His first act, as the master of the house, the sole human inhabitant of the near mansion (they had no live-in household staff), would be to toss that animal back out into the winter night, into the cold world from which it had emerged.
Just thinking about the beast — as Pierce stood at the bedside, taking his wife’s pulse, making sure she was in fact deceased — made his eyes burn, his nose twitch.
No... that was no psychosomatic response: that wretched animal was somewhere nearby!
Pierce turned sharply and there it was: sitting like some Egyptian statue of a feline, the blue-eyed brown beast stared at him, eyes in unblinking accusation.
“Did you witness it, then?” Pierce said to the animal. “Did you see what I did to your mistress?”
It cocked its head at him.
Sniffling, Pierce said, “I liked her... Imagine what I’ll do to you.”
And he hurled the pillow at the creature.
But Clarence leapt nimbly from harm’s way, onto the plush carpet, padding silently but quickly out of the bedroom, a blur of brown.
Pierce ran after the animal, chasing it down the curving stairs, past paintings by American masters, into a vast dark living room where the cat’s tiny claws had damaged precious Duncan Phyfe antiques. The thing scampered behind a davenport and Pierce threw on the lights, pulled out the heavy piece of furniture... but the cat was gone.
For hours he stalked the house, with a rolled-up newspaper in hand, looking behind furniture, searching this nook and that cranny of the expansive, six-bedroom spread, checking in closets and in the basement and the most absurdly unlikely of places... even under the bed where his late wife slept her dreamless sleep.
No sign of Clarence.
By dawn Pierce had given up the chase, figuring the cat had found some way out of the house. Exhausted, he sat in the breakfast nook with a cup of coffee and drinking the bitter brew, wondering if it was too early to phone 911 about the unsettling discovery of his deceased wife next to him in bed. He raised the cup to his lips and the cat jumped up onto the table and stared at him with its deep blue unblinking accusatory eyes.
I saw what you did, the cat seemed to say.
Spilling his coffee, Pierce reached for its throat, but the beast deftly, mockingly, dove to the floor and scampered across the well-waxed tiles and into the living room.
Racing after it, Pierce spent another hour searching high and low, before he finally gave up — and realized the house was in a terrible disarray from his search. It took better than an hour to straighten the furniture, smooth various throw rugs and otherwise make the place look as normal as possible.
At eight o’clock Pierce called 911, working up considerable alarm as he said, “Come quickly! I can’t rouse my wife! She won’t wake up!”
The paramedics came, and Pierce — not even taking time to dress — accompanied them in the ambulance, but Esther was of course D.O.A. at the emergency room. Rigor mortis had begun to sink in. He put on his best distraught act, working up some tears, moaning to the attending physician about his inadequacy as a husband.
“If only I’d been awake!” Pierce said. “To think I was asleep beside her, even as she lay dying!”
This melodrama seemed to convince the doctor, who calmed Pierce, saying, “There’s no need to blame yourself for this, Mr. Hartwell. There’s every indication that your wife slipped away peacefully in her sleep.”
“I... I guess I’ll have to find solace in that, won’t I?”
By eleven a.m., Pierce was back home, driven there by one of the ambulance attendants. He was whistling as he went up the curving stairway, almost racing to the bedroom where he had murdered his wife. He went to the closet to select appropriately somber apparel for the day — there were arrangements to make, starting with the funeral home — and when he reached for his charcoal suit coat, the cat leapt from the shelf above, as if jumping right at him.
But it wasn’t: Clarence scampered up onto the bed and resumed its Egyptian-style posture and again affixed its blankly reproachful blue-eyed gaze at him. Pierce moved slowly toward the animal, which twitched its nose; as if at this bidding, Pierce’s own nose twitched, and began to run, his eyes starting to burn. He leapt at the cat with clawed hands, but the animal adroitly avoided its master’s grasp and again fled the bedroom.
This time Pierce did not follow. He sat on the edge of the bed, at its foot, and caught his breath. Slowly the symptoms of his allergy eased, and he rose and finished dressing.
The cat’s next appearance came when Pierce was seated in his study, at the desk, calling the Ferndale Funeral Home. He was halfway through the conversation with the undertaker when the cat nimbly jumped up onto the desk, just out of his reach, and stared at him as he completed his phone conversation. Gradually the allergy symptoms returned, his eyes watering, burning, puffing up.
The undertaker, hearing Pierce’s sniffling, said, “I know this must be a difficult time for you, Mr. Hartwell.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ballard. It has been difficult.”
And as Pierce hung up the phone, the cat sprang from the desk and scurried out of the room.
Pierce didn’t bother following it.
The police came that afternoon, two of them, plainclothes detectives, a craggy thickset lieutenant named March with eyebrows as wild as cat’s whiskers, and a younger detective named Anderson, ruggedly handsome but also quietly sullen.
Pierce knew Lt. March, a bit, as the onetime Chicago homicide cop had married a wealthy widow several years before, the couple a staple of country club dances, where the detective was viewed as a “character” among the city’s captains of industry and inheritors of wealth.
They sat in the study, with Pierce behind the desk, the two men across from him, as if this were a business appointment. Pierce hadn’t offered to take their topcoats and neither men took them off, as they sat and talked — a good sign. This wouldn’t take long.
“Pierce,” Lt. March said, with a familiarity that wasn’t quite earned, and with a thickness of speech that reflected a stroke the detective had suffered a year before, “I hope you know that you have our deepest sympathy.”
By “our,” Pierce wasn’t sure whether March was referring to Mrs. March or his fellow detective, the younger man whose unblinking gaze seemed to contain at least a hint of suspicion.
“I appreciate that... Bill.”
March smiled; one side of his face seemed mildly affected from that stroke, and his speech had a measured manner, as if every single word had to be cooked in his mind before he served it up. “There is the formality of a statement. We can do that here, if you’d like. Save you a trip to the Public Safety Building.”
“Certainly.”
Anderson withdrew a small tape recorder from his topcoat pocket, clicked it on and set it, upright, on the edge of the desk. The recorder emitted a faint whirring.
“When did you discover that Esther had passed away?” March asked.
“When I woke up,” Pierce said, and his nose began to twitch.
“What time was that, would you say?”
“Well, just minutes, probably moments, before I called 911. I didn’t look at the clock.” His eyes were running now; that cat — that cat was somewhere in this room! “Don’t you record those calls?”
“Yes.”