Cat to the Dogs (7 page)

Early-morning joggers claimed to have seen the ghost, but in the coastal fog one could imagine seeing anything. Tourists came to look for the hag, and spun wonderful stories to take home.

Lucinda waited patiently, they supposed for any small sign of the stray cats approaching the food she had left. The shy animals didn't show themselves. Only when she rose at last and headed back, the hill now bright with sun, did the strays come out.

They appeared swiftly behind her, thin, wary, dark-faced cats crowding around the pie plate, snatching up the old lady's offerings. Dulcie and Joe remained very still, watching them. The fog had blown away, the ragged cliffs below emerging dark and wild, the sea black and heaving, the narrow ribbon of highway glistening wet—only the crest of the hill seemed to be warmed by the rising sun. A scream startled Joe and Dulcie. They leaped for shelter. The strays vanished. Lucinda, halfway across the hill, stopped and turned, looking below her.

The yelp came again: It was a dog, one of the pups. The cats knew that voice. A pup yowling with pain and fear. They reared up in the grass to see.

There was no car on the highway to have hurt a puppy. Stretching taller, they saw Clyde and Charlie standing at the edge of the road staring back toward the village. Charlie held the bigger pup on a leash—that was the pup she had named Hestig. The pup fought his lead, lunging and trying to bolt away, his feet sliding on the asphalt as he tried to join his brother, who raced madly toward the village, yipping and screaming.

Clinging to Selig's back was a small animal, a dark little creature yowling and clawing, its fluffy tail lashing with rage. When Selig swerved from the road, the little animal rode him like a bronc-buster; they vanished among the houses.

Joe stared after them, torn between amazement and a huge belly laugh. “So that was what the pups were afraid of—a mangy little cat. That's why they didn't want to come up Hellhag Hill.”

Below them, down the hill, Clyde stood on the road, staring at where the pup had vanished. “What
was
that thing? What kind of wild—”

“Cat,” Charlie said, doubled over laughing, and trying to hold the plunging Hestig.

“No, not a cat. It was some kind of wild animal. No cat would…My God. A cat?”

“A very small cat,” Charlie said. “And very, very mad.” She knelt and pulled Hestig close to her, stroking him and speaking softly until he became quiet. “A cat, Clyde. A tiny, angry little cat.” She watched Clyde take off jogging, hoping to round up Selig. “They never,” she told Hestig, “cats never cease to surprise me.”

“I hope,” Dulcie whispered, “that little cat finds her way back.” She imagined the little stray leaping off Selig's back in the middle of the village, confused among so many cars and people, not knowing where to run.

“Those cats might be wild and shy,” Joe said, “but they haven't survived without being clever. She'll be okay. Why was Clyde walking the dogs here? The highway's no place for those two.”

“Do you think he came to follow Lucinda, after Harper's questions about her?”

“After he ragged
me
for being nosy? That would be more than low.”

They watched Lucinda, across the hill, hurrying down to join Charlie; Charlie had slowed, waiting for her. Lucinda fell into step, smiling as if she had enjoyed the spectacle of runaway Selig, as if she had liked seeing one of the wild, shy felines show some unexpected spunk.

Lucinda and Charlie had known each other only casually, through Wilma, until Shamas's death drew Wilma, herself, to see Lucinda more often. Then Charlie, with her usual warmth, had
taken a deeper interest in the old woman. Gently, Charlie put her arm around Lucinda, gave her a hug. “Did you see poor Selig? Was that one of the little cats you've been feeding?”

“I believe it was,” Lucinda said, laughing. “Wild is the word for that one.”

“How many cats are there, Lucinda? Are they all that wild? Where did they come from?”

“I think there are six or seven. They appeared a few days after the quake. I only get glimpses of them, usually one at a time. Only that dark little cat—the one that just rode away on the back of Clyde's dog—only that one has had the nerve to approach me.”

“Cat the color of charred wood,” Charlie said with interest. “Black and brown swirled together on the palette.”

“Tortoiseshell,” Lucinda said.

“They must be glad of the food you bring. Though surely they are hunters.”

“I'm sure they are. They're most likely feral cats, they're far too shy to be simply strays.”

The old woman was silent a moment. Joe and Dulcie slipped quickly through the grass, following close behind the two women. “Maybe,” Lucinda said, “Pedric would have some knowledge about feral cats. Pedric is Shamas's first cousin. He seems to have some interesting theories about—feral animals.” She hesitated. “Strange theories, maybe. But these cats strike one as rather strange.”

“Is Pedric the thin old man? The one of slighter build?”

“Yes, that's Pedric.” She glanced at Charlie. “He's…very kind. He's one of Shamas's relatives that I…feel comfortable with. He and Newlon Greenlaw. Newlon…tried to save Shamas, you know.”

Charlie nodded.

“Pedric is…perhaps not as harsh as the others. Perhaps he has more of the old-country ways,” Lucinda said shyly. “Pedric Greenlaw might have stepped right out of his own myths, out of the same dark and shadowed worlds that shape his folktales.”

“He sounds interesting,” Charlie said, pushing back her wind-blown red hair. “I've always loved storytellers. It's a wonderful art: the skill to draw you in, make you see and live a tale as if you were there, to truly wrap you in the story.”

“Pedric…I think he looks at life through the lens of his stories…through the lens of dead ages. He clings to the old myths just as Shamas did, to the Irish beliefs and folklore woven through their family. That history was very important to Shamas.”

“I didn't know that about your husband.”

Lucinda smiled. “All the Greenlaws live to some extent a strange double existence. I think that in many ways they truly believe the old tales—believe in the old-world magic.”

She glanced at Charlie. “And yet another part of them—except perhaps Pedric and Newlon—is as cold and selfish as it is possible to be. That…that is the way Shamas was.”

Charlie turned to look at her.

“Well, I'm not grieving for Shamas,” Lucinda said softly. “If I am grieving, it is only…for myself, for what I have…missed.”

And,
Dulcie thought,
grieving for a life wasted.
She thought about what Lucinda had told Wilma, in a moment like this when Lucinda seemed to feel the need to talk, perhaps to bare a bit of her soul.

Lucinda had come to have tea with Wilma; Dulcie had been lying in her favorite spot on the blue velvet couch pretending to nap. Lucinda told Wilma that when the police came to her door that morning to tell her that Shamas was dead, she'd felt a drop of emotion straight down into panic, and then, almost at once, she'd been swept by a surge of relief so powerful that she'd tried to hide it from the officers, such a sense of freedom, of elation that the painful burden had gone from her life, that Shamas's lies and cheating were ended. That she could, at last, know some peace. Her words had seemed to spring from such a strong need to unburden herself; and when Wilma put her arm around her, Lucinda wept helplessly.

She told Wilma that she should have walked away from Shamas years before, should have taken the responsibility to change her life, but that she'd never been brave enough. Had never had the courage to walk out on Shamas Greenlaw.

But Charlie was saying, “Wherever those wild cats came from, the little creatures are lucky to have you, Lucinda.” Gently, Charlie shortened Hestig's leash, to make him walk by her heel.

“Maybe with time,” Lucinda said, “they'll grow tame, and I can find homes for them. The strange thing is,” she said, glancing at Charlie, “how powerfully those wild cats draw me. I don't usually think about stray animals; the world is full of strays, and I can't change the world. But these cats…” Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe they're something to hold on to, just now. Something outside myself, to love and care about.”

Charlie smiled at her, and nodded.

“Perhaps,” Lucinda said, “it's their freedom, too, that draws me—and the mystery of why they appeared so suddenly on Hellhag Hill, where, in all my years of walking there, I've seldom seen any creature.”

The two women turned down Ocean onto the grassy median, Hestig walking sedately at Charlie's side, watching his manners now, as if the spectacle of a cat attacking his brother had made a lasting impression. If the pup was aware of Joe and Dulcie slipping through the shadows behind him beneath the eucalyptus trees, he gave no sign other than to twitch an ear back, once, and wag casually. And soon Lucinda turned away, not toward her own street as she usually did, but in the opposite direction, into the heart of the village, leaving Charlie and Hestig to cross to Charlie's apartment above the shops on Ocean.

None of the shops was yet open, but the little cafés were busy. The cats followed Lucinda, padding along behind, dodging joggers and dog walkers. The old lady was just passing the post office, watching a yardman across the street watering the planter beds in front of Cannady's, that nice Western shop that Dulcie
loved, which had such beautiful embroidered denim and leathers. Cannady's front garden was brilliant with impatiens and lilies, behind its low wrought-iron fence. Lucinda had stopped to admire the garden when Dirken and Newlon Greenlaw came around the corner—and immediately Lucinda drew back into the shadows, stood very still, watching them.

The two men were walking slowly just at the curb, so close to the line of parked cars that the cats heard Newlon's jacket brush against a rearview mirror. Both men walked hunched, their heads bent as if looking into the car windows.

It took only a second. The two were quick; they paused, the cats heard a little click as if a car door had opened, another click as it closed again, and the men moved on, Newlon shoving something into his jacket pocket, some small item he had snatched from the seat of the car. A camera? A purse? Perhaps a cell phone.

Lucinda stood staring, a look of shock and anger on her face—a look as if she had been personally affronted.

Then she turned away and hurried into the Swiss House, taking refuge in the first empty booth, busying herself with the menu. The cats, leaping up onto the window box among the flowers, watched her ordering, watched her settle back sipping her coffee. Lucinda was more than usually pale, and her thin old hands were shaking.

D
INO'S HAD
the best fish and chips in the village. Max Harper, having picked up an order of takeout, sat in his king cab pickup eating his dinner and watching, through the lighted motel window across the street, Cara Ray Crisp skinning out of her sweatshirt. Cara Ray hadn't bothered to pull the blinds. She was only a slip of a thing, tiny and thin, but well endowed, the kind of delicate creature who would have appealed exactly to Shamas Greenlaw.

Harper had backed his truck into a narrow drive between Harren's Gallery and Molena Point Drugs, a lane so overgrown with jasmine that the vines trailed across the truck's roof and down the side windows. For some time Cara Ray had talked on the phone, lying nude on the bed, propped against the pillows, sipping on a canned drink; and now she was tying on a bikini top. As he watched her roll her long blond hair into a knot and secure it, and pull on the bottom half of her bathing suit, Harper had no notion that he, in turn, was watched, from the backseat of the king cab.

Sitting on the cab floor behind Harper, peering up between the bucket seats, Joe Grey could see through the windshield the
little pantomime in Cara Ray's lighted motel room, and he had to smile. Max Harper, spying on Cara Ray's strip act like some cheap voyeur, would be enjoying every rousing minute—free entertainment served up with his takeout dinner, all in the line of duty.

The fish and chips smelled so good that Joe was tempted to slash out with a quick paw and snag a nice warm chunk of fried cod. Maybe Harper wouldn't miss just one piece. Why was it that, so often when he did a bit of surveillance, the watchee enjoyed a nice meal, while the watcher ended up faint with hunger?

As Cara Ray stepped to the window, Harper drew back behind a lifted newspaper. She stood looking down at the street, then turned away again, a towel over her shoulder as if she were headed for the pool: a little break between her callous and bad-mannered visits to Lucinda Greenlaw. She'd been to see the old woman three times in three days, the last encounter stretching into dinner and on to midnight—Dulcie said the sleek little blonde had made herself very much at home among the male Greenlaws, drawing the cousins and nephews to her like flies to honey, despite the fact that the Greenlaw clan didn't take quickly to strangers. She said Newlon and Dirken had been all over Cara Ray. “No queen in heat, with a dozen toms raking around her, has any more nerve than that one.”

Cara Ray had pulled up at Lucinda's that first day in a gleaming new Jaguar, wearing a fur wrap against the chill of Molena Point's ocean breeze. The mink and the car, Dulcie said, were very likely gifts from Shamas. Lucinda had answered the door wearing a voluminous apron and wiping flour from her hands.

“I'm Shamas's friend, Mrs. Greenlaw. From the boat. I was there the night Shamas died.”

Talk about brass. And Lucinda too polite to send her packing. The older woman had asked Cara Ray in and even made tea for her. Dulcie had watched, disgusted, as they settled down before the fire. But the day was chill, and through the closed windows, she couldn't hear a word; it wasn't necessary, though. From their
expressions and Cara Ray's body language, even a dunce could see that the little blonde was buttering up Lucinda shamefully.

The moment Lucinda rose to make fresh tea, Cara Ray had gone into action.

She was swift and thorough, riffling through Lucinda's desk and through her checkbook. She had begun on the books that lined the fireplace, reaching behind the lower rows to feel along the walls, when she heard Lucinda return.

Lucinda entered the room to see Cara Ray sitting innocently cuddled in her chair beside the hearth.

Of course Dulcie couldn't leave that little episode alone; since Cara Ray's arrival, Dulcie had hung on the fence every waking moment. If Molena Point Library had a resident cat, she was not currently in residence; she hardly went home for meals. Cara Ray returned the next day and the next, and Dulcie was there. Again on the third day Cara Ray stayed until midnight.

Now, with Joe and Dulcie's “meddling,” as Clyde would put it, with Dulcie's anonymous suggestion to Harper, the captain was—pardon the pun—taking a good look at Cara Ray. It had begun earlier that afternoon, when Harper had stopped by Clyde's and mentioned he had a make on Raul Torres, and Joe and Dulcie decided to take a ride.

It was Saturday, and at Harper's suggestion, Clyde planned to take Selig up to Harper's pasture to work on the pup's obedience training in a large, open area. The two pups were impossible together; Charlie had taken Hestig home to her apartment. She and Clyde couldn't even attend the same obedience class; the pups did nothing but taunt each other, play on each other's foolishness. Joe had been shocked out of his claws when Clyde actually signed up for the class at the community center.

Surprisingly, both pups had learned to
Sit
, to
Come
on command, and, sometimes, to take the sitting position at
Heel
—except when they were together. Then they were oblivious, had never before heard those words, had no notion what they meant.

So that afternoon Harper, still in uniform, had taken a few hours off, left his unit parked in front of Clyde's, and he and Clyde had headed up the hills in Clyde's '34 Chevy, the convertible top folded down, Selig securely tethered in the rumble seat—and Joe and Dulcie concealed on the little shelf behind the seats, beneath the folded leather top.

It was hot as sin in there, but, crouched just behind the men's heads, they could hear every word.

“You started to tell me about this accident victim,” Clyde said, turning up Ocean. “Torres, you said?” He seemed far more willing to talk with Harper about the case when he thought Joe wasn't around.

“Raul Torres. He did give the antique car agency his right name. Torres was a PI working out of Seattle. I don't know why he used the fake address. Maybe he used that routinely, for security reasons.” Even Max Harper, Joe thought with interest, seemed more comfortable relating information in a supposedly cat-free environment.

“I called Torres's office a dozen times before I got his secretary. She was closemouthed until I identified myself. Said she'd call me back. While I waited, she called the station, checked me out. Called me back to say Torres was on vacation, that she didn't expect to hear from him for maybe another week. She'd gone in to do the billing.

“I told her Torres was dead. Took her a few minutes to take that in. When she felt like talking again, she said she'd made reservations for Torres at the Oak Breeze, in Molena Point, beginning last Saturday. That he'd gone down to L.A. on a case, had planned to leave there Saturday, was meeting someone in Molena Point Saturday night, a woman—girlfriend, she said.”

“You find a motel registration?” Clyde asked as he turned up the long dirt road leading to Harper's acreage.

“Nothing under Torres, not in Molena Point. But the fact he was a PI keeps me digging.”

“So he was a PI,” Clyde said. “That doesn't mean he was murdered.”

“Of course not,” Harper said, amused. “But it does make me wonder.”

The house at the end of the lane was white clapboard, with a four-stall barn behind and an open, roofed hay shed. The stable yard was shaded by three huge live oak trees, the garden weedy and neglected since Harper's wife died. They pulled up beside the barn, and while the two men were occupied tying a long, thin line to Selig's choke chain, the cats, panting from the heat, slipped out from under the folded leather top and beat it for the hay shed.

Scorching up the stacked bales to crouch high beneath the shadowed roof, they watched Harper head for the house and return carrying two cans of Coke. The slam of the screen door started Selig barking, and Clyde couldn't shut him up.

One word from Harper, and the pup was silent.

Clyde scowled at Harper and led Selig out into the pasture; the puppy pressed his nose immediately to the ground, jerking on the lead, ignoring Clyde, snuffling deeply at the delicious scent of horse manure.

Dulcie made herself comfortable on the baled hay, raking her claws deep. “Torres died Sunday morning,” she said softly.

Joe rolled over, slapping at straws, and turned to look at her.

“If Torres drove up from L.A. Saturday,” she said, “and if he was with a woman in the village on Saturday night, as his secretary told Harper, then what was he doing driving south again, before dawn on Sunday?

“And who was the woman?” Her green eyes narrowed. “Cara Ray told Lucinda she arrived Saturday. Don't you think it strange that Torres and Cara Ray would come to Molena Point on exactly the same day?”

“Dulcie…”

“Torres worked in Seattle. Shamas still had a business there.”

“So?”

“Lucinda told Wilma that when Shamas went up to Seattle she was sure he took a woman with him, not someone from Molena Point but someone he'd meet at the San Francisco airport—Lucinda did keep an eye on his phone bills.”

Dulcie smiled smugly. “Cara Ray lives in San Francisco, not too far from the airport. Shamas flew to Seattle, out of that airport, about once a month.

“So?” Joe said.

“Cara Ray was Shamas's lover. But was she Torres's lover, too? Did she see Torres, as well, when she was in Seattle? She must have been busy.”

Joe rolled over again, scratching his back against the rough straw; he looked at her upside down. “Say you're right, Torres was in Molena Point to meet Cara Ray. What was he doing on the highway, Sunday morning?”

“Maybe they had a fight. Maybe he drove off mad, and that's why he skidded.”

“What about the other car—the second car I heard, just before the crash?”

“Could someone else have known he was here? Cut his brake line, then—maybe phoned him, brought him out on some wild-goose chase, maybe something to do with the case he was working on in L.A.? That might explain why he was headed south again. Then they followed him, in the heavy fog, and honked to confuse him?”

“That's really reaching for it, Dulcie.”

“Whatever the truth, there's a connection. Cara Ray and this Torres didn't just happen to arrive in the same town, on the same day. And why was Cara Ray snooping through Lucinda's papers?”

Joe sighed at the monumental tangles that female logic could weave. “Even if there was a connection, we can't pass on that kind of shaky guesswork to Harper.”

“Maybe no one's mentioned Cara Ray to him. Maybe he has no reason to be interested in her. If he doesn't know about the Seattle connection…”

“Dulcie…”

“We'd only be telling him the name of the woman Torres may have met. What harm in that?”

“Maybe. But we can't call Harper from here.”

“Why not? There's a phone on his belt.”

“Do you see a phone in this hay shed?”

She gave him a sweet, green-eyed smile. “There in the dinette, you can see it through the bay window; the phone's right there on the table.”

Joe sighed.

“Go up on the shed roof, Joe. Where I can see you from the house. Signal me if he heads that way.” She leaped down the baled hay and was gone, streaking for the screen door.

Joe rose and shook the hay off. Sometimes Dulcie was impossible. He swarmed up a post to the roof of the shed. Impossible, clever, and enchanting.

Clyde thought that he, Joe Grey, got rabid over a robbery or suspicious death. But Dulcie set her teeth into a murder case as if she were fighting rattlesnakes.

Keeping low, out of the men's view, and trying not to let his claws scritch on the galvanized roof, Joe slipped to the edge, where he could see the house.

Behind the bay window, a small shape moved, padding across the table.

Watching her paw at the phone, he remembered the night they'd memorized Harper's various phone numbers from Clyde's phone file. Clyde had pitched a fit because they'd left a few tooth marks in the cards; he could be so picky. It was a huge stroke of luck that Pacific Bell had recently offered free blocking for that insidious caller ID service that so many phones had subscribed to—including Molena Point PD.

Harper had caller ID blocking for his own phones, and with a little encouragement Clyde had come around—it was free, wasn't it?

Wilma, always sensible, had subscribed at once. Wilma told Clyde there was no way he could stop Joe using the phone. She said if Clyde wanted to save himself acute embarrassment, he'd better go along with the blocking.

Out in the field, Clyde stood fifty feet away from Selig, his arm raised in an exaggerated signal, shouting “Sit! Sit, stay.”

Selig grinned at him and bounced around, playing with the nylon line that was supposed to control him.

Max Harper stood looking on, trying not to laugh. Faintly, Joe heard Harper's phone buzz.

Harper picked up, and listened. An irritated look spread across his lean face. His replies were brief. But he didn't hang up.

Harper might not like these anonymous phone calls, might not like the unsettling and impossible suppositions that they stirred, but he didn't ignore them.

Behind Harper, Clyde walked across the field to Selig. With a lot of pushing, he made the pup sit. Then backing away, holding the line, Clyde didn't take his eyes from the pup. The object was to get maybe fifty feet from Selig, making sure he remained sitting, to wait for a little while, then call him. The trainee was supposed to sit still until summoned by the trainer, then run directly to him and sit again, facing the tall human god.

What actually occurred was that the pup kept moving his butt around, only barely remaining in the sitting position, wild to lunge and run, and when Clyde did finally call him, Selig ran around Clyde, circling until Clyde's legs were wrapped in the line. Harper, scowling into the phone, couldn't help a lopsided grin as the pup hog-tied Clyde like a roped calf.