"Cat Fear No Evil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Shirley Rousseau)

5

Joe lay across Clyde's shoulder absorbing the warmth from his housemate's tweed sport coat, which smelled of aftershave and of dog. Around them along the village streets, the wind hushed coldly, and above their heads the sheltering oaks rattled like live things; a few tourists lingered looking into the bright shop windows, but the shadows between the shops were dense and still, for no moon shone beneath the heavy clouds. Clyde's tweed shoulder was rough against Joe's nose. Dressed in his usual party attire, a sport coat over a white cashmere turtleneck and Levi's, Clyde had had a haircut for the occasion. His dark hair was short and neat, with the obligatory little white line of non-tan-the general effect a clean, military look that Ryan liked. Ryan walked close beside them, Clyde and Ryan holding hands. Joe observed them with interest.

"What," he had asked Clyde just last week, like some over-protective parent, "are your intentions? You're dating Ryan, neither one of you seeing anyone else. I know it's not all platonic, but where's the wild abandon of passion? A couple of years ago, it was a different woman every week, in bed, cooking your supper, and in bed again. What happened to all the debauchery?"

Clyde had scowled at him, said nothing, and left the room. But Joe thought he knew. Clyde had had a sea change, a complete turnaround in the way he viewed his woman friends.

It had started with Kate, when she left her husband after he tried to kill her. She had been so very frightened, so distraught, had left the house in fear and come to Clyde for shelter and for comfort. Clyde had made up the guest bed and cooked a midnight supper for her, had tried to soothe and calm her, but when Kate exhibited her alarming feline nature, trying to make him understand the extent of her fears, when she took the form of a cat, she had put Clyde off royally.

After her move to San Francisco, there had been months when she'd been out of touch, when she wouldn't answer his calls or return them. Then Clyde began dating Charlie. That had lasted until Charlie and Max, unplanned and unintentionally, had fallen madly in love. And Joe smiled. They had been so distressed that they had hurt Clyde, so relieved when Ryan came on the scene, moving down from the city, and the two hit it off.

But where this romance was headed, Joe wasn't sure. Clyde had become far more circumspect in his relationships. No more one-week stands, no more wild partying-and Ryan, recovering from a miserable marriage, seemed just as reluctant to commit.

As they headed across the village to a late supper, strolling past the brightly lit shops, Wilma carried Dulcie wrapped in her red cloak, and Hanni carried the kit. Hanni had covered her jade-green sequined dress with a long cape made from a Guatemalan blanket-tacky on anyone else, smashing on Hanni Coon with her lean model's figure and tousled white hair. Hanni, definitely a dog person, carried the tattercoat with considerable deference. Consorting with cats was new to her. The kit was so thoroughly enjoying herself looking over Hanni's shoulder into the shop windows that Joe wanted to tell her not to stare. When passersby greeted them, Joe looked totally blank and mindless, but the kit was incredibly eager, accepting the petting of the locals and smiling at them in a far too intelligent manner. The few tourists they met stopped to stare at the bizarre little group carrying three cats, but then they smiled. Molena Point was famous for odd characters.

Ahead of Hanni and Wilma, Charlie walked with Kate, Charlie wrapped in a long, creamy stole over her wine-damp gold lame. Kate wore a black velvet ankle-length wrap. In the wake of the waiter's death, the party of six was silent and subdued. Strange, Joe thought. When the waiter fell across Charlie's lap, Kate had registered not only alarm but fear, a quick shock visible for only a moment before she took herself in hand.

Beside Joe, Ryan moved so close to Clyde that her dark, blowing hair tickled Joe's nose. She was growing more used to him, more comfortable with Clyde taking his tomcat around the village, carrying a cat in the car just for the ride or allowing Joe into a restaurant. No matter that Ryan took her dog into restaurant patios, that was different. After nearly a year of dating Clyde she hadn't quite decided what to make of Joe-Joe knew he shouldn't tease her and set her up, but his jokes gave him such a high. Nothing so bizarre as to reveal the truth, nothing to imply that he understood Ryan's every word and might have something to say in return.

But dog people were such suckers for the inexplicable behavior of cats, for the unfathomable mysteries of the feline persona. There was, in the minds of most dog addicts, not the faintest understanding of the logic of feline thought. And that made them ridiculously easy marks. The simplest ruse could bring incredulous stares: I never saw a cat go round a garden smelling the roses, standing up on its hind paws like that. I never saw a cat sit up like a dog to beg, or fetch a ball like a dog.

Well of course ordinary cats did all those things, when they chose to; he had demonstrated for Ryan nothing extraordinary. But in that ailuro-challenged young woman, his little dramas had stirred amazed responses. Dulcie kept telling him to watch himself. "You're going to blow it, Joe. Blow it big time. Ryan isn't stupid. How do you think Charlie found out that we can talk, that we're not ordinary? By watching us when we got careless, that's how. Just as you're getting careless with Ryan."

"Don't worry so much. I'm never careless, my jokes are totally harmless. And Ryan isn't Charlie, Charlie's the one with the imagination. Not everyone would come to the conclusion Charlie did. Ryan's a cop's kid, she likes a logical explanation for everything. Facts are facts. She would no more believe a cat could carry on a conversation than Max Harper would believe it. And you have to admit, we're in Harper's face all the time."

"But…"

"There's no way," Joe had said, "that either Ryan or Harper would ever buy the truth about us-unless, of course, we sat down and had a little heart-to-heart with them."

He looked up as they approached the restaurant's brick patio, and he licked his muzzle, tasting the good smells of steak and lobster. The patio was crowded with diners at small tables beneath its sprawling oaks. The host was all smiles as he escorted them through the patio, through the main dining room, and up the stairs. The eyes of everyone were on them, not only because Charlie was an up-and-coming artist in the community and the wife of the chief of police, not only because of Hanni's theatrical good looks and her status as a top interior designer, but because how many dinner parties, reserving the upstairs private dining room, included on the guest list three cats?

The smaller upstairs room with its paneling, high-peaked ceiling, and rafters, featured a long skylight along one slanting side, above which heavy clouds drifted, edged with light from the hidden moon. A fire was burning on the brick hearth. Bay windows formed three sides of the intimate dining room, looking down on the village's bright shops and dark oaks. A long table filled the room, draped with a white cloth and set with heavy silver, flowered china, and a centerpiece of red pyracantha berries. On a window seat in one of the bays, among a tangle of flowered cushions, three linen napkins had been laid open beneath three small flowered plates. There, no silverware was required. As the cats settled into their own places and the human diners took their seats, Max Harper hurried up the stairs, giving Charlie a grin, the two as delighted to be together as if they'd been parted for days.

"Dallas is still at it," Max said. "We just got the coroner's prelim."

"That was fast. What did he say?"

Harper's thin, lined face was expressionless, a cop's face that you had to know very well to decipher. He looked irritable, as if some vital question was still begging. Joe watched him so intently that Dulcie nudged him, pretending to nibble a flea. Immediately he stuck his nose in his supper, concentrating on his salmon mousse-the rich, creamy confection was far more delicious than any sweet dessert mousse that so delighted humans. Salmon mousse, in Joe's opinion, was one of the great inventions of mankind.

"Could have been accidental death," Harper said. "Could be manslaughter. No way to tell, yet. He died of blunt trauma, a blunt blow to the head."

"But there wasn't…" Charlie began. "No one…" She grew quiet, letting Max continue.

"As near as Dr. Bern can tell, so far, the blow occurred three or four days ago. There was slow bleeding within the skull where multiple small capillaries had ruptured. The pressure can build up slowly, over time." He took a bite of salad. "Pressure pushing down around the spinal cord. Bern thinks that happened over several days. At the last, while he was serving drinks at the party, the increase of blood became rapid.

"When Bern called, he was still looking for the sudden rupture of an artery or vein, which would have been the final event in a long drawn-out trauma." He spooned more dressing on his salad and took a sip of beer, a frustrated frown touching his face. Harper had quit smoking over a year before, but sometimes Joe saw him itching to reach for a cigarette, his fingers moving nervously, the creases along his cheeks deepening.

"The guy's ID was faked," Max said. "He's been using the social security number of a man who died three years ago. Strangest thing, his prints are not on record in any of the western states. It'll take us a week or two, maybe more, to get fingerprint information for the rest of the country. Department of Justice is always backed up."

Charlie said, "He could have been hit in the head anywhere, then? Several days ago?"

Harper nodded. "There's a rectangular bruise on the side of the head, the shape of a brick. It was already fading, but there were brick particles in the skin. Could have been an accident, maybe he stood up under a low flight of stairs, for instance, and cracked himself on the head. Or it could have happened in a fight, some guy bashed him with a brick. He was using the name Sammy Clarkman. He's worked for George Jolly for three months, has done several catering jobs during that time."

Ryan leaned forward, looking at Max. "Lucinda Greenlaw knows him."

Max gave her his full attention.

"I knew I'd seen him in Jolly's Deli," Ryan said. "I'd forgotten, until just now, that last month when the Greenlaws were here, Lucinda and I were in there, and she knew the guy."

Max listened quietly. The whole table was silent. Beside Joe, the kit was so alert and still that he kept an eye on her-he never knew when the kit would show too clearly her eager enthusiasm.

Lucinda and Pedric, a pair of tall, bone-thin eighty-year-olds, had married just a year before, after Lucinda's husband Shamas died in an unfortunate manner for which one of his nephews went to prison. On the day of their wedding the Greenlaws had adopted the kit. They knew her special talents, they knew that she, like Joe Grey and Dulcie, was not in any way ordinary. The kit's command of the English language, her off-the-wall ideas, and her opinion on almost every subject were, in the eyes of the Greenlaws, deserving of admiration and respect.

Setting out to travel at their leisure up and down the California coast, they had planned to have the kit with them, but she was so prone to car sickness that she had turned wan and miserable. For the kit, the pleasure of travel wasn't worth the distress. The Greenlaws had arranged that she stay for a while with Dulcie and Wilma. Just at the end of September they had returned to the village for a short layover before the holidays, had stored their RV in Wilma Getz's driveway, and, scooping up the kit in a delirium of pleasure, they had checked into a suite at the Otter Pine Inn, the nicest of several village hotels that catered to pets. The kit had spent a delirious week enjoying herself with her human family. And, to the kit's great joy, the elderly newlyweds had decided it would soon be time to fold away their maps of the California coast and build their Molena Point house as they had promised the kit they would do. The tortoiseshell had been ecstatic, a whirlwind of anticipation. When she spoke of the house, her round yellow eyes shone like twin moons, her bushy tail lashed and switched. She was a wild thing filled with exploding dreams: Their own home, a real home, her beloved Lucinda and Pedric forevermore near to her.

But now, what was this? What was the connection between the footloose Greenlaws and the dead waiter? Glancing at Dulcie, Joe intently watched those at the table.

"We had ordered a picnic," Ryan was saying. "We picked it up and spent the day on Hellhag Hill laying out their new house. Seeing how the sunlight falls, how to cut the prevailing winds. That hilltop house could be truly desolate and cold if it isn't set right on the land.

"When Lucinda and I stopped at Jolly's to get the picnic basket, that guy-Sammy-was behind the counter. You could tell he was new, didn't know where things were, like the small plastic containers. I thought maybe he'd just been working in the kitchen, not at the counter, he had to dig around in the cupboard forever to find what he needed.

"Lucinda called him by name," Ryan said. "He didn't seem to recognize her until she reminded him that they'd met in Russian River, and then he seemed pleased to see her. She told me later he'd worked at the inn where she and Pedric stayed this past summer.

"I thought," Ryan said, "that the guy wouldn't have acknowledged Lucinda at all, if she hadn't nudged him. That maybe he didn't want to be recognized."

Harper looked around the table, waiting to see if anyone else knew the man. No one did, and no one else had seen him at Jolly's. Kate had been in the village at the same time that Lucinda and Pedric were, but she hadn't been in Jolly's. Clyde said, "I ordered takeout last weekend, but Jolly's son made the delivery." He glanced inadvertently across the room to Joe Grey, as if wondering if Joe knew Sammy. The tomcat stared, wondering at Clyde's carelessness. The expression on Clyde's face, when he realized what he'd done, was embarrassed and shocked. To cover Clyde's social blunder Joe yawned hugely, pawed at his ear as if it itched, and belched.

That got a laugh. He'd have to talk to Clyde; his housemate was getting careless.

Harper studied Ryan. "Did Lucinda tell you anything about him?"

"She said he'd been interested in a locket she'd bought somewhere north of Russian River. That he'd wanted to know where she got it. She said she'd picked up several pieces of really nice costume jewelry in a little shop up around Coloma. She showed me the gold locket. It was set with topazes, and had a cat's face in the center. Beautifully made, rich, heavy gold all carved in leaves and flowers." She looked up at Kate. "It was, in fact, very like your choker. Same style, that heavy baroque look but… well, but different than baroque."

Kate was very still.

Ryan said, "Could the pieces have come from the same place originally? Old jewelry, some of which found its way to San Francisco? Maybe from the same group, the same jeweler?"

"The appraiser thought my pieces were made in the last century," Kate said. "He reminded me there were a lot of Italian immigrants along the coast then, and that some were fine jewelers."

Max turned to Ryan. "Did Lucinda tell you anything else about Sammy? "

"Not that I remember," Ryan said, pushing back her short, dark hair. Her resemblance to her uncle, Detective Garza, was most striking when she frowned, when she looked thoughtful and serious.

Rising, Harper moved out to the foyer, flipping open his cell phone. The cats could see him standing just at the head of the stairs, punching in a number. Joe counted ten digits. Maybe he was calling Lucinda and Pedric's cell phone. He tried the number twice, waiting for quite a few rings each time, then spoke briefly, apparently leaving a message, and returned to the table.

"It's midnight," Charlie said. "Would they turn off the phone at night?"

Max said, "Maybe they leave the phone in the kitchen at night, and don't hear it?"

"Maybe they checked into a nice inn somewhere," Wilma said, "and left the phone in the RV. They stay at an inn or motel every few nights."

On the window seat, the kit, always jumping to the worst conclusions, moved between Joe and Dulcie, nervously kneading her claws. It took stern stares from both cats to make her settle down again. Above them the sky brightened as the clouds blew past, revealing the thin moon.

"When I mailed the preliminary drawings to them last week," Ryan said, "they were in Eugene." She looked at Kate. "Aren't they coming through San Francisco?"

"They are," Kate said, "so I can show them the Cat Museum. It was nice they were here in the village the same time I was; Lucinda and I hit it right off. I'd never known her well when I lived in the village. Just to speak to. I had no idea she was so… that we'd have so much in common. We're some forty years apart, but that doesn't matter, I feel like I've know her forever."

As you should, Joe Grey thought, exchanging a look with Dulcie. And Wilma glanced across at the cats, knowing exactly what they were thinking: that Kate and Lucinda, because they shared special knowledge, would naturally be friends.

Those who knew the cats' secret had grown to a number that was sometimes alarming to Joe Grey. Secrecy was the only true protection he and Dulcie and Kit had against the wrong people knowing their true nature. They had learned that the hard way. Certainly, if ever the news media found out about talking cats, the fur would hit the fan big time.

Though as for their true friends, it was deeply satisfying to be surrounded by six staunch supporters, to have human allies who understood them. With Clyde and Wilma, Charlie and Kate, Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw playing backup, as it were, they were not alone in the world.

As for the three criminal types who knew their secret, the cats tried not to think about that. If fate were truly to smile, not only convicted killer Lee Wark, but Jimmie Osborne, Kate's ex-husband, would remain behind bars in San Quentin for the rest of their natural lives. And old Greeley Urzey, if indeed he had not accompanied Azrael back to the States, would stay in Central America for the rest of his evil days.

Well, Joe thought, he wasn't going to ruin his supper thinking about those no-goods. The salmon mousse was far too delicious. Licking the creamy confection from his whiskers, he would, like Scarlett, think about his enemies tomorrow. He listened to Ryan, Charlie, and Wilma make plans for an early breakfast and had almost finished his large helping of mousse when a black shadow appeared on the window seat, cast down from the moonlit skylight, a pricked ear and feline profile striking across his plate. Staring up, Joe met the blazing yellow eyes of the black tomcat; the beast's presence made Joe swallow his supper with a shocked snarl.

Beside him Dulcie hissed, crouching and looking up. And beside her the kit cringed low, staring up through the glass where the black tom poised predatory and still, intently watching them, his eyes blazing with the reflected glow of the restaurant's soft lights. In the backlight of the moon Joe could not see the beast's wicked face, only his broadly extended cheeks and flattened ears; surely a cold smile played across that evil countenance. As the three cats stared, rumbling low in their throats, the humans at the table looked up, too; and Charlie caught her breath; Wilma and Clyde half rose as if to chase the beast away, then glanced at each other and sat down again.

Max Harper put his hand on Charlie's arm. "It's only a cat, some cat wandering the rooftops." He looked at her strangely. "What did you think?"

"I… I don't know. It's so big, it appeared so suddenly up there."

The cats knew well that she was thinking the same as they; they could see her flash of shocked dismay that the black tom had returned, before she hid her true feelings and smiled at Max.

"Nerves, I guess," she said softly. "More stressed over the show than I'd thought."

Harper nodded. He did not look convinced. Glancing puzzled at Clyde, he hugged Charlie. She relaxed against him, smiling as if she had been flighty and silly.

Above them Azrael hadn't moved. Joe imagined him highly amused by the stir he was causing-to Joe, and to those who understood Azrael, the presence of the black tom cut through the companionable evening like claws ripping velvet. Beside Joe, Dulcie's green eyes glinted and her low growl was deep with rage, her angry rumble hiding a keen anxiety. But now that the kit's first startled fear had passed, she looked from Joe to Dulcie wide eyed, and extended a soft paw to Dulcie, a silent question. Joe watched her uneasily.

The kit had been told about Azrael; but Kit did not like to take others' word, she wanted to experience every new thing for herself. Joe glanced at Dulcie. The kit would need some talking to.

The delight of the evening, Charlie's joy in her first one-man show, and the friends' happy celebration, had, with the waiter's death, turned chill and worrisome. Now with the dark presence of the half-wild beast who called himself the death angel, Joe Grey felt his skin crawl with an ugly portent of disaster.