Shirley Murphy - Cat Pay the Devil

They heard his key turn in the lock, heard his door open. When they didn’t hear it close, they peered over.

The door stood wide open, as if to catch the cooler air that lingered in the small patio. From within the room, they heard Greeley open a window, then apparently drop a handful of change on the dresser, maybe emptying his pockets, meaning to change pants-though a grease stain had never before seemed to bother that old man. They heard an inner door close, then water running in the bathroom basin.

“Now!” Dulcie said, flying backward down a trellis, knocking off clematis blooms; ducking into a mock orange bush beside Greeley’s door, they looked into the dim room-and moved inside, searching for the best hiding place. They might have only a minute. And Greeley knew them. To that old man, they were not simple neighborhood cats, he knew very well what they were capable of, and that their sympathies lay not with cheap crooks like Greeley, but with the law.

The room was small, dim, dusty smelling, and overfurnished. Huge, dark mahogany dressers, big unmade bed. Wildly flowered, faded draperies left from another era, striped upholstered chair crowding one corner. On an upholstered bench stood Greeley’s wrinkled leather duffel. They hopped up beside it, and Dulcie disappeared halfway inside, searching, as Joe leaped to the dresser behind her, among the tangle of small items from Greeley’s pockets.

Greeley’s billfold smelled of old leather and old man and was well stuffed with cash. Beside it, a fall of loose change, a little penknife, a wadded-up handkerchief that Joe didn’t want to touch. A ring of five keys, including three safe-deposit keys, flat and smooth, without ridges. And a little flashlight and the tiny periscope that Greeley favored for cracking a safe. But no gold devil.

They heard the toilet flush. Dulcie leaped out of the duffle, the small gold devil dangling from her teeth, and took off fast, out the door, Joe beside her. They had barely made it to the shadows beneath a potted tree when Greeley came out of the bathroom. When he opened the closet door, they were gone, up the clematis trellis to the safety of the roof.

They heard items rattling on the dresser below, loose change clinking, as if Greeley was dropping those small possessions back in his pocket. They wondered if he had changed to clean pants? On the roof above the old man, Dulcie dropped the little gold figure on the dark shingles. It caught the morning sun in a flashing gleam: square, scowling face and large nose beneath an elaborate headdress, its body naked, its maleness boldly explicit. Its entire aspect, as Mavity had said, gave one the shivers.

Joe lifted it by the dark leather string from which it was suspended, widening his eyes when he felt its weight. “Heavy as a wharf rat,” he said, laying the huaca down again.

Dulcie’s green eyes glowed; the same triumphant look as when she came tramping across a field dragging a large and succulent rabbit. “It’s so heavy, Joe. If it’s real, and solid gold…then as sure as I have paws, this is what Cage was after, a stash of artifacts like this.”

“But…I don’t know.” Joe shook his head. “That’s big-time, Dulcie. To steal from a museum, in a country that will shoot you if you sneeze wrong. Greeley isn’t that sophisticated. Is Cage? Just how were those burglaries handled?”

“On the Web, one article Wilma pulled up said the unrecovered huacas from the museum had probably been sold to illegal collectors.” Her green eyes narrowed. “Think about it. If a person had an illegal collection of stolen goods, and then someone stole from him, would he report the theft?”

Joe smiled.

“And now,” she said, “with this information, what will Harper do?”

The tomcat shrugged. “Report it to customs or whatever federal agency deals with this stuff.” He laid his ears back uncertainly, but then he smiled. “Will the feds contact Interpol? Talk about heavy.”

But Dulcie looked uncertain.

“What?” he said, frowning.

“The feds can have Cage,” she said. “Let him burn. But his sister…If he did have a stash of gold, and it was in the house while Lilly was living there, won’t they arrest her, too?”

“So?”

“So, if she didn’t know, and they send her to prison, that would be too bad. She’s just a lonely old woman.”

Joe just looked at her. Here was his beautiful tabby lady, with her delicate peach-tinted ears and her huge emerald eyes, the most perfect cat in the world, feeling sorry for some second-rate, bad-tempered, and probably lying human.

“Dulcie, if Lilly Jones knew there were millions in stolen gold hidden in her own house-if that’s what this turns out to be-and she didn’t call the police, if she knew why Cage kidnapped Wilma and she didn’t tell Harper, if Lilly Jones just sat on her hands, then why would you feel sorry for her?”

“But what,” Dulcie said in a small voice, “if she didn’t know?”

Watching his lovely lady agonizing over that stupid woman, Joe Grey picked up the leather cord in his teeth and trotted across the roofs, the gold devil dangling and thumping against his gray-and-white chest.

Where a cluster of chimneys and air vents rose close together, in a little cleft between two steep peaks, several layers of shingles met at odd angles. There, Joe pawed back the shingles, dropped the little gold devil on its leather cord safely beneath them, and watched the asphalt squares flop back over it.

Patting at the shingles, making sure nothing could be seen, he turned back to Dulcie. “How about Jolly’s alley? I’m starved.” And the cats raced away toward Jolly’s, heading for a midmorning snack-leaving that one small fragment of a vast and ancient culture where not even a seagull or roof rat was likely to find it.

For nearly a week, the cats thought about the little gold man hidden among the shingles. Several times a day Joe or Dulcie trotted across the roofs to that aerial hiding place, making sure the treasure was safe; and all week their minds were full of questions yet to be answered. But not until the following Friday, when their human friends gathered at Clyde’s for dinner, did they learn more.

The occasion was Mandell Bennett’s release from San Francisco General and his arrival in the village to stay with Wilma for a short recuperation. Wilma wouldn’t hear of his staying alone in his apartment with only a handful of coworkers coming in to tend to his needs, though they would have been more than adequate. “What if Jones breaks out again and comes after you? Better to have someone else in the house until you’re better. This time, I promise, Mandell, I’m ready-and the department is only blocks away, they can be here in seconds.”

She had made up the guest room for Mandell, had all his favorite foods on hand, had arranged for a visiting nurse to come in to help him with bathing and changing bandages; and in anticipation of Mandell’s arrival, she and Clyde had planned a party.

O nly now, in the early evening, had the accumulated July heat managed to penetrate to Clyde Damen’s patio; in this sheltered oasis, the high, plastered walls hoarded well the cooler night air. It seemed to Joe that the heat spell would never end; he felt as if the whole world was being smothered by a giant, sweaty hand. Pacing the top of the six-foot wall above the unlit barbecue, he watched Clyde hosing down the brick paving and the plaster benches. Only the outdoor cushions, piled on the porch, had escaped the soaking onslaught of the spray. As Clyde adjusted the hose to a gentler pressure and began watering the flowers in their raised planters, the tomcat sniffed with appreciation the cool, damp breath rising up to him.

“Game for a little shower?” Clyde said, flicking the spray in Joe’s direction.