Shirley Murphy - Cat Under Fire

Nancy and Tim Duncan had been friends of Janet and Kendrick Mahl before the divorce. Over dinner they talked primarily about the sculpture; Janet meant to deliver it to San Francisco early the following week. The Duncans owned a popular San Francisco restaurant, for which the ten-foot sculpture was commissioned. Janet had not taken her van from the parking garage that night, as far as Jeanne knew. After dinner she said she was tired, and had gone directly to her room.

Jeanne said that she and Janet spent Sunday sketching around San Francisco. Sunday night was the opening at the de Young, and Janet had dinner with three artist friends, not Jeanne. Jeanne had given their names. She said that Janet and her friends went directly from dinner to the de Young, in one car. There Janet received her two awards. They stayed at the reception until about ten, then drove back to the St. Francis. Janet changed clothes and checked out, put her suitcase in the van, and headed back to Molena Point. Jeanne said she saw Janet just before she left. That part of Jeanne's testimony was corroborated by the bell captain and several hotel employees. There was nothing in any of the testimonies to implicate Jeanne, or to imply that Janet had been worried about any aspect of her personal life, or that she was afraid to return home.

Dulcie tried again to wash off the ashes, but gave it up. The sounds from below were faint now-they could hear only an occasional thud, as if Marritt had retreated to the far end of the house. "We could slip in now, he'd never see us."

"Cops see everything."

"He's not a cop, he's a fraud. He shouldn't…"

"He's a cop. Good or bad. Cool it until he leaves."

She moved away among the burned rubble, pawing irritably at the ashes, nosing at pieces of burned wood and twisted metal. The police had gone over every inch of the site, had bagged every scrap that looked promising, even straining some of it through cheesecloth. They had taken Janet's burned welding tanks and gauges, Dulcie supposed those went to the police lab, too. The Gazette said the Molena Point police used the county lab for most of their work. The police had taken prints from the sculpture of leaping fish before Janet's agent took the piece away for safekeeping; it had been badly warped by the fire. The police photographer had shot at least a dozen rolls of film, must have recorded everything bigger than a cat hair.

Warily, she approached the hole in the center of the rubble-strewn slab, where the stairwell led down to the apartment. The steps, beneath fallen ashes and debris, were charred and eaten away, and the upper portions of the concrete wall were black. The lower part of the stair was relatively untouched, the door at the bottom hardly smoke-stained. She had investigated down there days before, finding nothing of interest. Now as she turned away, something sharp jabbed into her paw, causing a quick, burning pain. Mewling, she shook her hurt foot.

A blackened thumbtack protruded from her pad, with a bit of burned canvas clinging, the tack stuck so deep that when she pulled it out with her teeth, blood oozed.

She licked her pad, staring down at the tack and at the half-inch strip of blackened canvas, at all that was left of one of Janet's paintings, a pitiful fragment of burned metal and cloth. Dropping it, she crept back to Joe, to press forlornly against him, mourning Janet.

This summer, when she became aware for the first time of the riches of the human world, of music, painting, drama, and then when she discovered the Aronson Gallery, she had been so intrigued that she trotted right on in, and there were Janet's landscapes, a dozen huge works as exciting as the canvas that hung in Wilma's living room.

There had been only a few patrons in the gallery, and they were fully occupied looking at the exhibit and talking with Sicily, so no one noticed her. She prowled among the maze of angled walls, keeping out of sight, staring up at Janet's rich, windy scenes. She was thus occupied when a patron saw her. "Look at the little cat, why the cat's an art lover…" And the gallery had filled with rude laughter as others turned to stare. She had fled, frightened and embarrassed.

She didn't go into the gallery again for a long time, but she would slip up onto the low windowsill and lie looking in, pretending to be napping, but fascinated with the rich paintings. Strange, they gave her the same high as did the bright silks and velvets that she liked to steal. Until this summer, stealing had been her only indulgence; she'd had no notion that anything else in the world would so excite her.

She wasn't the only cat who stole; Wilma had saved a whole sheaf of clippings about thieving cats. Some cats stole objects inside their own homes-fountain pens, hair clasps-but others stole from the neighbors just as she did. Their owners said that stealing was a sign of intelligence. Maybe-all she knew was that from kitten-hood she loved things, and she stole them. Before she was six months old she had taught herself to leap up at a clothesline and slap off the clothespins, taking the brightest, silkiest garment, had taught herself to open the neighbors' unlocked screen doors, and she could turn almost any door knob. Once inside a house she headed directly for the master bedroom-unless there was a teenage daughter, then that room got top billing. Oh, the satin nighties and silk stockings and little lacy bras. Carrying her treasures home, she hid them beneath the furniture, where she could lie on them, purring. When Wilma found and returned the purloined items Dulcie felt incredibly sad, but she hadn't let Wilma know that.

Joe nudged her. "He's leaving. He doesn't have the diary. Not a lump in that tight uniform." Marritt's jacket and trousers fitted him as snugly as a second skin.

Bang, bang, bang. The concrete vibrated under their paws as Marritt nailed up the plywood. The moment he was gone they fled down the hill and clawed their way underneath, ripping off hunks of the burned door, widening the hole Dulcie had started. She slipped under, flicking her tail through in a hurry though there was no one to grab her; her sense of helplessness at leaving her tail vulnerable was basic and powerful. Joe's short stub was not a problem.

Despite the bright sun outside, most of the room was dark. Blazing stripes of sunlight shone through the closed shutters, sharply illuminating a frosting of dust and ashes which coated the Mexican tile floor. The large living room must have been handsome before smoke and drenching water dirtied the white couch and white leather chairs, the white walls and white rugs. The floor was cold beneath their paws, but when Joe stepped onto a thick rug expecting a warm respite, he backed off fast; the rug was soaked with sour, stale water.

Marritt's footprints were everywhere incised into the dust, back and forth across the kitchen, and between the couch and chairs, as if he must have searched for the journal beneath the upholstered cushions. Six rectangles of clean white wall shone where Janet's paintings had been removed after the fire, the bare picture hooks clinging like dark grasshoppers.

The newspaper had said the paintings were being restored, that Janet's agent had taken them. Joe wasn't into the art scene, but he knew the monetary value of Janet's work. According to the Molena Point Gazette each of the forty-six paintings destroyed by fire was worth twenty to thirty thousand dollars. That added up to a nice, easy million.

He watched Dulcie sniff at the sodden chairs and couch, then leap to the counters of the open kitchen cube to paw at the cupboard doors. On the kitchen floor stood a bowl of cat kibble and a bowl of water, both scummed over with ashes and dust. Surely they hadn't been touched since the fire. And how could they be, unless Janet had had a cat door.