Frances rose, fetched the pan of turnovers from beside the window, and shoved them across the table where Mama could reach them. "Without you, Mama, Rob Lake could be sentenced to death. If he's innocent, Mama, his death would be your fault."
"But that white van the night before the fire could have belonged to anyone. I don't know that it was Janet's. Maybe if I told the police, that would just confuse everyone."
"The police will sort that out. That's their job. You can't choose what the court should know, Mama, and what it shouldn't be told."
Frances sipped her coffee. "Trust me, Mama. The sooner you go to the police, the gentler the court will be with you. Just tell this Mr. Grey what you saw. Tell him you're not sure the van was Janet's. Tell him what time it was-2:00 A.M. Saturday night when the van pulled into her garage and shut the door. Two-thirty when it left again."
"He'll want to come up here, want me to sign papers. Want me to go to court. I told you, Frances, my heart won't stand that."
"I'll explain to him, Mama, that with your heart so bad you're afraid to testify. I'm sure they'll make special arrangements."
Dulcie was so wired she couldn't keep still. She started to fidget, then began to wash, trying to calm herself. She might get annoyed at Joe sometimes, might call him an unimaginative tomcat, but this-this was a stroke of genius.
Mama reached for a turnover and crumbled it between her fat fingers. "I wish that young woman had never moved over there; I knew she'd cause trouble. Who in their right mind would build a welding shop in a residential neighborhood, and right on top of their own house? The city should never have allowed it. All that fire flashing around, it's no wonder… And that bang, bang, bang of gunfire going on for hours. Probably one of those indoor target things. Why would a young woman want one of those things. I don't…"
"It wasn't gunfire, Mama. I told you, it was just a staple gun. One of those big commercial staple guns. You know she used it to stretch her canvases. You know what she said, that putting in thumbtacks made her thumbs ache for days. Please, Mama, I've got to return this attorney's call."
"You've got a stapler right in there on your desk, Frances. It don't sound like that. You know I'm right. That crazy artist set the whole hillside on fire. I always knew she'd do that. Burn up the whole neighborhood. If not for my prayers to save this house, we would have burned up, too."
"Oh, Mama, she didn't…"
"Anyway, you don't need to argue. I won't do it. I don't want to be a part of it."
"But Mama, don't you see? You are a part of it. If you don't testify, they could convict the wrong person."
Dulcie crouched, very still. The morning was full of surprises.
A staple gun.
Janet had stapled her canvases. She hadn't used thumbtacks.
Then what was that thumbtack that had gotten stuck in her paw? That thumbtack with the burned wood and blackened canvas sticking to it? What were all those thumbtacks scattered among the ashes? There were hundreds of them, many with scraps of canvas clinging. Hundreds of fragments of paintings…
She caught her breath. Mama stared down at her. She pretended to scratch at a flea. Those tacks were not from Janet's paintings they were from someone else's canvases.
Those were not Janet's paintings that had burned. Janet's paintings had not been in the studio when it burned.
"It wouldn't hurt your heart, Mama, just to talk to Joseph Grey. If I call him back, won't you just speak to him? He could take your deposition right here. And even if you did have to go to court, they'd make it easy for you. A special car, probably a limo with a driver. Get you right in and right out, not make you wait. I'll bet it wouldn't take forty-five minutes. We could stop for ice cream afterward."
"Don't you patronize me, young lady. Besides, someone else must have seen her van besides me. Why don't they go to the police?"
"It was two in the morning, Mama."
"It was Saturday night. Young people stay up late."
"Our neighbors aren't that young, Mama. At two in the morning they're asleep."
"Yes, and no one cares if an old sick woman can't sleep. No one cares about an old woman sitting alone in the night-except to get information out of her." She stroked Dulcie so hard that static sparks flew, alarming them both. "Call him back," Mama said. "Tell him I won't."
But when Frances tried, she had the wrong number. It was not an attorney's office, and no one had ever heard of Joseph Grey.
Frances looked totally puzzled. "I know I wrote it down right. You heard me, I repeated it back to him." Frances was not the kind of woman to record a phone number wrong. As she dialed again, Dulcie jumped down, trotted into the laundry room, and leaped to the open window.
And she was out of there. Racing across the yard straight for Janet's house. She could see Joe in Janet's window: Felis at Law Joseph Grey, his ears sharply forward, his white markings bright behind the glass, his mouth open in a toothy cat laugh.
The cats fled down the black, burned hills, down into the tall green grass careening together, exploding apart, wild with their sudden freedom. Four days hanging around the Blankenships' had left them stir-crazy, dangerously close to the insane release people called a cat fit. Flying down, dropping steeply down, they collapsed at last, rolling and laughing beneath the wide blue sky. Dulcie leaped at a butterfly, at insects that keened and rustled around them in the blowing grass; racing in circles she terrorized a thousand minute little presences singing their tiny songs and munching on their bits of greenery, sent them scurrying or crushed them. "I wonder if Mama gave in-if she let Frances call the police." She grinned. "I wonder if Frances tried again to phone Attorney Joseph Grey."
She stood switching her tail. "If that was Janet's van that Mama saw, the Saturday night before the fire, what was she doing? She drove up to San Francisco that morning. Why would she come home again in the middle of the night, load up her own paintings? Take them where? If there'd been a show, her agent would have said."
She looked at him intently. "Those weren't Janet's paintings burned in the fire, so whose paintings were they?"
"Could Janet have hidden her own paintings, to collect the insurance?"
"Janet wouldn't do that. And there wasn't any insurance." She lay down, thinking.
"Of course there would be insurance," he said. "Those paintings were worth…"
Dulcie twitched her ear. "Janet didn't insure her work."
"That's crazy. Why wouldn't she? How do you know that?"
"Insurance on paintings is horribly expensive. She told Wilma it costs nearly as much as the price of the work. The rates were so high she decided against it, said she tried three insurance agents and they all gave the same high rates. Wilma says a lot of artists don't insure."
"But Wilma…"
"Wilma has that one painting insured, with a rider on her homeowner's. That's a lot different."
She was quiet a moment, then flipped over and sat up, her eyes widening. "Sicily Aronson has a white van. Don't you remember? She parks it behind the gallery beside the loading door."
"So Sicily took the paintings, at two in the morning? Killed Janet and took her paintings, to sell? Come on, Dulcie. Why would she kill Janet? Janet was her best painter, her meal ticket."
"Maybe Janet planned to leave her. Maybe they had a falling-out. If Janet took all her work away…"
"You've been seeing too many TV movies. If Sicily tried to sell those paintings, if they came on the market, Max Harper would have her behind bars in a second.
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