"You're saying he would have done it," Ryan said. "But then fate stepped in-as if Max and Charlie's guardian angel was looking after them, looking after all of us."
Wilma lifted her champagne glass. "Here's to that particular angel. May our guardian angels never desert us." And Wilma did not need to look beneath the table to know that the guardian angel was pressing against her ankle. That particular angel purred so powerfully that she shook both herself and Wilma.
6
The platters of party food were empty, the wedding cake had all been eaten or small pieces wrapped in paper napkins and carried away as little talismans to provide midnight dreams of future happiness. The empty champagne bottles had been neatly gathered and bagged, the tables and chairs folded and loaded into waiting trucks. In the quiet night the grassy, tree-sheltered median was empty now and silent and seemed to Ryan and Clyde painfully lonely. As they headed for the few parked cars, Ryan took his hand.
The bride and groom had left for San Francisco, for the bridal suite at the St. Francis, the loveliest old hotel in the city. They had joked about arriving in Max's Chevy king cab, and had talked about renting a limo but considered that extravagant. The pickup wasn't fancy but it was safe on the highway, and in the city they would put it in storage during their cruise. They had three days to enjoy San Francisco before they moved into the stateroom of their luxury liner and sailed for Alaska-or before Max realized that he couldn't leave, with the bombing case working, that they'd have to head home again.
"Maybe only a three-day honeymoon," Ryan said sadly, already certain of what Max would do.
"Whatever they do," Clyde said, walking her to Dallas's car, "they're happy." He gave Ryan a hug by way of good night, watched her settle in beside Dallas, then swung into his yellow convertible to drive the three blocks home, leaving Ryan and her uncle heading for her place to collect what little evidence might remain in the bed of her truck. Strange about the kid hitching a ride, hiding under the tarp where he couldn't be seen through the rear window-he had to know exactly when she'd be leaving San Andreas. He had made his way into the town itself, maybe hitchhiking, to wait for her there.
Clyde drove home thinking uneasily about Joe, and about the kit and Dulcie. The cats would be into this case tooth and claw.
A bombing was a different game than shoplifting, or domestic violence, or even domestic murder. A bomb investigation of any kind could be more than dangerous-and you could bet Joe Grey would be onto it like ticks on a hound.
Short of locking the cat up, there wasn't much Clyde could do to stop him.
Joe claimed he had no right to try. And maybe Joe was right. As much as Clyde wanted to protect Joe, the tomcat was a sentient being, and sentient beings had free choice. Joe could always argue him down on that point.
Parking in his drive, Clyde took a few minutes to put up the top of the antique Chevy. Following the slow, cumbersome routine, pulling and straightening the canvas and snapping the many grommets in place, he thought how strange and amazing, the way his life had turned out. Who would have imagined when he was living in San Francisco walking home from work that particular evening, when he paused to kneel by the gutter looking at that little bundle of gray fur among the trash and empty wine bottles. Reaching to touch what he was sure was a dead kitten, who could imagine the wonder that lay, barely alive, beneath his reaching hand?
When he took up the little limp bundle and wrapped it in his wool scarf and headed for the nearest vet, who could have dreamed the off-the-wall scenario that would soon change his life? That he was holding in his hand a creature of impossible talents, a beast the like of which maybe no other human had ever seen, at least in this century.
No other human, except Wilma.
It didn't bear pondering on, that Joe Grey and Dulcie had ended up with him and Wilma, who had been fast friends ever since Clyde was eight years old and Wilma was in graduate school. Through all of Wilma's moves in her career as a parole officer, and through Clyde's own several moves, they had remained close.
But how and why had the two cats come to them?
Dulcie said it was preordained. Clyde didn't like to think about that stuff, any more than Joe did. The idea that some power totally beyond his comprehension had placed those two cats where they would meet, not only kept him awake at night but could render him sleepless for weeks.
And yet…
Fate, Dulcie said.
Neither Clyde nor the tomcat believed in predestination, both were quite certain that your life was what you made it. And yet…
Entering the living room and switching on the low-watt lamp by the front door, he found Joe fast asleep in his well-clawed armchair. The gray tomcat lay on his back, snoring, his white belly and white chest exposed, his four white feet straight up in the air. Obviously overfull of party food. He must have left the reception early and hiked right on home and passed out, a surfeited victim of gluttony. Clyde turned on a second lamp.
Joe woke, staring up at Clyde with blazing eyes. "Did you have to do that? Isn't one lamp enough? I was just drifting off."
"You were ten feet under, snoring like a bulldog. Why aren't you hunting? Too stuffed with wedding cake? Where's Dulcie?"
"She took the kit home, she doesn't want her out hunting." Joe flipped over. Digging his front claws into the arm of his chair, he stretched so deeply that Clyde could feel, in his own spine, every vertebrae separate, every ligament loosen. "She's worried about Kit, afraid that old man saw her jump the boy and will come back to find her."
Clyde sat down on the couch. This thought was not far-fetched. Already Joe and Dulcie had been stalked by a killer because of their unique talents. If the kit had foiled the old man's plans, wouldn't he wonder what kind of cat this was? Wouldn't his rage lead him back to her? Clyde looked intently at Joe. "So where are you going to hide her?"
"I was thinking about Cora Lee French, when she gets home from the hospital. Since the play, she and the kit are fast friends. And that big house, that the four senior ladies bought for their retirement, has a thousand hiding places. Sitting there on the edge of the canyon, it would be a cinch for a cat to escape down among the trees and brushes-that old man would never find her, it's wild as hell in those canyons."
"Right. She can just slip away among the bobcats and coyotes, to say nothing of a possible cougar."
Joe shrugged. "We hunt that canyon now and then, we've never had a problem."
Clyde headed for the bedroom, pulling off his suit jacket and loosening his tie. You couldn't argue with a cat. Behind him Joe hit the floor with a thud, and came trotting past him into the bedroom. Glancing up at Clyde, he clawed impatiently at the sarouk rug, waiting for Clyde to turn back the spread.
Share and share alike was okay, cat and man each claiming half the bed. But one couldn't expect a poor little cat to turn back the covers.
Grumbling, Clyde pulled off the spread. At once Joe leaped to the center of the blanket and began to wash, waiting in silence for Clyde's inevitable lecture. You don't need to take your half in the middle. And as to that canyon, you can't possibly foresee all the dangers in that canyon. You do remember the mountain lion? And we can all hear the coyotes at night yipping down there. And those bands of raccoons…
When Clyde's words of caution were not forthcoming, Joe stopped washing to look at him.
Clyde said, "You are very cavalier when it comes to the kit's tender young life."
"That isn't fair. That is really insulting-to me, and to the kit. Kit can smell another animal, she knows how to slip away."
Clyde didn't answer.
"What would you do," Joe said, "if you were out on the hills and a cougar came prowling? You would simply keep your distance, use a little common sense."
"I'd get the hell out of there. And I'm not seven inches tall." He glared at Joe. "You can be so-cats can be so…
"Irritating," Joe Grey said, smiling. "Cats can be so maddening and unreasonable." Turning his back, he pawed his pillow into the requi
red nest shape for absolute comfort. He was just settling down, warm and purring, when Clyde pulled off his shirt. Joe sat up again, staring at Clyde's bare back, at the dried blood and raw, red wounds. "What happened to you? You look like you had a really wild night."
"Don't be crude." Clyde twisted around pressing against the dresser to look in the mirror. "That's the kit's handiwork-when she jumped on me to warn us about the bomb."
Joe watched Clyde dig through his top dresser drawer searching for the medication he used when one of the cats, or their elderly retriever, Rube, had a scratch. Clyde found the salve and, twisting and straining, began to spread it on the scratches.
"Dr. Firetti would be interested to know how you're using his prescriptions. Aren't you afraid of picking up something from old Rube or one of us cats? A touch of mange? Ringworm? Poison oak? Some ancient and incurable-"
"Cool it, Joe. This is all I have. I don't handle this stuff carelessly. I don't…" He stared at the open tube, and at his fingers, and turned a bit pale.
"There's iodine in the medicine cabinet," Joe said helpfully. "You used it on Rube when he cut his foot, but you poured it in a cup."
Recapping the tube, Clyde went into the bathroom. Joe heard the shower running as if Clyde were scrubbing off the dangerously infected salve. When Clyde came out again he smelled sharply of iodine. Refraining from comment, Joe turned over and closed his eyes. He was soon deeply asleep while Clyde lay in the darkness worrying about ancient and unnamed diseases.
Two floodlights washed across Ryan's drive, shining down from the roof of the duplex onto her new red pickup-not new from the factory, the vehicle was a couple of years old, but new to her, in mint condition and with really low mileage. A handsome new workhorse with locked toolboxes along both sides, and a strong overhead rack to hold lumber and ladders.
In the six-foot truck bed Dallas knelt examining the tarp that she had so carefully shaken out the night before and neatly refolded, unwittingly destroying all manner of evidence.
A few long black hairs remained, which Dallas removed with tweezers, and there were some short gray hairs, that Dallas hoped might have come from the old man. "I'll need to take the tarp to the lab."
"I have another." She watched as Dallas finished up. As he packed away his fingerprinting equipment and locked the truck, she went up the outside stairs to make fresh coffee. Filling the coffeepot, she wasn't sure how much information she could supply about Curtis Farger or about his two friends. She tried to recall the other boys' names, tried to remember which direction they came from when they arrived at the trailer, and to remember any chance remarks that might help Dallas know where Curtis had been staying. It was nearly midnight. With so little sleep the night before, it was hard to keep her eyes open. As the coffee brewed she stepped into the closet and took off her suit and high-heeled pumps, pulling on a warm robe and slippers. The idea that that boy had hitched a ride for two hundred miles, and she'd never known, both angered and amused her. You had to give him credit.
Had the boy set that bomb? Had he wanted to set it, or was he forced to do it?
The kid was old enough to know right from wrong, old enough to have refused to take part in such a deed, even when he was ordered by a grown-up. What kind of boy was this? A child terrified of crossing the old man? Or a twisted child, excited by the thought of murdering hundreds of people?
That was a hard thought to consider. A child warped and crippled by those who had raised him? She didn't like to think about that.
Returning to the kitchen, she watched Dallas pull a box of shortbread cookies from her freezer. He had his uniform jacket off, his collar loosened, and had poured the coffee and set the sugar and cream on the table.
They sat comfortably together the way they had when she was little, when she'd had a problem at school or when she wanted to hear for the hundredth time the old family stories about her dead mother, the tales about Dallas and her mother growing up on the little family acreage in the wine country east of Napa.
They remained talking until after 1:00, discussing the boy, and Ryan describing the Jakeses' mountain cabin where she had added a new great room, turning the old living room into a master bedroom. They both knew the foothill area well, the rolling slopes that were green in winter until the snows came, green again in spring until the summer sun burned the hills to the golden brown of wild hay, broken by the dark green stands of pine. Scattered vacation homes were tucked among the hills along with pockets of older shacks down in the gullies where the drainage was poor and there was no sweeping view. There were a few large estates too, back away from the main roads, like that owned by Marianna and Sullivan Landeau, the couple whose weekend house she had recently finished, here in the village. The Landeaus' San Andreas estate was huge, the house overbearing with its excessive use of marble. Not at all like the simple Molena Point cottage that Ryan had designed for them.
"Must be nice to have that kind of money," Dallas said. "What, three houses-one in San Francisco?"
She nodded. "Nice, I guess. But they don't seem all that happy."
Dallas broke a cookie in half. "And the boy-you have no idea where he lived, where any of those kids lived?"
"They came up the drive, but you can't see the road from the house. I never did see which direction they came from." She named the other two boys but she didn't know their last names, she was certain she'd never heard them.
"The kids didn't talk about their families. They hung around the way kids do, showed up after school as if they were on their way home, and once or twice on the weekend. They seemed open enough, and friendly.
"Right in the beginning Curtis was sort of nosy, asking questions about where I was from, and did I do this kind of work for a living." She glanced wryly at Dallas. "He looked… when I told him where I lived he did a little double-take, then immediately covered it up. We were busy surveying and laying out the addition, I didn't dunk any more about it."
She looked at Dallas. "Right then, did he decide to hitch a ride, when he knew where I lived? Did he have it all planned, weeks ago?
"And what was he doing up there? How did he get there, in the first place? And did the old man hitch too? That would make me feel really stupid, if those two were both in the truck." Ryan shook her head. "Did I give them both a ride so they could set that bomb?"
"Soon as we get a lab report, likely we'll start checking stores in the San Andreas area-hardware, drugstores, feed and grocery. That might be where the meth supplies were coming from. We sure didn't turn up with big purchases here on the coast. That raid on the Farger shack netted us a hoard of antifreeze, iodine, starter fluid, fifty packs of cold tablets, just for starters. To say nothing of the mountain of empties buried in a pit. But no record-or no admission-of increased sales locally. Could be they got their bomb makings up there too."
She looked at him. "I wasn't carrying their bomb supplies! In the back of my truck!"
Dallas shrugged. "That could be hard to sort out. Ammonium sulfate, for instance. The bomb wouldn't have taken much, compared to what a farmer might use."
"That would be sick, Dallas. If I was hauling their bomb makings for them."
"What time did you leave San Andreas? Took you about four hours to get home?"
"About seven in the evening. Took me five hours. I stopped in town to load some stained-glass windows I'd bought from an antique dealer. He'd said he'd wait for me. Then halfway home I pulled into a fast-food place for a burger." She imagined the kid hunkered down under the tarp, cold in the wind and nearly drooling at the smell of greasy fries and burgers. "Why didn't I see him? How could I have loaded the windows without…" She stopped, and sat thinking, then looked up at Dallas.
"When I loaded the windows, the guy had given me some cardboard to buffer them, so I didn't need the tarp. I tossed it near the tailgate, still folded. There was no one in the truck, then."
"When you'd loaded the windows, what did you do?"
"I went back inside to give the shopkeeper a
check."
"Was there any room left in the truck bed?"
"The windows were lined up in the front, riding on several sheets of foam insulation, and tied and padded. The back half of the truck bed was empty."
Dallas kept asking questions. Yawning, she went over every detail she could remember. The hitchhikers could easily have dropped off the back of the truck when she pulled into her drive. In the dark, she wouldn't have seen them.
"What other contacts did you have up there?"
"Lumber and building-supply people. Building inspectors. The furnace guy. A local realtor wanting me to do a remodel-a Larn Williams. Has his broker's license. Works independently."
"You take the job?"
"He wants to talk with his clients." She yawned. "I think I may skip that one. He seems interested in more than the work."
Dallas rose. "You're beat. I'll cut out of here."
She grinned up at him. "You never get tired, when you're on a case." She got up too, and hugged him, and saw him out the door. But the moment he pulled out of the drive and headed down the hill, she turned off the light and fell into bed, dropping immediately into sleep-she was definitely not a night person.
But others in the world loved the night, others found the small hours after midnight filled with excitement. While Dallas and Ryan sat in her studio trying to get a fix on Curtis Farger, Joe Grey woke from his nap in the double bed beside Clyde, woke hearing Dulcie and the kit at his cat door banging the plastic flap.
Leaping down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoying the cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean's wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn't pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves-they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.
Cat Seeing Double Page 6