by Ali Brandon
Then she frowned. “Wait. We’re talking maybe eight, ten hours since he would have stepped in the blood. And then he walked a couple of blocks through God knows what kind of crud on the streets to get back home again? If there was any blood left behind after all that, he probably licked it off.”
Darla felt her stomach roil at the mental image that statement conjured and was abruptly glad she’d missed lunch. Even considering everything else that had happened today, the idea of Hamlet casually licking Curt’s blood from his paws somehow seemed more ghastly than the rest. “Ew, Jake!” she exclaimed.
Jake snorted. “Darla, he’s a cat. What did you expect him to do, grab himself a pawful of hand sanitizer and tidy up? He probably ate a few nasty little mice while he was out, too.”
“Stop!”
Now it was Darla’s turn to raise a warning hand, even as a giggle bubbled up in her throat. Despite her best efforts, the giggle ballooned into a laugh. The mental picture of Hamlet pumping a few squirts from the industrial-sized container she kept by the store register was ludicrous enough to counteract the unpleasant images of Curt that had been drifting in her mind since that morning.
Finally regaining her composure, she conceded, “You’re right, I didn’t even think of that—I mean, the part about it being so many hours and him walking around. Bad idea, I guess.”
“Not necessarily. The pad on a cat’s paw has creases just like your skin does, so there is a chance some blood residue might be left. If you want to bring him down, we can give it a try.”
“Actually, I was hoping you could come up to the store. The only way to get him down here is in his cat carrier, which means any blood you’d find on him would probably be mine.”
Darla had endured a similar scenario when she’d had to take Hamlet to the vet for his annual exam a few months earlier. Her first attempt to load him into the plastic crate had dissolved into a contest of strength, with Hamlet gripping the carrier’s opening with all four paws and stubbornly refusing to be pushed inside. A second try had ended much like the first, save that Hamlet had cut short that round with a swipe of claws that nicked one of Darla’s fingers and left her muttering bad words as she sucked on that bloody digit.
She’d finally resorted to donning elbow-length oven gloves as protective gear. Then, sneaking up on him from behind, she managed to grab Hamlet and stuff him into the carrier before he had time to react. She doubted he could be fooled with that tactic a second time.
Jake grinned, apparently familiar with Hamlet’s aversion to being transported via crate. “Let me grab my keys and phone, and I’ll go up with you,” she said and then packed the vial back into her evidence-collecting case.
Not surprisingly, Jake’s trip upstairs took a couple of minutes longer than Darla’s, since she paused outside for a few clandestine puffs on a cigarette before heading into the store. By the time she walked in, Darla had already taken stock of her employees. James was in the reference section assisting two college boys—in what Darla could only assume was an homage to ghosts of students past, they wielded briefcases rather than the requisite backpacks—while Robert was busy rearranging the new arrivals table. As for Hamlet, he was still in classic p.o.’d mode, sitting on the register counter, tail tucked around him, ears flat. But Darla took the fact that he hadn’t stalked back up to the apartment as a positive sign.
“Robert,” she called out, “Jake and I need your help for a minute.”
“Sure.” Carefully squaring off one of the stacks, Robert sauntered over, fists crammed into the pockets of his black vest. “Hi, Ms. Jake. How’s the PI biz?”
“Not bad, kid. Say, do you think you could hold Hamlet still for a minute while I rub a little something on his paws?”
Robert looked alarmed. “What, like, medicine?”
“Nothing bad,” Darla hurried to assure him. The last thing she wanted to tell the teen was that they were swabbing her cat for a dead man’s blood. Though, knowing Robert, he would probably find that pretty cool. “We’re afraid he got out last night and stepped in, er, something he shouldn’t have. We need to clean him up.”
“Oh, okay, then.”
He scooped up the cat and cradled him so that all four paws were sticking out. “Hey, little bro,” he comforted Hamlet, who was giving Darla a suspicious look, “don’t get all bent. They just want to wash your feet.”
“This will only take a minute and a little bit of water,” Jake added as she dug into her metal box. She pulled out four test sticks and an ampoule of clear liquid. While Darla watched in interest, Jake applied a drop of water to the pad on the first test stick and then rubbed the dampened strip against Hamlet’s right-front paw pad. The “little bro” squirmed, but to Darla’s relief he let Jake repeat the process on his other three feet, using a fresh stick each time.
“All finished,” Jake cheerfully said as she set the final strip on the counter. “You can let the witness, er, cat, go now.”
“Good job,” Robert praised him and set him down on the floor.
Hamlet hissed and shot the youth a narrow green look that said, Yeah, bro, and this better not happen again. Darla suppressed a smile, feeling vindicated. Apparently, even Robert was subject to dropping a notch down Hamlet’s ever-sliding scale of acceptable human behavior.
Jake, meanwhile, was comparing each strip against a little chart on the side of the bottle that reminded Darla of a swimming pool chlorine test.
“Anything there?” she anxiously asked her friend. Then, recalling that Robert was still standing there and listening in while pretending ennui, she reached under the counter. She dragged out a three-ring binder the size of a New York City phone book—assuming such a thing was even printed anymore.
“Here you go,” she said and thrust the manual in his direction. “These are the instructions to the security system. Why don’t you thumb through it for a few minutes while I finish up with Jake, and then we’ll do a test run on how to do a replay?”
“Sure, boss,” he obligingly agreed and headed over to the children’s section, landing with an alarmingly loud plop in the beanbag chair. At another time, Darla would have lectured him on the proper care and handling of beanbags, but now her attention was on Jake and her test sticks.
“We have a winner,” the older woman said, holding up one strip that now sported a faint bit of green on the formerly white pad surface. “Definitely blood, but like I told you, there’s no way to tell if it’s human or not.”
Darla stared uncertainly at the strip. Finding the blood traces could mean that Hamlet had indeed been at the crime scene and been the one to leave the paw prints. On the other hand, the blood could be his own, or else have been the aftermath of Jake’s suggested nasty little mouse massacre. Bottom line, they still had no proof one way or the other that Hamlet had witnessed the crime.
Jake, meanwhile, had pulled out her phone. She snapped a quick picture of the strip next to the container’s color chart, then slipped the strip into a small paper bag and wrote Hamlet, left-rear paw and the date before initialing and sealing it. The remaining used strips she stuck into a mini biohaz bag.
“Normally, we’d need the original item as evidence,” she explained as she stowed everything back into her kit, “but I don’t think Hamlet will let me lop off his back paw.”
“And why would you want to perform an amputation on our store mascot’s extremity?” James asked—rhetorically, Darla assumed—as he slid past them to reach the register. With swift efficiency, he rang up his customers’ purchases (Latin grammar; Darla saw him nod in approval) while she and Jake prudently hung back and did their best to be invisible.
“Wonder what’s in those briefcases,” Jake whispered in her ear.
Darla gave the customers a professional smile as she murmured back, “Either dirty laundry or bomb-making materials.”
James finished the transaction but waited until the two young men had left the store before he coolly replied, “I believe it was the former, as I detected a dis
tinct whiff of gym socks emanating from one of the gentlemen. And now, would you care to share what sort of experiments you were performing on Hamlet?”
“Just testing a theory of Darla’s,” Jake airily dismissed the question as she collected her kit. “Gotta go. I’ve got some reports to write up and a couple of errands to run.” To Darla, she added, “I keep forgetting, the man has bionic hearing. I swear he could hear a mouse farting in the next room.”
Not waiting for a reply, she headed for the door. James fixed Darla with a quizzical look, one gray brow quirked in question. Darla debated fobbing him off the same way that Jake had, but she couldn’t just leave, as the store didn’t close for a few more hours yet. Finally, she said softly, “I’ll tell you more, but wait until after our part-timer goes home for the day.”
“Yo, I can hear mice farting, too,” Robert called from the beanbag. “It’s not nice, keeping secrets from the hired help.”
“Actually, keeping employees in the dark is a time-honored tradition,” James countered before Darla could respond. “I presume you are familiar with the concept of information being dispersed on a need-to-know basis?” At Robert’s nod, he clarified, “Let us just say that you do not need to know.”
Darla heard a bit of grumbling from the beanbag, but Robert obediently subsided back into his study of the manual. Hamlet, meanwhile, had slipped out from behind the main shelf in the kids’ section. He planted himself beside the beanbag in what appeared to be a gesture of solidarity with the teen, despite Robert’s earlier bit of betrayal.
Shaking her head, Darla said, “Robert, let’s do this training now, so I can throw you out of here before James dies of curiosity.”
“Believe me, there is no danger of that,” James countered with a hint of a smile. Tugging his vest into place, he headed toward the stairs leading up to the storeroom.
Robert slapped shut the manual and flung himself out of the beanbag with much the same gusto as he’d dropped into it. Darla waited until he’d joined her at the counter and then opened the security program on the computer.
“That’s the icon,” she said, pointing at the screen, “and here’s how you get in.”
Taking the manual back from him, she flipped it open to page 99 and showed him where she’d written the password information. She typed that in, and a welcome screen appeared. She used the mouse to click on the button marked “Menu.”
“You’ve seen the cameras inside the store. There are six total: the four inside, and one each at the front and back doors.”
“You mean there’s, like, one in the courtyard?”
“It’s pointed at the door,” she explained, pulling up a screen that showed all six views at once. “You don’t need to be paranoid; no one is spying on you if you sit out there to eat your lunch. Though pretty soon, it’s going to be too cold to be out there without a parka.”
“Yeah, I heard there might even be snow for Halloween. I think about how that would suck, you know, being homeless in the snow.”
“Don’t worry, there are plenty of shelters and volunteers to help folks in need when the weather gets bad,” she absently assured him, concentrating on the screen. “Here, the program’s set to run automatically. This is how you can tell it’s in real time, and here’s how to play back what you’ve previously recorded.”
She spent the next twenty minutes going over the features and letting Robert try it himself, until she was sure he had it down pat. “You can go through the review first thing tomorrow when you get here. You won’t have to watch every minute, just fast-forward through until you make it back to real time. Or you can stop it sooner if you see something that needs a closer look . . . like Hamlet sneaking out of the building. We’ve got to put a stop to that before he gets hurt.”
Or before he stumbles over another dead body.
“Don’t worry, boss, I’ll keep a sharp eye out,” the teen said with another of his snappy salutes. “And I’ll try to, you know, think like a cat so I can figure out where he’s getting out.”
“I’d appreciate that.” She glanced at her watch and added, “You can sign out now, but why don’t you plan on getting here about thirty minutes early tomorrow morning so you can look at the video.”
“Got it.” He initialed the printed schedule on the clipboard she kept beneath the register, and then reached for the backpack he kept stashed beneath the counter. As he did so, a couple of candy bars tumbled out of the unzipped side. While he stuffed the snacks back in and zipped up the pack again, Darla noticed that today he had a thin sleeping bag cinched to the bottom.
“Going camping tonight?” she asked with a smile.
He shrugged and then pulled the straps over his narrow shoulders. “Sometimes some of us go to the park at night to hang out. The girls, they always complain that it’s, like, too cold. But if I bring along a sleeping bag, we can crawl inside, and they don’t have an excuse to, you know, leave early.”
“Got the picture,” Darla said, hurriedly cutting him short. She didn’t want to think about what else might go on in that sleeping bag. “See you tomorrow, then.”
Robert headed for the door, sending a long-distance fist bump in the direction of Hamlet, who had taken over his spot on the beanbag chair. Darla frowned a little as she watched him leave. She’d hung out in parks at night as a teen a time or two herself. Still, that had been close to twenty years ago and in Dallas, which—contrary to its natives’ protests—had still clung to a small-town mentality despite its sprawling geographic bounds. But what was it like in Brooklyn, in this day and age? Besides, there could be a killer on the loose!
“You’re acting like someone’s mom,” she told herself with a wry smile. Robert was over eighteen and presumably had a mother of his own. If he wanted to go out at night, that was his call. But as for another of her employees—
She glanced again at Hamlet, who was busy kneading the beanbag chair into a more comfortable shape to accommodate his furry self. He’d been darned lucky so far to have returned home unscathed from his unauthorized forays outside the building. With luck, Robert would eventually discover the crafty feline’s escape route, but until then, she intended to keep a keen eye on Hamlet, as well as on her shop’s exterior fixtures . . . at least, until the roaming scrap thieves were caught and jailed.
Though heaven help any scrap thief—or murderer—unfortunate enough to cross paths with the official mascot of Pettistone’s Fine Books.
TEN
BY EIGHT P.M., DARLA WAS LOUNGING ON HER LIVING ROOM couch—a prickly, old-fashioned horsehair sofa inherited from Great-Aunt Dee—clad in gray sweats and a matching hoodie. Unfortunately, the fleece fabric wasn’t thick enough to protect against the sofa’s prickly hide. Grabbing a well-worn quilt, she spread the blanket over the offending cushions and then flopped again, this time with a sigh. She’d twisted her auburn hair into a knot held in place with a couple of her late great-aunt’s lacquered chopsticks, and her bare feet were planted on the coffee table as she watched a video of one of her favorite vintage British comedies. The show was her visual equivalent of comfort food after a particularly stressful day. And this day had definitely counted as stressful. She wasn’t sure how she was going to sleep tonight, since images of a waxen-faced Curt had continued to pop into her head all day.
But with any luck, she told herself, an evening’s marathon of To the Manor Born would be enough to relax her. Otherwise, she’d have to take more drastic measures and dig out the grainy VHS copy she had of The Joy of Painting and watch that a few times. If the soothing tones of Bob Ross talking about happy trees and clouds couldn’t improve her day, then nothing could.
She was halfway through both the second episode and her supper of leftover Thai takeout when the sound of a beehive on steroids nearly made her dump the carton into her lap.
She yelped in surprise, startling Hamlet, who was lounging behind her on the back of the horsehair sofa. A heartbeat later, she realized that the source of the sound was, of course, the buzzer l
inked to the glass entry door in the downstairs hall.
“Sorry, Hammy,” she told him as she set down the carton and shut off the video, and then padded over to the door.
The security system, similar to the kind one would find in a typical walk-up, had been nonfunctional when she’d first moved in. She’d only gotten it repaired when Jake had bluntly informed her that she was resigning as unofficial lookout for Darla’s evening visitors who didn’t realize their knocks couldn’t be heard two stories up. The intercom had only buzzed a couple of times since it had been restored to working order. Each time, the noise had startled the heck out of her, to the point she was considering bringing the repair guy back to upgrade it with a nice, soothing ding-dong chime.
She pressed the talk button and cautiously asked, “Hi, who is it?”
Except for a couple of food-delivery guys, her only visitors had been after-hours customers rightly guessing she lived over the store and hoping she’d pop down to open up just for them. She had politely declined both opportunities, leaving said would-be customers to go away disappointed. This time, however, she had an uneasy feeling that she knew who was standing down there at her door.
“Yeah, it’s Reese,” came the familiar Brooklyn-accented voice, made tinny by the intercom. “We need to talk, pronto.”
Darla winced. Time to face the music. She could probably think of a few other appropriate clichés, but what it all boiled down to was that she likely was about to get a lecture royal from the detective for breaking the news of Curt’s death to Hilda.
“All right, come on up,” she replied and buzzed him in. This, at least, was a major improvement, saving her from having to trot down two flights of stairs to manually open the door.
Reese must have taken the steps at a run, for a firm knock sounded on her door sooner than she expected. Deciding she’d better find out before she let him in if he was simply mildly ticked or if he was super torqued off, she fastened the security chain and popped the door open the couple of inches it allowed.
