Cat Chase the Moon

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Juana’s dark eyes smiled down at Joe, and she scratched his ears. Her black hair had just been cut, straight black bangs, smooth black bob above her collar, a few streaks of gray that gave it a nice flair. Her black uniform smelled of her two young cats. Max Harper’s western shirt and jeans smelled of horses. Across the desk, Dallas Garza looked at Joe with interest just as Max was looking, Dallas’s dark Latin eyes half amused, half questioning. “Why do you always show up when new information has just hit the desk?”

  “Leave the poor cat alone,” Juana said. “Look how frazzled he is, he’s probably been out half the night hunting for his kitten. Looks like the whole village is looking for her.”

  “Not the whole village,” Dallas said, reaching to pet Joe. “Though there are a lot of people wandering around and looking in windows. I know Joe’s bright, but to hunt for hours for his lost kitten?” He looked up at Detective Davis. “Hell, Juana, she’ll show up.”

  Pretending ignorance, Joe stepped delicately around Max’s assorted papers, onto the edges of camera views and X-rays of the robbery victim’s injured head, of his bloody neck and shoulder. That whole upper part of his body had been hit when the thief slammed the door on him, grisly color shots of blood and crushed bone. The victim’s foot and leg were twisted and looked broken. The coroner’s written report lay right in front of him, facing Max. Joe would have to read it upside down, but he didn’t think that would fly. A cat reading right side up, nose to the page, would be incriminating enough. He caught the name, Jon Jaarel. Jaarel’s charming bar and grill had been a Molena Point landmark for years. Now Jaarel was gone, Joe thought sadly. And would the treasured restaurant soon vanish, too?

  “The killer must have thrown all his weight against that door,” Dallas said.

  For some reason, Joe had the strange feeling that when the robber slammed the car door, he didn’t mean to kill Jaarel. A man so eager for the money that he did in his victim with more speed than thought, striking fast but clumsily.

  And who was the witness, the unknown snitch who had called Max?

  Max’s careful notes were there. The snitch had given him a more detailed description of the crime than Joe himself usually gave—yet this snitch had offered little to describe the killer, he said he hardly saw the man.

  Well, Joe’s own tips were often just as disjointed: details left out or confused in the fast action of the crime. A witness couldn’t catch everything. And how could the killer vanish so quickly in that small, crowded shopping center?

  But Max and Juana Davis were talking about what to do with Joe’s own case, as he thought of it. Whether to transfer the woman from the hospital to a nursing home where she could rest and heal, under police guard, when Kit came bolting in through Max’s door, wild-eyed. Joe crouched to leap down. Had she found Courtney? Had something terrible happened? She could say nothing until he’d raced out behind her, until they’d bolted to the roof and were alone, Joe nervous with worst-case scenarios.

  In the office behind them Harper, Davis, and Garza stared after the cats, uncomfortably puzzled. “Cats,” Dallas said. “Flighty as a drunk squirrel.”

  Juana smiled indulgently, thinking of her own cats. “Who knows what’s in their minds?”

  Max’s expression didn’t change, no one knew what he was thinking.

  9

  It was Kit who found Courtney, who came bolting down the sidewalk and in through the door of MPPD dodging two cops coming out. Ignoring EvaJean, she fled into Max’s office following Joe’s scent, so excited she could hardly help but shout out the whole story.

  She had, searching for the calico, coming along the alley behind Seaver’s Antiques, stopped suddenly and sniffed at the garbage truck that was idling there as two men dumped the week’s collection. The back of the building had carved molding, and the front of the two-story structure facing the street was even more ornate: fancily decorated framing all along the windows and above the shop’s wide glass door. Maybe the building was Victorian or maybe a mix of styles, but it seemed to fit the village. Kit stood inhaling the violent stink of garbage—but then sharply above that odor she caught the sweet scent of Courtney. Every cat has his own aroma, there was no doubt the calico was here, or had been. Staring into the truck’s open tailgate, she was gripped by fear. Was Courtney in there among the trash, and hurt? Had she been picked up by accident, too injured to leap away or cry out?

  Kit climbed up to look in, feeling sick at the thoughts that filled her. She turned to look for Dulcie who was down the alley behind her. She mewed, calling her, asking for help, she felt sicker as the men continued emptying trash cans and Courtney’s scent came stronger.

  Yes, it was from one of the cans. She dodged the empty bin as they tossed it down. It bounced twice and nearly hit her, rolled across the alley and hit the brick wall of the building on the other side. She approached the can warily, stuck her head in and sniffed again.

  She could see kitty litter clinging to the can’s sides where someone had emptied Courtney’s cat box. She whirled around and meowed again. Dulcie had paused to scent at a garage door; she looked up at Kit, raced to the truck, and now she got a full whiff of Courtney. At the same moment they heard a noise from above, a sound like claws on glass.

  The men were getting back in the truck.

  Before they could drive away Dulcie shouldered Kit aside and leaped to the truck’s hot hood, scorching her paws: the scratching from above came louder. Dulcie jumped from the hood to the top of the closed cab, Kit right behind her, as the truck began to move.

  “Damn cats,” said the driver, “cats all over this town.”

  Above, through the apartment window, the flash of white and orange was still wildly clawing.

  Hearts pounding, they flew from the truck across space to the wide, decorative ledge that ran beneath the second-floor windows, its concrete curlicues embellished with pigeon droppings. Courtney peered out at them, her busy paws raking glass, her amber eyes flashing. The iron frames that bound the windows looked as solid as an iron safe.

  “We need Joe,” Kit said, “we need help.”

  Dulcie rubbed her face against the glass, loving her child, as Kit raced away across the rooftops for where she’d last seen Joe Grey. There she dropped down the twisted oak and in through the glass door behind a pair of cops, ignoring EvaJean, praying Joe was there. Yes, she followed Joe’s fresh scent, ignoring EvaJean’s tirade. When she burst into Max’s office, the tomcat knew by her expression that she’d found Courtney. He leaped down from the desk and they fled the station—glass door, oak tree, courthouse roof—and raced six blocks of jagged peaks headed for the antiques shop, Joe Grey hissing, “Where is she? Where is Courtney, and where is Dulcie?”

  “Dulcie’s with her. I don’t know where Pan is, hunting for her somewhere.” That was all she had the breath to say.

  By the time Kit and Joe reached Seaver’s Antiques, Courtney had moved along the inside of the upstairs windows to the front of the building. On the outside, on the ledge, Dulcie followed, the two together trying every window. Maybe Courtney had already tried them, alone, while Seaver was downstairs in the shop; Joe could hear customers down there. Joe was so glad to see Courtney he almost yowled. But as he tried to help them loosen a slider, the attempt seemed useless, those windows looked like they didn’t open at all, looked like they’d been installed to stay forever. They tried another and another, but nothing gave.

  Pressing their ears to the glass, and whispering, the three cats could just hear each other. Courtney said, “This is not the same man as in the library. This one’s bald, no beard or mustache—bald all over. I think this man is Ulrich Seaver.”

  “But why did he capture you?” Dulcie said. “He’s . . .”

  “Did he hurt you?” Joe said. “What does he want? Why . . . ?”

  “So far, he’s been kind to me, nice salmon, a soft blanket.”

  “But after that, what?” Joe said crossly.

  “He wants to make a show cat of her
,” Dulcie said with fury. “He has some of the old tapestries, the real ones all in frames, and he has a gallery in San Francisco and has a museum show booked in New York just of her . . .”

  “And I’ll have my own Web site with colored pictures and maybe a movie and . . .”

  Joe hissed and growled at his daughter. “What kind of damn foolishness has he been feeding you! You get your tail out of there, Courtney, and do it now! Before he skins and frames you!”

  “I can’t get out,” she said demurely. “I’ve tried every window. But he told me, at night when he locks the big glass doors he’ll let me downstairs. All by myself,” she said, gloating.

  She looked at Dulcie and Joe and Kit, her eyes sparkling. “He carried me all around the store when there were no customers, but he locked the glass doors first. Oh, it’s beautiful, he turns the lights real soft and there are damask couches and marble statues and gold screens and all kinds of ancient, carved furniture and cloisonné vases, I read the little signs. And things I don’t know what they are and can’t name them. At night I’ll have the whole store to myself, until he comes to get me in the morning and then I’ll have the upstairs and a breakfast of salmon before he opens the downstairs doors to let customers in.”

  They all just looked at her.

  “There is one thing,” Courtney whispered. “A woman. A woman lives here—but she isn’t here now. She must be elegant, she has tailored suits and expensive shoes, I looked in the closets. Is she his wife? They share a bedroom, lacy nightgowns and panties in the drawers, but no pictures of her and he didn’t mention her. He doesn’t seem to have any letters from her, I went through a stack of mail on the desk. How long has she been gone? There are two cars in the garage.” Courtney looked at her daddy. “Has she disappeared? Could she be the woman in the grave?”

  Joe was amazed at how much the young cat already knew about the ways of the human world. He said, “She’s in the hospital. Max and the detectives were talking about it.” As he sat thinking, a flock of pigeons dove down at the sill; when one pecked at him, he struck and hissed at it, and they flew on.

  “There was no ID on that battered woman, they got no make on her fingerprints, nothing in AFIS, nothing anywhere that the department can find. If that woman is Seaver’s wife she’d have some kind of identification, her prints would bring up a driver’s license or maybe city records.”

  “But the woman is gone,” Courtney said. “No purse, no billfold or driver’s license, I looked all over the apartment. And she wears gold earrings, a whole drawer full of them, the kind with the little rings or buttons to hold them on.”

  “For pierced ears,” Dulcie said. “When he lets you downstairs at night, can’t you open any of those windows?”

  “They’re all like these. Except the powder room window. A tiny one, but even it has metal bars outside.”

  “Piece of cake,” Joe said. “We can handle that small window and we can sure squeeze through the bars.”

  Courtney flicked her bright tail.

  Joe said, “We wait until afternoon when he’s busy with a customer, we slip in, hide under the couches, in dark places.” He looked at Courtney. “Tonight after he locks up, goes upstairs and lets you down into the store, we get to work. The five of us ought to be able to . . .”

  “The latch is a metal tab,” Courtney said, “about four inches long. I think a person is supposed to squeeze it, then slide the glass open.” She looked uncertain. “Can we do that? I tried, but paws aren’t very good for squeezing. I guess the screen is on the outside but I can’t see it, the glass is that . . .”

  “Obscure glass?” Joe said. “With a bumpy surface? We can take care of the screen earlier, from outside.” He went silent as footsteps came up from downstairs, then the turn of the doorknob.

  When the apartment door opened Courtney was curled up on a blanket, on the big chair below the window. There was no other cat to be seen, the window ledge was blank, decorated only by pigeon droppings. A lone pigeon fluttered down to land on the carved rim: but it looked at the cats and it was gone again, in a flurry of wings. And as Courtney pretended to sleep on her blanket, she thought about Joe’s plan.

  But then she wondered. Did she really want to get away yet?

  What she wanted, before she escaped, was to find Seaver’s missing wife or find out who that woman was. Find out if it was she who had been beaten and nearly buried alive—find out if Seaver had done that. Sometimes he really did give her the shivers.

  She wanted to stay until she found out if he was what he pretended to be.

  Or did she? If he had beaten, nearly killed that woman, she wanted out of there now. Even as a little voice in the back of her head sang of glamour, of museums and bright magazine pictures, she saw too clearly the body that Joe had described and the bloody grave, and her own kitten blood filled with ice.

  Shivering, she tucked deeper under the blanket thinking of ways she might force open that downstairs window.

  10

  Late that evening, with the store’s lights dimmed and the big glass doors securely locked, Joe, Dulcie, Pan, and Kit waited, hidden under the antique furniture, for the upstairs door to open. When at last it did open and Courtney came out, she paused on the top step, looking up at Seaver. He smiled and leaned down and petted her and handed her a little treat. “Go on, my dear, the antiques store is yours now. Have a good time. It’s a lovely place for you to roam, to get used to the finer furnishings among which you will be living. I’m sure you won’t scratch anything, I know you’ll be a good girl.”

  His words made Courtney want to throw up. She glanced up at him innocently, as sweetly as she could manage, and raced down the steps. Moving out of his sight, she leaped to the top of a small, hand-carved writing desk that stood against the inner wall. The subtly lit display windows formed a background to the rich brocades, golden pitchers, gilded chairs all artfully arranged. She sat looking out among the shadows. She listened to the upstairs door close. Slowly, in the whisper of light from the windows, the shadows began to take shape, to morph into vague forms that only a cat could see. She sat watching until at last a cat slipped out, then another, each watching the door above in case it might open again.

  Dulcie appeared from under a settee, Kit and Pan from behind a china cabinet. Then Joe Grey from an elegantly arranged tangle of gold satin draped over a chair. As he reared up, the tomcat’s silver-gray coat glowed against the gold like another piece of rare artwork.

  Courtney sat tall on the desk before them, between a 1900 silver centaur priced at eight thousand dollars, and a seventeenth-century stone lion at twenty thousand, each price on a little card slipped beneath the object. Joe Grey, looking up at her, knew she was the most beautiful of the three. When finally she leaped down she led them winding through the store and into the little powder room with its gilt mirror, lace-edged curtains, and hand-painted tile.

  The window had bars behind the ruffles. The spaces between the outside, decorative iron grill were too small for a human but plenty big for a cat. Joe Grey returned to the showroom and dragged an antique wicker stool into the powder room, pushing it beneath the closed window.

  Earlier, before the store closed, before they had sneaked in, the four cats had inspected from outside the little window with its fancy barrier—and with a row of heavy wooden shipping crates, marked with Seaver’s address, lined up against the outside wall. Crates set up on heavy timbers and covered with plastic to keep them dry, containers used presumably for antiques coming into the store, and for sending sold treasures out again.

  Joe Grey had, standing on the tallest crate and using his claws, already loosened two of the flimsy turn-screws of the window screen. Now, with little effort, one could ease out one corner of the screen. With a good swipe of determined claws, one could bring down the whole thing if he chose.

  Now, inside the powder room standing on the wicker stool, Joe and Pan tackled the wide metal window latch with their paws—white paw, red tabby, white paw, red
overlapping, pressing as hard as they could while the three girl cats held the stool steady.

  The latch barely moved. Straining, they pressed harder. They changed positions so they could pull. Pulling and pressing, wiggling it back and forth, they began to loosen it.

  The latch gave all at once. Whack. The window slid open right in their faces.

  With that half of the window open, Joe Grey leaned out through the bars and pushed one corner of the screen loose. They slid through and were out of there in a tumble . . .

  All but Courtney.

  Balanced on the sill ready to leap out, she paused and looked back. She stepped back inside onto the decorative tile counter, stood looking out at the four cats below her, at three tails lashing, and one very angry tomcat, his short tail down, his ears flat, his yellow eyes blazing up at her. “Get the hell out of there!”

  “I’m not going. I’m staying. Just for a little while. I’ll slide the window almost shut so I can get out again later.”

  “What the hell do you mean, staying? What do you mean, later? You can’t stay. Why do you think we went to all this trouble! Get the hell down from there, get out here NOW, Courtney. Out here with us NOW! Do it NOW.”

  She looked through the bars at her daddy, both cats’ ears back, Joe’s scowl so fierce he frightened her, and her own amber eyes flashed defiantly. “I will stay here for now. I want to know if that woman is his wife, that woman lying in the hospital all beaten up. I want to know if that’s where his wife went, I want to know if it was Seaver who nearly buried her alive. I mean to stay until I find out.”

  “If she’s Seaver’s wife, the cops would have a make on her prints,” Joe said. “They’d know who she is. The guys at the department would know her, would have seen her around. I don’t even know if he has a wife.”