Shirley Murphy - Cat Striking Back

She sat down on the couch. Dallas handed her the pictures and said, “Someone was watching us while we ran the scene this morning-what appears to be a crime scene.”

Charlie was quiet for a minute, tilting the pictures this way and that for a clearer view, then she looked up at the detectives. “This could be the same man.”

They waited. Joe dropped off the desk and slipped up on the couch beside her. She glanced down at him and their eyes met for a moment, then she looked up again at the two detectives.

“When Ryan and Clyde left you this morning, they stopped up the hill where I was checking my clients’ houses. We were on the street, talking, when Clyde saw a man down the hill standing hidden among the trees as if he was watching us.”

She looked again at the pictures. “He was wearing a dark hat, a slouchy kind of hat. Jeans. A dark green windbreaker.” Her hand, petting Joe, felt reassuring. They were in this together and that thought pleased the tomcat.

“None of us got a look at his face,” she said, “with the hat pulled down. He ran down the hill and disappeared, and in a minute a white car took off. Maybe he was interested in my vacationing houses, too. A glass slider looks like someone tried to jimmy it. I didn’t report it, nothing seems to be missing.”

She looked embarrassed. “I guess it wasn’t a very smart way to tail someone, Clyde in a yellow car, me in a red SUV. When we lost him at Ocean, we split up. They went north, I went south as far as the shops, looked all over the parking lot, then gave up.”

“And you didn’t call about the attempted break-in,” Dallas said, frowning.

“It was so…I had nothing to report. Even the guy down the hill, watching. Might have been only a neighbor. If he was watching you, wouldn’t he know he’d show up in the pictures you were shooting?”

“He might have thought I didn’t have a very wide field,” Juana said. “I was shooting small details, a pair of dark glasses, close-ups.”

“And what was he going to do?” Dallas said. “If he’d moved and we’d seen him, we’d have brought him in for questioning. Maybe we’ll have better luck when the video is developed.”

“Could this be our snitch?” Juana said. “I took the call, and it was the snitch’s voice, I’m sure. Was he hanging around to see if we’d run the scene even, when there was no body?”

“That doesn’t tell us how he happened on the scene in the first place,” Dallas said. “The odds of him stumbling on that particular pool…How many people spend their time prowling around vacant houses and looking in empty swimming pools?”

Juana said, “Unless they saw the murder in progress, or saw the body before it was moved. But why the snitch’s continued secrecy? What’s that about? And how has he known any of the information he’s given us over the years? I’m beginning to think he’s some kind of psychic. If I believed in such things.”

“Sometimes,” Charlie said, “it seems there’s no other way to explain what he comes up with.” Her hand had tightened only slightly on the gray tomcat. He pressed nervously against her, eased by her steady touch. Sometimes that kind of conversation, hearing the detectives talk about their unknown informant and make guesses about the snitch’s identity while looking straight at Joe himself, tended to make a cat nervous.

“I’d say he was a member of the department,” Juana said, rising and heading for the door. “Except, not even someone in the department would know this kind of stuff. For any one person to have gathered all the information we’ve received over the years from this guy-and from the woman-that just isn’t possible.” Brushing a gray cat hair from the skirt of her dark uniform, the detective left them to return to her own office. Dallas sat looking after her, then looked across at Charlie.

Charlie said, “I sure don’t know the answer. I guess you and Max are right. If you like the help of the snitches, then run with it and don’t ask questions.”

Across the room beneath the credenza where Dulcie crouched hidden, the tabby’s green eyes looked out at Joe and Charlie, wildly amused. Beside her, Kit was silently laughing.

Charlie said, “Were you able to lift any prints?”

Dallas nodded. “Fingerprints. Blood. Shoe prints. And with spray, we got some tire marks.”

Charlie rose to leave. Joe, feeling uncomfortable suddenly, dropped off the couch and followed her. Dulcie followed Joe, the two cats trailing Charlie as far as the dispatcher’s cubicle, where they made a detour up onto the counter to see if Mabel had any more fried chicken.

FROM THE STREET above, he watched the yellow roadster nose in between two pickups near the dirt pile. As the couple got out, he pulled his car farther off the street, in among the stand of cypress trees, whose five dark trunks thrust up out of the earth like a huge hand, like the mangrove trees in Florida, where they’d lived for a couple of years. With his car better hidden, he sat taking in the scene below. Did he know the man in the roadster? Why did he look familiar? It was a small village, but he’d lived here only two years. He thought maybe he’d seen him around that upscale car agency, going in and out of the automotive repair shop. Maybe giving the mechanics orders? He liked to buy his beer at the liquor store across the street. Standing in the cool interior, he’d glance over there at the foreign cars in the agency window, thinking what kind he’d buy when they’d made a big enough haul. If this guy was the head mechanic or the owner, then the last name was probably Damen, as on the sign out front. Squarely built, dark, short hair, not particularly good looking. He wondered what the woman saw in him.

The house below him was a one-story stucco with a red tile roof, the typical pseudo Mediterranean of the area. At the far end, a blue tarp had been secured over the roof as if there was a leak there. Weird that they were working on Sunday. How could they hire people on Sunday? Didn’t the unions control when men could work?

The garage door was open but from this angle he could see inside for only a few feet. He could hear someone digging in there, and as the couple approached, a strongly built, redheaded man emerged. Red hair, red beard. Plaid shirt and muddy jeans, muddy boots and a shovel in his hand. Behind him the sound of digging continued. Outside the garage beside the tall heap of earth was a pile of broken concrete. Slipping out of the car, he hunkered down beside it, looking. But even at the lower angle he could see in only another two feet.

The cement floor was tracked with mud, as was the drive: spills of dirt, muddy boot prints, and the kind of single, muddy tire track a wheelbarrow would make as they hauled out the dirt to pile in the yard. He wanted to see this drain. He wanted to hear what they might say about it. He wasn’t any expert on construction, but he couldn’t imagine why they’d dig a drain in a cement-floored garage. From the amount of earth that had come out of it, the thing had to be huge.

Well, they weren’t only digging in the garage, part of the dirt must have come from a raw ditch alongside the wall of the house. They’d replaced some windows, too; there was a stack of old windows out front, leaning against a tree. How long did these people plan to stay here on a Sunday afternoon? He wondered if, when they did leave, they’d lock the garage doors. He grew so nervous with the frustration of waiting that he had to use the inhaler again. He hated the bother of carrying it around. She said he was lucky to have it. When at last his breathing came easier, and when they were all inside the garage and the digging was louder, as if maybe more than one man was working, he slipped down the hill, staying under the cover of the descending cypress trees, and crouched just above the garage to listen. But then, hunkered among the prickly foliage, he had to wait until the digging eased enough so he could hear.