Dana, who was sobbing for dear life, suddenly turned on me with a vengeance.“It’s all your fault,” she cried. “If you hadn’t started blabbing on and on about firemen, we could have saved that poor woman.”
“Huh?” I said, too stunned to construct a decent retort.
Dana wrung her paws.“I should have simply jumped down on that awful man’s back, claws extended. He wouldn’t have been so eager to go sticking knives in innocent women’s backs then. Or perhaps I should have jumped on his head and clawed at his nose. God knows I’ve done it before. Works like magic every time.”
I shivered, and this time it wasn’t from the sight of the gruesome scene down below, but from a slight apprehension at finding myself within striking distance of Dana’s claws. I’m a big boy and I pride myself on my powers of self-defense, but when I encounter dames of Dana’s obvious level of ferociousness, I respectfully bow out.
I started to do so now, but Dana stopped me with word and gesture. The gesture being a tap on my head and the word a menacing growl.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.
“Ouch,” I said, and rubbed the spot where she’d tapped me. “Home. Where else?”
“Home?” she cried, visibly appalled. “How can you talk about going home with this murder going on right under our noses. We have to…”
I gave her a wry smile.“We have to what? There’s nothing we can do. The police will take care of everything.”
“But, we know who did it. We can help the police.”
I scoffed.“We’re just cats. We can’t help the police. We can’t do a single thing.”
“But, but…”
“I’m going home,” I said, and turned to leave.
A searing pain in my left buttock made me change my mind.“On second thought…” I said, and watched as Dana licked her claws.
“We can’t let murderer boy get away with this,” Dana said. “Stevie would never…”
“Oh, please,” I said. “Not Stevie again. That bird-brain wouldn’t do a single thing.”
“Oh, yes, he would,” said Dana, adamant. “Stevie’s got more courage in one whisker than you have in that gruesomely large body of yours.”
“My body isn’t gruesomely large,” I said, slightly offended.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “We don’t call you Fat Tom around the neighborhood for nothing.”
“No one calls me Fat Tom,” I said, appalled at the slur.
“We do, you know,” said Dana with a smirk that didn’t become her.
“For your information, I’m not fat,” I said as haughtily as I could. “I’m just big, that’s all. Large bone structure, Zack always says.” Zack Zapp is, as the vernacular goes, my owner. Though I might as well add that no one really owns me, as I’m a free spirit. Well, that is until my stomach starts making funny noises and it comes time to have a stab at the cat bowl and find out what’s for lunch.
“Then Zack is as big a chump as you are,” Dana said decidedly. “Now, what are you going to do about that murdering fellow downstairs?”
“Nothing,” I said, after throwing a glance at the ground floor. “Because he’s legged it.”
Dana, after ascertaining my observation was correct, frowned thoughtfully.“And so did she.”
I did a double take at these words. It doesn’t often happen that dead bodies get up and take off. Looking again, I saw that she was right: both the killer and the killee, if that’s the word I want, had removed themselves from the scene.
“That’s odd,” I remarked. “Usually on these occasions the corpse stays put.”
“Unless the killer took it with him.”
“As a souvenir, you mean?”
Dana sighed.“Stevie was right about you. You really are a dumb brick.”
“I am not! Humans often take souvenirs. When Zack came back from England he brought a pipe and a tea pot.”
“A dead body is not a tea pot, Tom.”
I had to admit she had a point there. At least a tea pot serves some purpose, no matter how small, whereas a dead body is of no use to anyone.
She reflected.“The killer is obviously trying to hide the body. Would you recognize him when you saw him again?”
I said I probably could. For when the fellow had looked up I’d taken a good look at his face. Nothing to write home about, mind you. Just one of those average human faces. Fortunately for me—Dana was extending those claws of hers once more—I’d spotted one distinguishable feature about the killer’s face: a pimple.
“He had a large pimple on the tip of his nose,” I said triumphantly as I kept a close eye on Dana’s paws. “Unless it was a fly temporarily using the man’s face as a launching pad.” I gave a hearty laugh at my own joke. Dana didn’t laugh.
“A killer with a pimple,” she said. “And a dead body that has suddenly disappeared. Right.” She got up and started threading her way down the branches of the tree.
“Hey, where are you going?” I said. For, though I was feeling relieved to finally be rid of her, I was also a bit peeved at the abruptness of her departure.
“I’m going to get help,” she said, without looking back.
“Help? From whom?” Perhaps it should have been ‘who’, but whatever it was, Dana didn’t deign to reply. The night swallowed her up and before long she was gone.
I shrugged and after having given the matter some more thought—do teapots really have more use than a human corpse? After all, a human body can be used as compost, whereas a teapot merely serves as an eyesore—I trotted off myself. A midnight snack and a warm bed were awaiting me and a tall tale to tell my friends bubbled on my lips.
3
The Third Degree
I’d pretty much forgotten all about recent events, when a bark arrested my progress towards the homestead. It was Frank, the neighborhood watchdog. I know, watchdog isn’t much of a way to describe any dog, but it’s how we like to call him around these parts. Frank is in fact a Poodle—complete with woolly coat and docked tail—and fancies himself something of a local law enforcement officer. In other words, our very own flattie.
“Evening, Tommy,” he said in his customary gravelly voice.
“Evening, Frank,” I said, refusing, as usual, to address him as ‘officer’, something he’s quite keen on.
“I just met Dana,” he said, and cocked an inquisitive eye at me. I didn’t take the bait and he continued. “She said she was a witness to some funny business happening in the park just now and you were also present at the scene. Care to comment?”
I sighed. So this was the help Dana had gone and found.“Yes, Frank,” I said curtly, for what I wanted more than anything was to go home and have a bite to eat. Kibble and a bowl of milk awaited me. “I saw one human slash another human and then make off with the body. And no, I really don’t think it is any of our business. If humans want to slayeach other, fine. As long as they don’t start in on any of our kind, I really don’t see why we should get involved.”
Frank waggled his ears.“Oh, so that’s how you see it, is it?”
“That’s how I see it, Frank,” I said. As long as the humans keep the kibble coming, of course, but I didn’t voice this thought to the self-appointed keeper of the peace.
“Well, now,” he said, with a hint of reproach. “Isn’t that kind of selfish?”
“No, it is not,” I assured him.
“Then let me ask you this,” he said. “What if that woman who’d just been brutally murdered was Zack? How would you feel about the situation then?”
I hate to admit it but the fluffy one had a point there. Apart from the fact that Zack was a man and not a woman, I probably would have felt differently if he’d been the one on the receiving end of the knife just then. “Well…” I said, trying to come up with something glib and witty.