Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat (16 page)

“He’s a Grand Champion.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Well, he’s done better,” Jack looked into the cage.  He seemed nervous, I thought.  I wondered what home life was like now that his lover was dead.  I could see his hands trembling.  He was so pathetic.  She couldn’t seriously suspect him of killing someone.

“He doesn’t look too happy.”

“He used to like shows more than he does now.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Oh, it might be hormones…”

“Hormones again!” she said.

Yeah, I thought.  How are your hormones, Jack?  But I turned away from them, realizing they would know I was listening.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Wesley Taft

Saturday Evening

It was a long and horrid day.  No Max.  Kim was trying to come up with all sorts of ideas to help me get SuMe out from under the bleachers.  We tried all kinds of toys including her favorite, a laser light, to no avail.  She wouldn’t budge.  As the show wound to a close that day, it was going to be another long night for me. 

I was getting angry with Max.  Where was he when we needed him?  For all I knew, he could be on a plane to Spain by now.  He was always talking about Spain.  If he had killed Roxanne, God forbid, that’s where he would go.  He spoke a little Spanish and he sort of had that look about him, too.  In fact he was looking at a book about Spain, the day we met in the Barnes and Noble, four years ago.  It was four years and three months we had been together. 
Reva had taken to him like a duck to water.  That was how I knew it was real.

Reva
! I hoped he was looking after her.  We had left her in the hotel room with the TV on for background noise, to make her feel less lonely.  She had her favorite toys with her, but I knew she would prefer not to be alone.  And she had a bladder of iron.  There would be no accidents in the hotel room.  She would hold it until she burst.

After
Godspell, I stayed home like a good little boy, but things never were quite right.  I knew it wasn’t because of me.  Max still made jokes once in awhile.  He took Reva for long walks in the evening.  But I could tell he was very depressed.  It wasn’t merely the absence of Rusty.  It was the thought that anyone could do such a thing; that we knew people who were capable of such cruelty.  And it was torture not knowing where he was, and if he was all right.

SuMe
had brought Max around a little bit.  His face would light up when he came into a room and she was sitting on the window sill, wagging her stub tail frantically as a bird hopped on the ground outside, or if he caught her suspended on the curtains.  SuMe loved climbing the curtains.  Max said we could let her destroy them, and then replace them with vertical blinds.  He couldn’t bring himself to interrupt her fun.

I pulled my blanket up closer around me and slid down against the wall.

“SuMe!” I said softly, pleading.

She gave no response.

Chapter Forty

Andrew Gilbert

Saturday Night

Hotsy was getting dumped in one ring after another.  It was pitiful.  She was a little low on coat, perhaps, but I couldn’t understand the problem.  It was too bad I hadn’t entered the Somali kittens.  Then at least I would have something else to do.

Dennis and I were having a quiet dinner in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant not far from the show hall.  Normally it was the type of place we would have really enjoyed together.  There were lots of little details; tiny white lights wound around the pillars in the ceiling, which gave the place a soft and pleasant glow. 
A fresh carnation on every table.  Candles.  The music was great – a soft piano, not the typical blaring unbearable Spanish vocalists that you hear in Mexican restaurants.

Our table had the most unusual salt and pepper shaker set – it was quite beautiful.  They were porcelain, in the shape of little Spanish horses, one white and one black.  I picked up the black one, feeling its cold, smooth weight in my hand.  I lay it on the table on its side and rolled it back and forth between my palms.  I took it and spun it, and it became a black blur, whirring in tight circles.  I smiled. 
Hotsy would love this.  I suddenly laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Dennis said.

“I was just thinking about something Hotsy did today.”

“And that was….?”  He was sitting with his head in one hand, elbow on the table, unenthusiastically looking at his plate.

“She told me very clearly which toy she wanted.  It was so funny.  I tried the peacock feather.  She just sat there.  I tried the sparkly toy.  Ditto.  I tried the feathers on a stick.  She took one bat at that and then turned in a circle and sat down.  She sat with her head like this,” I tipped my head way down to the side, and he looked up at me. “So I knew she wanted to play.  So I tried the mouse on the springy cord, and bingo!”

I broke off, laughing, and then continued.  “You know, animals in some ways are so much better at communicating than we are.  They understand us so much better, read us better than we read them.  We make one move to the fridge,
Hotsy is right there.  We put our shoes on, she knows we are leaving.  We’re thinking about other stuff, but animals spend the whole day reading us.  And when they need something, sometimes we just don’t get it.  Just think about the charades they have to go through to get their point across!”

“I don’t have to do charades,” Dennis said. “
Hotsy knows what I want.”

I paused.  “Dennis, have you even been listening?  That’s what I just said.”

He slumped, holding his fork, carefully moving little bits of food with it.

“Don’t pick your beans,” I said.

He used to smile at things like this, but now he didn’t even look up.  His lower lip protruded in a pretty good rendition of an eight-year-old’s pout.

I sighed.  “Dennis, what’s wrong?”

“I’m upset because you don’t trust me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, Andrew.  You know what I mean.”

“That thing with Auntie?
  You’re still upset about that?  I said I was sorry.”

Dennis lay his fork down across his plate.  He stretched his arms up behind his head.  I admired the way his biceps bulged and his fingers twisted into the blonde hair, tugging at the locks in an unconscious manner.

“I’m going to be honest here,” Dennis said. “I get it.  I understand why it is that you are so suspicious.”

“Well, for one thing, I’m not so suspicious, but – go on.  Tell me why I am.”

“You’re insecure, Andrew.  That’s why you steal things.  You thought I wasn’t watching, but I know you have the salt shaker in your pocket right now.”

I pulled the salt shaker out of my pocket and put it back.  “Okay, one point for you.”

“You’re insecure, as anyone in your position would be.”

“In my position?”
  I winked at him.  “I’m not in any position just yet, but I promise you I will be.  I’ll even let you choose.”

“Be serious, please.  I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you.  If you can’t be serious for just two seconds then I’ll-“

“Okay, okay!  I’m sorry!”

“Good.”

“Now what are we being all serious about?  It’s a beautiful night!  The stars are shining!  The music is low!  Romance is in the air!”

He shook his head, sat up, took his napkin and balled it up and threw it down on the table. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Did you kill your aunt?”

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. “What?”

“You heard me.  Just tell me right now if you
offed her.  I want to know.”

“You can’t seriously think I’d be capable –“

“Don’t.  I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think so.  Look.” He leaned in closer, paused as if to rethink his point, but then he continued.  “I’ll be blunt here.  Someone like you doesn’t normally hang on to someone like me, okay?  Everywhere we go, I see people looking at us.  I know what they’re thinking.  ‘What’s he doing with that Dennis, the Queen of Anorexia?’”

I was stunned.  I sat there and I felt my eyes blinking and blinking, but I couldn’t seem to stop them.  They just kept blinking.

He let me digest this humble revelation for a moment, then he continued, “I can see why in this case it would be necessary to wipe out what you would consider to be the competition.  But you don’t have to feel that way.  I’m with you because I love you.”

He leaned back in his chair then, so far that he tipped on the back legs of it.  He knew I hated that.  But I said nothing.

“So, you see,” he added.  “That’s why I’m upset.  You don’t trust me enough to even let me in on something big like this.  Even when I was the cause of it.”

I shrugged.  “Well, Dennis, I guess you’re right.  Frankly, I don’t trust you that much.”

He smiled. “I knew it!”

Chapter Forty One

Ginny Robards

Saturday Night

I was starting to wonder if
Liesl had a secret boyfriend, with the way she was sneaking out at night.  It reminded me so much of the Liesl in, “The Sound of Music”, the way she had sneaked off with Rolfe.  That was, of course, before he had turned traitor.

Roxanne came to a show with a boyfriend several years before.  He was enormously fat, and seemed to have trouble walking.  He wheezed and wobbled as he went past our cage.  I wondered what she was doing with him.  She really wasn’t very nice to him, barking out orders as he attempted to scoop litter for her. 

“Not like that!” she said.  “You’re wasting it!”

I always tried to keep to myself if Roxanne showed up with a man at a cat show.  It was none of my business.  But this time,
Liesl kept staring.  Finally, she leaned over to me.  “Mom,” she said.  “It’s Jimmy!”

I looked up and the man was sitting near Roxanne’s cage, eating a submarine sandwich.  Pieces of lettuce were falling out and clinging to his shirt front.  He was easily well over three hundred pounds, but I recognized him as my golden sweetheart from years prior.  He still had all his hair, and it was beautiful, but he was a tragic figure indeed.  His sides
bulged out over the edges of the chair he was sitting on.   His skin shone with perspiration.

Liesl
said nothing more.  She didn’t suggest I go over to him.  And I couldn’t.  My heart was slamming inside my chest.  But all I could do was sit there while happy memories of Jimmy, and how I had loved him, flooded my mind.

Roxanne looked over at us and smiled.

Chapter Forty Two

Kim Norwich

Sunday

It was creepy how the spectators crowded into the show hall that way.  I knew it was because the word had spread that there had been a murder.  They weren’t all cat lovers.

I made my way through the throng to Larry Cox’s ring, where Miss Preppy busied herself.

“I want to talk to you,” I said.

Tracy looked up from her steward’s catalog, and smiled.  “Can it wait?  We’re just about to start the judging and I have to go to the –“

“No it can’t.  Come with me.  Please.”

It wasn’t that I was concerned about
privacy, I just wanted to get her out of the damn judging ring.  She had too much authority there.  I led her over by the vendor’s booth, near the litter boxes.  She stood before me with her arms folded.  She was wearing a red sweater that was pulled tightly across her ample chest.  She’d been a cheerleader at some point, I just knew it.

“When was your last conversation with Roxanne Moore?”  I asked.

She shifted her weight and looked around impatiently.  “I’ve already been through this.”

“Please just answer the question.”

“I saw her yesterday after Larry’s ring.  I congratulated her on her win.  Period.”

I tried not to be distracted by the unnerving way her eye kept gliding inward.  I noticed, in this light, that her eyes were not blue, as I had thought before.  They were green.  They were quite a lovely color green, too.  It was too bad about the one eye.  But I didn’t like this girl.  There was just something about her that bothered my gut.

“And how did she behave?”

“She was fine.”

“Where did she get that ring that she always wore?”  This was a long shot.  I wasn’t sure that Roxanne even owned that ring.  But Tracy nodded to one of the vendors down the aisle.  “Down there.  Cat’s Cradle.  She has the cat rings.”
”Uh huh, okay.  Thanks.” 

I turned and walked toward the vendor.  I didn’t want to make a big deal out of anything, in hopes that I could get more information out of her later.  She had given me a straight answer, without even suspecting that I would wonder how she knew.  She wasn’t as smart as she thought she was.  In some ways, that could be very helpful.

I went up to the vendor, a jolly-faced woman wearing an enormous hat with a faux fur brim.  “Hi.  Do you remember selling a cat ring with emerald eyes to Roxanne Moore? “

“Yes I do,” she said.  “That was a 14 carat gold Somali ring and Roxanne was going to bring it back to me to have the one eye reset.  The tines had bent and the emerald turned in partway.”  She held up another ring to show me.  “But she came to me on Friday and said the ring was missing.”

“Really?  And it turned up later?”

“Not that I know of.
  She told me to watch for it, because I would know that ring.  It was very unique with those emeralds and the one eye bent.  In fact, we had laughed about it, because it made the cat look cross eyed.”

At that moment it was like a bell was ringing inside my head.  I murmured a thank you to the woman and then turned away.  I had to find Reynolds.  I crossed the show hall at a rapid walk, looking this way and that.  Finally I spotted him near the main entrance.  He was going outside to have a smoke.  I followed him as the door swung shut.  He stood out in the parking lot, back turned to the wind, lighting a cigarette.  I went up to him.

“I know who killed her,” I said.

“Who do you think it is?”

I turned.  “It’s the little cross-eyed ring clerk.  Tracy Pringle.”

He shook his head as if he didn’t agree.  The cocky bastard!

“What’s your evidence?” he said.

I felt my shoulders slump involuntarily under the leather jacket.  “Okay, there’s no evidence, all right?  It’s just a gut feeling.  Roxanne was teasing her about that ring. 
The ring with the crooked eye.  It looks like her eyes!  They’re even green!”

He did that squint, only this time at me.  “What?”

I felt my face heating up.  “She has too many motives.  The competition.  The cheating husband.  Everything points to her.  And she just smells to high heaven.  She stinks like a rat.”

He shook his head again.  His expression was one of bemused tolerance.  It made me want to slug him.

“Look, you’re just going to have to trust my instincts on this,” I said.

“I have no doubt that your instincts bear consideration.  But this is a murder investigation.  We can’t arrest somebody on an eye color hunch.  We need hard evidence.  I’m sorry.”

It was the first time he had ever said anything remotely condescending to me.  I felt more than a professional frustration.  I couldn’t believe the crushing weight of disappointment that swept over me.  I thought he respected me more than this.  I stood there looking at him, feeling like an idiot.  What was it about this guy that made me let my guard down?  That made me so vulnerable?  Now he stood there smoking, gazing across the parking lot and it was obvious that his mind was a million miles away.  I might as well not even be there.