Shirley Murphy - Cat in the Dark

There was a long silence. Joe's eyes gleamed with the devil's own light.

"No, Joe. We can't! Not frighten the children like that-not to spite Freda, not to spite anyone." Hotly she slashed at him and bolted through her cat door into Wilma's office where she could call the station.

But she was too late.

As she leaped for Wilma's office she heard two librarians talking, heard Freda call out as she came in through the back door, and the next moment she heard children running up the walk past the hidden, flower-shrouded bodies, heard them racing across the reading room straight for their window seat.

THE LIBRARY and garden were crawling with cops. From the roof, Joe Grey watched three medics kneel among the lilies beside the bodies of Dora and Ralph Sleuder. Unable to observe all the action from inside, he had streaked up the back of the building to the roof, leaving Dulcie inside on the book stacks doing interior surveillance. The police action upon entering the garden had been swift and precise as each man swung to his appointed job.

But now the medics, unable to help the deceased, rose again and moved away, nodding to the police photographer. He, pushing back his shoulder-length black hair, knelt among the flowers to shoot close-ups first of the victims' faces, then of their raw white limbs, recording from every possible camera position; loading new film, at last he turned from the bodies to photograph the surround, the window above the corpses, the white stucco wall, and the garden itself, calling an assistant to part the lilies so he could shoot the earth beneath. Across the garden, Freda Brackett's angry accusations rose sharply.

She stood before the library's open front door, toe to toe with Max Harper, her words burning like flames. Harper listened to her harangue without speaking, his thin face frozen into complicated lines of distaste that made Joe laugh. Didn't Freda see the deep anger in the police captain's eyes-and the spark of cold amusement?

"What kind of police force is this, Captain Harper, to let such a shocking crime occur practically inside the library! This is beyond excuse. You have no idea the damage this will cause the children. What kind of police would subject children to this nightmare? Any well-run police force would have prevented this shocking event. You…"

Joe ceased to listen to her-as he suspected Harper had, too. The aftermath of the Sleuders' deaths was turning out pretty much as he'd thought-and as Dulcie had feared. The children, on arriving for story hour and discovering the bodies, had crowded against the window, pushing each other out of the way, shocked at first, then quickly out of control. Staring down through the glass, smearing it with their noses and with sticky fingers, they screamed then laughed, working themselves into a furor of shrill giggles that did not abate until their parents dragged them away. Not even the ululation of sirens careening through the village had quieted them, nor had the arrival of the ambulance and four police cars skidding to the curb; they only shouted louder, fought harder to see every detail.

Out beyond the garden, two officers were clearing the street and putting up cordons at the ends of the block. At both corners, pedestrians had gathered, idle onlookers drawn to tragedy, some out of empathy but most with prurient curiosity. Of all those who crowded to look, Joe was the only observer enjoying a rooftop vantage. Lying with his chin propped on his paws and his paws resting on the roof gutter, his alert gray ears caught every whisper.

He watched the evidence officer lift lint and debris from the bodies and the surround and mark the evidence bags as to content and location. Watched him go over the victims' clothes with the department's tiny vacuum cleaner and wondered if any lint had fallen from Greeley's clothes when he knelt over Dora-or, for that matter, if the lab would find black cat hairs-or traces of their own fur where he and Dulcie had sniffed at the victims' faces.

Well, so Harper found cat hairs. So what was he going to do? There'd been cat hairs at other murder scenes. He watched the fingerprint specialist dust the deceased's clothing and skin and the window and the slick green lily leaves, carefully lifting prints. Watched the forensic pathologist arrive-a white-haired man stepping out of an ancient gray Cadillac-to examine the bodies, place bags over the victim's hands, and wrap Dora and Ralph for transport to the morgue. As the courthouse clock chimed ten-thirty, the forensics team moved inside the library, and so did Joe Grey, heading for the book stack where Dulcie sat twitching her tail, highly amused as she listened to a little group of irate mothers.

Lieutenant Brennan, heavy in his tight uniform, stood talking with the five women and their excited preschoolers, the little ones wiggling and shouting. Three-year-old James Truesdel wanted to know why those people were asleep in the garden, and Nancy Phillips, with five-year-old superiority, told him they were not asleep, they were dead. She wanted to know: "How did they get dead, with their clothes off?" And five-year-old Albert Leddy, trying to drag his mother back toward the window seat from which he had been extricated, pitched such a tantrum, kicking his mother in the shins, that if he'd been a kitten Dulcie would have whacked him hard and nipped his nervy little ears.

But she had to smile, too, because from the temper of the parents, the pro-library cat group had snatched the day just as Joe had predicted, had grabbed opportunity by the tail. As Freda Brackett left Captain Harper and came back inside, nine parents converged on her, and James Truesdel's mother began to question her in a manner that indicated there would soon be a hotly phrased letter in the Gazette.

Behind Freda, Bernine Sage manned the three constantly ringing phone lines-word traveled fast in the village-giving dry, uninformative answers. It was hard to tell whether Bernine was an island of efficiency or of total indifference. Dulcie glanced up to the door as a young man bolted in, having talked his way past the police guard.

Danny McCoy was disheveled and breathing hard, his red hair tousled; having obviously rushed over from the Gazette offices, he exchanged a look of complicity with Mrs. Leddy.

Danny, too, was a mover and shaker on Dulcie's behalf. He had done several columns supporting the library cat and had made a big deal that library cats were a growing trend across the country. He had done a really nice article on the Library Cat Society, interviewing its president and several of its members and quoting from the society's quarterly newsletters about the popularity of individual library cats in Minden, Nevada, Eastham, Massachusetts, and, closer to home, El Centro. Now, deftly trapping Freda between the checkout desk and a book cart, he began with the standard questions: Who had found the bodies? What time where they discovered? Then he moved on to the question of why the children had been allowed to see the murder victims, why they had not been supervised, to avoid such ugly experience.

"We didn't know the bodies were there," Freda snapped. "One does not come to work expecting to find dead bodies outside the children's room. The police are supposed to patrol that street. Why didn't they see the bodies? This Captain Harper was extremely lax to allow such an occurrence. This is not New York City. This is a small, quiet town. What else do the police have to do, but keep the streets and public buildings safe?"

"But, Ms. Brackett, why were the children allowed to view the corpses?"

"I told you. We didn't know they were there! Can't you understand me? It was the children who discovered the tragedy. We don't go into the children's room first thing in the morning. We are far too busy preparing to open the library, preparing the checkout machine, clearing the bookdrop, starting up the computers…"