Cat on the Money

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  When the look-alikes’ numbers were finished, the three performers stepped down to mix with the audience. One of them headed for the outdoor ladies’ room, carrying a black duffel bag that must have been tucked out of sight on the float.

  “Probably went to change clothes,” Dulcie said. “Those leotards look hot.”

  But she came out still dressed in skin-fitting black, still carrying the bag. The three women were separated now; as night fell and the jazz band began to play, they were hard to keep track of. Folks began to dance on the blacktop at edge of the beach, and one black-clad blonde moved away through the crowd toward a stand of cypress trees.

  “Stay here, Dulcie. Watch the others.” And Joe Grey was gone, following her.

  The entertainment was long, with readings, more jazz numbers, and an announcement by a representative of Molena Point Animal Shelter that 27 cats and kittens had been adopted. Dulcie, watching for Joe, began to fidget. Soon she was pacing the shingles, her ears back, her tail twitching, staring away toward the cypress trees and the sea cliffs. It was during a jazz instrumental number that she heard a sharp thunk somewhere behind her, as if the branch of a tree had broken. Nervously she searched the beach and the line of tall cypress that loomed dark in the gathering night. No sign of Joe, no telltale white chest and paws gleaming in the darkness.

  As the number ended and a jazz guitarist came on stage, Dulcie saw, five blocks away, two squad cars take off fast, moving south, their lights flashing but no sirens.

  Crouched on the shingles, she felt her heart thunder. What had happened? And where was Joe Grey? A siren screamed down the street behind her, and she spun around to see a rescue vehicle careen across Ocean, turning toward the beach. She took off fast across the rooftops. Joe was out there, he had followed that woman exactly where the police were headed. Galloping across ancient mossy shingles and through a half-built second story addition between studs and sawhorses, racing over the slick tile roofs of expensive oceanfront homes, she followed two more police cars to where the emergency vehicle had screamed to a stop.

  A black-clad body lay on the sand, sleek in its tight suit, the face very pale. A perfect replay of the corpse at Otter Pine Inn.

  Except this victim was a man.

  Larry Cruz lay surrounded by police, the paramedics bending over him. His diving fins and mask, his hood and weights lay scattered across the sand. There was a bullet hole in his chest. The medics were doing their best to stop the bleeding and bring him back. As they worked on Larry, Max Harper’s car arrived. Dulcie ducked down, watching the captain step out with Detective Juana Davis, and the familiar routine began. The yellow tape, officers urging people back out of the way. Davis with her camera, her dark, short hair falling over her cheek. Soon the coroner was there to do his chilling work. Dulcie hardly paid attention to the investigation, as she searched beyond the gathering crowd, looking through the darkness for a small speck out on the sand-and for the black-clad woman he had followed.

  Chapter Ten

  On the rooftop of the oceanfront cottage, Dulcie was hardly visible, so well did her dark tabby coat blend in with the shingles. Nervously, she watched the police below her working the scene, the curious onlookers-and the black-clad corpse so reminiscent of the corpse in the tearoom.

  The coroner knelt over Larry Cruz’s body, studying the bullet hole through the dead man’s diving suit and searching for additional wounds; although the single shot through Larry’s heart must have killed him. Dr. Bern was a thin, button-nosed man; he served as both coroner and medical examiner for the Molena Point PD. She’d heard him say there was no indication of drowning, that the victim had not been hauled out of the sea dead and then shot.

  Detective Juana Davis knelt beside him, fingerprinting the dry areas of Larry’s diving mask and fins, and searching the pocket that had been built into his diving suit-an unusual addition, Dulcie thought. Davis found it empty. Dulcie puzzled only briefly over what it might have carried, but her thoughts were on Joe Grey. Shifting from paw to paw, she peered away into the night where Joe had disappeared, perhaps following the killer, and she could not be still.

  Dropping from the roof to the top of a fence and then to the sand, she trotted through the forest of human legs and out toward the sea, doubling back and forth until she found a single line of shoe prints broken by a narrow row of pawprints, both tracks so fresh that the sand was still trickling in. Dulcie’s own paws sank deep. The smell of iodine and dead sea creatures filled her nostrils. The double trail led straight for the rocky sea cliff, some quarter mile away. Hurrying, slogging through sand and increasingly worried for Joe, she arrived at the cliff, panting.

  Joe’s prints ended where the rocky cliff rose up. The human prints led along a narrow strip of sand between cliff and sea. No breakers surged tonight, only an oily churning as the tide rose.

  Racing up the sharp promontory of jutting stone, Dulcie searched the dark escarpment, softly calling Joe’s name. There was no answer, no sound but sea. The bleak stone hill was empty. Padding to the edge, she looked down on the black and roiling sea and on the thin sliver of beach. A woman stood there, a black-clad figure, her face and hair as pale as a winter moon.

  Quickly Dulcie doubled back, scenting along the rocks, cold with fear for Joe. But then at last she found his trail, descending the cliff along a four-inch-wide shelf, one of a dozen accordion-like ledges tilting toward the water-ridges that had likely formed eons past as the earth heaved up in some catastrophic quake. Padding down the narrow incline, Dulcie shivered, not from the cold.

  She liked the sea from a distance, she loved listening to the ocean’s pounding heartbeat, which always comforted her. But to venture upon the windy cliffs at night, with the water heaving close beneath her and the tide rising, was another matter.

  Where was Joe? Where was Joe Grey?

  Beneath her sweating paws she could feel the earth trembling, too, from the pounding of the swells that broke at last against the cliff and that seemed to surge within the cliff, a hollow surging like water crashing into a hidden cave. Yes, there was a cave, it could be seen from another neck of land when the tide was out. Now it would be mostly underwater. Descending the four-inch ledge, she stopped suddenly.

  Joe Grey stood below her as if he had materialized from the rock itself, his white face looking up at her, white chest and paws gleaming in the night, his black eyes intense. They spoke no word. Joe turned to look below them.

  Down on the beach, the woman was pulling on a black hood over her blond hair. They watched her position a diving mask.

  Padding down the narrow ledge, Dulcie pressed against Joe, licking his face and purring. He gave her a whisker kiss and a soft purr. It was all right, when they were together. They watched the woman pull on fins, accompanied by a little ratcheting sound as she tightened the straps. She secured a pale stick to her leg, too, then backed down the sand into the sea. Diving beneath the oily dark water, she was gone, vanished among the swells.

  They saw her once, a dark underwater shape hardly visible, moving beneath the cliff and in where the sea hushed hollowly-and suddenly Joe Grey, too, was gone, slipping back into the hole from which he had emerged.

  Dulcie followed him through a crack in the stone, a six-inch-wide fissure, as if the cliff had split at some time or perhaps prehistoric tides had washed out a softer part of the rock. She didn’t like creeping into the blackness between stone walls that pressed against her shoulders and zinged alarms through her whiskers. The floor of the hole was wet and slick, and as they pushed into the hollowness, the sea’s surging came louder. Then, abruptly, the right-hand wall ended and the narrow shelf fell away, straight down to the sea.

  Dulcie’s paws were sweating. She fixed on Joe’s white feet moving away ahead of her, following him blindly until the ledge widened. Then suddenly below them a bright light moved beneath the dark, roiling water like the single fiery eye of a sea monster burning up at them.

  Splash. The diver surfaced, her light expl
oding up, bathing the cliff as they fled away from the edge. Crouching against the wet stone wall, they kept their eyes slitted so as not to reflect the light back at her.

  A black hand and arm reached up holding the pale stick, which had been lengthened. It had some kind of pincer at the end, maybe operated by a squeeze handle, Dulcie thought, like a stick for catching snakes, the kind used on TV nature programs. The woman dragged it along the shelf, feeling and poking and tapping, the stick reaching blindly toward them. They kept moving out of its way, backing deeper in-until Dulcie stumbled and nearly fell over something wet and slick.

  A package lay on the wet stone shelf, a hard bundle as big as a book, wrapped in shiny black plastic. Joe slid his paw over it. “The money?” he said softly. “The stolen jewelry?”

  Below them, the woman hung in the sea looking up, her light exploding the darkness. Could she see them? Crouched just out of the stick’s reach, they dragged the package deeper into the tunnel.

  The diver, growing impatient, began making little leaps out of the sea, so she could angle the stick higher. With every jump her light came higher, too.

  Taking one end of the package in his mouth, Joe backed along the ledge toward the mouth of the tunnel, the stick hitting and scraping beside him. Dulcie carried the other end, the two of them forcing it into the tunnel, fighting to pull it through. The light followed them, but not the stick. Had she glimpsed them when she leaped up? The way seemed twice as far now, the hollow pounding twice as annoying. But at last they were out, dragging the bundle up the narrow ridge, trying to keep it from sliding over the side. It seemed forever until they got it atop the cliff and lay panting beside it, their hearts pounding, the sea wind prodding cold fingers into their wet fur. The night was very bright, after the black cave.

  “I’m never moving again,” Dulcie said.

  “We’d better move, she’ll be up here.”

  “Did she see us?”

  Rising, Joe began to tear at the package, ripping the plastic until he could slip a paw in-and his soft cat laugh filled the night.

  When he pulled out a paper bundle, beneath his white paw, held securely from the wind, was a stack of hundred dollar bills.

  “She’s coming,” Dulcie hissed. A dislodged pebble rolled down the cliff, then the squinching sound of the woman’s wet diving suit. Shoving the packet beneath loose stones, the cats fought to claw rocks over it-stones too heavy to be moved easily by paw.

  “She’ll have a gun,” Dulcie whispered. “Larry Cruz was murdered-shot.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “I saw her kill him.”

  Dulcie raised her head, looking at him; she felt very small, the two of them alone on the cliff in the night. Far away, down the beach, the whirling red light and police spotlights shone bright and safe. They were frantically digging and pushing at the package when the woman appeared above the edge of the cliff. She was coming straight for them, her fins and gloves dangling in her hand, her blond hair whipping across her face.

  Chapter Eleven

  The night wind scoured across the black cliff, whipping at the cats, and the sea hushed and sucked below them as if it wanted to snatch them away. Quickly the dark figure approached, climbing. She had extinguished the light that was strapped to her forehead. Reaching the crest, she paused to strip off her hood and diving suit, packing them into the duffel bag with her fins. She gave no sign that she had seen them. They watched her remove, from the bag’s zippered side pocket, a snub-nosed revolver. The starlight caught its gleam.

  Wrapping the gun in a pale cloth and then in a piece of plastic, she took a small, folding shovel from the bag. She knelt almost where they had buried the black plastic package of hundred dollar bills, and began to move rocks aside. Clearing a space not a foot away from where the cats crouched among the rocks, she began to dig. They couldn’t let her find the money and be off with it-they crouched, ready to spring at her, hardly breathing.

  But she didn’t find the package. When the hole was a foot deep, she laid the gun in and covered it, patting the earth down, then stood looking up the beach toward the police cars, toward the moving spotlights where she had shot Larry Cruz. The cats could not see her expression. She turned away at last, and they watched her descend the cliff and cross the sand, heading away from the murder scene, watched her enter the village well to the south, among the quiet cottages, disappearing in the shadows.

  “Why didn’t she throw the gun in the sea?” Dulcie said, pawing at where it was buried.

  “Things wash back up. She’d have to go far out, maybe didn’t want to take the time. Maybe she means to dig it up later.” And Joe Grey smiled. “Max Harper will have it before she does.”

  “If we’re quick, he will,” Dulcie said, pawing sand from her whiskers. “I wonder what she thought happened to the money, when she couldn’t find it? I thought sure she saw us.”

  Joe licked his own whiskers, spitting out grit. “She and Larry fought. Larry said she was holding back, said they were supposed to hide everything, the money, the jewelry, the credit card slips, and split it all later. She said she only held back enough cash for expenses-she accused him of taking the money from her room. Larry said she was crazy. She shouted that he was double crossing her, and just like that she shot him. I didn’t even see the gun. She must have had it in her hand all the time.

  Joe Grey’s eyes were sad. “Maybe she planned to kill him all along. Come on, Dulcie, let’s get the money off this cliff. We can’t leave it here.”

  “But who would find…?”

  “Azrael. If he comes looking for her, if he catches our scent, he’ll find it.”

  “You think she’s his partner? But this evening, Azrael went into the Mink Collar just before she slipped away from the crowd and you followed her. She wouldn’t have had time to go in and take anything. Anyway, he left the door locked.”

  “He could have opened it any time. That shop was closed all day. She could have sneaked in before the floats lined up, then Azrael could have gone back later, during the parade, and locked it from inside.”

  Pulling away stones with their claws, they freed the black plastic package and dragged it between them down the cliff and across the deep sand. They were both panting when they reached easier going beneath the cypress trees. The package was so heavy they were sure it contained more than paper money, though it couldn’t hold all the small items that had vanished, the fine purses and billfolds and silver. Hurrying along over a mat of dry leaves, beneath drooping cypress branches, they headed for Joe’s house. They stopped only once, near the murder scene, where the antique cars were parked.

  Leaving Joe to guard the money, Dulcie slipped among the feet of the crowd and up into Clyde ’s open yellow roadster. Crouching on the floor, she punched in the message code on Clyde ’s cell phone. Her voice was soft. “Go home now, Clyde. We have the money. Please, hurry!”

  Hitting end call, wondering if he would check his messages, she slipped up onto the back of the seat for a moment to watch the crowd.

  She spotted Alice Manning, with her husband. Then a blonde in a black leotard. Then, some distance away, her twin. But no. There were three. One over by the hot dog stand-all three were there. The diver had returned. Talk about nerve.

  She hurried back to Joe. “She’s stashed her duffel somewhere and come back to mingle, as if she never left. They’re so exactly alike! Who would know?”

  Dragging the package through the dark streets for what seemed miles, they covered a distance that ordinarily would be a hop and a playful gallop. Reaching Joe’s street at last, and his white Cape Cod cottage, they hauled their burden up the steps.

  “This isn’t going to fit through your cat door.”

  “Push, Dulcie. If we can get one edge under the flap…”

  “It isn’t going to go, not even catty-corner.”

  They got it stuck twice, then Joe ripped the plastic open.

  “Hurry,” she said. “The whole neighborhood will see us, with the porch light
on. Why did he leave the light on!”

  Tearing with claws and teeth, they shoved one pack of hundred dollar bills through, then another, littering Clyde ’s living room with enough cash to keep every cat in the village in caviar for the rest of its natural life. Beneath the money lay a dozen small plastic freezer bags filled with jewelry. Pushing it all through, they carried each bag and packet across the room, drooling some on the money, and stuffed them under the cushion of Joe Grey’s personal and ratty overstuffed chair-its cushions so lumpy that who could tell if there was a fortune crammed down atop the springs.

  “Very nice,” purred a rasping voice behind them.

  They spun, crouching, teeth bared, ears back.

  “You two little kitties work very well together,” the black tom said. He stood in the dark dining room, his amber eyes mirroring light from the front window. “You’ve brought it all out from the cave for us. How thoughtful. Come have a look, my dear.”

  A woman stepped from the kitchen, her blond hair tangled. She wore a blue sweater over her black leotard; she smelled strongly of the sea. Joe wondered where Rube was; he prayed they hadn’t hurt the old black Labrador. Normally Rube would be growling and barking. There was not a sound, and that worried Joe. Rube was growing frail, getting on in years.

  The woman looked at Joe’s chair, where Azrael was clawing the cushion aside. “So, we have the contents of our package. Very nice.” She smiled coldly. “And these are the other two with your talents, old tomcat! How good of them to help us.” Striding across the room, she tossed the chair cushion away and began to scoop the money and jewelry into a canvas bag. Her voice was not Dorothy’s harsh tones, nor Beverly ’s sweet ones.

  Gail Gantry. Bending over Joe’s chair, filling the bag with money.

  Crouching, Joe Grey leaped, clawing and biting her, unwilling to abandon what they had worked to retrieve. Azrael sprang at Joe-and Dulcie hit Azrael hard in an explosion of claws and teeth. Gail was in the middle, striking at cats and shouting when from the kitchen a black cyclone exploded barking and jumping at her.