by Susan Conant
The main source of Felicity’s dissatisfaction with the reality of her very own crime scene was, however, the absence of anyone of obvious importance. Ideally, there’d be a police chief remarkably like the one who confided his findings to Prissy LaChatte and solicited her assistance in solving cases that baffled him. Too bad about the “all but in Newton.” The City of Newton just might be in the habit of dispatching its police chief to murder scenes, but Boston assuredly was not. Felicity’s knowledge of police hierarchies beneath the level of chief was vague. What’s more, her great and happy familiarity with British mysteries meant that she understood the titles and responsibilities of detective chief inspectors, superintendents, constables, and such far better than she understood anything about the ranks within American forces. Still, she knew a pooh-bah when she saw one, and there was, alas, none in view.
Prominently in sight and sound were a uniformed police officer of some sort and Felicity’s trash-fussy Russian neighbor, Mr. Trotsky, who was shouting at the officer even more angrily than he’d ever shouted at Felicity about allowing her recycling bin to trespass on what was, in fact, condo association property. The object of Mr. Trotsky’s rage was the police cruiser, which had two of its wheels on his lawn. Its front doors were open, its lights were flashing, and its siren was still screaming.
Undeterred, Mr. Trotsky was shaking a fist at the officer—constable? sergeant?—and yelling in accented but fluent English, “You know what my lawn service costs me? You wanna take a guess?” Answering his own question rather anticlimactically, he finished, “Plenty, that’s what.”
Mr. Trotsky looked nothing like the Trotsky of revolution and assassination. Rather, he bore what Felicity found to be an alarming resemblance to Joseph Stalin. He had the same heavy features, the same thick, dark hair combed straight back from his face, and the same oversized moustache. Felicity was certain that he cultivated the likeness as a way to intimidate people.
The policeman was apparently unintimidated. At any rate, he didn’t move the cruiser.
“This is private property!” Mr. Trotsky hollered. “It’s not a public street! That car is on my property, and it’s compacting the soil. The grass is never going to recover.”
Approaching the men and butting in, Felicity said loudly, “Then it doesn’t matter whether it’s moved, does it? If it’s too late now?”
Turning to the policeman, she smiled, pointed at the cruiser, and held her hands over her ears. Having mimed her meaning, she shrieked, “Is the noise necessary? There was a darling cat left with the man in my vestibule, and the poor thing is very frightened. The siren isn’t helping!” Back-tracking, she bellowed, “I’m Felicity Pride. I’m the one who called.”
The policeman nodded to Felicity and complied with her request by getting in the cruiser and silencing the siren. In one of her books, he’d have been astonishingly young or had an embarrassingly large nose or a marked stutter. In fact, he had to be thirty-five or forty. Worse, he was maddeningly ordinary, with no oddity of feature, speech, or manner to distinguish him from other characters.
“We’ll want to talk to you, ma’am,” he said.
“Of course you will,” Felicity said. “And the cat is evidence. It . . . he, the cat, the very beautiful and sweet cat—strikingly beautiful and very lovable, irresistible—was in my vestibule with the man. The outer door was closed. The man and the cat were obviously left at the same time by the same person.” After allowing a few seconds to pass, she added dramatically, “At my doorstep.”
The pause failed to achieve its intended result: The policeman did not ask about the significance of Felicity’s doorstep. Furthermore, Mr. Trotsky gave him little time to mull over the implications of her remark. Instead, he demanded, “You gonna move the car now?”
“This is a crime scene,” the officer replied with an air of authority and dignity that surprised Felicity, whose low-ranking law enforcement characters tended toward the buffoonish.
As Mr. Trotsky was composing his face in an apparent attempt to increase his already hideous resemblance to Stalin, a silver sport-utility vehicle approached from the Norwood Hill end of the street and pulled up in back of the cruiser. The driver rolled down her window, and Felicity recognized a woman named Brooke whom she’d met at condo association meetings. Brooke, like her vehicle, was large, showy, and silvery. “What’s going on here?” she called out.
In the cozy mysteries Felicity devoured, neighbors reliably nurtured the friends and relatives of the victim by brewing pots of tea, a beverage that they oversweetened and dispensed in warm kitchens. Sometimes they even insisted that the traumatized survivors couldn’t possibly stay alone, but must move into guest bedrooms and be treated by sympathetic doctors who made house calls and dispensed sedatives or sleeping pills. Felicity was not, of course, a friend or relative of the little gray man. The only drink she wanted was a second shot of Laphroaig, she wanted to sleep in her own king-size bed between Aunt Thelma’s luxurious sheets, and she had no desire to see a doctor. She was curious about the medications doled out in the English mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and would probably have been happy to sample them—what on earth was in a cachet blanc? and how had aspirin lost the power to induce deep sleep?—but didn’t want contemporary prescription drugs, all of which had modern and thus uninspiring names. Still, she longed to be offered any of the familiar comforts.
Replying to Brooke, Felicity announced, “Murder! Someone has left a dead man and a cat in my vestibule!”
“A dead cat?”
“No, the cat is alive. The man is dead.”
“Who is he?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen him before. A little man in a gray suit. I’ve taken the cat in and given him some tuna. And water. And I’ve made a little bed for him. He’s very frightened. Someone must have known that I, of all people, would make sure that he was all right.”
Mr. Trotsky interrupted. “What about the no-pet clause? You’re not allowed—”
“That means dogs,” Brooke informed him.
“No pets,” he replied.
“Well, I didn’t deliberately go out and get a pet,” Felicity informed Mr. Trotsky. “It was left at my door. He. He was left at my door. And he’s evidence in a murder. He’s a very important cat. He probably holds the key to solving the crime.” A Very Important Cat. Useful in her next book, perhaps? V.I.C.
“Probably has worms,” Mr. Trotsky said. “Diseases. Did it scratch you?”
“No. He’s very friendly. And sweet. Besides, he took to me right away.”
“They always know who hates them,” Brooke said. “Cats do. They have a sixth sense about it.”
“I don’t hate him,” Felicity said. “On the contrary, I’m crazy about him, and I love cats. I write about—”
“Cats. Of course. Well, I hope it all turns out for the best,” Brooke said, “but I’ve got to get some dinner and get to bed.” With that, she drove off, leaving Felicity to wonder how a murder could possibly turn out for the best or even for the half decent. Brooke was probably too exhausted to know what she was saying. She and her husband, whom Felicity had never met, seemed to work eighteen-hour days and, understandably, to spend their weekends sleeping. Indeed, many residents of Newton Park left for work early in the morning and returned home late in the evening. Felicity assumed that they were slaving to pay their mortgages. Whatever the reason, the result was what often struck Felicity as an unpopulated or perhaps underpopulated neighborhood. If the murderer had driven up in an eighteen-wheeler and deposited scores of dead men and live cats on her front lawn, the chances were excellent that there would have been no one around to notice. With only a slight feeling of guilt, Felicity realized that in one respect, the murder actually was turning out for the best: For once, the neighborhood was filled with people.
SEVEN
Sprawled on her back on the unmade bed, Brigitte exposes her pale blue-gray belly to the musty air, which seems to her neither stale nor fresh but
so familiar that it is taken for granted. She is named after Bardot but is no sex kitten. For one thing, even for a cat, she is flat chested. Also, she was spayed at an early age, and thus feels nothing for males and cannot attract them. Even so, her name, Brigitte, is pronounced in the French manner or in as close to the French manner as Bostonians can manage. Furthermore, at the age of two years, she is not a kitten except to the extent that her diminutive size and long, fluffy coat doom her to be eternally, if nauseatingly, known as Baby Brigitte. At seven pounds, she is only a little more than half as big as her absent companion, Edith.
Brigitte cannot be said to miss Edith but does find it dull without her, principally because provoking Edith is Brigitte’s favorite means to banish boredom. In every tiff between the two, Brigitte is the instigator and the loser. To those who don’t know Brigitte, it might seem stupid of her to tackle so hefty an adversary. Brigitte, however, understands Edith’s gentle, pacific nature. Provoked beyond endurance, Edith strikes back, but she can be relied on to yank out great quantities of Brigitte’s long, soft hair without inflicting flesh wounds. What’s more, Edith never holds a grudge.
So, lolling on the sheets, Brigitte doesn’t actually long for Edith’s presence but suffers from the tedium that Edith’s presence would relieve. Rousing herself, she leaps off the bed, flies to the kitchen, and attacks the dry cat food in the bowl that she and Edith amicably share. When she finishes, the bowl is almost empty. Brigitte is unconcerned. She has never experienced hunger.
EIGHT
Irked at the unliterary—and infuriatingly un-British—behavior of the police and her neighbors, Felicity longed to retreat to her kitchen to await the inevitable arrival of an important detective of some sort, preferably a chief superintendent, if the rank existed in the United States, as she suspected it did not. To fortify herself against shock, a condition commonly observed at crime scenes in British mysteries, she intended to pour herself a second shot of Laphroaig and broil a fillet of farm-raised Scottish salmon. Accustomed as she was to controlling the behavior of law enforcement personnel, she was chagrined to have the lowly policeman forbid her to enter her house.
“It’s a crime scene,” he explained.
“The vestibule is a crime scene, and I have no desire to go there. Ever again! I have already been in my kitchen, and I just want to go back.”
“We’ll need to check for signs of forced entry. Were your doors locked?”
“Of course. The doors to the house were locked. The outer door to the vestibule wasn’t. And I have already been in the house! If the murderer were lurking there waiting to kill me, I’d be dead now.”
“Do you have an alarm system?”
“Yes, but it was turned off. I never use it. I tried, but I kept forgetting the code or setting it off by accident. Please! I’m cold, and I haven’t had any dinner.”
As the officer was sympathizing, yet more official vehicles arrived, and for the next ten minutes, Felicity was temporarily distracted from her thirst and hunger by the sight of what looked increasingly like a movie set. Powerful lights flooded the area, and to Felicity’s satisfaction, uniformed men taped off her yard with official crime-scene tape. Just as in a mystery novel, the police were securing the scene. Hurrah! Better yet, after Felicity had surrendered her house keys, a pair of officers armed with real, actual handguns entered her back door to search for the presence of what Felicity knew enough to call “the perp” or to look for signs that the perp had been inside. Meanwhile, other uniformed men walked around the house, presumably to check for signs of forced entry. At the outskirts of the hullabaloo, neighbors stood around in small groups. Noticing them, Felicity couldn’t decide whether she was happy or embarrassed to have her house the center of attention. If the powerful lights had been mounted on media vans, she’d have been unambivalently delighted. Where were the media?
“I’m freezing,” she told the officer. “And I really need to use”—she lowered her voice—“the bathroom.” What was wrong with her! She should have thought of that perfect excuse a long time ago. Maybe she really was suffering from shock.
After consulting with his colleagues, the officer gave Felicity permission to enter her house and returned her keys. “But don’t go anywhere else. And please don’t discuss anything you’ve seen with anyone. One of the detectives will want to talk to you first.”
A detective! Felicity thanked the officer and made her way to her back door and into her house. After the damp of the November evening, the kitchen was as cozy as a British village mystery. The prospect of being interviewed by a real detective sent Felicity to the powder room off the kitchen, where she fussed with her hair and freshened her lipstick. Then, as she’d been eager to do, she poured herself a second Laphroaig, broiled the salmon, and congratulated herself on having attended a presentation for mystery writers about procedures for interviewing witnesses. An interviewer’s first task, she had been told, was to establish rapport with the witness. The point was vivid in her mind because the example given, namely, remarking on the weather, had struck her as ludicrous. Hot enough for you? So, what did the gunman look like?
Seated at Aunt Thelma’s kitchen table, she ate the salmon with French bread and a helping of leftover salad. Instead of depositing the salmon skin in the garbage disposal as she’d normally have done, she chopped it up and put it on a saucer for the cat, which had remained out of sight. Fish skin was evidently a safe food for cats if given as an occasional treat. At any rate, Prissy LaChatte fed it to Morris and Tabitha without provoking readers to compose the kinds of irate letters that Felicity had received after the publication of her first book, in which Prissy had foolishly overindulged the cats’ love of canned albacore tuna. “If those cats don’t start eating a well-balanced diet in a hurry,” someone had written, “they’re going to die of malnutrition, and where will you be then?”
Feeling and, indeed, sounding foolish, Felicity called, “Here, kitty!” Should she whistle? After placing the saucer on the tile floor, she picked it up and put it back in the hope that the sound of a dish landing on a floor would be familiar to the creature and would lure him out in time to play his part when the chief superintendent, captain, lieutenant, or whoever he was finally turned up. The cat, however, failed to come running for dinner in the gratifying manner of Morris and Tabitha, and when the back doorbell rang, as it soon did, all Felicity had to display in place of that crucial piece of living furry evidence in a murder were the pillow and saucers on the floor, and a kitchen that smelled unpleasantly of fish.
Opening her back door, Felicity was startled to see a tall and almost unbelievably muscular man with an exceptionally large head and thick, curly gray hair. In introducing such a character to her readers, she’d have described the color of his eyes as the blue of a Siamese cat’s. There was, however, nothing truly catlike about the man; if he resembled any sort of animal, it was perhaps a Clydesdale horse. His muscularity was not confined to his body, but extended upward to his massive neck and jaw. Even his cheekbones were brawny. What surprised Felicity was not so much the man’s monumental build as it was the memory of where she had seen him before and what he had been doing then: She’d noticed him at the Highland Games in New Hampshire a little more than a year earlier. He’d been tossing the caber, the caber being a log the approximate length and width of a telephone pole.
“Dave Valentine,” he said.
Valentine or no Valentine, Felicity thought, you look like a MacKenzie or a MacFarlane or a Campbell to me. Then, having wondered what kind of name Valentine was and what it was doing on this Scottish Hercules, she realized with horror that her mind was, in effect, the pitiful victim of demonic possession; it had been so aggressively invaded and conquered by her mother that unless she immediately exorcized the maternal demon, she’d find herself quoting “Scots, Wha Hae” and offering this tree-trunk-hurling Highland giant a wee dram of Oban.