How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) (4 page)

A CLAIRVOYANT CAT

ISABELLA PERCHED ON
the edge of a display table, staring curiously at the leather recliner where the niece sat. The tip end of the cat’s orange and white striped tail strummed the table surface as she tilted her head inquisitively.

Isabella and her person had been living together for several years now, and the cat was adept at reading the woman’s thoughts. She knew the murder at City Hall and the possible connection to Oscar’s disappearance had been weighing heavily on the niece’s mind.

It was too bad that humans had such limited means of communication, Isabella reflected with a superior twitch of her whiskers. If only the niece spoke the cat’s more sophisticated language, Isabella could have given her a great deal of useful information—about more than just Oscar and the murdered intern.

To start with, there were a number of minor everyday events that her person’s less advanced faculties simply missed or glossed over.

For instance, Isabella knew that a brightly colored cat toy had recently fallen into the dirty clothes hamper. The catnip-filled packet was likely to cause the niece great consternation after the next wash cycle. Isabella had tried every possible means to alert the niece to this hazard, to no avail. The woman was destined to find the toy’s disintegrated remains in the dryer vent and strewn throughout the washed clothing.

Then there was the large hairball that Rupert had coughed up beneath the couch in the second-floor living quarters. Isabella had been monitoring the cylindrical-shaped lump for several days. It had almost cured to the optimal weight and soft, spongy texture.

Late one night when her unsuspecting person was on her way to the bathroom, the barefoot woman would step on the strategically placed lump and emit a terrified shriek—one that indicated she thought she’d accidentally smushed the body of a dead mouse.

Isabella paused, reconsidering. Even if the niece were suddenly capable of understanding the complicated feline vocabulary, the cat probably wouldn’t share this tidbit with her. The fake mouse–hairball trick was far too much fun to spoil with a warning.

Speaking of mice, Isabella mused, continuing the list of items her person failed to pick up on, a small family of rodents had taken up residence in the crawlspace beneath the stairs. After chasing a few members through the showroom, Isabella and the mice had reached a temporary truce. She would tolerate the mice’s presence in the Green Vase so long as they stayed clear of her food bowl in the second-floor kitchen.

The cat lifted her head, proudly preening. She was nothing if not accommodating.

• • •

LEAVING THE NIECE
still pensively gripping the recliner lever, Isabella hopped off the display table and meandered slowly toward the front of the showroom, pausing every so often to sniff at a floorboard or to rub the side of her face against a sharp corner. After a long course weaving in and around table legs and bookcases, she arrived at her favorite spot on the cashier counter and resumed her surveillance of the wet, wispy morning outside the store’s front windows.

Isabella’s thoughts shifted from the mundane happenings inside the Green Vase to the far more nuanced machinations of Uncle Oscar and his crew. This was another area where the cat’s vast knowledge and expertise exceeded that of her human.

She, for one, had always known that Oscar spent his days doing more than just cooking great chicken.

The cat’s gaze dropped to the floor as she pondered the basement that lay below, stuffed to the rafters with Oscar’s eclectic antique collection. It also held the entrance to a secret underground tunnel that ran beneath downtown San Francisco.

The tunnel was first formed during San Francisco’s Gold Rush era; its origins went back to the landfill expansion of the city’s downtown area and the coinciding construction of the Green Vase’s redbrick building. Over the years, countless individuals had used the passageway to slip in and out of Jackson Square undetected.

It had been a busy thoroughfare of late. The most recent users included an intrepid antique shop owner, her two cats, an art dealer with lofty political aspirations, a burly amphibian expert, and a remote controlled mechanical alligator—in addition, of course, to Uncle Oscar.

Isabella blinked, focusing her finely tuned senses. Her sonarlike ears closely monitored the foot traffic both above and below the showroom.

Just a few months back, she had detected a pair of rubber-soled sneakers sliding through the second-floor kitchen window overlooking the alley behind the store. The intruder had made a daring leap from the roof of the alley Dumpster, giving him a precarious finger-hold grip on the window’s exterior ledge. Dangling down the side of the building, the young City Hall intern had managed to push open the unlocked windowpane and pull himself inside.

Isabella’s shoulders stiffened with disapproval. The antique shop wasn’t the only target of the intern’s extracurricular investigations.

It was this persistent snooping, she suspected, that had led to Spider’s downfall. Somewhere along the way, he had unearthed a secret that was meant to stay hidden.

• • •

CONTEMPLATIVE, ISABELLA RETURNED
her attention to the art studio across the street.

Monty’s lanky silhouette could still be seen storming about the open room. With the picture frame now thoroughly demolished from his frenzied stomping, he threw his hands up and clasped them over his head.

As Isabella studied the scene, her extraordinary vision honed in on an item that her human had, predictably, missed.

A vaporous being, not discernible to human eyes, trailed two steps behind the tormented artist, energetically keeping pace with Monty’s agitated gait.

It was the spiritual presence of the young man who had been viciously slain two months earlier. He was dressed in the same style of clothes he’d worn during his breakin to the Green Vase: a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of worn blue jeans, a baseball cap pulled down over his dark-skinned forehead, and high-top canvas sneakers.

The bridge of Isabella’s nose crinkled and her ears turned sideways, an outward expression of her inner bafflement. Some answers eluded even her cunning insight.

After much thought and analysis, she couldn’t figure out what Spider’s ghost was doing in Jackson Square—or why he had chosen to haunt the city’s soon-to-be inaugurated interim mayor.

YESTERDAY’S NEWS

SAN FRANCISCO’S DAILY
newspaper occupied an Art Deco–style building at the corner of Fifth and Mission. A square tower ridged with streamlined piping rose from the grimy front entrance. Just above street level, a series of small reliefs depicted vintage scenes of printing and reporting.

Decades of pollution and rain had grayed the stone facade. The aging structure was as much of a relic as the Linotype presses it had once housed.

The faded retro design seemed to fit right in with the surrounding neighborhood’s mix of auto body shops, secondhand thrift stores, seedy hotels, and industrial warehouses. The bus stop shelter across the street was scarred with countless spray paint markings. Makeshift cardboard tents had been pushed up against the back side of the shelter’s plastic sheeting, the temporary home to a rotating pool of vagrants. Scattered trash littered the sidewalk, and a stale stench of sweat and cannabis hung in the air.

A less discerning eye might have recoiled from this grim setting. But for Hoxton Finn, one of the city’s veteran reporters, the newspaper’s offices couldn’t have been situated in a better location.

The building was eminently functional, blessedly lacking the so-called improvements that often came with modern-day infrastructure. Automatic lighting systems that flicked on and off as a person entered and exited a room annoyed him to no end.

As for temperature controls, the heat that emanated from the building’s network of ancient water pipes was more than sufficient. He would rather work from a cardboard box by the bus stop than behind a sealed window in a room pumped with central air.

In terms of convenience, the spot was unmatched. One block south of Market, the paper’s offices were only a short walk to both City Hall and an underground station for the BART and Muni lines. Multiple cabstands were within a few minutes’ reach. Hox could easily get anywhere he needed to go with minimal cost and hassle.

The gritty scene that played out each day near the building’s front steps was, in his opinion, one of the office’s highlighting features.

There was no risk the place would ever be described as pretty.

• • •

AFTER MORE THAN
twenty-five years of reporting, Hoxton Finn’s broad shoulders and chiseled chin were recognized throughout the city. Taxi drivers, policemen, street vendors, and bankers knew him on sight—and everyone called him Hox. He was a fixture, an eccentric in a town that venerated caricature.

The reporter brushed all notion of celebrity aside. Divorced with no children, he preferred his own company to that of others. Gruffly succinct, he was direct in his questioning and sparing in his follow-up, a no-nonsense man living in a nonsense-filled world.

The juxtaposition was often jarring—for both sides.

For the last several weeks, however, the community had been spared the brunt of Hox’s caustic jabs. He’d spent every waking hour sequestered inside the newspaper’s offices, barricaded behind the locked door of a third-floor conference room.

Piles of news clippings, Internet printouts, files, and handwritten notes were spread across the room’s wooden table. A ceramic mug emblazoned with the logo of the local baseball team occupied one of the table’s few open spaces. The residue from several pots of coffee stained the cup’s interior.

Insulated from phone calls, drop-bys, and the other distracting nuisances that typically occurred at his assigned desk in the newsroom, Hox had devoted his full attention to the table’s accumulated papers and files, stopping only for the occasional takeout delivery or a nap on the floor.

The reporter’s clothes bore the wrinkled fatigue of the most recent all-night session. A tweed jacket had been tossed over a nearby chair, and the sleeves of his collared shirt were rolled up to his wrists. His denim blue jeans sagged around his waist, the fabric tired and loosened from lengthy wear.

Rubbing his temples, Hox shut his eyes and groaned. It had been far too long since his last shower. A lawn of peppered gray stubble had sprouted across the lower half of his face, and he smelled almost as fragrant as the homeless men camped outside.

A migraine pounded inside his forehead, knots of tension strafed the muscles in his neck and lower back, and his left foot throbbed with pain.

The last ache emanated from the amputated stub of his big toe. It was an old injury, the result of an inadvertent mishap with a Komodo dragon during a visit to the Los Angeles zoo a few years back.

He’d been accompanied by his now ex-wife, a famous movie star best known for her role in a box office thriller set in San Francisco. They’d been fighting nonstop for months, and the relationship was on the verge of a breaking point.

Nevertheless, the star had used her celebrity to finagle a behind-the-scenes visit with the showcase lizard. It was a special anniversary present for her worldly reporter husband, a man for whom it was impossible to select gifts. The toe-chomping melee that followed had resulted in an emergency room visit, an unsuccessful toe reattachment surgery, several weeks of sensational tabloid stories, and the eventual filing of divorce papers.

Hox had never blamed the movie star for the injury, but whenever he felt a shot of pain in his foot, his already dour disposition tended to darken.

It reminded him of what he had lost—far more than just a portion of his toe.

• • •

WITH A YAWN,
Hox opened his eyes and stared bitterly at the piles scattered across the table, a clutter that represented the collective intel on the Spider Jones murder.

He’d started with the newspaper’s findings and added on from there. Copies of the police reports took up one corner of the table. The files he’d bullied out of reporters from competing news agencies had landed on another. Internet printouts on any number of random queries that had struck him as potentially useful filled in the rest.

Hox had reviewed each item multiple times. He had considered the evidence from every possible angle and drawn out endlessly varying scenarios. But the anticipated insight had yet to appear. He was no closer to finding an answer than when he had started this exercise.

There was still something missing.

Throughout his long career, the veteran reporter had covered the entire range of issues related to state and local politics. A couple of overseas sabbaticals had taken him through war zones, political unrest, and countries wracked with famine. He had seen it all: the whimsical, the bizarre, and the totally outlandish. He’d experienced up close the worst greed, corruption, murder, and brutality had to offer.

But never had a story gripped him with such an intense fervor.

He was immersed in an unsolved murder—one in which he was personally involved.