Mrs. Payson runs steeplechase horses, so she understands about jumping and, even more importantly, staying power. Peggy Augustus is another true horseman who cares about going the distance. Everyone these days seems to breed for sprint races. The good old distance bloodlines are thinning out. Remember, Husband, Peggy’s stallion, was the sire of my best hunter. I’ll be taking one of my other mares to Husband in January.”

  Horsemen, like golfers, could talk for hours, days, weeks about horses, bloodlines, great chasers and racers, great hunt horses.

  Alicia, a horseman herself—although her knowledge was interrupted by the time she’d spent acting in California—said, “Why don’t we continue this at the kitchen table? There’s potpie waiting for you all, if you don’t mind simple fare.” She paused a moment. “Not referring to you, Fair.”

  At the massive farmer’s table, the conversation bounced between recent events, horses, and politics, especially Wendell Ordman’s career.

  Fair cut into his pie, through crusty layers of perfection. “How did Maggie Sheraton like Herb?”