Cat Laughing Last (25 page)

T
he front
page of the
Molena Point Gazette
was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped the
Gazette,
but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

Max Harper and Dallas Garza watched the evening newscast while standing in Clyde's living room. The three cats lay on the back of the couch behind Charlie and Ryan, pretending to doze but Joe was so interested he could hardly lie still. Both the
Gazette
and the newscasters had mentioned only one New York witness.

So, Joe thought, smiling, NYPD had been able to keep some of the details under wraps.

Besides Marcy Truncant, the bag lady who had awakened to see Vivi kneeling in the alley holding a pillow over Traynor's face, a neighbor of the Traynors, living upstairs from them in their midtown apartment building, had come forward. She had told detectives that she saw Vivi and Elliott leave the building early the
evening of his death, five hours before the Traynors' flight. She remembered the date because it was her wedding anniversary, the first since her husband had died. She saw the couple go out the front door of the building and down into the parking garage, then in a few minutes saw their car pull out of the garage. She told police she saw both of them inside the car as they turned into traffic and sat waiting for the traffic light.

She said that approximately twenty minutes after the Traynors left the building, Elliott returned, coming into the lobby through the front door, and that he was dressed differently. He had left the building dressed in a suit and tie and had returned wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a frayed denim jacket, attire devoid of the meticulous care that Traynor always exhibited. She didn't see their car return, but an hour later when she went down to the garage, the Traynors' black Jaguar was in its slot.

Joe imagined a scenario where Vivi and Elliott left in the Jaguar, then Vivi had somehow gotten Elliott into Willie's car, maybe had feigned car trouble. She had gotten some liquor into him and perhaps additional Demerol. When he passed out they had changed his clothes and dumped him in the alley, and apparently smothered him to make certain he was dead. Crude, Joe thought. But effective.

Willie had driven the Jaguar back to the building and put it away, so it would appear that Elliott and Vivi were at home. In Elliott's place, he had gone up to the apartment. He had changed clothes, called a cab, and headed for the airport to meet Vivi, to catch their redeye flight out of JFK. Willie's car had not yet been located. Joe wondered what they'd done with Elliott's
dress clothes. Had they been stained or torn when Vivi dispatched Elliott?

When the TV news switched to tensions in the Middle East, Harper turned the volume down. Joe could hear Clyde in the kitchen tossing the salad and stirring the spaghetti sauce. The house smelled of Italian sausage and garlic. Elaborately, Joe stretched, trying to get the kinks out. His whole body felt tense. He'd rest easier when the two detectives had arrived from New York, and had taken Vivi and Willie Gasper away with them. He kept thinking, without any logic, that all the confusion with the Spanish chests and Catalina's letters wouldn't end until Molena Point had seen the last of Vivi Traynor—as if Vivi's switch-and-bait game had somehow contaminated everything she touched in the village.

Catalina's hidden letters, if the ladies of Senior Survival had been able to buy all the chests and found all the letters in them, would have contributed nicely to their future security. But that hadn't happened. Too many people knew about the letters. Of the seven chests that Marcos Romero had carved for Catalina, five were now accounted for. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle, in which he found the hidden compartment; the three chests that the Iselman estate gave to the Pumpkin Coach; and the chest that Susan Brittain had bought on eBay. Susan had examined it carefully, but had found nothing inside.

Five chests. And nine letters—the one Casselrod found in the white chest and that Joe and Dulcie had returned to Cora Lee, and the eight letters taken from one of the chests donated by the Iselman estate, that
Augor Prey took from the smashed chest in the Pumpkin Coach. Those would remain with the police as evidence until after Prey's trial, then would be returned to the Pumpkin Coach to sell. Eight letters, each valued at some ten thousand dollars, though both the curator at the museum of history where Susan inquired, and an official at Butterfield's, thought that at auction they would bring more. Forty to eighty thousand clams, Joe thought, for the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, and Meals for the Elderly—and maybe the local Feline Rescue. That would be nice, to see some of it go for indigent cats. After all, without a cat or two, Augor Prey might have slid out of Molena Point with the letters, as slick as a greased rat.

When Joe heard Clyde dishing up the spaghetti, he dropped off the couch and melted into the kitchen, rubbing against Charlie's ankles, then leaped to the far end of the counter beside Dulcie and the kit.

Curled up on the cool tile, impatiently awaiting their turn, the cats watched Clyde serve the plates. Charlie unwrapped garlic bread hot from the oven, as Ryan popped cold beers. The Italian feast smelled like the cats' idea of heaven, making them drool with greed.

Humans wind their spaghetti between spoon and fork, but cats slurp it—in this case while listening guiltily to Rube whining at the back door. The old dog's digestion could no longer handle spicy food. Clyde fed him a special diet about as appealing as tofu burgers.

But hey
, Joe thought,
the stuff is good for him
. He watched Charlie and Harper at the table, observing the sense of shared sympathy between them. And he had to smile, that Clyde and Ryan seemed to be hitting it off. Certainly Clyde was scrubbed and neatly dressed in a
V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck and freshly washed jeans, and he hadn't grouched once—he was, in fact, observing impeccable behavior. That never hurt, Joe thought, amused.

“When is Augor Prey's arraignment?” Charlie asked. “Are you sure he'll be indicted?”

“Time and patience,” Harper said. “You can never be certain of anything, but I see no reason why the grand jury won't hand down an indictment. We have the gun that killed Fern, with Prey's prints on it.”

Charlie nodded. “Along with Willie Gasper's prints, and Vivi's?”

Harper nodded. “It was apparently Willie's gun or hers. There was no registration. And no way to know if that gun killed the raccoons. It was the same caliber weapon, but with a hollow point that spreads all over, you're not going to see any riflings. If it was the same gun, Gasper apparently wiped off the trigger. It showed only Prey's prints.

“Prey's story is that, the morning Fern died, Vivi followed Fern in through the broken window, into the back room, and pulled the gun on them while they were fighting over the wooden chests. That he snatched it from her and it went off, killing Fern. We have evidence that Vivi was in the back room at some point.” Joe thought about the cherry pit that Garza had picked up, and about Prey's sworn statement putting Vivi there. The cats, playing up to the night dispatcher, had found a copy of Prey's signed statement that Garza had left for Harper. Easing the door of Harper's office closed and flipping on the desk lamp, they had crouched on the blotter, reading.

Not only had Fern tried to grab the chests from
Prey—a real fistfight, as Prey had described it—but Prey said that one of the chests had been smashed, and that Fern managed to snatch up the letters that fell out of it.

Joe assumed there had been some gentle pressure from Garza or Harper to obtain the rest of Prey's statement. Prey said that when Fern ran toward the window he lost his head, went kind of crazy, as he put it, and shot her again, firing at her in a fit of confusion.

He said that Vivi had disappeared, and that when he saw he'd likely killed Fern, he jammed the gun in his pocket and ran for the back door, jumped in his car, and took off. He said that, driving away, he wanted to go back and talk to the police, that he heard the sirens and wanted to tell them what had happened, but he was afraid to. That had made the cats smile. Anyone who thought Prey was trying sincerely to make amends for an innocent mistake ought to think again. For one thing, both shots had been from behind, entering Fern in the back.

“It's interesting,” Garza said, “that Vivi saw him shoot Fern, but didn't try to blackmail him. Likely she didn't want to call attention to herself at that point. Apparently she just went home and laid low, but then she got nervous and started to pack.”

Harper leaned back in his chair. “Not too nervous to send those chapters she was writing off to New York before she and Willie tried to sneak out. Maybe she hoped that in the next few weeks, New York would dispose of Elliott's body and no one would ever know he was dead. She may have planned for Willie to keep right on being Elliott Traynor, she may have really believed that Elliott's publisher would think that what she wrote was
Elliott's work. It takes,” Harper said with a lopsided grin, “some kind of talent to write like Elliott Traynor.”

The shadow of a smile touched Charlie's face; and she rose quickly to dish up more spaghetti. The cats watched her with interest; but it was not until the next morning that Joe was certain of what he suspected.

It was just after ten when Joe trotted in through Dulcie's cat door; she met him in the kitchen, her green eyes bright, her tabby tail lashing with excitement. He'd seen Charlie's van out front, and Gabrielle's and Mavity's cars. In the living room, Charlie and all the ladies of Senior Survival were gathered; all seemed to be talking at once. Joe sniffed the good smells of coffee and chocolate and sweet vanilla, and twitched an ear toward the animated female voices.

“They're celebrating,” Dulcie said. “They got the house. They really got it, they're so happy they're almost purring.”

“What house?”

“The last one they looked at, the one they've all been talking about, the one above the canyon. Don't you listen? Tomcats,” she said, flattening her ears with annoyance. “It has a bad water problem, so that young couple didn't get their loan. Anyway, they didn't want to do the repairs. The ladies are so thrilled.”

“Right. That's just what they need, a huge house with a water problem. Plumbing? Leaking basement? What? Do you know how much it costs to—”

“Ryan looked at it. She said she can fix it.”

Joe narrowed his eyes. “Saying something and doing it are not always the same. The drainage on those hills—”

“Come on, Joe. They're so happy. It'll be all right
let's stay for a little while. Charlie's here. She will be one of the trustees. But she's—I don't know what's wrong with her. She's acting as nervous as a mouse at a cat show.”

Heading for the living room beside Dulcie, Joe glanced up at the buffet. “Is that the chest Susan bought, the one that was in her car during the break-in?”

“Wilma's keeping it for her.”