How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) (3 page)

THE FACE

MONTY SCOOPED UP
what was left of the charcoal pencil and tossed it into the air. He watched the slender stick tumble end over end. Then with a well-timed swipe, he caught it in his hand.

Clutching the pencil in his fist, he set off on a frustrated circle through the showroom.

“Every time I try to sketch this scene, it falls apart when I get to the face.” He blew air through his lips, causing them to vibrate. “I just can’t get it to come together properly. Something’s not right.” He gave the pencil another toss. “I’ve never had such difficulty capturing an image.”

The niece gently dropped Rupert to the floor and stood from the recliner.

“Which face?” she asked warily. “Rupert’s or mine?”

Blinking sleepily, Rupert yawned himself awake. After a deep lunging stretch, he waddled beneath the easel to where Monty had thrown the crumpled piece of paper. His feather duster tail swished back and forth as he inspected the discarded drawing.

Dropping his chin to the ground, Rupert slid a front paw forward, turned it sideways, and swatted at the balled-up paper, sending the wad skidding across the floor and under a display table.

“Rupert isn’t the problem,” Monty said as he once more lobbed the pencil into the air. “I’ve got a perfect feline model.”

He gazed warmly down at Rupert—or, at least, his fluffy rear end. The cat’s front half was wedged beneath the display table, where he was trying to reach the crumpled paper ball.

Distracted by Rupert’s antics, Monty missed the pencil’s downward arc. It clattered onto the floor, instantly transforming into a new cat toy, one that was far easier to reach.

As Rupert scooted after the pencil, Monty plopped onto the vacant leather chair and pulled the recline lever. With a creaking
whomp
, the seat shifted into its flattest horizontal position.

“I think it’s the nose that’s bothering me,” Monty said, throwing his arms back and cupping his hands behind his head. “The shape is off.”

The woman folded her arms in front of her chest. “What’s wrong with my nose?” she demanded testily.

Rupert captured the wayward pencil. Holding it trapped beneath his paw, he gave it an investigative sniff. After tentatively mouthing the distasteful charcoal lead, he spat out the pencil and returned his attention to the crumpled paper.

Sliding like a dust mop across the slick wood flooring, he reached once more beneath the display table. This time, he managed to tap the wad of paper with the tip of an extended front claw, sending it flying toward the recliner.

The pudgy cat continued the chase, bumping into table legs and the bottom facing of a bookcase during an increasingly wild pursuit.

Fully extended across the recliner, Monty crossed his legs at the ankles and squinted up at the ceiling.

“Then there’s the chin,” he murmured thoughtfully. His face contorted into a sour expression as he envisioned the sketched image. “I just can’t get the dimple right.”

“I don’t have a dimple on my chin!” the niece sputtered indignantly.

Despite the temptations of the clattering pencil and the skittering clump of paper, Isabella had maintained a dignified stance on her seat by the easel. But as Rupert once more careened past on the floor beneath her, she couldn’t help joining in the play.

With a flying leap, she bounded after her brother. A rolling ball of cat fur ensued, leaving the crumpled paper abandoned in a corner.

Stepping gingerly around the wrestling feline pair, the woman bent to pick up the abandoned drawing.

“Painter’s block,” Monty muttered at the ceiling. “That’s what I have. Instead of being stymied on a word, I’m struggling with an image.”

In typical fashion, he had ignored the niece’s previous comments. It wasn’t an unusual response, just one of many in his repertoire of annoying mannerisms.

His stance swiftly changed, however, when he noticed the woman’s movement toward the crumpled sketch.

“Oh no,” he gasped, lunging off the recliner. “No, no, no. You can’t look at that. It’s not ready.”

The niece paused, her eyes slanting suspiciously.

It was only a short hesitation. Before Monty could reach her, she scooped up the paper and sprinted toward the front of the showroom. Monty followed, his long arms flailing as he tried to grab the wad of paper.

Reaching the cashier counter, the niece tugged at the edges of the sheet, spreading it across the counter’s flat surface. Her brow furrowed in confusion.

“This doesn’t look anything like me!” she exclaimed as Monty clambered up behind her. She jabbed her finger at the human figure in the drawing. “This person is wearing a baseball cap and high-top sneakers . . .”

Monty snatched the paper from her grasp, but she had already seen the entire sketch.

“And it’s a
man
,” she finished, perplexed. “Monty,” she said, placing her hands on her hips, “what’s going on?”

Her chatty neighbor suddenly lost his voice. Inexplicably mute, his freckled face blanched to a shade of pasty pale.

Shaking his head, Monty shoved the paper into his pocket. He returned to the center of the room, collapsed the easel to its folded position, and headed for the exit.

The woman watched as he squeezed the easel and the sketch pad through the doorway and hurried across the rainy street to his studio.

Pondering, she bent to pick up the charcoal pencil from the floor. Slowly rotating it in her hands, she reflected on the sketched picture.

Try as she might, she couldn’t think why Monty would have replaced her position in the drawing with the image of Spider Jones—the young intern who was murdered in City Hall the same night the board of supervisors met to select the interim mayor.

THE DISAPPEARANCE

“WHAT IS WRONG
with that man?” the niece murmured as she slipped the charcoal pencil into a drawer behind the cash register.

Isabella gave her person a blank stare, the feline version of a shrug. The woman’s question required far too long and complicated of an answer for the cat to attempt a verbal response. And besides, she reasoned, it was unlikely her human would have understood the explanation.

Still puzzling over the image of the dead intern in Monty’s sketch, the niece walked around the counter to the front door and propped it open so that she could get a clearer view of the art studio across the street. The rain streaked down the studio’s front windows, but a light had been turned on in the main room. While still blurry, it was possible for her to see inside.

Isabella joined her person in the doorway, and the two of them watched Monty’s slim figure pace around a row of easels. He appeared to be engaged in an animated conversation, agitatedly throwing his hands in the air as he stormed back and forth.

The niece shook her head, relieved not to be on the receiving end of this overwrought display of emotion.

The rant reached a fever pitch as Monty stopped and grabbed a picture frame from a stack near his desk. His narrow face howled in a silent scream as he raised the frame over his head, waved it threateningly at the ceiling, and slammed it onto the ground. Then he proceeded to stomp on the frame’s wooden boards, jumping up and down until he slipped and fell backward onto the floor.

The woman frowned. The behavior was odd, even for Monty. She squinted through the window, her eyes searching the corners of the art studio, but as far as she could tell, Monty was alone in the room.

• • •

THE NIECE CLOSED
the door, turning away from the scene across the street, but she continued to ponder her neighbor’s strange actions. Who was he talking to over there in his art studio and why had he thrown such a tantrum?

Her earlier questions remained just as puzzling. Why had he superimposed the image of the murdered intern into her spot on the recliner?

“And why did he make me sit there all that time if I wasn’t even in the picture?” she demanded aloud in frustration. She felt like stomping on a picture frame herself. “The nerve of that man.”

Isabella looked up at the niece, her furry brow crinkling as she contemplated a response.

The cat kept close surveillance on the Green Vase and its surroundings. As usual, she knew far more about the goings on in Jackson Square than her person.

Deciding it was worth a try, Isabella emitted a series of sharp clicking sounds, an eloquent attempt to describe what was tormenting their neighbor, but at the sight of the woman’s confused expression, the cat cut short her commentary and reverted to the blank stare.

“Spider Jones,” the niece said softly, setting Monty’s problems aside as she returned to the topic that had started the day’s trouble. “What’s all this got to do with the murdered intern?”

Stroking Isabella’s soft fur, the woman reviewed what she knew about the horrific crime. The story had been widely reported in the press, and the niece, like the rest of San Francisco, had read all the gory details.

The grisly scene had played out on the second floor of City Hall, inside a specially designated area called the ceremonial rotunda.

Located at the top of the building’s central marble staircase, the elevated platform provided one of the best views of the building’s soaring dome and ornate interior. A circular third-floor balcony directly above the small round space conveyed an extra element of fairy-tale mystique. It had been a favorite spot for wedding ceremonies—at least, until last November’s murder.

The crime took place less than an hour after the completion of the supervisors’ interim mayor meeting. City Hall had emptied out as soon as the marathon session finished. The intern was one of the few people still left inside the building when the interior lighting dimmed to its nighttime security setting.

The assailant had apparently approached Spider from behind, reaching around the young man’s torso to stab him in the chest. Multiple blows followed in quick succession, an act of both strength and dexterity. Forensic experts estimated that the entire event, from start to finish, spanned less than a minute.

By the time anyone realized what had happened, it was too late to save the young intern. His body was found in a pool of blood in the middle of the ceremonial rotunda—just a few feet away from the memorial bust of Supervisor Harvey Milk, who, along with Mayor Moscone, was slain in City Hall more than thirty years earlier.

• • •

TWO MONTHS AFTER
the tragic death, interest in the victim continued to surge. Spider Jones had become a macabre celebrity. Posthumously, his grinning face was one of the most well known in the Bay Area.

Family pictures of the cheerful dark-skinned lad in a baseball cap and high-top canvas sneakers had been widely circulated by the media. Every aspect of his short life had been extensively investigated and reported.

Just a year out of high school, Spider was a local boy, born and raised in the East Bay suburb of Walnut Creek. He still lived at home with his mother and younger siblings. For the last several months, he had been taking the BART train into the city for an unpaid intern position with the outgoing mayor.

In the days following his death, Spider’s tearful mother had given a heart-rending interview, praising her son as a good-natured young man who had enjoyed being outdoors, eating spicy takeout food, and riding his bike. He had recently retaken his SATs and had hoped to be admitted to UC Berkeley for its upcoming fall semester. Sadly, his college acceptance letter had arrived days after his death.

Like everyone else with an interest in local politics, Spider had been hanging out at City Hall the night of the supervisors’ meeting, eagerly awaiting the results of the interim mayor selection.

Once the meeting concluded, he had worked for a short while in his basement cubicle. Later, he had planned to meet a friend in North Beach for a bite to eat. Police speculated that he was preparing to leave the building when the murder occurred, although they were at a loss to explain why his body was found in the second floor’s ceremonial rotunda.

Spider’s mother hadn’t been concerned about his absence that night. Her son was a night owl, she explained, and he routinely worked late into the evening. The night of his murder, she had gone to bed without worry, expecting to feed him breakfast the next morning.

It wasn’t until she received the middle-of-the-night phone call from the police that she learned the terrible news.

• • •

THE NIECE RUBBED
her temples, once more envisioning the sketch Monty had drawn on the textured art paper. After weeks of saturated news footage, the face of the murdered intern was permanently inked on the subconscious of most San Franciscans, but that didn’t explain why Monty had inserted the man into the drawing.

Of course, in the two years since she’d first met Montgomery Carmichael, she’d failed to understand the motivations behind most of his actions.

With a sigh, she wandered through the showroom to the dentist recliner, the spot where she had posed for the illfated sketch. Isabella followed closely behind, her dainty feet soundless on the wooden floorboards.

The woman circled the leather chair, thinking of the distinctive image of Spider Jones on the crumpled paper. The insertion of the dead man—and her omission—were the only aspects of the drawing that departed from the posed setting. The surrounding Gold Rush relics had been replicated with meticulous precision; the fluffy round cat lazily stretched across the young man’s lap had been an exact duplicate.

The real-life Rupert lay sprawled across the recliner’s leather cushions. His brief burst of frenetic energy had quickly dissipated following the earlier race around the room, and he had retaken his spot on the chair for a midmorning nap.

The chair was still reclined into its flat, horizontal position, the setting in which Monty had left it when he leaped up to chase after the niece and the discarded sketch.

Gently rolling Rupert to one side, the niece slid onto the seat beside him. As the cat wheezed out a peaceful snore, the niece’s thoughts returned to Spider’s murder.

• • •

DESPITE THE INTENSE
public interest in the crime, the police had yet to make any arrests. Given the height and direction of the knife wounds, the perpetrator was believed to be of short to medium build, but despite the vast amount of blood spilled, no other substantive clues had been left in the ceremonial rotunda. Even the murder weapon remained as yet unaccounted for.

In the days following the incident, several people known to have been at or near the scene that night were interviewed and, one by one, dismissed from consideration—leaving as the main suspects two men seen fleeing the building in the minutes after the murder.

The first was a tall burly man with flaming-red hair, quickly identified as former City Hall janitor turned amphibian specialist Sam Eckles. The day after the murder, Sam failed to turn up for his current consulting position with the California Academy of Sciences. His name and photo had been widely distributed, but his whereabouts were still unknown.

The second fugitive’s description was more nebulous in nature. An older gentleman with a balding head and short rounded shoulders, his identity was at first a mystery.

Soon after, however, the police issued a bulletin seeking information on fried chicken entrepreneur James Lick, the front man for a North Beach fried chicken restaurant—and Uncle Oscar’s most recent alias.

• • •

THE NIECE THREADED
her fingers into Rupert’s fur, anxiously running them through his fuzzy coat. Despite the suspicious circumstances, she refused to believe that Sam and her uncle were responsible for the intern’s gruesome slaying.

Sam was a gentle soul, intimidating in size and frequently off-putting in odor and personal hygiene. But the frog whisperer’s large hands had held the tiniest and most delicate of tree frogs. His mannerisms struck some as strange, but he was fundamentally incapable of harming another living being.

The niece felt similar confidence in her uncle’s innocence. Even after his last two years of clandestine activity, it was impossible for her to imagine him taking such a violent, malicious action.

And yet, she thought pensively, the day of the murder, Lick’s fried chicken shop had been emptied out and shuttered. All of the pots, pans, and cooking implements had vanished—along with her uncle.

Rupert let out a sleepy grunt of protest at the woman’s nervous tug on his fur. She couldn’t convince herself that the intern’s death was totally unrelated to Oscar’s disappearance.

Reaching for the lever at the base of the chair, she pulled herself into an upright position. The chair back clicked into its vertical slot, but her fingers remained tightly wrapped around the metal handle.

There was one more troubling fact she couldn’t dismiss.

Her uncle’s short-statured height fit the only description thus far known about Spider’s assailant.