Shirley Murphy: Cat Pay the Devil

“Payback time,” Wilma had told them, though she, too, worried about the kit. But at least now the older cats understood what such worrying was about.

Finishing her coffee and paying her bill, she left the restaurant. The mall parking lot was only half full, the shop doors just opening, but already the heavy July heat was enervating. She hoped it was nicer at home, that the sea’s fog had moved in to cool the village, to cool her cottage that, even with thick stone walls, could in this weather grow too hot for her taste or Dulcie’s. Moving her car over in front of her favorite discount stores, sitting for a moment looking at her short shopping list, she had a fierce, empty feeling of missing home; felt an unaccustomed nostalgia for her cozy living room with its soft blue velvet chair and love seat, the huge, bright landscape above the stone fireplace between the walls of books, her cherry desk before the window where Dulcie liked to sit. She felt empty suddenly, as if she’d been gone for months.

But she’d be home in a few hours. She was just tired, and feeling bruised after the court hearing, after having to dredge up all Jones’s ugly history and listen to his squirming protestations. She was just wanting to be snug at home, where she could restore her sense of the goodness of the world. Annoyed with herself, she swung out and locked the car, and, mustering a bit of shopper’s eagerness and excitement, she headed for the first row of stores.

R acing home, Dulcie couldn’t get Mandell Bennett out of her mind, a vision of the strong, dark-haired, soft-spoken man falling beneath a blaze of gunfire-and she imagined Wilma falling…falling…But that had not happened! She had to stop this, she mustn’t think this…Courting bad luck, Lucinda would say.

Wilma’s car was not in the drive, and there was no scent of exhaust as if she had pulled into the garage. Dulcie pushed resolutely through her cat door into the service porch then into the kitchen.

Crossing the blue linoleum, there was no scent of Wilma. She padded into the dining room, stood beneath a dark, carved chair, her paws on the Persian rug, looking through to the living room. There was no one there. The vivid oil painting over the fireplace, with its red rooftops and dark oaks, seemed faded; the blue velvet love seat, Wilma’s cherrywood desk, the potted plants, the bright books in the bookcases-all seemed abandoned without Wilma, diminished and forlorn.

She knew she was being melodramatic, overreacting. Turning away, she hurried down the hall to Wilma’s bright bedroom, stood looking in at the cheerful flowered chintz and white wicker, the red iron woodstove-then she fled back to the living room, leaped to the desk, and again pressed the message button.

Nothing, no message. Punching the speaker button, then the one for Wilma’s cell phone, she recorded a few listless words. The effort seemed useless, she’d already jammed Wilma’s cell phone with messages. Shouldering quickly out through her cat door again, then through Wilma’s wildly blooming garden, she leaped once more to the rooftops and raced through waves of rising heat across the hot shingles and tiles, straight to Joe Grey and Kit. Above her, the sky was deepening into evening, the gleam of the low, slanting sun glancing golden across the roofs ahead of her. She found Joe and Kit atop a little penthouse where the faintest breeze fingered their fur. The kit was curled on the high roof, dozing, but Joe Grey paced, now as restless as Dulcie herself. As if, having had a restorative nap, he could no longer stay still.

She knew it wasn’t Wilma that Joe was fretting about-he was yearning to get back to Molena Point PD, to the dispatcher’s desk and its rich sources of information. Joe’s whole being was focused on last night’s break-in murder; something about this shooting had deeply puzzled the tomcat, had taken hold of him from the very beginning. He’d been grumpy and preoccupied all day, waiting for the lab reports, waiting to cadge a look at whatever information might come in over the wire.

Joe was indeed growing grumpy. The murder had occurred at around three A.M. There had been no sirens, and he hadn’t learned about it until that morning over the radio while Clyde made breakfast-an omelet for the two of them, the usual canned feast and kibble for the three family cats. Halfway through the news, Joe had pawed the morning paper open across the breakfast table, and there it was.

While Linda Tucker’s husband, a real estate agent, was in Santa Cruz at a training conference, Linda had been shot once in the forehead, with a small-caliber bullet, while she slept.

Clawing the page over to read the rest of the article, Joe had quickly devoured his breakfast omelet and taken off, up to the roof and across the rooftops to Molena Point PD, where he slipped in on the heels of two officers coming on duty. Leaping to the dispatcher’s desk, he had rolled over and purred, making nice, picking up what news he could-and when that source dried up, when no more information seemed forthcoming, he had headed for the murder scene.

He had found Dulcie and Kit already there, having heard the news when Kit’s humans, Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, turned on the TV before breakfast to see if the weather might cool off.

No such encouraging weather report was at hand, but when reports of the murder came on the screen, and before Lucinda could stop them, Dulcie and Kit had fled out the dining room window and across the oak branch to Kit’s private tree house, where they scrambled backward to the ground, claws raking the oak bark, and headed for the murder scene. There, Joe and his tabby lady, and Kit, had waited, hidden and watching, until Detective Garza and three other officers had secured the scene and left, at around ten A.M.-and quickly they had slipped into the house, past a uniformed guard and under the yellow tape, to search for scents that the police had no way to detect, and for any tiny, hidden items that the officers might somehow have missed.

The Tucker house had been torn apart, drawers pulled out and dumped, furniture turned over. And yet, for the first time in all the crime scenes the cats had prowled, they’d found nothing of value that the law hadn’t already photographed and bagged as evidence; they had detected not even the scent of the intruder, a clue that human officers would, of course, miss. The house reeked so of the husband’s cigar smoke that they could smell nothing beyond it. Even the scents of the three other cops and Detective Garza, laid back and forth across the house, were muddied by the stink of cigars. The only other notable smells were a spoiled onion in the kitchen cupboard and the unpleasant odors associated with the death of the deceased.

Later in the day, Joe had returned to the PD twice to prowl the dispatcher’s desk and then the chief’s office. He knew it would take a few days to get the ballistics report. As far as the cats knew, the police had not found the gun; the bullet was from a.22 fired at point-blank range. It had made an ugly, torn wound at the back of the head. Not that the deceased cared; if Linda Tucker was looking down from heaven, she probably cared only that she was dead and wanted to see her killer apprehended and punished.

Joe Grey wondered sometimes about the dead. Did they look down, watching the investigations? And if they did, why couldn’t they, one way or another, give a sign? Why couldn’t a murdered woman point a ghostly finger? How convenient that would be-if a cop knew how to read those unearthly signals.

The ransacked Tucker house was a mess in the crime photographs, which Dallas Garza studied later at his desk, going over and over them. Yet, for all the mess, according to the bereaved husband only jewelry had been taken, and some cash from Linda’s purse. Tucker had arrived home about five A.M., an hour after the Santa Cruz police located him asleep in his hotel room in that small coastal town. There had been some mix-up at the desk about his reservation, and he had been moved from one hotel to another because of overbooking, so it had taken officers a while to find him. When he did arrive home, and when at last he pulled himself together sufficiently to go through the mess in the house, he was certain that nothing else was missing. Linda’s body had been taken to the county morgue, where it would remain until disposition of the case.