Cat Deck the Halls (5 page)

“At least,” Joe said, “if they lift cat hairs in there, they're legit.” The cats worried, often, about cat hairs at a crime scene where none should be found; cat hairs duly bagged could royally confuse a police investigation. Dulcie sometimes had nightmares of Max Harper confronting her, shaking a handful of tabby hairs in her face, demanding that she explain. She would wake mewling and clawing at the quilt, waking Wilma, who would hug her tight and tell her not to worry—but Wilma, herself, could offer no solution to the problem. She could only repeat that no cop would ever believe such a wild phenomenon as talking cats. Telephone-literate cat snitches. Cats addicted to the same adrenaline-high challenge of law enforcement that the cops themselves experienced.

When Eleanor backed out of the pump house, placing several small bags of evidence in her pocket, the two officers walked the length of the dark plaza using their lights to examine windows and doors, moving slowly along beside the small shops though Dallas had already walked the scene. The cats watched Garza post guards around the plaza and send the few remaining men back to their patrols, watched him leave in his own unit, heading for the department. When chief Harper left, the cats, with the scene cleared of human disturbance, spent more than an hour prowling the gardens, walking the scene themselves, in their own way, sorting through hundreds of scents—trying to identify them all, and to isolate the one fresh scent they didn't recognize, trying against heavy odds to sort out the smell of the killer.

They found nothing definitive. They isolated a scent that might be the killer, but there was no way to be sure. With the smell of death around the Christmas tree, they had no sure point of reference. At last, their heads full of questions, the three cats called it a night and headed home, tired and hungry.

Kit's Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, being early risers, would soon be out of bed to make her a nice breakfast. Dulcie was thinking of a quick little snack in the kitchen, without rousing her housemate, and then crawling back under the warm comforter beside Wilma—of not waking Wilma, unleashing a barrage of questions and receiving another lecture. But Joe Grey, racing home along the plaza wall, was too hungry to wait for Clyde's alarm to go off. He meant to wake Clyde at once and demand a good hot breakfast. Eggs, bacon, cheese, and anchovies—the works.

C
LYDE
D
AMEN LAY
prone on the bed, trying to get his breath despite the twenty-pound weight solidly planted on his chest. “What the hell, Joe! What are you doing? I can't breathe. Your feet are as hard as pile drivers.” He lifted his head enough to stare eye to eye with the gray tomcat. “It's the middle of the night! What the hell do you want?”

Joe Grey narrowed his eyes, and tried to keep from smiling.

“This is the third time this week, Joe! Third time you've jumped on me in the middle of the night, nearly cracking a rib. What the hell's with you?” Despite the hindrance of the heavy tomcat pressing down on his solar plexus, and despite Joe Grey's yellow-eyed smirk, Clyde managed to struggle up on one elbow.

He looked, heavy-eyed, at the bedside clock. “Four thirty-five.” He lay down again, sighing. When the tomcat smiled and began to purr, Clyde raised a threatening hand.

“You wouldn't,” Joe said complacently.

“Nothing in this world, Joe, could be so important as to warrant your behavior. Your rude and thoughtless behavior. You're not a lightweight kitten anymore. You weigh in about the same as a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler loaded with concrete.”

“Muscle,” Joe said in a rough tomcat voice. “How could I be heavy? I'm only a little cat, not a German shepherd. Whatever infinitesimal weight I might possess is pure muscle. If you were in better shape, if
your
stomach muscles weren't so flabby, you wouldn't even feel my delicate feather ounces.”

“Might I point out that it is still pitch-dark. That it is not yet dawn, that it is not even five o'clock, and that I—”

“It's winter,” the tomcat said. “December. This time of year, it stays dark until—”

“Can it, Joe! Shut up and get the hell off my stomach and let me go back to sleep! You know damn well I have to go to work in the morning to support your prodigious appetite. If you had one ounce of consideration, you…”

But now Joe's expression changed as if by magic, from amused and mildly sadistic to bewildered hurt. Clyde's eyes widened as the tomcat turned his back, dropped cringing off the bed, and fled to the far corner of the bedroom, where he curled up on the cold hardwood floor, his back to Clyde, his white nose tucked under and his eyes closed, breathing out a soft sigh of wounded resignation.

Staring at the tomcat, Clyde swung out of bed. Shivering in bare skin and Jockey shorts, he padded across the room and knelt beside the gray tomcat.

“I'm sorry, Joe. What's wrong? Tell me what's wrong,” he said softly. With Joe curled into a miserable ball, Clyde couldn't see the cat's expression, couldn't see Joe's sly grin,
his yellow eyes slitted in amusement. When, gently, Clyde turned Joe's sleek silver face toward him and looked into his eyes, there was, again, only a pitiful look, an expression so wan and lost, so filled with desperate hurt, that Clyde could think only of the starving, fevered stray kitten Joe had once been, when Clyde found him abandoned in that San Francisco gutter.

Clyde had rescued Joe then, gently picking up the sick kitten and taking him home to his small apartment, where he fed him rare steak and milk, and then took him to a vet—who treated Joe for a broken and infected tail, and duly removed most of that appendage. Clyde had nursed Joe back to health, and they had never been parted since. Now, studying the suffering look on the tomcat's gray-and-white face, Clyde was overwhelmed once more with pity. “Do you hurt somewhere? What happened?”

The tomcat rolled his eyes.

“Do you feel sick? Are you feverish? Is your stomach upset?”

Silence.

“Or could it be,” Clyde offered, “that you are weak and faint from hunger?”

Joe Grey smiled.

Clyde uttered another long-suffering sigh and, dispensing with shower and shave, pulled on his pants and headed downstairs to get breakfast.

The kitchen was cold and silent. No shuffling doggy sounds getting out of bed, no clicking of doggy toenails on the cold linoleum, no glad panting. The room was hollow with an emptiness that neither Clyde nor the tomcat could get used to. Even when Clyde threw on the light and turned
on the radio and spoke to the three sleeping cats in the adjacent laundry, the silence pressed in. No glad huffing, no doggy yawn and whine, no doggy mumbles of greeting. Old Rube was gone. Buried out at the back of the patio, with a little flat headstone marking his grave, right next to Barney's marker.

How long would it take, Joe wondered, until he and Clyde learned to live more equitably with the death of the old black Lab? It had taken a long time of grieving after golden Barney died, and he knew that the aftermath of Rube's death would be no different. He peered into the laundry at the three household cats who, despite Clyde's greeting, still slept, the two older cats twined together in the top bunk among their blankets, Fluffy's head resting on Scrappy's flank—Scrappy, through several name changes, had finally settled in with the name that had fit him best when he was young. Now that he was in his later years, that name didn't seem to fit very well, either.

Only Snowball, the younger, white cat, slept on the bottom bunk. In Rube's old bed. Grieving. Snowball had mourned deeply since Rube died.

She looked out at them, now, with only a sad expression, then curled tighter and squeezed her eyes shut.

Joe spent a long time licking and grooming her, but she didn't respond much. Even when the smell of frying sausage and then scrambled eggs began to fill the room, Snowball remained in bed. As did Scrappy and Fluffy—the older cats letting Clyde know that it was too early, and too cold and dark, to get up. They would come yawning down later, stretching, and then hopefully Snowball would follow.

The aromas of sausage and eggs sent Joe Grey up onto
the kitchen table, where he stretched out on his own side, impatiently waiting. Clyde set a place for himself, then went to get the paper, which they'd just heard hit the step. The time was 5:10. Clyde got up at six anyway, Joe thought unsympathetically. This would give him more time to read the paper.

Returning, Clyde shook open the paper and stood at the stove with his back to the tomcat, making toast as he read the headlines and sipped his coffee. Joe hated when Clyde hogged the front page. Rearing up on his hind paws, on the table, he could just see over Clyde's shoulder, the headline above the fold.

So there
had
been a reporter on the scene last night, slipping around, keeping out of the way, quietly pumping an officer or two for information. The guy had had to hustle, to get his article in this morning's paper. Joe wondered what “important” story they'd pulled off the front page at the last minute, to make room for the more sensational headline:

C
OPS
C
ONVERGE ON
P
LAZA
C
HRISTMAS
T
REE
P
OSSIBLE
M
URDER?
N
O
B
ODY
F
OUND

Clyde put their plates on the table and sat down, continuing to read, leisurely finishing the article—payback for the early wake-up call. Watching Clyde fork in scrambled eggs, Joe wolfed a few bites of his own breakfast. It tasted bland. “Do we have any kippers? Or a can of those imported sardines that you so carefully hid behind the canned beans?”

“You're getting fat. No one eats sardines with sausage and eggs.”

“I do. You know perfectly well that I like a little fish
condiment with my breakfast, it makes the eggs go down.”

“I didn't know you had trouble making anything edible go down.” But Clyde rose, reached deep into the back of the cupboard, and withdrew a can of sardines. “I'm just lucky I have a strong stomach.” He twisted the little key to open the lid. “No one wants to smell sardines with their eggs at five in the morning.”

Dishing sardines onto Joe's plate, he looked intently at the tomcat. “So
that
was what last night was about! When Kit came barging in and woke me up and then made that phone call. She reported a dead body that wasn't there! I swear, Joe…”

“Woke you? How could we wake you? You never stopped snoring.”

Clyde looked hard at Joe. “The department got a phone tip, caller reports a dead man. Cops arrive, nothing. No body. A little blood—they don't know, yet, if it was human blood.” He studied Joe. “What are you cats trying to pull? Cops search the plaza and find nothing. Nothing, Joe!” He laid aside the paper. “You want to explain this?”

“What's it say about the child?”

“What child? There wasn't any child. The paper doesn't mention a child.” Trying to curb his temper, Clyde scanned the last column more carefully, then shook his head, still looking hard at Joe. “What did you tell the cops, you and Kit? What are you cats up to? What have you done now?”

Joe just looked at him.

Clyde laid down his fork. “You didn't…Oh, hell! You didn't mess with a crime scene? You didn't lure away some witness? Some kid who saw a murder? Why, Joe? Why would you do that?”

“Do you suppose,” Joe said patiently, “that the law didn't give the reporter the whole story? That they found something last night that they decided to keep quiet and didn't share with that reporter? Is it possible for you to imagine, in that hidebound brain, that that child could be a holdback? A witness they don't want the public to know about? That maybe they're trying to protect her?”

Clyde concentrated on finishing his last bite of sausage. Then, “Was there a body? And who's the kid? Why is a kid so important? You want to tell me what happened?”

Joe licked sardine oil from his whiskers. “Maybe Harper figures the kid's safer if he keeps her under wraps, if the killer doesn't know where to find her.”

“Will you start from the beginning?
What
child? Who is she? And,” he said, fixing Joe with a keen stare, “if there
was
a body, where is it?”

“Strange, though,” Joe mused. “Strange the guy didn't kill her when he had the chance. She had to be a witness, she was right there in the dead man's arms when Kit found her. Except, maybe the shooter didn't have time, maybe he heard something, and hurried away dragging that heavy body—maybe he plans to go after her later.” The tomcat sat thinking about that, then returned to his eggs and the bright little sardines, which, along with the sausage, certainly did enhance the eggs' bland flavor.

Only when he had finished his breakfast and licked his plate and cleaned his whiskers and methodically washed his front paws, a procedure that took some time and left Clyde fidgeting impatiently, did Joe fill Clyde in on the events of the previous night, on as much of the story as Joe himself knew. He described the body that only Kit had seen, and
then the little girl they had found. Who the child was, and who the dead man was, and where the body was now, no one yet knew. The fingerprint reports might help. Or not, Joe thought. The killer could have no previous record, though that didn't seem likely.

“So what happens,” Joe said, curling down on the want-ad section, which neither one of them read, “the way I see it, the killer knocks this guy off. Shoots him right there under the Christmas tree, maybe even while he's holding the kid. He's about to get rid of the body when something startles him, some noise or maybe some late passerby, maybe a car slowing out in front of the plaza. Noise scares him, and he runs.

“I'm guessing he hides somewhere close by. At about that time, Kit comes along over the roofs, smells blood and death, looks down, and there's the body and the kid. Who knows, the guy might even have heard Kit herself scrambling up to the roof, maybe that's what scared him off. Anyway, Kit sees the dead man and the kid, and takes off to get help.

“Now,” Joe said, “the plaza is quiet again, and the guy returns. Maybe he means to knock off the kid so she can't ID him, but meantime, the kid has run. Vanished. Found a place to hide. Have to give her credit that she got the hell out of there, she's only five or six. Kid took care of herself the minute she could, and she had to be scared witless, still scared when we found her. Some kids would just fall apart screaming.”

Joe took a last lick at his plate, then had to wash his whiskers again. “With the kid gone, the guy starts to get nervous. Maybe he looks for her, maybe not. He's in a hurry
to get the body out of there. Maybe figures she's too little to give the law a coherent description. Figures if he gets the dead man away, maybe no one will ever know there was a body. Fat chance of that. Anyway, he…”

Clyde was fidgeting again. “This is really…”

“I'm not totally guessing here,” Joe said. “Dallas found tire marks coming into the plaza, up over the flower bed, along the sidewalk, and out again where someone had backed down over the curb. Eleanor made a dozen casts where tires went over the flowers and dirt, and she made casts of a man's footprints, someone besides the corpse.

“Guy brings his car around, drives into the plaza, loads up the body, and takes off—while Kit is racing to our house and waking me and calling the dispatcher, and then we're scorching back there. Then the sirens, and that had to scare him and make him hustle.

“We get back, the cops are on the scene, but no body and no kid. Blood. Footprints. Tire marks. The samples and fibers and stuff that Dallas collected for the lab.” Joe scratched his ear with his hind claws, looking across at Clyde. “So, except for the little girl, Kit was the only one to see the victim.”

“This is making my head ache.” Clyde glanced at his watch and rose. Stacked their dishes in the sink and started to rinse them. “Does it occur to you, Joe, that if that child—”

“Kit and I found her,” Joe interrupted, “in the pump house behind the dog fountain. Little shed the size of a doghouse. We were in there with the kid, trying to calm her, when Brennan found her—and found us.”