“I don’t understand why people buy all these horrible machines, Max. Haven’t they learned anything from watching The Terminator?”
I smiled. “The Terminator is just a movie, Dooley. It’s not real.”
“It looked very real to me,” he said.
I heaved a big sigh of contentment. A cat really doesn’t need much, you know. My belly was full, and so was my bowl, I had a nice roof over my head, my best friend was right next to me, my human was watching television on a couch nearby, where I could keep an eye on her, so as far as I was concerned everything was A-okay with the world.
Chase walked in and sank down onto the couch. “You’ll never guess what happened,” he said.
“What?” asked Odelia, turning down the volume on the movie she was watching.
“Vale and Carew tried to escape. They knocked out the two priests they’d asked to help them come to terms with their misdeeds, donned their clothes and walked out!”
“But you caught them, right?”
“I didn’t catch them—your grandmother did, along with her cronies of the neighborhood watch.” He placed his hands behind his head and leaned back. “What a day. At least they’re behind lock and key, and this time there will be no visits for their spiritual nourishment.”
“Did you get Ida’s Picasso back, and the other stuff they stole?”
Chase shook his head. “Nope. They’re playing dumb. Insist they’re innocent. But they’ll crack sooner or later. Alec will make sure of that. And in the meantime it’s back to insurance fraud for me.”
“Poor baby,” said Odelia. “I can’t believe my uncle is letting you handle what must be the most boring case in police history.”
“It’s not that bad,” said Chase. “But it’s definitely not as exciting as chasing a couple of crooks dressed up like Jehovah’s Witness elders. Here, did you see this video?”
He took out his phone and showed Odelia a video. Unfortunately I couldn’t see from my vantage point, and I was frankly too lazy to get up.
Lucky for us, Odelia carried Chase’s phone over to us and showed us the video. It was clearly shot by someone with an unsteady hand, but it was still entertaining to watch: Johnny and Jerry running at full tilt, chased by a motley crew of crime fighters: Dan Goory, Charlene Butterwick, Uncle Alec, Gran and Scarlett. And the ones who actually caught them were Wilbur Vickery and Father Reilly!
“A regular team effort,” I said.
“Yeah, the watch did good today,” said Odelia as she handed Chase back his phone.
The lanky cop yawned and stretched. “I’m beat. Early to bed tonight, babe?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty bushed, too. Let’s make it an early night.”
And as the humans turned in for the night, Dooley and I were only just getting started. But first I needed a quick power nap, too.
Marge was still smiling when she thought back to the cats and their heroic fight with the Roomba. She should have been upset that they managed to destroy the thing, but she wasn’t. The Roomba wasn’t a real Roomba but a cheap knockoff she’d found in a store off Main Street and had bought for a bargain. Odelia had suggested getting it fixed but she thought that was probably not a good idea. If the cats had destroyed it once, they would probably do it again. Besides, the poor darlings were clearly terrified of the machine.
And as she walked into the bedroom, much to her surprise she found her husband seated on the bed, a beatific smile on his face and apparently staring off into space.
“Hey, honey. Boy, do you look happy.”
Tex seemed to wake up as if from a dream. “Mh?”
“I said that you look happy.”
“Oh, it’s because I finally found the perfect place to put my Metzgall.”
The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees as Marge’s mood plummeted. She hated that Metzgall with a vengeance. Tex had paid twenty-five thousand bucks for it, claiming it was the perfect investment, and a bargain at that price. She’d wanted to throttle him when she found out what he’d done with their hard-earned savings: spent it on an ugly painting of a hideous troll.
Sometimes she didn’t understand her husband. Really she did not.
And it was when she closed the bedroom door and discovered that the painting of the troll was hanging on the wall behind the door that she yelped in horror and surprise.
“What the…” she said, staring at the thing. So that’s what Tex had been looking at.
“I saw it in a documentary,” said her husband, sounding proud of himself. “Thieves will never find it, as the bedroom door is always open except at night, and we can still enjoy it by simply closing the door and looking at it from the bed.”
Marge stared at her husband. “You want me to look at that thing from the bed? Are you nuts? I’ll have nightmares knowing that gnome is staring at us all night.”
Tex’s smile faltered. “You don’t like it? It is a real Metzgall.”
“When did I ever give you the impression that I like that horrible thing?” she said, her voice rising both in pitch and volume. “I hate it. I want you to give it back to this Metzgaff guy.”
“Metzgall,” Tex corrected her. “And I don’t think he’ll take it back.”
“I don’t care! It’s revolting to look at and I want it gone. Out of my sight!”
“All right, all right,” said Tex, getting up from his perch on the foot of the bed. “Where do you want me to put it? The basement is too humid, the attic too dusty, the kitchen too smelly, and in the living room it’s going to attract too much unwanted attention.”
“Put it in the garden shed,” she suggested.
“But honey!”
“Or bury it for all I care. I want it gone—out of my life—gone, you hear?”
Tex looked like a kicked puppy when he took down the painting and carried it out of the bedroom. Marge shook her head. Men. They really were impossible sometimes.
Chapter 25
As we walked out of the house, to go for our midnight stroll, strange noises drew our attention to the next-door backyard. And even though we are by no means guard dogs, we decided to go and have a look anyway. We may not be watchdogs but we are very, very curious, in case you hadn’t noticed.
“Do you think it’s burglars, Max?” asked Dooley when we set paw into the backyard belonging to Marge and Tex. The noise was coming from the garden shed, and for a moment I thought that Dooley just might be right. Then again, what burglar would target a garden shed? Unless hoping to fetch a nice price for a bunch of gardening tools that have seen better days and a lawnmower that has been in service for so long it will fetch more when sold as an antique than an actual mower.
But still we approached the shed, anxious to find out what was going on. When we took a peek inside, we discovered to our surprise that it was none other than Tex who was making all the noise. He was holding up a painting of a garden gnome for some reason, positioning it here and there, apparently looking for the perfect place to put it.
The best place to put it, I could have told him, was six feet under, although subjecting moles and earthworms and other creatures of the freshly dug soil to the hideousness of the painting would probably be considered cruelty to animals so that was out, too.
I’d never understood Tex’s obsession with gnomes, and this was taking his love for all things garden troll to new and increasingly worrisome heights.
“What is he doing, Max?” asked Dooley.
“I think he’s looking for a place to hang up his painting,” I said.
“Did he paint it himself, you think?”
“Odelia told me he bought it off a guy named Jerome Metzgall, who specializes in gnome art. He paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it and now Marge is upset with him.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money for a painting,” said Dooley.
“It is. Tex reckons it’s an investment, and he’ll double his money in due course.”