Shirley Murphy: Cat Striking Back

“Yes, feed her,” Charlie said, amused. “Cat food’s on the washer.” She guessed Joe and Dulcie and Kit were not only good at sleuthing, they were skilled, as well, at expanding the horizons of a dedicated dog person. Dallas had had pointers all his life, mostly German shorthairs. He was a bird hunter, a gun-dog man, and until recently he’d had no use at all for cats. She hung up, smiling at the change in him, wondering if he’d like to make a home for one of Mango’s little kittens.

RYAN AND SCOTTY stood looking at the broken window, at the hammer gleaming up at them among the fall of shattered glass. Scotty made no comment about the paw prints; she hoped he thought they belonged to some prowling neighborhood cat. “ Someone was here,” she said. “Someone broke into the garage and threw your hammer out through the window.” She looked at him helplessly. “Just like the caller told me.”

Scotty shrugged and scratched his beard. “We won’t know for sure until we’ve dug out the concrete. You’re willing to take his word for it, whoever it was?”

“I don’t see that we have a choice. The department does have a report on a missing body. The lab has identified human blood, human hair, and human skin in the drag marks. And now someone says there’s a body buried here? You think we have a choice?”

“Come on, then. The cement’s setting up.”

As she turned away to the garage, Kit squirmed in her arms and jumped down. Ryan watched her trot away and leap into the bed of her pickup. The labor and expense of digging out the concrete and of a new pour lay totally on the word of one small cat who, by sensible standards, could not exist at all.

Well, hell, she thought, moving into the garage and taking up her shovel. She watched Scotty fetch a wheelbarrow and give Manuel and Fernando their orders. Manuel looked as if Scotty had gone mad, but obediently he fetched a heavy pick. Small Fernando of the scarred face didn’t move, stood frowning at Scotty.

Scott Flannery was a big man, broad shouldered, a bit wild looking with his thick red beard. But he was a quiet man, and patient-until his temper kicked in. Now when he grabbed a second pick, Manuel backed away.

Scotty tested the hardening concrete with the pick, and then lit into it, swinging so hard he sent damp, crumbling debris flying. He handed the pick to Manuel.

“Dig now! Dig here, dig now, or you’ll have no job to come back to and no pay.” He repeated his orders in fractured Spanish.

Soon the two men were digging out the setting ce ment. With Scotty and Ryan working beside them, it didn’t take long to clear away the carefully poured floor and rake the debris into a heap to be hauled away. Ryan couldn’t stop thinking how embarrassed she’d be if, after they moved the gravel and dug down into the earth, they found nothing. No grave, no body. It hurt her to see the men’s faces as their careful work was destroyed, as the nice smooth cement job was trashed into rubble.

She thought life might have been simpler if they’d quit work after the pour, paid the men, and sent them home for the rest of the day, and then she and Scotty had done the digging alone. She hoped to hell the missing corpse was down there so she wouldn’t come up a liar. She was dismayed that she could never tell Scotty the real source of her information, that she had to lie to her uncle. Scotty had helped Dallas and her dad raise her and her sisters after their mother died, they were family and they seldom kept secrets from one another.

Through her goggles she watched patches of dark gravel appear, mixed with cement. Soon, Fernando and Manuel started heaving the gravel out, piling it against the garage wall where, later, it could be shoveled back into the pit-after the body had been disinterred.

If there was a body. And if there was…She thought about Dallas or Davis and the coroner working the scene; about the long wait of perhaps weeks or months until the case was resolved and they could close up the pit again, and pour fresh cement. She thought about her clients who were waiting anxiously to move in, who expected the work to be finished promptly-now, she was going to have to pay a steep penalty. Not envisioning this kind of delay, she’d deviated from her usual contract and allowed a time restriction to be written in, docking her a hundred dollars a day for every day over the agreed-upon finish date.

Earth began to show beneath the gravel. As Fernando reached to move a black drainpipe aside, Scotty reached to stop him, and Ryan fished her phone from her pocket. Time to call the department, they didn’t want to disturb anything more until they had Max or a detective on the scene.

The two men climbed up the ladder. Glancing at each other and at Ryan with renewed skepticism, they stood waiting at the edge of the pit to see what would happen next. Despite their boss’s crazy female notions, they were too curious to walk away. No one noticed that beyond the open garage, in the bed of Ryan’s pickup, the three cats sat in a row, half hidden beneath the tarp, also waiting for the victim to be revealed. No one could have said whether the four humans, or the three cats, were the more curious and impatient.

DISPATCHER MABEL FARTHY clicked on the phone, answering Ryan’s call. Ryan pictured the hefty blonde speaking through her headset, sitting in the open cubicle formed by the reception counter, her cluttered desk, filing cabinets, and shelves crowded with radios and the fax and copy machines. “I’m up at the Cowen remodel,” Ryan told her. “On Blakely. Max and Dallas know where. We had a phone tip this morning, guy said we have a body buried up here, down in a drainage ditch-into which we’d just finished pouring fresh cement,” she said wryly. “We’ve dug that out, dug out the gravel. We’re down to raw earth and don’t want to go any further.”

Mabel didn’t ask questions. “The chief’s out. Hold on, I’ll buzz Detective Garza. You okay? You sound pale.”

“I’m fine,” Ryan said, smiling at Mabel’s turn of phrase. In a minute, Dallas came on. She said, “You know the ditch we dug inside the Cowen garage?”

“Yes, the second Panama Canal?”

“I got a phone call this morning that there’s a body buried there.”

“What kind of call? Who was it? What time? You get the name of the caller?”

“He wouldn’t give it. It was…I was on my way up to the job, it was about ten. He gave me the message, said, ‘The detectives and the chief know me,’ and he hung up.”

Dallas was silent for a long time, undoubtedly thinking about the department’s anonymous snitch, the voice from out of nowhere, to which they had all learned to listen.

“ Dallas, I believe him. You…You’re cutting out,” she said, not wanting to be interrogated.

“I’m on my way,” he said shortly, with considerable irritation. “Don’t do anything. Wait for me.” When he’d hung up she stood outside looking around the property, wondering how much their careless coming and going this morning, so many people back and forth, had destroyed of the tire tracks and footprints. When she glanced up the hill, where the grass was swaying, she was startled to see Tansy and Sage slipping away over the crest as if headed home. Her phone rang and it was Dallas. “We’re just turning onto Cohen.” In a moment she heard cars approaching up the narrow road, crunching bits of gravel beneath their tires. Dallas ’s tan Blazer appeared, and Max’s truck behind it. As they parked, she glanced at the bed of her pickup where the tarp was rippling in a quick, scurrying movement. For an instant, Joe Grey peered out, then vanished, and the tarp went still.

JOE WATCHED DALLAS swing out of his tan Blazer. His small SUV was a few years older than Charlie Harper’s red model, and showed far more wear. The dark-haired Latino detective wore jeans, a white shirt open at the collar, and a leather jacket. Max Harper, stepping out of his pickup, was dressed in uniform this morning, as if he might have been in court. The two men headed into the open garage, stepping as carefully as they could between piles of wet cement and cement-covered gravel. As they stood looking down into the pit, talking with Ryan and Scotty, the two Latino laborers moved away.