by Nic Saint
24
That evening, I was sitting in the window for a change. Yes, I know cats sitting in the window looking out into the street is a cliché, but I never said I was Mr. Original, did I? Besides, Dooley was also there, snoozing and enjoying a pleasant break from the excitement of before.
“I really thought it was a UFO, Max,” said my friend now. “It looked like a UFO, and it sounded like a UFO, so why wasn’t it a UFO?”
“Maybe the people who designed it are UFO fans,” I suggested. I didn’t care what it was, I was simply glad Odelia had gotten rid of it, and had promised us she’d never buy another. Which didn’t mean much, of course, as she hadn’t bought this one either.
“I don’t understand why people buy all these horrible machines, Max. Haven’t they learned anything from watching The Terminator?”
I smiled. “The Terminator is just a movie, Dooley. It’s not real.”
“It looked very real to me,” he said.
I heaved a big sigh of contentment. A cat really doesn’t need much, you know. My belly was full, and so was my bowl, I had a nice roof over my head, my best friend was right next to me, my human was watching television on a couch nearby, where I could keep an eye on her, so as far as I was concerned everything was A-okay with the world.
Chase walked in and sank down onto the couch. “You’ll never guess what happened,” he said.
“What?” asked Odelia, turning down the volume on the movie she was watching.
“Vale and Carew tried to escape. They knocked out the two priests they’d asked to help them come to terms with their misdeeds, donned their clothes and walked out!”
“But you caught them, right?”
“I didn’t catch them—your grandmother did, along with her cronies of the neighborhood watch.” He placed his hands behind his head and leaned back. “What a day. At least they’re behind lock and key, and this time there will be no visits for their spiritual nourishment.”
“Did you get Ida’s Picasso back, and the other stuff they stole?”
Chase shook his head. “Nope. They’re playing dumb. Insist they’re innocent. But they’ll crack sooner or later. Alec will make sure of that. And in the meantime it’s back to insurance fraud for me.”
“Poor baby,” said Odelia. “I can’t believe my uncle is letting you handle what must be the most boring case in police history.”
“It’s not that bad,” said Chase. “But it’s definitely not as exciting as chasing a couple of crooks dressed up like Jehovah’s Witness elders. Here, did you see this video?”
He took out his phone and showed Odelia a video. Unfortunately I couldn’t see from my vantage point, and I was frankly too lazy to get up.
Lucky for us, Odelia carried Chase’s phone over to us and showed us the video. It was clearly shot by someone with an unsteady hand, but it was still entertaining to watch: Johnny and Jerry running at full tilt, chased by a motley crew of crime fighters: Dan Goory, Charlene Butterwick, Uncle Alec, Gran and Scarlett. And the ones who actually caught them were Wilbur Vickery and Father Reilly!
“A regular team effort,” I said.
“Yeah, the watch did good today,” said Odelia as she handed Chase back his phone.
The lanky cop yawned and stretched. “I’m beat. Early to bed tonight, babe?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty bushed, too. Let’s make it an early night.”
And as the humans turned in for the night, Dooley and I were only just getting started. But first I needed a quick power nap, too.
Marge was still smiling when she thought back to the cats and their heroic fight with the Roomba. She should have been upset that they managed to destroy the thing, but she wasn’t. The Roomba wasn’t a real Roomba but a cheap knockoff she’d found in a store off Main Street and had bought for a bargain. Odelia had suggested getting it fixed but she thought that was probably not a good idea. If the cats had destroyed it once, they would probably do it again. Besides, the poor darlings were clearly terrified of the machine.
And as she walked into the bedroom, much to her surprise she found her husband seated on the bed, a beatific smile on his face and apparently staring off into space.
“Hey, honey. Boy, do you look happy.”
Tex seemed to wake up as if from a dream. “Mh?”
“I said that you look happy.”
“Oh, it’s because I finally found the perfect place to put my Metzgall.”
The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees as Marge’s mood plummeted. She hated that Metzgall with a vengeance. Tex had paid twenty-five thousand bucks for it, claiming it was the perfect investment, and a bargain at that price. She’d wanted to throttle him when she found out what he’d done with their hard-earned savings: spent it on an ugly painting of a hideous troll.
Sometimes she didn’t understand her husband. Really she did not.
And it was when she closed the bedroom door and discovered that the painting of the troll was hanging on the wall behind the door that she yelped in horror and surprise.
“What the…” she said, staring at the thing. So that’s what Tex had been looking at.
“I saw it in a documentary,” said her husband, sounding proud of himself. “Thieves will never find it, as the bedroom door is always open except at night, and we can still enjoy it by simply closing the door and looking at it from the bed.”
Marge stared at her husband. “You want me to look at that thing from the bed? Are you nuts? I’ll have nightmares knowing that gnome is staring at us all night.”
Tex’s smile faltered. “You don’t like it? It is a real Metzgall.”
“When did I ever give you the impression that I like that horrible thing?” she said, her voice rising both in pitch and volume. “I hate it. I want you to give it back to this Metzgaff guy.”
“Metzgall,” Tex corrected her. “And I don’t think he’ll take it back.”
“I don’t care! It’s revolting to look at and I want it gone. Out of my sight!”
“All right, all right,” said Tex, getting up from his perch on the foot of the bed. “Where do you want me to put it? The basement is too humid, the attic too dusty, the kitchen too smelly, and in the living room it’s going to attract too much unwanted attention.”
“Put it in the garden shed,” she suggested.
“But honey!”
“Or bury it for all I care. I want it gone—out of my life—gone, you hear?”
Tex looked like a kicked puppy when he took down the painting and carried it out of the bedroom. Marge shook her head. Men. They really were impossible sometimes.
25
As we walked out of the house, to go for our midnight stroll, strange noises drew our attention to the next-door backyard. And even though we are by no means guard dogs, we decided to go and have a look anyway. We may not be watchdogs but we are very, very curious, in case you hadn’t noticed.
“Do you think it’s burglars, Max?” asked Dooley when we set paw into the backyard belonging to Marge and Tex. The noise was coming from the garden shed, and for a moment I thought that Dooley just might be right. Then again, what burglar would target a garden shed? Unless hoping to fetch a nice price for a bunch of gardening tools that have seen better days and a lawnmower that has been in service for so long it will fetch more when sold as an antique than an actual mower.
But still we approached the shed, anxious to find out what was going on. When we took a peek inside, we discovered to our surprise that it was none other than Tex who was making all the noise. He was holding up a painting of a garden gnome for some reason, positioning it here and there, apparently looking for the perfect place to put it.
The best place to put it, I could have told him, was six feet under, although subjecting moles and earthworms and other creatures of the freshly dug soil to the hideousness of the painting would probably be considered cruelty to animals so that was out, too.
I’d never understood Tex’s obsession with gnomes, and this was taking his
love for all things garden troll to new and increasingly worrisome heights.
“What is he doing, Max?” asked Dooley.
“I think he’s looking for a place to hang up his painting,” I said.
“Did he paint it himself, you think?”
“Odelia told me he bought it off a guy named Jerome Metzgall, who specializes in gnome art. He paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it and now Marge is upset with him.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money for a painting,” said Dooley.
“It is. Tex reckons it’s an investment, and he’ll double his money in due course.”
“It’s not a very nice painting though is it, Max?”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed.
“So that’s a gnome?”
“Yeah, Tex seems to have a thing for gnomes lately.”
“Poor Marge,” said Dooley, taking the words right out of my mouth.
We decided to leave Tex to it. We had an appointment at the park for cat choir, and we didn’t want to be late. Shanille, cat choir’s conductor, hates it when cats are late, and we don’t want to provoke her ire.
So we took a late-night stroll along the roads and pathways that crisscross our fair town, and soon were inhaling that bracing ocean air the Hamptons is so rightly famous for. The park is close to the ocean. In fact you can walk from the park down to the beach in next to no time. Not that we’d ever do that. Cats are not all that fond of the ocean, you see—or water in general, I should probably add. Water makes you wet, and we hate wet.
We arrived at the park and found it already teeming with fellow felines. Harriet and Brutus had arrived, of course, and so had Shanille, and Kingman, Wilbur Vickery’s cat, but also Buster, the barber’s Maine Coon, and many other friends and acquaintances. In fact it isn’t too much to say that the feline population of Hampton Cove is one big family. I almost said a big happy family, but since that isn’t always the case, I won’t.
“Did you hear what happened this afternoon?” asked Kingman the moment he clapped eyes on us. “My human caught two serial killers!”
“They’re not exactly serial killers,” I said. “Or even regular killers. They’re thieves.”
“Well, they’re bad news anyway, and Wilbur caught them.”
“The way I heard the story Wilbur accidentally stepped in front of the crooks as they were running along the sidewalk,” I said. “So it’s not that he actually caught them. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Or the right place at the right time,” Dooley said.
“That, too,” I said.
“I don’t care how you want to tell the story,” said Kingman. “I’m still sticking to my version of the truth.” He’d spotted another cat—a female one, of course—and I could hear him tell her the same story he was probably going to tell cats all night, and all the nights to come: “My human caught two serial killers. Caught them red-handed!”
“My human was there, too,” said Shanille. “Father Reilly happened to step out and got in the way. They all tumbled to the ground and by the time he knew what was happening, Chief Alec had already made the arrest.”
“Well, good riddance,” I said. “Let’s hope this spate of burglaries will now finally be over and done with.”
“Of course it will be over and done with,” said Harriet, who’d also joined the conversation. “We caught the killer, Brutus and I. Isn’t that right, baby boo?”
“Yeah, we caught the bad guys,” said Brutus.
“So many people caught the bad guys,” said Dooley admiringly. “They really didn’t stand a chance, did they?”
I smiled at this. He was right. But then of course success has many fathers—or mothers—and failure none.
Still, it was time to give credit where credit was due. “I think you guys did a great job,” I said therefore. “And Hampton Cove is a safer, better place because of it.”
“Why, thanks, Max,” said Harriet, pleasantly surprised. “And I still haven’t thanked you properly for saving us from that monstrous device.”
“Monstrous device?” asked Shanille. “What monstrous device?”
“A Roomba,” I said. “You know, one of those vacuum cleaners that are fully automated.”
“It was terrible,” said Harriet. “I thought for sure it was going to kill us.”
“Max jumped on top of it and destroyed it,” Dooley said. “He saved our lives.”
“I could have jumped on top of it and it wouldn’t have put a dent in the thing. It needed a fat cat like Max to do real damage,” said Brutus, quite nastily, too, I thought.
“It’s not my weight that made me successful,” I pointed out, “but my technique.”
“Yeah, you have to know where to jump, boogie bear,” said Harriet. “And Max must have studied the intricacies of the machine long enough to know its weaknesses and to know exactly where he should land to put it out of commission. Isn’t that right, Max?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, though of course I’d simply jumped the thing and, like Brutus had indicated, my sheer big-bonedness had done the rest. Though I’d never admit it—ever.
I could tell that Brutus wasn’t happy, though.
“Cheer up,” I said, clapping him on the back. “The next Roomba is yours to tackle.”
“There won’t be another Roomba,” he grumbled. “I heard Marge tell Odelia she wasn’t buying a second one.”
“Father Reilly has a Roomba,” said Shanille now, surprising us all. “I love it.”
I blinked. “Love it?” I asked. “How can you love a Roomba?”
“It’s great fun,” she said with a shrug. “He uses it to clean the church, and I like to ride it from time to time. Very entertaining.” And with a light laugh, she assumed the position of choir director and raised her voice. “Gather around, cats! Rehearsal is about to start!”
“She likes the Roomba,” said Harriet, flabbergasted. “Shanille really is a weird one.”
“Maybe she’s a terminator herself?” Dooley suggested. And for the rest of choir practice he didn’t let her out of his sight, just in case she turned out to be a killer robot from the future.
I felt a little bad now. Maybe I shouldn’t have destroyed the thing. Now what was Odelia going to do about her dust bunnies?
26
Cat choir had been a smashing success as usual, and it was with uplifted spirits that the four of us returned home.
Harriet, especially, was feeling on top of the world. She’d sung her solo performance, and it had earned her a spontaneous round of applause. The fact that the applause was muted—it’s those darn paw pads, you see—hadn’t detracted from the warm sense of accomplishment Harriet had experienced, and it wasn’t too much to say she was walking on air.
“Once we get started with our quiz show,” she said now as we wended our way home along deserted streets, “I think I’ll sing a couple of songs in between the rounds. It will motivate and inspire the candidates, don’t you think, doodle bug?”
“Oh, sure,” said Brutus. “The candidates will be over the moon, and so will the millions of viewers at home.”
“Do you really think we’ll attract millions of viewers?” asked Harriet, her eyes shining at the thought of becoming a global superstar.
“Did I say millions? I meant hundreds of millions, of course. Seeing as there are a hundred million cats in the United States alone, I think it’s safe to say this show of ours is going to go viral and hit the stratosphere.”
“It’s going to leave Ed Sheeran and that Despacito guy in the dust,” said Harriet.
And as Harriet and Brutus shared their roseate dreams of global stardom, I saw that Dooley didn’t look happy.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You don’t seem excited about the new quiz show for cats?”
“Harriet took it over,” he said quietly. “It was my idea and Harriet and Brutus took it and now they’re saying it was their idea all along. But it was my idea, wasn’t it, Max?”
“Of course it was your idea, Dooley,” I said. “And Harriet and Brutus know this.”
“You think so?” He didn’t look entirely convinced.
“Of course they do. Besides, don’t tell them I said this, but I think their ambitions just might be slightly overoptimistic. Since cats don’t own smartphones, or tablets, and only very rarely have access to computers or laptops, I think the chances of a show made by cats for cats being a huge success are slim.”
“Oh,” he said, taken aback. “So maybe we should bring the show to television?”
I shook my head. “Apart from the four of us, do you know any other cats that have a certain measure of control over the remote?”
“You mean cats don’t have any say in what they get to watch on television?”
“No say whatsoever, buddy. None.”
“Poor creatures.”
“Yeah, you can say that again.”
“Always having to watch whatever their humans like to watch.”
“Can you imagine?”
“Having to watch things like Game of Thrones.”
“Or NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL. Or even NASCAR!”
He shivered at the thought. “We really are very lucky cats, Max.”
“I know, Dooley. We have the best humans. Who let us watch whatever we like to watch.”
“Like cat food commercials.”
“And the Cartoon Network.”
“And the Discovery Channel.”
I grimaced. “I’ll leave that to you.” Dooley is a big fan of the Discovery Channel, and likes to watch it with Gran of an evening. Of course he also watches soap operas and other daytime television with Gran, too, but that can’t be helped. At least the Discovery Channel gives him some food for thought, and a paw up for his general education.
We’d arrived on Harrington Street and were about to enter the house when I became aware of some strange goings-on at the house next door. Two dark-clad individuals came sneaking out along the narrow strip that divides Odelia’s house from Kurt Mayfield’s.