Cat Seeing Double
Page 20
Because the apartment Cora Lee had recently vacated had been all in shades of cream and white and cafe au lait, Wilma expected the large, sunny upstairs retreat to be much the same.
But this room was wild with color, as bright as the Dixieland jazz that Cora Lee and Wilma loved. The walls were a soft tomato red. The long, cushioned seat that filled the big bay window, the wicker armchairs, and the bed, were piled with patterned pillows brighter than the artist's paints that Cora Lee favored. The room was a medly of reds and greens and blues and every possible color, all in the smallest and most intricate patterns. Pillows like jewels, like flower gardens; and Cora Lee's paintings on the walls were just as bright.
The kit, crouched on Cora Lee's shoulder, looked and looked, then leaped into the heap of cushions on the window seat rolling and purring.
"I think," Wilma said, "that she likes it. I love it!"
Cora Lee stood in the center of the room caught between laughter and amazement. "She does like it. Well, new things always smell good to cats. But… look at her pat at the brightest colors. Cats don't see color?"
"Maybe they do," Wilma said uneasily. "The world of science hasn't discovered everything yet." She glanced at Dulcie who stood beyond Cora Lee admiring every detail, and the two shared a look of delight. The private chamber was jewels set in cream, flowers scattered on velvet. The minute Cora Lee sat down on the window seat the kit stepped into her lap, nuzzling her hand, looking from her to Wilma so intelligently, so much as if she meant to join in the conversation, that Wilma stiffened, and Dulcie leaped to the cushions to distract her.
But the real distraction was the tea that Cora Lee had set out on the coffee table before the blazing fire. As the two women made themselves comfortable, the cats looked with interest at the lemon bars and shortbread; and Wilma fixed her gaze on the kit. 'This is your home for a little while, Kit. You are to behave yourself, you are to mind your manners."
Cora Lee grinned at Wilma's stern tone, but Wilma's look at the kit was serious and cautionary. Don't speak, Kit. Don't answer by mistake. Don't speak to Cora Lee. Don't open securely closed doors or locked windows. Don't under any circumstance forget. Do not talk to Cora Lee or to anyone. Keep your little cat mouth shut.
The kit understood quite well. She smiled and purred and washed her paws. Certainly she was content to behave herself, at least until late at night. Only then, if her wanderlust grew too great, who would know? If, while Cora Lee slept, she lifted the window latch and roamed, who was to see her?
Meanwhile the bits of tea cake that Cora Lee fixed on two small plates were delicious. The kit, finishing first, eyed Dulcie's share but she daren't challenge Dulcie. She listened to Wilma's half-truths about how she had had a prowler and was worried about the kit because of her reputation as a highly trained performing cat, how she thought it best to get her away for a while.
Early this summer when the kit's surprise appearance onstage with Cora Lee had turned out to be the sensation of the village, Wilma had gone to great lengths to make Kit's appearance seem the product of long hours of careful training. But even trained cats were valuable.
"I'll keep her safe," Cora Lee said. "We all know the doors must be kept shut. I have no theater sets to work on now, not until close to Christmas. I'll be right here most of the time, working on the house. We still have the two downstairs apartments to paint and recarpet. Kit will be up here, two floors away from the paint fumes, and with the windows just cracked open-she can't get through those heavy screens. I've hidden some toys and games for her around the room, that should keep her entertained. Well, she's already started to find them."
The kit, exploring the bedroom, had discovered an intricate cardboard structure with many holes where, within, a reaching paw could find and slap a Ping-Pong ball. Next to it, hardly hidden but blending nicely in the fanciful room, stood a tall, many-tiered cat tree that led up to a high, small window. She found a tennis ball beneath Cora Lee's chair, and a catnip mouse under the bed.
"You will," Wilma told the kit again, sternly, "behave as we expect you to do. You will mind Cora Lee and stay inside this room, you will not slip away on some wild midnight excursion."
Cora Lee laughed. "I'll see that she behaves."
But the kit's look at Wilma was so patently innocent that all Wilma's alarms went off-alarms just as shrill as when, during her working career, she had assessed a parolee's too-innocent look and listened to his honeyed lies.
The sheriff pulled up beside Max's pickup, drowning them in dust. He was a heavy man, maybe six-four, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones, and in Charlie's opinion an overly friendly smile. He loaded Hurlie into the backseat of his unit, behind the wire barrier. "What charges?"
"Interfering with the duties of a law-enforcement officer," Max said. "Harboring a felon."
"Fine with me."
"And obstructing justice. I'll want his prints."
The sheriff nodded. "You want to toss his place? You have a warrant for the old man. Or I can do it on the way down."
Max considered. "Let's run down together and have a crack at it."
The sheriff made Hurlie hand over his keys, and moved Hurlie's truck onto the shoulder; Max and Charlie followed him down toward Little Fish Creek. As the two men entered the cabin, Charlie waited in the truck. Max had parked where she could see in through the window of the one-room shack. A single bed, covers in a tangle. An easy chair so ragged that not even Joe Grey would tolerate it, far scruffier than Joe's clawed and hairy masterpiece. One plate and cup on the rough wooden sink drain. A door open to a fusty-looking little bathroom that she imagined would be dark with mold. Max and Sheriff Beck were in the shack for nearly half an hour; she watched them going through the few cupboards, checking under the mattress, pulling off wallboard and ceiling tiles in various locations. They performed similar searches in the two scruffy outbuildings. The sheriff's unit, parked directly in front of the shack, afforded prisoner Hurlie Farger a direct view of her. She sat sideways, with her back to him, but she could feel him staring. Max came away from the search looking sour. He stood a moment in the dusty yard beside the truck, with the sheriff.
"You ask questions around those estates," Beck said softly, "you might want to watch yourself. DEA seems interested in that area. They took out two small marijuana plots up in the national forest, day before yesterday, and they still have a plane up. I haven't heard of anything on those estates, but they're all big places and there's sure plenty of money up there."
"I'll be careful," Max said, studying Beck. He nodded to the sheriff. And the officer stepped into his unit and pulled away, chauffeuring Hurlie Farger to a cleaner bed man he was used to.
Swinging into the pickup, Max grinned at Charlie. "What?" he said, seeing her uncertain look.
"I half thought you were going to ask me to ride back with the sheriff. So you could run this one alone."
"Would you have gone?"
"I wouldn't have gotten into that patrol car with Hurlie Farger, even with the sheriff there, if you gave me a direct order to that effect."
Max studied her with a small, twisted smile. "I don't think I'd want to try giving you a direct order, Charlie Harper." And he headed up the hills and across a forested plateau approaching the Landeau estate.
But sitting close beside Max, Charlie was quiet, trying to rearrange her thinking. Hurlie Farger had scared her. Something in his eyes, as well as his bold challenge of Max's authority, had left her chilled. And the sheriff's attitude hadn't helped.
Well, she had to learn to live with this stuff, learn to accommodate the ugly, adrenaline-packed moments. In fact, she guessed maybe it was time for a down-to-earth assessment of the way she looked at the world.
She had never been hidebound in what she expected of life. Life was what you made of it, and you sure didn't have to knuckle under just because there were bad guys around. But marrying Max had made her far more aware of that element. Had shoved people like Hurlie Farger right in her face.
She just wanted, right now, to get through this visit to those estates, to the Landeau place, get through the day and be alone again with Max.
Maybe the aftermath of the church bombing was still with her. The pain of the last few days mixed with Hurlie's attitude had hit home unexpectedly. Laying her hand on Max's knee and leaning to kiss his cheek, she looked ahead to the tall, marbled-faced Landeau mansion with its high forbidding wall. This was just a routine visit. It would soon be over. They'd soon be alone again cuddled before the fire at the inn, ordering in a hot, comforting supper.
21
Clyde's attic, once a dark tomb for generations of deceased spiders, was now free of cobwebs and dust and ancient mouse droppings, and swept clean of sawdust. The last rich light of the setting sun gleamed in where the end wall had been removed, and a soft breeze wandered through, sweet with the scents of cypress and pine. The attic was silent too, the power tools and hammers stilled, the carpenters gone for the day-it was Joe's space now. He lay stretched out across a sheet of plywood that was propped on two sawhorses, lay relaxed and purring, digesting a half-bag of corn chips that had been abandoned by one of the carpenters. The wind off the sea caressed him. The buzz of a dispossessed wasp distracted him only faintly, humming among the rafters. He was nearly asleep when footsteps on the temporary stairway forced him to lift his head- though really no action was required, he knew that step. Clyde's head appeared at the north end of the attic silhouetted in the bright triangular space. Rising up the last steps, Clyde ducked beneath the apex, walking hunched over. By this time tomorrow evening he would be able to stand tall, would be able to reach up and not even touch the ceiling-barring some delay in construction, Joe thought. Barring some accident. What if, tomorrow morning, the roof-jacks didn't hold until the newly raised walls had been secured? What if…
But such thoughts belonged to the more human aspect of his nature. Humans loved to fret over the disaster that hadn't happened and likely wouldn't happen. Joe's more equitable feline persona lived for the moment and let the future fall how it might, pun intended.
Yawning, he considered Clyde with interest. Clyde stood with his back to Joe, looking out toward the sea, his short black hair mussed up into peaks the way it got when he was irritated. Was he not seeing Ryan tonight? Certainly he wasn't dressed for an exciting evening or even a casual dinner. Arriving home, he had pulled on his oldest, scruffiest polo shirt, the purple one with the grease stains across the front and the hole in the sleeve. And when Clyde turned to look at him, his scowl implied, indeed, an incredibly bad mood. Joe licked his whiskers. "You look sour enough to chew the roof off."
No response.
"This is more than a bad day at the shop. Right?"
Nothing. Clyde's body was rigid with annoyance.
"You have a fight with Ryan? But she's doing a great job, the new room will be something. I love that you can see right down to the beach, between the roofs and trees."
A slight shifting of shoulders.
"And the new tower," Joe said. "That's going to be some kind of elegant cat house."
Clyde continued to glare.
"What did you fight about?" Joe studied Clyde's ruddy face trying to read what exactly that particular scowl might mean. "She's too hardheaded and independent?" he asked tentatively-as if he were Clyde's shrink drawing him out. "She wants to install pink flamingos in the front yard with fake palm trees?"
Clyde sat down on a carpenter's stool, a boxy little bench used for tool storage, for cutting a board, for scabbing two boards together, to stand on, or to sit on while eating lunch, a very clever little piece of furniture. He glared. "She's going out with that guy tonight. Out to dinner. The guy who broke into her truck and switched her billing. She's going out with him."
"Why would she do that? The guy's a crook. He tried to set her up. Why would she…" He stared at Clyde. "She's going to set him up? But what does she…?"
"She wants to see what else he might try. He doesn't know she switched the billing back to the original, he'll think the fake bill is in the mail. She wants to see what he'll talk about, what questions he might ask her. She thinks she can figure out what he's after."
"Oh, that's smart. What if he killed Rupert? Say he murdered her husband. Shot him in the head. So she goes out to dinner with him." Joe looked hard at Clyde, assessing his housemate. "You couldn't stop her short of locking her up. And you're scared for her."
Clyde nodded, looking miserable.
"So, follow them."
"She figured I might. She said that would blow it, said maybe he knows me and would certainly know my yellow roadster. That I might put her in danger."
Joe sighed. He licked his paw, waiting. But Clyde was silent again-far be it from Clyde to come out and ask for help. "So, where are they going?"
"She's meeting him at the Burger Basher at seven. She called me at work, broke our date for dinner. Asked if I'd keep Rock for a couple of hours. I thought I'd…"
"What? Just happen in for a beer? That'll fix it."
"I plan to wait outside. In case she needs someone. In case he tries to strong-arm her, get her in his car."
"That's so melodramatic."
"And a dead body in her garage is not melodramatic."
Joe washed his right ear. "And that's why you drove that old brown Hudson home. I wondered what that was about."
"She's never seen that car, and certainly Williams wouldn't have seen it."
Clyde had in his upscale automotive shop, in a private garage at the rear of the complex, enough rare old cars to run surveillance in a different vehicle every night for a month. Clyde's assortment of classic and antique models, all waiting to be restored, might seem to some a monstrous collection of junk. To Clyde Damen those old cars were CDs in the bank, gold under the mattress.
Clyde looked at him a long time.
Joe licked some crumbs from inside the ripped-open corn chip bag. "Burger Basher. Seven o'clock. Okay. So you owe me one."
"How would you go about it without getting-without them seeing you?"
"Feeling guilty already?"
"Burger Basher is all open, just that little low wall around the patio, then the sidewalk. And Ryan knows you. If she sees you schlepping around there, she'll have to wonder. She already thinks you're a bit strange."
"Strange in what way? Why would she think me strange? And what's she going to wonder? If I'm running surveillance? Oh, right."
"That little trick with the mice on her doorstep, you think I didn't have to stretch to make that little caper seem even remotely unremarkable? What made you…?"
"Do you want my help or not? I have a hundred ways to spend my evening."
Clyde shrugged, looking embarrassed.
"And," Joe said, eyeing Clyde closely, "I have a hundred ways to listen to those two without being seen. In return, if you want to contribute a little something tasty to my supper plate before I undertake this risky venture…"
"Tasty is such a crass word, even for a cat. It isn't a word. I've never heard you use such a common expression."
Joe smiled. "Dulcie couldn't agree more. She thinks that word is incredibly crude. Let's put it this way. I'm hungry. I'd like something for my dinner that is in keeping with my elevated status as your newly hired private investigator."
Clyde moved toward the stairs. "I just happened to bring home some filet. I'll go on down and slap it in the skillet."
Clyde's skillet-broiled steak, rare and juicy in the middle, crisp and dark on the outside, suited Joe just fine. Leaping past Clyde down the stairs, he headed for the kitchen to sit in the middle of the table as Clyde put supper together. "What time is he picking her up?"
"They're meeting there, at seven. She wanted it to seem as little like a date as possible, just friends meeting f
or dinner."
"You better park a block away. If she's in immediate danger I'll slip out and alert you. I wish, at times like this, that I had access to a walkie-talkie or a small and unobtrusive cell phone."
"Don't you think a cat carrying a phone around the village is going to attract attention?"
"Not if an enterprising firm would make one that looks like an electronic flea collar. It wouldn't have to ring, it could just vibrate. And…"
Clyde turned away to dish up supper.
And Joe, savoring his steak, looked forward with great anticipation to the evening. There was nothing, absolutely nothing as satisfying as sharing your professional skills with those who were less talented.
At seven in the evening Burger Basher's patio was crowded to overflowing: people had gathered out on the sidewalk and sat on the two-foot high wall of the patio, waiting for their names to be called. Ryan and Larn sat on the wall, drinking beer from tall mugs. Half a block away, Joe watched them through the windshield of Clyde's old Hudson. Beside him Clyde had slouched down in the seat with a cap pulled over his eyes, a real B-movie heavy, so ludicrous Joe nearly choked, laughing.
"So what are they doing?" Clyde said, his voice muffled.
"Still waiting for their table. From the looks of the crowd, I'd say about twenty minutes. Williams parked just down the street. He's driving a white SUV, not the gray hatchback."
"Hope they don't decide to take a walk. Maybe I should move the car."
"Don't fuss. No one's going to spot you, you look like an old wino gearing up for a big night of panhandling. Turn on the radio. Listen to a tape. Play some nice hot jazz and let me concentrate. I need to figure where I want to land, in there-the place is about as accommodating as an airport terminal at rush hour."
"I told you it was too open. And why would I turn on the radio? I can hear the restaurant tape just fine. How about that little service counter? You could hide behind the coffeepots."
"And if I suffer third-degree burns? We don't have pet insurance." Studying the crowded dining patio, Joe picked out four possible refuges, none of which looked adequate to hide a healthy mouse. Listening to the sweet, rocking runs of Ella Fitzgerald, he considered the layout.