Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  ‘Any change?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘He’s breathing. Real slow. He—he doesn’t move. Brady, the blood…’

  ‘The ambulance is on its way.’

  At that moment we heard the siren, and a minute later the emergency vehicle slammed up to the gate, its high beams flashing. Its siren growled, then stopped. Three men leaped out. One was black and skinny. One was beefy and blond. The third could have been the second’s brother after a rigorous diet. All seemed very young. They wore white short-sleeved shirts with patches on the left shoulders. I went to the gate. It was ajar. The three men came in. The black one said, ‘Where is he?’

  I nodded backward. ‘There.’

  The thinner of the two blond men slid a wooden plank from the back of the van. It was about six and a half feet long and three feet wide, narrowed down to a foot at one end. The three of them hurried over to where Jeff lay. Lily, who was still crouched beside Jeff, stood up and backed out of their way. I moved beside her and hugged her against me. She put her arm around my waist.

  The EMTs squatted beside Jeff. The black guy, who seemed to be in charge, shone a penlight into Jeff’s eyes while one of the others strapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm. The way they had clustered around him, it was difficult to see clearly all that they did, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each other.

  After a minute or two the black man stood up. I could see that Jeff had been strapped on to the wooden board. His neck was immobilized in a rigid collar, and a strap around his forehead kept his head from moving. A green oxygen mask, with a white plastic inflated bag beneath it, covered his mouth and nose. They had put a gauze dressing on Jeff’s head. Dark blood stained it.

  The black EMT jogged back to the van. I hurried along behind him.

  ‘How is he?’ I said.

  Without turning around, he said, ‘He’s alive.’ I deduced he wasn’t interested in a conversation.

  He reached into the front of the van and pulled out the radio. ‘This is Orleans Car Nine,’ he said.

  ‘This is Cape Cod Hospital,’ came a fuzzy voice from inside the van. ‘The time is oh seven thirty-six. Go ahead, Orleans.’

  ‘We have a white male, sixty—He glanced at me, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Fifty,’ I said.

  ‘Fifty,’ he said. ‘Head trauma. He’s comatose. Vital signs as follows: BP 180 over 110. Respirations twelve and shallow. Pulse ninety. Physical examination shows major depressed skull fracture, left temporal area, with bony fragments. Pupils dilated, gaze fixed to the left.’

  I glanced back to where Jeff had fallen. The other two EMTs had lifted him, board and all, on to a stretcher and were lugging him towards the van at a trot. Lily straggled along behind them.

  ‘He’s boarded. Full C-spine precautions have been taken.’

  The EMTs slid Jeff into the back of the ambulance. Then they jumped in behind him. The doors slammed.

  ‘We’re initiating an IV line of Ringer’s Lactate. Preparing to intubate. ETA nineteen minutes. Suggest neurosurgery be ready.’

  Their radio crackled. A voice said. ‘We copy, Car Nine. We’ll be expecting you.’

  ‘Here we come,’ said the black man. He leaped into the van.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ I said.

  ‘Hyannis. Cape Cod Hospital.’

  He slammed the door. The siren grumbled, then screamed. Gravel spewed from the tyres.

  We stood there for a few moments, staring down the driveway, listening to the wail of the siren grow dimmer. When the sound died, the silence seemed vast.

  Lily had her arm around my waist. She was leaning against me. I felt that if I moved, she’d topple over. After a while she sighed. ‘Well…’

  ‘That was impressive,’ I said.

  ‘They came and went. It seemed like just an instant.’ She shuddered.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I sensed her nodding. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was soft but firm. ‘I’m OK. He’s going to die.’

  ‘They’ll take care of him.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Brady. Did you see his head?’

  ‘I saw it. It was bad.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for him to get sick and die. So has he. I just didn’t think it would be this way. It’s too sudden. I’m not ready for it.’

  ‘We don’t know that he’s going to die, Lily.’

  She gave me a quick hug and stood away from me. ‘Sure. Right.’

  I took her hand. ‘Nothing we can do. The police will be here. We’ll have to answer a lot of questions. Let’s go have some coffee. I want to grab a quick shower.’

  CHAPTER 4

  LILY AND I SAT at the kitchen table sipping coffee. We talked about Jeff and the jaguars. We tried to figure out what had happened. Who came for the cats? Why was Jeff out at the gate? If he had suspected a break-in, Jeff would have brought a gun with him, and he wouldn’t have hesitated to use it, we agreed.

  Lily was calm and steady. I did all right, too. But when the bell at the gate bonged, both of us spasmed. Then we smiled at each other.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Lily. ‘It must be the police.’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  We went down the path, past Tondo’s and Ngwenya’s carcasses, past the place where Jeff had lain, past the black stains in the sand, to the gate. Two uniformed policemen waited on the other side of the fence. Lily unlocked the gate and swung it open.

  The older of the two cops—he might’ve been thirty-two or -three—looked at me. ‘My name is Coyne,’ I said to him. ‘Mr Newton’s lawyer.’

  ‘You got here fast, sir.’

  ‘I was spending the night.’

  He shrugged. ‘Officer Maroney,’ he said, not offering his hand. ‘This is Officer Kinney.’

  Maroney was short, slim, quick, deeply tanned. Kinney was a bigger guy, mid-twenties, with small pink eyes and a roll of pink flab bulging over his shirt collar. Neither of the two struck me as particularly affable.

  Maroney arched his eyebrows at Lily. ‘Lillian Robbins,’ she said. Maroney nodded. ‘I’m Mr Newton’s housekeeper,’ she added. Maroney shrugged, as if he didn’t believe it but didn’t care.

  ‘You’ll want to know,’ he said, looking at Lily, ‘that they got Mr Newton to the hospital in Hyannis OK. I got it over the radio. He’s holding his own.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, look,’ said Kinney to his partner. He was pointing down at Ngwenya’s corpse under the bush beside the path. ‘A dead dog.’

  ‘Good,’ said Maroney. ‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet.’ To me he said, ‘This supposed to be a watchdog?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Did a helluva job, didn’t he?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there were two of them. They were both killed trying to do their job.’

  ‘Probably some kind of crime, killing dogs.’ Maroney glanced at Lily, then back to me. ‘What about Mr Newton? You found him out here?’

  Lily nodded. ‘Here. By the gate.’ She gestured to one of the bloodstains on the sandy path.

  Maroney barely glanced at where she pointed. ‘OK. Let’s go inside. You can tell us what happened, first. Then we’ll have a look around.’

  On the way up the path Kinney paused beside Tondo, opened his mouth, and then closed it. Maroney glanced at me. I couldn’t read his expression.

  We sat in the living-room. Maroney and Kinney looked around without apparent interest at the disarray.

  ‘Coffee?’ said Lily.

  Maroney declined with a wave of his hand. Kinney did not respond at all. Maroney seemed to speak for both of them.

  Maroney took a notebook and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. He clicked the button on the pen and licked the tip. ‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘Let me have your names again, first, please.’

  We told him our names. We had to spell them for him.

  ‘And you were all here last night?’

  We nodded.

&n
bsp; ‘On business, Mr Coyne?’

  ‘Partially.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Partially a visit, partially to clean up routine things. Mr Newton is an invalid, so whenever I have business with him I come here.’

  ‘An invalid, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he was down there by the gate in the nighttime.’

  ‘He could get around. He wasn’t bedridden. He used a crutch.’

  ‘Was his crutch down there with his body?’

  ‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said. I glanced at Lily. She shook her head.

  ‘So you were spending the weekend?’ said Maroney to me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’ He shrugged. ‘What happened last night, then? Any idea who hit Mr Newton?’

  ‘No. We were both sleeping.’

  ‘Miss?’ said Maroney to Lily.

  She nodded. ‘I was asleep.’

  Maroney sighed. ‘So much for the assault.’ He looked over at Kinney, who had one fat leg crossed over the other. ‘Hopefully we’ll get to talk to Mr Newton,’ he said to his partner. ‘He obviously saw who it was. That’s why they hit him.’ He turned back to me. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you know, then, Mr Coyne.’

  ‘I was awakened by two men in my bedroom. One of them—

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I have no idea. Before daybreak.’

  ‘Two men, you said?’

  ‘Yes. One held a flashlight. The other had a knife. They taped my wrists to the bedposts and they taped my mouth shut. They pretended they were going to kill me. They seemed to find this amusing for a while.’ I touched the scratch on my throat and the bigger wound on my collarbone. Lily had put Band-Aids on them. ‘They finally got tired of that game. So they hit me on the head and I went unconscious.’

  ‘What’d they hit you with?’

  ‘I’m not sure. A gun, maybe. It looked like they hit Jeff with something bigger, blunter. His wound was…’ I glanced at Lily. She was watching me, nodding.

  ‘We’ll get a report on Mr Newton,’ said Maroney, tapping his teeth with his pen. ‘Describe these two men, please.’

  I shrugged. ‘It was dark. I think they had ski masks or hoods or something over their faces. They were shining a flashlight in my eyes. All I can tell you was that there were two of them, both male.’

  ‘Did they speak?’

  ‘One of them did most of the talking. Sadistic bastard. The other one mostly laughed.’

  ‘What about their voices? Any accent?’

  I shrugged. ‘Their voices were muffled. No accent that I noticed.’

  Maroney gazed placidly at me. ‘Well, did they sound educated? Did they use proper English and all?’

  ‘I can’t remember being struck by anything they said. Just the content of it. How much fun it might be to sever my head from my body.’

  ‘Had they been drinking, could you tell? Drugged up? Anything like that?’

  ‘No. Well, maybe something. The guy who taped me up had bad breath.’

  ‘Booze, maybe?’

  ‘More like garlic, or old tobacco.’

  ‘Big or small? Black or white? Come on, Mr Coyne.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘They seemed big to me. Otherwise, I don’t know.’

  Maroney nodded. ‘OK. Fine. So then what happened?’

  ‘Well, when we got up this morning, we found the jaguars missing and the dogs with their throats cut. Then we found Jeff. We called 911. The EMTs came.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘Jaguars? What about jaguars?’

  I gestured across the room at the seven empty glass cases. ‘Mr Newton owned these seven statues—sculptures—solid gold, Mayan works of art. Very valuable. Very old. They’re gone.’

  Maroney glanced at the glass cases, as if to verify that they were indeed empty. ‘What else did they get?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lily, speaking for the first time. ‘Just the cats.’

  ‘As if that’s what they came for,’ said Maroney, allowing himself a faint smile. He turned to Lily. ‘You live here, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was Mr Newton doing outside last night?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He usually sleeps soundly. He takes pills.’

  ‘Pills?’

  ‘Sleeping pills. And other pills. He’s not well.’

  ‘Where’s his bedroom?’

  ‘In the back of the house. Next to mine.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘These two men, they didn’t come into your room?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear Mr Newton get up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Noises?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t wake up.’

  ‘Did Mr Newton take his pills last night?’

  She shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I left them for him.’

  ‘Are you a sound sleeper, miss?’

  She nodded. ‘Average, I guess.’

  ‘Does Mr Newton get up in the night? To go to the bathroom, for example? When the pills wear off?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Lily. ‘I don’t think so. Sometimes he has bad dreams. I hear him when he cries out. But he doesn’t usually get up.’

  ‘But he did last night.’

  She shrugged. ‘Obviously,’ she said.

  Maroney peered at his notebook for a moment. Then he looked up at me. ‘The dogs were supposed to guard the place, then,’ he said. ‘Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘They were trained killers. You had to know their names, to be able to say them properly, to get by them.’

  ‘Explain.’ Maroney’s eyebrows furrowed.

  ‘Tondo and Ngwenya,’ I said, pronouncing them carefully. ‘Their names. African words. He—Jeff—he used to be a professional hunter in Africa. You can’t pronounce the dogs’ names unless Jeff taught you. If you couldn’t say them right, the dogs would bite off your leg.’

  ‘So the bad guys knew their names, then, huh?’

  ‘No,’ said Lily. ‘Only we three could say their names.’

  Maroney turned to look at her. ‘And you were sleeping. Miss Robbins, when Mr Coyne here was being taped to his bed and Mr Newton was outside getting hit on the head and the dogs were getting their throats cut?’

  ‘Miz,’ she said.

  Maroney rolled his eyes. ‘Miz. Sorry.’

  ‘I was sleeping, yes,’ she said. ‘I told you that. I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘So,’ said Maroney, glancing at Kinney, who was sitting back in a soft chair, his little pig eyes darting from one to the other of us as we spoke, ‘they came into your room, Mr Coyne, tied you up, scratched you with a knife, and hit you, but they didn’t go near Miz Robbins here. What do you make of that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But, of course, I did. Lily could have been in on it. I doubted it. But it was possible.

  ‘Miss?’ he said to Lily. ‘I mean, miz?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sat forward and jutted her chin at Maroney. ‘My bedroom’s in the back. Brady was in the guest room, right off the living-room. Maybe that’s why they went in there.’

  Maroney nodded.

  ‘Why are you asking a question like that?’ said Lily.

  He stared at her for a moment. She returned his gaze levelly.

  ‘It’s a logical question,’ he said finally. ‘Did they take a blanket or a pillowcase or a slipcover from the sofa or something?’

  My estimate of his competence clicked up a notch. He was asking if the thieves brought something with them to carry the jaguars in, meaning they knew exactly what they were after, or did they break in, see the golden cats and decide they were valuable, and then look around for something to lug them away in.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lily. ‘Nothing else is missing.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing that I noticed, any
way.’

  Maroney jerked his head towards the scattering of papers on the floor by the desk. ‘Have you looked through all that stuff?’

  ‘No,’ said Lily. ‘We didn’t think we should touch anything.’

  Maroney nodded and glanced again at Kinney. Kinney nodded. It was hard to tell if the younger cop was following this.

  ‘Back to those dogs,’ said Maroney. ‘You said if someone knew their names—’

  ‘The dogs would lie down,’ I said. ‘Friendly as cocker spaniels. You could kick them and they wouldn’t do anything.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Otherwise, they were vicious, monomaniacal killers.’

  ‘So our burglars—’

  ‘Either knew their names, or—’

  ‘Or tranquillized them or something,’ finished Maroney. ‘Otherwise they couldn’t have gotten close enough to them to cut their throats.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

  Maroney stared out the wall of windows. A brilliant, cloudless Cape Cod Saturday. The beaches would be mobbed, as would the pizza and ice-cream and T-shirt emporiums that lined Route 28 on the ocean side of the Cape. A fun place.

  ‘I suppose we could have somebody do an autopsy on the dogs,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what it would tell us.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Kinney. ‘Never heard of that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Maroney. He shrugged. ‘Are those jaguars insured, do you know?’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘Sure.’

  ‘A good thing. Someone best call Mr Newton’s adjuster. Describe the missing pieces for me.’

  ‘They were solid gold,’ I said. ‘Emerald eyes. Each weighed about twenty pounds. The smallest was fifteen and a half inches long. The biggest was nineteen and a quarter. They looked—like cats, you know? Jaguars, of course, are spotted. Like leopards. These gold ones weren’t spotted. Just burnished gold. Quite beautiful, in their fashion. A little crude, representative. Primitive. Jaguars were kind of gods to the Mayans.’

  ‘So the seven of them—they’d weigh well over a hundred pounds.’

  I nodded. ‘Closer to one-fifty.’ Maroney was taking notes.

  ‘What’s their value?’

  ‘They’re insured for seven hundred seventy thousand. One-ten each. They were appraised for about double that. That was a number of years ago.’