Cat Telling Tales (9 page)

It smelled of uncountable human hands, the oily scent of well-circulated greenbacks. Rifling through with a finesse more suited to Dulcie, he counted fifties and hundreds to a total of two thousand dollars. Well. That should pay rent on a simple room and groceries until she got a job. If, in fact, a job
was
in Debbie's plans.

Straightening the stack, he put the money back in the side pocket, fought the zipper closed, and sauntered out of the room. Heading for the kitchen, he stopped still, hearing Tessa's voice for the first time. She was crying. “I did, too,” she sobbed. “I dreamed about Pan and in my dream he talked to me.”

Vinnie laughed rudely.

“Don't make up impossible stories,” Debbie said. “That's the same as lying.”

“I didn't make it up, I dreamed it.”

As Joe padded into the kitchen, Debbie was saying, “That's the cat we had, I think it was in the picture I sent. It was only a stray, but the kids made such a fuss to let it stay that I gave in. Tessa decided its name was Pan, she said it told her its name,” Debbie said sarcastically.

Joe thought about the many times Misto had talked about his son, Pan. How many cats were named Pan?

“I did dream it!” Tessa said boldly, and Joe watched with interest the way she'd suddenly come alive. “He told me in my sleep, his name is Pan.” She looked hard at her mother. “After that, when I called him Pan, he always came to me.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, tears of anger at her mother, tears of grieving for her friend who'd vanished, an innocent friend her mother hadn't ever bothered to look for.

Ryan said, “How long did you have the cat?”

“I guess a year or so,” Debbie said. “It showed up at suppertime wet from the rain, slipped in when I heard a noise and opened the door. Got muddy water all over the carpet. I tried to push it out, I didn't want to pick it up and get scratched,” she said, glancing meaningfully down at Joe. “Tessa pitched a fit until I fed it, it was easier to give in than listen to her bawl. Next morning she started calling it Pan,” Debbie said, amused.

“What happened to it?” Ryan said. “You said something in your letter, but—”

Debbie shrugged. “It left again, that's what cats do.”

Clyde said, “Did you look for it?”

Debbie laughed. “How can you look for a cat? There one day, gone the next. Tessa bawled and bawled.” She looked at the little girl with disgust.

“You didn't think it might have been hurt?” Ryan asked, trying to control her temper.

“With two kids to take care of? When did I have time to look for some stray cat?”

Tessa had stopped crying, retreating into her silence but staring angrily at her mother, her face red and splotched, the tears still running down.
This little kid,
Joe thought,
is going to be trouble when she gets older—trouble for Debbie but, most of all, trouble for herself, so hurt and miserable and unloved.

And,
he thought,
how
does
she know Pan's true name?

The nursing home in Eugene hadn't known, they had called him Buddy. In the dead of night,
did
Pan tell Tessa his name? Was that young cat foolish enough to talk to the child as she slept? Had he crept into the little girl's bed late at night, whispered to her over and over,
The kitty's name is Pan, your kitty is called Pan,
and when she woke up she thought she'd dreamed that whispered message?

Joe was turning this over in his mind with a strange little shiver when there was a knock on the front door and Max Harper's voice came through the intercom. “Anyone home? Any breakfast left?” The chief seldom stopped by early in the day, his sudden unannounced visit startled Joe. Clyde glanced at Debbie and rose to let him in.

Had Ryan or Clyde called Max to tell him Hesmerra's daughter was there, one of the two sisters Max needed to notify of the old woman's death? Or had a patrol unit spotted Debbie's station wagon parked in the drive, called it in because of the
Be On the Lookout
that was out on it? A BOL not only because of the need to notify Debbie, but because of the manner in which Hesmerra died, because of a possible murder, because Debbie Kraft might have information useful to the department.

Max came on back to the kitchen, shook hands with Debbie, sat down at the crowded table, and accepted a cup of coffee. At the far end of the kitchen, Joe stretched out in the flowered easy chair where he could watch Max and Debbie without calling attention to himself. Debbie didn't seem comfortable in the presence of the law, and that was interesting. But then, some people just naturally became defiant and angry at what they considered the intrusion of uniformed authority. Debbie was, under Max's scrutiny, as silent and withdrawn as her smaller child.

11

W
hen John Firetti left the veterinary clinic at midmorning, crossing the garden to his own small cottage to retrieve some paperwork, he stepped through the doorway into the empty house and paused. He listened, puzzled, to the faint echo of voices coming from his study.

Mary's car was gone; he knew she'd left early to work with the cat rescue group setting up another shelter. No one else lived with them, and this wasn't cleaning day, the housekeeper's car wasn't in the drive. He could hear nothing that sounded like burglars, no stealthy sliding of drawers or wrenching open of locks, just soft voices, one of them female, and John smiled. Was Misto entertaining guests? Pausing beside the fireplace, he listened.

Sunlight shone in through the big living room windows onto the two flowered couches and glinted across the coffee table that was littered with flyers and veterinary magazines and decorated with paw prints etched into a faint coat of dust. Beyond the fireplace, through the door to his study, he could see the pale, cool light of his computer screen. Silently he approached, looking in.

Three furry backs were silhouetted against the screen's glow. Three pairs of upright ears, one pair orange, one pair tortoiseshell, and Dulcie's dark tabby ears. Three tails hanging over, swishing in unison like metronomes for an unheard symphony. The attention of all three cats was fixed on the picture of a red tabby tomcat. But as John approached, they started, looked around at him like children caught at a forbidden prank—and Misto's yellow eyes reflected such a strange mix of excitement and pain that John leaned down for a better look.

The cat on the screen was younger than Misto, but with a broad head and with Misto's same long, bony face. The same wide-set ears, the same wide, curving stripes, but in shades of rusty red. The swirl mark on his left shoulder was startlingly like Misto's own. Sitting down in the desk chair, John peered around the cats to read the accompanying article.

Did Nursing Home Cat Die in Fire?

The remarkable red tabby cat who began, on his own, to visit infirm patients at Green Meadows Nursing Home nearly a year ago has not been seen since a midnight fire burned the complex to the ground. “We're terribly afraid he died in the fire,” said nursing supervisor Jamey Small. “We haven't seen him since three hours before the fire broke out, since the alarms went off and we began to evacuate the patients. He came to us as a stray, but he was a most unusual cat. He not only spent nearly every waking moment with the patients, he always favored the most depressed and lonely among them, or the sickest. He would stay with a very ill patient for hours, snuggled close. He would leave for only a few minutes, to eat or drink or visit one of the sandboxes we provided, then he'd hop back on the bed again, purring and rolling over. He gave affection, and enjoyed whatever affection the patient was able to give back. Many of his charges began to sit up in their beds, to smile and talk with the nurses for the first time in months, even to enjoy their meals again.”

Even after all the patients were evacuated to safety, to temporary quarters in nearby motels, no one had found Buddy. The night of the fire, which was caused by a faulty furnace in the basement of the building, off-duty personnel searched the rest of the night and into the next morning, searched all over the grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods, but they found no sign of him.

“If he's been taken in by a nearby family,” Small said, “we would very much like to know that he's safe. The nursing staff and the attending doctors have raised a reward of two thousand dollars for information leading to Buddy's return. If he was injured in the fire, we will be happy to repay all his veterinary bills, in order to have him back safe. Buddy is part of our family, he's a remarkable cat, our patients miss him and we miss him, we all pray that he is alive and has not been harmed.”

“This is Pan?” John said, stroking Misto. “Your son, Pan?”

The old cat twitched an ear, and touched the picture with a soft paw. “He's too quick to get trapped in a fire—maybe it was Pan who set off the alarm, alerted them at the first smell of smoke, but then he would have beat it out of there.” Misto's eyes were filled with a stubborn hope, and John, watching him, prayed that he was right.

When Dulcie scrolled down the screen, two more pictures of Pan appeared, sharing the beds of other patients. In one shot he was curled up against a woman's shoulder, in the other an old man sat up in bed, his arm around the red tomcat, both looking into the camera, the cat's amber eyes bright, his smile laced with humor. Kit, too, lifted a paw to the screen, to touch the young tom's nose. She looked at the picture a long time, her fluffy tail twitching—as it did when she was deep in thought or was deeply enchanted.

B
ut while John Firetti and the three cats browsed online searching for clues to the lost Pan, down at the Damen household Clyde had lit a fire on the hearth, and had left the living room to Max Harper and Debbie. The big room was no longer done in black and brown African patterns, which Hanni's studio had created for Clyde in his bachelor days. That primitive mood had given way to sunny yellow walls, flowered linen covers on the couch and chairs and, over the couch, an arrangement of Charlie Harper's drawings, portraits of Joe, Rock, Dulcie, Kit, and Snowball, all handsomely framed. Three tall schefflera plants softened the corners of the room, and over the mantel was a Charlie Harper etching of Dulcie and Joe and Kit hunting through the tall grass of the Molena Point hills. The white linen draperies were new and fresh, the wood floors gleaming. The only furnishing left over from earlier days was Joe Grey's faded, claw-shredded, fur-matted easy chair, and even its fate was under negotiation. Joe said if his chair went to Goodwill, he went with it. Ryan had proposed a washable linen cover, which, with reservations, he was considering—he wasn't fond of the smell of laundry soap.

Debbie sat at one end of the couch, Max across from her in Clyde's reading chair. Joe, padding into the room, leaped into his own chair and curled up for a nap, as if he was quite alone in the room; he soon let himself snore a little, his head tucked under, his closed eyes slitted open just enough to watch Debbie's reaction as Max questioned her. The chief started out friendly enough, and low-key; he told her how sorry he was about Hesmerra's death, and asked gently when she had last seen her mother.

“I didn't see her much,” Debbie said, pretending to wipe at a tear, a gesture Joe thought singularly unconvincing.

“A few months, would you say?”

Debbie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Do you come down during the winter months, when Erik's working down here?”

“I haven't the last few years. Erik was . . . He's always busy with work. I have the children to care for . . . Tessa's so little, she takes up a lot of time. And Vinnie's in school. I don't like to pull her out, move her back and forth between schools, that's very unsettling for a child.”
My,
Joe thought,
the ever-caring mother. This, from a woman who patronizes her littlest child until she cries.
“It's bad enough,” Debbie said, “that she has to change schools now. But now, of course, I have no choice. We couldn't stay in Eugene, I have no money at all.”

“The children are how old?” Max asked.

“Vinnie's twelve, Tessa nearly five.” She looked uncomfortably away, causing Joe to wonder about the seven-year gap between the two little girls. Family planning? he wondered. Or long-standing marital troubles?

“If you didn't come down with Erik,” Max said, “you must at least have talked with your mother on the phone, or written to her?”

“She didn't have a phone. I wrote to her sometimes,” Debbie said evasively. “We weren't . . . We had differences,” she said shortly. “I didn't see her much.”

“You want to tell me what that was about?”

“She . . . We didn't see eye to eye. I don't understand why you're asking me all this. Is this really necessary?”

Max said, “What, exactly, was the problem between you?”

Debbie sighed. “For one thing, that boy she's raising. My dead sister's child. My mother isn't . . . wasn't fit to raise a child, with her drinking. When the child was born, I told her she should take it to Child Welfare, where he could be adopted.”

“What about his father? Couldn't he have taken Billy?”

“We have no idea who the father was. Some boy from her high school, too young and irresponsible anyway to take care of a family. Greta would never say who he was, only that his family refused to help.”

“And your other sister, Esther? She didn't want Billy?”

“Esther didn't want children,” she said shortly. Joe, listening to Max bait her, ask her questions to which he already knew the answers, wondered where this was going. Did he think Debbie was involved in Hesmerra's death? Or was he, indeed, simply gathering background information?

“You were sixteen when you married Erik Kraft? Wasn't that pretty young, too?”

“But we got
married,
we didn't just . . .” Again she sighed, as if losing patience with his lack of insight. “I wanted out of there, I didn't like living with my mother, I didn't like her drinking. All right?”

“She was drinking then?”

“Not as much as now, I've heard. Not every day. She worked in an office then, some kind of clerk. Some weekends she'd go on a tear, then call in sick on Monday. We were living up in the hills above the village, renting a backyard guesthouse. My mother's a loud, mean drunk. She yells and cries. I'm surprised they didn't kick us out. Esther and Greta and I would get out of the house, go our separate ways. When I left to get married, she and Greta moved to that shack. Esther was already married and gone. What does this have to do with the fire and with my mother's death?”

“Just trying to get a picture of her situation,” Max said quietly. “Did your mother try to get financial help from the state or county to raise the child?”

“I don't know. Probably not. Who would give her help when she lived in that shack, and the way she drank? They'd just take the kid away from her. No, she would never apply for help, she didn't like government do-gooders.”

“Did Hesmerra drink after the baby came?”

“I don't know, I wasn't there. Once in a while, I talked with my sister Esther. She said Mother was about the same.”

“You didn't talk with Esther often.”

“She and I had a blowup. These questions have nothing to do with my mother.”

“They help to give me a picture of your mother's life,” Max said, “to understand what might have happened.”

“What's to understand? She got drunk and burned the house down. How
did
the fire start?”

“Fire investigators determined she left a skillet on the stove, with the burner on high. The grease in the pan got too hot, flamed up. Flames ignited the wall and then the ceiling. The house went up like tinder.”

Debbie's face drained of color. But, strangely, her hands lay relaxed in her lap. Joe watched Tessa creep in and slip behind the couch. Vinnie appeared behind her, as if not to be left out. She found a place on the floor beneath a schefflera plant, sat there silent for once. Was Vinnie, too, intimidated by the law? Joe wondered, amused.

“It was about twelve years ago that you and Erik first separated?” Max asked. “That you left the village and moved up to your uncle's, in Eugene?”

“Yes, but first I took what little money Erik gave me, and some I'd stashed, and enrolled for a summer semester at San Francisco Art Institute. Moved into the cheapest room I could find. I hardly had enough for food and for paper and paint. I don't know, I thought it would lead somewhere, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to get away.

“Halfway through the semester, I found out I was pregnant,” she said bitterly. “When school was out, I moved up to my uncle's—just before Vinnie was born.”

“And then some five years later you and Erik got back together?”

“Yes, but what does—”

“That's when you left your uncle's farm, and Erik rented the house in Eugene?”

She shifted her position on the couch, glancing impatiently toward the door. “I still don't see what this has to do with my mother.”

“Just trying to get the whole picture,” Max repeated. “There's some question about the cause of her death. In the investigation of a murder, we need to have some sense of the victim's family as well as of her own life.”

Debbie stared at him. “A murder? Someone killed her? Someone set that fire and . . .” Her hands went to her face. “Someone burned . . . ?”

“She was dead before the fire started,” Max said. “But possibly not from natural causes.”

Debbie's brown eyes remained fixed on Max. Joe tried to read her, as Max was reading her, but the chief was more skilled at this stuff. At first she had been too calm, too cool. Now, was her shock and distress genuine, or a good act?

Max said, “We don't have many answers yet. I'm sorry to press you, but can we go back in time again, for a moment? Try to bring me up to speed?”

Debbie nodded, mute and still.

“When you and Erik moved into the Eugene house, he worked in that office during the summer months, came down to the Molena Point office for the winter, while you and the children remained in Eugene?”

“Yes. Tessa was only a baby.”

“And that is still the arrangement?”

“Until last fall, when he filed for divorce,” she said. “September. He sent child support money until just after Christmas, then the checks stopped. A month ago he stopped paying the rent, too. The landlord said we had to get out. I told him we had nowhere to go, and no money. I
told
him Erik took everything, but he didn't care, all he wanted was money. I had to close out my household account, it was down to nothing. We have nothing.”