Shirley Murphy - Cat Deck the Halls

They found nothing definitive. They isolated a scent that might be the killer, but there was no way to be sure. With the smell of death around the Christmas tree, they had no sure point of reference. At last, their heads full of questions, the three cats called it a night and headed home, tired and hungry.

Kit’s Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, being early risers, would soon be out of bed to make her a nice breakfast. Dulcie was thinking of a quick little snack in the kitchen, without rousing her housemate, and then crawling back under the warm comforter beside Wilma-of not waking Wilma, unleashing a barrage of questions and receiving another lecture. But Joe Grey, racing home along the plaza wall, was too hungry to wait for Clyde ’s alarm to go off. He meant to wake Clyde at once and demand a good hot breakfast. Eggs, bacon, cheese, and anchovies-the works.

C LYDE DAMEN LAY prone on the bed, trying to get his breath despite the twenty-pound weight solidly planted on his chest. “What the hell, Joe! What are you doing? I can’t breathe. Your feet are as hard as pile drivers.” He lifted his head enough to stare eye to eye with the gray tomcat. “It’s the middle of the night! What the hell do you want?”

Joe Grey narrowed his eyes, and tried to keep from smiling.

“This is the third time this week, Joe! Third time you’ve jumped on me in the middle of the night, nearly cracking a rib. What the hell’s with you?” Despite the hindrance of the heavy tomcat pressing down on his solar plexus, and despite Joe Grey’s yellow-eyed smirk, Clyde managed to struggle up on one elbow.

He looked, heavy-eyed, at the bedside clock. “Four thirty-five.” He lay down again, sighing. When the tomcat smiled and began to purr, Clyde raised a threatening hand.

“You wouldn’t,” Joe said complacently.

“Nothing in this world, Joe, could be so important as to warrant your behavior. Your rude and thoughtless behavior. You’re not a lightweight kitten anymore. You weigh in about the same as a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler loaded with concrete.”

“Muscle,” Joe said in a rough tomcat voice. “How could I be heavy? I’m only a little cat, not a German shepherd. Whatever infinitesimal weight I might possess is pure muscle. If you were in better shape, if your stomach muscles weren’t so flabby, you wouldn’t even feel my delicate feather ounces.”

“Might I point out that it is still pitch-dark. That it is not yet dawn, that it is not even five o’clock, and that I-”

“It’s winter,” the tomcat said. “December. This time of year, it stays dark until-”

“Can it, Joe! Shut up and get the hell off my stomach and let me go back to sleep! You know damn well I have to go to work in the morning to support your prodigious appetite. If you had one ounce of consideration, you…”

But now Joe’s expression changed as if by magic, from amused and mildly sadistic to bewildered hurt. Clyde’s eyes widened as the tomcat turned his back, dropped cringing off the bed, and fled to the far corner of the bedroom, where he curled up on the cold hardwood floor, his back to Clyde, his white nose tucked under and his eyes closed, breathing out a soft sigh of wounded resignation.

Staring at the tomcat, Clyde swung out of bed. Shivering in bare skin and Jockey shorts, he padded across the room and knelt beside the gray tomcat.

“I’m sorry, Joe. What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong,” he said softly. With Joe curled into a miserable ball, Clyde couldn’t see the cat’s expression, couldn’t see Joe’s sly grin, his yellow eyes slitted in amusement. When, gently, Clyde turned Joe’s sleek silver face toward him and looked into his eyes, there was, again, only a pitiful look, an expression so wan and lost, so filled with desperate hurt, that Clyde could think only of the starving, fevered stray kitten Joe had once been, when Clyde found him abandoned in that San Francisco gutter.

Clyde had rescued Joe then, gently picking up the sick kitten and taking him home to his small apartment, where he fed him rare steak and milk, and then took him to a vet-who treated Joe for a broken and infected tail, and duly removed most of that appendage. Clyde had nursed Joe back to health, and they had never been parted since. Now, studying the suffering look on the tomcat’s gray-and-white face, Clyde was overwhelmed once more with pity. “Do you hurt somewhere? What happened?”

The tomcat rolled his eyes.

“Do you feel sick? Are you feverish? Is your stomach upset?”

Silence.

“Or could it be,” Clyde offered, “that you are weak and faint from hunger?”

Joe Grey smiled.

Clyde uttered another long-suffering sigh and, dispensing with shower and shave, pulled on his pants and headed downstairs to get breakfast.

The kitchen was cold and silent. No shuffling doggy sounds getting out of bed, no clicking of doggy toenails on the cold linoleum, no glad panting. The room was hollow with an emptiness that neither Clyde nor the tomcat could get used to. Even when Clyde threw on the light and turned on the radio and spoke to the three sleeping cats in the adjacent laundry, the silence pressed in. No glad huffing, no doggy yawn and whine, no doggy mumbles of greeting. Old Rube was gone. Buried out at the back of the patio, with a little flat headstone marking his grave, right next to Barney’s marker.

How long would it take, Joe wondered, until he and Clyde learned to live more equitably with the death of the old black Lab? It had taken a long time of grieving after golden Barney died, and he knew that the aftermath of Rube’s death would be no different. He peered into the laundry at the three household cats who, despite Clyde’s greeting, still slept, the two older cats twined together in the top bunk among their blankets, Fluffy’s head resting on Scrappy’s flank-Scrappy, through several name changes, had finally settled in with the name that had fit him best when he was young. Now that he was in his later years, that name didn’t seem to fit very well, either.

Only Snowball, the younger, white cat, slept on the bottom bunk. In Rube’s old bed. Grieving. Snowball had mourned deeply since Rube died.

She looked out at them, now, with only a sad expression, then curled tighter and squeezed her eyes shut.

Joe spent a long time licking and grooming her, but she didn’t respond much. Even when the smell of frying sausage and then scrambled eggs began to fill the room, Snowball remained in bed. As did Scrappy and Fluffy-the older cats letting Clyde know that it was too early, and too cold and dark, to get up. They would come yawning down later, stretching, and then hopefully Snowball would follow.

The aromas of sausage and eggs sent Joe Grey up onto the kitchen table, where he stretched out on his own side, impatiently waiting. Clyde set a place for himself, then went to get the paper, which they’d just heard hit the step. The time was 5:10. Clyde got up at six anyway, Joe thought unsympathetically. This would give him more time to read the paper.

Returning, Clyde shook open the paper and stood at the stove with his back to the tomcat, making toast as he read the headlines and sipped his coffee. Joe hated when Clyde hogged the front page. Rearing up on his hind paws, on the table, he could just see over Clyde ’s shoulder, the headline above the fold.

So there had been a reporter on the scene last night, slipping around, keeping out of the way, quietly pumping an officer or two for information. The guy had had to hustle, to get his article in this morning’s paper. Joe wondered what “important” story they’d pulled off the front page at the last minute, to make room for the more sensational headline:

COPS CONVERGE ON PLAZA CHRISTMAS TREE POSSIBLE MURDER? NO BODY FOUND