Depawsit Slip (Vanessa Abbot Cat Protection League Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) (3 page)

The heat from the fire weighed Vanessa’s eyelids down. She would go to bed soon and put this murder as far out of her mind as she could. All at once, a loud knock rapped on the door. Vanessa started, but she couldn’t get up very fast with three cats on her lap. She tried to inch them off, but they hooked their claws into her pant legs and held on. Even when she stood all the way up, they clung to her until their claws ripped the fabric of her pants. They jumped back up into the warm place she left on the chair as soon as she left it.

She waded through acres of cats to get to the door. She peeked out and gave a cry. “Penny! What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in, Vanessa?” Penny barged in without waiting to hear the answer. “I need to talk to you.”

Vanessa stood in the open door and stared after her. “Well, I was just about to go to bed.”

“Do you know what that rotten detective said to me?” Penny stormed. “He said I couldn’t leave town while I was under suspicion for Alfred’s death.”

Vanessa closed the door and sighed. “Well, that only makes sense. Don’t you think? He doesn’t want the killer running off to escape justice.”

Penny gasped in exasperation and waved her arm. “I gotta sit down.”

She strode over to the nearest chair in front of the fire. With one sweep of her hand, she scraped all the cats off the chair. They scattered in all directions with a chorus of yowls. Penny plopped down into the chair and gasped again.

Ambrosia stopped a few paces away and looked back over her shoulder at Penny. Foxle ran all the way to the bedroom, crawled under the mattress, and didn’t come out for a week. BettyLou ran in a complete circle around the living room and ended up next to Vanessa’s chair. She considered the options. Then she jumped up and settled down in the nest with the others.

Vanessa stared at Penny. Penny looked around the room. She noticed the painted lampshade on the table at her elbow. She gazed into the flames in the fireplace. She brushed a speck of lint from the leg of her pants. She saw everything in the room but the cats.

Vanessa waited until the hubbub died down.

Penny cleared her throat. “I don’t know what’s going on in this town anymore. Who is this Detective Sargent Wheeler, anyway? Who does he think he is, sticking his nose into our business?”

Vanessa humphed. You couldn't make a person understand, no matter how hard you tried. “Investigating Alfred’s death is his business. He’s a police detective, and Alfred was murdered. It’s his job to find out who did it.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Penny shot back. “He has no reason to question me.”

“How would he know you didn’t do it?” Vanessa asked. “It had to be one of us that was standing next to Alfred at the bank. It could only be you, me, Walter, or Ollie Fleetwood. Of course he wants to question us.”

“He didn’t question you,” Penny remarked.

“Oh, yes, he did,” Vanessa replied. “He questioned me very thoroughly. You were there. You saw him talking to me. Fortunately for me, he decided I wasn’t as suspicious as the rest of you, so he let me go.”

“Why did he decide that?” Penny asked. “You had as much reason to hate Alfred as the rest of us.”

Vanessa shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him that. I told him the truth, that I never had any dealings with Alfred or his backroom business. Maybe he thought you and the others had more opportunity to get mixed up with Alfred's seedy side.”

“But I didn’t,” Penny insisted. “I barely ever said a word to him in all the years I lived in this town, and I certainly never got my hair cut at his barbershop.”

Vanessa went back to her chair. She collected the cats from the seat and sat down with them on her lap. They didn’t settle down again the way they did before. BettyLou pranced around in a circle for a minute, but then she jumped down and left the room. Amber and Porcupine got into a scrap over Vanessa’s lap and wound up tumbling to the floor. Amber ran away, and Porcupine sat in the middle of the hearthrug to lick his fur and glare at everyone.

Vanessa sighed again. When would Penny leave? She only came to complain about Detective Wheeler’s investigation. “I really don’t know what Detective Wheeler has in mind for investigating Alfred’s murder, and frankly, I don’t really care. He’s a police officer. It’s his job to look into these things. I leave it in his hands. I told him to ask Captain Jameson for Alfred’s file. The police must have a file three feet thick on Alfred’s activities. I’m sure they can get all the information they need from that.”

“You’re a very trusting soul, Vanessa,” Penny remarked. “I suppose that’s what comes of spending all your time with cats.”

Vanessa stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t have to deal with real people,” Penny explained. “You don’t have to deal with their failings and their indiscretions and their foibles. Take me, for instance. My job requires me to deal with people at their worst on a constant basis. People are always on their last nerve when they plan a wedding, and they take it out on their wedding planner.”

Vanessa sat up. She couldn’t relax anymore with Penny around. “If you don’t like your job, Penny, why don’t you do something else? I spend my time with cats because I love cats and I want to take care of them. I want to give cats a good life. That’s what I do for a living. If you want a job you enjoy, then do it. No one told you to be a wedding planner. I can’t imagine you get much work in Caspar Crossing, anyway.”

Penny groaned. “If you only knew.”

“So tell me,” Vanessa replied. “You came here to talk, so talk. What is so bad about being a wedding planner in Caspar Crossing?”

“Do you really want to know?” Penny asked. “All right. I’ll tell you. One of my clients wanted to ride to the church in a horse-drawn carriage. She had a nervous breakdown when I told her she would have to order one from the city, since no one in town does that sort of thing. Then I had a client, a man, who wanted a flock of white doves released in front of the church. One of the doves poo-ed on the shoulder of his tuxedo, and he wanted me to pay for it.”

Vanessa giggled under her breath.

Penny scowled at her. “It’s not funny.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” Vanessa returned. “It’s hilarious. Keep going. I haven’t heard anything this funny in a long time.”

“You think that’s funny?” Penny snapped. “One couple wanted to get married on top of Mount Patterson. I arranged the whole thing, but when the day came, some of the older guests couldn’t walk up the mountain. It was too steep for them. The couple demanded a refund. And then there's the bride whose brother was some sort of big-shot mafioso who wanted to make all the decisions on his sister’s wedding.”

The smile evaporated from Vanessa’s face. “What are you telling me, Penny?”

Penny stared into the fire. “No one could make a move without his approval.”

Vanessa kept perfectly still. “If you know something about this case, Penny, you should tell Detective Wheeler, not me.”

“And make myself more of a suspect than I already am?” Penny shot back. “No thanks.”

“Then we really don’t have anything more to talk about, do we?” Vanessa asked.

Penny muttered something Vanessa didn’t catch. She pushed herself out of her chair and went to the door. The toe of her high-heeled boot clipped Ambrosia on the back leg and the cat let out a yelp, but Penny didn’t even notice.

“I...I guess I’ll see you around, Vanessa,” Penny muttered.

“If you want to talk anymore....about anything,” Vanessa replied, “you can always find me in the Shop.”

Penny nodded and left.

Vanessa closed the door behind her with another heavy sigh. This time, she secured the deadbolt, and the chain, and the stainless steel barricade before she went back to her chair. None of the cats would come near her now. A cold empty place in her lap ached for its familiar feline company.

Only Henry examined her from his usual place in the chimney corner.

“Do you really think so?” Vanessa asked. “I thought she might be referring to someone else. You meet all kinds of people in her line of work.”

Henry turned back to the fire and closed his eyes.

“I don’t really know,” Vanessa told him. “You’re right about that. But you would think she’d meet a lot more different people as a wedding planner than I do as President of the Cat Protection League. I never met a mafioso in my life.”

Henry laid his head on his paws and curled his tail around him.
 

“You don’t have to be rude, Henry,” Vanessa told him. “I know it as well as you do. Still, she could have been talking about somebody else. She could have been talking about anybody. She didn’t have to be talking about Alfred, just because she’s a suspect in his murder. Besides, Alfred was not a mafioso.”

Henry’s breathing deepened into sleep. Only one ear twitched to show he still heard her.

“No one really knows, do they?” she asked. “No one knows all that he was doing in back room of his barbershop. Anyway, it doesn’t concern us. Even if she had dealings with Alfred during his sister’s wedding doesn’t mean she killed him.”

Vanessa glanced up when she heard the door bells jingling. The blood mounted to her cheeks when she spotted Detective Wheeler coming through the door.

He smiled at her and looked around the Shop. Then he closed the door behind him. “So this is it.” He strolled through the aisles and eyed the merchandise.

AngelPie strutted along a shelf and mewed down at him. He scratched her between the ears and down her neck to her shoulders. She purred and jumped down to a table in front of him. Flossy stood up from her bed among the glassware and stretched. When Pete approached, she tiptoed across her table to meet him. He ran his hand down her back and gave her tail a flick. Teddy slipped out from behind the trashcan and rubbed his side against the cuff of Pete Wheeler’s jeans. The detective bent down and scratched him along the back, too.

Vanessa smiled to herself in approval. So that’s the kind of man Detective Sargent Peter Wheeler was. Well, that would do. That would do just fine.

She was still smiling when he stood up and faced her. “Nice place you got here.”

She chuckled. “It’s nothing fancy, but it pays the bills and it helps take care of mistreated cats.”

He nodded and looked around again. “You’ve got some nice stuff here. I mean it. I love shops like this.”

She blushed. “What can I help you with? I’m guessing you didn’t come for a set of dishes.”

He snorted. “No. I came to talk to you about the case.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “Anything I can do to help.”

“You said the plumber comes in here with his family,” he recalled.

“That’s right,” she replied. “Almost everybody does.”

“And you know everybody in this town a lot better than I do,” he went on. “I don’t suppose you could get them talking. Maybe they would tell you things they wouldn’t tell the police.”

“I’m sure I could,” she replied. “People love to talk. I’m like a bartender that way. People walk through that door, and they just naturally start spilling their guts to me.”

“So you could put your feelers out for me?” he asked. “You could make some discrete inquiries about Botchweather and his dealings, and then let me know. I’ll understand if you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to get a name in this town for working with the police.”

“I wouldn’t exactly be working with the police, though, would I?” she pointed out. “I’d just be asking about their lives, the same way I already do. People like to gossip, and they’ll be talking about the murder. I don’t think they’ll tell me anything they wouldn’t tell you, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

“You might be surprised,” he told her.

“Did you talk to Captain Jameson about Alfred?” she asked. “I’m sure he can tell you a lot more than I could.”

“I talked to him,” he replied. “And I read the file. Would you believe I got a lot more information out of you than I did out of that file? It seems our friend Alfred knew how to keep his nose clean. He’d never been arrested in his life, and the police had no more than suspicions about his dealings.”

“Maybe he had help from inside the police force,” Vanessa suggested.

Pete shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I worked in Chicago for seven years before I moved here. I have a pretty good nose for police corruption, and this department seems pretty clean to me. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to move here. No, I think Alfred Botchweather was just very good at what he did. He paid his taxes, and he never left any paper trail in his back room dealings that could get him into trouble.”

“Then how are you going to find out who killed him?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I'm hoping you can help me. Then again, his killer probably wasn’t so careful. A career criminal can cover all the bases. Your ordinary citizen who decides to rub somebody out doesn’t usually take all the possibilities into account. Our killer is bound to have left some stone unturned, and that’s where we’ll catch him.”

“We?” she asked.

He smiled. “Yeah, we—if that’s all right with you, of course.”

Vanessa held up her hands. “I’m telling you right now. I’m no detective. I’m just going to talk to people about the case.”