Shirley Murphy - Cat Seeing Double

The waiter appeared. As they ordered, Clyde glanced out through the wall again, to where Ryan's truck was parked. Several tourists were passing, glancing into the cab as people seemed compelled to do, peering into empty vehicles.

"It'll take only a day to raise the roof," Ryan said, "once we have the end walls off. A few days to build and sheath the new roof and new end walls. Then we'll be dried in and it won't matter what the weather does." Or if I go to jail, she thought. "My uncle Scotty will be coming down to work on the job. My dad's brother."

Clyde nodded. "Dallas calls him a red-faced rounder of an Irishman with a Scotch name and the mind of an insanely talented chess player."

She laughed. "Scotty loves analyzing the smallest detail, sorting out every possibility. It was from Scotty I learned to love all kinds of puzzles-that's what made me want to be a builder. When I was little he taught me about space, the uses of space. I learned to design from Scotty-silly games a kid loves, that teach you to look for all possibilities in how you arrange and use space."

She looked at him solemnly. He didn't teach me about finding a dead body in your space. What kind of puzzle is that? She said, "Dallas called Harper. He and Charlie are coming back, canceling the cruise."

"Yes, Harper called me just before I left the house. They were on the road, going to stay somewhere in the wine country tonight then spend a day or two in San Andreas, see if they can get a line on what the boy was doing up there."

"Some honeymoon."

"Dallas said you talked with the kid again, in jail. What do you make of him, now?"

"He's difficult to read. Maybe scared, maybe just hard-nosed defiant. It's ugly to think about a ten-year-old kid without conscience, but it can happen. Or maybe," she said, "maybe he's trying real hard to protect his grampa."

"You think the old man set the bomb?"

"His son's in prison for running a meth lab. The fact that Harper couldn't make a case against Grampa may have left the old boy feeling like he had to do a little payback."

"Pretty heavy payback. Have you wondered if the kid, when he was up in San Andreas, had anything to do with copying your truck keys?"

"It's possible. That was the first thing Dallas asked me. We both had keys, Scotty and I. I suppose mine could have gone missing for hours, and I wouldn't notice. But that's…" She shivered. "If that's the case, who got him to steal them?"

Clyde buttered a tortilla. "Whatever they find out about the boy, looks like the department's stuck with him for a while. Harper said juvenile hall can't take him, he'd just talked with Dallas. The fire they had last month destroyed most of the building, and the temporary quarters aren't that secure. Juvenile authorities want Curtis to stay where he is."

"When Max called, did you talk with Charlie too?"

He nodded. "She had lunch with Kate Osborne yesterday in the city while Max made some phone calls and kept an appointment-a couple of Dallas's buddies on San Francisco PD," he said softly. "They'll be checking, unofficially at this point, on Rupert's connections in the city."

"The girlfriends," she said. "That's encouraging."

He nodded. "The girlfriends, and their male companions. Maybe they'll turn up a jealous lover or two, find something they can run on."

"I hope." She touched his hand. "I feel shaky about getting through your job without the grand jury coming after me. If you want to…"

"Will you quit that? You didn't kill him and you're not going to jail." He took her hand. "You figure a month to do my upstairs. You were right on schedule with my patio construction, so I'm guessing you will be with this. Long before that, Dallas and Harper will have Rupert's killer behind bars."

She just looked at him.

"Believe me. You have no faith in those guys? In your own uncle?" He winked at her. "You'll have to stay out of jail if you mean to be on time, so you can get on with the next project." They had agreed early on that ripping out one downstairs wall, opening Clyde's seldom-used dining room to the kitchen to make one big space for casual entertaining, fit Clyde's lifestyle. Clyde and his friends played poker in the kitchen, and enjoyed their potluck meals there, or on the new enclosed patio.

"And you still want the little tower at one end of the new upstairs?"

"Absolutely. Joe would feel slighted if he didn't have his own place."

Ryan laughed. "You don't spoil your animals." "Of course not." A private cat tower, Joe Grey had said, with glass all around. Sun warmed, with an ocean view. A private feline retreat, off-limits to humans.

But as he joked with Ryan and tried to reassure her, Clyde kept wondering if the cats had called her from her apartment. And wondering if someone had followed her. Wondering if they might have doubled back when they were sure the apartment was empty, maybe used a duplicate key? And that worried him. If someone was in there, he prayed the cats had left.

The gray hatchback did return to Ryan's place while the cats were still crouched on the desk. They were poised to leave when the same car passed below the windows, coming slowly up the hill, and parked half a block up the street.

A tall man emerged moving swiftly toward the building and silently up the wooden stairs. He was maybe forty, with soft brown hair in a handsome blow-dry and, in his right hand, a small leather case the size of a cell phone. As he approached the door the cats dropped off the desk and under the daybed. They were beginning to feel like moles, or like a pair of fuzzy slippers abandoned beneath the mattress. He knocked, knocked again, waited a few minutes, knocked a third time. Then faint scratching sounds began.

"Picking the lock," Joe said.

He was inside within seconds, moving directly to Ryan's desk. Pulling the curtain across the broad windows, he switched on the lamp to low and reached to a pile of files. But then he shoved them back, laughing softly, and picked up the bills and the copy of her billing for the Jakes job, that lay on the blotter. Chuckling, he turned on her computer. The cats glanced at each other. What had these no-good types done before the invention of computers? Seemed like every kind of villainy, these days, required electronic assistance.

But Dulcie couldn't be still, she kept fidgeting and glancing away toward the bathroom window, thinking about going home, thinking about the kit. Joe laid his ears back, hissing.

"Will you cut it out? She's fine."

"We don't know that. We don't know where she is. I don't like when she's gone for hours and hours. We haven't seen her since breakfast."

Joe hissed again gently to make her shut up, and watched their burglar bring up Ryan's bookkeeping program. He went immediately to the Jakes account.

He made a disk copy of the pages, then changed the figures on her hard drive, making them higher, adding several thousand dollars to the bill. Cooking Ryan's books, setting her up for some kind of swindle. Turning on her copy machine, he made two sets of her lumber and supply bills. He put one set in his pocket, and worked on the other with an eraser and Wite-Out, apparently inserting new figures to match the higher numbers in her computer. He made fresh copies of these. As he ran a printout of the doctored billing, the cats could only puzzle over where this was leading. Ryan had taken her completed bill with her, ready to mail. Had the guy guessed that? Had he seen her through the window working at her desk? Did he plan somehow to intercept the envelope after she mailed it?

Or had she not had time to mail it? Was the envelope still in her truck? If he had followed her to the restaurant, he'd know she didn't stop at a mailbox. Maybe he'd strolled by her truck and seen the envelope lying on the seat.