Cat Telling Tales

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  It hadn’t been so neat when he was in town; then, looking in, you’d see his clothes dropped here and there, and often a woman’s things, sleek nightgown, satin slippers tossed under the bed, a mess of jars and tubes on the bathroom counter—Alain, she supposed, or maybe some other woman; human men were so fickle.

  She prowled until her paws felt like ice cubes and then she spun around and headed for home. She was freezing when at last she clambered up her own oak tree and back under her own soft pillows, just her nose and face sticking out where she could see the street and yards below. From her high vantage she sighed once, purred twice, and was nearly asleep when she saw, down on the street, Emmylou’s old car moving slowly along. What was she doing out at this hour? Looking for a place to park for the night? Somewhere the cops wouldn’t hassle her?

  Strange old woman, Kit thought, very independent even with the law. She guessed Emmylou didn’t like the cops or anyone else telling her what to do—didn’t like to be bossed around, any more than a cat did. Maybe in ancient times, Kit thought, letting her imagination run, maybe Emmylou would have been a homeless loner then, too, always at odds with the world, an outcast faring no better, then, out in the cold looking for a place to rest and get warm.

  Rambling along in her old Chevy, with the heater turned on full blast, easing along beside the village shops looking in their softly lit windows at wares she couldn’t buy, Emmylou at last turned up into the narrow residential streets, to find a place to park. But she stopped now and then where a living room light burned, sat watching the flicker of firelight against drawn curtains, imagining the cozy room within. Then, moving on, she tried to think what she should do; she had to find a job but she so hated the regimentation. She’d tried, at three groceries, to get on as a bagger, had filled out applications, left her name, but no one needed her. Maybe, like others down on their luck, she should steal just a little, just enough to get by, if she could do it without getting caught.

  The cops were right, she had meant to stay at Sammie’s. Until she saw the mess, until she thought someone had been in there—or something. Something she didn’t want to share a bed with. She’d hidden the metal box there earlier, but then had gone back to retrieve it. The trashed house had frightened her so that, even if the cops stopped watching the place, she wouldn’t go back inside.

  Earlier in the evening, driving around looking for Sammie’s cats as well as for a place to get warm, she’d stopped outside Dr. John Firetti’s clinic, thinking about her own cats. Wondering if they were still there, if she could get them back when she did find a place, or if he had already found homes for them.

  Maybe better homes than she could give them. He’d known when he questioned her that she was lying about their shots, but he’d been willing to help them anyway. She liked him for that. The clinic complex was a hodgepodge affair, the two small cottages joined by the big solarium and then, across a little patch of lawn, the doctor’s own small cottage. Two outdoor lamps burned in the yard, their glow smeared by rain, lighting the way between the house and clinic. Neat flower beds flanked the front door, and through the shuttered windows the undulating light of a hearth fire gave her a sharp jolt of loneliness. Listening through the car’s open window, she caught soft laughter, a happy sound that twisted at her and made her move on, feeling left out, knowing she wouldn’t be wanted there.

  Chilled by loneliness as much as by the icy night, she headed up among the winding hillside streets where the cottages were crowded close and the streets didn’t have parking limits, where if she could find an empty spot among the residents’ own cars, she could safely stay the night. She was searching for a parking place, thinking the cops didn’t usually bother a person up here, when a black-and-white approached her from the rear, startling her, coming fast, its tires throwing up sheets of water. Slowing, she pulled over. What did they want? They had no reason to follow her, no reason to hassle her.

  But the squad car didn’t slow, it sped on past, and another behind it, and then two civilian cars, all of them heading straight up the hill—in the direction of Sammie’s neighborhood. She looked after them with unease.

  But hundreds of people lived up there, in those little pocket neighborhoods separated by ravines or outcroppings of boulders too rugged to build on. Why would she think they were headed for Sammie’s? They had no reason to go to Sammie’s, she was worrying for nothing.

  She was just tired, exhaustion always left her edgy and nervous. Turning onto a short dead end, she found a parking place no one else had wanted, really only a swale, a runoff that directed rushing rainwater down into a little ravine, sheltered by a dripping willow so her car would be nearly hidden.

  She backed parallel into that portion of curb, her front and back wheels straddling the low dip. She locked her doors, rolled up her windows to just a crack. Crawled over into the backseat, stacked the bags and boxes on the floor as she did every night, to make a flat surface. Shook out her blankets and quilt and pulled them around her. The backseat still smelled of ashes from Hesmerra’s metal box. Hesmerra had called it her safe, and she’d been partially right. It wasn’t insulated like a fire safe, but the metal had been enough to protect the papers from the dampness of the earth where it was buried; and the earth in turn had protected it from the fire.

  The problem now was, should she take it to the police, or keep the papers to herself as Hesmerra had done? Maybe at some future time, she thought uneasily, the papers would serve as a payback? A payback for Hesmerra’s death?

  “And what,” Joe said, stretching out along the juniper branch where the rain didn’t reach, “what do I tell the department? I just happened to crawl under Sammie Davis’s deserted house? I, a grown human, just happened to squeeze through a space not big enough for a miniature Chihuahua?”

  “Tell them . . . that the cellar door was standing open and you smelled something. I can’t call, they might think it’s Emmylou. She’s been in that house, nosing around. That would sure make her a person of interest.”

  “Maybe she is a person of interest. I have to tell them the cellar door was open, how else would the killer, or the snitch, get in? So how come it’s locked now? What, I tell them I locked it when I left, after discovering the body? Oh, right.”

  “We’ll have to unlock it,” she said sensibly.

  “You’re going to pick the lock. Like some trick movie cat? Jimmy the lock with your clever little claws.”

  She narrowed her green eyes at him, the tip of her tabby tail twitching. “Maybe that’s what the key in the kitchen was for. You think? It looked like a padlock key.” Scrambling backward down the tree, she disappeared around the corner, was up the back steps in an instant and in through the cat door, leaving the little square of plywood banging in Joe’s face.

  This was a long shot, but who knew? Joe watched her leap to the counter and open the cupboard, watched her ease the key off its hook with a delicate paw, trying not to smear any existing fingerprints. Maybe the killer had used this key. Or not, Joe thought. Maybe he had a key of his own. Either way, they didn’t need paw prints. Cat prints might be just as unique as human fingerprints, if any of the three detectives decided to follow a hunch and check out the markings they found.

  So far, they had been lucky no one had thought to compare paw prints found at a scene, with prints an officer could lift within the department itself. Joe imagined Juana or Dallas offering them little treats, and then restraining them long enough to ink their paws, to produce a set of fingerprint cards that would go into the office files. The idea gave him chills. Could he get used to wearing gloves? Pulling on little cat mittens?

  Dulcie, taking the key carefully in her teeth, dropped to the floor looking smug, and they beat it out again, down the steps and around to the cellar door. Carefully Joe took it from her, and climbed up through the brittle branches of the nearest bush, trying not to drool, not get the key wet and slippery. Clinging within the bush, he found a steady position and pulled the lock to him with a careful p
aw.

  Holding it steady, turning his head at an angle, he tried to ease the key in. Just a little finesse, and he’d . . .

  He dropped it.

  Silently Dulcie retrieved it, and climbed up through the bush; he took it, and tried again, but it wouldn’t go. He turned his head, adjusted his balance. Another try, but it didn’t fit. This wasn’t the right key. Ears back, he tried forcing it, but still it wouldn’t go. He turned around in the branches, poised to leap down.

  “Try again, Joe. Is the lock rusty?”

  Of course it was rusty. This baby’d been out in the weather since locks were invented.

  “Take your time,” she said. “Try just once more.” In the female mind, any impossible problem can be solved with sufficient patience. Ducking lower, he tried again, bowing his back so the key wasn’t angled, giving it a straighter approach.

  Nothing. Nada.

  “Turn it over.”

  He’d already tried that. It wouldn’t fit. He couldn’t talk with his mouth full, couldn’t even hiss at her. He was fighting it, the metal hard against his teeth, when he dropped it again. Dulcie gave him a look, dove into the bushes, rustled around, and came out with the key safe between her teeth.

  Motioning with her head for him to get down, she climbed, silent and quick. Around them, the rain had quickened again, they were both soaking wet, the raindrops on Dulcie’s back pale and icy. His paws felt like blocks of ice. Above him Dulcie was fiddling and fussing as she eased the key up to the lock. Females were so nitpicky, not direct like a tomcat.

  Within minutes she had it open. With a quick paw she pulled the padlock off, let it fall, the key still protruding, a rustle and dull thud as it dropped to the ground among the bushes.

  She didn’t brag or tease him. “What shall we do with it?”

  “Lose the key, keep the lock. If anyone else knows the key was inside the locked house, that leads right back to Emmylou. Maybe she’s innocent,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe she’s not.” He watched Dulcie remove the key and, with it safe between her teeth, they scrambled up the nearest pine and headed across the roofs.

  They carried it six blocks away where two steep peaks angled together, and tucked it down beneath the overlapped shingles. Then shoulder to shoulder they headed for Dulcie’s cottage, and a phone.

  “I just hope Wilma’s asleep, we don’t need to drag her into this, in the middle of the night.”

  “You don’t want to listen to her scold,” Joe said, grinning. Though, in fact, Dulcie’s housemate was as tolerant of the cats’ involvement with the law as a human could be. Wilma had been, for twenty-five years, a federal parole officer, she knew very well the intense fascination of sorting out a crime, she knew how it felt to be deeply involved with a case.

  But that didn’t stop her from worrying, she knew the disasters, too. She worried because they were small and vulnerable, and because they were, in her opinion, far too brash and bold. Worry made her overprotective, and so she fussed at them. Joe followed Dulcie in through her cat door, stopping midway to ease the plastic flap down along his back, to keep it from swinging, thump, thump, and waking Wilma. She slept attuned to that sound, to any small noise that would herald Dulcie’s return home.

  Crossing the laundry, they left wet paw prints on the blue kitchen floor, left a wet trail across the oriental rug in the dining room, and when Joe leaped to Wilma’s desk, again a damp row of prints incised across the blotter. As he pawed at the phone’s speaker, pressing the arrow down until the sound was as soft as it would go, Dulcie slipped down the hall to the bedroom, peering in, to make sure Wilma was asleep.

  Yes, she slept, breathing deeply, her back to the phone on the night table. Dulcie, watching her, decided she really was asleep and not faking, that she wouldn’t see the phone’s flashing light. Trotting back through the dim house and leaping to the desk, she watched Joe key in 911 and prayed, as she always did, that Wilma’s ID blocking was working as it should. She’d heard a number of stories where the service had failed, incidents too alarming to bear thinking of, at that moment.

  The night dispatcher came on, a young man they didn’t know well. Joe asked for the chief or whichever detective was on duty.

  “If this is not an emergency, you—” the dispatcher began.

  “It is an emergency. Do it now. Max will be mad as hell if you fool around. And no, I won’t give my name. Just do it!” There was a short silence, then Kathleen Ray came on. She knew his voice, she didn’t interrupt as he described the location and probable condition of the body.

  “In the crawl space of a dark cellar? How did you find that?”

  “I was walking my dog, he smelled something. The body must be pretty rank.”

  “You crawled back in there, to look?”

  Joe went silent, and clicked off. “Does she have to be so damned nosy?”

  “She’s a police detective. That’s her job.”

  He hissed at her companionably and they waited, listening, looking out at the cold night. The raindrops had turned suspiciously white and slushy. Dulcie said, “It’s going to snow.”

  Joe turned, gave her a look. “Snow. Right. Since when did it snow on the central coast?”

  But even through the glass, the night felt cold enough to freeze the rain solid. They were peering out when a lone siren cut through the silence from the direction of the station: one whoop, like a squad car clearing traffic as it sped away. They imagined the black-and-white moving fast through the village followed by another and maybe by Kathleen’s white Ford two-door. Dropping from the desk, they slipped quickly out of the house, scrambled to the roofs again through the rain, which was heavier now, almost sleeting, and they followed where they knew the cop car was headed. The immediacy of the police response took precedence over the cold, over their sharp hunger, and over their need for sleep—even over their caution to remain unnoticed at the soon-to-be-busy crime scene.

  24

  Wilma was awake when the cats quietly left the house. She’d heard them come in just moments earlier, the faint brush as they slipped through the cat door, and she’d thought Dulcie was in for the night. But then when Dulcie didn’t trot in to leap on the bed, and she heard Joe’s soft voice from the living room, she’d rolled over to look at the phone.

  With the red light for the main line flashing, she knew the phantom snitches were at work, calling the department, she knew the scenario too well. She hadn’t dared turn on her speaker to listen in, the little click would have alerted them at once. Swinging out of bed, shivering even in her flannel gown, she’d slipped barefoot to the bedroom door and listened, only mildly ashamed of herself. She could hear the faintest mumble, not Dulcie’s voice, but Joe’s, serious and urgent, too faint to make out a word he was saying.

  She daren’t slip closer, they’d hear even the faintest brush of her gown against the wall or door, or would scent her approach. The next moment, the whoop of a siren rose from the center of the village, a squad car leaving the station. How cold the night had grown, her bare feet were freezing. She’d stayed by the bedroom door debating whether to go on out, but then she heard them leave as stealthily as they’d entered. Searching for her slippers, she pulled them on and went up the hall to the living room, turned on the desk lamp, and hit the redial button.

  The number 911 came on the screen, and quickly she clicked off.

  She couldn’t ask the dispatcher what was happening. How would she know they’d just received a tip from the snitches? That lone siren could have been a patrol unit pulling over a speeding driver, but from the cats’ stealth and haste, she didn’t think so. Something was happening out in the night, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep again. Wide awake, she turned out the lamp and pulled the curtain aside.

  The rain had turned to slush, the cold was as sharp as knives. Closing the curtain again, she moved into the kitchen, flipped on the light over the sink, got the milk from the refrigerator, and a saucepan, and made a cup of cocoa. Carrying it back to bed, she opened the c
urtain, then tucked up under the covers, getting warm as she sipped her cocoa and looked out at the night. The slushy rain was falling more slowly, in a strange, drifting pattern.

  She sat up straighter when she realized it was snowing, small flakes floating beyond the glass. Snow, here on the coast. And the weatherman apparently hadn’t had a clue.

  This hadn’t happened in a decade, smatterings of snow in the village, deeper drifts up in the surrounding hills, an amazement that had brought the whole village out to look. There were newspaper articles in the library’s local history collection, pictures of heavy snow some fifty years ago when, one article said, Molena Point High School students abandoned their cars to throw snowballs in the drifts, getting to class hours late. That was the year that the steepest grades were too icy to drive on, and the Bing Crosby Pro-Am Golf Tournament was postponed because the golf course was covered with snow. The newspaper pictures made the higher elevations look like ski country, hills and roads solid white, roofs and the tops of the fence posts heaped with snow. The papers said that all day a steady stream of drivers headed up the valley to have a look and take photos.

  And now here it was again. The real thing. She imagined the village waking in the morning to a white world, everyone running outdoors, excited by the novelty.

  But right now, tonight, the two cats were out in it freezing their busy little paws. If they had alerted a patrol car, you could bet they were headed back to the scene, to whatever violence had occurred, that they’d be in the middle of the action, peering down from some freezing rooftop into the glare of strobe lights, hardly able to hear the officers’ voices for the harsh radio’s grainy insistence. Two little cats out in the icy night with no thought to frozen ears, their entire attention on the investigation unfolding below them.

  It seemed so long ago that Dulcie was just a giddy kitten, with no thought to human crime, human evil, and with no notion of her true talents.