Cat Spitting Mad (15 page)

When he moved in with Clyde, he'd graduated to intimidating Clyde's lady friends. How amusing, to terrorize those lovely young women, faking lethal claws, treating them to loud snarls and flashing teeth—all because life could get so yawningly, nerve-deadeningly, mind-numbingly dull.

But now, with his newly discovered skills, there was no time to be bored. He hardly had time for a nap or a good rabbit hunt—the sleuthing life took every claw-clinging ounce of creativity he could muster.

And now, as a pattern of clues was forming in the Marner murders, a morass as intriguing as a crisscross of fresh rabbit tracks, he had no time for discontented thoughts—except in terms of the final retribution for this killer.

This case was more than a fascinating puzzle. This time, he wanted not only justice, he wanted revenge. Sweet, sharp-clawed revenge. This time, he was out for blood.

D
ressed in
the oversized T-shirt she'd slept in, Charlie Getz stood on a ladder in her small bathroom, removing the vent fan from the ceiling. She had gone up on the roof last night, removed the fresh-air grid and wiped out a quarter-inch of accumulated dirt from inside the vent pipe. The four-inch tunnel didn't allow much room—peering along its length at a small circle of sky, she went queasy at the tight quarters through which the cats must push. Six feet of claustrophobia leading from her apartment out to the village rooftops. She guessed Dulcie and the kit could slither through, but Joe Grey had better not try.

Coming down the ladder, glancing in her bathroom mirror at the reflection of her milk-white legs, she had a sharp vision of Molena Point's pretty, tanned blondes in their tennis shorts. The only tan she had was what her grandmother had called a farmer's tan, brown only on her neck and hands and lower arms. Not a body to bring the men flocking.

Not the face, either,
she thought.
But I have a warm
heart. And I have nice hazel eyes, if anyone bothers to look.

She wished Max Harper would bother.

Lifting the disconnected ceiling fan from atop the ladder, she nodded to Dulcie and the kit where they crouched in the doorway peering up.

“That should do it. Your own private tunnel. I'll leave the ladder for you to climb.

“But I warn you, Dulcie. If a rat or a bat comes in through that vent—if so much as a wool moth comes in—you're dog meat.”

Dulcie smiled. Lashing her tail in reply, she leaped up the ladder into the hole and was gone through the ceiling. Charlie imagined her slipping along above the bathtub, popping out of the wall above the roof like a swallow from its hole. The kit followed her, her fluffy tail twitching as it disappeared, probably to race madly across the rooftops.

She'd done a drawing once of Dulcie and Joe running across the roofs. But it wasn't a cheerful piece, it was dark and frightening. Though it hung in a prominent place in the Aronson Gallery, still it disturbed her.

Clyde had brought Dulcie and the kit over last night, like a father bringing his children to stay with a favorite aunt. Clyde had treated her like an aunt, too, making it obvious that he knew how she felt about Harper. When he left, she'd been really down. Had she hurt him terribly? She'd queried Dulcie, but Dulcie had little to tell her.

“He's…would the word be stoic?” Dulcie had said. “Understanding?”

“
Stoic,
Dulcie?”

“Max Harper is his best friend. You are, in a different way, his best friend. He's so caught up in Harper's problems just now…” Dulcie, sitting on the end of the daybed, had looked up quizzically at her. “You are asking me, your friendly neighborhood cat, about your love life?”

“Come on, Dulcie. You sound like Joe.”

“What can I tell you? He loves you both. He knows Harper needs someone just now.”

“You're saying he's glad to dump me on Harper.”

“No, he—”

“He's seeing someone else.”

“No! But—but when Kate called him that night, when she got into town…”

Charlie had sat back against the pillow, hugging herself. Kate. Kate Osborne. That beautiful blonde. It seemed a hundred times harder to lose a man to a beautiful woman than to some pig. If her rival were ugly, she could tell herself Clyde didn't have any taste. But Kate Osborne…

But why did she
care
? She'd been mooning over Max, feeling guilty that she was longing for him, that she was hurting Clyde.

And now here she was green with jealousy because Clyde wanted someone who was more beautiful than she could ever hope to be.

“Perfidy,” she had told Dulcie. “Perfidy and capriciousness.”

Dulcie had smiled and turned away to wash.

“It is all very well, Dulcie, to have a nonchalant wash-up when you want to end a discussion. But such behavior isn't very informative.”

Dulcie hadn't answered.

The bottom line, Charlie told herself, was that she wanted what she couldn't have.

And that didn't say much for her depth of character.

And through this conversation, the kit had prowled the one-room apartment poking into every box and cranny—making herself immediately and totally at home. Taking over just as she had taken over Wilma's house and, before that, Lucinda and Pedric's luxurious RV. Claiming every surface—Charlie's few pieces of furniture, the kitchen counters, the packing boxes Charlie used for cupboards, as her own feline territory. Leaving little face rubs and tufts of black-and-brown fur as fine as silk, to mark her conquests. Clyde said the kit was the greatest feline opportunist ever born, and Charlie believed it.

But who could blame her? The kit had never had a home. Always on the move, tagging along behind a clowder of cats that didn't want her, never sleeping in a warm, safe house or knowing the friendship of a human, until she went to live with Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw.

Charlie smiled. The kit had learned pretty fast.

Stashing the ceiling fan in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she put her tools by the front door with her purse, nuked her cold cup of coffee, and sat down to finish her sweet roll, using her paper napkin to wipe Dulcie's and the kit's pawprints from the table. This business of having cat houseguests was like living in a dream straight from Lewis Carroll. It was one thing to take your meals with cats who could carry on a dinner conversation, one thing to go to bed at night with two
kitties who said, “Good night, Charlie,” like some feline version of
The Waltons.
But cats who peered over your shoulder at the pages of the latest Dean Koontz, one trying to learn to read while the other offered off-the-wall opinions of Koontz's writing style and baroque setting, was a bit too much.

At least Dulcie was well read—and her opinions of Koontz, though wild, were always upscale and positive.

Finishing her breakfast, Charlie pulled off her T-shirt, showered, dressed quickly in jeans and a clean shirt and tennis shoes, and headed out the door. She had two houses to clean today, a garden fence to repair, and a roof to mend.

But as she climbed into her old Chevy van, she took a moment to look up toward the roofs and say a silent prayer for Dulcie and the kit, and for Joe Grey. Her wish, as she turned out of the alley, consigned Lee Wark to a far more uncomfortable fate than incarceration in the Molena Point jail.

 

And while Charlie's prayer coiled itself into the wind to be sucked up like celestial e-mail by the forces that rule the universe, one subject of her concern was quickly and stealthily pawing through Dallas Garza's papers, scanning a stack of police reports on ex-cons who, apparently, Garza considered possible suspects in the Marner murders. This turn of events was heartening: the tomcat was in a very up mood. The prospect of half a dozen additional contenders cheered him considerably. Maybe Garza
was
going to give Harper a fair
shake.

Unless these documents were for show, simply to make his investigation look good.

The time was 8:15. The cottage was empty, Garza gone to work, Kate and Hanni headed for the Pamillon estate to make measurements and take additional pictures. This time they had a cell phone, two canisters of pepper spray, and, tucked in Hanni's belt, a .38 automatic that she intended primarily as a noisy deterrent to scare away the cougar.

But was the cougar all they might encounter? Joe wondered if the old adage was true, that a murderer would return to the scene.

Of the six ex-cons in the police reports, four were on parole and two were under house confinement. One of those on parole was Stubby Baker, who had served twelve years on seven counts of embezzlement and fraud. Garza had files on both Baker and Lee Wark. Joe was drawn to the information on Wark in the same way a rabbit is drawn to the mesmerizing form of a weasel that stands deadly still, waiting for his prey to approach.

Wark was thirty-two years old, had brown hair and light brown eyes (muddy). He was five-ten, 160 pounds, pale (make that pasty) complexion, hunched posture. (They got that right.) He had no facial scars. He had been born and raised in Wales, had become a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty-three.

In the photograph Wark wore his hair trimmed short and neat. Joe had seen it only shoulder length, always greasy. Wark's current legal address was San Quentin State Prison.

Wark's interests while in prison had included reading lurid space operas, girlie magazines, and Celtic history. He took no more exercise than the prison demanded. He had socialized with only two other inmates: James Clayton Osborne, Kate's ex-husband and Wark's partner in the murder of Samuel Beckwhite, and Kendrick Mahl, whom apparently neither man had known before they were incarcerated. Both Osborne and Mahl were serving life without parole.

Joe knew from the newspapers that the guard whose throat had been lacerated with the prison-made garrote was still hospitalized but that doctors now thought he would survive.

At the bottom of the stack of files and reports was a document Joe had not expected. It was not a police report but a three-page memo from LAPD, on a witness in a seven-year-old fraud trial.

He forgot to listen for anyone approaching the cottage. He forgot he was
in
the cottage. He did not realized he was digging his claws into the page. He read avidly, his stub tail twitching. The witness was Helen Marner.

While art dealer Kendrick Mahl, now serving time in San Quentin, was married to Janet Jeannot, whom he later murdered, he had an affair with Helen Marner, a society reporter and aspiring art critic for the
Los Angeles Times.

Joe and Dulcie had helped Max Harper amass the evidence that would convict Mahl—including the decisive clue, which the police would never have discovered without the curiosity of someone small enough to crawl twenty feet through a mud-filled drainpipe.

The memo said that Mahl saw Helen Marner whenever he flew down to L.A. to conduct business with clients. During this time, Helen realized that Mahl was accepting part of the sales price for each painting under the table, thus circumventing the artist. She had blown the whistle on Mahl. In the case that ensued, she had testified against him.

Mahl had not been convicted; he had received only a reprimand and probation and had had to pay restitution. At about that time, as Joe remembered, Mahl's marriage to Janet had started to go awry.

Later, when Mahl went to prison for killing Janet, he had not kept in touch with Helen Marner. But he had kept in contact with the woman he was then dating. Joe was so fascinated that he startled himself with his loud, intense purring. If ever he'd hit the jackpot, he'd hit it this morning.

Or, rather, Garza had hit the jackpot.

The question was, what was Garza going to do with this information? Mahl and Crystal Ryder had been hot and heavy when Mahl was sent to Quentin. Joe couldn't wait to hear the phone tapes—if he got to hear them.

Joe was still on the desk chewing over the facts when a car pulled into the drive. Glancing through to the kitchen windows, he saw Garza heading for the back door. He was crouched to drop to the floor behind the desk, when he changed his mind—if Garza had come home to work, he wouldn't see much from the floor. Leaping to the mantel, he settled above Garza's desk in his classic improvisation of deep, deep sleep.

The back door opened. He listened to the detective moving around the kitchen. Sounded like he was making a sandwich. Refrigerator door, sound of knife on cutting board, sound of a jar being opened, the smell of pickles. Lying limp as a rag, Joe considered the suspects, to date.

Kendrick Mahl had to hate Helen Marner for blowing the whistle that he was ripping off his artist clients. Mahl was mean-tempered anyway, a vindictive sort who had made Janet's life miserable.

Lee Wark and Jimmie Osborne had both been in residence at San Quentin when Mahl was convicted. Very likely the three men had been drawn together by their mutual connections in Molena Point and their mutual hatred of Max Harper.

And Mahl's contact on the outside, Crystal Ryder, was a friend of Stubby Baker, who also had no love for Harper.

Garza came into the study carrying a plate and a cup of coffee. The smell of ham and cheese and pickles filled Joe's nose. Setting his lunch on the desk, Garza opened the morning paper, then turned to look at Joe. Joe kept his eyes closed, didn't flick a whisker, but he felt his heart pounding. He imagined Garza's intense black gaze on him, a penetrating cop look. Couldn't a little cat catch a morning nap?

Only when Garza sat down at his desk did Joe open the old peepers enough to peer over the detective's shoulder.

He didn't see the two miniature tapes he'd been hoping for. Were they still in Garza's pocket? Or had
he left them at the station, properly checked into the evidence vault? He was wondering if he'd ever get to hear them—how he could manage to hear them—when the phone rang.

Pressing the speaker button, Garza continued to enjoy his sandwich.

“Detective Garza, I got your number from the newspaper. I don't understand. Why does the paper keep saying there were no witnesses to where Captain Harper was the afternoon of the murder? Except that man who said he saw Harper on his horse, following the riders?”

“He is the only witness we have,” Garza said, laying down his sandwich.

“I made a report the day after the murders. You must have a record of that.”

Garza clicked the phone's record button. Joe could see the tape rolling. “Could you give me your name, please?”

“This is Betty Eastmore. I manage Banton's Jewelry, across the street from where the captain was parked, the afternoon of the murder.”

“And you made a police report to that effect?”

“Yes, I gave it to Officer Wendell while he was on patrol. He had some blank report forms, I filled it out right there in my shop and signed it. He said he'd take care of it for me. Is it just that the paper didn't want to say there was a witness? In case—”