Shirley Murphy: Cat Striking Back

Returning to the room, grabbing the small duffle that he’d brought in with him last night, he walked down the one flight, stopped at the desk to pay his bill. The clerk was young and pudgy; she avoided looking at his face. When he told her he might be back that night, she wanted him to make a reservation, and that made him laugh. As if they were expecting a big crowd, were booked solid with upscale tourists or some medical convention. The quality of this place, they couldn’t count on a convention of second-rate hookers. Paying his bill in cash, which the clerk didn’t question, he went around to get the RV.

No, nothing had been disturbed. When he slipped in, locked the driver’s door, and went to look in the back, the boxes and furniture and rolled rugs were just as he’d left them. Starting the engine and moving out to the street, he stayed in the scuzzy neighborhood, driving the narrow streets looking for someplace for breakfast. Once he’d eaten he meant to return to Highway 1, stay on the coast, away from cops and traffic. As soon as he’d taken care of business in the city, dumped the RV and bought a car, he could move north on any route he chose, he wouldn’t be recognized then. Meanwhile, the day was clear and bright, the sea reflected the sun cheerfully, and he might as well enjoy the ride. After a week or two, he’d decide whether to go back and say she’d left him, or to keep moving.

THE THREE CATS watched from Ryan’s truck as Dallas and John Bern emerged from the pit with the wrapped body on a stretcher and lifted her into Bern ’s van. She was fully covered by the body bag, and the cats were relieved not to have to look on her face in death. They wanted to keep their own picture of Theresa, her eyes laughing down at them, her hands gentle and warm as she stroked them, her round cheeks pink with health and life. They didn’t want to remember her sunny face as the waxen face of a corpse.

As the coroner’s van pulled away, Dallas followed in his dusty Blazer, leaving the house encircled by crime tape. Max had already left to return to court and then to pick up Charlie, to head for the morgue. As soon as everyone else was gone, Ryan stepped to the bed of her truck and pulled aside the tarp where the cats were huddled.

“Come on, you three,” she said gently, reaching to stroke sad little Dulcie. She looked into their eyes, so miserable. There was nothing she could say to ease their pain over this woman she’d never met. While Charlie knew the four couples well, she didn’t know them at all. “I’ll take you home,” she said softly, “if that’s where you want to go. Come up front with me, where it’s warmer.”

Joe hesitated, crouching lower.

“Those boxes could shift, Joe. I don’t want you hurt. I can drop you in the village if you’d rather.” She tried to stroke the tomcat, but his miserable glare made her pull her hand back. She picked up Dulcie, who pressed against her. When she took Kit in her arms, Kit pressed her face into Charlie’s shoulder. Carrying the two lady cats, she turned away toward the cab. “I’m not starting the truck, Joe, until you come up front.”

In the cab, she started the engine, turned on the heater, and left the door open for Joe. As Dulcie and Kit crowded against her, she thought of many things she might say to try to ease their pain, except anything she said would sound patronizing and insincere.

At last Joe appeared, slipping up into the cab beside Dulcie.

The cats snuggled together trying not to think of Theresa wrapped in the body bag and headed for the morgue, but able to think of nothing else. No one spoke as they moved down the hills on the narrow, winding road, they were silent all the way to the village. On Ocean, Ryan pulled to the curb, reached over, and opened the passenger door. “This okay?” she asked, trying to hide her worry over them.

“Fine,” Joe said. Dulcie and Kit nosed at her by way of thanks, and the cats leaped out to the sidewalk. She’d started to pull away when a portly man in a brown tank top banged on the truck door, shouting that her cats had escaped. Already the cats were gone, flowing up a bougainvillea vine to the rooftops, heading for MPPD. Behind the fat man, his frumpy wife stood staring up, shouting and pointing.

Ryan rolled down her window. “It’s all right,” she told the meaty tourists. “They do that all the time. They like to ride into town, then go off on their own. They’ll be home for supper.” They stared at her, shaking their heads in disbelief. She smiled and waved, and pulled away.

AT MOLENA POINT PD Detective Juana Davis sat before her computer typing up her field notes from the burglaries and from her interviews with eight of the neighbors. She had slipped off her uniform jacket, revealing a white shirt open at the collar. Beneath her desk she had loosened the laces of her regulation shoes and slipped them off, too. The divergent observations she’d collected were the usual tangle, from which she must try to separate facts from imagination. Civilian witnesses weren’t trained in accuracy. Too often their minds, at the moment in question, were half on other matters. Listening for the kids sleeping in their beds, hearing the TV or a ringing phone, wondering if they’d turned off the stove. Few folks remembered clearly what they’d seen and heard, particularly when they didn’t realize at the time that those moments would later be important.

Leaning back in her chair, she sipped her cold coffee, thinking about the burglar. He knew the neighborhood, knew it well enough to know exactly what he’d wanted to steal and, apparently, where it was in each house. He-or she-hadn’t rooted in the drawers or torn apart the closets, he’d gone right to his objectives. He had copies of all four garage door openers and access to the house keys. Whether keys had been kept hanging in some of the garages, or he’d had duplicates of them all, was yet to be determined.

Every one of her eight interviewees had said that, as far as they knew, none of the four couples kept extra garage door openers in the house, that there was just the usual button inside each garage, and an opener in each car, some of those programmed directly into the cars’ electronic systems. She thought it likely that the guy had one of those programming gadgets available online to your everyday thief. As she set her coffee cup down, a movement in the bookshelf along the far wall startled her.

She looked up, frowning at Joe Grey. “When did you slip in here? I’m no more observant than our witnesses.” That disturbed her, that she hadn’t seen an intruder cross her office, even if it was only a cat, that she’d been so focused she’d noticed nothing. “At least you’re not armed, you little bum,” she said, grinning companionably.

What she hadn’t seen was Dulcie and Kit melt behind the small easy chair that sat at an angle at the end of her desk. By stretching, standing on their hind legs, their claws in the back of the chair for support, the two lady cats could just see Juana’s computer screen, though at an angle that made it hard to read.

The interview she was typing was with a Raymond Atwater, who lived at the south end of the block. Atwater was a widower and lived alone. Sometime between his supper and his bedtime, he saw the lights of a car pulling into the Becker garage. He thought they might have delayed their vacation, and he didn’t question that. He didn’t recall the time. He said he tried not to mind the neighbors’ business. He’d gone on to bed, to read, and hadn’t seen the car leave. He’d been deep in his book when he heard the scream of a cat, said he’d assumed a couple of neighborhood cats were mating.

Well, he heard us yowling in the closet, Joe thought. Would he eventually have come to rescue us? Maybe, maybe not. We could have died within earshot, and some people wouldn’t care. In order to read the report, to avoid a glare on the screen that wiped out the message, the tomcat had to move along the bookcase and crane his neck. He was waiting for Juana to finish up with Atwater and get on to the next witness when the phone rang.