"Oh, Mama, she didn't…"
"Anyway, you don't need to argue. I won't do it. I don't want to be a part of it."
"But Mama, don't you see? You are a part of it. If you don't testify, they could convict the wrong person."
Dulcie crouched, very still. The morning was full of surprises.
A staple gun.
Janet had stapled her canvases. She hadn't used thumbtacks.
Then what was that thumbtack that had gotten stuck in her paw? That thumbtack with the burned wood and blackened canvas sticking to it? What were all those thumbtacks scattered among the ashes? There were hundreds of them, many with scraps of canvas clinging. Hundreds of fragments of paintings…
She caught her breath. Mama stared down at her. She pretended to scratch at a flea. Those tacks were not from Janet's paintings they were from someone else's canvases.
Those were not Janet's paintings that had burned. Janet's paintings had not been in the studio when it burned.
"It wouldn't hurt your heart, Mama, just to talk to Joseph Grey. If I call him back, won't you just speak to him? He could take your deposition right here. And even if you did have to go to court, they'd make it easy for you. A special car, probably a limo with a driver. Get you right in and right out, not make you wait. I'll bet it wouldn't take forty-five minutes. We could stop for ice cream afterward."
"Don't you patronize me, young lady. Besides, someone else must have seen her van besides me. Why don't they go to the police?"
"It was two in the morning, Mama."
"It was Saturday night. Young people stay up late."
"Our neighbors aren't that young, Mama. At two in the morning they're asleep."
"Yes, and no one cares if an old sick woman can't sleep. No one cares about an old woman sitting alone in the night-except to get information out of her." She stroked Dulcie so hard that static sparks flew, alarming them both. "Call him back," Mama said. "Tell him I won't."
But when Frances tried, she had the wrong number. It was not an attorney's office, and no one had ever heard of Joseph Grey.
Frances looked totally puzzled. "I know I wrote it down right. You heard me, I repeated it back to him." Frances was not the kind of woman to record a phone number wrong. As she dialed again, Dulcie jumped down, trotted into the laundry room, and leaped to the open window.
And she was out of there. Racing across the yard straight for Janet's house. She could see Joe in Janet's window: Felis at Law Joseph Grey, his ears sharply forward, his white markings bright behind the glass, his mouth open in a toothy cat laugh.
14
The cats fled down the black, burned hills, down into the tall green grass careening together, exploding apart, wild with their sudden freedom. Four days hanging around the Blankenships' had left them stir-crazy, dangerously close to the insane release people called a cat fit. Flying down, dropping steeply down, they collapsed at last, rolling and laughing beneath the wide blue sky. Dulcie leaped at a butterfly, at insects that keened and rustled around them in the blowing grass; racing in circles she terrorized a thousand minute little presences singing their tiny songs and munching on their bits of greenery, sent them scurrying or crushed them. "I wonder if Mama gave in-if she let Frances call the police." She grinned. "I wonder if Frances tried again to phone Attorney Joseph Grey."
She stood switching her tail. "If that was Janet's van that Mama saw, the Saturday night before the fire, what was she doing? She drove up to San Francisco that morning. Why would she come home again in the middle of the night, load up her own paintings? Take them where? If there'd been a show, her agent would have said."
She looked at him intently. "Those weren't Janet's paintings burned in the fire, so whose paintings were they?"
"Could Janet have hidden her own paintings, to collect the insurance?"
"Janet wouldn't do that. And there wasn't any insurance." She lay down, thinking.
"Of course there would be insurance," he said. "Those paintings were worth…"
Dulcie twitched her ear. "Janet didn't insure her work."
"That's crazy. Why wouldn't she? How do you know that?"
"Insurance on paintings is horribly expensive. She told Wilma it costs nearly as much as the price of the work. The rates were so high she decided against it, said she tried three insurance agents and they all gave the same high rates. Wilma says a lot of artists don't insure."
"But Wilma…"
"Wilma has that one painting insured, with a rider on her homeowner's. That's a lot different."
She was quiet a moment, then flipped over and sat up, her eyes widening. "Sicily Aronson has a white van. Don't you remember? She parks it behind the gallery beside the loading door."
"So Sicily took the paintings, at two in the morning? Killed Janet and took her paintings, to sell? Come on, Dulcie. Why would she kill Janet? Janet was her best painter, her meal ticket."
"Maybe Janet planned to leave her. Maybe they had a falling-out. If Janet took all her work away…"
"You've been seeing too many TV movies. If Sicily tried to sell those paintings, if they came on the market, Max Harper would have her behind bars in a second.
"And Beverly wouldn't take them, she inherited Janet's paintings." He licked his paw. "And if there wasn't any insurance, Beverly had nothing to gain." He nibbled his shoulder, pursuing a flea. Even with the amazing changes in his life, he still couldn't shake the fleas. And he hated flea spray.
"Maybe," she said, "Sicily could sell them easier than Beverly. If she did, she'd keep all the money, not have to split with Beverly. With Janet dead, and with so many paintings supposedly destroyed, each canvas is worth a bundle."
"Whoever has them could sell them. Beverly. Sicily. Kendrick Mahl."
"But Mahl had witnesses to everything he did in San Francisco."
Mahl had gone out to dinner with friends both Saturday and Sunday nights, leaving his car in the hotel parking garage. Mahl lived in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge. He had driven into the city Saturday afternoon and checked into the St. Francis; the hotel was full of artists and critics. In the city he had taken cabs or ridden with friends.
Dulcie scowled. "I guess anyone could have rented a van. When we know who was in that van, we'll know who killed her. I'll bet Detective Marritt didn't take one thumbtack, one scrap of the burned paintings as evidence."
"Or maybe Marritt took thumbtacks but didn't bother to find out how Janet stretched her canvases. You'd think someone would have told him. Wouldn't Sicily?"
"Unless she didn't want the police to know." Dulcie examined her claws. "It'll take a lot of phoning, calling all the rental places, to find who rented a white van that night."
"Dulcie, the police will check out the rental places, as soon as they know about the van, and about the missing paintings."
"Where would someone hide that many paintings?" she said speculatively.
He sat up, staring at her. "You think we're going to look for those canvases? You think we're going to find two million dollars' worth of paintings? Those paintings could be anywhere, a private home, an apartment, another gallery… What do you plan to do, go tooling up and down the coast maybe in your BMW, searching through warehouses?"
She smiled sweetly, cutting her eyes at him. "We could try Sicily's gallery."
"Sure, Sicily's going to have those big canvases right there under the cops' noses. And don't you think Captain Harper deserves to know that the paintings are gone, that they weren't burned?"
"It would take only a few minutes, just nip into the gallery and have a look. If we find them, we'll be giving Captain Harper not just a tip, but the whole big, damning story." She grinned. "Not just a sniff of the rabbit but the whole delicious cottontail." Her eyes gleamed green as jewels. "We can slip in through the front door just before Sicily closes, stay out of sight until she locks up."