Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1)

by Nancy C. Davis

  Jason waved his hand. “She never cared about him. She originally started coming on to me to pay him back for fooling around on her.”

  Naya frowned. “She came onto you?”

  Jason nodded. “I wouldn’t make the moves on the boss’s wife. I wouldn’t give her the time of day, but she wouldn’t let up until I gave in. I’ve got a girlfriend to think about, you know.”

  Naya sighed, and Carl scratched his head. “I don’t even want to know how you explain that one. So you were down behind the Nickel Alley Cafe with Josephine when the bakery went up in flames. How did you get out of your shift? Roy would have been standing right there.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Jason countered. “After I clocked in, I searched the whole building for him, but he wasn’t there. So I started making the dough for the cinnamon raisin bread. Then Josephine showed up at the back door and told me to come with her. I still had dough all over my hands.”

  “So off you went to the Nickel Alley Cafe,” Carl added.

  “Not to the Cafe,” Jason corrected. “We were behind the Cafe.”

  “Of course you were,” Naya replied. “We don’t have to talk about what you two were doing there. But I think we can all agree your alibi is no good, Jason. Josephine says she never knew you. She says she never had anything to do with you in the bakery or out of it. She won’t corroborate your story. You’re right back where you started.”

  Jason stared at her. Then he slapped his thigh and let out a string of curses. “That little witch! Just wait until I get my hands on her.”

  Carl held up his hand. “You’re not going anywhere near her.”

  “But she’s leaving me in the lurch,” Jason exclaimed. “She must have planned this whole thing. She must have knocked Roy out somewhere in the bakery and started the fire. Then she called me out to go with her while the place went up in flames. She must have planned to pin the murder on me all along.”

  “That’s exactly why you’re not going anywhere near her,” Carl replied. “If she did plan it, then we all need to keep up the appearance of blaming you. You need to make yourself look as suspicious as possible so she won’t know we’re really moving in on her. She’ll let her defenses down, and that’s when we’ll catch her.”

  Jason hesitated. Then he started laughing. “All right. I’ll go along with it for now. Just as long as you both understand I didn’t kill Roy.”

  Naya put out her hand to him, but she didn’t touch him. “We both know that.”

  Jason leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. “Good.”

  “Now, then,” Naya went on. “Just a couple more questions. You say Roy cheated on Josephine. Do you happen to know who he cheated with?”

  “Everybody knows that,” Jason replied. “He had a thing going with Marlena Rappaport for over five years. He even got his picture in the paper escorting her to the Metro Art Exhibition opening.”

  Carl rubbed his chin. “Marlena Rappaport, huh? Now that’s punching above his weight.”

  “You’re telling me,” Jason returned. “Don’t ask me how he bagged that bird, but he used to run off to her apartment in the middle of shifts all the time. She must have had him on speed-dial.”

  Naya chuckled. “I guess that’s why Josephine got you on speed-dial.”

  Jason made a disgusted face. “Josephine never had me on speed-dial.”

  “How often did she come to the back door of the bakery?” Naya asked.

  Jason looked away. “Not often.”

  “Not often enough, you mean,” Naya shot back. “Did she wait in her car across the street for Marlena to call up Roy, and then after he left, come to the back door to call you out to the Nickel Alley Cafe? Is that the way it worked?”

  Jason dropped his voice to a husky whisper. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Naya pushed her chair back. “You can go now, Jason. You’ve been very helpful. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you had anything to do with Roy’s death. You can put your mind at ease on that.”

  Jason jumped up and grabbed her hand. He pumped it so hard he almost pulled it out of its socket. “Thanks a million, Detective. I knew I could count on you.”

  Naya laughed. “That’s all right. I hope we can count on you if we need any more information for this case.”

  “Oh, absolutely, Detective,” Jason exclaimed. “You can count on me. You can count on me for anything you need. Day or night, you call on me.”

  Naya smiled up at him. “Thank you. I will.”

  Jason tore out of the room. The next moment, you could hear the sound of his footfalls and drumming up the stairs. Carl gazed down at the stack of paperwork in front of him and shook his head. “What did you let him go so easy for? I had half a dozen more questions I wanted to ask him.”

  “Just wait a little while,” Naya told him. “We’ll bring him in for questioning again, and when we do, we’ll have a lot more information to use against him. Right now, we have bigger fish to fry.”

  “You can’t be thinking of Marlena Rappaport,” Carl remarked. “She’s got a national reputation as a film diva. She wouldn’t stoop to killing a harmless baker.”

  “Who ever said Roy was harmless?” Naya asked. “Marlena could have some reason to want to get rid of him. Either way, even if she didn’t kill him, we still have to question her.”

  “She didn’t kill him,” Carl insisted.

  “What makes you so sure?” Naya asked.

  “I know her,” Carl replied.

  “Personally?” Naya asked.

  Carl shifted in his seat. “Well, no, not personally. But I’ve seen everything she’s ever been in. She doesn’t have any reason to get rid of Roy. Jason told you she let herself be photographed with him. She wouldn’t have cared who knew they had something going. She wouldn’t even have cared about Josephine finding out. She would probably be proud of the fact that she bagged a married man.”

  Naya turned away and headed for the door. “You might be right, but there’s one more person we haven’t thought about. There’s one more person in this case who has a very distinct motive.”

  Carl frowned. “Who’s that?”

  “Jason’s girlfriend,” Naya replied. “Marlena might not care who found out about her and Roy, but Jason sure didn’t want his girlfriend finding out about his relationship with Josephine.”

  Carl rifled through the papers. “Her name is Annika Neilsson. She lives in Cherry Tree Court.”

  “We’ll question Marlena tomorrow morning,” Naya decided. “Then we can start looking into Annika.”

  “But she would have no motive to kill Roy,” Carl pointed out. “She probably didn’t even know him.”

  “Maybe not,” Naya replied. “But she could have had plenty of reason to frame Jason. If she found out about his fling with Josephine, she could have gotten mad and tried to pin the murder on him.”

  Chapter 5

  Willow sat on Carl’s desk and peered into the darkness. Nothing stirred in the deserted police station. Every now and then, a red light blinked on the smoke detector on the ceiling. Other than that, dead quiet filled the building.

  Willow couldn’t sit still. Her whiskers twitched, and her ears swiveled in every direction to catch the slightest noise. The tiniest tick of the clock sent her nerves jangling. She whispered into the darkness, “Are you there, Nat? Are you awake?”

  For the first time in an eternity of waiting, a gruff voice answered her. “I’m awake.”

  Willow couldn’t tell which direction the voice came from, but she jumped with a start and whirled around. “Where are you?”

  A spot in the inky blackness caught her attention. A shadow moved in the gloom, but she couldn’t make out any distinct shape. Only a semblance of movement convinced her Nat was somewhere over there.

  Sure enough, his whiskers glistened in the moonlight. He blinked. Willow caught her breath. She kept a firm hold on herself to keep from racing toward him. She would have bowled him over an
d jumped on top of him with her fangs bared, but that was kitten play. Nat didn’t play that way.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Nat sat down in the square of moonlight streaming through the window. “You heard Naya. They’re going to interview that Marlena woman in the morning. We have to get out and find some more information so we’re ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Willow asked.

  “Ready for the interview,” he told her. “We’re going to be there, and we need to get out and stir up more information before that happens.”

  “Get out—you mean, into the field?” Willow’s heart beat faster.

  “That’s what I mean,” Nat replied.

  Willow couldn’t hold herself back a second longer. She sprang off the desk and danced circles around Nat. She kept her composure just enough to avoid tackling him. “Oh, Nat! I can’t wait. Just tell me what I have to do. Should I do anything to prepare? Should I groom myself first? Do I look okay the way I am now?”

  “You look fine,” he replied. “You don’t have to do anything. You look a little too clean to go into the field as it is, but that’s neither here nor there. You’ll get dirty enough where we’re going.”

  “Where are we going?” Willow asked.

  Nat started toward the door. “You’ll see.” He slithered through the cat door and vanished into the night.

  Willow raced after him, but when she got through the cat door, she couldn’t see him anywhere. She paused and glanced around. Then she spotted Nat crossing the park across the street and dashed after him. She caught up with him next to the fountain and slowed to a walk at his side.

  “I really appreciate you bringing me along,” she panted. “I know I’m just learning detective work.”

  Nat shrugged, but he didn’t look in her direction. He trained every sense into the wakening night. Willow watched him in awe. Every sound and smell brought him news of the wide world. He didn’t get overwhelmed by the excitement of it all.

  Nat was a real police cat. He’d seen it all before. He knew how to pace himself so every tin can with a piece of tuna fish sticking to it didn’t send his heart fluttering. If only Willow could be like him.

  She kept quiet until they crossed the railroad tracks. Then she just had to ask again. “Where are we going?”

  “I have a couple of friends out here who can help us,” Nat replied.

  Willow almost stopped walking. “Friends? Who?”

  Nat didn’t answer. He scrambled over a chain link fence and dropped down on the other side. He walked up an alley, and Willow lost sight of him around a dumpster. She looked right and left. Should she follow him?

  She didn’t like where he was going, and she didn’t want to go there after him. Her previous owner always told her to stay on the grass. Even Willow’s own mother told her to stay clean and stay out of the dirt.

  Willow looked up at the fence. Could she even climb it? Maybe she should head back to the station and leave the detective work to Nat. He was the expert. She was good at looking pretty and snuggling up to people.

  All at once, Nat stuck his head out from behind the dumpster. “Are you coming or not?”

  Willow wrinkled her nose up at the fence. “I don’t think I can climb this.”

  Nat shrugged and turned away. “I guess you’ll be left behind, then.” He vanished.

  Willow’s heart sank. She couldn’t let herself be left behind, not when she got all her hopes up of becoming a police cat like him. She took a few steps back and, with a deep breath, she took a run at the fence.

  She never jumped over any fence before in her life. She had no idea how to go about it. When she judged she was close enough, she jumped blindly and put out her paws in a desperate hope of catching something.

  One paw went through a hole between the wires, and she banged her nose on one of the links. She grunted in pain, but when her body hit the fence, instinct took over. Without thinking, she started clawing her way up. Her foot wound up in mid-air at every other step, but she couldn’t do anything other than keep climbing.

  At long last, she struggled over the top of the fence and the alley on the other side spread out before her. She caught her breath, but then she faced the greater challenge of getting down.

  This time, she didn’t give herself a chance to hesitate. If Nat could jump from that height without hurting himself, she could, too. He wouldn’t expect her to do it if she couldn’t do it safely. She took another deep breath and jumped.

  She hit the ground on all four paws, and the shock woke up some part of her cat soul she never knew she had. So this was how the other half lived. The cats who didn’t have owners and police detectives putting food out for them and turning on the heater on winter days had to jump and climb and hunt for their living.

  She stepped forward with a new confidence in her gait, but she stopped dead when she spotted Nat on the other side of the dumpster with two other cats. One was a dishwater grey Persian, but he wasn’t a Persian like her. His face crunched up in a sour expression so he looked ready to bite anybody’s head off that came too close. Dirt and rotten food caked his fur, and he didn’t have any whiskers at all that Willow could see.

  The other cat was a microscopic little scrap of a tortoise-shell Abyssinian. She looked like a kitten, except her head wasn’t big enough compared to the rest of her body. What could make a cat so small, in spite of being a fully mature adult? She wasn’t a miniature, either, only a tiny adult cat.

  Willow almost lost heart again. Her mother always told her to stay away from alley cats. They didn’t have the breeding of house cats, and they were smelly and dirty. That Persian certainly was, although the Abyssinian looked all right. Still, they were liable to do anything.

  Nat sat down and looked around. “This is the new police station cat, Willow. I’m showing her around until she gets the hang of things.”

  The Persian scowled at Willow. She fidgeted. The Abyssinian bounced straight up in the air and landed on the very rim of the dumpster. Willow stared at her. How could any animal accomplish such a feat? Not even a cat could make that jump, and this cat didn’t look big enough to jump out of a tea saucer, let alone up to the top of that dumpster. She didn’t even crouch to spring first. She levitated straight off the ground like a puppet on a string.

  The Abyssinian spoke down to Willow in a high-pitched squeak, and she spoke so fast Willow had to concentrate to catch every word. “You show ‘em, girl. This town needs another police cat. You’ll be the next wonder of the animal world before you know it.”

  Nat sniffed at a pile of something sticky on the pavement next to him and curled up his nose. “This is Chester, Willow. He looks terrible, but he’s got his paw on the pulse of this town. Nothing happens in this town that he doesn’t know about.”

  The Persian made a horrible face and turned away. Willow never met a cat she wanted so much to have nothing to do with. But she couldn’t back out now without disappointing Nat. He brought her here. He must have some reason for introducing her to these two oddities.

  Nat flicked his ear at the Abyssinian. “This is Bella. Try to speak slowly, Bella, so Willow can understand you.”

  “I am speaking slowly,” Bella squeaked.

  Nat turned back to Willow. “I’ve known these two since I was a kitten. At least, I’ve known Chester since I was a kitten. I’ve known Bella since she was a kitten.”

  “How long ago was that?” Willow asked.

  Bella let out a shriek that raised the hair on Willow’s back on end. She hissed back at the tiny cat. Then she realized Bella was laughing.

  “She’s three years old,” Nat told her. “She suffered terrible malnutrition in her first year, so she never grew any bigger than your average kitten. She’s still like a kitten in a lot of other ways, but she’s as sharp as a tack. She knows as much about everything in this town as Chester does, and that’s saying something, considering he’s almost four times her age. They can help us with the case.”

  C
hester faced Nat. “So it’s another case, is it? I suppose you’re out to help Naya Wesley again, along with that dump of a partner of hers. Well, tell me the details and we’ll see what we can come up with.”

  “It’s about the Morningside Bakery fire,” Nat replied.

  “That just happened this morning,” Bella observed.

  “That’s right,” Nat replied, “Carl and Naya already have four suspects lined up.”

  “What are Carl and Naya doing investigating that fire?” Bella asked. “They’re homicide detectives. Ross Bowen should be investigating. He’s the arson investigator on the squad.”

  “The bakery owner was inside the building when it burned down,” Willow replied. “Whoever set that fire killed him.”

  Chester crumpled his face up even more. “It was only a matter of time. Roy Avino deserved to die a nasty death. I knew someone would come after him eventually.”

  “What makes you say that?” Willow asked.

  “He was a philandering clod,” Chester growled. “He chased every woman in this town, and he didn’t care who knew it. I suspect some jealous husband bumped him off.”

  Willow glanced at Nat. “Carl and Naya don’t have any jealous husbands among their suspects.”

  Chester cocked his head. “They don’t? Well, that just goes to show. I never was much of a police cat.”

  “You’re better than a police cat,” Nat remarked. “Why do you think we came to see you?”

  “Why did you come to see us?” Chester asked.

  “What do you know about Marlena Rappaport?” Nat asked.

  “Everything,” Chester replied.

  Nat closed his eyes halfway. “Don’t tell me you’ve seen all her films.”

  “I haven’t seen any of them,” Chester shot back. “But I’ve lived in the same town with her for over ten years. A cat can’t help but hear things about her on the street.”

  “Tell me what you know about her,” Nat urged.

  “She’s famous,” Chester replied. “She’s filthy rich, and she can get any man she snaps her fingers at.”

  “Like Roy Avino?” Willow asked.