Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

Is it poetic justice that a big cat has clawed the big game hunter into a corner? That the stab of a long-dead antelope’s horn has finished him?

Or was the means of death not only a medium but a message?

She takes a last look at the leopard. It has stopped pacing and regards her with an expression she recognizes. Feline sagacity.

She wonders how many other people would be glad that this time the animal has won. Or has it?

By four that afternoon, Molina was alert and ready for a break in the case. She had heard from several highly placed men in city government and commerce that Cyrus Van Burkleo was a highly regarded member of the community. Translation: they owe him, she had better deliver a killer soon, and it had better be someone—or something—whose identity will not rattle anyone’s cages. Enter the leopard.

Molina doesn’t believe in worms turning, not even on fishermen. She certainly doesn’t believe in leopards committing murder one.

Su and Alch think they have a prime suspect. In fact, they think they have three.

“Who found them?” Molina asked.

“Employees of the deceased,” Alch said amiably.

“‘Animal keepers,’” Su put in, her china doll face wearing a mask of hard-edged suspicion that Molina reads like a child’s book.

“You don’t think Mr. Van Burkleo’s employees are what they say they are.”

“They’re muscle,” Su said contemptuously, as contemptuously as a four-foot-eleven black belt in karate can say of large lumbering musclemen.

“Why did Van Burkleo need muscle?”

“Because of these three people,” Alch answers promptly, good Boy Scout that he was thirty-five years ago.

Alch and Su crack her up: such an unlikely team, and so effective for that very fact. The 180-degree difference in their ages, their sizes, their genders, their cultural background, Jewish and Chinese, makes them the perfect complement to any case, like sweet and sour sauce to pork loin. Except that, contrary to stereotypes, Alch is the sweet, and Su is the sour. Molina doesn’t show her amusement, or her approval, of course. They would be insulted.

“You think these ‘employees’ were itching to have these people found?” Molina asked.

“Of course.” Su stubbornly folded her arms, inadvertently displaying her Mandarin-long fingernails. Weapons, in her case.

Alch shifted in his chair, scratched his neck, put off an answer until Su’s elderberry eyes flashed imperial impatience.

“Maybe,” Alch conceded, with a wicked feint of a glance at his steaming partner. “But the fact is they were trespassers on private property. And they were armed.”

Su spat out an unspoken comment. “Flare guns.”

Molina nodded.

“They’re animal-rights activists,” Alch said.

“Interesting.” Molina stood. “You’ve got their names, ranks, and serial numbers?”

Su nodded.

“Then I’ll take a look at them.” Molina checked the names and facts the detectives had recorded from their separate preliminary interviews, then led the way to the interrogation rooms, curious as a cat.

Three people might be just what it would take to stage-manage the Van Burkleo death scene to make it look like a wild animal had turned the tables on the hunter. Predator turned prey, turned predator.

Everybody liked a happy ending.

First Molina eyed the trio through three different two-way mirrors.

“The old woman’s the leader,” Su told her. “A retired professor from Davis, California.”

“Late middle-aged,” the thirty-something Molina corrected the twenty-something Su.

The fifty-some thing Alch just snickered to himself.

Su shrugged. Over thirty was one big Do-Not-Go-There Zone.

The twenties seem to last forever, Molina thought, remembering what it was to be kid-free…also as green as goat cheese that had been sitting out for three months. Don’t-Go-Back-There Zone.

They marched off to eye the other suspects. Molina passed on the twenty-some thing surfer boy with the punk haircut.

At the late-forties tree hugger in the ponytail, she smiled nostalgically. “I’ll try him first.”

Su’s sharply arched eyebrows rose. She plucked them in a dragon lady pattern that Molina had only seen in that old comic strip, Terry and the Pirates , drawn decades ago when the “Oriental menace” had been Fu Manchu instead of sweatshop labor.

Every generation reached back to find fodder for rebellion. With Mariah, it was ear decor so far. So good.

Alch was nodding approvingly, not that she sought it.

Molina left the two detectives behind the mirror and entered the room, sat down, turned on the tape recorder. “Lieutenant C. R. Molina,” she began, adding date and time in a toneless official voice.

She flipped open a manila folder and appeared to study it.

“Evan Sprague.” She repeated his name aloud without acknowledging him. “You don’t have a criminal record.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said, trying to sound indignant and merely sounding nervous.

Molina slapped the folder shut. “We’re investigating a murder.”

“I…I’ve been told that, Lieutenant.”

“What were you doing on the deceased’s property?”

“I told the other officers. Detectives. Whatever. We were…scouting.”

“Just a bunch of Boy Scouts on a camp-out?”

“No, uh, we’re green.”

“I guess!”

“We’re for animal rights.”

“So.”

“You must know what goes on at that ranch.”

“We’re just ignorant city police. You tell me.”

“It’s a head-hunting place.” Mr. Limp Noodle was turning into Mr. Barbed Wire before her eyes. “They collect de-accessioned once-wild animals, like excess zoo stock, illegal exotic pets that have been confiscated from all over, anything that used to be wild and free and has a beautiful coat of fur or a handsome set of horns.”

Molina nodded to show comprehension. He would never tell from her expression that she was also nodding agreement with his indignation.

“These animals are not wild in any sense of the word. They’ve become dependent on humans. They’re domesticated, fed, watered like sheep or cattle. And then they bring in these wealthy weekend ‘hunters’ who don’t have time to go to authorized hunting areas, these weekday lawyers and doctors who want heads for their office walls, and let them take potshots with bows and arrows and rifles and bullets at the animals until they kill them. It may take a while. These ‘professional men’ are lousy shots, and they don’t want to mar the heads and shoulders before they’re stuffed.”

“I get the picture. So, if Van Burkleo was this…pimp for canned hunters”—Sprague’s pale eyes glittered at the word she’d armed him with—“why couldn’t your dedicated group have turned a leopard loose, thrown Van Burkleo on the antelope horn, and clawed him somehow, leaving a dead body with no suspect but a dumb animal, with which the community outrage is usually satisfied if it’s put down for the sin of touching a human. Case closed. The leopard was doomed anyway.”

Sprague practically leaped up from his chair at her throat.

“That’s just it. We subdue, brutalize, imprison, abuse these wonderful beasts that nature has given us, and let one—one—raise a paw in protection or protest or plain animal instinct, and we kill the animal. We are the animals that deserve killing!”

“Exactly,” Molina said coolly. “Which of your compatriots was the mastermind?”

“None! We didn’t do it. We protest peacefully. We disrupt the hunt.”

“You risk getting yourself skewered with an arrow or a bullet. Killed yourselves.”

He took a deep breath. “If so, it shows what kind of ‘recreation’ this sort of hunting is.”