He knew there was nothing he could do for Barney but wait and hope. He wasn't used to praying, but he did wonder if a cat prayer would be accepted by whatever powers-if indeed there were any powers existing beyond the pale.
He looked at Dulcie, sitting so regally in the center of the table delicately washing her face. "I thought you took your meals on the rug. When did Wilma start sharing the table?"
She glanced at her bowl, and grinned. "When I told her you ate on the table. She's not about to let Clyde spoil you more than she spoils me."
"The house looks nice," he said, leaping down. He didn't usually notice domestic details, unless Dulcie called them to his attention, but Wilma had recently redecorated. Her niece Charlie had helped her paint the walls white and replace the lacy curtains with white shutters. Wilma had sold the thick rag rugs, too, and bought deep-toned Khirmans and Sarouks that were luxurious to roll on. A dozen of Charlie's animal drawings, framed in gold leaf, graced the front rooms, several of Dulcie and even one of himself, of which he was more proud than he let on. The couch had been re-covered in a deep blue velvet as silken as Dulcie's rich fur, and Dulcie's blue afghan lay across the arm just where she liked it; the three upholstered chairs had been re-covered in a red-and-green tweed. And over the fireplace hung a large oil landscape of the Molena Point hills and rooftops, all vibrant reds and greens, done by Janet Jeannot some years before she was murdered.
He trotted into the living room, following Dulcie, and leaped to Wilma's desk, where the early light flooded in through the white shutters.
Beneath their paws lay a map of Molena Point, unfolded and spread out flat.
"Wilma left this for us?"
Dulcie smiled. Beside the map lay a stack of newspaper clippings about the cat burglar, machine copies of papers Dulcie had read in the library.
Joe scratched his ear. "If Clyde knew Wilma was leaving out maps and news clippings for us-aiding and abetting-he'd have a royal fit." Clyde did not take easily to Joe's playing detective. For a hard-nosed macho type, Joe's housemate worried too much.
"A few measly clippings and a map," she said. "That's hardly aiding and abetting. And Wilma's never helped us before-not that I wanted her to. She didn't have a clue that we were into the Beckwhite murder."
"Maybe she didn't, but she knew about Janet. She told you afterward she was worried."
"But she stayed out of it-she's sensible, for a human." Dulcie stretched, and curled up on the blotter. "You have to admit, Wilma tolerates our interests better than Clyde does."
"She couldn't spend her whole career working criminal cases without getting some sense of perspective."
Some of the clippings were about the local burglaries, but most of them chronicled the cat woman's thieving progress as she moved up the coast from San Diego, working ever farther north as the summer progressed.
"As if the old gal prefers cooler weather," Joe said. "Southern California in the winter, San Francisco for the summer."
Studying reports of the local burglaries, they inscribed a claw mark on the map at each location but found no pattern. The woman seemed to travel back and forth at random, across the wealthier neighborhoods, perhaps picking out whatever house she passed where people were working outside.
"I like this one," he said, pawing at the newspaper clippings. "Shell Beach. She goes right on in while the guy's sleeping.
"Guess she thought, if he'd been to a bachelor party, he'd be so drunk nothing would wake him."
The cat burglar, slipping upstairs into the prospective groom's bedroom on the morning of the appointed wedding, had lifted the matched gold wedding rings, laid out for the ceremony, from the dresser.
She took the rings out of the box, left the closed box on the dresser with two coins stuck into the slots, presumably to give the box some weight. The groom, probably hung over and in a hurry, or dazed with the thought of his coming nuptials, didn't have a clue until he opened the box at the church, to give the ring to the best man, and found instead, two nickels.
Dulcie smiled. "The woman's brazen."
"And she's afraid of cats. When she sees me watching, I scare the hell out of her." He rubbed his whiskers against the shutters, staring out through the glass.
The morning was turning golden, the windows across the street reflecting tiny suns mirrored all in a row. He narrowed his eyes against the glare. "We need a lookout; I've about worn out my pads following false leads, when the cat burglar never did show. The roof of Clyde's shop isn't high enough. I can't see half the hills."
His plan, so far, had been to watch from the roof of the automotive shop as the cat burglar drove around choosing her mark, then nip on over to where she'd parked. Trouble was, she ditched her car blocks away, and sometimes she didn't return to it. And that one time, when he thought she was inside a laundry room, she'd slipped away, or maybe had just outstubborned him. He'd waited what seemed hours, until he was faint from hunger, had left at last in a huff, not sure if she'd given him the slip or was still in there, and so hungry he didn't care. Then the next day, sitting on the breakfast table, he'd read the Gazette article with a list of what she'd stolen, including a miniature cat painting worth a cool two hundred thousand. He'd really muffed that one-he'd felt stupid as dog doo.
"That brown shingle house," Dulcie said, "that tall one up on Haley with the cupola on top. Except for the courthouse tower, it's the highest point in the village."
"Right on."
"And today's Saturday, half the village will be digging up their yards."
They leaped from the desk and out through Dulcie's cat door, and as they headed up Dolores toward Sixth, she couldn't help purring. She loved this sneaky stuff. Spying was a hundred times more fun even than stalking rabbits.
But as they crossed Danner, the wind quickened, swirling along the sidewalk and ruffling their fur, and above them the clouds came rolling. Joe stared up at the rain-laden sky.
"If that cuts loose, no one will work in their yard. If it rains, that old woman will stay home in her bed."
"Maybe it will blow on out, dump itself in the sea."
Crossing Danner, trotting between morning traffic, they angled through a backyard to Haley, could see the brown house rising just ahead, its cupola thrusting up like a child's playhouse atop the wide roof, jutting up into swiftly gathering clouds. There was no tree by which they could reach the roof. As they circled the shingled walls and stared above for a likely windowsill or vine-covered downspout, the wind gusted sharply, pressing them against the bushes with strong thrusts. "Wind gets any stronger," Joe said, "it'll lift us right off the roof, send us flying like loose shingles."
7
The dark and ungainly old house had been built long before earthquake restrictions decreed that no building over two stories be constructed in Molena Point. With its extra height and poor condition, it was a sitting target for ground temblors. At the first 6.0 on the Richter it would likely topple in a heap of scrap lumber and rusty nails. The roof was ragged. The dark, shingled walls looked as if they were eaten with rot. The FOR SALE sign which had been pounded into the mangy front lawn led one to imagine not a new owner and fresh paint but a future with the wrecking crew.
The house stood just a block off Ocean and a block below the green park which spanned the Highway One tunnel. As the cats circled it, pressing through scraggly weeds, they found at the back a precarious rose trellis held together only by the thick thorny vines. Swarming up, climbing three stories, they gained the steep, slick roof, trotted up across it to the cupola. The old shingles beneath their paws were worn soft. Scrabbling up, gaining the high peak, they pushed into the little open cupola-onto a thick white frosting of bird lime that coated the cupola floor. The place stank of bird droppings, despite a fresh wind that swirled through the four arched openings, bringing the smell of rain.