Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) (7 page)

Bella laughed. “I bet you never thought
you’d want to spend any time with an alley cat.”

Willow blushed. “You’re right. You’ve
completely changed my opinion. I’m sorry for judging you the way I did.”

“Never mind,” Bella replied. “We can be
friends now. And don’t worry about leaving. If you want to talk again, you know
where to find me.”

Willow waved her tail in the air.
“Thanks. It sure helps to know I have someone out in the field I can count on.”

Nat called to her over his shoulder.
“Come on, let’s get going.”

Willow followed Nat, and Chester and Bella
disappeared into their alley. Willow cast one last look at them before they
vanished into the shadows. “They really are an amazing pair.”

“No police cat could solve a case
without them,” Nat agreed. “There’s an old saying. ‘It’s not what you know,
it’s who you know.' They’ve helped me a dozen times or more. They can tell you
things you would never be able to figure out on your own.”

“You mean like finding that cologne?” Willow
asked.

Nat made a face. “I don’t think that
cologne contributed much to the case, but Chester did, and I defer to his
expertise. We can add it to our store of information about the suspects, but it
does seem to point very strongly to Jason and Annika. Those two have the
highest likelihood, in my opinion, of being the killers.”

“Maybe they did it together,” Willow
suggested.

Nat cast her a sidelong glance. “I
wouldn’t be surprised. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Josephine and Jason did
it together. When people cheat on their spouses, they don’t have very far to go
before they decide to rid themselves of their old partners altogether. The
temptation to murder can become overwhelming.”

He turned a corner and climbed a set of
concrete stairs to the roof of the Motel building. “Look at that,” Willow
remarked. “I didn’t know we’d been out so long, but the sky is getting light.
We better get back to the station to meet up with Carl and Naya. We don’t want
to miss out on Marlena’s interview.”

“We aren’t going back to the station,”
Nat informed her.

“What?” she cried. “Why not? Did you
decide not to interview Marlena after all.”

“We’re going to interview her,” Nat
told her. “We just won’t bother to go back to the station first.”

Willow blinked. “I don’t understand
you.”

“Do you see that building over there?”
Nat asked. “That’s the Montague Estates Apartments. I know it well, because the
Nelson Toms Choir used to meet there every second Sunday of the month.”

“Is that the group Chester belongs to?”
Willow asked.

“Yes, and I used to belong to it, too,”
he told her. “That was before I joined the Highland Golf Course Toms Choir. But
what I really wanted to tell you is that Marlena lives at the Montague Estates
Apartments. We can get there much faster from here. Going back to the station
would only waste our time, and we would probably both fall asleep there and
miss the interview.”

“But we have hours to wait before Carl
and Naya come to interview Marlena,” Willow pointed out. “We could have a nap
in the meantime and still get out in time for the interview.”

Nat shook his head. “Even if we did
wake up in time to leave the station, we would attract too much attention
leaving at the same time Carl and Naya did. Our best bet it to hunker down
somewhere near Marlena’s apartment so we’re on the spot when they show up. As
it happens, I know the perfect spot.”

“Where?” Willow asked.

Nat trotted across the street toward
the building. “Follow me.”

Willow joined him.

“Do you see that alley next to the
building?” Nat Asked.

Willow caught her breath. “There’s a
cat.”

“That’s Thorndale Alley,” Nat told her.
“It’s full of cats. It’s one of the strongest alleys in town. If you ever need
alley cats and can’t find Chester and Bella to help you, call on the
Thorndales. They’re a very powerful family, and they can do pretty much
whatever they have to do. They’ll be good cats for you to get to know.”

Willow hesitated. “I don’t think I want
to go in there.”

“We’re not going in there,” Nat told
her, “not right now, anyway. I just want you to know about it. There’s another
alley on the other side of the building. That’s Stevenson Alley, and it’s full
of cats, too.”

“Are they friends with Thorndale
Alley?” Willow asked.

“No,” Nat snapped. “Not by a mile. They
hate each other, and it’s taken years of work by cats like Chester and Rondo
James to stop them warring in the streets.”

“Who’s Rondo James?” Willow asked.

“He’s another very old and very
powerful alley cat,” Nat told her. “He and Chester negotiated a partial truce
between Stevenson and Thorndale, just to keep the bloodshed to a minimum, but
the two families still don’t like each other. They stick to their own alleys,
or they would kill each other on sight.”

Willow shuddered. “I think we should go
back to the station.”

“Keep your shorts on,” Nat growled.
“You aren’t in any danger from either one of them, and you might need them one
day. This neighborhood is crawling with cats. That will come in handy for us
this morning.”

He found an iron staircase running up
the side of the building, and he and Willow climbed up a series of fire escapes
to a balcony.

“This is Marlena’s apartment,” Nat told
her. “We can settle down here and take a nap before Carl and Naya get here.
Marlena sees cats on her balcony all the time, so she won’t suspect us of
anything. In fact, she might even give us something to eat.”

Willow tried to peer through the
window, but the curtains were shut. “How will we hear the interview?”

“Once the sun comes up and the heat
rises,” Nat explained, “Marlena will open the window. We’ll be able to hear
every word they say. If that doesn’t work, we can claw at the window and beg
for food.”

“Does that work?” Willow asked.

“All the time,” Nat replied. “The
instant she opens the door, you run inside like you own the place and start
meowing as loud as you can. You pace back and forth in front of the
refrigerator until she gets the idea. Nine times out of ten, she’ll feed you
right there in the kitchen. People don’t want to walk all the way back out to
the balcony to feed you. We’ll be in the apartment while Carl and Naya question
her.”

“That sounds like a perfect plan,” Willow
exclaimed. “You’re a genius, Nat.”

“Hardly,” he muttered. “Any cat could
tell you the same thing. All you have to do to get a human being to do what you
want is pretend to be a tame house cat. Humans are used to that. They like
feeding house cats and having them in their houses.”

Willow sat down in the corner of the
balcony and narrowed her eyelids. “This is nice. I could get comfortable here.”

“Take a nap, but don’t get
comfortable,” Nat ordered. “After Carl and Naya interview Marlena, we’ll go see
what we can find out about Annika. You’ll need all your resources for that. We
don’t know what we’ll find.”

Willow curled up in a ball in the
corner and closed her eyes. She didn’t realize how much her night in the field
exhausted her. She wasn’t used to all the excitement, and the adventure wasn’t
over yet. In an instant, she fell asleep.

Nat sat to one side and gazed at her
for a while. He didn’t usually go for those immaculate house cats, but he
couldn’t deny his attachment to Willow. Her plucky determination to master the
art and skill of police work endeared her to him beyond anything he ever would
have expected. Pride and paternal protection filled his being when he
introduced her to his alley cat friends.

She snoozed away, and her delicate fur
rippled when she breathed. He could sit up all morning and watch her sleep, but
he needed to rest himself. He watched her for another ten minutes. Then he
sighed and curled up next to her. She stirred in her sleep and sank back into
the depths of slumber. Nat closed his eyes and dropped off, too.

Two hours passed, and the sun rose
against the side of the apartment building. The heat woke up Nat, but Willow
slept on. In the end, he nudged her with his paw. She stirred, but she didn’t
open her eyes. “Go away.”

Nat sighed. “Wake up, Willow. It’s
almost ten o’clock.”

Willow blinked and sat up. She looked
around and yawned. “Where are we?”

“Don’t you remember?” he asked. “We’re
on Marlena Rappaport’s balcony, and Carl and Naya just showed up to interview
her.”

Willow looked around again. “How can
you tell?”

Nat peered through the apartment
window. “They’re in there right now. If you look, you’ll see them.”

A stately woman with straight blonde
hair carried her dewy glass across the main room of the apartment and slid open
the window. “I can’t stand when it gets so hot in here. I need air.”

Carl and Naya exchanged a grin. The
lace curtains hid Nat and Willow on the balcony right outside the window, so
they didn’t see their own station cats listening to their interview.

“We just want to ask you a few
questions, Marlena,” Naya began. “You may have heard that Roy Avino was killed
yesterday morning.”

Marlena waved her hand. “I don’t
appreciate you calling me by my first name, Detective. You can call me Miss
Rappaport until we’re on a first name basis.”

“We could be on a first name basis now,
if you like,” Naya replied. “I don’t mind you calling me Naya.”

“I don’t think so,” Marlena growled.

Naya shrugged. “That’s okay. We all
know you had a relationship with Roy, so that gives you a motive to kill him.”

“Everybody had a motive to kill Roy,”
Marlena told her. “That guy had more enemies than whiskers.”

Carl snorted. “That’s a good one.”

Marlena turned a withering stare at
him. “I’m not joking. Anybody could tell you Roy Avino was going to wind up at
the bottom of the harbor wearing concrete sneakers.”

Naya bit her lip to stop herself from
smiling. “That’s interesting, but Roy didn’t drown wearing concrete sneakers.
Someone burned down his bakery with him inside it.”

Marlena narrowed her eyes. “Then it
must have been started by someone who worked there.”

Carl and Naya looked at each other.
“What makes you say that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Marlena asked.
“Whoever lit the fire had to get into the bakery somehow. How could they do
that if they didn’t work there?”

Carl shrugged. “Good point.”

“Did you know anyone who worked there?”
Naya asked.

Marlena rubbed the drops of
condensation on her glass. “Only Roy. I don’t mix with plebeians.”

“We’re plebeians.,” Naya pointed out.

“I wouldn’t mix with you, either,
Detective,” Marlena replied.

“Roy was a plebeian,” Naya went on.
“You definitely mixed with him. You ever let the local paper print a picture of
the two of you together at the Metro opening.”

Marlena waved her bejeweled hand. “That
was nothing, and Roy was nothing. I’m sure the world is a much better place
without him.”

“That’s the kind of thing I would
expect to hear from the person who killed him,” Naya told her.

Marlena shrugged. “I didn’t kill him. I
wouldn’t stoop so low. If I wanted Roy dead, I could have taken any number of
opportunities over the years to bump him off. I know enough heavyweights in
organized crime that you detectives wouldn’t come knocking on my door to find
out who killed him. You would never even know he’d been murdered. Whoever got
rid of Roy did a very amateurish job, if you ask me.”

“Where were you yesterday morning,
Marlena?” Naya asked. “Where were you between the hours of seven and nine?”

Marlena fixed Naya with an icy glare,
but she didn’t bother to correct her for calling her by her first name. “I was
in a meeting with my agent. He can vouch for me.”

Naya’s eyebrows went up. “You were in a
meeting at seven o’clock in the morning? I find that hard to believe.”

“If you don’t want to take my word for
it,” Marlena replied, “you can check with his secretary. His building has
security cameras over the doors and in the elevators and in all the hallways.
You can check them for yourself, and you’ll see that I was with him all
morning.”

Nat turned away from the window and
whispered to Willow. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“But the interview isn’t over,” Willow
pointed out.

Nat jumped onto the fire escape and
started picking his way down to the ground. “The interview doesn’t matter
anymore. Marlena has an ironclad alibi. We don’t have to waste any more time on
her.”

Willow’s heart pattered when she got to
the top of the fire escape. The ground reeled far below her. How could she ever
climb all the way down without falling? Then she remembered Bella. The tiny
Abyssinian would probably jump from the balcony all the way down to the ground
in one spring without scratching her little toenails.