Cat Got Your Cash

by Julie Chase

  “No.”

  Jack frowned. “Who?”

  “I’m not sure. Her name’s on a binder full of Annie’s designs. I know because my companion line was meant to pair with them.” I pointed to the desk. “Whoever Shannon is, I think she might’ve met Annie for coffee today. I accidentally knocked a sticky note onto the floor when I came in here.”

  Jack marched around the desk and examined the open binder. He lifted his gaze to mine.

  I pointed at the sticky note.

  He pulled an evidence baggie from his pocket and stuffed the note inside. “This room is officially off-limits.” He opened his arms and moved toward the door, herding us forward with undeniable authority.

  I clutched the little pillow to my chest as we fumbled down the steps ahead of him.

  Halfway to the foyer, Jack snapped his fingers, and a group of people looked up. “We need to get a statement over here. This is the victim’s PA, Josie Fresca.”

  An officer extended his hand toward the stairs and ushered Josie away.

  I hurried onto the marble floor and scooted out of the way.

  Jack fixed his attention on me. “I asked for a written statement, but my notebook is blank, and you let yourself into Annie’s personal library. Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He harrumphed. “Are you difficult on purpose, or does it come naturally?”

  “You first.”

  “Funny,” he deadpanned.

  A greasy-looking man stepped into the foyer. “Someone call animal control?” He hooked meaty thumbs under his belt and yanked his pants up to cover his boxers. His face looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a baseball bat, and his breath smelled like whiskey.

  “No,” I said, a little louder than intended.

  “Come on in.” Jack waved him through the tightly knitted crowd. “Cats are in the kitchen. Wait here.”

  I chased after Jack. “No,” I whispered. “Stop.” I grabbed his hand and dropped it when he turned on me.

  “What?”

  “You can’t let that guy take Annie’s kittens. She loved those babies, and he’s . . . well, he’s gross, and he smells like alcohol. You can’t put her kitties in a car with an inebriated driver.”

  He didn’t look convinced.

  “Someone beat him up, so he’s probably not a nice guy. You said that about Annie. Innocent people aren’t usually attacked. He stinks, and he’s wearing his pants under his butt cheeks. I hate that. Aren’t there some kind of standards for animal control officers?”

  Jack’s cheek twitched.

  “This is serious.”

  He sighed.

  “Please?”

  He pressed tanned fingertips against his forehead. “What am I supposed to do with two kittens? Someone has to care for them until they’re claimed by Annie’s people or adopted by a new family. I don’t have time for that. I’m a homicide detective, not a rescue operation.”

  “But,” I stumbled.

  “I’m sorry.” Jack lifted the crates and turned for the next room.

  “Stop!” I scurried in front of him and opened my arms to block his path. “They’re potential witnesses.”

  “Are you planning to question them?”

  I gave each carrier a careful look. “No, but please don’t send them to the pound. They’ve had a terrible day, and they were rescue kittens. What if they have flashbacks or think they’ve been abandoned again? It would break Annie’s heart. I’m sure someone from her family will want them once they’ve heard the news.”

  Jack set the crates on the floor, defeated. “What do you want me to do?”

  I bounced onto my toes, sensing imminent victory. “I’ll take them.” I squeezed the little satin pillow in my sweaty hand. “I’ll keep them until they can be collected by whoever Annie preselected. I’m sure she has a will to clarify all that.”

  Jack’s expression softened. His resolve washed away. Jack was an animal lover and a cat owner. No matter how infuriating he was from time to time, he’d always have that going for him, and I respected it deeply. He slid his eyes closed for one long beat. “Fine, but no funny business.”

  I drew an X over my heart. “Promise. I’ll be a model caretaker.”

  He dipped his head in one sharp bob of approval. “And you can’t leave until you write up your statement like I asked.”

  “I’m on it.” I tucked the pillow under one arm and grabbed the crates from the floor near his feet. I hustled past the greasy guy in the foyer—“You can go. They’re coming with me. Buy some coffee. Call a cab. Move along”—and motored through Annie’s house in search of Jack’s notepad.

  I might not have arrived soon enough to save Annie from her fate, but I could protect Cotton and Cashmere until their new family arrived. I had enough love and cat treats to last forever.

  Chapter Three

  Furry Godmother’s warning for the hostess: What’s yours is theirs.

  I set the metal crates with Annie’s kittens in my living room and hurried back to my car for Penelope, who’d ridden shotgun in her travel pack. She wasn’t thrilled that I’d rushed her off of Spot the vacuum and into the car with two strangers who meowed all the way home.

  Annie’s kitties growled and complained as I locked my front door and opened their crates.

  “Welcome to my home.” I hurried to the kitchen and wiped out two cereal bowls for food. The ordeal with the police had taken hours, and based on the empty food bowls at Annie’s place, these girls had to be starving. I set two fresh places beside Penelope’s dish and freshened the communal water. “Dinner.” I plopped a generous selection of my baked goods into the trio of bowls. “I know it’s not technically a meal, but you little sweethearts have been through so much. You deserve a special dinner.”

  The twins slunk into the kitchen like runway models, winding their bodies around every chair leg and corner they came to. “Mew. Meow. Mew.”

  I crouched by the bowls. “Here you are.”

  They sat across from me with judgmental blue eyes.

  “Don’t be shy.” I pinched a piece of tuna tart between my fingers and offered it to them, hoping not to instigate a catfight.

  They took turns sniffing and rejecting my offering. “Mew.”

  “Okay, well, I have pawlines and peanut butter kitty cakes.” I lifted the next selection from their bowls. No response. They jumped onto my counter and stared.

  “No, no.” I scooped them up and set them on the floor. “Here you are.” I lifted the bowls to them. “You’ll love these. I made them myself this morning.”

  “Mew.” They turned their heads away in unison, one looking east, the other looking west.

  Penelope watched from the back of my couch.

  I put a treat into her bowl. “Are you hungry, sweetie? Come on. Meet our houseguests.”

  She leapt silently onto the floor and strode toward me, head high.

  The Siamese hissed and pawed as she drew near.

  Penelope backpedaled. She looked at me with an expression of betrayal.

  “I didn’t know they’d do that,” I explained. “No.” I nudged their paws to the floor. “Be nice kitties.” I retrieved Penelope and set her beside her bowl. “Eat.”

  The Siamese charged her, wailing and growling.

  “Shoot! No. No. No. Hey!” Someone bit my ankle. “Naughty! I know you’ve had a bad day, but let’s all try to get along.” Good grief. I carried Penelope and her bowl to my bedroom and shut the door.

  I returned to find the Siamese on my counter. “Hey. No.” I set them on the floor by the food bowls, and they walked away.

  My blue betta fish jumped and splashed in her tank on the counter, as excited to see me as any puppy. “Hello Buttercup. You’ll eat your dinner, won’t you?” I twisted the lid on her food and dropped a few brine shrimp pellets onto the water’s surface. She pounced on them with vigor. “Good girl.” I ran a fingertip across the glass, and she followed it with enthusiasm.

  Th
e Siamese watched with rapt attention, gently swaying their tails.

  Yikes. I gave poor Buttercup another look. “Good thing your tank has a lid.”

  “Fish are friends, not food,” I quoted Finding Nemo to Annie’s kittens. “Your dinner is in your bowls.”

  Something caught my eye outside my front window. My silly heart hoped it was Jack following up on the day’s events, but whatever it was had vanished. Probably a neighbor or a jogger. I opened my sheer curtains for a better look.

  My phone rang. I swiped it from my purse and sandwiched the little phone between my ear and shoulder. “Hi, Mom. Sorry I didn’t make it tonight.” I did my best to sound more upset than I felt. I washed my hands and ripped a wad of bleach wipes from the container by my sink. “I’m getting ready to bake tomorrow’s treats.”

  “Baking treats? That’s why you aren’t here?”

  “I was at Annie’s longer than expected,” I hedged. Music from her party poured through the phone. “I should let you get back to welcoming the new neighbor.” She and I could talk tomorrow when I felt more emotionally stable and less like arguing. Mom was guaranteed to flip out when she learned I had been at another crime scene. She’d been doing her dandiest to make me a proper District bachelorette, and finding dead bodies didn’t mesh with her vision.

  “Are you aware,” she asked, “that I am not an idiot?”

  “What?” I rubbed a handful of disinfecting wipes over the space where I planned to organize my pupcake ingredients. “Of course I don’t think that. I don’t think anything like that.”

  “I have my finger on the pulse of this district, Lacy Marie. Or lack thereof,” she muttered the afterthought.

  I dropped the fistful of wipes on the counter and pulled a wineglass from my rack, then filled it to the top. “You’ve heard.”

  “Yes I’ve heard!” she snapped. “Of course I’ve heard. My only daughter was at the scene of another murder today. Do you know how that looks? Never mind. I’ll tell you. Sketchy.”

  “You sound like Jack.”

  “You should’ve called me. I shouldn’t have to keep hearing about these things through the grapevine. Our attorney is threatening to raise his retainer.”

  I swigged the wine. “I don’t want to talk about it yet.” I resumed scrubbing the counter with enough elbow grease to rub grooves in the cheap Formica top. “I just got home. I’m still processing.”

  “That’s what I’m for,” she said. “I’m your mother.”

  “You’re having a party.”

  “You were invited!”

  I had another gulp of wine. “I wasn’t going to interrupt the party to give bad news. I planned to call and fill you in when I got to work tomorrow.”

  Two Siamese landed on the counter, attacking my hands and the cluster of wipes. “Mew. Mew. Mew.”

  I jerked the wipes away before they poisoned themselves.

  “Well,” Mom huffed, “at least tell me you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. Shaken, but alive and unharmed. Jack didn’t even accuse me of murder this time, so that’s an improvement.”

  “Very funny.”

  I turned my back to the kittens and slid onto a barstool at the island. “How do perfect days go completely awry?”

  “It happens.” Spoken as if she had a few of her own in mind. “Can we bring you anything? I can send your father out for whatever you need if we don’t have it here.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  The kittens stretched off my counter. One landed in my lap and rolled around until she nearly fell off. The other gripped my head in her paws and sniffed my face. “Mew. Mew. Meow. Mew.” I batted her paws away from my nose.

  “Do I hear a Siamese?”

  I pulled the phone back and made an obnoxious face at the screen. “How on earth can you tell a Siamese by their meow?”

  She hacked a throaty noise into the phone. “Your father loves the incessant little devils. We had a pair when we were first married. The blessed things never shut up, and forget about relaxing. They won’t be ignored. Why are they there?”

  I smiled at the idea of kittens making Mom crazy. She loved cats. Though, these particular two were a bit needy. I craned my head away from their reaching paws. “They belonged to Annie. I volunteered to keep them until they can be united with their new family. I’m sure Annie made provisions. She loved them dearly.”

  “Good luck. You’ll owe Penelope big time after this.”

  A paw slapped my cheek. The other kitty worked the material of my skirt under her feet until my skin was fully exposed.

  I covered my legs and struggled to hold the soft wool in place.

  My phone buzzed against my cheek. I checked the display. “Mom, that’s Scarlet. Go back to your party, and we’ll talk tomorrow when I’m less crabby.”

  “Very well. Remember to set your alarm system, and you might want to invest in some earplugs.”

  “Thanks.” I switched lines and sighed into the receiver. “I’m having an awful day. How about you?”

  “Aw,” Scarlet said. “So it’s true? You found another body? You’re going to need a nickname if this keeps up.” Scarlet had been my best friend since we were in diapers. Our moms put us together for playdates so they could drink coffee and have a break, but it backfired. We weren’t the kinds of friends who complemented one another. One shy, one outgoing. One timid, one brave. No, we were the kinds of friends that necessitated phrases like “double trouble.” We were cut from the same cosmically ornery cloth and loved it.

  Our paths diverged when I left town following high school graduation, but the minute I moved home last spring, Scarlet was on my doorstep with a DVD collection from the 1990s and a box of cheap wine. We were caught up by dawn, as if we’d never parted. Scarlet was the kind of friend everyone needed and I aspired to become.

  I swirled red wine around my glass. “I found Annie Lane on her kitchen floor. It was awful. Nothing wrong with the local grapevine, though.”

  She laughed. “The rumor mill is a well-oiled machine. We take gossip seriously around here.”

  I offloaded the kittens and went in search of my laptop. “Yet I’m always the last to know anything that doesn’t directly involve me.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “Uh oh.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think the children are headed my way. I told Carter I went to take a bath. He was supposed to keep them busy until I came out.”

  “Are you hiding in the bathroom again?”

  She scoffed. “I have three small children and a newborn. Of course I’m hiding in the bathroom. Hiding is my life.”

  I logged into my computer and finished my wine. The Siamese mewled and complained at my feet. One jumped onto the keyboard. “I’ll trade you two kittens for your four kids.”

  “Do the kittens wear diapers or need constant supervision?”

  “No to the first question, and I think yes to the second.” I removed the kitty from my keyboard.

  “Then no. I’m comfortable in my current chaos.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” I typed Annie’s name into the search engine. “How’s Poppet doing?” Poppet was the newest addition to the Hawthorne brood.

  “Good. She can sleep through anything, but I haven’t slept in three months. Seven years if you want to be technical.”

  A chorus of little voices echoed through the line.

  “Drat,” Scarlet whispered. “They’re calling for me through the keyhole and under the door.” She groaned. “Mommy’s in the shower. Daddy will help you.”

  “Daddy needs help changing the baby!” One voice rose above the others. “Now he needs a shower.”

  “Oh, lord,” Scarlet said. “I’m not getting a shower tonight, am I? If you come over to visit soon, bring some of that powdered shower-in-a-can stuff that hippies use. And a poncho to cover the spit up stains on every dress I own.”

  “Hey. This will pass, and you’ve gotten an awesome little offspring out of the deal. Who cares if you smel
l funny for a few months? At least that’ll keep Carter on his side of the bed.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I choked back a laugh. “Okay. Go. Take your shower. Carter doesn’t need your help with anything no matter what the kids say. He’s a big, powerful attorney. He can work it out while you take ten minutes for yourself. Tell him I said so.”

  “Okay. Stay out of trouble. I’m too tired to help, and I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll come over soon and watch the kids so you can nap.”

  “Bring wine.”

  “What are friends for?” I disconnected.

  Cotton and Cashmere bit my ankles and pawed at my feet. “Meow.”

  “Come on.” I loaded them into their crates and went back to the kitchen to clean my counters.

  Twenty minutes later, there were pupcakes in the oven, and my timer was set. I stacked feathers on my couch in piles of green, gold, and purple. My Mardi Gras line would go on with or without Annie and all the blood-splattered pieces collected from the crime scene as evidence. Replacing the ruined items wouldn’t be easy. The materials’ cost alone was astronomical, not to mention the time involved and the fact that each piece was a Furry Godmother original creation. Then again, starting over was becoming my thing, and maybe without Annie, my work wouldn’t be seen on a global scale, but it would still make local pets and owners happy, and I was okay with that.

  I bundled feathers into threesomes as I scanned online articles with Annie’s name and perused her social media accounts. Josie was right. Annie had a few haters. The faux fur line she’d presented as an alternative to the real thing had been an epic disaster. Commenters on blogs and message boards thought Annie should’ve taken a strong no-fur stance. No exceptions. They argued that her faux line continued to glorify the murder of innocents for fashion.

  I researched a few of the angriest individuals and discovered that one going by the username PrettyCharlie86 lived in town. Charlie also had a blog dedicated to ethical treatment of animals, and his bio came complete with a photo of him and a friend outside his home. The house number was visible on the door, and I recognized the street. “Gotcha.” I jotted the address down.