Shirley Murphy - Cat Under Fire

The stairwell door, just beyond the kitchen, had been boarded up though it did not seem burned. From beneath it came the smell of wet ashes, and a chill breeze sucked down. Beyond the stairwell, the door on the far wall was closed but not boarded over. Marritt's intrusive footprints led to it, ripe with his scent, a combination of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. The crack beneath the door was bright with sunlight. The smell from within was not of ashes but of a woman's delicate perfume. Dulcie sniffed deeply at the bright space, then leaped up, grasping the knob between her paws. Swinging, scrabbling with her hind feet against the molding, she turned the knob, kicked against the doorframe. The door swung in. They were struck in the face by glaring sunlight, blinding them.

The cats narrowed their eyes, bombarded by sunlight. Sun blazed through treetops and bounced off burnished clouds. They stood at the edge of a terrace high above the hills, a tile expanse furnished with white wicker chairs, white wicker desk… a bed… bookcases…

Their eyes adjusted, their response focused, they saw clearly. They stood not on a terrace but on the threshold of Janet's bedroom, its two glass walls filled with trees and sky. To the left of the wide corner windows Janet's bed was tucked cozily into a wall of books. The white sheets had been tossed back in a tangle, the brightly flowered quilt lay half on the floor, as if Janet had just stepped away from the bed, had perhaps gone into the kitchen to make coffee; the sense of her presence was powerful. Her blue sweatshirt lay tossed across the wicker chair with a pair of jeans and a red windbreaker; beneath the chair lay a pair of jogging shoes leaning one atop the other, her white socks tucked neatly inside. Dulcie sniffed at the clothes of the dead woman and shivered; these would be the clothes she wore driving home from San Francisco that night after the opening at the de Young. The next morning she would have put on welding clothes, old scorched jeans, heavy leather boots, clothes that an accidental welding burn wouldn't hurt.

Three big white rugs softened the expanse of tile, thick and inviting and quite dry; the cats' paws sank deep, inscribing sooty prints. Dulcie sat down to clean her pink pads, but Joe stood, absorbing the warmth of the room, heat from the sun pressing in through the glass, absorbing the powerful sense of the dead woman. The feel of her presence was so strong he felt his fur tingle.

Beneath the white wicker desk was a tennis ball, and clinging to the desk legs and to the legs of the chair were fine white cat hairs. As Joe scented the tomcat, an involuntary growl rose in his throat; but it was an old scent, flat and faded.

He leaped to the bed, onto the rumpled sheets, leaving sooty pawprints, then belatedly he licked clean his own pads. The sun-warmed sheets smelled of human female, and of Janet's light perfume. He flopped down and rolled, purring.

The bookshelves above the bed had been recessed into the wall. The bottom shelf, at bed level, was bare. When he reared up to study the books, he could see the names of writers that Clyde liked to read, Cussler, Koontz, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Pasternak, an interesting mix. Half a dozen scrapbooks and photo albums were sandwiched between these, but he saw nothing that looked like a diary-unless Janet had made her journal in one of the big albums. As he clawed one down, Dulcie leaped up beside him.

"Strange that there's no nightstand. Where did she keep her night cream? Her facial tissues and clock? And Wilma keeps a bowl of mints by the bed. They're nice late at night."

Pawing open the album, they found newspaper clippings neatly taped to the pages, reviews of Janet's work and articles about awards she had won. Many had her picture, fuzzed and grainy, taken beside a painting or a piece of sculpture. There was a quarter-page article from the L. A. Times about Janet's top award in the Los Angeles Museum Annual, and another Times article gave her a big spread for a one-woman show at the Biltmore. Northern California papers supplied clippings about an award at the Richmond Annual, and the San Francisco papers listed awards in Reno, San Diego, Sacramento. There seemed to be clippings for all the major exhibits, as well as for Janet's one-woman shows, many at the major museums.

"She's done-she did all right," Joe said. "It wasn't easy. She put herself through school working as a welder in San Francisco, lived in a cheap room in the commercial district. That's a rough part of the city. I was born in an alley just off Mission. That's where I got my tail broken, that's where Clyde found me.

"She didn't have any furniture at first, just an easel, and she slept on a mattress on the floor. She kept everything in cardboard boxes."

"How do you know all this?"

"From napping in the living room while she and Clyde drank beer and listened to Clyde's collection of old forties records." Joe grinned. "She liked the big bands as much as Clyde does." He'd loved those nights, just the three of them. He'd been comfortable with Janet, and, long before he'd discovered his super-cat talents, he had shared with Janet and Clyde a cat's normal pleasure in music. That heady forties beat seemed to get right under his skin, right in to where the purrs started.

"She was the only woman he ever dated who didn't pitch a fit about Clyde keeping my ratty, clawed-up chair in the living room. Janet called it a work of art." The covering of his personal chair, he had long ago shredded to ribbons. The chair was his alone: no cat, no dog, no human had better mess with it.

After graduation Janet had moved to Molena Point, to another cheap room, had picked up welding jobs around the docks to support herself. Every penny went into paint and canvas, into oxygen and acetylene for her sculpture, and into sheets of milled steel. She had taken her work to every juried show in the state, and in only two years she was picked up by the Aronson Gallery.

She had lived better then, had bought some used furniture and a used van. She had been in Molena Point less than a year when she started dating Kendrick Mahl. Mahl was the art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle then; he kept a weekend place in Molena Point. When they married, Janet moved in there, but she kept her old room for studio space. After the wedding, Mahl's reviews of her work were favorable but understandably restrained. After the divorce he called her paintings cheap trash. Months after she left Mahl, she started dating Clyde. Joe thought she'd needed that comfortable relationship.

He clawed down a second album, this one was filled with eight-by-ten glossies, publicity photos of Janet and of her work. In the first shot she stood turned away from a splashy landscape, a painting of the rocky sea cliff as seen from the level of the white, crashing waves. At the very top of the painting, just a hint of rooftops shone against a thin strip of sky. Janet stood before the painting looking directly at the camera, her grin mischievous, her hands paint-stained, her smock streaked with paint; her eyes were fixed directly on them, filled with power and life.

Shivering, Dulcie wrapped her tail close around herself and sat looking at the room where Janet had lived. Where Janet had waked that Monday morning with no idea that, within an hour, she would be dead.

Dead, Dulcie thought, and with nothing else afterward? Ever since Janet died, that question had troubled her.

They found in this album dated photographs of Janet's recent paintings, and at the back was a picture of the white cat, an eight-by-ten color shot. He sat on a blue backdrop, a carefully chosen fabric the color of his blue eyes and blue collar. His fur was long, well groomed, his tail a huge fluffed plume. His expression was intelligent and watchful, but imperious, too, coolly demanding.