Cat Laughing Last (11 page)

I
n the
black attic Dulcie raced among hulking furniture, clawing at cartons, searching for a box that she could move, could shove against the hole to block the raccoons' entrance. In the little square of moonlit sky that marked the vent hole, a black shape loomed, and another was coming fast up the trellis. Her nose was filled with the smells of mildew and dust and ancient mouse droppings, as if all the house dirt of generations had been sucked upward into this dank space. Searching, pulling at heavy boxes, she watched the lead raccoon forcing himself through the little vent, could hear the others behind him pushing up the trellis following the scent of cat.

They daren't shout; the Traynors would hear them—she wondered if Elliott heard the raccoons scrabbling up the wall of the house. She attacked another box, straining with claws and teeth to drag it toward the opening. Where was Joe? Cats weren't built to move heavy loads. If she got a grip with her claws and pulled, she pulled her own back feet out from under herself. When she tried pushing with her shoul
der, the box might as well be nailed to the floor. Straining, lying on her back, pulling, she mewled when the box gave suddenly, was shoved so hard it nearly ran her over. She rolled away as it rammed against the wall.

“Push, Dulcie. Push now!” Joe hissed. In the darkness behind the box, his white face and chest gleamed. But as they fought the carton toward the opening, the beast pushed through, forcing the box back in their faces. He was a huge animal; he seemed to fill the attic.

“Run, Kit. Run.” The three cats flew through the dark, dodging between the legs of stacked furniture.

“Here,” Joe hissed. “Down through the crawl door.” He shouldered the kit toward a thick slab of plywood lying askew on the rough flooring, a crack of blackness showing at its edge.

“This?” Dulcie said. “We have to move this?” She pawed uselessly at the slab.

“All together. Hook your claws in the edge.”

They hooked into the rough splintery plywood and pulled, lunging backward. The slab moved, and moved again. Behind them, the beasts came swaying and lumbering. Pulling again, they jerked the cover aside far enough to free a six-inch hole. As the masked bandit lunged at them, Joe shoved the kit, and they dropped through into blackness.

They landed on hard linoleum, in a little room walled by shelves that smelled of raisins, brown sugar, cereal. Above them in the hole, a masked face peered down, and another. Trapped in the pantry, they watched the raccoons turn, preparing to back down, watched the first one reach a hind foot to grip the nearest shelf.

Leaping, Joe pawed at the pantry door swinging on the knob and turning it. The door flew open, they were through.

“Get your tail through, Kit.”

She flicked her fluffy tail away, and Joe flung himself against the door again, slamming it closed.

They heard the raccoons drop, then a terrible thudding racket as they fought among themselves, scrabbling at the door to force it open. The cats fled, searching the kitchen for a place to hide, listening to the latch rattle as if any minute it would give.

The animals charged the door for some moments, then began, apparently, to vent their rage and hunger on the pantry shelves. Cans and boxes fell clattering, cardboard was torn and ripped to the sounds of munching and slurping—five voracious eating machines heralding their entry into Elliot Traynor's cottage, announcing their arrival with enough noise to wake the village.

The Traynor kitchen, even without lights, was a bright room, its cabinets and tile floor creamy pale, its wide bay window over the sink offering a vista of starlight above the massed houseplants. But its pristine counters afforded no shelter. When a door banged, down the hall, the cats fled behind the refrigerator.

Elliott Traynor came running, Vivi close behind him. Peering out, the cats watched the Traynors pause, staring at the closed pantry door where, within, the raccoons were knocking down cans and thudding against the walls. Elliott was dressed in a velvet robe, pajamas, and slippers—and carrying a black automatic. Crouched behind the refrigerator, Dulcie and the kit hunched close to Joe.

Moving to the pantry, Elliott paused for a long
minute, listening. When he jerked the door open, Vivi screamed. Three shots rang. At the booming explosion, the cats scorched down the hall, into the living room and underneath the couch.

“He shot them,” Dulcie whispered, shocked. As terrified as she'd been of the raccoons, she was appalled that Traynor had killed them. Crouching in the black dusty dark beneath the couch, she pressed against Joe, shivering. “He might have shot us.”

“Shhh.” Joe's warning hiss was cut off by Vivi's high, nervous giggle.

“My God! Why did you have to shoot them! Look at the mess you made. What on earth are they, what kind of animal would…?” She giggled again. “Oh, it's gory. What are we going to do?”

“Raccoons,” Traynor snapped. “Get some garbage bags.”

“You had to load with soft-nose.”

“Be glad I did. Bullet could go right through these walls, who knows where. Then there'd be hell to pay. Get me the damn bags. Hope to hell the neighbors thought it was a backfire.”

“How did they get in?”

Silence—as if Traynor might be pointing above them, to the crawl hole.

“Well, how did they get in there?”

“How the hell do I know? There are vents in an attic. Get the damn bags.”

“You don't need to snap at me.”

“I'll snap if I want. And look in the garage for a ladder.”

Beneath the couch, Dulcie said, “Maybe our uneasy
feeling wasn't so silly. Why would Traynor have a gun?”

“I don't know, Dulcie. Maybe he carries it when he's traveling. Clyde carries a gun in the car when—”

“The Traynors flew out. People aren't supposed to carry guns on planes.”

“They can, if they check their bag. And lock it. Unload the gun and declare it. Get a special tag—”

The back door banged. Elliott snapped, “Hold the damn bag open!”

“I don't want to do this! Leave that for the cleaning woman—keep it away from me. This makes me sick.”

“Shut up and hold the bag!”

They listened to sounds of scraping, laced with plenty of swearing. Pretty soon they heard the back door open again, then the clanging of metal from the backyard as if Elliott had righted the garbage can that the raccoons had earlier turned over. The idea of a dead animal, even a raccoon, stuffed into a garbage can sickened the cats. They heard Traynor secure the lid and pound it down, as if with an angry fist.

“How many did he kill?” Dulcie said. “There were only three shots. Why didn't we hear the others running away across the attic?”

“Maybe two for one,” Joe said coldly. “I hope he closed the door tight.”

The kit began to wriggle. Joe scowled at her.

“Curl up, Kit. Close your eyes. We can't leave with them fussing around in the kitchen.

“Come here, Kit,” Dulcie said, nudging her. She licked the kit's face and ears, washing her gently until the kit stretched out and dozed off. Dulcie didn't mean
to sleep, but she woke later with the kit curled against her and Joe Grey gone.

Listening, she heard not the faintest noise in the house. Leaving the sleeping kit, she crept out from behind the couch and followed Joe's scent down the hall.

No light burned beneath the bedroom door. She could hear Vivi and Elliott breathing, in two separate rhythms. Their human sleep-smell was sour. Beyond the bedroom, Elliott's study was dark, the door pulled nearly closed. Pressing it open, she padded in.

Against the pale color of the drawn draperies, where a thin wash of moonlight brightened the window, Joe sat atop Elliott Traynor's desk, his silhouette black, his white markings gleaming, his ears pricked sharply—he was as still as a sphinx, watching her. The illuminated clock on the desk said 1:30. She leaped up beside him.

A heavy brown folder lay at his feet, from which he had pawed out a thick sheaf of papers, scattering them across the blotter. There was barely enough light to read, even for a cat. She looked at the pages, frowning.

“Traynor's research,” he said softly. “Take a look at this. A San Francisco museum owns some of Catalina's letters, which they have translated—pretty impassioned letters,” he said, grinning. “She was mad as hell when her father made her marry the American. And look at this.”

With a deft claw he pulled out several pages revealing a paper tucked between them, an auction-house notice offering two letters written by Catalina Ortega-Diaz, the bidding for each to start at ten thousand dollars. A handwritten notation at the bottom indicated that one had sold for twelve thousand, one for fourteen. Clipped to the notice was a printed statement
listing the two items, and making payment to Vivi Traynor.

In the gloom, Joe Grey's eyes were as black as obsidian. “Did someone say there's been no crime? Famous author or not, this is most interesting. There's money here, Dulcie—how many letters did she write over her lifetime? How many did she never send?

“Catalina had seven carved chests that Marcos made for her. Was that white cask one of them? And did they all have secret compartments? Even so, how did she keep her husband from finding them?

“The research said they had separate chambers—bedrooms—where the chests were hidden.”

Dulcie looked at the date on the auction notice. “Only a few weeks since these letters were sold. Then Susan Brittain's house is broken into, and the burglar is attacked. Did those men think she had one of the chests? And the same morning, Casselrod snatches the white one.”

“Add to that,” Joe said, “that Elliott carries a gun and that Vivi and Elliott are afraid of the cops and apparently of Garza's niece.” He looked intently at Dulcie, his yellow eyes gleaming with a hot predatory flame—with the same resolve that he had reserved, in the past, for thieves and killers.

“He's a famous author,” Dulcie said softly. “He's…Well, I don't know. To accuse a man like that…” Looking around the study, looking at the papers that Joe was neatly pawing together, she shivered. “Prying into Elliott Traynor's business makes me nervous.”

“Come on,” he said, pawing the envelope open and pushing the papers in. “Get the kit, let's get out of here.
I need fresh air, away from these people.” Quickly he pushed beneath the draperies and slid the window lock. He had the glass open when Dulcie returned with the yawning kit. And they left the Traynor's with far more silence than they had entered, softly sliding the window closed behind them, as they dropped down among the bushes.

But Joe Grey was back inside the cottage again by the time Charlie got to work. He had watched from the oak tree as Vivi and Elliott left the house, had come in through the window, returning to Elliot's study, his curiosity not nearly satisfied.

He had no idea what else he would find—and no idea that he would catch Charlie snooping, exactly as he and Dulcie had done, hiding her prying with energetic bouts of vacuuming and dusting.

W
hether you're
a cop with a search warrant or the weekly cleaning person come to scour the bathrooms and vacuum the rugs, if you peek through someone's private papers you can stir matters you might wish you'd let lie. The more bizarre the results of such prying, the more compelled one may feel to keep searching, to see what else might come to light.

Charlie Getz had no idea, when she let herself into the Traynor cottage at nine on Monday morning, of the bloody mess she'd have to clean up or of what she would find later in Elliott Traynor's study.

The cottage the Traynors had rented was one of the most charming in the village, with its pale stone exterior and winding brick walk through a lush and tastefully planted garden. The high roof, above tall clerestory windows, was sheltered by an ancient oak. The front porch was laid with pale stone. The hand-carved front door opened into a handsome foyer brightened by a skylight and by a floor of cream-toned Mexican tiles. From the high-ceilinged living room to the tile-floored kitchen, the interior was filled with light.

The furnishings were casual and well designed, the copies of antique Persian rugs well made and rich in color, every detail planned for a tasteful but durable upscale rental. The owners had only recently refurnished, storing their antique pieces in the insulated attic among chests of outgrown children's toys and personal mementos.

Unloading her grocery bag, Charlie rinsed the salad greens and the pound of Bing cherries she had bought for Vivi, put the cherries into a flat plastic container, and slipped them in the freezer—frozen cherries for Vivi to suck on during the day, a childish habit that seemed to Charlie to have weird sexual connotations.

Moving into the living room, she watered the plants with a specially prepared plant food that was kept in a gallon plastic bottle under the wet bar. It was when she returned to the bright kitchen to get the vacuum from the cleaning closet next to the pantry, that she smelled something sour and metallic, a vile stink like spoiling meat, seeping out around the pantry door. Had some food gone bad, or a can of something exploded?

That didn't seem likely. She had stocked the shelves herself, only three weeks before, with freshly purchased staples, following instructions from the rental agent. Reaching for the doorknob, she hesitated, filled with a strange apprehension.

Slowly she pulled the pantry door open—and slammed it closed again, trying to catch her breath.

Her first thought was that some kind of meat had been butchered in there and been flung around, then left lying in globs on the floor. Who would do such a thing? And there were hanks of hair on it, pieces of fur.

Dark fur, mixed with gore and blood.

Fur mottled like…

Terrified, ripping open the door again, she expected to see tortoiseshell fur mottled black and brown. Those cats roamed everywhere, they were likely to slip into anyone's house. But who would…?

Oh, not the kit. Please, not the kit.

Having flung open the door, she forced herself to look carefully.

Relief flooded her. This wasn't the kit's tortoiseshell fur, nor Dulcie's tabby-striped coat. This fur was coarse and rough—black and gray, not brown.

Raccoons?

Raisins and crackers were mixed with the blood. From the shelves, the contents of burst cans of corn and fruit salad dripped down. Raccoons couldn't do that—the cans had been blown open by some tremendous force.

She turned away, her breakfast wanting to come up. What kind of horrible prank was this? What sick joke? She stood holding her hand to her mouth, trying to mask the smell, trying to keep from heaving. Trying to construct a plausible scenario.

Chill air touched her from above, a cold draft. Looking up at the pantry ceiling, she saw the access door had been tampered with, the plywood cover apparently pulled aside, then pushed crookedly back again into place, its unpainted parts marking its altered position. Would raccoons be able to pull aside an attic door, would they know how to do that?

Certainly raccoons had broken into several village houses that were supposedly vermin proof. She remembered when a dozen of the beasts got into the Carvers' house through the attic and down into an up
stairs bedroom, terrifying old Mrs. Carver nearly to apoplexy. And that wasn't the only bizarre tale of the damage raccoons could do. When two of them got into the high school by shoving aside an acoustical tile, they took over the principal's office and quite effectively rearranged his filing system before they could be evicted. As she stood studying the bloody mess, trying not to be sick, she realized she was looking, among a pattern of dark splatters, at a ragged hole in the Sheetrock.

A bullet hole? Was that what happened, had these animals been shot? She thought the bullet would have to have been a hollow-point, to tear the beasts up like that and to make that huge ragged hole in the wall.

She imagined the animals breaking in, making a racket as they attacked the food, then Elliott flinging open the door and shooting them. Afterward, he must have pushed the plywood back over the ceiling opening, maybe thinking that more of the beasts were up there.

Couldn't he have thought of some other approach than killing them? The police carried animal nets for this kind of emergency. Or the police would have called a specialist. There were several services in the area that had humane traps to deal with such cases. She felt rage that he had called no one, that he had shot the them. And then, to top it off, he had left the mess for her to clean up.

Swallowing back her anger, she fetched rubber gloves from her tote bag, and put on one of the surgical masks she carried for use when she didn't want to breathe caustic fumes. Tying a dishtowel over her hair, she cursed the Traynors. She was a cleaning profes
sional, not a dead body disposal service. Not in this situation. This wasn't the aftermath of police business, to which she had been summoned. She felt like walking out, telling them to clean up their own mayhem.

With a roll of paper towels and a dustpan to use as a scoop and several heavy garbage bags, she cleared out the spilled food and scrubbed away the blood where it had splattered on the walls and shelves. She dumped the undamaged cans in a bucket of hot, soapy water and scrubbed each one. As she cleaned, she found two other holes. From one, she dug out a soft-nosed bullet smashed like a mushroom. The other was too deeply embedded. When she had finished scrubbing and disinfecting and carried the bags out to the garbage, she saw that her work wasn't finished.

The yard around the back door was covered with garbage—empty cans, soiled wrapping paper, all kinds of household refuse. Strange that the garbage can itself was upright, with the lid secured.

After pitching the scattered garbage piece by piece into a fresh plastic bag, she opened the tall can and saw that two bags were already there, heavy with something, and smelling of gore; and she felt disgust all over again. Traynor had put the bodies here. That sickened her. Couldn't he have given them a decent burial? This was going to be her last day working for Elliott Traynor. It took a really colossal nerve to leave such a mess, not only in the pantry but in the yard, not even to pick up the garbage, no matter how famous he was.

When she'd finished cleaning, she threw her mask and hair cover and gloves into the garbage, fetched a clean uniform and shoes from her van, and, in the Traynor's guest bath, washed her face and hands and
arms, washed every exposed part of herself, dropping her soiled garments and shoes in a plastic bag to be discarded. She'd bill Traynor for replacements. Cleaning up after a murder didn't hold a candle to this.

Returning to the kitchen to fetch the vacuum, the thought struck her that not only raccoons but a man could have been shot in there.

How silly. Did she always have to imagine more than was possible?

And yet…

If there had been a man, she thought, panicked, she had destroyed the evidence.

Hurrying out to the garbage can, she hauled out the plastic bags she had filled and opened the two at the bottom.

Raccoons. Badly mangled. Surely that accounted for the blood and gore.

Tying up the bags again and stuffing everything back on top, she closed the lid tightly and went inside to scrub herself all over again—and to call the police department. Her feelings about Elliott Traynor, which had before today deteriorated from admiration to puzzled unease, had turned to disgust.

She supposed she was too inclined to see her heroes as giants above reproach. She expected Elliott Traynor to be without any possible fault.

Though she didn't suppose that it was illegal to shoot raccoons, under the circumstances, she thought she ought to tell Max of the incident, thought there might be some reason that he would need to know this. When she'd placed the call, the dispatcher told her Captain Harper was in court. She left a message for him to call her, she didn't want to tell the dispatcher
why. She felt tired, enervated. Felt used and unnaturally defenseless—not her usual state of mind.

She wanted to see Max and feel the strength of him holding her, wanted to hear some wisecrack, some wry comment about murdered raccoons, some twisted cop humor that would make her laugh.

But then when she went to dust the dining room and mop its tile floor, she found Traynor's note. It lay on the table beside a hundred-dollar bill.

Not a graceful communication. Short and abrupt. Well, what did she want, a eulogy to dead raccoons? She felt inclined to leave his hundred-dollar bill. Surely Traynor had intended this as a bribe.

But she had more than earned the hundred, cleaning up his mess. If she didn't take it now, she'd be billing him for the extra work. Likely the money was intended as both payment and bribe.

She called it earned, slipped it into her pocket, and got on with the vacuuming. She did the living room and front bedroom, emptying the wastebaskets with distaste, where Vivi's cherry seeds stuck to the plastic liners. Only when she started on Traynor's study did she slow her pace.

When she wheeled the vacuum into Traynor's study,
it was as neat and tidy as ever. Nothing on the desk but his computer and the freshly printed chapter he had written the night before. He always left the new chapter on the desk, possibly to go over the next day when he and Vivi returned from their walk or from the theater. They went often to approve the sets that Cora Lee was painting, then had breakfast out.

Tryouts were tonight. Charlie supposed that when rehearsals began they'd be at the theater for longer periods. It seemed a rigorous routine for someone being treated for cancer. Traynor had told her, when they first arrived and were discussing her work routine, that he worked late into the night. He said that was when the juices flowed. She remembered the amused look in his eyes, some private joke—or maybe his faint smile was simply juvenile humor at the off-color connotation. A strange man. He still interested her, despite her anger this morning.

He was far more stern in real life than he looked in the promotion picture on his book jackets. Long before this morning, Traynor had made her uncomfortable. He seemed to analyze and weigh a person far too closely—maybe a writer's penetrating observation, she supposed, as he tried to see beneath the surface.

Did she, when she was sketching an animal, stare like that at her subject? Did she make her animals uncomfortable? With Joe and Dulcie, she'd seen them both wince when she was drawing them. And despite the kit's bright disposition, several times when she'd looked too hard at the kit, she'd gotten a hiss in return or a striking paw that surprised her and made her draw back.

Who knew what animals felt when you stared at
them? In the animal world, a stare meant the threat of attack. One was supposed to stare at a mountain lion, to keep him from attacking first—to show superiority. But one was not, while hunting, supposed to look a deer or rabbit in the eye, that only alerted them.

Joe and Dulcie and the kit were sentient cats, not instinct-driven wild beasts. Most of the time, logic drove those three—but a logic overlying the same deep feline nature as any ordinary kitty—they weren't any less cat, they were simply more than cat.

Vacuuming beneath the fine walnut desk and along beside the walnut bookshelves, she reached to try the desk drawers and file drawers. As usual, they were locked. Hesitantly she reached for the new pages of Traynor's book that lay before her.

All week she had been sneaking looks at Traynor's manuscipt. Last Friday, reading his earlier pages, she had been shocked and deeply upset. She'd been so excited to have a look at his work, had told herself that after all, it was written for public consumption, and it was right there on the desk; she only wanted to see how he developed his prose, from the beginning. In school she had been interested in writing fiction—though far more fascinated, always, with drawing, with the visual images she wanted to create. But Traynor had always been a favorite; she had loved reading some of his passages over and over, simply for their poetry.

She'd heard him tell someone on the phone that this new book was set in Marin County, above San Francisco, at the turn of the century. She liked the title,
Twilight Silver
. She had stood with the vacuum paused and roaring, reading the neatly printed pages.

They'd been dreadful. The words stumbled, the
paragraphs didn't make sense. She had started again, thinking her lack of comprehension was her fault. She had skipped ahead several pages, but had found no improvement. She'd decided this must be a first draft, a rough beginning. Surely a writer was allowed a flawed first draft.

But why print it out so neatly? Why bother, until it was the way he wanted it—why print out these garbled pages, this lack of clarity with not a hint of his lucid style?