Shirley Murphy - Cat Spitting Mad

"Come on, Dulcie. You sound like Joe."

"What can I tell you? He loves you both. He knows Harper needs someone just now."

"You're saying he's glad to dump me on Harper."

"No, he-"

"He's seeing someone else."

"No! But-but when Kate called him that night, when she got into town…"

Charlie had sat back against the pillow, hugging herself. Kate. Kate Osborne. That beautiful blonde. It seemed a hundred times harder to lose a man to a beautiful woman than to some pig. If her rival were ugly, she could tell herself Clyde didn't have any taste. But Kate Osborne…

But why did she care ? She'd been mooning over Max, feeling guilty that she was longing for him, that she was hurting Clyde.

And now here she was green with jealousy because Clyde wanted someone who was more beautiful than she could ever hope to be.

"Perfidy," she had told Dulcie. "Perfidy and capriciousness."

Dulcie had smiled and turned away to wash.

"It is all very well, Dulcie, to have a nonchalant wash-up when you want to end a discussion. But such behavior isn't very informative."

Dulcie hadn't answered.

The bottom line, Charlie told herself, was that she wanted what she couldn't have.

And that didn't say much for her depth of character.

And through this conversation, the kit had prowled the one-room apartment poking into every box and cranny-making herself immediately and totally at home. Taking over just as she had taken over Wilma's house and, before that, Lucinda and Pedric's luxurious RV Claiming every surface-Charlie's few pieces of furniture, the kitchen counters, the packing boxes Charlie used for cupboards, as her own feline territory. Leaving little face rubs and tufts of black-and-brown fur as fine as silk, to mark her conquests. Clyde said the kit was the greatest feline opportunist ever born, and Charlie believed it.

But who could blame her? The kit had never had a home. Always on the move, tagging along behind a clowder of cats that didn't want her, never sleeping in a warm, safe house or knowing the friendship of a human, until she went to live with Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw.

Charlie smiled. The kit had learned pretty fast.

Stashing the ceiling fan in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she put her tools by the front door with her purse, nuked her cold cup of coffee, and sat down to finish her sweet roll, using her paper napkin to wipe Dulcie's and the kit's pawprints from the table. This business of having cat houseguests was like living in a dream straight from Lewis Carroll. It was one thing to take your meals with cats who could carry on a dinner conversation, one thing to go to bed at night with two kitties who said, "Good night, Charlie," like some feline version of The Waltons. But cats who peered over your shoulder at the pages of the latest Dean Koontz, one trying to learn to read while the other offered off-the-wall opinions of Koontz's writing style and baroque setting, was a bit too much.

At least Dulcie was well read-and her opinions of Koontz, though wild, were always, upscale and positive.

Finishing her breakfast, Charlie pulled off her T-shirt, showered, dressed quickly in jeans and a clean shirt and tennis shoes, and headed out the door. She had two houses to clean today, a garden fence to repair, and a roof to mend.

But as she climbed into her old Chevy van, she took a moment to look up toward the roofs and say a silent prayer for Dulcie and the kit, and for Joe Grey. Her wish, as she turned out of the alley, consigned Lee Wark to a far more uncomfortable fate than incarceration in the Molena Point jail.

And while Charlie's prayer coiled itself into the wind to be sucked up like celestial e-mail by the forces that rule the universe, one subject of her concern was quickly and stealthily pawing through Dallas Garza's papers, scanning a stack of police reports on ex-cons who, apparently, Garza considered possible suspects in the Marner murders. This turn of events was heartening: the tomcat was in a very up mood. The prospect of half a dozen additional contenders cheered him considerably. Maybe Garza was going to give Harper a fair shake.

Unless these documents were for show, simply to make his investigation look good.

The time was 8:15. The cottage was empty, Garza gone to work, Kate and Hanni headed for the Pamillon estate to make measurements and take additional pictures. This time they had a cell phone, two canisters of pepper spray, and, tucked in Hanni's belt, a.38 automatic that she intended primarily as a noisy deterrent to scare away the cougar.

But was the cougar all they might encounter? Joe wondered if the old adage was true, that a murderer would return to the scene.

Of the six ex-cons in the police reports, four were on parole and two were under house confinement. One of those on parole was Stubby Baker, who had served twelve years on seven counts of embezzlement and fraud. Garza had files on both Baker and Lee Wark. Joe was drawn to the information on Wark in the same way a rabbit is drawn to the mesmerizing form of a weasel that stands deadly still, waiting for his prey to approach.

Wark was thirty-two years old, had brown hair and light brown eyes (muddy). He was five-ten, 160 pounds, pale (make that pasty) complexion, hunched posture. (They got that right.) He had no facial scars. He had been born and raised in Wales, had become a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty-three.

In the photograph Wark wore his hair trimmed short and neat. Joe had seen it only shoulder length, always greasy. Wark's current legal address was San Quentin State Prison.

Wark's interests while in prison had included reading lurid space operas, girlie magazines, and Celtic history. He took no more exercise than the prison demanded. He had socialized with only two other inmates: James Clayton Osborne, Kate's ex-husband and Wark's partner in the murder of Samuel Beckwhite, and Kendrick Mahl, whom apparently neither man had known before they were incarcerated. Both Osborne and Mahl were serving life without parole.

Joe knew from the newspapers that the guard whose throat had been lacerated with the prison-made garrote was still hospitalized but that doctors now thought he would survive.

At the bottom of the stack of files and reports was a document Joe had not expected. It was not a police report but a three-page memo from LAPD, on a witness in a seven-year-old fraud trial.

He forgot to listen for anyone approaching the cottage. He forgot he was in the cottage. He did not realized he was digging his claws into the page. He read avidly, his stub tail twitching. The witness was Helen Marner.

While art dealer Kendrick Mahl, now serving time in San Quentin, was married to Janet Jeannot, whom he later murdered, he had an affair with Helen Marner, a society reporter and aspiring art critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Joe and Dulcie had helped Max Harper amass the evidence that would convict Mahl-including the decisive clue, which the police would never have discovered without the curiosity of someone small enough to crawl twenty feet through a mud-filled drainpipe.

The memo said that Mahl saw Helen Marner whenever he flew down to L.A. to conduct business with clients. During this time, Helen realized that Mahl was accepting part of the sales price for each painting under the table, thus circumventing the artist. She had blown the whistle on Mahl. In the case that ensued, she had testified against him.

Mahl had not been convicted; he had received only a reprimand and probation and had had to pay restitution. At about that time, as Joe remembered, Mahl's marriage to Janet had started to go awry.

Later, when Mahl went to prison for killing Janet, he had not kept in touch with Helen Marner. But he had kept in contact with the woman he was then dating. Joe was so fascinated that he startled himself with his loud, intense purring. If ever he'd hit the jackpot, he'd hit it this morning.