Cat Laughing Last

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  The front yard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence and belonged apparently to one or more large dogs that were not at the moment in residence. The earth was trampled bare beneath a few sickly bushes and dotted with their chewed rubber toys. At least the owners had cleaned up the dog do; and probably they had taken the dogs away for the day-the sight of canine pets could cause a prospective buyer to look twice as hard for interior damage, for chewed door moldings, scratched floors, and stained carpet. The ladies gathered in front, beside the "Open House" sign.

  "I don't think…" Gabrielle began, looking the house over, "I don't think this one…"

  Wilma took her arm. "Come on. It won't hurt to look, it's the last one on the list. Nearly four thousand square feet, Gabrielle, and it has enough water credits to start a hotel."

  The ad read, five bedrooms and five baths, five custom-built fireplaces plus two sunny, legal basement apartments. The word legal should mean not only that the land was zoned for two apartments, but that every water fixture on the premises had a proper permit.

  All over Molena Point there were unobtrusive apartments tucked into a hillside basement or over a garage, some legal, some not. All were in demand as rentals. Molena Point's water code mandated an official permit for any household fixture that used water in its functions, from a king-sized shower to a bar sink. New credits were not an option; your house had just so many. If you wanted another washbasin, you had to give up a fixture in exchange.

  "There's plenty of parking space," Susan said. "Three-car garage and this nice wide drive. And the front planting, between the fence and the street, is nice, where the dogs don't play." That wide area was lush with native bushes, succulents, and large volcanic boulders. Susan's Lamb, though he, too, had a fenced yard, had in his poodle dignity allowed Susan's garden to flourish and even the lawn to present a respectable green carpet.

  The front door was open. They saw no one inside. Entering, they formed a divergent group, Mavity in her maid's uniform, Wilma in jeans and a red T-shirt, Gabrielle wearing a linen suit and heels, and Cora Lee in stretch pants and the oversized shirt that hid her bandage. Susan wore a calf-length denim jumper over a white T-shirt, and leather sandals. They moved into the foyer.

  "Oh, my," Mavity said.

  "Oh!" Cora Lee whispered.

  They stood in a wide entry, its tile floor and skylight bathing them in brilliance. Potted plants filled the corners. Through a door to their left, they saw a young couple in the large, light kitchen, talking with realtor John Farmer. Glancing up, he waved to Wilma. A stairway rose to their right. Passing it, they moved ahead into a large living room dominated by a fireplace of native stone.

  The gray-blue walls wanted paint, and the carpet still showed stains despite an apparently recent cleaning. But the ceiling was high, with tall windows, a spacious room very different from what the exterior implied.

  The three bedrooms on the main level, two to the right of the living room and one to the left past the dining room, were all large. Each had a private bath, and two had raised fireplaces.

  The oversized kitchen was done in cream-and-white tiles. Opening off this were an ample laundry and storeroom, before one entered the garage. All the walls needed paint, and some needed patching. The doors were marred with claw scratches, made, apparently by a very large dog. Returning to the entry hall, they climbed the stairs.

  The upstairs cubicle, that looked so small from without, offered a large master suite with another raised fireplace, a private deck, an ample study that would do for another bedroom, and a view straight down into the canyon. Three levels of decks overlooked the canyon. The ladies glanced shyly at each other, but no one spoke. They hurried down again, to the basement apartments.

  Both apartments were fusty and needed work. But both had their own small kitchens. Either would do for a housekeeper, a caregiver, or as rental income.

  Returning to the living room, they could see John Farmer still in the kitchen with the young couple. Farmer was in his forties, a man with surprisingly round cheeks, a pink-and-white complexion, a slim, sculpted nose, and dark hair in a military cut. He sat at the dining table with the blond young woman and the slim, red-haired young man. Their voices were low, their conversation solemn, the couple's expressions excited and serious.

  "They're too young to afford this house," Mavity whispered.

  "And whose BMW is that at the curb?" Susan said softly.

  The sight of the young man making out a check wilted the ladies. When the couple had left, shaking hands with John Farmer and tucking away a deposit receipt, Farmer joined them.

  "Did they offer full price?" Wilma asked.

  John Farmer nodded, and put his arm around Wilma. "You folks were serious."

  "We were," Wilma said. "Very serious. Are they requesting an inspection?"

  "Yes. And the sale, of course, is contingent upon their getting their loan. If you'd come half an hour earlier…"

  Wilma looked at the others; she didn't know what had come over her, she wasn't ready to sell her house, but they couldn't let this one go. Maybe the loan would be refused. Maybe the inspector would find some disastrous seepage problem that the couple wouldn't want to bother repairing.

  "You can make a second deposit," John said. "Contingent upon their not completing the sale."

  An hour later, after walking around the outside and inspecting the furnace and the ducts and wiring as best they could, and writing in several contingencies to their deposit, the checkbooks came out. The ladies split the deposit five ways and called their attorney to help set up the venture. The legal work seemed tedious, but they were caught up in the thrill of the purchase and in the trauma of not knowing whether they had actually made a purchase.

  While Wilma and her friends agonized over their hunger to own this particular house, across the village in Wilma's guest room, Joe Grey and Dulcie were pawing a few scattered cat hairs from the dresser, where they had left a brown, padded envelope. They had placed a computer-printed note on top, weighting it down with Cora Lee's bracelet so it couldn't be missed.

  Cora Lee,

  The letter in this envelope belongs to you. You bought the white chest at the McLeary yard sale. Richard Casselrod took it from you by force, even if he did shove some money at you. He took the chest apart and removed this letter from the false bottom, so it should be legally yours, to keep or sell.

  A friend

  The letter had been Dulcie's longest effort at Wilma's computer. Her paws felt bruised, and her temper was still short. It took a lot of squinching up to hit only the right keys, and took far more patience than patrolling the most difficult mouse run.

  They had gotten Catalina's valuable letter out of Joe's house before Clyde might, in fact, decide to pack up and move. Before he fell prey to the hunger for change that had gripped the ladies of the Senior Survival club. At least three of those women seemed fairly itching to box up their belongings.

  Now, following Joe out through her cat door, Dulcie said a little prayer for him, a plea that Clyde wouldn't sell their house, that there would be no move for the tomcat, that Clyde and Joe would stay where they belonged, and Joe could quit worrying so foolishly about homelessness and displacement.

  30

  The front page of the Molena Point Gazette was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped the Gazette, but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

  AUTHOR ELLIOTT TRAYNOR MURDERED VISITING AUTHOR AN IMPOSTOR

  The handsome gray-haired author living among us while his play, Thorns of Gold, was being cast, has turned out to be an imposter. The man whom villagers assumed to be Elliott Traynor is, in fact, a New York fry cook from Queens bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author. The real Traynor died six weeks ago on the New York streets, in a dram
a more bizarre than any of Traynor's many works of fiction.

  The debonair and charming fry cook who impersonated Traynor was able to deceive the entire village, including director Samuel Ladler and musical director Mark King. Only Traynor's wife, Vivi, seems to have known the truth.

  The body of the real Elliott Traynor was identified late yesterday by New York police after it had lain for six weeks in cold storage in the New York City morgue, tagged as a John Doe. Molena Point police are holding Vivi Traynor and the fry cook, Willie Gasper, for transport back to New York where they will face murder charges. Until this morning, Traynor's death was considered a possible suicide. Police now have a witness to the murder.

  Traynor was found dead in early March, in an alley frequented by the homeless. There was no identification. He was dressed in rags. The fingerprints lifted could not be matched in any New York State or federal records. On Friday, Traynor's widow and Gasper were arrested and held for possible illegal disposition of a body, but early today a witness was located claiming to have seen the author's wife smother him with a pillow and dump him in the alley.

  Early this month, Elliott and Vivi Traynor were thought by Traynor's publisher and his New York agent to have flown to the West Coast, where Traynor meant to complete his latest novel and oversee the production of his play. According to New York police, Traynor died the night the couple's flight left John F. Kennedy Airport. Gasper, impersonating the world-famous author, accompanied Mrs. Traynor on the flight to California using Traynor's identification, then posed as Traynor, even acting as consultant on the production of Traynor's only known play.

  New York medical examiner Holland Frye told reporters that Traynor's body contained a large dose of Demerol laced with alcohol, a potentially lethal combination. Traynor had a legal prescription for Demerol, which is a powerful pain reliever. The pillow with which Traynor was smothered was hidden by the witness to his murder. Subsequently turned over to police, it was booked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab for identification of hairs clinging to the fabric and DNA testing of possible saliva stains.

  Max Harper and Dallas Garza watched the evening newscast while standing in Clyde's living room. The three cats lay on the back of the couch behind Charlie and Ryan, pretending to doze but Joe was so interested he could hardly lie still. Both the Gazette and the newscasters had mentioned only one New York witness.

  So, Joe thought, smiling, NYPD had been able to keep some of the details under wraps.

  Besides Marcy Truncant, the bag lady who had awakened to see Vivi kneeling in the alley holding a pillow over Traynor's face, a neighbor of the Traynors, living upstairs from them in their mid-town apartment building, had come forward. She had told detectives that she saw Vivi and Elliott leave the building early the evening of his death, five hours before the Traynors' flight. She remembered the date because it was her wedding anniversary, the first since her husband had died. She saw the couple go out the front door of the building and down into the parking garage, then in a few minutes saw their car pull out of the garage. She told police she saw both of them inside the car as they turned into traffic and sat waiting for the traffic light.

  She said that approximately twenty minutes after the Traynors left the building, Elliott returned, coming into the lobby through the front door, and that he was dressed differently. He had left the building dressed in a suit and tie and had returned wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a frayed denim jacket, attire devoid of the meticulous care that Traynor always exhibited. She didn't see their car return, but an hour later when she went down to the garage, the Traynors' black Jaguar was in its slot.

  Joe imagined a scenario where Vivi and Elliott left in the Jaguar, then Vivi had somehow gotten Elliott into Willie's car, maybe had feigned car trouble. She had gotten some liquor into him and perhaps additional Demerol. When he passed out they had changed his clothes and dumped him in the alley, and apparently smothered him to make certain he was dead. Crude, Joe thought. But effective.

  Willie had driven the Jaguar back to the building and put it away, so it would appear that Elliott and Vivi were at home. In Elliott's place, he had gone up to the apartment. He had changed clothes, called a cab, and headed for the airport to meet Vivi, to catch their red-eye flight out of JFK. Willie's car had not yet been located. Joe wondered what they'd done with Elliott's dress clothes. Had they been stained or torn when Vivi dispatched Elliott?

  When the TV news switched to tensions in the Middle East, Harper turned the volume down. Joe could hear Clyde in the kitchen tossing the salad and stirring the spaghetti sauce. The house smelled of Italian sausage and garlic. Elaborately, Joe stretched, trying to get the kinks out. His whole body felt tense. He'd rest easier when the two detectives had arrived from New York, and had taken Vivi and Willie Gasper away with them. He kept thinking, without any logic, that all the confusion with the Spanish chests and Catalina's letters wouldn't end until Molena Point had seen the last of Vivi Traynor-as if Vivi's switch-and-bait game had somehow contaminated everything she touched in the village.

  Catalina's hidden letters, if the ladies of Senior Survival had been able to buy all the chests and found all the letters in them, would have contributed nicely to their future security. But that hadn't happened. Too many people knew about the letters. Of the seven chests that Marcos Romero had carved for Catalina, five were now accounted for. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle, in which he found the hidden compartment; the three chests that the Iselman estate gave to the Pumpkin Coach; and the chest that Susan Brittain had bought on eBay. Susan had examined it carefully, but had found nothing inside.

  Five chests. And nine letters-the one Casselrod found in the white chest and that Joe and Dulcie had returned to Cora Lee, and the eight letters taken from one of the chests donated by the Iselman estate, that Augor Prey took from the smashed chest in the Pumpkin Coach. Those would remain with the police as evidence until after Prey's trial, then would be returned to the Pumpkin Coach to sell. Eight letters, each valued at some ten thousand dollars, though both the curator at the museum of history where Susan inquired, and an official at Butterfield's, thought that at auction they would bring more. Forty to eighty thousand clams, Joe thought, for the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, and Meals for the Elderly-and maybe the local Feline Rescue. That would be nice, to see some of it go for indigent cats. After all, without a cat or two, Augor Prey might have slid out of Molena Point with the letters, as slick as a greased rat.

  When Joe heard Clyde dishing up the spaghetti, he dropped off the couch and melted into the kitchen, rubbing against Charlie's ankles, then leaped to the far end of the counter beside Dulcie and the kit.

  Curled up on the cool tile, impatiently awaiting their turn, the cats watched Clyde serve the plates. Charlie unwrapped garlic bread hot from the oven, as Ryan popped cold beers. The Italian feast smelled like the cats' idea of heaven, making them drool with greed.

  Humans wind their spaghetti between spoon and fork, but cats slurp it-in this case while listening guiltily to Rube whining at the back door. The old dog's digestion could no longer handle spicy food. Clyde fed him a special diet about as appealing as tom burgers.

  But hey, Joe thought, the stuff is good for him. He watched Charlie and Harper at the table, observing the sense of shared sympathy between them. And he had to smile, that Clyde and Ryan seemed to be hitting it off. Certainly Clyde was scrubbed and neatly dressed in a V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck and freshly washed jeans, and he hadn't grouched once-he was, in fact, observing impeccable behavior. That never hurt, Joe thought, amused.

  "When is Augor Prey's arraignment?" Charlie asked. "Are you sure he'll be indicted?"

  "Time and patience," Harper said. "You can never be certain of anything, but I see no reason why the grand jury won't hand down an indictment. We have the gun that killed Fern, with Prey's prints on it."

  Charlie nodded. "Along with Willie Gasper's prints, and Vivi's?"

  Harper nodded. "It was a
pparently Willie's gun or hers. There was no registration. And no way to know if that gun killed the raccoons. It was the same caliber weapon, but with a hollow point that spreads all over, you're not going to see any riflings. If it was the same gun, Gasper apparently wiped off the trigger. It showed only Prey's prints.

  "Prey's story is that, the morning Fern died, Vivi followed Fern in through the broken window, into the back room, and pulled the gun on them while they were fighting over the wooden chests. That he snatched it from her and it went off, killing Fern. We have evidence that Vivi was in the back room at some point." Joe thought about the cherry pit that Garza had picked up, and about Prey's sworn statement putting Vivi there. The cats, playing up to the night dispatcher, had found a copy of Prey's signed statement that Garza had left for Harper. Easing the door of Harper's office closed and flipping on the desk lamp, they had crouched on the blotter, reading.

  Not only had Fern tried to grab the chests from Prey-a real fistfight, as Prey had described it-but Prey said that one of the chests had been smashed, and that Fern managed to snatch up the letters that fell out of it.

  Joe assumed there had been some gentle pressure from Garza or Harper to obtain the rest of Prey's statement. Prey said that when Fern ran toward the window he lost his head, went kind of crazy, as he put it, and shot her again, firing at her in a fit of confusion.

  He said that Vivi had disappeared; and that when he saw he'd likely killed Fern, he jammed the gun in his pocket and ran for the back door, jumped in his car, and took off. He said that, driving away, he wanted to go back and talk to the police, that he heard the sirens and wanted to tell them what had happened, but he was afraid to. That had made the cats smile. Anyone who thought Prey was trying sincerely to make amends for an innocent mistake ought to think again. For one thing, both shots had been from behind, entering Fern in the back.