“Either a full bird colonel or some kind of law enforcement. My guess would be our detective from San Francisco. Garza’s due to arrive this morning.”
They followed him, padding along the curb and through sidewalk flower gardens until the broad-shouldered stranger entered Molena Point PD. As Garza stepped in through the glass door, the cats beat it into the courthouse, whose front door was easy enough to claw open, galloped down the hall into the squad room, and took cover under Max Harper’s desk.
They couldn’t see much but the jungle of desk and chair legs and officers’ shoes spreading away across the linoleum, but they could hear Garza working the room, introducing himself to individual officers. They listened with interest to the causal wariness exhibited by Harper’s men and women as they tookGarza’s measure.
“Talk about a roomful of tomcats,” Joe said, grinning.
“So what would you expect? Garza was sent here to dotheirjob and possibly to help prosecute their chief.”
Joe slipped out from under the desk far enough to see Garza sitting at Detective Davis’s desk with Davis and Ray. They seemed to be going over field notes, Garza reading his copy and asking questions. Joe felt nearly invisible, with all officers’ eyes on the threesome while trying to look busy with their own affairs. When at last Garza headed for Harper’s desk, carrying the detectives’ thick sheaf of reports and photographs, Joe was deep under the drawer section beside Dulcie.
Sheltered from Garza’s feet, they dozed as the detective shuffled papers. Periods of silence indicated that he was reading. He rose occasionally to refill his coffee cup from the large coffeemaker on the credenza behind him. Joe was soon cross-eyed with boredom.
They had meant, coming out of the alley, to head for Dulcie’s house and make that call to Marin County-Joe had a feeling about that phone number. The same kind of feeling as when, though he couldn’t see or smell a mouse, he knew the little beast was close. He wanted to make that call in an empty house, without any human listening, and Wilma would be atwork.
Telephones still amazed him-sending his voice over that unseen cable to manipulate someone invisible at the other end.
That joining of humanity’s electronic wonders and his own remarkable feline skills gave him a huge sense of power. A real twenty-first-century, state-of-the-art jolt.
And right now, while they marked time on the dusty linoleum under Harper’s desk, learning nothing of value, that Marin phone number bugged him.
They listened as Garza arranged to see the stable manager where the Marners had kept their horses, and to see several Marner family members who had arrived soon after the tragedy and were staying in the village. He set a time to see Charlie Getz and to interview the staff at Cafe Mundo. The problem with all this was that Joe and Dulcie would be privy to nothing, no more inside line to what was happening than if they’d been a thousand miles from Molena Point.
Garza told Lieutenant Brennan that he would talk with the Marners’ neighbors in their condo building, and he made an appointment for that evening with Dillon Thurwell’s parents. That would be a hard call, for Dillon’s mother and father to talk with police again, when there was only that one slim lead to finding Dillon, only the lost barrette.
At least they knew she’d escaped the killer at one point. But nothing after that. Nothing more than that one small piece of jewelry that had been described in the paper just after the murder, the barrette Dillon’s mother said the child had been wearing when she left the house Saturday morning. Nothing else to give them hope that Dillon was still alive.
Garza made no appointment with Joe’s housemate, though Clyde was Harper’s closest friend. Other than this omission, the detective seemed to be starting out in an efficient and businesslike manner. Maybe he was going to descend on Clyde’s place unannounced, hoping to catch Harper off guard.
When Garza finished with the phone, he nodded to Detective Davis and Ray, and the three of them headed back to the conference rooms, Garza carrying the reports Davis had given him, as if he meant to go over the meat of the case in strict privacy. The cats were crouched for a swift race down the hall to listen, when they heard the conference room door slam closed.
Slipping into the shadows of an adjoining room, they pressed their ears uncomfortably to the wall-cats’ ears are not made for wall-pressing; it hurts the delicate cartilage. Even with their superior hearing, they could make out only indistinct murmurs, and the conference rooms had no windows that might be open to the bright morning. Their source within Molena Point PD had dried up faster than canned tuna left in the sun. Sometimes even a cat, the most facile and adept of snoops, gets outshuffled.
“Come on,” Joe said, and he headed down the hall, through the courthouse, dodging behind the heels of a pair of attorneys-you could always tell attorneys, they had briefcases growing out of their hands-and down the street to Dulcie’s house, hot to get at the phone.
14 [????????: pic_15.jpg]
JOE AND DULCIEspied the kit in Jolly’s alley as they were headed for Dulcie’s house and the phone. The kit sat smugly beneath the jasmine vine beside an empty paper plate.
Dulcie nudged her.“Come on, kit. Is that your second breakfast?”
The kit smiled. Her face smelled of caviar and roast lamb.
The two cats hurried her along out of the alley and down the street-like herding fireflies. She was everywhere, up the bougainvillea vines that climbed the shop walls, up into the oaks and across the roofs and down onto balconies and awnings. When they nosed her through Dulcie’s cat door, she charged at a plate of scrambled eggs that Wilma had left on the floor and inhaled yet another meal.
“I saw Wilma walking to work,” she said between bites. “She looked elegant. Those beautiful pale jeans and that new black blazer and cashmere sweater.”
“Just jeans,” Dulcie said. “Not soveryfancy, kit.”
“Elegant,” the kit repeated. And Dulcie had a sharp sense of the kit’s fascination with beautiful clothes-a hunger perhaps as keen as Dulcie’s own covetous craving. She wondered if the kit had ever stolen a silky garment from some house when she traveled with that rebel band of homeless cats. Wondered if the kit, just as she herself, had ever innocently lifted a silk nightie from someone’s clothesline or nipped in through an open window to snatch a lacy teddy or a pair of sheer stockings.
Well,Dulcie thought,Idon’t do that anymore.
At least, hardly ever.
She missed having those lovely garments to snuggle on. Oh, Wilma gave her pretty things. But the stolen ones were nicer.
She was ashamed of her failing, and secretly reveled in it. She didn’t consider herself a thief. She always gave back the stolen items, in a way-leaving them in the box on the back porch that Wilma had provided, where the amused neighbors knew to retrieve their “misplaced” clothes.Notstealing, she thought, following Joe through the dining room and onto Wilma’s desk.
Joe pushed the phone from its cradle, squinched his paw small, and punched in the San Rafael number. He was unusually nervous. The kit bounced up beside them to watch, round-eyed. And the three cats bent their heads, listening to the measured ringing.
A man’s gravelly voice. “Year. Alby? That you, Alby? You’re two minutes early.”
Joe said,“Is this Davis Drugs?”
“What the hell? Who’s this? Who you calling?”
“Davis Drugs.” Joe repeated the number he’d dialed.
“You got the wrong number, buster. Get off the friggin’ line.”
Joe pressed the disconnect, scowling.“That didn’t net much.”
“Didn’t it?” said Dulcie. “Wait a few minutes, and try again.”
He waited, then punched the redial, checking the little screen to be sure he’d dialed the right number the first time. The kit watched every move.