Joe laid back his ears, his yellow eyes narrow.“You’re seeing what you want to see. I’ve never known you to be so gullible. You follow them, listen to Pedric sympathizing with her, and you go all sentimental.”
She hissed, lowering her own ears, switched her tail in his face, and hurried on down the grassy median-then stopped, crouching, looking fearfully around her as sirens screamed from the direction of the fire and police stations.
A rescue unit thundered past, shaking the earth, prompting the cats to cower beneath the bushes. It was followed by three black-and-whites. Joe and Dulcie, their hearing numbed by the blast, watched the heavy vehicles heading fast for the shore.
Following, galloping down the median toward the crowd gathered beside the sandy park, their first thoughts were the same as Charlie’s had been, that someone had drowned, on this chill, foggy morning, some poor soul alone out in the dark sea. Then they saw a man lying on the ground, the paramedics bent over him-maybe a homeless man? They often slept in the park, near the rest rooms.
But as the medics lifted the victim up onto a stretcher, the cats recognized a Molena Point resident, a man they knew only by sight. White hair, baby-soft face that was usually very red, whether from sunburn, excessive scrubbing, or excessive booze, they had no idea. Now he was as pale as a bedsheet.
Trotting in among the crowd between jogging shoes, sweatpants, and bare, hairy legs, the cats stayed away from the uniforms-no need to upset Max Harper, no need to endure his puzzled glances. A confusion of comments assaulted them:
“? stabbed. He was stabbed. I saw?”
“? is he dead?”
“Still alive, can’t you see?”
“? was lying there when that lady found him, I’d have fainted? some transient?”
“No-he lives here, he comes in my shop.”
“? George Chambers. You know, the guy who?”
The cats did a double take. George Chambers? Swerving out of the crowd, they skinned up a cypress tree beside the rescue vehicle, for a better look.
George Chambers, a member of the sailing party when Shamas Greenlaw died. The man who, with his wife, had slept through the attempted rescue, had not awakened until the next morning, when theGreen Ladyput in at Seattle.
From among the thickly massed cypress trunks that rose around them like dark, reaching arms, the two cats got a good look at Chambers. He kept moving his hand, trying to press at the stab wound in his chest that the medics had bound with gauze and tape, the clean bandages already soaked with blood. One of the medics was covering him, with a pair of thick brown blankets.
So this was George Chambers. The passenger Harper had talked with twice about Shamas’s accident, the mild-mannered fellow who had given Harper no indication that either he or his wife had, that stormy night, been awake to observe anything questionable about Shamas’s death.
So why had he been stabbed?
They watched Captain Harper drop a rusty, blood-smeared butcher knife into an evidence bag. As the paramedics lifted Chambers’s stretcher into the rescue vehicle, the cats clawed higher among the arms of the cypress, up into its dark foliage, out of sight ofthepolice. Below them, Lucinda was talking with Officer Davis, a private conversation away from the crowd. The cats could catch no word; there were too many idle onlookers expressing their opinions.
The two cats remained within the branches through several hours of photographing and examination of the crime scene. Among the areas of interest to forensics was a patch of sand where someone had been digging. They watched a kneeling officer brush sand away with a little paintbrush and sift sand tediously through a strainer. Four officers went over the cordoned-off area thoroughly, inch by inch. They bagged some bits of paper, a few loose threads caught on bushes, items that might link to the attacker, or might have been exposed in the damp and rain for months or years. When the cats left the beach they dropped down to the roof of the public rest rooms and to the far side of the building, out of sight of Max Harper. They came away from the Chambers stabbing knowing very little about what had happened. It was not until that evening that they were able to fill in some blanks.
Joe woke from a nap in late afternoon hungry despite his feast of rabbit early that morning; somehow eating wild game always made him want human food to top it off. Half an hour before Clyde was due home, he called Jolly’s Deli and ordered takeout, telling them to charge it and leave the food at the door. He had told Clyde he wouldn’t do this anymore, but he hadn’t exactly promised.
Listening to the delivery truck pull away, he hauled the white paper bag in through his cat door and enjoyed, on the livingroom rug, a nice selection of smoked herring, sliced Tilsit, and cracked crab. It was these little added luxuries that made his peculiar talents well worth the trouble they caused him. When he had finished eating, he pawed the containers back into the bag, licked up all telltale crumbs from the carpet, and carried the bag through the kitchen, out the dog door, and over the back fence.
Glancing at the next-door neighbor’s windows and seeing no one looking out, he stuffed the evidence into their trash. Clyde wouldn’t know a thing until he got his deli bill-then he’d pitch a royal fit.
Clyde didn’t know a thing about the stabbing, either, when he got home from work. Only what he saw in the eveningGazette.After reading the front page he glanced at Joe, but made no offer to call Harper and glean a few additional facts. Joe wasn’t about to ask him for that kind of favor. He’d be back oncheap, cardboard-flavored kitty kibble that hadn’t passed his whiskers since his kitten days in San Francisco.
As it turned out, it was Wilma who got the particulars about the Chambers stabbing, and told Dulcie. Joe found Dulcie on the back fence in her usual perch.“You might as well move your bed and supper bowl up here,” he said, settling down beside her.
She hissed gently and lifted a soft paw as if to belt him.“Something’s going on. Dirken and Newlon are all worked up, really hassling Lucinda. You can’t hear a thing, even with the windows open, with all those women in the kitchen. Can’t they wash the dishes without so much jabber?”
Dirken and Newlon stood before the hearth looking down at Lucinda where she sat in her favorite chair, sipping her after-dinner coffee. She looked drawn into herself, tense, glaring up at them. Both men were talking at once. The cats couldn’t make out their words, but they were apparently interrogating her.
“Chambers is more or less out of danger,” Dulcie told Joe. “That rusty knife had sand from the park on it; forensics is pretty sure that’s what was buried-it might have lain there for years, maybe a dog dug it up, or a transient making his camp, and the attacker found it.”
“Harper’s not assuming that Chambers was stabbed by a transient?”
“Of course he isn’t. You know Harper better than that. Chambers was on the boat that night. Don’t you suppose Harper’s digging, don’t you suppose he’s got his teeth into this!”
“How did you??”
“Wilma happened to drop into the Iron Horse, earlier this evening. A special favor, for yours truly.” Harper often ate at the Iron Horse when he was working late.
“That’s all she found out,” Dulcie said. “It’s all the police know, so far. Wilma said Harper had that tight, preoccupied look he gets when he’s caught up in a tangle of evidence, when he’s digging for the missing pieces.”
She returned her attention to the parlor window.“Dirken and Newlon tried all through dinner to get Lucinda to talk about the stabbing, to tell them what she saw this morning.
“It was Lucinda who called 911. She told them she’d been out walking, saw the man lying there when she came across the park to use that awful rest room, that she thought he was asleep. Then she saw the blood. She ran to the phone, there between the men’s and women’s, but it was out of order. She hurried back to the village and called the station. She told Dirken that the rest is public knowledge-they could read it in theGazette.”