Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat (18 page)

Well, with Tracy Pringle trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, some of the cat people were getting what they deserved.  Now the Mouth Breather had Kenya back.  But I still had her pen and it suddenly occurred to me that I should really return that, too.

I took my backpack out from under
Hotsy’s cage and unzipped it.  I spilled about a third of the contents out onto the floor.  It reminded me of that scene from, “The Breakfast Club” when Ally Sheedy dumps the contents of her duffel bag out for inspection by the other kids.  I had a tortoiseshell comb – the kind with the handle that had protruded from everyone’s back pocket in the seventies.  I couldn’t believe it when I saw it sticking out of that lady’s handbag in the grocery store.  I didn’t think anyone used those types of combs any more.  There was the usual store loot: bubble gum, licorice, a Pez dispenser.  I had a comic book taken from a bratty kid at the movie store.  I had sticky notes, 3 by 4 inch picture frames, bean bag animals, an extension cord, a compact, Altoid mints, and there in the midst of the mess was Cecilia’s Kenya pen on its long black cord.

She was sitting with Kenya, petting and talking to him, oblivious to the world around her.  She looked up smiling as I approached.

“I took this from you,” I said.

She took the pen and looked at it, and then up at me.  “Why?”

That was the question.  I couldn’t explain.  I stood looking at her.  She stretched the pen’s springy cord and hung it around her neck.  Kenya stood up and bumped her shoulder with his forehead.  She looked at him, patted him and then looked back up at me.

“Okay, I might have a teensy problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“I take things sometimes.”

“You mean you steal things?”

Boy, this girl always had to put things bluntly.  “Sure, I guess you could say that.”

“It is stealing.  Even if it’s just a pen.  If it belongs to someone it’s stealing.”

“Now you’re judging me.”

“I’m not judging you.  And accusing me of judging is just your way of taking the focus off the topic.  Which is, your stealing.”

There she goes again, I thought.  I took a deep breath.  “Okay.  I do have a problem.  I take things.  Sometimes it
makes me feel better when I do it.  I can’t really explain why that is.  It gives me a little high.”

“That’s pretty sick.”

“Thank you.”  I turned to go.

“Wait!” she said.  “Let’s talk about this.”

“What is there to talk about?  I took it, you got it back.”

“But you gave it back!”

“Umm, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Well, it just seemed like you had been through enough.”

She smiled.  “You’re a
klepper.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Well, if you feel the need to label, then yes, I suppose I am.”

“It’s okay,” she said.  “You might need Prozac.”

“I don’t want that.  I hear it gives you the runs.”

She laughed.  “Yeah, people as skinny as you probably shouldn’t have it.”

“Okay, so I return the pen, and this makes me your physical and emotional fodder.”

“Oh Daddy!” she laughed.  But then seeing that I wasn’t joking, she sobered.  “I’m sorry.  I am really not being very nice about this.  I’m a clod.  Thank you for bringing it back.  And thank you for Kenya!”

The next thing I knew she had jumped up and was hugging me.  It was quite bizarre, but I hugged her back.  She was warm and soft, and her hair smelled like baby oil.  She released me and pulled away, and looked a little embarrassed.  I assumed she was not normally this demonstrative, and it warmed me to her a little.  She was a dork, but she was doing her best.

“Okay,” I said.  “I admit it.  I do have a problem.  I take things, little things I don’t need, all the time.  And it appears that maybe I also have an eating disorder.  Maybe it’s time for me to clean house a little.”

She stepped back, looked at me and smiled.  When she smiled, she really was sort of pretty. 

“You know,” I added.  “You should do something with your hair.”

Chapter Forty Six

Ginny
Robards

Ruminating

When I was a child, I had a cat, a white one.  She had a black spot on top of her head.  My mother let me keep her in my bedroom but Dad didn’t like cats and he didn’t want her.  Well, one day that kitten disappeared.  I looked everywhere, but never found her.  Later some school kids told me they had a white kitten show up in their barn.  She had a black spot on her head.  She grew up and had kittens and lived her life hunting mice in the barn.  I liked to think that it was my kitten but I never knew for sure.

I had dreams of that cat – her name was Daisy – for years.  My father never mentioned her again after she disappeared.

Liesl
and I had refrained from naming any of our cats Julie Andrews.  We were waiting for the perfect specimen.  It would have to be one with a sweet temperament.  I often thought she would come to us in the form of a white cat with a black spot on her head.

And then things would have come full circle.  Wrongs would be righted.  It had happened for Julie herself.

“Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand myself.”  She had said that, and I thought it so becoming.  So humble.  She had starred as Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” onstage, but they wouldn’t give her the movie role.  That went to Audrey Hepburn.  So, she turned to Mr. Disney instead.  She became Mary Poppins.  And she won the Academy Award that year!  Not Audrey.

Then came, “The Sound of Music.”
  Her crowning glory.

Some people just deserve what happens to them.

Chapter Forty Seven

Kim Norwich

Sunday Morning

I’d been made a fool.  I kept turning events over and over in my mind.  Tracy Pringle was dead, and we were obviously dealing with a serial killer now.

What the hell was wrong with me?  I decided that I had let my attraction to Reynolds cloud my judgment, that I had accused Tracy Pringle of murder just because he had been flirting with her.  That was really bad. 
Really unprofessional.  And even worse, a second person had been killed on my watch.

I did my rounds in a sort of haze that morning, wondering how in the hell I had gotten to this point.  My instincts had never let me down before.  Now I was just like a dumb schoolgirl with a crush. 
God, how humiliating.

I needed to put a stop to this infatuation.  Reynolds wasn’t good for me.  He was messing up my logic.  I wondered if, when this show was over, I should start looking for another job.  If I was letting my emotions screw up my performance this much, then I wasn’t cut out for this line of work.  Maybe I was entering some kind of midlife crisis.  Whatever the
reason, it was very depressing.  My intuition had always been the one thing I could count on.

I walked up and down the aisles, answering the greetings of various exhibitors with a brief hello.  People had to be pretty shaken by this new development, and yet they all just sat by their cat cages, huddled in groups, talking.  Nobody was packing up to leave.  The cats were mostly exhausted by this time, sleeping curled in their cuddle beds or splayed out in the laps of their owners.

As I turned to go down another row, I noticed a woman dressed in a long dark skirt, moving up the aisle away from me.  There was something wrong about her.  Wrong and weird.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something.

She was walking slowly up the aisle, looking at the cats but not looking.  She had a large canvas handbag hanging over one arm.  She had the air and movements of a shoplifter.  Her hair was
pitch black and fell down her back from beneath the wide brim of a tan velvet hat.  I didn’t like the way she was overdressed, her sneaky air, her tentative step.  It was odd to me that no one else seemed to notice her.

She bumped and jostled others as she moved, but she never turned or spoke to anyone.  I drifted along behind her.

Finally, she came to the cages where the Somalis were benched, and she stopped.  Cecilia Fox had taken Kenya up to a ring, and there was no one close by.  The woman looked in the cage at Zephyr, the other Somali. 

“She’s going to steal that cat,” I thought.

I turned away, predicting her next move, which indeed was a furtive glance around.  I had timed it just right so she didn’t see me watching her.

The next thing I knew, she was moving swiftly toward the exit.  I followed her, dodging around the grooming carts that blocked the aisle here and there.  She was practically running.  I stayed right behind her, and as she swung the door open, I said, “Hold it right there!”

Her head turned quickly, an unintended acknowledgement that she had heard me and understood. She bolted through the door, passing the small group of exhibitors who stood outside smoking cigarettes. When she got past them, she started to run.  I raced after her.  She was still carrying that canvas bag, which swung heavily.

“Stop!”
  I called. 

But she kept going.  That was my cue.  She was taller than I, but she wasn’t very fast.  I just doubled my efforts, caught up to her and made a flying tackle.  She went down easily, rolling on the pavement.  The bag flew from her hands and landed a few feet away. 

Her body was big and heavy, and she thrashed madly on her stomach, swinging her hands back trying to grab me.  I felt her fingernails rake my forearm, peeling the skin up in tight red lines.  As her hand flew away from my arm, I grabbed it and pulled it back, flexing the palm backward, hard.  She yelled in pain and immediately stopped moving.

The smokers by the door were laughing and whooping, yelling, “Cat fight! 
Cat fight!”

How cliché!  I yelled at them to shut up.

I straddled her, pulled my handcuffs out of my back pocket, and with one hand, clipped them around her wrists.

“What are you doing?” she gasped.  “Let me go, you crazy bitch!”

I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye, and saw that the bag had taken on a life of its own.  I got up, picked it up and unzipped it, to find the frightened face of a Somali cat looking up at me.  Zephyr.

I turned back to the woman lying flat on her stomach, out of breath.  The hat was gone, and her black wig was sliding sideways on her head.  I pulled it off to reveal the garish red hair of Roxanne Moore.

Just then the door opened and out came Detective Reynolds.  “Good work, Norwich.  Impressive.  I’ll take it from here.”

I walked right up to him and slapped his face as hard as I could.  He staggered one step, put his hand up to his cheek and looked at me.

“You knew she was alive!” I said.

“Well, yeah.”

It was all coming back to me now, the frantic way the deputy had waved to Reynolds when the ambulance came in.  The way the ambulance lights flashed.  The way Reynolds went running.

I felt like a fool.  I should have seen the signs, all the indications that she was still alive.  But I had felt her pulse, and found nothing.  The others had too.  She must have stopped breathing for a few minutes.

“You bastard!  Why didn’t you tell me?  You just let me go on believing-“

“I couldn’t tell you.  I couldn’t tell anyone.  We were going to find the killer.”

“What is she doing here?  How is this possible?”

He was rubbing his cheek, the flaming red spot spreading there, and looking at me mildly.  “She came to in the ambulance.  She had a concussion and she had sleep apnea.  She would stop breathing during sleep for sometimes as long as a couple of minutes.”

“I’ve heard that happens to fat people sometimes,” I said.

“Shut up you bitch!” she roared.

Reynolds ignored our jabs.  “She’s not supposed to be here.  She was supposed to stay home until the killer was found.  She was supposed to check in by calling the station every few hours.  She says she didn’t see who attacked her.  Isn’t that right, Roxanne?”

Roxanne lay on the pavement on her stomach, glaring up at the two of us.  “I don’t know who it was.”

“Uh huh,” Reynolds said.  “Pretty ironic that you would show up on the same day another victim is found.  Looks like you tried to turn the tables.”

“You can’t prove that!” she screeched.  “This redhead is a psycho!  She attacked me for no reason!”

I rolled my eyes.  “I told you to stop.  You stole a cat.”

“He’s my fucking cat!”