Shirley Murphy - Cat On The Edge

They saw no dark, moving shapes within the fuzzed light and mist. They heard no footfall, heard only the muffled beat of Dixieland jazz from Donnie's Lounge up on Junipero. The time was just after midnight.

Slowly and methodically they began to search the alley for the stolen wrench. They dug into the earth of the planters, around the roots of the oleander trees though surely the police had dug in the pots, looking for the murder weapon. The police must have investigated every crevice in the alley; but the cats searched anyway. Dulcie poked her paw into cracks beneath the uneven thresholds at the doors of the little shops, feeling into every small opening she could find in the old, renovated buildings.

They nosed up under the windowsills, and beneath the climbing vine at the other end of the alley where Dulcie had been crouching when Beckwhite was murdered. They climbed the jasmine trellis to the roof and searched there, pawing along the metal gutters into a sticky mixture of mud and slimy dead leaves. Joe grinned. If he found the mess repulsive, Dulcie was ready to retch. Every little while he heard her trying to lick off the stickly accumulation, then sputtering out cat spit.

They searched the entire roof, then searched the alley again, but they found no weapon.

Sitting on the damp brick walk, Dulcie said, "Maybe he still had the wrench when he chased you. Maybe he hid it somewhere else."

"If he just wanted to hide the evidence, it could be anywhere."

"But Joe, if he hid it to get Clyde-so if Clyde crossed him in some way, then…"

"I still don't get why Clyde would cross him. They weren't friends. It would have to be something at the shop." He frowned. "Clyde serviced the cars Wark shipped in, but that's all. They didn't even like each other-at least Clyde doesn't much like Wark. What else could have been between them?"

She licked her paw. "Could Clyde know something about Wark? Something to do with the shop?"

Joe flicked an ear. "I've never heard him say anything. Never heard him say anything to Max Harper. If he knew something illegal that Wark had done, he'd tell the chief of police. Clyde's as straight as an old woman."

She shifted her bottom on the cold brick paving.

"But Clyde has been coming home from work really short-tempered lately. Not like himself. And when Beckwhite…"

He stopped speaking. His eyes widened. "I just remembered something." He spun around, and headed for the fog-muffled street. "Come on. Maybe I know where Wark hid the wrench."

She ran to catch up. Within minutes, racing along the foggy streets side by side, they slid into the crawl space beneath the antique shop where Joe had escaped from Wark.

The earth was cold beneath their paws. The dark, moldy dirt smelled sour. Neither of them mentioned the sharp scent of female cat. As they pushed underneath, festoons of cobwebs caught at their ears and whiskers.

He said, "That night, when I hid under here, just before I ran out the back, Wark knelt and looked in. I thought he meant to crawl in, but he only reached, feeling around. Maybe that's what he was doing; maybe he was hiding the wrench."

He reared up, sniffing at the top of the concrete foundation where it supported the heavy old floor joists.

Dulcie patted at the earth along the foundation beneath the opening, to see if Wark might have dug a shallow hole. But the earth was smooth and hard. Probably no one had dug in this ground for a hundred years, except for the resident cat-a female, she had noticed. She wondered about that, about why Joe had picked this particular building to hide under.

But he'd told her. It was the first place he could get under. All the other shops were store buildings on concrete slabs, no crawl space. This old place had been a house, once. Houses had crawl spaces. Wilma's house had a lovely crawl space, cool in hot weather, and delightfully mouse-scented, though the mice themselves had long ago met their maker.

She nosed along the top of the concrete foundation, reaching her paw warily behind ragged bits of black building paper. She didn't want to rip her soft pads on a hidden nail. She wondered how far Wark could have reached in. After some feet of poking and sniffing, she hissed, "Here. Something cold."

She pawed aside a ragged corner of building paper that was caught between a double joist. Its end sat securely atop the cement foundation, a double beam built to support some extra weight in the house above. Maybe a refrigerator; or more likely an old-fashioned icebox, from the age of the place.

The wrench was there, shoved up between the two joists. She tried to pry it out, then Joe tried, clutching it between his paws. The wrench wouldn't budge.

"Be careful," she said. "His fingerprints could be on it, as well as Clyde's."

"Damned hard to get it out without pawing. I wonder if he wore gloves."

"Well, did you see gloves on his hands?"

"I don't remember. I was too busy saving my neck. I don't know how else to get it down, without smearing it. Do you have a better idea?"

She stood on her hind legs, tapping at the wrench with a delicate paw. "What about this hole, here in the end?"

The small hole that ran through the end of the handle wasn't big enough to get a paw through. Joe could just hook his claws in. He pulled as hard as he dared without tearing out a claw, but the wrench remained solidly secured. As he backed away licking his paw, Dulcie said, "What would a human do?"

"How the hell do I know?"

He pictured with amusement Clyde's infrequent household repairs.

But Clyde did know how to use a lever. Clyde claimed levers had been one of the great steps forward for mankind. That seemed to Joe a little much, but what did he know? Certainly the lever system was innovative, at least from a cat's point of view. He'd been fascinated when Clyde levered up the heavy file cabinet in the spare bedroom, when a black widow spider ran underneath.

Clyde wouldn't have bothered to kill a spider just for himself. Probably if a black widow bit Clyde, it would be the one to die. But, afraid for the animals, he had lifted the file cabinet by wedging it up with a long metal rod. When the spider ran out, he stomped it. The smashed spider had left a permanent black spot on the carpet.

Thinking about the lever, he moved away into the blackness to prowl the cavernous space, and soon Dulcie joined him, searching for a piece of iron, maybe a scrap left from some repair, or even a stout stick to help dislodge the wrench.

Searching through the scent of female cat, he was interested that Dulcie did not remark upon the matter. Well if she wasn't asking, he wasn't offering. Anyway, what difference? That was another life. That female meant nothing, now.

When they found no lever to use on the wrench, nothing but a few rusty nails, Dulcie headed for the street. Trotting out the hole in the foundation, moving along through the fog, she stared up at each parked car until she found one with a window half-open.

She leaped, hung by her front paws, and climbed through, her belly dragging on the glass. She disappeared inside.

Joe waited, watching the street. Twice he leaped up the side of the car to stare in, but she was on the floor, he couldn't see what she was doing. When she appeared at the glass again, she had a thin, rusty screwdriver in her mouth, securely clamped between her teeth.

As she climbed out, the metal hit the glass with a little ping.

Within minutes, in the dark beneath the antique shop, they had pushed the screwdriver through the hole in the torque wrench. Bracing the lever against a joist, Joe laid his weight on the handle.

The wrench gave, it slid down a few inches.

But then it stuck again. He pried harder. He was able to force it slowly out, until it protruded so far he couldn't get a purchase.