It’s a wonder an orchestra didn’t pop up by the driveway right then with a rousing rendition of “The William Tell Overture,” because remembering the kitty treats made me remember the two whopping twenty-pound bags of organic cat food that had been in the cabinet with the treats. Forty pounds of dry cat food would be like money in the bank for a retired clown on a fixed income, and it would be a steady source of meals for Leo.
I said, “There’s cat food at Laura’s house, and a lot of other things you’ll need. I’ll get it while you finish making the bed.”
He looked anxious. “Is that all right? To go in her house?”
I shrugged. “It’s Leo’s house too, and Celeste officially gave me authority to find a home for him. As far as I’m concerned, that includes handing his food and toys over to his new owner.”
“Well, if you think it’s all right.”
From the Bronco, Leo made a loud and indignant yowl. It was the first sound he’d made, and both Pete and I hurried to the car to see what had provoked him. He was poking his paws through the air holes in the carrier, and from the low growling noise he was making, I didn’t think he was going to be quiet much longer.
Pete said, “I don’t want him to think I’m keeping him locked up in here. That’s not a good beginning for us.”
I grunted and reached inside the Bronco for the carrier.
I said, “I’ll take him with me.”
“Well, maybe that’s good. He can say goodbye to his old home before he moves to his new one.”
I grunted again. I was too tired and too hungry to speak. As I trudged down the sidewalk to Laura’s house with the cat carrier in my hand, a neon sign inside my head was flashing Will This Friggin’ Day Never End?
32
Laura’s house looked smaller in the dark. Security lights on each side of her front door cast glittering reflections on the glass panes, but dull grayness lay behind the glass. As I unlocked the door and pushed it open, I had a momentary apprehension that a passing motorist might see me going in and think I was an intruder.
Out of habit, I locked the door behind me, but I didn’t switch on a light. I might have had every legitimate right to be there, but I didn’t want to call attention to it. An observer looking through the glass-paned front door and seeing me inside might get suspicious and call the cops, and then I’d have to explain the whole business. I was in no mood to explain myself to anybody.
The house had the strange neutral feel that a place gets when its life odors have been eradicated. Crime-scene cleaners not only remove all traces of blood and body fluids, they destroy all possibility of bacteria and odor with a pall of ozone, then cover up the ozone with a spray that smells like cherry-flavored cough syrup.
As I walked through the shadowy living room, Leo made a noise that seemed to end in a question mark.
I said, “I know it smells different, but this really is your house.”
At the end of the living room, where it made an L to a dining area next to the kitchen, I turned the corner and set Leo’s carrier on the bar between kitchen and dining area. Out of sight of the front door, I felt safe to flip on overhead kitchen lights.
Leo whined and scrabbled at the roof of his carrier.
I said, “We’ll just be a minute, and then you’re going home with Pete. You’ll like him, he’s a sweet guy.”
While Leo growled and pushed at the carrier’s top, I searched for his food and water bowls. I found them in the utility room between kitchen and garage, where somebody had neatly stacked them on the dryer. I carried them to the bar and put them down beside the carrier. As I did, it occurred to me that it was going to be awkward, to say the least, to carry the bowls, two twenty-pound bags of cat food, and the cat carrier.
I said, “Damn, I should have brought the Bronco.”
Okay, no big deal. I’d just have to take Leo back to the Bronco and drive to Laura’s driveway, then come in and lug out the bags of cat food and the bowls. Except I’d have to let Pete know what I was doing so he wouldn’t get anxious when I left in the Bronco. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes it’s a real pain in the butt to play well with others.
With a plan in place, I went to the pull-out cabinet where I’d seen the bags of cat food. Sure enough, there they were, each weighing twenty pounds. There were also several jars of vitamins, along with a bunch of twenty-ounce bags of sun-dried bonita treats. Laura had definitely believed in having plenty of stuff on hand, which was good. Cats love those fish flakes, and Pete would be glad to have them. They made a rather large heap when I piled them on the bar next to the carrier. They were also too slippery to carry by hand, so I went looking for a bag to put them in.
While I was exploring the cupboards in the utility room, Leo popped open the top of the carrier, leaped to the floor, and streaked out of sight.
Under my breath, I said, “Shit.”
I had failed to take into consideration that Havana Browns are strong muscular cats, not to mention smart. Leo had used his brain and his muscles to open the carrier, which made him a lot smarter than me. Furthermore, every cat has its favorite hiding place, and Leo was bound to have his. Now, lucky me, I’d have to coax a stressed cat out of its hiding place.
I found a stash of plastic grocery bags and filled one with the packets of bonita flakes. Leo’s food and water bowls went in another bag. I didn’t intend to take Leo’s litter box. I had plenty of temporary boxes in the Bronco and Pete could use some of them until he got a permanent one. All I had to do was get the bags of dry food out and persuade Leo to play nice with me.
Back at the pull-out cabinet, I leaned down and lifted one of the bags. That sucker felt like a lot more than twenty pounds, but I was so tired a five-pound weight would have seemed heavy. I carried it to the bar and plopped it beside the carrier. I looked again at the description of the contents printed on the bag. Chicken and lamb nuggets, it said. Twenty pounds, it said, but I could have sworn it was a lot heavier. It was also oddly rigid. Dry cat food is usually packed a bit loosely to allow for the contents to slosh around and not break through the bag. When you set it on the floor, it sits with a certain relaxed slump, like a woman sits when she doesn’t care if she bulges in spots.
I started to get the other bag from the cabinet, then turned back to check the first bag again. The top inch had been neatly folded over and stapled. That seemed peculiar, because it seemed to me that most bags of cat food were glued at the top. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe some were glued and some were stapled, and what difference did it make? It didn’t make an iota of difference to a cat, and it shouldn’t make any difference to me.
I got the other twenty-pound bag, and as I lifted it out I had an image of Laura Halston lifting her model’s bag after she’d stuffed it with money from Martin Freuland’s bank vault. The image was so clear and so sudden that I went to my knees with the shock of comprehension. With the bag between my knees, I examined the stapled top. The staples had been driven in with careful exactness, but they didn’t appear to have been done by a machine. Some human had laid those staples in that folded-over top, and the human had probably been Laura Halston.
I stood up and got a table knife from a drawer, then knelt on the floor and gently used the knife to pry the staples out. Carefully unfolding the bag’s top, I peered inside. It took a moment to recognize what I was seeing, because I’d never seen anything like it. Two rows of brown paper bands, each band imprinted with $10,000, each wrapped around a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Six bands in all, holding sixty thousand dollars, and that was just the top layer. I sat down on the floor and pulled out one of the stacks. It was surprisingly thin, not even an inch thick. The bag itself was about twenty inches tall. I did some fast arithmetic and came up with around a million dollars in the bag. And there were two bags, which meant Laura had been hiding around two million dollars in plain sight in her kitchen.