How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery)

by Hale, Rebecca M.

Despite the temptations of the clattering pencil and the skittering clump of paper, Isabella had maintained a dignified stance on her seat by the easel. But as Rupert once more careened past on the floor beneath her, she couldn’t help joining in the play.

  With a flying leap, she bounded after her brother. A rolling ball of cat fur ensued, leaving the crumpled paper abandoned in a corner.

  Stepping gingerly around the wrestling feline pair, the woman bent to pick up the abandoned drawing.

  “Painter’s block,” Monty muttered at the ceiling. “That’s what I have. Instead of being stymied on a word, I’m struggling with an image.”

  In typical fashion, he had ignored the niece’s previous comments. It wasn’t an unusual response, just one of many in his repertoire of annoying mannerisms.

  His stance swiftly changed, however, when he noticed the woman’s movement toward the crumpled sketch.

  “Oh no,” he gasped, lunging off the recliner. “No, no, no. You can’t look at that. It’s not ready.”

  The niece paused, her eyes slanting suspiciously.

  It was only a short hesitation. Before Monty could reach her, she scooped up the paper and sprinted toward the front of the showroom. Monty followed, his long arms flailing as he tried to grab the wad of paper.

  Reaching the cashier counter, the niece tugged at the edges of the sheet, spreading it across the counter’s flat surface. Her brow furrowed in confusion.

  “This doesn’t look anything like me!” she exclaimed as Monty clambered up behind her. She jabbed her finger at the human figure in the drawing. “This person is wearing a baseball cap and high-top sneakers . . .”

  Monty snatched the paper from her grasp, but she had already seen the entire sketch.

  “And it’s a man,” she finished, perplexed. “Monty,” she said, placing her hands on her hips, “what’s going on?”

  Her chatty neighbor suddenly lost his voice. Inexplicably mute, his freckled face blanched to a shade of pasty pale.

  Shaking his head, Monty shoved the paper into his pocket. He returned to the center of the room, collapsed the easel to its folded position, and headed for the exit.

  The woman watched as he squeezed the easel and the sketch pad through the doorway and hurried across the rainy street to his studio.

  Pondering, she bent to pick up the charcoal pencil from the floor. Slowly rotating it in her hands, she reflected on the sketched picture.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t think why Monty would have replaced her position in the drawing with the image of Spider Jones—the young intern who was murdered in City Hall the same night the board of supervisors met to select the interim mayor.

  Chapter 5

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  “WHAT IS WRONG with that man?” the niece murmured as she slipped the charcoal pencil into a drawer behind the cash register.

  Isabella gave her person a blank stare, the feline version of a shrug. The woman’s question required far too long and complicated of an answer for the cat to attempt a verbal response. And besides, she reasoned, it was unlikely her human would have understood the explanation.

  Still puzzling over the image of the dead intern in Monty’s sketch, the niece walked around the counter to the front door and propped it open so that she could get a clearer view of the art studio across the street. The rain streaked down the studio’s front windows, but a light had been turned on in the main room. While still blurry, it was possible for her to see inside.

  Isabella joined her person in the doorway, and the two of them watched Monty’s slim figure pace around a row of easels. He appeared to be engaged in an animated conversation, agitatedly throwing his hands in the air as he stormed back and forth.

  The niece shook her head, relieved not to be on the receiving end of this overwrought display of emotion.

  The rant reached a fever pitch as Monty stopped and grabbed a picture frame from a stack near his desk. His narrow face howled in a silent scream as he raised the frame over his head, waved it threateningly at the ceiling, and slammed it onto the ground. Then he proceeded to stomp on the frame’s wooden boards, jumping up and down until he slipped and fell backward onto the floor.

  The woman frowned. The behavior was odd, even for Monty. She squinted through the window, her eyes searching the corners of the art studio, but as far as she could tell, Monty was alone in the room.

  • • •

  THE NIECE CLOSED the door, turning away from the scene across the street, but she continued to ponder her neighbor’s strange actions. Who was he talking to over there in his art studio and why had he thrown such a tantrum?

  Her earlier questions remained just as puzzling. Why had he superimposed the image of the murdered intern into her spot on the recliner?

  “And why did he make me sit there all that time if I wasn’t even in the picture?” she demanded aloud in frustration. She felt like stomping on a picture frame herself. “The nerve of that man.”

  Isabella looked up at the niece, her furry brow crinkling as she contemplated a response.

  The cat kept close surveillance on the Green Vase and its surroundings. As usual, she knew far more about the goings on in Jackson Square than her person.

  Deciding it was worth a try, Isabella emitted a series of sharp clicking sounds, an eloquent attempt to describe what was tormenting their neighbor, but at the sight of the woman’s confused expression, the cat cut short her commentary and reverted to the blank stare.

  “Spider Jones,” the niece said softly, setting Monty’s problems aside as she returned to the topic that had started the day’s trouble. “What’s all this got to do with the murdered intern?”

  Stroking Isabella’s soft fur, the woman reviewed what she knew about the horrific crime. The story had been widely reported in the press, and the niece, like the rest of San Francisco, had read all the gory details.

  The grisly scene had played out on the second floor of City Hall, inside a specially designated area called the ceremonial rotunda.

  Located at the top of the building’s central marble staircase, the elevated platform provided one of the best views of the building’s soaring dome and ornate interior. A circular third-floor balcony directly above the small round space conveyed an extra element of fairy-tale mystique. It had been a favorite spot for wedding ceremonies—at least, until last November’s murder.

  The crime took place less than an hour after the completion of the supervisors’ interim mayor meeting. City Hall had emptied out as soon as the marathon session finished. The intern was one of the few people still left inside the building when the interior lighting dimmed to its nighttime security setting.

  The assailant had apparently approached Spider from behind, reaching around the young man’s torso to stab him in the chest. Multiple blows followed in quick succession, an act of both strength and dexterity. Forensic experts estimated that the entire event, from start to finish, spanned less than a minute.

  By the time anyone realized what had happened, it was too late to save the young intern. His body was found in a pool of blood in the middle of the ceremonial rotunda—just a few feet away from the memorial bust of Supervisor Harvey Milk, who, along with Mayor Moscone, was slain in City Hall more than thirty years earlier.

  • • •

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the tragic death, interest in the victim continued to surge. Spider Jones had become a macabre celebrity. Posthumously, his grinning face was one of the most well known in the Bay Area.

  Family pictures of the cheerful dark-skinned lad in a baseball cap and high-top canvas sneakers had been widely circulated by the media. Every aspect of his short life had been extensively investigated and reported.

  Just a year out of high school, Spider was a local boy, born and raised in the East Bay suburb of Walnut Creek. He still lived at home with his mother and younger siblings. For the last several months, he had been taking the BART train into the city for an unpaid intern position with the outgoing mayor.

  I
n the days following his death, Spider’s tearful mother had given a heart-rending interview, praising her son as a good-natured young man who had enjoyed being outdoors, eating spicy takeout food, and riding his bike. He had recently retaken his SATs and had hoped to be admitted to UC Berkeley for its upcoming fall semester. Sadly, his college acceptance letter had arrived days after his death.

  Like everyone else with an interest in local politics, Spider had been hanging out at City Hall the night of the supervisors’ meeting, eagerly awaiting the results of the interim mayor selection.

  Once the meeting concluded, he had worked for a short while in his basement cubicle. Later, he had planned to meet a friend in North Beach for a bite to eat. Police speculated that he was preparing to leave the building when the murder occurred, although they were at a loss to explain why his body was found in the second floor’s ceremonial rotunda.

  Spider’s mother hadn’t been concerned about his absence that night. Her son was a night owl, she explained, and he routinely worked late into the evening. The night of his murder, she had gone to bed without worry, expecting to feed him breakfast the next morning.

  It wasn’t until she received the middle-of-the-night phone call from the police that she learned the terrible news.

  • • •

  THE NIECE RUBBED her temples, once more envisioning the sketch Monty had drawn on the textured art paper. After weeks of saturated news footage, the face of the murdered intern was permanently inked on the subconscious of most San Franciscans, but that didn’t explain why Monty had inserted the man into the drawing.

  Of course, in the two years since she’d first met Montgomery Carmichael, she’d failed to understand the motivations behind most of his actions.

  With a sigh, she wandered through the showroom to the dentist recliner, the spot where she had posed for the illfated sketch. Isabella followed closely behind, her dainty feet soundless on the wooden floorboards.

  The woman circled the leather chair, thinking of the distinctive image of Spider Jones on the crumpled paper. The insertion of the dead man—and her omission—were the only aspects of the drawing that departed from the posed setting. The surrounding Gold Rush relics had been replicated with meticulous precision; the fluffy round cat lazily stretched across the young man’s lap had been an exact duplicate.

  The real-life Rupert lay sprawled across the recliner’s leather cushions. His brief burst of frenetic energy had quickly dissipated following the earlier race around the room, and he had retaken his spot on the chair for a midmorning nap.

  The chair was still reclined into its flat, horizontal position, the setting in which Monty had left it when he leaped up to chase after the niece and the discarded sketch.

  Gently rolling Rupert to one side, the niece slid onto the seat beside him. As the cat wheezed out a peaceful snore, the niece’s thoughts returned to Spider’s murder.

  • • •

  DESPITE THE INTENSE public interest in the crime, the police had yet to make any arrests. Given the height and direction of the knife wounds, the perpetrator was believed to be of short to medium build, but despite the vast amount of blood spilled, no other substantive clues had been left in the ceremonial rotunda. Even the murder weapon remained as yet unaccounted for.

  In the days following the incident, several people known to have been at or near the scene that night were interviewed and, one by one, dismissed from consideration—leaving as the main suspects two men seen fleeing the building in the minutes after the murder.

  The first was a tall burly man with flaming-red hair, quickly identified as former City Hall janitor turned amphibian specialist Sam Eckles. The day after the murder, Sam failed to turn up for his current consulting position with the California Academy of Sciences. His name and photo had been widely distributed, but his whereabouts were still unknown.

  The second fugitive’s description was more nebulous in nature. An older gentleman with a balding head and short rounded shoulders, his identity was at first a mystery.

  Soon after, however, the police issued a bulletin seeking information on fried chicken entrepreneur James Lick, the front man for a North Beach fried chicken restaurant—and Uncle Oscar’s most recent alias.

  • • •

  THE NIECE THREADED her fingers into Rupert’s fur, anxiously running them through his fuzzy coat. Despite the suspicious circumstances, she refused to believe that Sam and her uncle were responsible for the intern’s gruesome slaying.

  Sam was a gentle soul, intimidating in size and frequently off-putting in odor and personal hygiene. But the frog whisperer’s large hands had held the tiniest and most delicate of tree frogs. His mannerisms struck some as strange, but he was fundamentally incapable of harming another living being.

  The niece felt similar confidence in her uncle’s innocence. Even after his last two years of clandestine activity, it was impossible for her to imagine him taking such a violent, malicious action.

  And yet, she thought pensively, the day of the murder, Lick’s fried chicken shop had been emptied out and shuttered. All of the pots, pans, and cooking implements had vanished—along with her uncle.

  Rupert let out a sleepy grunt of protest at the woman’s nervous tug on his fur. She couldn’t convince herself that the intern’s death was totally unrelated to Oscar’s disappearance.

  Reaching for the lever at the base of the chair, she pulled herself into an upright position. The chair back clicked into its vertical slot, but her fingers remained tightly wrapped around the metal handle.

  There was one more troubling fact she couldn’t dismiss.

  Her uncle’s short-statured height fit the only description thus far known about Spider’s assailant.

  Chapter 6

  A CLAIRVOYANT CAT

  ISABELLA PERCHED ON the edge of a display table, staring curiously at the leather recliner where the niece sat. The tip end of the cat’s orange and white striped tail strummed the table surface as she tilted her head inquisitively.

  Isabella and her person had been living together for several years now, and the cat was adept at reading the woman’s thoughts. She knew the murder at City Hall and the possible connection to Oscar’s disappearance had been weighing heavily on the niece’s mind.

  It was too bad that humans had such limited means of communication, Isabella reflected with a superior twitch of her whiskers. If only the niece spoke the cat’s more sophisticated language, Isabella could have given her a great deal of useful information—about more than just Oscar and the murdered intern.

  To start with, there were a number of minor everyday events that her person’s less advanced faculties simply missed or glossed over.

  For instance, Isabella knew that a brightly colored cat toy had recently fallen into the dirty clothes hamper. The catnip-filled packet was likely to cause the niece great consternation after the next wash cycle. Isabella had tried every possible means to alert the niece to this hazard, to no avail. The woman was destined to find the toy’s disintegrated remains in the dryer vent and strewn throughout the washed clothing.

  Then there was the large hairball that Rupert had coughed up beneath the couch in the second-floor living quarters. Isabella had been monitoring the cylindrical-shaped lump for several days. It had almost cured to the optimal weight and soft, spongy texture.

  Late one night when her unsuspecting person was on her way to the bathroom, the barefoot woman would step on the strategically placed lump and emit a terrified shriek—one that indicated she thought she’d accidentally smushed the body of a dead mouse.

  Isabella paused, reconsidering. Even if the niece were suddenly capable of understanding the complicated feline vocabulary, the cat probably wouldn’t share this tidbit with her. The fake mouse–hairball trick was far too much fun to spoil with a warning.

  Speaking of mice, Isabella mused, continuing the list of items her person failed to pick up on, a small family of rodents had taken up residence in the crawlspace beneath the stairs. Aft
er chasing a few members through the showroom, Isabella and the mice had reached a temporary truce. She would tolerate the mice’s presence in the Green Vase so long as they stayed clear of her food bowl in the second-floor kitchen.

  The cat lifted her head, proudly preening. She was nothing if not accommodating.

  • • •

  LEAVING THE NIECE still pensively gripping the recliner lever, Isabella hopped off the display table and meandered slowly toward the front of the showroom, pausing every so often to sniff at a floorboard or to rub the side of her face against a sharp corner. After a long course weaving in and around table legs and bookcases, she arrived at her favorite spot on the cashier counter and resumed her surveillance of the wet, wispy morning outside the store’s front windows.

  Isabella’s thoughts shifted from the mundane happenings inside the Green Vase to the far more nuanced machinations of Uncle Oscar and his crew. This was another area where the cat’s vast knowledge and expertise exceeded that of her human.

  She, for one, had always known that Oscar spent his days doing more than just cooking great chicken.

  The cat’s gaze dropped to the floor as she pondered the basement that lay below, stuffed to the rafters with Oscar’s eclectic antique collection. It also held the entrance to a secret underground tunnel that ran beneath downtown San Francisco.

  The tunnel was first formed during San Francisco’s Gold Rush era; its origins went back to the landfill expansion of the city’s downtown area and the coinciding construction of the Green Vase’s redbrick building. Over the years, countless individuals had used the passageway to slip in and out of Jackson Square undetected.

  It had been a busy thoroughfare of late. The most recent users included an intrepid antique shop owner, her two cats, an art dealer with lofty political aspirations, a burly amphibian expert, and a remote controlled mechanical alligator—in addition, of course, to Uncle Oscar.

  Isabella blinked, focusing her finely tuned senses. Her sonarlike ears closely monitored the foot traffic both above and below the showroom.