Garza had studied Joe with the same expression that, Joe imagined, he used on a particularly seedy transient arrested for mugging old ladies.“Can’t Clyde take the cat to a kennel?”
“Clyde put the other three cats and his Lab in the kennel. But Joe pines away. He won’t eat. The last time Clyde boarded him, Joe worried and paced until he made himself sick.
“And Wilma Getz couldn’t take him; her cat has the sniffles-like kennel cough, you know.” She had given Garza that lovely bright smile. “I don’t want him to be a problem. It’s just that… I volunteered, I guess. I could take him to a motel.”
Garza snorted.“You know you can’t get a motel on short notice-particularly with a cat in tow.”
Kate had watched Garza diffidently, glancing at Hanni.
It was then Joe made his move.
Leaping down from Kate’s shoulder and looking the detective square in the eye, he had meowed twice, boldly, the way a dog would speak, and lifted a paw to shake hands. Such pandering disgusted him-but he was doing it for Harper.
Garza had widened his eyes and burst out laughing, a hard, bawdy cop’s laugh.
Joe had kept his paw raised, watching the detective with the same keen intensity he had seen in the expression of an attentive German shepherd.
Garza, possibly impressed, certainly amused, had leaned down to shake Joe’s paw. “I guess he can stay. As long as he doesn’t spray the furniture. Who taught him to shake hands?”
Kate said,“Clyde’s taught him a number of tricks. Clyde says sometimes he seems almost as smart as a dog.”
Joe cut her a look.
“Can he roll over?”
“Roll over, Joe. There’s a good boy.”
He had flopped down on the rag rug and dutifully rolled over, an appalling display of submission. He was going to kill Kate.
Amazing what indignities a good sleuth had to endure, for a little inside information.
“He can fetch, too,” Kate said. Wadding up a piece of paper into a twist, she tossed it across the room.
Joe fetched the paper back to her, quickly expanding the list of embarrassments he was going to visit upon Kate Osborne. She had sensibly ended the list of his talents with the fetching routine.
Now, finishing his shrimp, he sat on the window seat washing his paws and observing the human diners, wondering if he could work them for seconds. With a few more“cute” exhibits of caninelike intelligence, Garza might have offered a glass of wine.
Thus began Joe’s surveillance of the man who had been appointed to clear-or to destroy-Max Harper. When, after dinner, Kate and Hanni went for a walk in the village, Garza retired to his desk and turned on his tape recorder. And Joe leaped nimbly onto the protruding end of the mantel, where he had a clear viewof the top of Garza’s desk.
The first interview tape that Garza played, with Dillon’s parents, made Joe feel deeply sad-and then angry.
The Thurwells blamed Max Harper for Dillon’s disappearance.
Even with the heartbreaking tragedy of their missing child, they had no right to blame Max Harper. Harper had treasured that child, had been so proud of her increasing riding skills, of the way she handled Redwing.
He supposed the Thurwells had to blame someone. Supposed that to blame Harper was only human. But Harper had taken such pains with Dillon, had taught the little girl a valuable discipline.
The Thurwells were good to Dillon, but, as Dulcie pointed out, they didn’t seem to see the need a growing child has for some direction in her life. Harper knew about that kind of need. He had given Dillon the goals she’d hungered for, had fostered the skills and the strength of mind that could keep her from going off suddenly on some tangent when she hit her teens.Dulcie said you didn’t have to be a human to recognize that universal need.
When Garza had rewound the Thurwell tape, he played Harper’s statement to Detective Davis, and as the tape ran, he made detailed notes on a large yellow pad.
The detective played back interviews with various personnel at the ranch where the Marners kept their horses, and with the manager and the three waitresses who had been on duty at Cafe Mundo the day of the murder. There was nothing in their answers to conflict with Harper’s statement.
Garza played, three times, his interview with the witness who claimed to have seen Harper following the three riders up the mountain, directly after lunch. The man was a tourist staying in the village, a William Green. He said he had been out biking, that he had recognized Harper because Green had lost his car keys the week before, and had gone into the station to identify them after a foot patrol found them, that Captain Harper had come in while he was signing for his keys, and he’d heard an officer call him by name.
Fishy, Joe Grey thought.
Green was very sure about his details. Joe felt easier when Garza made a note to check out the man’s home address and background.
At twelve-fifteen, Garza called it a night. Kate and Hanni had come in around ten and gone downstairs to bed. Switching off the desk lamp, Garza turned suddenly toward the fireplace, looking directly at Joe.
“For all the attention you’ve given me tonight, tomcat, I’d say you were some kind of snitch.”
Joe’s belly did a flipflop. He purred hard and tried to look stupid. He could feel his paws sweating.
Garza grinned.“Working for Max Harper? And does that mean you’re working for the killer?” Garza’s eyes were as black as obsidian, totally unrevealing. Joe regarded him as coolly as he could manage, considering he had a bellyful of hop-frogs.
“Instead of spying on me, you might make yourself useful. This cottage has been shut up for months. It has to be crawling with mice.”
Garza tousled Joe’s head as he would rough up a big dog, and headed for the bedroom.
Well, maybe it was only Garza’s way. Joe had heard him tease Hanni with the same dry wit, and had seen him ruffle her head, too.
Retiring to the window seat, he curled up, listening to the night sounds through the slightly open, locked-in-place window. The small clock on the kitchen pass-through said 12:19. An occasional car passed on the street below, and later a party of raccoons began to squabble, chittering and hissing, and he heard a garbage can go over. He woke and dozed, and when next he looked at the clock, its illuminated face said 4:40. Something had waked him. His head raised, his ears sharp, he lay listening.
The sound of footsteps reached him softly from up beyond the kitchen windows, and the rustle of bushes, sounds so faint that only a cat would hear.
Dropping to the carpet, he sprang to the pass-through and padded silently across the kitchen counter. Keeping to the shadows behind the bread box, he peered out beside the curtain into the night.
A man stood among the bushes on the hill, a dark shadow nearly hidden among the black masses of foliage and trees, a thin, tall man, looking down into the house.
Was he stoop-shouldered like Lee Wark? Through the glass, Joe could catch no scent, but the look of the man made him choke back a stifled mewl, his voice as tremulous as a terrified kitten. In panic, he dropped to the floor, crouching behind the refrigerator, and stared up at the window, half expecting the man to slide it open and climb in. He was ashamed to admit the fear that swept him; he was scared down to his tomcat paws.
Butwasit the Welshman? The shadow blended so well into the overgrown gardens that he really couldn’t see much. And now, his nose filled with the stink of dust from the refrigerator’s motor housing, he couldn’t have smelled Wark if the man had stood on top of him.
Leaping to the counter, he peered out again, but the figure was gone. He could see only the crowding houses and massed bushes, could detect no human shape within the indecipherable tangles of the night.