“You were right,” the voice said.
When we turned, I saw that the disembodied voice belonged to Shanille. She looked as miserable as a cat can look without possessing the opposable thumbs to hold a liquor bottle.
“He kicked me out,” Shanille announced. “Diego kicked me out of cat choir, can you believe it? My own choir. The one I started. And he goes and tells me that from now on he’s the new conductor. Says I couldn’t conduct my way out of a paper bag. Basically calls me a talentless hack and a fraud. And the worst thing is that not a single member opposed him when he put it to a vote.”
“I told you. He’s pure evil,” I said. Though I should have felt sorry for her, the fact that she’d thrown us out on our ears still rankled.
“I’m so sorry, Shanille,” said Dooley commiseratingly. “I think you’re a great conductor.”
The tiger-striped tabby smiled weakly. “Thanks, Dooley. And I’m sorry for not listening to you before. You were right all along. I should have known better than to be taken in by his smooth-talking ways and his promises of endless supplies of Cat Snax.”
“Those endless supplies of Cat Snax are paid for by Odelia,” I told her. “Which makes him a liar and a thief.”
“Oh, and to think my week started so great. Saw my favorite singer Charlie Dieber from up close—got a wink and a smile from him…” A beatific smile momentarily crept up her face at the sweet memory.
“Wait—you were there when the Dieber got shot?”
“Charlie didn’t get shot,” she said. “His bodyguard did.”
A thrill of excitement rushed through me. “You saw what happened?”
“Of course I did. I saw the whole thing.”
And she’d just finished telling us about her startling discovery when the sound of a human talking had me look up. Somehow the inflection sounded familiar, so I padded to the edge of the roof and looked down. “Hey, it’s your human,” I announced. Dooley joined me.
“Hey, it’s Grandma,” he said.
“That’s what I just said.”
Odelia’s grandmother was walking down the street, in the middle of the night, talking on her phone for some reason. Odd. Very odd. Then again, this night had already proven to be the oddest night I’d had in a very long time. So Grandma Muffin roaming the streets of Hampton Cove at night was simply par for the course.
“Yes, Chancellor. No, Chancellor. Yes, Chancellor,” she was saying, her voice carrying up to where Dooley and I were sitting and watching. “No, I don’t think the current crisis can be solved with violence. Diplomacy is the solution, Chancellor Merkel. Oh, yes, I told Ban the same thing I’m telling you now. Yes, I will put in a good word for you. No big deal. Yes, I’m always at your service, Angela. Day or night. We all need to do what we can for world peace.”
She passed around a corner and her voice drifted off.
“Angela Merkel,” Dooley said musingly. “Somehow the name sounds familiar.”
“German Chancellor. Top European politician. But why Grandma would be talking to her beats me.”
“She’s been talking to a lot of important people lately. She even talked to the President the other day.”
“Our President?”
“I don’t know. Do cats have a president?”
He raised an interesting question. Did cats have a president? I didn’t think so. We’re anarchists by nature, apt to adhere to no one. Then again, we do like Abraham Lincoln, since he allegedly used a golden fork to feed his son’s tabby at White House dinners. I guess a guy like that is worthy of our everlasting allegiance.
Brutus seemed to have finally tired of sitting by himself, and wandered over. “You know? I’m starting to feel that maybe we should give Dieber a second shot at adopting us.”
“He won’t adopt us, Brutus,” I told the cat, who’d clearly lost his mind. “We’re males, and Charlie only adopts females.”
“So what if I tell him I identify as female?” Brutus suggested. “Wouldn’t that work?”
I wanted to ream him out for talking nonsense when there was a commotion behind us. The rickety fire escape was groaning and creaking violently, indicative of a large body climbing up. If this was a cat, it was a substantial one. Moments later, a head cleared the roof, and then a bare tattooed torso, and I saw that once again we were in the presence of Charlie Dieber.
“Hey, dudes and dudettes,” the irrepressible singer caroled. “Now this is what I call a fine gathering!” He looked a little unsteady on his feet, swaying dangerously, his eyes half-lidded. I hoped he wouldn’t come near the edge of the roof, for if he fell off and got squashed he wouldn’t get up again. No nine lives for the Dieber. He caught sight of us and frowned, pointing a finger in our general direction. “Dudes! We have got to stop meeting like this!” He lurched, then pivoted, his arm outstretched, until he was pointing, like a weathervane, at Shanille. He blinked a few times. “Um, so are you a dude or a dudette, dude?”
“I’m a dudette, actually,” said Shanille, whose exuberance had returned at the sight of her great idol.
“I think you’re a babe,” the Dieber announced, then did the most outrageous thing. He scooped Shanille up into his arms and started staggering back to the fire escape. “You’ve been adopted,” he announced to a slightly startled Shanille.
“Oh, that’s fine, Charlie,” she trilled.
“Shanille!” I cried. “Where are you going?”
“Didn’t you hear? I’ve been adopted by Charlie Dieber!”
“But… what about Father Reilly?” I asked, referring to her most recent human.
“He’ll just have to learn to live without me,” she said, and gave us a diva-like wave farewell. “Just like I’ll have to live without cat choir! Goodbye, cruel world! Goodbye!”
The three of us watched, stunned, as Charlie disappeared down the fire escape, this time clutching the former cat choir conductor in his arms.
“I didn’t know Shanille was such a drama queen,” said Dooley.
“It would appear Diego brings out the worst in cats,” I said.
“Charlie should have picked me,” Brutus lamented. “I should have told him about my transition.”
“Oh, stop talking nonsense, Brutus,” I said. “Cats don’t transition. Do they?”
“If it gets me out of the house I share with Harriet I’ll do whatever it takes, Max. Anything is better than having to feel this pain. This searing heartache. This tristesse.”
Wow. Talk about drama queens.
“It’s the pain of lost love,” Dooley said knowingly, then placed a sympathetic paw on Brutus’s shoulder. “I feel your pain, brother Brutus.”
“Sister,” Brutus announced. “From now on I’m a dudette.”
Chapter 19
Odelia woke up from a loud noise. Since she’d spent half the night dealing with this Dieber knife business, it was a grumpy and decidedly annoyed Odelia Poole who opened first one tentative eye and then the other.
“What’s with the racket?” she muttered, and discovered that the foot of the bed hadn’t been slept on. “And where are my cats?” she added, suddenly thinking it ominous that neither Max nor Diego had come home that night.
Light was seeping through the curtains, and one intrepid sun ray had even had the gall of peeping through a split in the middle, where both curtains met, and was casting its bright and cheery light across Odelia’s face.
“Ugh,” she muttered, recoiling like a particularly timid vampire.
“Help!” a voice suddenly intruded her foggy thoughts. “Help me I’m stuck!”
Now she realized what noise had awakened her. It was Max, and he was in trouble!
“Max, I’m coming,” she croaked. With an extreme effort she swung her feet from beneath the Garfield-motif comforter, inserted them into her pink Hello Kitty slippers, managed to rise from the bed without tottering to the floor, and shuffled out of the room.