Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat (3 page)

Chapter Three

Tracy Pringle

Thursday Morning

It was only my second year breeding Abyssinian cats, and I already had a National Winner on my hands.  I can’t say how exciting this was.  I had had few such successful ventures in my life.  The campaign trail was long and tough, but we were getting there.  The only problem was, the travel was expensive, and the hotel stays were, too.  Then I was laid off for taking so much time off work.  I’d worked for a doctor’s office and they were real sticklers for attendance there.  Of course, after I was let go, I told everyone the office was overstaffed.  But I knew it was the cats.

Jack was a little reluctant to mortgage the house to pay for the campaign.  But he loved Baloo and understood we would get it all back in stud fees.

“At least someone in this house will be getting some action,” he grumbled.

He had no right to complain.  He knew my sinuses were acting up, yet he still expected me to perform unspeakable things.  Men.  They were all alike.  Period.

“There are more important things in life than blow jobs, and plenty of other ways to have fun,” I said one evening when he was growing insistent.

“Really?” he said.  “Name one!”

“There’s no need to be like that,” I said.

He put his glasses on and stood up, totally naked, and began pacing around the bedroom.  His appearance really didn’t help his cause any.  “A man’s got to have an orgasm!  That’s all there is to it!”

“Well there’s certainly more than one way to skin a cat!” I said.

“I don’t find your analogy amusing at all!”  He was getting more and more upset, and now he stood in the doorway waving his arms around.  His hips were a little wider than a man’s should be, and his skin was white and rather greasy.  He had a large pink bump, a mole, nestled amongst the matted hairs on his chest like an extra nipple.  It was really hard to concentrate on the issue at hand.

“Please put some clothes on, and we’ll talk about it,” I said.

“I don’t want to put my clothes on!” he shrieked.  “That’s the whole point!”

That was back in his uppity phase.  Since then he had calmed down, probably because I rewarded his good behavior one night.  He had gone out to the pet supply store without me, come home and unloaded 200 lbs of pine-based
pelleted kitty litter in the basement.  It wasn’t really that big a deal, but as a reinforcer I allowed him to have sex with me.  I won’t go into details, but let’s just say he was very satisfied that night. 

“I wish you’d put out more often,” he said as he rolled off me.

“Please!” I said.  “You’ve gotten it two times in the very recent few days!  And now you have the nerve to complain?”

I thought it didn’t hurt to remind him, even though I understood all about men and sex.  Men had to be kept satisfied that way.  So I had learned to use it to my advantage.  It was ridiculously easy.  It was all in the timing.

Cats were a little more complicated than men.  My Baloo-Bear was a blue Abyssinian.  He was the best of the best.  Period.  He had a few leg bars but I found this colored powder that perfectly matched his peachy undercoat.  It did the job nicely.  When you held him up under the lights, you could see the stripes a little bit, if you knew where to look.  Mostly they weren’t noticeable.  I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about leg bars anyway.

Brushing up on my motivation, I was immersed in a very good book by Dr. Saul
Marelli called, “Swamp Them With Kindness!  How To Have What You Want Before Others Get There.”  His methods had a little more empathy than the last book I’d read, “Goals With Gusto.”  But I didn’t subscribe to any one person’s methods.  I thought it was best to learn what I could and then go my own way.

Jack thought the books were hogwash for the most part.  “There’s no better way to succeed than to write a book telling someone else how to succeed,” he said. 

In a way I could see his point.  “But you have to admit that, judging by Baloo’s success, I’m on to something.  And I am going to make this work.  Baloo is going to be a National Winner.  Period.”

He backed down like he always did.  He knew I was right.

We were a team, Jack and me.  I stayed busy with ring clerking, and I got to know the judges that way.  I made a mental note of whatever refreshment they preferred.  I had gotten this idea from, “Rub Elbows With the Winners and Become One”.  Even though it was Hospitality’s job, whenever I got the chance, I would run and fetch their cola or coffee.

“You are so thoughtful!” they would say.  The men, that is.  The women were generally a little harder to sell.  I could usually get to them, though, by finding out whatever kind of cats they had bred.  All the judges were breeders, or had been at some point.  If I started taking an interest in their breed of choice, and asking them lots of questions, they would sort of forget
themselves and defenses would come down.  This happened especially if I acted like a prospective buyer.

If a judge made a joke to the spectators while he was judging, I would be sure to laugh.  I naturally had a very loud and infectious laugh.  Sometimes I could time it just right if I knew the joke was coming.  I would take a sip of water from my bottle, and then when the judge made the joke I would lean forward and spray the water out, as if I couldn’t help it.  I was, of course, careful not to wet the cats.  I would then
clap my hand over my mouth and look embarrassed.   The judges loved this. 

In “Ten Ways
To Influence Anyone,” I also learned to imitate someone’s body language.  If a judge leaned on the table with one hand, I would casually lean the same way, either on the same hand, or if I was standing across from him, I would mirror his movement.  If he scratched his nose, I would scratch mine too, or make some less obvious motion toward my face.  This was supposed to bond the person with you, a subliminal language telling them that you are like them, sort of a kindred spirit.  I wasn’t sure how well this one worked, but I kept using it just in case.

While I did the ring work, Jack took care of
Baloo.  He groomed him and he put a nice sheen on his coat with Bay Rum.  We’d had an attack of ringworm in the cattery during the past winter.  I thought that was going to slow us down.  But I had a secret weapon – a Baloo duplicate!  Mowgli, his brother.  Mowgli actually had better clarity than Baloo but his color was not as intense.  Still, they looked similar enough.  Mowgli was a year older, but from the same breeding.  He didn’t have the same happy show attitude, and sometimes got a little grumpy with the judges.  He would get all hunched on the judge’s table.  They would shake toys to try to get him to show off a little, but he would just sit there with his ears kind of flattened.  I gave him Valarian Root to calm him, but it didn’t seem to help any.

Fortunately, by this time a lot of the judges knew me, and remembered
Baloo.  “He’s having an off day,” I would explain as I carried Mowgli past.  For added emphasis, as I placed him in the judging ring cage, I would talk to Mowgli. “Okay, Baloo, you be good, Mr. Man!”

And even with his attitude, sometimes they would still call him up for their top ten finals.  That’s where the real points were.

Jack didn’t approve of me switching the two cats, and showing Mowgli under Baloo’s name.  But it was only for a couple of months until the scaly ringworm spots were healed and Baloo’s hair had grown back.  It was early in the season too, so the points were not as essential as they were now.  I told Jack to keep his mouth shut, and he did.  We didn’t always get along, but we were a team.  Period.

Chapter Four

Wesley Taft

Thursday Morning

“The thief is here,” Max muttered.

I looked up and saw her.  It was six months after she had taken Rusty from us, and Roxanne was still strutting around the show halls like nothing had happened.  She walked right by with her chin in the air, as if we were invisible.

“Did you see that simper on her face?” I whispered.

“Hold her up,” Max instructed.  He was combing our Japanese Bobtail.  She had a remarkably thick coat, even though she was a shorthaired cat.  Her hair lay close against her body, but sometimes her britches tangled and she didn’t like the comb running through them.

“
It’s okay honey,” I told her. “Daddy Two will be finished soon.”

“It’s Daddy One,” Max corrected me with a grin.

“No.  You’re number Two.  You’re the big, dark, solid one.”

“That’s gross.”

But he smiled.  He was a good-humored sort. 

Jokes like this made it easier to cope with the loss of Rusty Halo, a ruddy Somali who had been kidnapped in a nasty co-ownership dispute.  We had adopted him as a kitten,
thoroughly charmed by his back flips and other antics, and his sweet face.  He was our first Somali and our first show cat.  Our dog Reva, an ancient German shepherd, had raised Rusty as her own, even nursing him as if he were the puppy she’d never had.  Rusty developed the most peculiar habit of sucking on the tips of her ears.  She would lie there with her ears straight out to the side, while he nursed and purred and kneaded into the thick fur around her cheeks.  Max and I thought he would outgrow it, but at a stretchy eight months of age, he was still doing it, and Reva still allowed it.  The two of them were inseparable.  They slept together and would even eat chicken from the same bowl.  We were a family verging on euphoria.

Roxanne had proceeded to ignore Rusty until he turned eight months old and began wowing the judges in championship classes.  After that, she started wanting to handle him herself and taking him home to groom and breed him.  Then one weekend she just stopped bringing him to shows.

At first we couldn’t believe it.  Then after the third show, and no Rusty, it began to dawn on us that we might never see him again.

Things got ugly fast.  Max had put his fist through the wall of our hotel room that night.  I couldn’t eat, and I started smoking again.  I dropped fourteen pounds that first month.  Max lost his job driving cabs due to his sleepless days.  He couldn’t handle the hours anymore.  We contacted the police, and the show committees, and the directors at CLAW, but
everyone said the same thing:  Because Roxanne was his legal co-owner, she had the right to keep him.

We filed a lawsuit against her in small claims, but she bumped it into civil court, full well knowing that we couldn’t afford that.  We were barely getting by on my paltry schoolteacher’s income.  We were forced to drop the suit.  Roxanne Moore had effectively ruined our lives, at least temporarily, and we couldn’t do a thing about it.

We would rather Rusty had died.  Not knowing what she had done with him was torturous.

Coming back to the shows was Max’s idea.  We thought eventually, Roxanne’s greed would overcome her and she would either bring Rusty out again, or someone in the cat fancy would hear of what had happened to him.

Obviously, if we were going to continue showing, we needed a cat.  Instead of a Somali, we went with the Bobtail, a darling white female with black patches.  She had one blue eye, and one gold, and when she was little she garnered lots of attention from passersby.  Reva was so grateful for this new baby, immediately adopting her.  The kitten, after an initial panicked hissing phase, quickly adapted to the constant grooming and mothering by the big dog, and nestled in with her at naptime, much as Rusty had.

The kitten’s short hair was much easier to groom than Rusty’s had been, so there wasn’t much to preparing for a show.  We read up on the breed standard and thought we understood what the judges would be looking for.  Even from
the beginning, our Bobtail kitten was very distinctly Japanese.  She had high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and a wonderful pom-pom tail.  Her hind legs were longer than the front ones, but they angled so much that her back remained straight.  She was very lean, trim and agile. She was like a work of art; a haiku or an ink painting.  Max and I were both completely smitten with her.

We hadn’t come up for a name for her yet. 
“How about Geisha?” Max had suggested.  Apparently it was the only Japanese thing he was familiar with.

“No, too slutty.
  Besides I don’t like the way it sounds like you’re spitting.  Or your tongue is too thick, like you’ve just had a root canal or periodontal work.”

We had searched online for Japanese words but nothing seemed to fit the bill.  We were calling her pet names, like Dolly and Sweetie and Sugar.  She didn’t mind.  She answered to anything.

That first Saturday morning, when Roxanne saw us in the show hall with the new kitten, she marched over to us in a display of rage I will never forget.

“I thought you two were gone for good,” she hissed. 

Instinctively, I held the new kitten close and turned away from her.  But Max, who had been sitting in a chair browsing through the job ads, threw down his paper and jumped up to face her.  She was taller than he, but he stood to his full height and snapped back.  “It’s a free country, in case you haven’t noticed!  We have every right to be here!”

“Fine!
  Have your fun.  Knock yourselves out.  But you boys keep your mouth shut about me, or I will see you in court!”

“Where is Rusty?”

“Rusty is my cat as much as he is yours!”

“Where is Rusty?”

“That’s really none of your business!”

“Where is Rusty?”

“Whatever I have done, I did legally.  And I see you’ve already replaced him anyway! With a bobtail, of all things!”  Her lip curled up on one side in a contemptuous sneer.

“She’s not a replacement.  You know nothing could replace him.”

“Oh yeah, your hearts are so broken over him!”

“Get out of here!”  Max snarled.

“Oh, grow up, Max!” she shot back.  “And I’m warning you.  Don’t you mention my name to anyone here.  Don‘t talk about me.  Don’t look at me.  Don’t even think of me!”

“You’re a kidnapper and a thief!” Max pointed a finger at her for emphasis.

She slapped his hand away.  “If I hear that out of anyone else’s mouth, you will be getting a call from my lawyer!”

Max turned to me, holding up the offended hand.  “Did you see that?  I believe she just assaulted me.”

“Tell that to someone!  I dare you!  I’ll have you in court for slander so fast your head will spin!”

She turned and hustled back to her cage.  I turned to Max.  “I’ve got a name for her!”

“Oh, I can think of a few things to call her,” Max said.

“No, not Roxanne.
  The kitten.”

He turned to me, shaky, upset.  He was even breathing hard.  But his face softened when he looked at the kitten, still cradled in my arms.  “What is it?”

“SoSuMe.”

There was a pause for two beats as he processed it, and then he burst out laughing.

SuMe, as we called her, was a joy, but she wasn’t Rusty.  Rusty Halo had been the ultimate show cat, and SuMe was a little flighty.  Max thought it was her gender.  I thought it was just her nature.  She had had the same upbringing as Rusty, having been exposed to many shows at an early age.  I thought that’s probably how it was with show cats – you can do everything right, but some just have it and some don’t.  SuMe was still getting by though.  She was darling with the black spotted coat, the odd eyes and the short quirky tail.  She had earned her championship ribbons and was now on her way to a Grand Champion title, having started off with a decent sixty points in her first show.  Only one hundred forty left to go.  Now she was poised on the grooming cart, batting at the feathered stick Max was holding.

I turned to him.  “Did you look at the show catalog?”

He nodded.  He knew what I was talking about.

“She’s over there.”  I pointed across the hall.  I could see the girl taking the Somali out of its cage.  She was smiling, hugging the cat.  “Oh God, it makes me sick!”

“Who is that girl?” said Max.

“I don’t know.”  Holding
SuMe under one arm, I flipped through the catalog.  “It says here her name is Cecelia.  Cecilia Fox.  It’s another one of Roxanne’s co-ownerships!  And get this!  The cat, named Kenya Strut, is a son of our Rusty Halo!  Poetic, isn’t it?”

“Kenya Strut?
  That was one of the names you came up with.”

“Yes, I know. 
Rattling off clever names to Roxanne.  Remind me next time to keep my mouth shut, just like she said.  Oh, look how she loves him!”

Max followed my gaze and we watched quietly as poor Cecelia hugged and kissed the helpless and happy Kenya Strut.  Both of us were silent for a while, both picturing someone else going through the grief and despair that we had been through a year ago.

Finally, Max spoke.  “We should do something.”