How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) (17 page)

A FROLIC IN THE FOUNTAIN

SETTING HER BEARINGS
for the Pacific Stock Exchange, the niece rounded the corner of the TransAmerica Pyramid building.

Having worked for several years in one of the financial district’s high-rise office buildings, she knew the downtown area well. And in the years since she’d left the accounting job for her uncle’s antique business, she had studied countless maps of San Francisco, particularly the streets that encompassed the former Barbary Coast.

Pondering the layout in her head, the niece pushed the stroller past the pyramid’s southeast flank.

“If we go about a block toward the water,” she said, thinking aloud, “and then turn right, that should put us in front of the Stock Exchange.”

Remaining vigilant inside the stroller, Isabella peered out at her surroundings. She piped a consenting
chirp
at the niece’s proposed route, but as the stroller reached the gate to the small park located immediately behind the Pyramid, she appeared to change her mind.

“Wrao-ow.”

“Let’s not get distracted,” the niece replied absentmindedly, still focused on navigating toward the Stock Exchange.

The second instruction was more direct.

“Mrao!”

Stopping, the niece strummed her fingers against the stroller handle. Isabella’s indignant blue eyes stared up through the passenger compartment’s net cover.

“Okay, we can take a short break by the fountain. I think I have a map in the stroller. I can check the route.”

Seemingly satisfied, Isabella returned to a forward-facing position.

She’d seen something that her human had missed.

Spider’s transparent figure had loped through the park and was beckoning Isabella to come toward the fountain at its center.

• • •

MUTTERING UNDER HER
breath about taking orders from a cat, the niece pushed the stroller through the open gates of Redwood Park.

Sky-high redwoods ringed the half-acre green space, blocking out most of the adjacent office buildings. Frequented by workers from the downtown’s many financial institutions, the park was a popular spot for coffee breaks and sack lunches. For the time being, however, the area was empty.

The niece parked the stroller by a bench positioned near the fountain and began searching the many pockets for the map.

Isabella, meanwhile, focused her intensity on the fountain. Several spigots shot aerated spouts of water up from the center, an imitation of the surrounding redwoods. Around the fountain’s edges, a number of metal frogs posed in various leaping positions, their bodies wet from the center spray.

The fountain’s frog theme was a tribute to Mark Twain, playing off the subject matter of one of his earliest writing successes, a short story involving a prized jumping frog.

The niece finally pulled the map from a stroller pocket. The laminated folio had seen a great deal of use. Unfolding the worn sheet, she sat down on the bench to study their location.

“I think we’re heading in the right direction,” the niece said after a brief inspection. “Funny, it puts us right on the track of . . .”

She stopped and looked up as the stroller began to rock back and forth. Isabella stabbed at the net cover, urgently signaling to her person.

Rupert poked his head up through the blankets, stretched his mouth into a sleepy yawn, and turned his gaze toward the fountain—and the object that was causing his sister’s tizzy.

His blue eyes opened wide as his furry face registered shocked surprise; then he ducked back down into the stroller’s passenger compartment.

Brow furrowed, the niece glanced at the fountain—and sharply drew in her breath.

A human image had formed in the splashing water. It was something less than solid, but dense enough to cause the moving water to divert around its shape.

The niece stared at the figure in the fountain, dumbstruck.

The liquid silhouette was that of the murdered intern.

He was emphatically pointing toward the park entrance—and across the street to the northern terminus of Leidesdorff Alley.

LEIDESDORFF ALLEY

BEFORE THE NIECE
could utter a word, the figure in the fountain disappeared. The water resumed its regular bouncing rhythm, shooting out the spigots in the fountain’s center base, rising ten to twelve feet into the air, and then pattering like rain back into the frog-ringed pond.

Stepping tentatively toward the nearest stream of water, the niece reached with her free hand to touch the outer droplets. The moisture that coated her skin was a regular liquid consistency—with no apparent transformative properties.

Crouching to her knees, she squinted at the metal spigots, trying to identify the device that had been used to manipulate the spray.

There was nothing to indicate the application of a special effect, no sign that the fountain had been altered in any way.

Wiping her wet fingers on her pants leg, she struggled to wrap her mind around what she had just seen.

What could have possibly caused the water to form the shape of the murdered City Hall intern? Why had he been pointing toward the park exit?

“And was he wearing rubber-soled sneakers?” she asked, thinking of the previous day’s footprints. She hadn’t had time to look at the apparition’s feet.

“I must be losing my mind,” she said, returning to the stroller.

“But then again,” she added with a shrug toward the passenger compartment, “here I am, talking to my cat.”

Isabella glared sternly up through the mesh netting and sniffed her offense.

• • •

TRYING TO REGROUP,
the niece once more focused on the map.

Both the figure in the fountain and the
City Life
mural had directed her toward a path she had studied before—and traveled directly beneath.

A half block off of Montgomery, Leidesdorff Alley had been the subject of the niece’s first Oscar-inspired treasure hunt. Below the narrow side street lay a secret tunnel that ran across the financial district. Near Market’s busy thoroughfare, the tunnel system branched out, threading through the multi-layered underground BART and Muni systems to the Palace Hotel. On the north side of the financial district, the tunnel’s main access point was in Jackson Square—through a hidden door in a basement wall beneath the Green Vase showroom.

The tunnel’s path, like Leidesdorff Alley at ground level, traced the edge of San Francisco’s original shoreline, a marshy landscape that was filled in during the city’s massive Gold Rush–era expansion into the Bay.

The niece had stumbled across the tunnel entrance two years earlier while exploring the Leidesdorff-related treasure her uncle had been researching before his apparent death. Leidesdorff and his tulip-shaped cuff links had been the key to the location of a set of valuable diamond jewels—and an important clue to the sleeping potion used to facilitate her uncle’s disappearance.

The caper eventually culminated in a kitschy cat show at the Palace Hotel, where Rupert and Isabella modeled elaborate costumes fashioned out of the diamonds, followed by a race back through the tunnel to the Green Vase basement and a showdown intended to trap her uncle’s long-term nemesis.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” the niece murmured to herself, looking up from the map and through the park gates to the opening of the nondescript alley. But she couldn’t dismiss the correlation.

William Leidesdorff marked the beginning of the weird and wonderful journey she’d begun when she and her two cats moved into the apartment above the Green Vase. She’d left behind a secure but tediously predictable career as an accountant and taken on a pursuit of endless mystery.

It was difficult for her to imagine ever going back to her previous life—even with all the hassles she’d had to endure from her crazy neighbor.

No, she thought resolutely. This had to be it. A path down Leidesdorff Alley was just the type of route her uncle would have devised.

Isabella sent up a trill of agreeable cat chatter as the niece slid the map into the side pocket and pushed the stroller across the street.

THE NOSE KNOWS

THE NIECE ROLLED
the cat-filled strolled into Leidesdorff Alley. Raising her hand to block the sun’s overhead rays, she peered down its short length. No more than a single car’s width, the alley stretched a few short blocks, wiggling from one side to the other as it cut through the downtown financial district.

Other than a sandwich shop that had recently opened at the alley’s midway point, there was nothing much of note. To the casual observer, it was just an empty service corridor, flanked by the solid brick-and-concrete walls of the adjacent buildings.

But the niece knew better.

She stopped in front of a nondescript wall near the alley’s entrance and studied a historical marker that had been mounted, shoulder height, onto the brickwork.

The square plaque featured a relief-style sculpture of William Leidesdorff’s head and shoulders. The metal surface had been stained a dark brown, perhaps in recognition of Leidesdorff’s Caribbean roots. The son of a St. Croix sugar plantation owner and a West Indian slave, Leidesdorff had been born with a dusky complexion that allowed him, during a time of racially drawn boundaries, to blend in and mix with different cultures and social classes.

The plaque’s center portrait image was surrounded by a series of smaller scenes, each one depicting a seminal event from Leidesdorff’s life.

After leaving St. Croix at a young age to work on the shipping vessels that moved goods up and down the East Coast, Leidesdorff eventually established a successful transport business in New Orleans. There, he fell in love with a debutante from a wealthy society family. They were set to be married—until her parents found out about the groom’s mulatto ancestry. With the wedding called off, a broken-hearted Leidesdorff sailed up the Pacific coast to the wilds of Upper California, then a Mexican territory.

Along with a Russian maid, who bore a strong resemblance to the New Orleans fiancée, Leidesdorff built a new life for himself in the frontier town of Yerba Buena (the predecessor of San Francisco). This renaissance was unfortunately cut short when Leidesdorff died under suspicious circumstances days before the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill.

Leidesdorff was buried in San Francisco at the Mission Dolores, a site that the niece, memorably accompanied by Montgomery Carmichael, had visited during her first treasure hunt.

In order to give the niece time to examine the gravesite, Monty had distracted the supervising priest with questions about pursuing a career in the ministry.

“I don’t think the father ever recovered from that experience,” she said, shaking her head as she recalled the scene.

• • •

“MRAO,”
ISABELLA CALLED
up from the stroller. In her opinion, the niece had spent long enough staring at the plaque. It was time to get moving.

“Onward,” the niece replied, grabbing the stroller’s handle and giving it a strong push down the alley.

They soon reached the sandwich shop, which was starting to percolate with midmorning customers. Around the corner from several legal and accounting firms, the alley location had proven to be a convenient niche.

A few tables had been spread across a small patio on the alley side of the building. The outdoor eating area was framed by a line of distinctive black posts, each one topped by an iron horse head with a flat nose and a metal ring threaded through the mouth like a bit.

The niece braked the stroller, yielding to a patron who had just exited the sandwich shop carrying a paper bag with an early lunch.

As the door swished open and closed, Rupert’s orange ears suddenly perked. Something had awakened his sleeping sonar. From the stroller’s cat compartment came a loud snuffling sound, followed by a disbelieving
“Mow?”

Isabella looked at her brother, puzzled at what he could have possibly sensed that she would have missed.

Rupert snorkeled in another volume of air, seeking confirmation. After the recent switch to diet cat food, his smelling skills were, if anything, amplified by the dissatisfied rumbling in his stomach.

Yes
, he thought jubilantly. It was just a sliver of a scent, but he was confident in his nasal analysis. He had expertise in just one area, but on this topic he commanded full feline respect.

Lifting his head, his furry chest puffed out as he made the gleeful pronouncement.

“Mreow!”

Bemused, the niece looked down at the stroller.

“What’s got into you?” she asked with a laugh.

“Mreow!”
Rupert repeated, this time a forceful statement as he stared with intensity at the sandwich shop.

“Don’t be silly,” the niece said placatingly. “You don’t eat sandwiches. And besides, that takeout bag was marked pastrami, not chicken.”

Rupert’s face registered panic and confusion as the niece pushed the stroller past the shop. In the stroller compartment beside him, his sister added her voice to the cause, to no avail.

“Don’t worry,” their person said. “When we get back to the Green Vase, I’ll pour you a big bowl of your new diet giblets.”

Rupert’s sorrowful howl echoed down the alley.

• • •

DISTRACTED BY THE
cat commotion inside the stroller, the niece failed to notice a white cargo van parked around the corner from the sandwich shop. The vehicle had received several additional dents and scrapes on its exit from the Sonoma forest, and the windshield now bore a long crack across the passenger’s viewing side.

Minutes earlier, two men, grungy from their months of camping in the woods, had retrieved a covered painting from the van’s rear cargo area.

The niece and stroller bustled past the sandwich shop just as Sam and Oscar hung the artwork on a wall inside. Having been painted in the cabin near the cooking fire, the canvas had absorbed trace amounts of fried chicken scent.

The painting was a near-perfect replica of Victor Arnautoff’s
City Life
.