Ник Сайнт - Purrfect Murder

She frowned. Aissa Spring lived together with her girlfriend Marissa. Together they ran a vegetarian restaurant right on the main drag. The two women had been together for ages, and very happily so.

“What are you saying? That Frey had a thing against lesbians?”

“You better ask Aissa about it,” she said, loudly blowing her nose. “But from what he told me, he didn’t like gays. At all. Which was a little weird for a writer of his stature.”

Yes, that was a little weird. She now realized she didn’t know all that much about Paulo Frey. Apart from the fact that he was a million-selling writer of thrillers, the guy was a mystery to her.

“Thanks, Rohanna. I’ll go and have a word with Aissa.”

“You do that, and nail the bastard that did this.”

Before she left the room, she turned and said, “Oh, the police will probably want to have a word with you as well.”

Rohanna nodded. “I’ll tell Chief Alec the same thing I told you.”

“It won’t be my uncle. Chase Kingsley is in charge of the investigation.”

Rohanna’s eyes lit up. “Chase Kingsley? That hottie?”

Odelia grimaced. “Yes, the hottie.”

“Oh, he can interrogate me anytime,” said Rohanna, her distress over Paulo Frey’s murder quickly making way for a different emotion altogether.

She managed to give Rohanna a grimace at this, thinking hard thoughts about ‘the hottie.’ She needed to get to the bottom of that story, too, and as soon as she revealed that Chase Kingsley was a notorious molester of women, she was pretty sure people like Rohanna would think differently of him.

But first things first. She needed to talk to Aissa Spring. She was the first person who might have a motive for murder. And she was just passing through the corridor on her way to the waiting room, when she bumped into her father, emerging from the examination room with a patient in tow.

“Oh, hey, honey,” he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek. “If you came to check up on your grandmother, she’s fine. I tried to give her a checkup this morning and she brushed me off, insisting she was in greater shape than me!”

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a smile. “She’s probably in better shape than all of us.”

Her father was a big and bluff man, and well-liked by all of his patients. He had a knack for putting anyone at ease in a matter of seconds, and often only needed a glance to know what was ailing his patients. They were two qualities that partly explained his popularity as Hampton Cove’s premier doctor. The fact that he was also the town’s only doctor was another reason.

“See you tonight?” he asked now.

“Yes, Dad,” she said, briefly wondering whether to tell him about the murder but quickly deciding against it. They could discuss it over dinner.

“Your mother invited a guest,” he said as he waved the next patient in.

“A guest?” she asked. “You mean Uncle Alec?”

“Yeah, Alec is coming, and he’s bringing one of his colleagues,” her father said as he walked into his office. Before he closed the door, he frowned. “What was his name again…” Then his face cleared. “Oh, that’s right. Chase Kingsley. A new cop. See you later, honey.” And then he closed the door and she was left staring at it, a look of abject horror written all over her features.

Chapter 8

I was still feeling a little groggy and unsteady on my paws. Usually I like to take my eighteen hours of sleep in one long stretch, interspersed with the occasional run to the litter box and the feeding trough. Today, though, I was a cat on a mission, so I’d decided to cut my nap time short and head downtown to see what I could find out about the case of the murdered writer.

I never followed a strict plan on these trips of mine but simply went where my paws took me. I had my regular haunts, of course. Places where I knew I could find the best information. Like the barber shop, or the doctor’s office, or the police station. For some strange reason I always happened to be in the right place at the right time. Call it cat’s intuition. It’s a very powerful thing, let me tell you. And I’d just wandered out into the street, when Dooley fell into step beside me, looking even more haggard than I was feeling.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked as we trundled along the sidewalk.

“Duty calls, Dooley,” I said a little solemnly. “You simply can’t wait around for the next clue to arrive on its own. A genuine detective goes out there, into the great unknown, and hunts the clues where he can find them.”

Dooley yawned. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep either. All this stuff about Brutus and that gruesome poo-poo murder got me wondering about my mortality.”

I stared at the cat. I never would have guessed that Dooley even knew the word ‘mortality’ let alone pondered about his own perishability. In fact I’d never known him to worry about anything, except when Marge, Odelia’s mom, dished out the wrong kind of kibble. Dooley likes chicken, but Marge tends to forget, and buys him one of those twenty-pound bags of fish kibble which then he has to eat, because she hates to throw away perfectly good kibble. What can I say? We all have our predilections and peculiarities.

“Do you really think Brutus is going to move in with us and lay down the law?” he now asked.

“I think the odds are not in our favor,” I confirmed. “Chase Kingsley is a very handsome male, and Odelia an attractive female. What’s more, they’re both young and single, and live in a town with a limited supply of eligible bachelors. And if I know something about human nature, it’s that eligible bachelors are prone to mate, and when they do, they tend to make babies and get married and move in together, at which point they bring their cats along.”

Dooley shook his head sadly. It was obvious he wasn’t liking this. “I didn’t want to say this in front of Harriet, because she seems to like this Brutus character, but I honestly fear for our lives when Brutus moves in.”

I looked up in surprise. “Fear for our lives? What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. This Brutus strikes me as the kind of cat who doesn’t like competition in the home. I’m pretty sure that once he moves in he’s going to want to make us disappear. If you know what I mean.”

“You’re saying he’s gonna want to kill us?”

“You, me, and maybe even Harriet when she doesn’t do what he says. Cats like that want to rule supreme, Max. They’re like the evil stepchild who tries to kill their stepsiblings once they’ve taken up position in the home.”

“You mean like Damien in The Omen ?” I asked, remembering the horror movie marathon Odelia had us sit through the other night. Harriet, Dooley and I had been scared stiff the entire time, but Odelia had loved the story of Satan’s spawn. She loved a good horror movie, while the three of us preferred to watch Garfield . Or Finding Nemo . I never get tired of watching those fishes in that fish tank. Finding Dory was even better. Much bigger tank.

“Well, more like The Good Son ,” said Dooley after a moment’s deliberation. After a lifetime spent with Odelia, he knew his horror classics better than me.

“I don’t think Brutus is going to kill us,” I said thoughtfully.

“And I’m sure he is. He’s going to strike when we’re all sleeping safely in our beds.”

I shivered. Maybe Dooley was right. Brutus was capable of anything. Now, more than ever, I was convinced we needed to figure out a way to make Odelia see what kind of a man Chase Kingsley really was. If we could convince her he was a genuine menace, we could avert the Brutus disaster.

And it was as we were crossing the street, wondering where to go next, that I saw Chase Kingsley enter the doctor’s office. I nudged Dooley. “Speak of the devil. It’s him!”