Cat Seeing Double

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Dulcie hurried through the village beneath pools of light from the shop windows heading home, praying the kit was there, an uneasy feeling in her stomach, a frightened tremor that drew her racing along the sidewalks brushing past pedestrians' hard shoes and dodging leashed dogs, running, running until at last she was flying through Wilma's flowers and in under the plastic flap of her cat door. Mewing, she prowled the house looking for the kit, mewing and peering behind livingroom furniture and under the beds, unwilling to speak until she was sure Wilma didn't have company.

  Determining at last that the house was empty of humans and of the kit as well, she called out anyway, her voice echoing hollowly. "Kit, come out. Kit, are you there? Please come out, it's important." All this in a voice that was hardly a whisper though her calls would reach feline ears.

  There was no answer, not a purr, no soft brush of fur against carpet or hardwood as she would hear if the kit sneaked up on her, playing games.

  At last, leaving the house again, she scented back and forth across the garden, and searched driveway and sidewalk for a fresh track. She raced up a trellis and sniffed all across the roof too and up the hill in back through the tall dry grass where hated foxtails leaped into her fur. Finding no fresh scent of the kit she grew increasingly worried. Kit hadn't been home at all.

  Well, she couldn't search the whole world, one couldn't search all the hills though she and Joe had tried to do just that when the kit disappeared for three days last winter.

  But the kit had been smaller then, and more vulnerable. She was a grown-up cat now. And, as Kit was far more than an ordinary cat, Dulcie thought stubbornly, she would have to take responsibility for herself.

  Hurting and cross but giving up at last, Dulcie headed for Lupe's Playa. I must not worry, I hate when Wilma worries about me. The kit is big now and can take care of herself. But Dulcie was so unsettled that when she saw Joe on the low branch of a cypress tree outside Lupe's Playa she scorched up the trunk ploughing straight into him, shivering.

  He hardly noticed her; his entire attention was on Ryan's red pickup parked just across the street.

  The passenger door stood open. A man sat inside, poised with one foot on the curb and watching the restaurant through the window, as if ready to slip away at any sign of Ryan.

  Joe Grey glanced at her, and smiled. "He opened the envelope. Removed Ryan's billing." They watched him fill Ryan's large brown envelope with the sheaf of papers from his pocket. "He opened the door with a long, thin rod. Only took a second. Opened the bottom of the envelope, peeled it back as slick as skinning a mouse. He doesn't see Ryan and Clyde watching." He looked toward the patio wall where the bricks were spaced in an open and decorative pattern offering passersby a teasing view of the garden and diners. In the restaurant's soft backlight Dulcie could just see Ryan and Clyde with their heads together, peering out through the wall's concealing vine. Talk about cats spying.

  "I wonder if Ryan called Detective Garza," Dulcie said, glancing along the street as if Garza or Detective Davis might have hurried over from the station to stand among the shadows.

  "I don't think so. She means to lead the guy on- that's Larn Williams, all right." Joe flicked an ear. "I was on the wall when he approached the truck. She told Clyde she can make a second switch, print a new, correct bill and mail it. Let Williams think he was successful, let him wait for the Jakeses to hit the roof because the bill's so high, wait for them to maybe file a lawsuit. She thinks he might tell the Jakeses that she cooked the books, even before the bill arrives, make up some story about how he found out."

  "Would they believe him?"

  "Are Larn Williams and the Jakeses close friends? We don't know a thing about them." Again Joe smiled. "One more phone call. Who knows how much Harper can pick up about Williams, while he's in San Andreas?"

  "You're going to ask Harper to gather information for you?"

  "Turnabout," the tomcat said softly, looking smug.

  Dulcie stared at him for a long time. She did not reply.

  Williams sealed the envelope and laid it on the seat. "Same position as he found it," Joe said. Quietly Williams depressed the lock, shut the truck door and slipped away up the street, disappearing around the corner. The cats heard a car start. He was gone when Ryan and Clyde emerged.

  Ryan drove slowly away as if she had no idea the truck had been broken into. Clyde, parked in the next block, followed her.

  "What will they do now?" Dulcie said.

  "She'll swing by our place, I guess. She left Rock there. I'm betting that when they finish going over tomorrow's work Clyde will follow her home. Check out her apartment. Maybe try to talk her into staying at her uncle's for a few nights."

  "She won't, she's too independent. And if Larn Williams wanted to kill her, why would he bother setting her up for a lawsuit?" Dulcie backed quickly down the tree and headed up the street toward home. "Maybe the kit's back, maybe she's raiding the refrigerator right now."

  And Joe, his stomach rumbling with hunger, galloped along beside her. Within minutes they were flying through Wilma's garden among a jungle of chrysanthemums and late-blooming geraniums, the flowers' scents collecting on their coats as they approached the gray stone cottage.

  Padding up the back steps and in through Dulcie's cat door, entering Wilma's immaculate blue-and-white kitchen, Joe headed directly for the refrigerator but Dulcie never paused, off she went, galloping through the house again searching for the kit.

  The first time Dulcie ever brought Joe here, she had taught him to open the heavy, sealed door of the refrigerator, to leap to the counter, brace his hind paws in the handle and shove. Now, forcing it open, he dropped to the floor catching the door as it swung out. The bottom shelf was Dulcie's, and Wilma always left something appealing; she didn't forget half the time the way Clyde did. Joe might find on his own refrigerator shelf a fancy gourmet selection from Jolly's Deli, left over from the last poker game, or the dried up end of a fossilized hot dog.

  Dulcie's private stock tonight included two custards from Jolly's, sliced roast chicken, a bowl of apricots in cream, and crisply simmered string beans with bits of bacon, all the offerings stored in Styrofoam cups that were light enough for a cat to lift, and with easily removable lids that were gentle on feline teeth. He had them out and was opening them when Dulcie returned.

  "Kit's not home. And Wilma's still gone. I think she said there was some kind of lecture tonight on the changing tax picture."

  "Sounds deadly. Why does she go to those things?"

  "To reduce her taxes, so she can buy gourmet food for us." She nosed at the array of delicacies that he had arranged on the blue linoleum. "I wish the kit would come home."

  But the kit did not appear. Joe and Dulcie feasted, then Joe retired to Wilma's desk to call Harper. He punched in the number but there was no answer. He tried again half an hour later, and again.

  "The phone's turned off," Dulcie said. "Leave a message."

  Joe didn't like to use the phone's message center, but he did at last, then curled up on the blue velvet couch beside Dulcie and fell quickly asleep. Curled next to him, Dulcie lay worrying. The kit's propensity for trouble seemed so much worse at night, when Dulcie imagined all kinds of calamities. She dozed restlessly, jerking awake when Wilma came in, and again at 6:00 in the morning when she heard her cat door flapping.

  She leaped up, fully alert as the kit galloped into the living room, her tail high, her yellow eyes gleaming. Above them, the windows were growing pale. Hopping to the couch, Kit nosed excitedly at Dulcie. "I found the old man. I found where he lives. I smelled chemicals so maybe it's where he made the bomb. I found where he dumps his trash. Why does bomb-making leave all that trash?"

  'Trash?" Joe said, sitting up yawning. "What kind of trash?"

  "Boxes and cans that smell terrible of chemicals."

  He rose to stand over her. "Where, Kit? How much trash? Where did you find it?"

  The kit looked longingly back toward the kitchen where s
he had raced past the empty plastic dishes. "Is there anything left to eat?"

  "We left a custard in the refrigerator," Dulcie said, "and some chicken."

  The kit took off for the kitchen. Following her, they watched her jump up to force open the heavy door. The minute it flew back she raked out the cartons, fighting open the loosely applied lids, and got down to the serious business of breakfast. She ate ravenously, gobbling more like a starving hound than a cat, making little slurping noises. She didn't speak or look up until the custard and the chicken had disappeared and the containers were licked clean.

  "All right," Joe said when the kit sat contentedly licking her paws. "Let's have it."

  "I need to use the phone," the kit said softly. "Right now. I need to call Detective Garza."

  Joe and Dulcie stared at her. "Come in the living room," Joe said. "Come now, Kit."

  Cutting her eyes at Dulcie, the kit headed obediently for the living room and up onto the blue velvet couch.

  "Start again," Joe said, pacing across the coffee table. "From the beginning."

  "I found where the old man lives. Up the hills above the Pamillon estate in a shack on the side of a cliff above that big gully and a chicken house hanging-"

  "Kit. How did you find him?"

  "I hid in his car. A black Jaguar with the top down. He drove so twisty it made me carsick again. An old shack and the chicken houses hanging on the edge of the cliff and I could smell chemicals and there weren't any chickens, maybe the chemicals killed them all. He filled his car with stinking garbage bags and went away and then I saw his car far down in the old ruins and-"

  "Kit," Joe said, "slow down. This is all running together. What are you leaving out?"

  The kit stared at him.

  "For starters, where did you find his car?"

  "At the police station. After he talked to that boy. He drove like fury. I didn't know why he had such a nice car or why he would load it down with garbage. I-"

  Dulcie licked Kit's ear. "Go slower. Tell us slower."

  The kit started over from where she had slipped into the old man's black Jaguar. She described the shack and how she had gone inside. How he had loaded up his trash and driven down into the Pamillon estate. "I went there. I ran and ran."

  The hills had loomed below her black and silent, and her head was filled with unfriendly beasts hunting for their supper. She ran listening for every sound, watching for any movement among rock and bushy shadow. Ran flying down the hills as night fell, trying to make no noise herself in the dry grass, ran terrified until the half-fallen mansion loomed against the darkening sky, and ancient dead trees rose up with reaching arms.

  Slipping into the ruins among the old oaks she had padded among fallen walls into the empty mansion with its rooms open to the stars. She could smell where the old man had walked, his scent thick, his old-man stink mixed with the nose-burning chemical odors. His trail led through the half-fallen parlor and through the kitchen and down into the cellars, his sour trail clinging along the walls.

  The cellars were too black even for a cat to see. She had to travel by her whiskers alone, by the little electric messages telegraphed from muzzle and paws. Warily jumping at every imagined movement, she drew deep beneath the mansion. A thinnest light came at last seeping in from a great crack in the cellar wall. And smells exploded suddenly, as loud as a radio blaring on. She could barely make out, ahead in the blackness, a looming form like a huge misshapen beast. It was silent and still, and it stunk: the garbage bags, black and lumpy. Imagining the old man standing there too, she spun and ran again back and up through the tunnels until at last she could see starlight once more, above the open rooms.

  Hiding behind fallen stones panting and staring out at the night sky, she had crept up the broken stairs to the nursery and into the old chest beside the fireplace where once her friend Dillon Thurwell had hidden. There, hungry and frightened and very tired, she had curled up in a tight ball trying to comfort herself, and soon she slept.

  She had awakened when the first hint of dawn shone in one long pale crack beneath the lid of the chest. Pushing up the lid with her nose, and crawling out, she had padded across the second-floor nursery to where the wall fell away. There she stood looking down at the heaps of rock and dead oaks that bristled like some gigantic devil's garden, stood looking past the ruins to the hills that dropped away below her. Wanting to be home right then, right that minute, wanting breakfast, wanting most of all to telephone Dallas Garza and tell him where that old man was, who had tried to kill half the village. Was she the only one in the world who knew where that old man was hiding? Consumed by her need she had leaped down the ragged stairs flying over heaped stones and through tangled bushes running for home, running.

  "And here I am," said the kit, licking a last smear of custard from her whiskers. "No one else knows where that old man is. No one but the boy because the boy's clothes were in the shack but that boy will never tell anyone." And she sailed to the desk and pawed at the phone, her ears and whiskers sharp forward, her long fluffy tail high and lashing-this kit who was scared of the phone but who, right now, was more full of herself and more eager to confide in the law, or at least to confide in Detective Garza.

  18

  "Very smooth," Joe said, leaping on the breakfast table, landing inches from Clyde's plate.

  "What's smooth?" Clyde said, wiping up the last of his fried eggs. "Where've you been? Your breakfast's getting cold."

  "Up on the roof, watching them put up the platform and stairs. Pretty fast workers."

  "Scaffolding. It's called scaffolding." Clyde glanced at his watch. "They got here before seven, one of the carpenters had the lumber on his truck. They're expecting another delivery at eight."

  "I gather Ryan's not a union member. She'd never get away with starting work so early." Already Joe's ears felt numb from the thunder of hammers and the rasping scream of the electric saws. He might boast superior knowledge and skills, for a tomcat, with none of the normal feline fears, but the sound of a Skilsaw or an electric drill still sent shivers up his furry spine.

  The scaffolding that Ryan had constructed along the side of the house, with a temporary stairway from the front sidewalk, was indeed a platform large and strong enough to support any number of carpenters plus a considerable weight in lumber and building materials. The men wouldn't have to enter the house except to connect the plumbing and, at some point in the job, to build the inner stairway in half of Clyde's small guest room. Clyde's present bedroom would become the new guest room, without his desk and weight equipment that now cluttered the little space. That would all be moved upstairs.

  "They plan to have the shingles off the roof this morning before the lumber arrives," Clyde said. "There'll be roofing nails all over the yard. I'm taking the morning off to vacuum them up, but you cats stay out of the way. Watch your paws. Stay inside when the truck gets here, until they've dropped that load of lumber. Be sure the kit is inside."

  "Anything else? Don't pick up any fleas? Stay away from barking dogs?"

  Clyde gave him a long, patient look. "I am only a human. You can't expect me to be as intelligent or perceptive as a feline. But because I am human, I worry about you. That is what humans do. You are going to have to make allowances. If you want to keep me healthy and happy and keep me bringing home the kippers, you will have to humor me. Stay out of the way of the truck. Is that clear?"

  "There is no need for early morning sarcasm. I already told Dulcie about the lumber. And I laid down the law to the kit. You don't need to write a script and do a two-minute stand-up."

  Clyde glared.

  But Joe Grey smiled. "A load of lumber in the yard will be the end of that patch of scruffy grass you euphemistically call the front lawn."

  Ignoring him, Clyde rose to rinse his plate. Joe nibbled at his own breakfast. "Very nice omelet." Savoring the Brie-spinach-bacon-and-cheese concoction, he pawed open the morning paper.

  DETECTIVE'S NIECE PRIME MURDER SUSPECT
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  San Francisco contractor Rupert Dannizer was found shot to death Sunday morning in the garage of local contractor Ryan Flannery, niece of newly appointed police detective Dallas Garza.

  Rupert's death had not come to the attention of reporters until the Sunday edition was already on the street. This Monday morning it filled me front page above the fold. There was no photograph of the body or of Ryan; likely Dallas had seen to that. Joe scanned the article, which said nothing that he didn't already know. The press had made clear mat the murdered man's widow, in whose garage the body had been found, was not only police detective Dallas Garza's niece, but was the sister of local interior designer Hanni Coon. And that Ryan's father was Michael Flannery, chief U.S. probation officer for the northern district of California, based in San Francisco. The article pointed out that Ryan had filed for divorce from Dannizer six months earlier when she moved to Molena Point to open a separate contracting business. It gave the name of her new business and some interesting details about the lawsuit in which she was suing Dannizer for half the value of their San Francisco firm, Dannizer Construction. That lawsuit was now unnecessary. The paper made it clear that, with Rupert's death, Ryan would be a wealthy woman. Joe scanned, as well, the Gazette's latest article on the church bombing, but it was only a rehash of previous reports, except for information on those who had been treated for minors wounds or shock, and that Cora Lee French had been released from the hospital.

  Now that Cora Lee was home, Joe thought, it was time to take the kit up to stay with her. The kit could have gotten herself into all kinds of trouble, up at that old man's shack. Cora Lee would love playing hostess to her favorite cat, and until this bombing business was cleared up, the unpredictable tattercoat would be safer-and Dulcie wouldn't be wound in knots. Joe was more than curious to see if Garza would run with what the kit had told him.