Brutus made a throwaway gesture with his paw.“That’s peanuts, Max. I’m talking major crime prevention here. We’re going after the big guns. The people that are laying waste to our community, preying on the innocent and destroying the social fabric of this town.”
“Well, I think catching Rosa’s blackmailer is a good start,” I said.
Brutus gave me a nasty look.“I think you hit your head harder than you thought last night, cause this kind of thinking is indicative of some major brain damage right there.”
“Oh, no,” said Dooley, slapping a paw to his mouth. “Max, you have to get an MIR as soon as possible!”
“You mean an MRI?”
“That one, too.”
Just then, the doorbell chimed, and I was glad, for it saved me from having to contend with Brutus’s cat army, and Dooley’s concern for my apparently very feeble brain.
Odelia stirred, and so did Chase, but it took another couple of attempts by our unknown visitor to finally wake them sufficiently to crawl from underneath the covers and head down the stairs to open the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Odelia without much enthusiasm. And when I arrived downstairs to see who this could possibly be, I saw it was none other than Uncle Alec.
“I’m afraid there’s been a murder,” said the Chief as he took in his frumpy-looking niece.
Chase, also stomping down the stairs, and looking much too refreshed for a man who’d only turned in late last night, frowned and said, “A murder? What do you mean?”
Uncle Alec sniffed the air.“Is that coffee I smell?”
The hint was obvious, and while a sleepy-looking Odelia popped a capsule into the coffeemaker, Chase had already popped back upstairs and moments later we heard the shower running.
Brutus might be built like a brick wall, but so was his human, and all that brick needed regular maintenance to keep it in excellent shape. And while Uncle Alec took a seat at the kitchen counter, and proceeded to inform his niece about this most recent crime, the rest of the cat contingent made their way down, and I told Brutus, “There’s been a murder. Time to instruct your lieutenants and your soldiers to start looking for clues and such.”
But Brutus held up his paw.“I’m afraid I don’t have time to deal with that right now, Max. You’ll have to handle this one on your own, I’m afraid.”
“Oh? But I thought—”
He shook his head.“You don’t understand what an enormous undertaking the Baker Street Cats is, do you, Max? First we need to put an entire infrastructure in place. There’s meetings we need to conduct, people that need to be trained, an organization that needs to be built. It will take time before we’re fullyoperational. But once we are, you better watch out, for here we come.”
But instead of coming, he was going, disappearing through the cat flap.
I glanced up to Odelia.“Is it all right if Dooley and I tag along, Odelia?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said, having trouble keeping her eyes open. That’s what you get when you spend half the night trying to catch a blackmailer: you look like a train wreck in the morning. And since Odelia has never been a morning person to begin with…
Chase now came thundering down the stairs, looking like the Energizer Bunny.
“Tell me all, buddy!” he yelled, causing Odelia to wince and shake her head.
Chapter 8
Turns out the victim of this latest crime had come to a sticky end in our very own street. And so two Harrington Street Cats—me and Dooley—found ourselves a couple of houses down from the one we call home, and staring at the body of the recently deceased.
The house itself was of the dilapidated kind, and not nearly as nice as most of the houses on the block. Then again, once upon a time probably all the houses had been like this: a little cramped and not exactly up to modern specs. But over the years houses had been torn down and rebuilt, and others renovated. Willie Dornhauser’s house had escaped this remodeling craze, and I would like to say that it had stood the test of time but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Mr. Dornhauser, too, looked a little dilapidated, and I’m not saying this merely because he was dead. His hair was unkempt, and so were his clothes, and he had a ratty sort of facial growth on his chin and a ruddy face, now slightly less ruddy, presumably, than when he’d still been amongst the living.
Abe Cornwall, the county coroner, sat crouched next to the dead man, examining him closely, as a country coroner does, then finally shook his head.“He’s dead,” he announced in a mournful baritone.
“I know he’s dead, Abe,” said Chase. “But what made him this way, that’s what I would like to know.”
“Well, that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?” said the heavyset coroner as he got up with some effort and some serious cracking sounds coming from both knees. He pointed to a sort of reddish spot on the man’s head. “He was hit over the head with a blunt object. Hit from behind, too. Likely fractured the skull and death would have been instantaneous.”
Chase glanced around the messy living room: the tattered couch that had seen better days, the floral chintz curtains, the fast food cartons on the floor, the coffee table loaded with beer cans and the ashtrays filled to overflowing. It was clear that Mr. Dornhauser was a man who had believed in living dangerously, and hadn’t been taking advantage of the Surgeon General’s health advice. But what had ultimately killed him weren’t the cigarettes he’d obviously been fond of, or the beer, but a vicious smack on the head.
“Any sign of the murder weapon?” asked Odelia as she walked in.
“Nothing,” said Chase. Both he and Odelia had donned plastic gloves, and were deftly going through the man’s stuff.
“Do you think we should wear plastic gloves, Max?” asked Dooley.
“I don’t think so, Dooley.”
“But what if we contaminate the evidence!”
“I don’t think that’s an issue,” I said with a smile. You see, cats don’t have fingers, so we don’t have fingerprints either. We do have pawprints, but those are easily eliminated from the investigation.
“Weird,” said Chase as he rifled through what looked like a small desk in the corner of the room.
“What is?” asked Odelia.
“No phone, no computer.”
“Maybe he didn’t have a phone or a computer?”
“He had an internet connection. And how many people do you know who don’t have a phone nowadays?”
“None?”
“And what have we here?” the detective murmured as he stuck his hands into the man’s jacket pocket and came away with a wallet.
“Can he do that, Max?” asked Dooley, referring to Chase looking through the man’s wallet with keen interest.
“They’re conducting a murder investigation,” I pointed out. “So I think it’s fine.”
“But isn’t this man entitled to privacy?”
“This man is dead, Dooley, and right now it’s more important to catch his killer than to protect his privacy.”
“Oh, right,” said Dooley as he, too, glanced around, then sniffed the air. “It smells very bad in here, Max. I think they probably should open a window.”
“Yeah, it does smell pretty terrible in here,” I agreed. The smell of thousands of cigarettes having been smoked in this very room. And the stench of stale beer, of course.
“Look at this,” said Chase, as he held out a neat stack of crisp twenty-dollar bills.
“Do you think…” Odelia began, as she took out her tablet and brought up a note she’d made. Odelia is a modern detective, you see. Used to be that police officers jotted everything down with pencil and paper, and Chase still does, but Odelia has one of those tablets on which you can write with a stylus. She and Chase now stood bent over her tablet, while they compared something on the screen to the bills Chase had liberated from Mr. Dornhauser’s wallet. Then they both looked up, a smile on their faces.
“Bingo,” said Chase.
“What’s going on?” asked Dooley.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, “if the bills in Willie Dornhauser’s wallet are the same ones Rosa Bond paid to her blackmailer last night.” I now remembered that Odelia had instructed Rosa to have the bank write down the numbers on the notes they gave her.