Shirley Murphy - Cat to the Dogs

None of the shops was yet open, but the little cafes were busy. The cats followed Lucinda, padding along behind, dodging joggers and dog walkers. The old lady was just passing the post office, watching a yardman across the street watering the planter beds in front of Cannady's, that nice Western shop that Dulcie loved, which had such beautiful embroidered denim and leathers. Cannady's front garden was brilliant with impatiens and lilies, behind its low wrought-iron fence. Lucinda had stopped to admire the garden when Dirken and Newlon Greenlaw came around the corner-and immediately Lucinda drew back into the shadows, stood very still, watching them.

The two men were walking slowly just at the curb, so close to the line of parked cars that the cats heard Newlon's jacket brush against a rearview mirror. Both men walked hunched, their heads bent as if looking into the car windows.

It took only a second. The two were quick; they paused, the cats heard a little click as if a car door had opened, another click as it closed again, and the men moved on, Newlon shoving something into his jacket pocket, some small item he had snatched from the seat of the car. A camera? A purse? Perhaps a cell phone.

Lucinda stood staring, a look of shock and anger on her face-a look as if she had been personally affronted.

Then she turned away and hurried into the Swiss House, taking refuge in the first empty booth, busying herself with the menu. The cats, leaping up onto the window box among the flowers, watched her ordering, watched her settle back sipping her coffee. Lucinda was more than usually pale, and her thin old hands were shaking.

DINO'S HAD the best fish and chips in the village. Max Harper, having picked up an order of takeout, sat in his king cab pickup eating his dinner and watching, through the lighted motel window across the street, Cara Ray Crisp skinning out of her sweatshirt. Cara Ray hadn't bothered to pull the blinds. She was only a slip of a thing, tiny and thin, but well endowed, the kind of delicate creature who would have appealed exactly to Shamas Greenlaw.

Harper had backed his truck into a narrow drive between Harren's Gallery and Molena Point Drugs, a lane so overgrown with jasmine that the vines trailed across the truck's roof and down the side windows. For some time Cara Ray had talked on the phone, lying nude on the bed, propped against the pillows, sipping on a canned drink; and now she was tying on a bikini top. As he watched her roll her long blond hair into a knot and secure it, and pull on the bottom half of her bathing suit, Harper had no notion that he, in turn, was watched, from the backseat of the king cab.

Sitting on the cab floor behind Harper, peering up between the bucket seats, Joe Grey could see through the windshield the little pantomime in Cara Ray's lighted motel room, and he had to smile. Max Harper, spying on Cara Ray's strip act like some cheap voyeur, would be enjoying every rousing minute-free entertainment served up with his takeout dinner, all in the line of duty.

The fish and chips smelled so good that Joe was tempted to slash out with a quick paw and snag a nice warm chunk of fried cod. Maybe Harper wouldn't miss just one piece. Why was it that, so often when he did a bit of surveillance, the watchee enjoyed a nice meal, while the watcher ended up faint with hunger?

As Cara Ray stepped to the window, Harper drew back behind a lifted newspaper. She stood looking down at the street, then turned away again, a towel over her shoulder as if she were headed for the pool: a little break between her callous and bad-mannered visits to Lucinda Greenlaw. She'd been to see the old woman three times in three days, the last encounter stretching into dinner and on to midnight-Dulcie said the sleek little blonde had made herself very much at home among the male Greenlaws, drawing the cousins and nephews to her like flies to honey, despite the fact that the Greenlaw clan didn't take quickly to strangers. She said Newlon and Dirken had been all over Cara Ray. "No queen in heat, with a dozen toms raking around her, has any more nerve than that one."

Cara Ray had pulled up at Lucinda's that first day in a gleaming new Jaguar, wearing a fur wrap against the chill of Molena Point's ocean breeze. The mink and the car, Dulcie said, were very likely gifts from Shamas. Lucinda had answered the door wearing a voluminous apron and wiping flour from her hands.

"I'm Shamas's friend, Mrs. Greenlaw. From the boat. I was there the night Shamas died."

Talk about brass. And Lucinda too polite to send her packing. The older woman had asked Cara Ray in and even made tea for her. Dulcie had watched, disgusted, as they settled down before the fire. But the day was chill, and through the closed windows, she couldn't hear a word; it wasn't necessary, though. From their expressions and Cara Ray's body language, even a dunce could see that the little blonde was buttering up Lucinda shamefully.

The moment Lucinda rose to make fresh tea, Cara Ray had gone into action.

She was swift and thorough, riffling through Lucinda's desk and through her checkbook. She had begun on the books that lined the fireplace, reaching behind the lower rows to feel along the walls, when she heard Lucinda return.

Lucinda entered the room to see Cara Ray sitting innocently cuddled in her chair beside the hearth.

Of course Dulcie couldn't leave that little episode alone; since Cara Ray's arrival, Dulcie had hung on the fence every waking moment. If Molena Point Library had a resident cat, she was not currently in residence; she hardly went home for meals. Cara Ray returned the next day and the next, and Dulcie was there. Again on the third day Cara Ray stayed until midnight.

Now, with Joe and Dulcie's "meddling," as Clyde would put it, with Dulcie's anonymous suggestion to Harper, the captain was-pardon the pun-taking a good look at Cara Ray. It had begun earlier that afternoon, when Harper had stopped by Clyde's and mentioned he had a make on Raul Torres, and Joe and Dulcie decided to take a ride.

It was Saturday, and at Harper's suggestion, Clyde planned to take Selig up to Harper's pasture to work on the pup's obedience training in a large, open area. The two pups were impossible together; Charlie had taken Hestig home to her apartment. She and Clyde couldn't even attend the same obedience class; the pups did nothing but taunt each other, play on each other's foolishness. Joe had been shocked out of his claws when Clyde actually signed up for the class at the community center.

Surprisingly, both pups had learned to Sit, to Come on command, and, sometimes, to take the sitting position at Heel -except when they were together. Then they were oblivious, had never before heard those words, had no notion what they meant.

So that afternoon Harper, still in uniform, had taken a few hours off, left his unit parked in front of Clyde's, and he and Clyde had headed up the hills in Clyde's '29 Chevy, the convertible top folded down, Selig securely tethered in the rumble seat-and Joe and Dulcie concealed on the little shelf behind the seats, beneath the folded leather top.

It was hot as sin in there, but, crouched just behind the men's heads, they could hear every word.

"You started to tell me about this accident victim," Clyde said, turning up Ocean. "Torres, you said?" He seemed far more willing to talk with Harper about the case when he thought Joe wasn't around.

"Raul Torres. He did give the antique car agency his right name. Torres was a PI working out of Seattle. I don't know why he used the fake address. Maybe he used that routinely, for security reasons." Even Max Harper, Joe thought with interest, seemed more comfortable relating information in a supposedly cat-free environment.