Cat Chase the Moon

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  In the bathroom, a lady’s powder box, bottles of lady’s makeup, and a few lace-edged towels. And in the bedroom, in one of two closets, ladies’ clothes, finely tailored suits and blouses, sleek dresses; lovely shoes with low heels. A woman’s expensive purses on the top shelf, everything neat and dust-free.

  A woman lived with him, but where was she? Seaver hadn’t mentioned her, not once. When he referred to “we,” she had thought he meant herself: Courtney and Seaver. But had he meant the woman? A wife? There was no picture of her on the dresser, no framed wedding pictures as there were in her own human friends’ homes. Maybe his wife had just taken a trip, leaving him to tend the shop. Or maybe she had gone herself to try to capture the calico cat for whom they had such plans.

  Thinking about this, she hopped to the bedroom window to look down on the main street. It was then that she saw the cats below and her human friends, saw almost everyone she knew down on the streets among the shoppers, saw them searching for her. Saw Pan stalking the rooftops, saw Kit across the street peering in among the shadowed peaks—saw her own parents prowling a little garden between buildings; they appeared to be calling her name but she knew they were softly mewling, that was all they dared to do.

  She saw Charlie Harper enter a dress shop, maybe to put up a poster. She was carrying a thick roll of heavy paper, her red hair reflecting in the windows. Courtney watched Ryan and Clyde, Joe’s housemates, tacking up posters, too, or taping them to windows. Both were wearing old jeans, faded T-shirts, and baseball caps, ordinary and unremarkable.

  Each poster had a big calico drawing of her, her own face, her own right front leg with the three black bracelets, a picture as lifelike as if she were looking in a mirror. That was Charlie Harper’s drawing, sharply reproduced above the words reward: one thousand dollars.

  One thousand dollars! Oh my! She backed away, shocked that anyone would lay out money like that. She might be young but she read the paper and she listened to her human friends. She didn’t know what the stock market was except it was all about trading and Clyde said even a thousand dollars was a “nice piece of money.” Was she worth a thousand dollars? And she was more confused than ever.

  Until now, she’d been thinking only about herself trapped in this apartment. One minute imagining her grand new future, people crowding to see the tapestries of her past lives and to learn their ancient stories and to look at her! The next minute she’d been filled with cold fear at what such a future might really mean, the two emotions racing back and forth, muddling her head until she didn’t know what to think.

  She thought about the woman nearly dead out there in the sand, beaten and almost buried alive. Was that Seaver’s wife? Was that where she was? Was there more to his plan, more to this seemingly kind man than she imagined? Why hadn’t Seaver mentioned his wife’s name as he talked about the gallery exhibits? Had she refused to help him in some ugly plot that involved more than stealing a cat, and he had beaten and tried to kill her? Maybe they had fought, maybe he thought he had killed her, he was trying to bury her when something frightened him, made him run, made him leave her there half alive? If that woman was his wife, maybe Courtney’s own kidnapping was part of some far more grisly scheme? Letting her imagination run, she tried to think how to escape. I could be alone with a killer and no one knows where I am. Everyone is out searching for me, they’re all looking, my parents, my friends all hurrying out on this cold morning while I’m thinking only of myself, of what Seaver really means to do to me.

  She began to examine the windows again, trying to find one that was loose, one that she could claw open and at least cry out her meows. But this apartment, as Joe Grey might have said, was built like a steel jail cell.

  7

  Joe Grey was searching frantically for Courtney when he skidded to a halt before a newspaper stand, scanning the details of a bank-money theft and murder last evening that he’d known nothing about. It happened shortly after they sat down to supper. But there wasn’t much story there, it looked like Max had held out a lot. Joe got more details when he saw Clyde on the next corner—by now everyone, cat and human friends alike, was out looking for Courtney. Even a few cops were watching as they went about their patrols. When Joe and Clyde stepped into an alley behind some trash cans where they could talk, Clyde gave him a few more specifics: how fast the rough-voiced snitch clicked off, and his words exactly as Joe would have said them . . .

  “But I didn’t make that call, I was . . .”

  “Max knows it wasn’t his regular snitch, he said the voice was totally different, but the message was just as brief, as businesslike and curt. He kept as much out of the paper as he could, until he gets it sorted out.”

  That was often Max’s way, when a crime looked dicey. Joe could understand that. In fact, he realized, the half-buried woman had been kept out of the papers and off the TV completely. Even the crime tape had vanished as soon as the detectives finished investigating the site and filling in the grave.

  Earlier that predawn, when Courtney first went missing in the small hours, Joe had raced home in the dark and fog to wake Clyde and Ryan to tell them she had vanished, that they needed help, that they couldn’t find her anywhere; that she was there with Kit and Dulcie one minute, and gone the next. At his alarm his housemates had risen, scrambled into their clothes, and they were gone before daylight, the three of them looking for the little calico, as was Wilma, and soon the Greenlaws. All this, long before the morning paper came out.

  Wilma had called Charlie on her cell, so not to wake Max. But Max was at the station. Charlie, in her pajamas, had gone to her studio, found a drawing she had done recently of Courtney. Putting heavy paper in the copier, she ran off two hundred posters with the words reward: one thousand dollars at the bottom, and with several phone numbers that could be called. She was dressed and half out the door headed for her SUV when Max got home. He raised an eyebrow at the stack of signs. She said, “Something’s happened to Courtney. Wilma called. The kitten’s gone. The posters . . . Everyone’s out looking.”

  “I know. Someone called the station. Hell, Charlie, those cats wander the village all the time—and Courtney’s not a kitten, she’s nearly grown. What does Wilma mean, gone?”

  “She said it was pitch-dark when all the cats woke her barging in through the cat door and into her bedroom. They were meowing and crying, very upset. And Courtney, she wasn’t with them. They kept crying and clawing at the skirt of her robe. ‘Courtney?’ she asked them, and they yowled louder.”

  She looked up at Max. “You think dogs are smarter than cats, but I don’t think so. They were trying to tell her as best they could, that was the only way they could tell her. They were too shaken over Courtney’s disappearance for her to have just wandered off.” She could imagine what they were really crying out, a narrative no cop could believe.

  “Wilma tried to calm them but they kept running back and forth between her and the door. She thought maybe Courtney had been hit by a car. She pulled on her clothes, grabbed her cell phone and followed them, they all piled in the car, heading for the village.

  “It was then she got the call,” Charlie said. “Someone in the village, in an upstairs apartment just off Ocean—a Robby Arlen. He had gotten out of bed to close the window, he saw a young calico cat wandering the street below, he described the stripes on her leg. He knew Wilma had a kitten like that, he had seen it in the library when he took his granddaughter to story hour. He said she went on up the street and disappeared in the shadows. It was still dark, just the moonlit fog. He said that in a minute the other cats she hangs out with, he thought some of them were Wilma’s, they came up the street looking all around, meowing, excited, searching and nearly frantic. He was sure they were looking for the kitten, he said there was no other explanation, said it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. He apologized for waking her, but he was worried—he’s one of the CatFriends group. He’s out helping look.”

  Charlie wondered if she was talking too mu
ch.

  Max looked at her for a long time. He said nothing.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Robby told Wilma some of them ran up the street as if maybe they’d caught her scent. Then in a while they came back, their tails and ears down, and started searching around the shops. He said he started back to bed, then grabbed up his phone and called her.”

  “Is Wilma all right? Has she been having bouts of . . . ?”

  She stared at him. “Dementia? My aunt Wilma?” That made her furious. “Of course not. She’s sound as a rock. Something happened to that kitten. Maybe someone stole her.”

  “Cats don’t get stolen, Charlie. Why would someone . . . ?” But there were reasons to steal a cat, ones Max didn’t like to mention.

  As Charlie left, he started a pot of coffee, frowning. He had wanted to make breakfast for her but she wouldn’t wait even for a sip of coffee; carrying the stack of posters, she was already headed for town.

  It seemed like something weird happened with those cats every week or two. You could have dogs, and no problem, but cats . . . Though he knew that wasn’t true, dogs could get into almost as much trouble; except these cats always seemed too closely involved with some village crime.

  And still, as he puzzled over the cats and the calico kitten, most of his mind was on the snitch’s call last evening, that gravelly old man’s voice; and on the crushed body. Though that guy hadn’t been his regular snitch, not with that rusty voice, he had had the same brief way of passing on information; he had given Max the same kind of short, curt facts as his own snitch would—describing the robbery, describing the murder that Kathleen and the coroner were now investigating.

  It was amazing that someone as delicate and beautiful as Kathleen Ray could deal with the gory coroner’s job with no trouble, no pallor and shakes, no throwing up on the job. That was why Dr. Bern liked working with her.

  Charlie, on her way to hang posters, found Joe and Wilma on Ocean Avenue searching between the shops; she pulled over and parked. She could see others, cat and human, looking for the calico and softly calling her. Wilma, Charlie’s tall, gray-haired aunt, picked Joe up and slipped into the passenger seat of Charlie’s car. They sat for a few moments, Charlie combing out her short, tangled red hair, she and Wilma getting their stories straight on what they had told Max, or what they would tell him.

  Charlie had wanted to leave out the part about a man stealing Courtney. She didn’t know what kind of city council brouhaha that would cause, what kind of position that would put Max in if his officers went pounding on doors and searching the shops for a cat; though she didn’t think Max would ever suggest that. All she wanted was a story that Max would believe, and that might encourage his men to keep an eye out for Courtney without puzzling questions. Courtney had been stolen, in Charlie’s mind the pictures and tapestries of her had prompted the theft, there was no other way to look at the kidnapping.

  As full daylight crept into the village, the cats’ human friends were all out nailing or taping up Charlie’s posters, and of course still searching for Courtney, walking the little courtyards between buildings, peering under porches, under and over fences, among huge pots of flowering trees and bushes, looking down occasional alleys that held only grubby garbage cans. Had the small calico escaped from her captor, or did she lie somewhere hurt, or worse?

  And while everyone looked for her, Courtney was just as fiercely searching for a way out. In the chill morning, when Seaver went downstairs to ready the shop for opening, she prowled the apartment once again from window to window, seeking a loose latch, for a way to freedom. She had awakened on the couch edgy and frightened, and knowing she was done with dreaming of Seaver’s bright and impossible future—she was cold and frightened one moment, excited the next; and she began again to wonder where his missing wife had gone. Perhaps she wasn’t the woman in the grave? Maybe he hadn’t tried to kill her? Whatever he’d done with her, and whatever plans he had for Courtney herself, she wanted only to be out of there.

  Putting aside thoughts of grand gallery exhibits and the TV shows he’d promised featuring her, still she prowled the apartment pawing at the locks, her ears down, her calico tail lashing. Peering out the tall glass windows she could see her mama and daddy and the other cats down on the streets with her human friends, all looking for her. She wanted to wrap her paws around every one of them, she wanted to be held, wanted to be loved by those she trusted, she wanted to be safe.

  The way the windows were set into deep stone sills, though she could see down, it would be hard for anyone below to get a glimpse of her up here. She watched Joe Grey scramble to the roofs searching the windows of other apartments, but even when she stood up tall, looking across, and scratching down the glass, there were too many reflections, slants of first sunlight bouncing off other buildings so he must not see her at all. His ears flat, he backed down the oak tree again, she watched him pause beside another newsstand and rear up to read the front page of the Gazette that had just been put in the rack. Could that be about her? But soon he went racing away once more, heading for the courthouse, for MPPD.

  8

  Joe Grey entered through the bulletproof glass doors of MPPD on the heels of two garbagemen marching a dirty-faced young boy between them. Their truck was parked in the red zone. The taller, better-groomed city servant held a young calico cat close against his shoulder, held her tight but gently. Joe, only glimpsing her, thought for a second it was Courtney but then saw that it was not. He felt further dismay when he realized that his office friend, blond, plump Mabel Farthy, was not at the dispatcher’s desk with her welcoming smile. Instead, sour-faced EvaJean Simpson scowled at the calico, at the dirty, fighting boy being dragged through the door, and at the garbagemen. She gave Joe himself a poisonous stare.

  The real surprise was that the waiting room was half full of calico cats, each in a battered carrier, the cages lined up in the far corner between the long counter and the window. Joe pushed in behind the garbagemen and fighting kid and ducked under a folding chair, searching through the bars of each cage for Courtney.

  She wasn’t there, no one looked back at him with eager amber eyes, no one yowled out to her daddy.

  Where had these cats come from? Had they been collected by sticky-fingered little thieves like that kid, after reading Charlie’s posters? Clean, healthy neighborhood cats maybe snatched from their own front porches, each “rescuer” eager for his thousand dollars.

  Money they’ll never see, Joe thought, extending his claws.

  He was only partly hidden in the chair’s shadow. In a minute EvaJean would see him and make a royal fuss—once she was finished dressing down the garbagemen. “That cat does not belong here. Look at the poster, at the phone numbers. Call them, call the shelter, call those rescue people. All this fuss over a cat. This is a police department, not an animal pound.”

  The man with the cat fetched an empty cage from those stacked to one side. He put the cat gently in, gave her a last pet, and set the cage with the others.

  EvaJean said, “I suppose you want to book that boy. People don’t realize . . .”

  “We don’t need to book him. Just take his name and address and file a complaint. We already gave him a talking-to that ought to cool him for a while. If he pulls something like this again, you can take care of him.”

  “I don’t take care of little boys, or cats. I want him and those cats out of here.”

  The glass door opened and Charlie Harper came in. She nodded curtly to EvaJean and began collecting the cats in their cages. The two men helped her carry the calicos out to her SUV where she had backed into the red zone and opened the rear door. She carried in some extra cages, for further contributions.

  “Where will you take them?” said the shorter, unshaven man.

  “To the vet, to be checked for an identification. You know, those implanted chips. If we can’t find all the owners, we’ll take those cats to our shelter.” She glanced under the chair at Joe Grey, her green eyes laug
hing as he left the shadows and walked boldly past EvaJean’s counter, following Charlie as she headed for the hall and Max’s office.

  “The cat can’t go back there,” the clerk said sourly. “Catch him, Mrs. Harper. Take him away. Your husband doesn’t need a cat in there, he’s in a meeting.”

  Charlie smiled. “Joe spends half his life in that office, he’s been in meetings before. You’re a temp, EvaJean. You’re signed up to work here all week, until Mabel gets back. You wouldn’t want to be in the chief’s bad graces all week, let alone the rest of the department?”

  EvaJean’s look was snake-cold. Ignoring Charlie, she turned away to the copy machine.

  But Charlie didn’t want to break into the meeting. She loaded the last of the caged cats in her SUV and took off for Dr. Firetti’s. Joe Grey smiled as he sauntered on down the hall and pushed into the chief’s office through the slightly open door. If Max was in a meeting, it would most likely be about yesterday evening’s murder and robbery and their connection to the other bank thefts. Maybe he’d also hear some casual mention of missing Courtney, maybe some of the guys were keeping an eye out as they went about their patrols. To a cop, a vanished cat doesn’t compete with theft and murder. But maybe Charlie had sweet-talked Max into seeing that his men keep a lookout. Courtney was Joe Grey’s own kitten, and most of the officers considered Joe family, a part of the department, though they had no idea that Joe, so many times, had helped them wrap up a case.

  Now, maybe it was their turn to help Joe.

  Max and three detectives were crowded around the desk examining half a dozen pages of what looked like the coroner’s preliminary report, with graphs, colored photographs, charts, and various printouts. Leaping to the desk, Joe pushed comfortably between Detective Juana Davis and the chief. Max looked down at him like, What the hell do you want? Maybe he was grumpy from being awakened at three in the morning.