Martha Grimes - The Black Cat

Jury winced.

“I pointed out the word ‘Aardvark” didn’t have the ‘g’ sound, so that was out.”

“Really? The only reason you stood against Aardvark was because it lacks a ‘g’?”

“Aggrieved, Aghast, Aggro. Horse, goat, dog. It’s brilliant.”

Jury rolled his eyes at the empty air. A waste of time rolling them at Melrose Plant. “His name’s Joey,” he said for the umpteenth time.

For the umpteenth time, Melrose ignored it.

Jury sighed. “Anything decided in the Jack and Hammer will end in tears.”

Joey (aka Aggro) was trotting along beside Jury, who stopped every once in a while to rub the dog’s head. Every time he did this, Joey would make a sound in his throat and bounce up toward Jury’s hand.

Melrose picked up a long stick and was brandishing it at nothing in particular. It was the time of day in which everything-trees, road, hedgerows-looked burnished. “The idea was that neither of these women had any connection with their victims.” They’d been discussing the case. “But Chris Cummins did know Stacy Storm; she knew her as the librarian.”

“True,” said Jury. Only she didn’t know before she appeared that night at the pub that Stacy Storm was Mariah Cox. If she had, she might not have gone through with it. It gave her a bad scare to find out who the woman she’d murdered really was.”

“Good Lord, it must be hard on her husband. Hard in any circumstances, but for a policeman…? Is she in the nick right now?”

“Yes. But not for long, I expect. She’ll be arraigned, and then who knows? What’s worse for David Cummins is that the woman Chris Cummins arranged to have shot was the love of his life. He’d lost her a long time ago. Now, he lost her again.”

“That’s terrible.” Melrose tossed out a stick for Joey to chase, but the dog didn’t. He walked amiably along by Jury’s side.

“I don’t know why he likes you more than me,” Melrose said.

“Because I don’t call him Aggro.” Jury wondered if Joey remembered the dark doorway where he had found him and the mince he’d bought and tried to feed him, and Dr. Kavitz, and Joely at the animal hospital.

It had been on that night after Jury had left St. Bart’s Hospital, after he’d seen Lu. The night he’d actually talked to her. There had been no talking yesterday.

After his lunch with Phyllis, he’d gone to the hospital, walked down the same white corridor with the same feelings of inadequacy-worse, the fear of feeling the wrong thing again.

Either the room was cold or he had brought the cold with him. He shivered inside his lightweight raincoat.

She lay as she had the last time, as if she hadn’t moved a finger since he’d last seen her. She looked frozen; that had caused his shivering. The tangle of wires and tubes led to what was keeping her alive or recording her body’s functions.

He pulled over the straight-backed chair and sat down. He watched over her for a long time, he was not sure how long. The light had changed by the time he left.

The way he’d been with her before the accident tumbled through his mind. Her skin, her lips, her hands on him. Her black hair.

He reached out and took her hand. “Wake up, Lu.”

Mindy was asleep in the courtyard and opened her eyes only when Melrose and Jury came along. But she did show an interest in Joey, who was walking about, sniffing.

Neither of them could understand why the dog Mindy felt this connection to the past. She had belonged to the owner of the Man with a Load of Mischief. That person had, of course, abandoned the dog, just as he abandoned everything else. Pub, people, honor, decency.

They stood looking at the half-timbered facade of the meandering building, its white paint chipped and faded, its rear door sinking into the ground. The small leaded-glass windows were strangled by the vines that grew around them. The place hadn’t been tenanted in years.

“It’s a handsome old pub, charming, too, despite its unfortunate last days,” said Melrose.

“What I think is that all of you should chip in and buy it. Then you can sit around and talk uselessly anytime you want.”

Melrose was appalled, but not at their uselessness. “You can’t just up and change things that way. You can’t change the mise-en-scène. No, we’ve got to sit at the same table, in the same chairs, with the same longcase clock ticking in the background-”

“What clock? I don’t remember a clock.”

“All right. I just tossed that in. There’s always a longcase clock in stories. My point being if you start changing anything, then the whole cloth unravels. Come on, Mindy.”

Mindy struggled up but didn’t come on.

“Don’t be silly; it wouldn’t unravel if the Jack and Hammer got blown to smithereens. That’s assuming you and your gang weren’t idling along inside. You’d all get back together around some rock. Yes, you’d manage to meet at Stonehenge if no other venue were possible.”

They had left the pub and were proceeding along the road back to Ardry End, with Mindy behind and Joey keeping a slow pace with the old dog.

Melrose said, “That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”

Jury didn’t think so; he was enjoying the image. Weren’t there a few big rocks lying on the Stonehenge site that could serve as a table? He turned and looked back at the Man with a Load of Mischief and was glad somehow that it had remained tenantless. As if it were waiting for them all to come again.

Melrose threw another stick and ran after it, as if to fetch it himself, as if teaching the dog how to do it. “Come on, Aggro! Fetch!”

Jury didn’t even bother raising his voice. “His name’s Joey.”