Cat Deck the Halls

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  “That kind of flattery will get you a long way, with this lady. Meantime,” she said, rising, “I’m starved. I feel like Rock, ready to dive into lunch with all four paws.” Rock, though he had his own bowl of kibble, had been eyeing the picnic table with ears up and nose twitching. He knew better than to grab, but this degree of restraint wasn’t easy on the energetic young dog. Ryan was putting her sandwich together when her phone rang.

  “Maybe Scotty,” she said, glancing at her watch. “He stopped in to see Jim Holden again at the building department.” She fished her phone from its holster, listened expectantly-and her hopeful look exploded into a dark scowl.

  “They did all that. The research! The hearings! The historic look won’t be changed! We aren’t doing anything to the outside. What the hell do they…” Ryan’s face was flushed, her green eyes burned with anger. Clyde opened another Buckler’s and handed it to her.

  “We’re not changing the outside,” Ryan shouted into the phone. “Can’t they understand simple English! Can’t they read a simple damned blueprint! What kind of…” She listened; then, “I know it’s nearly eighty years old! We’ve been through all that, Scotty!”

  Scott Flannery was Ryan’s uncle, and her construction foreman. He was her father’s brother, a big, burly, redheaded Scotch-Irishman. He and Dallas Garza, her mother’s brother, had both moved in with Ryan’s dad when her mother died, and had helped to raise Ryan and her two sisters, staggering their work hours and sharing the household chores. Scotty was largely responsible for Ryan’s interest in the building trades, while Dallas had honed the girls’ interest in fine bird dogs and hunting, and in safe firearms training.

  “The Historical Society is totally out of line,” Ryan snapped at Scotty. “They can’t have the gall to…”

  But they could, Clyde thought, watching her. Everyone knew that the city historical committee could be incredibly high-handed and officious. When Ryan hung up at last, Rock pressed quietly against her, looking up at her with concern, his pale yellow eyes almost human. The big silver hound might be rowdy, and an aggressive protector of those he loved, but he was supersensitive and highly responsive to Ryan’s moods.

  “Maybe,” Clyde said, “the two public school teachers who pitched such a fit when children began to transfer to the Patty Rose School, maybe they’re responsible for this.”

  “If they are,” Ryan said, kneeling down to hug Rock, “that’s even more maddening-a personal vendetta. Small-minded personal rage, aimed at hurting the school and hurting those children.

  “But,” she said, looking up at him, “it isn’t the teachers that make the public school so dull and ineffective-not all the teachers. It’s the policies, the administration, the red tape and constrictions and their morass of stupid rules.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Clyde said.

  “Ours.” Rising, Ryan moved to the table and finished slapping her sandwich together. “The city, the state. The voters,” she said, sighing with frustration.

  Clyde, watching her, knew that that kind of bureaucratic control upset Ryan perhaps even more than most people. When Ryan moved down from San Francisco about a year ago, a big change in her life, it was to end the cold patronization of an emotionally brutal marriage. He put his arm around her.

  “Slow down,” he said softly. She was almost crying, and Ryan never cried. He took her sandwich plate from her, set it down, and held her tight. She had worked so hard on this redesign for the old Stanhope studio, so intent on retaining its historic character while creating the needed classrooms. She had endured endless meetings, endless bureaucratic rejections, each of which sent her back yet again to the drawing board. She had put up with senseless arguments that had little to do with the quality and integrity of the designs and a lot to do with people’s desire to control.

  She looked up at him, swiping at a tear. “I didn’t come down here to fight another bunch of small-minded, shortsighted, selfish…I thought I got away from all that.” She pressed her face against him. “I’m so tired of this damned squabbling, I don’t even want to do the renovation.”

  Clyde held her away. “You’d let the city win? Let the city make you back down, and beat you?”

  “Screw them,” she snapped. “I don’t care.”

  “Lori and Dillon didn’t back down. They fought the city and won. Two little girls…”

  “Two little girls and three adults. And I said, Clyde, I don’t care!”

  Clyde hugged Ryan harder, knowing that she would rally. But he had to wonder about the reason for the harassment. Was it only the small-minded teachers? Or was there something else, besides the petty backbiting and power struggles? And that thought stirred his own cold and protective anger.

  24

  L UCINDA GREENLAW, leaving the house earlier that morning with the pottery shards safe in her pocket, smiled again thinking of Pedric wandering down the hill like some distinguished-looking mushroom hunter, kneeling among the neighbors’ wet leaves and digging out the plastic bag of broken shards; as soon as he returned, she’d called Chief Harper. Her call had just caught him, he’d just come in and was about to leave again. She’d hurried down to the station, parking hastily among the courthouse gardens. As she headed in through the heavy glass door of the police wing, Mabel Farthy looked up from her realm of electronic communications.

  “Lucinda!” Mabel swung out through the little gate to give her a hug, the pudgy blonde laughing, her dark uniform a bit tighter around the middle, Lucinda thought, not unkindly. “It’s been a long time.” Mabel sniffed at the white plastic bag that Lucinda had laid on the counter. “What did you bring? Some of your good Christmas cookies?”

  Lucinda laughed. “Not this time. This is…” She did her best to look embarrassed. “I think it might be evidence. Well, fingerprints,” she said hesitantly. “This is so…so busybody of me, Mabel. I…”

  Max came up the hall as they were talking, took the bag she offered, and led her back to his office. The tall lean chief poured her a cup of coffee and made her comfortable on the couch, sitting down beside her. She opened the plastic bag, still trying to appear embarrassed when, in fact, she wasn’t at all, she was having a fine time. But her story required a certain shy reluctance, she was not in the habit of bringing in evidence, and she had to make this look good.

  Well, she thought, amused at herself, she’d always wanted to do a little acting. As she laid out her story, she knew she was letting the three cats off the hook-Joe Grey was right, the timing would have been way too pat if the snitch had called about this evidence: The cats are in the office, the chief says he’d give a lot for Betty Wicken’s fingerprints, and not an hour later the snitch calls, telling him where to find those prints. “With that scenario,” Joe had said, “everything would hit the fan.”

  “I know it’s meddling,” Lucinda said now, looking at Max shyly. “But that woman in the rental, the woman our housebreaker was spying on? You said last night, if you could get information on her…Well, I was afraid if I didn’t slip right over there when I saw her break this flowerpot, if I didn’t snatch up the pieces before she threw them away…I don’t even know if a flowerpot can hold fingerprints, but…Am I making any sense…?”

  Max looked into the bag, didn’t touch the broken shards.

  “When she dropped it on the drive…She looked in such a hurry…It shattered and she just left it there, got in her car and drove off. Can you take fingerprints from this? Will that help find out about her?”

  Max was silent for so long that Lucinda began to get nervous. She looked at him uncertainly, and sipped the coffee he’d poured for her. “Those photographs of the children, Max. I worried about that all night, I find that really frightening.”

  “As do we,” Max said. He watched Lucinda so intently that she grew increasingly uneasy. She knew she was gushing, and that wasn’t like her. Max put his arm around her as if, she thought, he meant to humor her, to tell her kindly that what she had done was very clever of her, and t
hen send her away.

  But instead, he had beeen interested in what she told him about Evina Woods.

  “If we can lift some prints,” he said, “and if we can get anything from AFIS on them, if the woman turns out to have a record, we’ll have something to work with.”

  Max rose to refill their coffee cups. “So far, on those three tenants, we have false names, false IDs, falsified car registration. That in itself might give us reason to bring them in for questioning, but it leaves a lot of holes.” He picked up the plastic bag. “We have a call in to Arkansas, to check on Evina Woods’s story. I’ll take this back to Dallas, see if he can lift clear prints. If not, we’ll send it along to the lab, where they have more sophisticated equipment.”

  “I feel so sure,” Lucinda said, “that Evina was telling the truth.”

  Max took her hand, helping her up. “You were bold to go down there and talk with her, Lucinda-I won’t say foolish.”

  “She didn’t threaten me, Max, she seemed really scared. When she saw I wasn’t going to call the police, she calmed down. I know that could all have been an act, but…Call it a gut feeling. I think she’s telling the truth.”

  She looked intently at him. “I’m not a soft touch, but once in a while, you have to take a chance on someone. This is one of the times…If I’m wrong, I expect I’ll pay for it. This gamble,” she said, “is one I choose to take.”

  I N THE DIM garage, as Betty Wicken and Leroy Huffman sorted tools at the workbench, packing them into a canvas bag, Joe approached the blue Chevy van. Slipping up onto a stack of cardboard boxes piled between the van and the wall, he balanced with a forepaw against the van’s window, peering into the dim interior, his nostrils filled with the stink of automotive paint, from the amateurish blue paint job.

  Pressing against the tinted glass, he saw not the pristine interior of Charlie Harper’s van, no neatly built-in cupboards, no polished worktable running down one side. Only bare metal bracing and raw composition walls. This ancient, neglected interior had never had any care; it was stripped and ragged, only an empty hulk.

  Dropping down to the garage floor, he studied the lettering painted on the van’s side-the hasty, unprofessional logo, an amateurish copy of the more finely spaced CHARLIE’S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT.

  Somewhere, the Wickens had found another old Chevy van and had treated it to a home paint job on a par with what any active five-year-old kid could accomplish.

  “Not Charlie’s van,” Kit whispered, narrowing her eyes and lashing her tail.

  But Dulcie smiled with relief. “Charlie’s safe, and Mavity’s safe. But why would anyone copy Charlie’s van? What do they mean to do?” Her green eyes flashed. “Setting Charlie up,” she hissed. “But for what? For some burglary?” she said softly. “Or…could this be the missing vehicle that hauled away the dead man?” Her eyes widened. “Did you smell death in there?”

  Joe slipped under the van, Dulcie and Kit beside him, and they reared up, sniffing among the axles and brakes. Trying, over the stink of grease and hydraulic and brake fluids, to detect the faintest scent of death; but there was nothing else, no foreign smell.

  Dropping down again, they fled among the boxes as Leroy opened the side door of the van and tossed in two bags of tools, some cans of paint, and then ladders, drop cloths, everything one would need to renovate a house, or repair it.

  “Are they horning in on Charlie’s customers?” Dulcie whispered. “Pretending to work for her?”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Joe said softly. “And there’s no cleaning equipment, just the repair stuff.” The tomcat frowned. “Doesn’t make sense, unless…Unless they’ve staked out Charlie’s wealthy regulars, meaning to rob them-that would set Charlie up, big-time.”

  They looked at one another, feeling sick. Law enforcement families were prime marks for any scam to embarrass or compromise them, to put them on the wrong side of the law. The cats remembered too painfully when Captain Harper had been framed for a double murder.

  “That won’t happen again,” Joe said.

  But Kit shivered, pushing closer to Dulcie.

  “Nothing has happened yet,” Dulcie said. “We won’t let that happen!”

  25

  H URRYING BY THE station, loaded down with shopping bags, hoping Max was free for lunch, Charlie found him gone. “He had to meet with the judge,” Mabel said. “He went straight there from the Patty Rose School, from talking with Dorothy Street.”

  “Another rain check,” Charlie said, laughing. It was well past noon, and she was starved.

  “That’s what you get when you marry a cop,” Mabel said good-naturedly. “Lucinda Greenlaw brought in some kind of evidence. They talked for a while, then he headed over to meet Dorothy. Leave your packages here if you want to get a bite.”

  Charlie nodded. She didn’t like to leave packages in her SUV, with no locked trunk. Not this time of year, when bright store packages containing free Christmas booty were all too tempting.

  Tucking her packages out of the way in Max’s office, she stood a moment wondering what kind of evidence Lucinda discovered. She was headed out of the station, meaning to stop for a quick bowl of soup, when she saw Dorothy Street and Ryan coming out of the courthouse. Ryan was in jeans, work boots, and a red sweatshirt, Dorothy elegant in a soft gray suit, sheer hose, and Italian flats-succeeding very well in her new, businesslike mode. They waved, and Charlie went to join them. Ryan looked mad enough to explode. Meeting them on the steps, Charlie didn’t ask what they’d been doing. This had to be about the permit for the children’s home. “Have you had lunch? I’m starved.”

  “I ate with Clyde,” Ryan said. “Scotty called me in the middle of lunch. They’ve denied the permit again. If I die young, of a coronary, you can blame that bunch of bigots!” She glanced at her watch. “I need to get back, meet the landscaper,” and with a wave she headed across the parking lot to her big red Chevy pickup.

  Dorothy looked after her, shaking her head with sympathy. Then, “I guess Max stood you up. I rode over with him to pick up some papers. Come on, I’m hungry, too. Want to go back to the inn, have lunch in my office, where we can talk?”

  When Charlie nodded, Dorothy flipped open her cell phone, hitting the code for the inn’s kitchen. “The shrimp melt okay?”

  Charlie nodded enthusiastically. “And hot tea?”

  Dorothy gave her chef the order, and as they strode out together past the courthouse gardens, Dorothy glanced at her. “Those people taking pictures of our children…That really scares me. Max called me last night after the Greenlaws’ break-in, and then, just now, he showed me the pictures-the copies he made-to see if I could add anything.

  “I feel better knowing he’s doubled his patrol around the school. But to take pictures of the children…In my book, that means only one thing,” Dorothy said with disgust. “I’m glad they have the woman’s fingerprints-the tenant in that house where the pictures came from. Max said he was hoping to get an immediate hit on them, something about having to get an expert to examine them, and he didn’t know how long it would take.”

  Charlie hadn’t known about the prints. Was that what Lucinda had brought in? But how had Lucinda gotten the woman’s prints? Why had she…? Oh, Charlie thought, maybe it wasn’t Lucinda who retrieved that evidence. And the scene in Max’s office, earlier that morning, played back to her: The officers’ mention of the prints. Kit’s sudden excitement, the little cat hardly able to contain herself, she was so wild to race away. This time, Charlie thought, this time, those cats sent Lucinda Greenlaw as their courier.

  But to Dorothy she said, “It’s great when AFIS can get back with an immediate reply, but if the prints aren’t clear, someone does have to do a visual exam. And if the prints are close to a lot of others on file, finding a match can take some time.” She studied Dorothy. “Have you talked with the children, about those people?”

  “Oh yes. As soon as we knew about the pictures. We don’t like to keep things from the children. We
all get together after breakfast in the central hall, before classes, talk over anything that needs discussing.”

  She looked seriously at Charlie. “We told them about the pictures, and we described the two men and the woman as well as we could from the photos that the intruder shot. Described the car in their driveway, the old green Dodge. Told them not to play alone, anywhere in the school yard. Not to leave the grounds without one of us, for any reason. It’s hard to get the message across to the little ones, and not give them nightmares. Takes a lot of hugging and reassurance.

  “But our kids are pretty wise,” Dorothy said. “They all know what to do if they’re approached. That’s part of the survival course Patty designed-self-protection, managing their money, good health practices, making positive choices in life-and, of course, values.”

  Dorothy laughed. “We’ve had several teachers apply for jobs who said they wouldn’t be caught dead teaching values to the children.”

  “And? What did you do?”

  “We sent them packing,” Dorothy said. “Values are a part of survival, and that was important to Patty, after her little grandson was so brutally murdered. She told me the main reason she left Hollywood was the brutality and glitz and false values, the way the entertainment industry changed, over the years she was a star.”

  Turning in through the inn’s wrought-iron gate, they crossed through the patio gardens. The sprawling, Spanish-style building, with its pale stucco walls, red tile roof, and generous inner patio, looked as if it might have stood during the days of the Spanish ranches and the first missions. It had, in fact, been built in the late years of the nineteenth century and had served as an inn since its beginnings, under half a dozen owners. Patty Rose had bought it when she retired from Hollywood and moved to a quieter environment. Having always loved Molena Point, she soon became a comfortable part of the village family.

  They went in through the tearoom that wouldn’t open until midafternoon, when formal tea would be served. The cheerful, chintz-curtained room was chilly, with no fire burning on the hearth to warm the little round tables and the Mexican tile floor. Dorothy led her on through, to her office.