Cat Laughing Last

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Joe just looked at her.

  "She was really hurt when she lost the part," Dulcie whispered. "Angry at Traynor, at Vivi, at Sam Ladler-she must have hated Fern. But she wouldn't…"

  Joe was busy sniffing the bushes. "Cora Lee brushed by here. So did the kit. Come on."

  They followed the scents of woman and cat up the brick walk and around to the street behind the Pumpkin Coach, where the shop's back door opened. The empty street smelled of car exhaust. They didn't see the officer on foot, nor was the squad car in sight. As they approached the small, blind utility alley just beyond the Pumpkin Coach, the scents they followed deepened. They could see nothing in the short dead-end alley but a heap of wadded white paper down at the end piled between the trash cans.

  But something else was there, besides paper. They glimpsed dark hair among the white, and a tan arm. Then they saw the kit crouched over the figure, pawing at her, trying to wake her.

  Cora Lee lay among the rubble, her white dress twisted, her face grayish and sick. When the kit saw Joe and Dulcie she bolted into them mewling.

  "She's dead. Oh, she's not dead! Oh, help her!"

  Sirens screamed again as another squad car roared through the side streets. Pushing the kit away, Joe nosed at Cora Lee trying to detect breathing. Yes, a faint, warm breath, though her skin was chilled.

  "She's alive, Kit. We need the medics, the cops. But you called-"

  "From Cora Lee's car phone like you showed me. I told them there was a dead woman in the window."

  "You told them Cora Lee was here?"

  "She wasn't-I didn't know she was here. Just that Fern woman in the window."

  "Stay with her, Kit. Stay until we-"

  But Dulcie had already raced away, headed for Cora Lee's car and cell phone.

  20

  The ambulance had gone, taking Cora Lee to the hospital bundled onto a stretcher, tucked up under a blanket. Dulcie imagined her in surgery surrounded by doctors and nurses working over her. Stubbornly she imagined Cora Lee awake again, sitting up in a white hospital bed with flowers and get-well cards around her. And, crouched in the shadows of the alley, cuddling the kit close, she tried to stop the little tattercoat's frightened shivering. Licking the kit's ear, Dulcie purred against her, whispering, "It's all right. She'll be all right, Kit." But they couldn't be certain of that.

  "She ran from that man," the kit said. "He chased her, he must have hit her. When I found her here she was so cold, then sweating, and then cold again. She looked at me and cried, 'Don't!' and tried to get up and then she twisted, and cried out, then fainted." The kit looked wildly at Dulcie. "All those terrible tubes hanging when they put her in the ambulance. What did they do to her?"

  "The tubes could save her life, Kit. The medics will do all they can, and we must be patient." But Dulcie didn't feel patient.

  The kit's dark mottled fur stuck up in frantic wisps, and her yellow eyes were as round as moons. "She was taking me home to Wilma's, she…"

  "I know, Kit. I was there when she called Wilma. She said she'd stop here to look in the shop window at the new display. She'll be all right, Kit. She'll be fine. Did you have a nice evening?"

  "Oh, yes. Custard and chicken and music and such a pretty house and a nice creamy blanket on her bed, but I had a bad dream and then this morning it came true. When we got here the window was all broken, and I could see someone lying in there. Cora Lee rushed to look, she was so upset and wanting to help that she left the car door open, didn't think about a cat running away. But I didn't run, I jumped on the dash and watched her through the window. She looked in at the dead woman, then she whirled around toward the car like she meant to call the police, but there was a little white packet nearly under her feet, like papers. She snatched it up, hardly stopping."

  "What papers, Kit?"

  "I don't know, papers tied in a ribbon, and she was almost to the car when a man burst out of the window and hit her and grabbed at them. She kicked him and hit him and twisted away and ran. She still had the little packet. Ran around the side of the building. I remembered about the phone and punched the numbers like I saw you and Joe do, and told them about the woman in the window.

  "He chased her, and I followed them. I was so scared and I wanted to claw him. He chased her into the alley and hit her hard. When she fell he grabbed the papers and ran. Left her there all huddled up clutching her middle. I heard a car roar away. She tried to crawl but she was hurt too bad and I didn't know what to do. She looked at me like she didn't see me right, like she didn't know what I was. I licked and licked her face and was going to go talk in the phone again, but she was so hot and then cold and then I heard the siren, and then you came."

  "Kit, what did the papers look like?" Dulcie said.

  "Folded up and tied with an old faded ribbon. Old brownish paper like if it's been in the trash a long time."

  "What did the man look like?" Dulcie glanced around for Joe but didn't see him.

  "Just a man. I don't know. Tan clothes. Tall, sort of thin, running away."

  "What color hair? Would you know him? Recognize his smell?"

  "I don't know. Maybe." The kit looked crestfallen, her head down, her ears back to her head. "I'm not sure. Maybe I would." She began to sniff around the alley. But the medics and police had been there; the smells were all mixed up.

  "Come here, Kit," Dulcie said. "It will be all right, we'll find him." But her mind was on Joe Grey, uneasy because Joe had vanished.

  Was he back there among the officers? Had he followed them into the shop through the broken window? Armed officers going in after a killer would be alert to any smallest movement. The faintest disturbance among the shelves and furniture, and their guns would be on him.

  But she was being foolish. Police officers didn't fire blind-not like some untrained deer hunter shooting at a sound in the brush.

  Yet still she worried, pacing the alley, afraid Joe would do something foolish, something macho and foolish.

  Within the shop, Joe looked far from macho. Crouched under a rack of women's dresses with a lacy hem dragging over his ears, he peered out from between swaths of silk and velvet, watching Dallas Garza clear the premises. The resale store was so crowded with racks and shelves and overflowing boxes that he felt like he was back among the heaped refuse of some San Francisco alley-except these cast-offs were a far cry from the junk he'd encountered in the city; that trash had been so tacky that even the homeless didn't want it. This shop had some nicer cookware than Clyde's kitchen, some handsome lamps, and typewriters and even a microwave oven. In the center of the room between the clothes racks stood a child's desk, a faded easy chair, a pink crib, three dining chairs, and a sign proclaiming that all mechanical items were in working order.

  Slipping along beneath the ladies' hems, flinching as clothes slithered down his back, he followed Detective Garza. Garza was taking his time, photographing and making carefully recorded notes in a small black notebook.

  Pausing under a rack of men's pants and shirts, Joe followed Garza through an archway, creeping belly-to-carpet among the shadows, into the back room-into chaos. A bookshelf lay toppled, its books scattered open across a cascade of phonograph records and broken china. An accordion lay crushed beneath an overturned table, among a spill of mismatched shoes. And there were splatters of blood, the smell of human blood.

  Beneath the fallen books and records, he saw a small, carved chest. A second chest lay half hidden by a scatter of baby clothes. Both looked old, dark, and roughly made, very much like those in the newspaper picture. Watching Garza photograph the scene, Joe slipped behind an upended suitcase for a better look. He wondered if Garza had seen the morning paper, if he was aware of the wooden casks. One was the size of a small bread box, incised with primitive birds and painted in soft greens and blues. The other was half that big, carved with flowers and stained in red and green. The pieces of a third box lay beneath it, smashed and split, with the lid torn off. Joe studied the scene of what must have been a viole
nt fight, and sniffed the tangle of smells.

  He had, following Garza in through the front door, reared up to look into the window at Fern's body where she lay waiting for the coroner. The two bullet holes, one through her chest, one through her throat, were both small and neat. As the detective turned away, Joe had nipped into the window for a better look.

  The bullet holes were larger in front, raggedly splattering blood and flesh, as if she'd been shot in the back. Certainly she had been shot at close range. He couldn't see her back, to know if there were powder marks. The unpleasant smells of death mixed sickly with Fern's perfume.

  But here in the back room, Fern's perfume came sharper, clinging among the broken furniture.

  Had she fought with her killer here? Had she been shot here, from behind, then dragged into the broken window? Or had she managed to crawl there before she died? Or had she run, and gotten as far as the window? He watched Garza photographing, taking advantage of every angle, capturing every smallest detail. Was it Fern who broke the window to get at the chests or did her killer show up first and shatter the glass? If Fern broke in, why would she bring the casks in here? Maybe she was followed, maybe she ran back here to get away.

  Too many possible scenarios. He wanted to hear the kit's story. And he wanted to know more of what Garza and Davis found before he tried to fit the pieces together.

  The fur flew in both directions. Joe's clandestine method of investigation, even with the advantage of his highly superior scent detection, his finer night vision, and his acumen at breaking and entering, was seldom adequate alone, without input from the police. A cat sleuth, picking up what the cops missed, was still deeply dependent on the findings of the crime lab.

  Face it, Joe thought, he and Dulcie and the cops were a team- even if MPPD knew nothing of the arrangement. What a cat laugh, Joe thought, stretching out under an antique baby carriage, watching Garza bag evidence. The department had no notion that it was the cooperation of cat and human that had made them one of the finest detecting machines in the state, had put them right up there in the top percentage of cases solved.

  Garza had photographed the area where the three chests lay, and was now bagging them, taking great care, placing each piece of the broken cask in a separate evidence bag. One thing was sure. If the fight in the back room was between Fern and the man who hit Cora Lee, if Fern had held her own long enough to create this amount of damage and chaos, Fern was stronger than she looked.

  But she would be strong, Joe thought. Working for Richard Casselrod in the antiques shop, she not only kept the books but helped with the displays and moved heavy pieces of furniture. Though a lot of that skill was in the balance, in little tricks like moving a heavy dresser across smooth floors on an upside-down throw rug, sliding it along as he'd seen Wilma do when she rearranged her furniture.

  Say the unknown man broke the glass and grabbed the chests, but saw Fern approaching. He ran into the shop. Fern followed him, tried to take the chests, and there was a fight. One of them fell, breaking the one chest. The guy pulled a gun, Fern ran, and he shot her.

  Too soon to speculate. So far, his ideas were no more than a forensic shell game-Clyde would say Joe was playing Monday morning football. Yet he couldn't leave it alone; something kept nudging him. He was missing something, some fact right in front of his nose, some small bit of evidence that, apparently, even Dallas Garza hadn't found.

  He sure didn't want to think that Cora Lee was involved in this. And so far, he'd found no scent of her within the shop, or in the window.

  One thing was certain. When the ladies of the Senior Survival club had gotten interested in the old chests, they had fallen into more than they bargained for. Someone intent on making a bundle from the Ortega-Diaz letters had become a real threat to the ladies' innocent pursuit.

  Creeping close on Garza's heels among the clutter, Joe sniffed every object, trying to sort out the smells. It wasn't easy, with recurring whiffs of Fern's gumdrop perfume mixed with the aroma of old books and old clothes and shoes, with a regular soup of ancient stinks. Yet he did find one scent worth sorting out, a hint hardly detectable over Fern's perfume. Padding closer to a heap of clothes, he fixed on a tiny bit of refuse barely visible beneath a wrinkled scarf.

  He was looking at telling evidence, at a missing piece of the puzzle.

  He reached out a paw, but didn't touch. He shoved the scarf away, so the cherry pit was in plain sight. He was crouched, looking, when Garza turned.

  Backing into cover, Joe remained frozen behind a rack of dresses. Garza stared in his direction and stood watching for further movement, his square, tanned face immobile, his dark eyes watchful, his hand on his gun.

  When the detective moved suddenly, rolling the clothes rack aside, Joe moved along with the rack, staying under the clothes, his nose inches from Garza's black shoes.

  When Garza found no one behind the rack he circled it, and investigated two more racks that stood against the wall before he decided he was alone.

  But he had seen the cherry pit. He stood looking, then knelt and scooped it into an evidence bag.

  Smiling, with a twitch of whiskers, Joe Grey fled the scene, fading among the shadows to the front door, pawing it open where an officer had left it ajar. Racing up the sidewalk and around the corner to find Dulcie and the kit, the last bit of evidence burned in his brain, Vivi's forgotten little cherry seed, sucked clean.

  21

  "This isn't going to work," Joe said, looking up at the new, locked front door of the police station.

  "Of course it will work." Dulcie backed deeper into the bushes, away from the sidewalk and the scudding wind that dragged leaves along the pavement past their noses. They were quiet a moment, warm against each other, watching the pub door, half a block down, waiting for Max Harper. Every time the door opened, the wind carried to them the heady scent of beer and hot pastrami.

  When Harper emerged at last, returning from an early dinner, Dulcie slipped from the bushes into the shadow behind the twin urns of potted geraniums that flanked the door. When he entered the station she padded in directly behind his heels, as silent and intent as a stalking tiger.

  Joe moved close to her and they slipped behind the front desk, across from the dispatcher's counter. Above them, the new front window was just beginning to darken, the spring sky streaked with swiftly blowing clouds. As Harper headed down the hall to his office, Dulcie slipped out again and approached the dispatcher's open cubicle. Padding in under the counter, looking up at the dispatcher, she mewed softly.

  The evening dispatcher was a middle-aged woman with blond curly hair and a thick stomach that pulled her uniform into horizontal wrinkles. She occupied a nine-by-nine room with open counters on three sides, loaded with electronic equipment. When she saw Dulcie, she glanced across the entry and down the hall to make sure no uninvited human had entered with the cat.

  "Will you look at this. Where did you come from, you pretty thing? Did you follow the captain in here? Oh, aren't you sweet!" She knelt to pet Dulcie, her curly blond hair brassy in the overhead light. Maybe the little chirping noise she made was the way she talked to her own cats. She was new to the station, working the four-to-twelve watch. Her name tag said Officer Mabel Farthy. Opening a drawer under the counter, she produced a ham sandwich from a crackling paper bag.

  "Come on up on the counter, kitty. Want a little bite? Come on up here."

  Dulcie leaped onto the counter, smiled sweetly, and accepted the offering, gobbling the ham but daintily spitting out the bread. At least the woman didn't use mustard. Mabel stood stroking and talking to Dulcie until an emergency call pulled her away. When she turned to handle the radio, Dulcie walked along the counter to where she could see Joe peering out from behind the information desk. He couldn't see down the hall but she could.

  The coast was clear, not an officer in sight. She flicked her tail, and Joe streaked down the hall toward the offices.

  Light spilled from two rooms. The one at the far end
was where Harper had disappeared. When Joe vanished into the first room, Dulcie turned to study the communications layout.

  This setup had far more space than the old communications desk, and Harper had purchased more and fancier equipment. The three new computers and three radios were indeed impressive. Mabel answered two more calls, sending her squad cars out, then took advantage of a lull in the action to offer Dulcie another morsel of ham, petting and talking to her. Oh, Dulcie thought, fate did smile upon the righteous feline. This woman was a pushover.

  Dulcie remained on the counter for some time, shamelessly purring and rubbing her face against Mabel's stroking hand, cementing their relationship. With the increased security in the remodeled department, Mabel and the two other dispatchers were going to be key players.

  She just hoped one of the three didn't turn out to be ailurophobic. Smiling up at Mabel, she purred a song of delight that left the officer beaming, and left Dulcie feeling that she could tame the most timorous cat hater. All she and Joe had to do was hang around the department and make cute, and they'd soon be regulars. Maybe they could even become department mascots, and she could turn her gig as official library cat over to the kit for a while.

  This morning, when Cora Lee was taken straight from the Emergency Room into surgery, the kit had been a basket case, pacing and worrying until Wilma, in desperation, took the kit to work with her at the library. The kit had seemed to like that. Cora Lee was out of surgery by noon, minus her spleen, which Wilma said was not critical. Otherwise, Wilma said, she was doing well. Wilma had promised the kit that, if she behaved, she'd smuggle her in when Cora Lee was ready for visitors.

  A cat in a briefcase? Or maybe concealed in a pot of fake flowers? Smiling, Dulcie pictured a gift box fitted out with a little door and perforated with air holes.

  Following Max Harper's scent down the hall, Joe tried to get the lay of the new design. The remodeling wasn't yet finished, but most of the drywall was up and plastered, and ready to paint. The new bulletproof windows were in place, as well as bulletproof glass between the offices. He missed the huge squad room crowded with desks, with all the officers doing their paperwork and taking their phone calls in communal chaos. Now that Harper and the two detectives had private offices, Joe's own life would be more difficult.