“That’s right. We need your help, Clarice.”
“Yes, Clarice,” Harriet chimed in. “We really need your help.”
“Who’s that?” the voice bellowed.
“My name is Harriet. I’m Marge Poole’s Persian? My friend Brutus’s human is in trouble.”
“Helping humans again, are we?” Clarice growled, not sounding convinced. “When are you finally going to realize you’re cats? Cats help themselves! Not humans!”
“Well, we happen to like our humans,” said Dooley. “So we like to help them if we can. And in exchange they give us food and shelter and love and cuddles and—”
“Shut up, you make me sick!” Clarice bellowed.
Suddenly there was a loud clanking sound behind us, and the wild cat appeared at the rim of a dumpster, then gracefully jumped to the floor beneath. She had a fishbone stuck to her brow, and Dooley winced. He didn’t like Clarice, and he didn’t like fish, which was a little strange for a cat.
Clarice was a mangy cat, scrawny and more than a little scary. Her eyes seemed to glow red in the obscurity between the dumpsters, and her claws clicked on the concrete ground. When she spoke, it sounded like a hiss, and she gave the impression she was about to pounce and rip us to shreds.
“What do you want?” she hissed. She wasn’t the most pleasant cat to deal with, but because of her peripatetic ways she was unusually well-informed.
I quickly explained the predicament we found ourselves in, and she eyed me stoically all the while. If she knew something, she wasn’t letting on.
“I might be able to help you,” she finally said, “but what is in it for me?”
“We know a place that serves the most delicious food imaginable,” I said. “Actual pâté in an all-you-can-eat buffet. They’ll even adopt you if you like.”
“Where is this place?” she asked, plucking the fishbone from her brow and throwing it down.
“John Paul George’s house,” I said. “Xanadu.”
“He’s not there right now,” said Dooley helpfully, “because he’s dead, but his boyfriend is. Oh, wait, no. He’s in jail for murder. But the food is there. And so are a dozen cats. But they won’t bother you,” he hurriedly added.
“Pâté, huh?” asked Clarice, her eyes glittering. “I’ve heard rumors about Xanadu, but I always thought it was just a myth. A folk tale.”
“It’s not a myth,” I told her. “We were there, and we ate that pâté.”
“And it was to die for,” said Dooley.
Harriet slowly turned to me. “You ate pâté and you didn’t tell me?”
“We were there on official cat choir business,” I said. “And since you’re not in the cat choir…”
“Cat choir?” asked Brutus. “That sounds like something for me.”
“Oh, God,” groaned Dooley.
“Can you even sing?” I asked. “The first rule of cat choir is—”
“You do not talk about cat choir,” Dooley said, eyeing me reproachfully.
“Is that you have to be able to sing,” I said, ignoring Dooley’s outburst.
“I sing like a nightingale,” Brutus grunted. “Listen to this.” And he suddenly broke out into a caterwauling the likes of which I’d never heard before—it was truly terrible. Like a cat being castrated without sedation.
“Shut the hell up!” growled Clarice. “If you don’t want me to cut you.”
Offended, Brutus said, “If you think you can do better…”
“I don’t think I can do better,” Clarice hissed. And at this, she burst into song, belting out an aria from some little-known opera. It sounded… nice.
“Hey, that was great!” cried Dooley. “You have to join the choir!”
“Over my dead body,” she grumbled. “I wouldn’t be seen dead with a bunch of namby-pamby losers like you.”
“You could be our conductor,” I said. “We have a conductor now, but she’s… not very good.” In fact Shanille simply tried to copy her human, Father Reilly, who led the church choir, and did a pretty lousy job as well.
“Enough about the cat choir,” she said. “Do you want to know about this cheating commissioner business or not?”
“Yes, please,” said Harriet, clutching Brutus’s paw. “It’s a matter of life and death.” She turned to Brutus. “I can’t imagine life without you, sweets.”
“Aw, sugar pie,” said Brutus, touched.
“Enough with this nonsense!” cried Clarice. “I’ll take your offer of the Xanadu pâté, but first we need to do the oath.”
“Oh, not the oath!” Dooley cried.
“Yes, the oath. I can’t tell you about my private affairs unless we all swear an oath to secrecy.” She held up her right paw and gave it a quick slit with her left claw. A drop of blood appeared, and suddenly there was a sigh behind me and a dull sound. When I looked, I saw Brutus had collapsed.
“Brutus!” cried Harriet. “Sweetie, baby!”
She managed to revive him while we watched on, and he stared up at us, looking woozy. “Blood,” he finally muttered. “Can’t stand the sight of it.”
“Oh, you bunch of sissies,” Clarice growled. “Look, no oath, no information.”
“I’ll do it for you, my turtle-dove,” said Harriet. “You just close your eyes.”
Brutus squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and Harriet made a small incision in his paw, then in her own. That only left Dooley and me. I winced when I made the cut, and Dooley… just stood there, lips trembling, eyes locked on Clarice, who was eyeing him grimly.
“Well?” she asked. “What’s it gonna be? I haven’t got all day.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I grunted, and walked over to him and scratched his nose.
“Ouch!” he cried. “What did you do that for?!”
“Because I know that you don’t want to be the one who prevented us from saving Chase!”
“You’re dead to me,” he said in a whiny voice.
“That’s fine with me. Just do it already,” I told Clarice.
She held her paw against mine, then Harriet joined in and then Brutus, his eyes still shut tight, and then we all pressed our bloody paws against Dooley’s injured nose, who whimpered in pain, even though I can’t imagine it could have hurt all that much.
“Wimp,” Clarice muttered.
“It hurts!”
“Right,” said Clarice, satisfied as we all started licking our paws, and Dooley his nose. “Commissioner Necker and Malka Putin have been using the Writer’s Lodge for months now. Since there are no bookings—because of that murdered writer—they’ve got the place all to themselves, and have been coming out here every weekend. I’ve seen them at it,” she said with a grimace. “And let me tell you, it’s not for the faint of heart. I consider myself a pretty tough baby and the way they go on is pretty damn disgusting.”
“Sex?” I asked.
“Human sex,” she clarified.
“Yuck,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
“So are they there right now?” I asked.
She smiled, flashing her razor-sharp teeth. “Oh, yes, they are.”
Chapter 27
It is one of those annoying things when a detective comes at the end of her long list of suspects and discovers there aren’t any left. Odelia wasn’t a detective, per se, but she certainly wanted to catch a killer, and when she stared down at her notebook, she found she’d scratched out all the names. Veronica had been her final and most promising suspect, and now she’d lost her as well. Dang, she thought, as she threw her notebook on the dash.
So now what? Start from scratch?
She stared out through the windshield, gathering her thoughts. After dropping off her litter of cats, she’d idly driven around, trying to gather her thoughts, and now found she’d returned to Bryony Pistol’s place. Which was just as well, for she wanted another word with Johnny’s widow anyway. Last time she’d practically been shown the door, and she wanted to talk to her a little more about Johnny, and whether the man had any other enemies.