Shirley Murphy - Cat Deck the Halls

Clyde put their plates on the table and sat down, continuing to read, leisurely finishing the article-payback for the early wake-up call. Watching Clyde fork in scrambled eggs, Joe wolfed a few bites of his own breakfast. It tasted bland. “Do we have any kippers? Or a can of those imported sardines that you so carefully hid behind the canned beans?”

“You’re getting fat. No one eats sardines with sausage and eggs.”

“I do. You know perfectly well that I like a little fish condiment with my breakfast, it makes the eggs go down.”

“I didn’t know you had trouble making anything edible go down.” But Clyde rose, reached deep into the back of the cupboard, and withdrew a can of sardines. “I’m just lucky I have a strong stomach.” He twisted the little key to open the lid. “No one wants to smell sardines with their eggs at five in the morning.”

Dishing sardines onto Joe’s plate, he looked intently at the tomcat. “So that was what last night was about! When Kit came barging in and woke me up and then made that phone call. She reported a dead body that wasn’t there! I swear, Joe…”

“Woke you? How could we wake you? You never stopped snoring.”

Clyde looked hard at Joe. “The department got a phone tip, caller reports a dead man. Cops arrive, nothing. No body. A little blood-they don’t know, yet, if it was human blood.” He studied Joe. “What are you cats trying to pull? Cops search the plaza and find nothing. Nothing, Joe!” He laid aside the paper. “You want to explain this?”

“What’s it say about the child?”

“What child? There wasn’t any child. The paper doesn’t mention a child.” Trying to curb his temper, Clyde scanned the last column more carefully, then shook his head, still looking hard at Joe. “What did you tell the cops, you and Kit? What are you cats up to? What have you done now?”

Joe just looked at him.

Clyde laid down his fork. “You didn’t…Oh, hell! You didn’t mess with a crime scene? You didn’t lure away some witness? Some kid who saw a murder? Why, Joe? Why would you do that?”

“Do you suppose,” Joe said patiently, “that the law didn’t give the reporter the whole story? That they found something last night that they decided to keep quiet and didn’t share with that reporter? Is it possible for you to imagine, in that hidebound brain, that that child could be a holdback? A witness they don’t want the public to know about? That maybe they’re trying to protect her?”

Clyde concentrated on finishing his last bite of sausage. Then, “Was there a body? And who’s the kid? Why is a kid so important? You want to tell me what happened?”

Joe licked sardine oil from his whiskers. “Maybe Harper figures the kid’s safer if he keeps her under wraps, if the killer doesn’t know where to find her.”

“Will you start from the beginning? What child? Who is she? And,” he said, fixing Joe with a keen stare, “if there was a body, where is it?”

“Strange, though,” Joe mused. “Strange the guy didn’t kill her when he had the chance. She had to be a witness, she was right there in the dead man’s arms when Kit found her. Except, maybe the shooter didn’t have time, maybe he heard something, and hurried away dragging that heavy body-maybe he plans to go after her later.” The tomcat sat thinking about that, then returned to his eggs and the bright little sardines, which, along with the sausage, certainly did enhance the eggs’ bland flavor.

Only when he had finished his breakfast and licked his plate and cleaned his whiskers and methodically washed his front paws, a procedure that took some time and left Clyde fidgeting impatiently, did Joe fill Clyde in on the events of the previous night, on as much of the story as Joe himself knew. He described the body that only Kit had seen, and then the little girl they had found. Who the child was, and who the dead man was, and where the body was now, no one yet knew. The fingerprint reports might help. Or not, Joe thought. The killer could have no previous record, though that didn’t seem likely.

“So what happens,” Joe said, curling down on the want-ad section, which neither one of them read, “the way I see it, the killer knocks this guy off. Shoots him right there under the Christmas tree, maybe even while he’s holding the kid. He’s about to get rid of the body when something startles him, some noise or maybe some late passerby, maybe a car slowing out in front of the plaza. Noise scares him, and he runs.

“I’m guessing he hides somewhere close by. At about that time, Kit comes along over the roofs, smells blood and death, looks down, and there’s the body and the kid. Who knows, the guy might even have heard Kit herself scrambling up to the roof, maybe that’s what scared him off. Anyway, Kit sees the dead man and the kid, and takes off to get help.

“Now,” Joe said, “the plaza is quiet again, and the guy returns. Maybe he means to knock off the kid so she can’t ID him, but meantime, the kid has run. Vanished. Found a place to hide. Have to give her credit that she got the hell out of there, she’s only five or six. Kid took care of herself the minute she could, and she had to be scared witless, still scared when we found her. Some kids would just fall apart screaming.”

Joe took a last lick at his plate, then had to wash his whiskers again. “With the kid gone, the guy starts to get nervous. Maybe he looks for her, maybe not. He’s in a hurry to get the body out of there. Maybe figures she’s too little to give the law a coherent description. Figures if he gets the dead man away, maybe no one will ever know there was a body. Fat chance of that. Anyway, he…”

Clyde was fidgeting again. “This is really…”

“I’m not totally guessing here,” Joe said. “ Dallas found tire marks coming into the plaza, up over the flower bed, along the sidewalk, and out again where someone had backed down over the curb. Eleanor made a dozen casts where tires went over the flowers and dirt, and she made casts of a man’s footprints, someone besides the corpse.

“Guy brings his car around, drives into the plaza, loads up the body, and takes off-while Kit is racing to our house and waking me and calling the dispatcher, and then we’re scorching back there. Then the sirens, and that had to scare him and make him hustle.

“We get back, the cops are on the scene, but no body and no kid. Blood. Footprints. Tire marks. The samples and fibers and stuff that Dallas collected for the lab.” Joe scratched his ear with his hind claws, looking across at Clyde. “So, except for the little girl, Kit was the only one to see the victim.”

“This is making my head ache.” Clyde glanced at his watch and rose. Stacked their dishes in the sink and started to rinse them. “Does it occur to you, Joe, that if that child-”

“Kit and I found her,” Joe interrupted, “in the pump house behind the dog fountain. Little shed the size of a doghouse. We were in there with the kid, trying to calm her, when Brennan found her-and found us.”

Clyde spun around, glaring at him. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just the kind of caper I like to hear about. That’s the very kind of stupid move I keep warning you cats about. What the hell did Brennan think?”

“How do I know what he thought? You think I’m clairvoyant?”

Clyde shrugged. “How the hell do I know? You’re everything else unnatural.”

Joe let that pass. “She wouldn’t come out for Brennan, so he called for a woman.” He smiled. “The kid came out for Davis, nice as you please. Scared as hell, but she snuggled right up to Davis. She wouldn’t say a word, though. Not a sound. Davis took her to the hospital for a look-over, told Harper she’d take the kid home with her, that she didn’t want to leave her among strangers. God knows what happened to her,” Joe said darkly, not wanting to think about the possibilities.