Shirley Murphy: Cat Pay the Devil

“As good as can be expected. Max says everyone goes through this.”

“Everyone does. It gets better, with time. Just remember that he could have killed you, killed both of us and Max and maybe Ryan, if you hadn’t shot him.”

Charlie shivered. “We still don’t know what he wanted. What he thinks you took, what he had hidden.”

The waitress came with their tea. They ordered crab sandwiches, salads, and three kinds of dessert to go. When they were alone again, Wilma said, “Dulcie says Greeley searched the Jones house.”

“Is she saying Greeley’s involved in this? Those cats! Did he find anything? What did they-”

“Dulcie and Kit found a safe,” Wilma said. “Which, of course, they couldn’t open.”

“When was this?” Charlie said softly. “Greeley can crack a safe.”

“I’m not sure when. After we were kidnapped. I don’t have it all sorted out yet.”

“Weren’t Cage and Greeley in Central America together?”

“They were both down there, Greeley working in Panama. I can’t be sure when Cage was there-only times he was not was when he was under supervision or in prison. He was always secretive, said he couldn’t remember the dates. Said he was all over Central and South America, couldn’t remember exactly when and where. Even if he’d given me dates and places, it would have been hard to corroborate. Certainly, most of the time, Lilly didn’t know where he was.”

“The interesting thing is, why did Greeley show up here, just now?”

Wilma nodded. Their order arrived, and they were silent for a while. Charlie said, when her first pangs of hunger were appeased, “When Mavity called this morning to ask what time they should be at your place, she sounded really distressed. She said she’d kicked Greeley out, called the station and gotten a restraining order. She said he’d been so drunk, so loud that she didn’t have a choice. I let her talk it out, or try to.

“She really rambled,” Charlie said, “not at all like Mavity, said she was so embarrassed, the way he behaved in front of her friends. She confessed she’d gone through Greeley’s suitcase, she was embarrassed about that. She said he had some kind of little gold idol, an ugly little man. She called it a devil, said it gave her the shivers. Sounded like those museum copies that Greeley’s ex-wife brings back from her trips. But Mavity said this was far heavier. She said she’s looked at those, and they don’t weigh half what this did…”

Wilma had stopped eating. “Those little pendants that Sue brings back for the South American shop.” She was silent for a long time, looking at Charlie, and thinking. “Charlie, on the way home, let’s swing by the library. It won’t take a minute, I’ll just run in.”

Charlie nodded. Wrapping half her sandwich in her paper napkin, and asking for the bill, she quickly paid it, gulped her tea, and rose, picking up the cardboard box filled with the Bakery’s famous desserts.

They were back home at Wilma’s twenty minutes later, Wilma loaded down with half a dozen heavy coffee-table books on pre-Columbian art, Charlie carrying the bakery box. Pushing in through the front door, they smelled fresh coffee. It was not until the five of them had finished coffee and the desserts that Wilma sat down with Mavity in the living room surrounded by library books. Getting Mavity settled with the heavy books, Wilma thought, amused, that she’d set aside the next few days to be alone and quiet, to enjoy a little recuperative R and R, and instead, here she was, digging into clues, unable to leave the puzzle alone-every bit as curious as the three cats.

In the library, as she’d hurried toward the stacks, one of her coworkers had stopped her and started laying on the sympathy about her “ordeal,” asking nosy questions about the kidnapping. You could keep nothing secret in a small town. Little dumpy Nora Wahl had told her with great authority that what she needed to do “right now,” was to “get right out with your friends again, Wilma. Do things, go places, don’t stay shut up in the house brooding. Go out among people right away, get your mind off all that trouble, keep busy and you’ll soon forget it.”

Wilma had told Nora curtly that that wasn’t the way to heal anything, to try to forget it and hide from it. That that wasn’t the way her mind worked, thank you. That what she needed was a little privacy. And she had headed into the stacks, leaving the library assistant startled into unaccustomed silence.

Now, sitting on the couch next to Mavity, with Charlie on the other side, she watched the little grizzle-haired woman leaf through color photographs of gold pendants and gold ceremonial artifacts that had been dug from ancient graves.

“Ugly,” Mavity said. “But…I don’t know…” She looked up at Wilma. “They hold you, don’t they? Do you think they’re ugly?”

Charlie said, “I think they’re fascinating, strong. But maybe that’s an acquired taste. The faces are ugly, but the work itself…”

“Yes,” Mavity said. “I think I see.” She studied Charlie. “You’re the artist, you know about these things. These were made by ancient Indians?”

“Yes, with really simple tools. The whole of that continent was so rich with gold, great veins of gold that they could just dig out. When the Spanish conquered those people and killed them, they took their beautiful gold sculptures and melted them down, destroyed thousands upon thousands of these pieces, casting them into Spanish coins.”

“But how did Greeley…?”

“His is most likely a copy,” Wilma said. “The museums make copies, to sell.”

“It was so heavy,” Mavity repeated. “So very heavy, for such a little thing.”

“If it is gold,” Wilma said, “it was illegal to bring it out of the country. In Panama, it’s illegal even to own real gold huacas, unless you register them. You can’t sell them. Only the Panamanian government, and the museum of Panama, can legally own them.”

“Then if it is gold, where could he…? Oh, he didn’t steal it, from a museum! Greeley isn’t that clever.”

Charlie said, “Would there be more? Would he have more of them?”

Mavity’s eyes widened. “Greeley…Greeley isn’t some international thief like you read about, able to get into a museum.” She looked hard at Charlie, and at Wilma. “That’s just not possible.”

“We’re guessing a lot here,” Wilma said. “But…maybe not a museum. ‘The most recent grave discovered,’” she read, ‘was found less than a hundred years ago.’” She looked up at Mavity. “People stole gold artifacts from it, before the Panamanian government found out and stopped the thefts.” She scanned the columns again, then, “No one knows where those pieces ended up. Possibly, it says, in private collections.”

“But,” Mavity said, “if Greeley stole something so valuable, even from a private collection…” She shook her head. “My brother’s just a petty thief. I don’t think he’d know how to go about that kind of sophisticated theft.”

“Maybe Greeley and Cage together?” Wilma said. “Cage might be capable of that, if he planned carefully.”

Mavity sat back, marking her place in the book that lay open on her lap. But then, leaning forward again, caught almost beyond her will by those riches, she read aloud the description of a golden garden in ancient Peru, a garden paved in gold, with life-size gold corn growing on gold stalks, life-size gold sheep and their lambs, huge gold jars filled with emeralds, full-size gold women; she read of gold fountains with running water where gold birds bathed, and there were even gold spiders, other gold insects, and gold lizards.

“Like a fairy tale,” she said. “Such wealth seems impossible. To even imagine…Oh my, how valuable even that little devil must be, if it’s real. And how many centuries old?”