Ник Сайнт - Purrfect Crime

“Sad story, though. To be on top of the world one minute and down in the dumps the next.”

“Yeah, almost like the story of A Star is Born ,” Chase said. “Donna Bruce went on to become a big star with her website, while her mentor became a washout.”

“Ransom was her mentor?”

“Sure. Ransom Montlló was the man who gave Donna Bruce her very first shot at fame and stardom. He cast her in her breakout role. A prostitute with a heart of gold who gets involved with an honest man who tries to get her out of that racket.”

“The remake of Pretty Woman ?”

“No. The remake of Irma la Douce . Though I prefer the original.”

“Of course you do. So what’s next?” she asked, leaning against her car.

“Now we talk to the ex-husband.” He tapped the side of his nose. “And if my intuition is right, he just might be our guy.”

Chapter 13

It took us a long time to find out anything from the Internet. Cats aren’t exactly equipped to work on computers. For one thing, we don’t come outfitted with a set of digits that make for good typing, and if you use your claws it’s easy to totally wreck a regular computer keyboard. So Harriet tried to use her paw pads, but that proved really hit and miss. And we were just about to give up, when Dooley saw a picture of a nice kitty on the screen and touched it with his paw.

“Don’t touch the screen!” I yelled, but too late. And then the small picture of the kitty suddenly blew up into a big picture of the same kitty and we all stared at it.

“What just happened?” asked Brutus.

“I don’t know,” said Dooley. “I touched the screen and something changed.”

“Do it again,” Harriet urged.

So Dooley touched the screen again, careful not to use his claws, and the screen changed again, this time to a set of pictures of the same kitty posing up a storm. “So weird,” he said, staring from his paws to the screen. “Do you think I have magical paws? That must be it, right? I must have magical paws.” A look of absolute delight came over his face. “Imagine what I can do with my magical paws! Maybe everything I touch changes into something else!” And to try out this new theory of his, he immediately touched Harriet’s face.

“Hey!” she yelled, slapping his paw away. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I just wanted to change your frown into a smile,” he said sheepishly.

Harriet’s frown only deepened, debunking Dooley’s magical paws theory.

Meanwhile, Brutus had also put his big paw on the screen. Nothing happened and he growled with annoyance. “Stupid screen,” he grumbled.

“I think it’s one of those touchscreens,” I said, a memory stirring in the back of my mind. The computer Odelia had set up for us was her old work computer, and I seemed to remember her once telling me something about it being one of the first models with a touchscreen. Since I had no idea at the time what a touchscreen was, I hadn’t really paid any attention to her words, but now it dawned on me. You touch the screen, and something happens!

“Touch that kitty,” I told Brutus.

“You’re not touching that kitty,” Harriet said when Brutus made to follow my instructions.

“But it’s not a real kitty,” he said now.

“I don’t care. You are not touching that kitty, Brutus, and that’s my final word!”

“So you touch that kitty,” I suggested.

“What? Eww! I’m not that kind of cat, Max.”

I groaned. “Okay, so I’ll touch the kitty.”

“Can I touch the kitty?” Dooley asked. “I like touching kitties.”

That much was obvious. Dooley placed his ‘magical’ paw on the kitty’s face and suddenly it morphed into a ‘bio’ page, which told us the kitty’s name was Susan and she possessed a sweet and disarming personality. She also liked taking long naps on the couch and chasing her own tail.

“ I like chasing my own tail!” Dooley exclaimed. “Looks like me and Susan are a match made in heaven.” And since he was having so much fun, he kept on putting his paw on the screen, scrolling down the page to read more about Susan’s daring and exciting habits.

We watched the phenomenon with fascination, and for the next five minutes found out everything there was to know about Susan, including her love of belly rubs. Only when Harriet had finally wrested back control over the computer, she managed to steer the Internet search in the right direction again. Half an hour later we were up to date on Donna Bruce, thanks to the power of the touchscreen and the tendency of the Internet to remember everything about everyone. Turned out Donna used to have a boyfriend, something even Odelia probably didn’t know. His name was Dexter Valdès and he was the spitting image of Ricky Martin, only about two decades younger. For some strange reason, all the pictures we could find featured Dexter with naked torso, though that could have been Harriet, of course.

“It says here they broke up,” she said, having found a site called TMZ. “It also says Dexter felt emasculated in his boy toy role, especially after Donna wrote a blog post on donna.vip about him and his tiny wiener.” She looked up. “What is a wiener?”

“It’s a kind of sausage,” I said knowingly. “Some people really like it.”

“I like sausage,” Brutus grunted.

“Me too,” Dooley chimed in.

“Me too,” I said with a wistful sigh. No more wieners for me in the near future, though. Odelia had already tucked my usual kibble away in a safe place where I couldn’t find it, and replaced it with the special diet kind that tasted like cardboard. From now on, and until the scale dipped below what Vena had determined was my ideal body weight, it was the only food I was going to get, and no more than one bowl of the filthy stuff either.

Brutus gave me a smirk. “No more wieners for you, huh, Max?”

I scowled at him. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

“I believe I will,” he said. “You always told me your bulk was all muscle. Well, as it turns out that was a big, fat lie. It’s all flab, just like I thought.”

“It’s not flab. It is muscle. I just have too much of it is all.”

“You can’t have too much muscle,” he said, flexing his shoulder muscles. “No, just admit it, Max. You are one flabby tabby.”

Dooley laughed at this, but when I turned my scowl on him, he quickly stopped.

“Guys,” said Harriet urgently. “I don’t think Donna was referring to Dexter’s sausage after all. Her blog post was all about his… performance.”

I noticed her ears had taken on a reddish tinge, and her eyes were glittering brightly. “Performance? What performance?” I asked. Anything was better than to have to listen to Brutus’s taunts about my ‘bulk.’

“I think she was referring to his… sexual performance,” she said. She then turned to us, eyes wide. “I think a wiener is… a pee-pee.”

Now we were all staring at the screen, eagerly drinking in the details of Donna Bruce’s blog post. I’m not a great reader, but it soon became clear to me that the article was a lot more revealing than any human male would have appreciated. Not only was there a lot of talk about Dexter’s pee-pee and its lack of size and performance, there was also a long bit about his endurance or lack thereof. All in all, the piece wasn’t entirely flattering to Donna’s boy toy, and I could understand why the two of them hadn’t been a couple at the time of Donna’s untimely demise.

“But why would she write all that?” I asked. “That’s just a lot of very private stuff.”

“Some people are like that,” said Harriet knowingly. “They just enjoy sharing all of their private things with the world.”