The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  “Why did you call her the cat lady? Is she into exotic cats? Or show cats?”

  “My guess is you’ll be able to answer your own question when we get there.”

  * * *

  Wanda Farr was an institution in Indian Run. Stories about who she was and what she was and why she did the things she did may have been founded in fact once, but over time the truth had become more elaborately embroidered than the lines on her face—and no one disputed how deep and intricate those were. If any of her contemporaries were still alive, maybe one or two might be willing to say whether it was accurate that Wanda Farr had actually been pretty once, and normal once, or perhaps even just average on both counts. But the Farr woman had apparently outlived them all, and no one now could remember her as anything except an ill-tempered old lady who shared her days and nights with too many cats and too much bad wine.

  As Claudia got out of the car and made her way toward the Farr woman’s trailer, Booey so close behind her that he clipped her heels once, she called to mind an image of the woman. She’d spotted her on the streets a few times, the woman slightly bent, but with purpose in her step. She tried to recall what else she knew about the woman. It wasn’t much.

  Once, years earlier, a reporter from the twice-weekly Indian Run Gazette had tried to interview Farr for a human interest feature, but the woman was uncooperative and the reporter wound up writing a column loosely based on comments and details supplied by everyone but the cat lady. Claudia still lived in Cleveland when the column was written, but Suggs had shown her a faded copy shortly after she’d arrived and first noticed the old woman beside a dumpster, muttering to herself and tossing scraps to at least a dozen squalling cats. The reporter must have been miffed that Farr wouldn’t talk to him. He painted her in an unflattering light, making more of the complaints she’d generated over the years than the compassion she’d shown to the stray felines that prowled the town’s shadows. Claudia hadn’t given the story or the woman much further thought. Every municipality seemed to have a cat lady. Indian Run’s was eccentric, crabby, and old.

  A cat abruptly streaked past Claudia and Booey, hell-bent from beneath a gnarled bougainvillea bush to a recess under the trailer. Claudia jumped, swore. She could hear others from inside the trailer, Wanda Farr’s cats. She could smell them, too—that, and something else.

  The animal control officers fidgeted outside the door and gave her a quick rundown. They’d received a call. They’d come out. No one responded to their knock. Claudia nodded and tugged Latex gloves onto her hands. She handed a pair to Booey, then rapped hard, once and again, called out Farr’s name. Nothing. She took a deep breath and tried the door. It was unlocked. Shadow and stench leached out of the trailer when she opened it. She turned to Booey.

  “You don’t have to come in, you know.”

  He swallowed and waved a hand. “No, no . . . this is all part of police work, right?”

  Claudia looked at him. “All right. Don’t touch anything. Don’t step anywhere I don’t step first.”

  Booey nodded. He was about to say something else, but a sudden sneeze cut him off. He covered his nose with a hand and followed her in.

  Of course, Claudia didn’t think Wanda Farr was literally one-hundred, but that she was way up there in age seemed a certainty. Whether she was as cranky as everyone said—right now that seemed a likely possibility, too. Even in death, bottomed-out naked in her bathtub as she was, the Cat Lady of Indian Run appeared to be glowering. Then again, maybe it was just an illusion. In life, Farr’s left eye had a tendency to drift off-center—no doubt one of the reasons kids called her a witch—and that same eye now stared blankly toward the side of the tub while her right eye seemed anchored directly on Claudia. Disconcerting.

  Booey took one look at the corpse and fled, sneezing in violent bursts, both hands at his face. Claudia could hardly hold it against him. If she’d had a choice, she would’ve raced him for the door. The smell of death combined with the pungent odor of cat urine made her eyes water and her stomach lurch. Almost as bad was the racket. Cats howled and wailed from every corner of the stuffy trailer, their collective voice a shriek that raised goose bumps on Claudia’s arms. She batted aside a half-grown cat that had leaped onto the edge of the tub, then peered uneasily behind her. There had to be twenty or twenty-five felines in every shape and color and size. They weren’t the cute cuddlies that played with balls of yarn in cat food commercials on TV. Wanda Farr’s cats were hungry and testy, and Claudia wanted to get the hell out of the house—now.

  She looked back at the dead woman. Farr lay flat on her back in the tub, her head below the faucet and her knees slightly raised to accommodate the short length of the tub. Now and then, Claudia heard a pipe gurgle. She couldn’t see the drain stopper under Farr’s head, but assumed that bath water was slowly trickling past it. Enough had already seeped out so that by now it fell just below Farr’s nose, but a high-mark ring of dirt around the tub suggested the water had originally been plenty deep enough for the old woman to drown in. She hadn’t drowned without a little help. A glass with an inch or so of amber liquid sat on the side of the tub against the wall. Claudia carefully leaned across the tub and sniffed at the glass. Liquor of some sort. She straightened, then stood and shook her head. Too many old people died alone and lonely. All the cats in the world couldn’t change that.

  She moved outside of the bathroom. The trailer was little more than a boxcar with electricity and plumbing. Beside the bathroom, it contained nothing more than a kitchenette and a long, narrow living room. She took her glasses off and wiped a smudge from the lens. Even through blurred vision, the trailer looked shabby, and as dirty as the air smelled. Partly it was the cats. Claudia knew they were fastidious creatures by nature, but the cluster of litter boxes in a corner were heaped with their waste, and their fur clung to every surface. She made a face and put her glasses back on. Everywhere she looked, she saw piles of . . . stuff. Clothes were heaped in random piles. Bags filled with more bags nested two and three deep against one wall. Uneven stacks of faded newspapers, some of which had clearly become handy latrines for the cats, sprawled beside a tattered sofa. There was no bed in the room, but oily contours in the sofa cushions suggested that Farr used it as one. Claudia couldn’t imagine shutting out the din of the cats well enough to actually sleep. Then again, she didn’t know much about cats. Maybe they drifted off when their owners did.

  The temperature in the trailer must’ve been in the 90s. Claudia shrugged off her jacket, this one beige and one of many such jackets she special-ordered for their sturdy practicality. She liked the mid-thigh length. She liked the bellows pockets even more. Robin, who had just turned fourteen and liked to tell Claudia how to dress—liked to give her advice on just about everything—told her she was nuts to wear them in the summer. “News flash, Mom,” she’d said a week earlier. “Half the cops in Florida wear shorts in the summer. You have to get with it. I mean, like no offense or anything, but you look like you just got off the boat.” Claudia didn’t bother pointing out that only uniformed cops had the privilege of shorts, and certainly not half of them. Robin wore her fourteen-year-old convictions like a second skin.

  Something tugged at her slacks. She looked down at a calico kitten, its tiny nails stuck in the fabric. It hissed when she bent down to free it, batted once at her hand, then dashed beneath the sofa. Tough guy, Claudia mused. Cute, sort of. She wondered how long it had been stuck in the trailer with the dead woman.

  On her way out Claudia paused by the kitchenette, a square room separated from the living area by a faded picnic table that Farr must’ve dragged in—probably a trophy from someone’s trash. A huge bag of dry cat food, the bag shredded almost to the point of being indistinguishable, lay on the floor beside it. The cats had spared Wanda Farr. They’d made do with what they could find.

  She shuddered and examined the table. It was burdened with crusted plates, empty cat food cans, a few drained wine bottles and a crumpled sandwich wrapping
. Claudia read the print on the wrapping: roast beef with provolone from the gourmet grocer in Indian Run’s ritzy Feather Ridge community. The expiration date had come and gone two weeks earlier. Wanda Farr had probably crossed the tracks and scavenged it from a dumpster outside the store. For the grocer, a discard. For the Cat Lady of Indian Run, a feast.

  Claudia stepped outside and inhaled fresh air, one deep breath after the other. She’d be at the trailer for a few more hours, trying to find neighbors and documenting the minutiae of Wanda Farr’s life. Unless the old woman had been under the care of a doctor—Claudia thought not—then in police parlance, Farr was officially an “unattended death.” An autopsy would be required. Paperwork would mount. First, though, the cats needed to go. Booey, too, it looked like.

  The chief’s nephew was hunched beneath a scraggly pine tree, his head between his bony knees. “Booey? You all right?” Claudia asked.

  “Yeah . . . I’m, uh . . . fine.” He sneezed loudly—once, twice, a third time. “Really.”

  “There’s no reason you have to stay here.”

  “No, no . . . I’m good. It’s just, I’m . . . the cats . . . allergies.”

  “Your stomach all right?”

  “Fine. I . . .” Abruptly, he swiveled away and vomited into the grass.

  Claudia winced. She tossed her jacket in the back seat of the Cavalier, lit one of the cigarettes she had vowed to quit, then raised Sally on the radio and told her what she needed. She glanced at Booey again and asked her to send a patrol officer over, too. The chief’s nephew needed a ride home.

  Chapter 2

  Emory Carella was in his element. The computers had landed and he was knee-deep in cartons, whistling while he wrested a monitor from its Styrofoam packing. Claudia had forgotten. She eyed the boxes and pushed her hair off her collar for a second, letting the station’s air-conditioned air whisper against her neck. On a good day her hair fell to her shoulders in gentle mahogany curls that tempered the sharp angles of her face. Just now, though, still damp from the humidity of Wanda Farr’s trailer, bits of her hair jutted out in spikes that matched her disposition. Claudia hoped Carella’s good humor would jar her into a better mood. She had less confidence in the long-awaited computers.

  “You know what you’re doing, Emory?”

  Carella set the monitor on a desk and turned around. He grinned. “Child’s play, Lieutenant, child’s play.”

  “Could’ve used you on the road earlier. Where the hell is everyone today, anyway?”

  Carella leaned against the desk. “Well, let’s see. The chief went home with a belly ache. The sarge is still on vacation. Moody caught a missing persons call out at Feather Ridge—this Becker character again. Third time this month. His wife phoned it in a couple hours ago.”

  She nodded. “The name rings a bell. What’s the story on him?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s a wanderer of some sort. Old guy. He usually finds his own way home before we’re done with the paperwork. But since we’re talking Feather Ridge, Moody snagged two officers to scout the area with him—you know, give the wife the illusion that we’re dropping everything else, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, let’s see . . . we got one or two other guys cruising for speeders, aiming to make the chief’s quota for the month, and one more who’s chasing off some bonehead trying to make a buck with an illegal fireworks stand. Fourth of July is coming up fast.”

  Claudia briefly wondered if she should pick up some sparklers. Would Robin consider herself too old for that?

  “So, Lieutenant, there you have it, except for me and these babies.” Carella gestured at the computer boxes. “The chief made me the department’s technology guru, which is fine by me. Keeps me off the street and out of the heat—at least for a day or two. Saved the budget a buck or two by picking them myself. I’ll be surprised if the chief doesn’t promote me all the way from officer to captain.”

  “Carella, you’re a shameless suck-up.” Claudia lobbed a pink message pad at him. He fielded it in mid-air.

  “It’s worse than you think. Guess whose desk got the first computer?”

  Roselli in records had a computer, a tired thing that took five minutes to boot and froze on a regular basis. Chief Suggs had one, too, though his was acquired only after the town council boosted the department’s budget and told him to upgrade its technology—which meant get some technology, as far as Claudia was concerned. Suggs demanded a machine that would be faster than anything the rival sheriff’s office had. Once he had it, he lost interest. He turned the thing on every morning, then bitched about how much space it took up on his desk the rest of the day.

  “Emory,” Claudia said, “please don’t tell me that a computer is parked on my desk if you’re not going to tell me that it’s already hooked up and ready to go, too.”

  Carella shrugged. “Sorry. I got as far as ‘parked.’ Look for ‘hooked’ tomorrow. Right now, I just have to get these sweethearts out of their boxes. You know how the chief hates clutter. Of course, I would’ve stored them in the utility closet if we had one. Come to think of it, we used to. It seems to have gone missing.”

  They grinned at each other. Claudia gave Carella a half salute and made her way to her office. There it was, on her desk, all right. It swallowed half the room.

  “Hey, Lieutenant.” Carella bounded into view. “In all the excitement of high technology, I forgot to tell you that before Moody fielded the Becker thing, he followed up on the El Dorado. He knew you were out on the Farr call, figured he’d just take the car gig before you told him to.”

  Claudia was the department’s only bona fide police detective, but Suggs had reluctantly given her the green light to draft Moody for minor investigations if time permitted. It almost always did.

  “Apparently there wasn’t much to it,” Carella said. “Vehicle was there one day. Gone the next. Gorman doesn’t exactly have a secured lot. Anyway, Moody told him to alert his insurer, and he put a BOLO out on the car.”

  “Busy day for Mitch,” Claudia said. “Tell him I said thanks.”

  She spotted Booey’s flame-topped head a fraction of a second before he squeezed past Carella into her office and parked himself on the metal chair. Great. She’d hoped for a reprieve, at least until the next day.

  “BOLO . . . that’s ‘be on the lookout’, right?”

  Carella clapped him on the back. “You got it, sport.” He mouthed “and you got him” to Claudia, then slipped away. She glared at his retreating back, then looked at Booey, trying to decide what to do with him next. His face had color again, but he’d been pretty sick at Farr’s trailer. “You know, Booey, you didn’t need to come back today. It’s already—”

  “Ailuromania.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Ailuromania. I looked it up.”

  The boy was speaking in tongues. “Give it to me in English, Booey.”

  “That cat lady—the way she is? I mean was? It’s called ‘ailuromania.’ That’s the psychological definition for someone who’s got an unhealthy enthusiasm for cats. I thought you might want to include it in your report.”

  “Ah. Something to consider.”

  “I don’t mean ailuromania killed her, of course. She drowned, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably? Wait—you mean that’s not how she died?”

  “I just mean ‘probably’, Booey. Don’t get excited. I have a few things to check. Routine things. And we’ll know more when the medical examiner does an autopsy.” Claudia swiftly deflected additional questions by asking Booey if he knew enough about computers to get the monster on her desk hooked up.

  He did, and would—with enthusiasm. Claudia smiled. Good. Carella could baby-sit him for a while. It was four-thirty. Maybe she’d still have time to play detective. Because “probably” wasn’t good enough.

  * * *

  Back in Cleveland, Claudia had grown close to a patrol officer whose career on the road abruptly ended the night a drunk driver slammed into him while h
e was helping a motorist change a tire. He’d lost a leg in the accident, but months later he told Claudia that half the time it still felt like it was there and that in his dreams, it always did. He called it his “phantom limb,” and said that most amputees experienced the same phenomenon.

  As Claudia steered the Cavalier toward home, it occurred to her that the smell of death was a little like that. It lingered ghost-like long after contact with it, a grim plea that the life it represented not be forgotten. Her stomach rolled, and she cranked the window all the way down. The fresh air helped, but there was more going on here than the odor of decay. Claudia sniffed, picked the smell apart, and cursed. Cat urine. Of course. She’d spent a few hours walking around in it. The shoes would have to go.

  By the time she reached that conclusion, she was pulling into the driveway, her headlights sweeping across the thirty-year-old house at the end. On most nights, the image was enough to induce a twinge of guilt over how much work the house still needed. Not tonight. A black BMW was parked in her spot. She didn’t recognize the car, but she recognized the vanity plates instantly. Everything else dropped from sight.

  Brian.

  She turned off the car and listened to the tick of the engine until it spun down into silence. She hadn’t seen him for a long time; didn’t want to see him now. Of course, he wasn’t here for her. He was here for Robin. Maybe he was between gigs. Or maybe he was just out of work altogether. That would hardly be surprising.

  With a dread that made her feel a decade older than her thirty-six years, Claudia stepped out of the car. She’d have to stow her feelings, because whatever animosity she felt toward her ex, he was still Robin’s father. It was really that simple.

  She leaned into the back seat and fumbled for her jacket. Her hand touched something wet, and at the same time she recognized what it was—what it only could be—she felt something sharp scissor her wrist.