A Novel Way to Die (2 page)

She broke off with a gasp as she found herself nose-to-nose with Hamlet, who had lapsed
into ninja-cat mode and slipped unnoticed off the shelf. Suddenly he was on the floor,
standing between the girl and her property. Green eyes cold and unblinking, the throaty
meowrmph
that emanated from him dared her to make a grab for the bright pink case.

“Don’t do it,” Darla hastily warned as the girl huffed again and made as if to reach
around him. “Let’s walk back to the cash register and give him a chance to leave,
and then we can come back for it.”

“And let a cat get the better of me?”

Madison planted her fists on her hips and shot the feline an evil look of her own,
earning a bit of admiration from Darla. She’d dismissed the girl as a cream puff—particularly
after her Mr. Cuddles reference—but it seemed she was made of sterner stuff. Darla
allowed herself a small flicker of hope. Maybe this was a test, and all Hamlet was
looking for in an employee was someone who would stand up to him.

Or not.

Hamlet had defeated far more formidable foes than blondes with liberal arts degrees,
and it appeared he wasn’t about to let a challenge go unanswered. He walked over to
the pink case and plopped atop it, front paws tucked neatly under his chest. Despite
her irritation with the feline, Darla found herself smothering a grin. If this had
been a chess game, then this had been Hamlet’s official “check.”

Madison’s glare dissolved into a look of pleading. “This isn’t funny. Please make
him move, Ms. Pettistone.”

“Hamlet, give it up.”

The cat blinked but remained firmly settled on his prize. Cautiously, Darla edged
a foot in his direction, intent on nudging him off. He raised a warning paw, claws
fully extended, and she prudently pulled her foot back out of reach again. She’d seen
those claws go through shoe leather before.
Check, again.

“Hang on, Madison,” she said with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll get the squirt gun.”

She’d bought the toy a couple of weeks into her tenure at the bookstore as a last-ditch
cat disciplinary tool . . . say, for times that he stole gizmos worth six hundred
dollars plus from would-be employees. The cat version of water boarding never failed
to work. The problem was that Hamlet always exacted his own revenge for such tactics—last
time, she’d found her store keys buried in his cat box—so she employed this method
of persuasion only when she had no other choice.

She headed to the register and returned with the plastic gun firmly clutched in hand.
She checked the water level and gave the gun a quick pump. “Last chance,” she warned
him, then pulled the trigger.

The instant the first drop of water hit his sleek black fur, Hamlet gave a vertical
leap that would have done an Olympic athlete proud. Then, with a hiss that sounded
like a combination of a cobra on steroids and a semitruck’s air brakes, he made a
beeline for the next aisle, leaving the iPad behind.

Darla bent and scooped it up. “Here you go,” she told the girl and handed over the
tablet.

Madison hugged the pink case like a prodigal child returned and managed a smile. “I
guess he doesn’t like me much, does he?”

“Maybe he just had a bad day,” Darla assured her. “Should I put you down on the list
for a second interview?”

“Well, I—”

She broke off with a look of horror, staring at something beyond Darla. Darla swung
about to see that Hamlet had returned, green eyes narrowed to slits as he stood behind
her.

“Uh, maybe I’d better go,” the girl declared, taking one step back. Hamlet took a
step forward. She took another step back, and Hamlet moved forward again. Slowly,
she backed up, with Hamlet smoothly pacing her step for step. She froze . . . and
he did, too.

That was enough for Madison. With a squeal of horror, she turned and ran. Darla heard
the discordant jangle of bells as the front door flew open, and winced as it slammed
shut with a glass-rattling
thud
.

Darla turned to glare at Hamlet. He sat calmly in the middle of the aisle, unconcernedly
licking his paw and swabbing it over one black velvet ear.

“Great, another one bites the dust,” she told him. “I hope you’re proud.”

Hamlet looked up from his toilette and gave an innocent blink. Then, with a flick
of his whiskers as if to say,
My work here is done
, he turned and calmly padded toward the children’s section.

“Great,” Darla repeated, this time adding a Madison-esque huff.

Still, she did have one more interview after lunch. Maybe this candidate would appeal
to Hamlet, since the ornery feline obviously hadn’t cared for Madison. Of course,
he hadn’t cared for any of the other previous and equally qualified candidates, either.
All of them—the grandmotherly retired teacher; the middle-aged gay writer; the fortyish
female former editor—had suffered one variation or another on the treatment that Madison
had just received.

The bells jangled again, and Darla hurried toward the front to see if Madison had
perhaps decided to come back for another round. But instead it was her neighbor, Mary
Ann Plinski, stepping through the doorway.

The sprightly septuagenarian and her brother, Mr. Plinski (Darla had yet to learn
the elderly gentleman’s first name) owned the matching brownstone next door. Like
Darla’s building, theirs had long since been converted to apartments above and retail
space below. In their case, the shop was Bygone Days Antiques, specializing in nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century fixtures and furnishings, along with period jewelry, clothing,
and other collectibles.

“Hi, Mary Ann,” Darla called to her and waved her in. “I’ve been meaning to stop by.
What was with the moving van in front of your place yesterday?”

“Hello, Darla. I’m afraid that was our garden apartment tenant, Mrs. Gallagher. She
was a snowbird”—Darla knew that fanciful term referred to a northerner who lived in
the South during the winter months—“and she finally got tired of shuttling back and
forth between two homes. She decided she wanted to live in Florida permanently, so
off she went.”

“Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that. I only met her a time or two in passing, but she seemed
a pleasant enough lady.”

“Actually, she was an obnoxious old biddy,” Mary Ann replied with a polite sniff,
“but she paid her rent on time and kept to herself mostly. What’s upsetting is that
we have to find a new tenant now. The whole interview process is so taxing!”

“Tell me about it,” Darla said with a wry grin. “But don’t worry, I’ll be glad to
keep my eyes open for someone who’s looking for a place.”

“Thank you, dear. But that’s not why I’m here. I wanted to tell you that I think I
saw Hamlet outside of the building last night.”

“Hamlet was outside? I never let him out.”

“I know, but these buildings are old. He must have found a way to sneak out.”

“The little devil,” Darla fumed. “Why couldn’t Great-Aunt Dee have had a nice little
orange tabby, the kind that would sit on your lap and purr contentedly?”

“Well, to be fair, I did see Hamlet sitting on Dee’s lap many a time, and he’s cuddled
on my lap a time or two.”

“He’s never sat on mine yet,” Darla replied, wondering why she felt offended by the
slight. “But this slipping-outside thing has me worried. Especially with Halloween
coming. You know how the animal shelters always warn people to keep their black cats
inside around the holiday in case some weirdo is out looking for a live decoration
or something.”

“Maybe he found a spot somewhere in Jake’s place to sneak out,” the old woman suggested,
referring to Darla’s own garden apartment tenant.

Darla nodded. “That makes sense. I’m meeting Jake for lunch in a little bit. I’ll
be sure to ask her to keep an eye out for any AWOL cats wandering through her place.
Thanks for the heads-up.”

Mary Ann smiled. “My pleasure, dear. Oh, and good luck with your interviews for the
part-time position. I believe that I may know one of your candidates.”

She left on that cryptic note, but Darla let the comment fly past her. She was more
concerned with her warning about Hamlet’s nocturnal wanderings. Of course, it was
always possible that the old woman had seen another black cat on the street, but Darla
doubted it. Prior to becoming a cat owner, she’d always believed that all black cats
looked alike. Since taking custody of Hamlet, however, she had discovered that aside
from their fur color, the difference between one black feline and the other was as
great as . . . well, day and night. If Mary Ann thought she’d seen Hamlet, it was
likely that she had.

Darla shook her head. Bad enough that the feline was playing havoc with her hiring
attempts. The last thing she needed was Mr. Hell on Paws loose on the streets. She’d
have to put a stop to this, and soon. Otherwise, who knew what sort of mayhem the
cantankerous cat might cause?

TWO

“HE TOOK OUT ANOTHER ONE?”

Jake Martelli put down her half-eaten turkey Reuben and leaned forward in her chair,
her expression incredulous. Lowering her voice, as if she were worried that someone
else in the crowded deli might overhear her, she went on, “How did he do it this time?”

“iPad kidnapping, followed by a full-frontal fake out. I swear the little so-and-so
is back at the store laughing up his cat sleeve at his cleverness.”

Darla took an angry bite of her own sandwich, chewing miserably. Even the mile-high
stack of juicy white turkey breast piled on pumpernickel and topped with sauerkraut,
Swiss, and dressing wasn’t enough to restore her to something resembling a good mood.

Jake nodded sagely and reached for her own sandwich. Through a mouthful big enough
to choke a linebacker, she mumbled something that sounded like, “Any blood?”

“Not this time. But the screams were pretty darned awful.”

“Look, kid, why don’t you just stick Hamlet in a carrier or something while you’re
interviewing?” Jake suggested in a reasonable tone. “Keep the applicants out of claws’
reach, at least until after they’ve filled out the paperwork and you’ve asked all
your questions. Once you’ve hired someone, well, it’s survival of the fittest.”

Darla considered the notion a moment and then shook her head.

“Unfortunately, I know who’s going to come out on top in that battle. And I don’t
have time to train a series of people. It’s mid-October, which means the holiday buying
season is only a month away. I need someone I can depend on to help me and James,
and I need them trained before the big rush starts.”

Darla took another bite.

“I’ve got another applicant coming in after lunch,” she told her friend. “Maybe I’ll
luck out with him. Of course, with the job market like it is, it’s not like Hamlet
will run out of potential hires to torment anytime soon.”

“Well, speaking of the job market . . .” Jake swallowed the last of her sandwich and
reached into the pocket of her brown corduroy jacket to withdraw a business card.
Tossing it onto the table in front of Darla, she gave a casual shake of her curly
black mop and said, “Check it out.”

“Does this mean what I think it does?”

Jake nodded, her strong features glowing with a proud smile. Darla hurriedly wiped
a bit of errant dressing from her fingers and snatched up the card to read it aloud.

“Martelli Private Investigations, Inc., Jacqueline ‘Jake’ Martelli, President.
Oh, and you even have a website!” Darla’s smile matched her friend’s as she added,
“I can’t believe you finally did it. Congratulations!”

“Well, I figured sitting on my butt for two years was enough,” Jake replied. “Those
occasional security jobs along with the disability settlement might pay the rent,
but I can only watch so much cable television when I’m not hanging out in your store.
I missed being in the thick of things.”

“Once a cop, always a cop, right?

“Pretty much. Besides, fifty is too damn young to retire.”

“So is forty-nine,” Darla said, knowing that her friend wouldn’t actually be turning
fifty until January, when she’d officially start collecting her retirement. This still
gave Darla a couple of months to plan the surprise birthday party she intended to
throw. And since Darla’s own next major milestone birthday wouldn’t be for almost
five years, when she hit forty, she was pretty confident that she was safe from any
similar birthday revenge for a long time.

Aloud, she merely said, “Actually, as soon as you started talking about going into
business, I checked into the zoning laws here. There’s no issue if you want to go
ahead and run your office out of your apartment.”

“I was hoping you’d say that, since I already ordered the signs to hang on the fence
and doors,” Jake confessed, her grin now a bit sheepish.

Darla had inherited Jake as her garden apartment tenant—Darla always had to correct
herself from calling it a basement—in much the same way she’d ended up with Hamlet
and the bookstore. The aforementioned fence was a sturdy, wrought iron barrier to
the short series of steps that led down to the apartment, which was partially below
sidewalk level. Jake had moved into Dee’s brownstone soon after the on-duty shooting
that had left her with a permanent limp and hastened her retirement from her police
detective career. Viewing Jake as her personal on-site security force, Darla’s great-aunt
had in return offered Jake a rent well below the going rate.

Darla had also inherited the subsidized lease, but she agreed with Dee that it was
rather cool to have her own personal cop—or rather, ex-cop—keeping an eye on things.
Besides, she and Jake had become fast friends.

Now, Darla laughed. “Actually, I think there’s a certain cachet to having a private
investigator in the same building as an independent bookstore. Maybe I need to expand
my mystery section, take advantage of the atmosphere.”

“Don’t go wild until I see if things really take off or not. I’m hoping for walk-in
business, to start . . . you know, the old word-of-mouth thing. God knows how many
PIs in town I’m competing against. I figure if I keep it in the neighborhood, I’ll
have an advantage.”

“So, you going to be skulking around with a camera taking pictures of cheating spouses?”

Jake snorted. “Not if I can help it. I’ve got plenty of corporate contacts, so I’m
looking at narrowing the field. Corporate espionage, insurance fraud, surveillance—”

“Mystery shopping,” Darla supplied with a grin, earning an eye roll from her friend.
“Let me know if you need any help with that. I can spend other people’s money with
the best of them.”

“Maybe I’ll hire Hamlet. He proved himself a pretty good little sleuth with that whole
Valerie Baylor business.”

Jake’s tone was rueful, but Darla had to concede that she was right. Valerie Baylor,
the YA author famous for her
Haunted High
series, had made a well-publicized stop at Darla’s store—drawing hundreds of fervent
fans, and one pitiless murderer. In the aftermath, Hamlet had demonstrated an uncanny
knack for what Darla began to call “book snagging”: knocking seemingly random books
off the store shelves, books that had proved, in retrospect, to have bearing on Valerie’s
murder and the killer’s true identity. And though Hamlet didn’t get any credit, the
feline had definitely had a paw in solving the crime.

Then her frown deepened. “Actually, I should hire you to tail the little beggar. It’s
bad enough that he’s got some secret cat tunnel where he can go back and forth between
the shop and the apartment. Now I think he’s found a way to sneak out of the building
at night.”

“What makes you say that? Did you see him out on the sidewalk or something?”

Darla shook her head. “He’s too smart to tip his hand—er, paw—like that. But Mary
Ann said she saw him outside last night. And, come to think of it, the other morning
when I went to feed him, I saw what looked like grease or oil on his fur, like he’d
crawled under a car. I’m afraid he’s out prowling the neighborhood looking for trouble.”

“Not good,” Jake agreed.

Darla took another determined bite of sandwich. “Mary Ann thinks he might be getting
out through your place, so keep an eye out, okay? And let me know if you stumble across
a cat-sized GPS we can stick around his neck.” Then, with a glance at her watch, Darla
added, “Time to get back to the shop. James will be waiting, and I’ve got a few things
to do before the next interview.”

They gathered their now-empty plates and dropped them off in the overflowing dish
bin before heading for the door. Jake paused by the community bulletin board near
the exit long enough to pin up a few of her new business cards.

“Half the neighborhood eats here,” she reminded Darla. “You never know who might need
a private investigator.”

Darla pulled her olive-colored hip-length sweater more tightly around her as they
made the two-block walk back to her store. The temperature was barely above fifty.
It made for a perfect day for New Yorkers, but was pretty darn cold for a Texas girl
used to battling summertime weather this time of year. She definitely wasn’t looking
forward to winter in New York.

Jake must have seen her reflexive shiver, for she laughed. “Toughen up, kid. In another
month or two you’ll be wading through snow up to your waist.”

Which meant said nasty white stuff would come up only to Jake’s thigh, Darla thought
with an inner snort. Her friend was a good six inches taller than Darla’s own five-foot-four-inch
height, and in the stacked Doc Marten boots that were part of her personal uniform,
Jake easily topped six feet.

Halfway down the block from the corner deli, they both halted before the lace-curtained
windows of one of Crawford Avenue’s many brownstones. This building, like Darla’s
elegant, three-story Federal and several other brownstones on the surrounding blocks,
had been converted to retail on its ground floor and apartments above.

The shop in question was a bath-and-body boutique that had become a favorite guilty
pleasure of theirs. Aptly named Great Scentsations, the store was designed for indulgence,
offering custom perfume, handmade soaps, and organic makeup, among other alluring
merchandise.

“Wanna do a little retail therapy?” Jake suggested, her expression one of longing
as she gazed at a genie-bottle-shaped vial of body lotion displayed amid a tiny desert
oasis scene.

Darla gave her head a reluctant shake, even as she moved to the next window.

“I really need to get back to the bookstore. But Hilda is so talented with her window
designs that I always like to take mental notes every time she puts up a new display.”

“Hilda” was Hilda Aguilar, the impeccably coiffed and dressed owner of the boutique.
The petite Cuban woman was in her fifties, and bore a faint resemblance to the late
Princess Grace of Monaco. She exuded an air of class and good taste that, to Darla’s
mind, one had to be born with, though Hilda constantly asserted that she used no beauty
products other than what could be found at Great Scentsations. Which gave her customers
hope that they could attain similar class and good taste simply by shopping there.

“Not that I can ever come up with anything half as clever,” Darla added on a note
of admiring regret. “I thought I was doing pretty good hanging my store with black
crepe and jack-o’-lanterns. But next to Hilda, I’m a rank amateur. Isn’t that cute
how she made that little Halloween graveyard with soaps for tombstones and those net
poufs for ghosts?”

“Yeah, cute,” Jake agreed with a quick look at the phantom scrubbies, though her gaze
quickly returned to the genie bottle. Then, with a sigh, she added, “I really shouldn’t
be spending anything until I pull in a client or two. But once I cash my first check,
a-shopping I will go.”

“All right, but in the meantime, let’s get you out of temptation’s way.” Grabbing
her friend by the arm, Darla dragged her back to their brownstone.

They arrived at the bookstore a few minutes later. While Jake headed down to her apartment,
Darla trotted up half a dozen balustraded concrete steps to her shop’s door.

She paused as she reached the top to glance over at a second, smaller set of steps
that lay to the right of the bookstore’s stairway. At the top of those steps was a
modest glass door. This was Darla’s private entrance to a hallway where a long flight
of stairs led up to her third-floor apartment. It was a handy arrangement. She didn’t
need to cut through the store to go home; instead, an inner door connected that hallway
to the shop, which meant she could travel from home to store at any time of day or
night without ever leaving her building. She had a feeling that, come winter’s snowy
weather, she’d be doubly grateful for this convenience.

For the moment, though, she was looking for cat-sized exits and entrances. She saw
no gaps in the bricks, however, which meant Hamlet must be pulling his Houdini trick
around the back of the building. Sparing a few choice words for the little beast,
she reached for the doorknob. Gilded letters on the door’s wavery glass above it proclaimed
“Pettistone’s Fine Books.” As always, the sight gave Darla a small thrill.

Once inside, she headed straight for the counter. Sections of the parlor’s original
mahogany wainscoting had been cleverly repurposed to build a narrow, U-shaped counter
near the front window where the register was located. Darla fondly regarded this area
as her control center, her personal literary cockpit. For the moment, however, her
store manager had assumed command and was planted there behind the register.

Dressed in his usual cable-knit vest, handmade Oxford shirt, and sharp-creased wool
trousers, James looked more like a model for an upscale gentlemen’s emporium than
a clerk in a neighborhood bookstore. A former English professor at one of the area’s
more prestigious universities, Professor James T. James was, to put it mildly, terminally
stuffy.