How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) (5 page)

THE SPIDER FILES

HIS MIND INTENSELY
focused, Hox leaned back in his chair. Turning away from the table, he propped his sock-covered feet on the nearest heating pipe and stretched his arms up over his head.

The horrifying murder of the young intern had shaken everyone who worked at City Hall. For Hox, who spent several hours each week inside the building covering the city’s political beat, the incident had been particularly disturbing.

The night of the young man’s death, mere minutes before the attack, Hox had passed the doomed intern on the central marble staircase. The reporter was on the descent, preparing to head home, while the intern was climbing up toward the ceremonial rotunda.

He was likely the last person, other than the murderer, to have seen Spider Jones alive.

• • •

HOX QUICKLY BECAME
obsessed with the crime, its troubling anomalies, and the related reams of unanswered questions.

First off, why Spider? Why had such a nonthreatening, seemingly unimportant person been targeted for such a violent stabbing? What had the intern done to attract that level of vicious rage?

By all accounts, Spider was an affable young man, good looking and with an easy sense of humor. There was no indication he had any enemies. He was enthusiastic about his work, but not in competition with anyone else at City Hall. His position in the mayor’s office was so far down the totem pole, few people even knew who he was—that is, until after his murder.

What had triggered the killer’s attack? Had Spider simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Hox stared at the conference room ceiling, his mind rehashing the same outline of issues and concerns that he had reasoned through countless times before.

Shifting from motive to the matter of the two primary suspects, Hox reached for his file on Sam Eckles.

“The frog guy,” he muttered as he riffled through the pages to a photocopy of Sam’s driver’s license. A ruddy-faced man with tousled hair, ragged beard, and a slightly dazed expression peered out from the paper.

Sam’s ten-year stint as a City Hall janitor had been relatively uneventful. Despite the overlap in their locations, Hox had never engaged with the man. He had only a vague recollection of the hulking red-haired brute in coveralls pushing a refuse cart.

The building’s infamous frog invasion that had led to Sam’s termination, however, was a far more vivid memory.

Hox
thunked
his thumb against a newspaper clipping covering the story.

“The slimy critters were all over the place,” the reporter groaned, remembering the scene.

A
ribbiting
, croaking mass of several thousand amphibians had surged into City Hall from an improvised tadpole farm in the basement, covering the marble floor beneath the main rotunda. During the height of the occupation, frogs could be seen lounging on the central marble staircase, meandering down hallways, and loitering in the rest rooms. It had taken weeks to get them cleared out.

Hox shook his head, cringing at the recollection. He didn’t share the frog phobia that had caused the current lieutenant governor, then San Francisco’s sitting mayor, to suffer a state of near mental collapse, but after the City Hall invasion, Hox had seen enough amphibians to last him a lifetime.

“Sam Eckles,” Hox summed up, slapping the file shut. “Clearly an odd bird.”

But was he a knife-wielding killer? Grimacing, Hox found himself circling back to the same tired conclusion.

“I just don’t see it.”

• • •

“NEXT UP, JAMES
Lick,” Hox grunted as he switched to the slim folder containing the few details known about the second murder suspect. If Sam had gotten into trouble, Hox was willing to bet James Lick was the instigator.

The only picture in the file was a black-and-white image of a man who had died in 1876.

“Not the current Lick.” Hox frowned. “Obviously.”

The lean face and strong hawkish nose belonged to a San Francisco millionaire who had made his fortune in real estate during the Gold Rush boom. An eccentric, notoriously miserly gent, Lick never forgot the penniless years he endured before landing his windfall. Even after becoming one of the wealthiest men in California, Lick continued to wear cheap threadbare suits and to shun luxuries like expensive restaurants, which he deemed frivolous and unnecessary.

Lick’s name was still prominent throughout the Bay Area, commemorated on freeways, high schools, the San Jose observatory that his estate endowed, and, most recently, as the namesake for a North Beach fried chicken joint.

Hox held up the photo, staring at the man’s steely eyes. For his money, the original James Lick would have made a good murder suspect. Surely the man who hid behind this mask was just as menacing.

“I can only guess,” Hox mused grouchily. “No one knows who you are.”

Even though the Lick restaurant had been wildly popular during its short North Beach run, the proprietor had kept his real identity a secret. A grungy fellow in ripped-up overalls had handled the counter operations. The man behind the famous fried chicken recipe, the one responsible for obtaining the diner’s requisite licenses and lease, remained an enigma.

Hox glanced down at the open file in his lap. The only other paper in the folder was a green-colored flyer that had accompanied the restaurant’s takeout packages. The flyer provided a brief historical background on the millionaire miser James Lick. There was no reference to the man behind the alias.

Hox tossed the second sheet back into the file with disgust.

“I never liked fried chicken,” he groused bitterly.

Once more resting his head against the back of the chair, Hox reflected on a last Lick-related item. In the police report, which he could now recite by memory, there was no mention of how the fried chicken Lick had been matched with the description of the second fugitive, an elderly man with thinning white hair and short rounded shoulders.

Hox blew out a frustrated sigh. “Yet another missing piece of information.”

• • •

THE REPORTER GAZED
silently at the ceiling, the somber lines deepening in his weary face as he reached a last question, one that bothered him more than all the others.

After leaving the empty supervisors’ chambers, Hox must have passed within feet of the murderer. The villain would have been lurking in the shadows, knife in hand, as Hox crossed through the ceremonial rotunda and started down the staircase. He could have easily been caught up in the attack.

The face of the grinning intern flashed through Hox’s head.

Why had he been spared Spider’s fate?

THE MINUTES BEFORE THE MURDER

AS HAPPENED EVERY
time Hox reviewed the details of the Spider Jones case, the analysis inevitably led him to revisit his own firsthand account of the minutes before the murder.

The reporter had been extensively debriefed by the police both on the night of the crime and in the days that followed. He had repeated his story on multiple occasions for the investigating detectives. In his mind, he had played the sequence over and over again.

No matter how many times he ran through the short scene, he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d forgotten something from his brief, but now crucial, interaction with the young intern.

As Hox sat in the makeshift war room, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, and disheveled, he envisioned the episode once more, letting each step of the memory unfold in slow motion.

• • •

FOR ALMOST A
half hour following the conclusion of the supervisors’ meeting, Hox had sat in the empty chambers, staring down at the vacant podium as he pondered the board’s mayoral selection. He’d remained in the public arena–style seating long after everyone else had left, alone—or so he thought—with his thoughts.

“Montgomery Carmichael,” he’d groaned in disbelief. “How could they have picked Montgomery Carmichael?”

Finally, he got up from his chair and began a brooding march out of the building. He’d spent much of the day chasing the renegade alligator all over town, and the stub of his left toe felt as if it were on fire. That, combined with the appointment of the most ill-qualified mayor in the history of San Francisco, had put the reporter in a particularly foul mood.

Still muttering under his breath, Hox turned from a second-floor hallway and stepped into the ceremonial rotunda. A glint of light reflected off the Harvey Milk bust, and Hox paused to look at the slain supervisor’s smiling bronze face. He could almost hear the sculpted metal figure laughing at the ridiculous situation that had unfolded in the supervisors’ chambers.

Grumbling bitterly, Hox started the descent down the marble stairs. Lurching from one slick step to the next, he looked out across the dimly lit interior.

The huge crowd that had attended the supervisors’ meeting had dispersed, quickly emptying out of the building, and the lighting system had been switched to its reduced nighttime setting.

Despite the vast windows along the upper portions of the north and south walls, the night’s dense fog masked the moon and stars, leaving only the eerie glow from a few scattered lamps inside the darkened structure.

Hox paused as a slim figure entered the main rotunda, crossed to the bottom of the stairs, and began to jog effortlessly up the steep steps. It was a young man in blue jeans, high-top sneakers, and a T-shirt. He wore a baseball cap pulled down over his brow.

Spider Jones was making his final ascent.

The intern looked up, and his eyes met the reporter’s grim gaze. For a second or two, the young man appeared startled, as if Hox had somehow spooked him. But as they neared one another at the staircase’s midpoint, Spider’s dark-skinned face broke into a broad smile of recognition.

Accustomed to false familiarity from strangers, Hox had merely grunted his acknowledgment. The momentary distraction caused him to stub his left toe on the next step, and a shooting stab of pain coursed through his body.

Cursing, the reporter hurried down the rest of the stairs and rapidly exited the building, eager to get home to a hot soaking bath.

As the memory concluded, Hox heard Spider’s fading footsteps continue up toward the ceremonial rotunda where, only moments later, he would meet his gruesome end.

• • •

THE FRONT LEGS
of the chair slammed against the floor as Hox returned to the dog-eared papers and files.

He whacked his hand against the table, still haunted by the nagging intuition that he was missing something, some detail or nuance that could be critical to solving the case. He reached for his mug and drained the last gulp of stale coffee.

His face skewed up, the response more from the next image that flashed into his head than the bitter taste of the brew.

The crime scene was far more vivid in Hox’s memory than the brief passing on the stairway.

• • •

HOX WAS HALFWAY
home when the newspaper’s dispatch operator reached him on his cell phone and relayed the news of the City Hall murder. (The reporter had ignored the operator’s call minutes earlier about the albino alligator being found at Mountain Lake.) Immediately reversing course, Hox had tuned into the police scanner for more details.

Upon his return to City Hall, Hox gave his initial statement. He then convinced the lead detective to let him view the crime scene at the top of the marble staircase. It was against department regulations, but he was accustomed to navigating around such barriers. Reluctantly, the detective escorted him up the steps and past the yellow and black police tape.

The technicians had just finished processing the evidence. The body had been zippered up into a plastic bag and carried off to the morgue for autopsy.

What remained, however, conveyed a gruesome tale.

A pool of blood had dried to the marble surface, the sticky red coating marred by the imprint of the body and the handprints where the young man had struggled to drag himself across the slick floor.

Red spurts were spattered across the surrounding infrastructure. Hox turned a slow circle, surveying the carnage on the stone walls, the rounded columns, and the brass light fixtures. A few drops dotted the base of the third-story balcony overlooking the rotunda.

Grimly, Hox returned his gaze to floor level. Another spray had hit the Harvey Milk bust, leaving a gory graffiti across the statue’s wide grin.

• • •

“SPIDER JONES,” HOX
said, leaning over the conference room table, his eyes desperately scanning the piles of papers and files. “Who did this to you? And why?”

A loud banging thumped against the door. With a testy sigh, the reporter swiveled in his chair. The harried producer from the newspaper’s sister television network glared through the glass window mounted into the door’s upper half.

Apparently he had blown off one too many of the woman’s calls, and she had appeared in person to drag him out of the conference room.

Reluctantly, he scooted his chair away from the table. He couldn’t keep ignoring his regular reporting duties.

Spider Jones would have to wait a little while longer for his murder to be solved.