Cat on the Edge (11 page)

It did occur to her to wonder which being she liked best. But what matter? She evidently had control of both. Talk about liberating.

She turned away from the mirror, and assembled her toothbrush and some makeup and toiletries. She packed panties and bras, a couple of blouses, a robe, stuffing everything into her overnighter. She tucked in an extra checkbook from her own account, then opened Jimmie's dresser and removed the stack of twenties and hundreds he kept for emergencies. She put the bills in her purse on the dresser.

She showered and washed her hair, gave it a few quick swipes with the blower and shook it into place. She put on fresh jeans and a clean shirt, and a decent pair of sandals. In the study she retrieved their savings book.

The balance was forty thousand and some change. She would stop at the bank and clean out the account before he found the book missing, open an account in her name alone. More than half of it was money her mother had left her. She figured she deserved the other half. She was straightening the pile of bank statements she had disturbed, when she uncovered, behind them, several small folders held together with a rubber band.

She removed them, frowning, and slipped off the rubber band. They looked like bankbooks, but
she and Jimmie had no other accounts, just the one.

They were bankbooks. She opened one, then the next. All were on foreign accounts, two in the Bahamas, one in Curaçao, two in Panama. None was in Jimmie's name, but in the names of companies unfamiliar to her. The balances were all in the six figures, the largest for eight hundred thousand, none for less than three hundred thousand.

These had to belong to someone else. Why would Jimmie have them? Who would he be keeping bankbooks for? Her hands shook so hard she dropped the books. She knelt to pick them up, knelt on the rug staring dumbly at the evidence of accounts worth over two million dollars.

Maybe they were Beckwhite's. But why would Jimmie have Beckwhite's bankbooks, and after he was dead?

She thought of taking them with her, showing them to an attorney, or at least to Clyde. She started to put them in her pocket, but a coldness filled her.

If these were Beckwhite's bankbooks, what did that mean? And even if they were not Beckwhite's, if they were Jimmie's accounts, still, he was into something frightening.

She put them back in the drawer, and straightened the drawer, making sure everything was as she had found it. The bank statements had been facing with the cut edges of the envelopes to the back. The bankbooks had been facedown. Spines to the right? Or the left?

She was growing more shaken as the possibilities behind those huge accounts presented themselves.

She put their savings book back, too, just as she had found it. She didn't want him to know she'd been in this drawer; she'd rather do without the forty thousand.

She had meant to take her car, but she didn't want him to know she'd been home. She was, suddenly, afraid of Jimmie. She closed the drawer and left the room quickly.

In the bedroom she opened her purse and snatched out the twenties and hundreds, put them back in his dresser drawer. When she looked out the bedroom window to the backyard, she saw that the neighbors were setting up their barbecue. The afternoon had grown gray with cloud, heralding an early dark. In the Jenson yard, four tiki torches burned, and a crowd of kids had gathered. There were more than a dozen children in the yard. One of the Jenson kids must be having a birthday. She watched Joan Jenson spread a paper tablecloth over the long picnic table, watched the two Jenson boys weight down the corners with rocks. Well she wasn't going out that way in the form of Kate, not when Jimmie had alerted the whole neighborhood that she was missing. And when she looked out the front, there were cars pulling up in front of the Jensons'. She'd have to leave as the cat.

She stuffed her checkbook and keys in the pocket of her jeans. If her clothes had stayed with her, surviving the change, then whatever she put in her
pockets might survive, too. She had no idea if there were rules to this alarming new life. She hid her purse and her packed bag on the shelf of her closet, behind some boxes. And she changed to cat with a haste that left no time to enjoy the strange rush it gave her.

The little cream-colored cat slipped out the back door, praying that the children wouldn't see her. Those boys were death on cats.

To leave without money or her car was going to present endless problems. But she couldn't shake the idea of getting out unseen. She wanted to leave no trail for Jimmie; not until she knew what was going on. Not until she knew where those bank accounts came from.

She fled around the side of the house and into a flower bed. She was crouched between some clumps of daylilies, looking out, scanning the street when a noise startled her.

Before she could run, Wark was on her, he had appeared out of nowhere. He grabbed her by the legs, squeezing with excruciating pain, and swung her high, then down toward the concrete. She fought, twisting, trying to reach him with her claws. A shout from the street put him off-balance.

But again he swung her.

This time she got a paw free and raked him. There was another shout, and she hit the concrete in a jarring explosion that dropped her into blackness.

The cat lay on the cement walk unmoving. Wark shoved her with his foot, pushing her under the bushes. Then, goaded by the shout, he ran, pound
ing away through the gloom that had gathered beneath the overhanging oaks.

Halfway down the block he swung into a black BMW and burned rubber, screeching away into the darkening evening.

Joe watched Dulcie remove every trace of fur from their freshly killed squirrel before she touched the rich, dark meat. He had watched her do this at each meal, remove feathers, claws, beaks; he had never seen a cat so fastidious. The squirrel was big and fat and it had fought hard, leaving a long bloody gash down Dulcie's leg. They had caught it by working together, by driving it away from all available trees.

He was impressed by Dulcie's bold hunting style. She was quick and fearless, and she could catch a bird on the wing, leaping to snatch it from the wind. He had seen her outrun a big rabbit, too, and bring it down screaming though the animal outweighed her. The rabbit had raked her badly. It hurt him to see her beautiful tabby coat torn and bloodied, hurt him to know how those gashes stung and throbbed. He had licked her wounds at intervals all night to ease the pain, and to prevent fever. She was so beautiful, so delicate. And so puzzling.

At first light yesterday morning he had watched her steal a child's blue sweater from a deserted
porch. Waking, he had watched amazed as she dragged the sweater deep into the bushes.

Following her, he found her in a little clearing arranging the sweater, kneading and patting it. She was so engrossed she didn't hear as he brushed softly in through the foliage. When she had shaped the sweater to her liking she curled up on it and rolled onto her back, her head ducked down, her paws limply curled above her belly. Her purrs rumbled.

But when she glanced up and saw him she looked startled and embarrassed. And when he asked her what was so great about the sweater and why she had taken it, she clutched the blue wool with her claws and stared at him, hurt. He felt ashamed. Her need was a private thing, a preoccupation he should not have spied on and really didn't understand.

“It's so soft,” she said, by way of explanation. “So soft and pretty, and it's the very color of a robin's egg. Can't you imagine wearing it, all soft wool against your bare skin?”

“I don't have bare skin,” he said uneasily. What was this? What was she dreaming? What did she imagine?

“Don't you ever wonder, Joe, what that would be like? To be a human person?”

She had to be kidding. “No way. I may talk like a human and sometimes think like a human, but I'm a cat. I'm a fine and well-adjusted tomcat.”

“But wouldn't you…?”

“No. I wouldn't. I can just imagine it. Repairing the roof, mowing the lawn. Having to deal with car registration and income taxes. With traffic tickets
and lawsuits and fixing the leaky plumbing.” He shook his head. “No way would I be a human.”

“But think about concerts and nice restaurants and beautiful clothes and jewelry. About being…I don't know. Driving a nice car, running up to San Francisco for the weekend.” She stared at him, hurt.

When he didn't capitulate, didn't say it would be nice, she returned her attention to the blue sweater.

He hadn't meant to hurt her. In truth, her intense pleasure in the wooly sweater touched him, made him feel tender and protective. Made him very aware of her soft vulnerability. Made him smile, too. This was the same cat who had told him, late last night as they snuggled in the branches of an oak tree, how she had set out enraged to stalk the man who tried to poison her. The same cat who could explode into a hot chase after a wood rat, all claws and muscle, and nothing soft or helpless about her.

But yet the mystery was there, like another dimension behind her green eyes. And when she stood looking down the hills at the little village snuggled beside the wide sea, he knew she was not thinking cat thoughts. She was thinking of the tangle of human life; of the shoppers hurrying along the streets, the swiftly moving cars, the sounds of music and of human voices; of the richness of a world foreign to them.

He was hypnotized by her longing. And when, looking down at the village, she sensed him watching, she gave him a look so filled with mystery that it made his claws curl. And she laid her head against him, purring.

And in the night when he missed Clyde, and Dulcie missed Wilma, they would curl up close together and she would lick his face.

She told him a lot about Wilma, how they always shared supper, Dulcie sitting on a little rug by the sink, how they watched television curled on the couch together eating popcorn, and how nice it was to be in the garden with Wilma as she dug in the flowers; she told him about the books Wilma read aloud to her, and that was one thing they had in common, both their housemates read to them. The two humans shared a keen taste for mysteries, and traded paperbacks. They were always trading books, every time they got together.

But the biggest mystery, more urgent than any book, the real and frightening mystery, Dulcie found difficult to talk about. She would mention it, skirt around it, but soon change the subject.

And then on their third day in the hills as they crossed the yard of a redwood cottage where newspapers had blown out of the trash can, part of a headline drew Joe. He trotted over and found, on a crumpled portion of the paper,…
POLICE SEARC…WEAPO
…

He spread the paper out and smoothed it with his paw.

“I don't understand,” Dulcie said. “If the killer went to the trouble of stealing that wrench from Clyde, meaning for the police to find it with Clyde's prints on it, why didn't he leave it beside the body?”

“I don't know. All I know is, if he plants the weapon later, for the police to find, Clyde's in big trouble.”

“But why would he?” She cocked her head, puzzled. “Unless he means to use it to force Clyde to do something.”

“Or keep him from doing something,” he said. “All I know is, I'll feel better if—when we find the damn thing.”

But it was not until late that night after finding the newspaper, that Dulcie woke mewling and shivering. Joe cuddled her close, clutching his paws around her. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“I dreamed about the murder. I dreamed about the third man.”

“What third man?” he said sleepily, then woke more fully. “What man?” He looked hard at her. “There was no one else in the alley. Only Beckwhite and the killer. And you and me.”

“A third man.” She shoved her nose against his neck. “In the shadows. Standing near me between
the jasmine vine and a little oleander tree. When he saw the killer hit Beckwhite, he slipped away fast, down the dark street.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I didn't think of it. I supposed you saw him, too.”

“What did he smell like? Could you see his face?”

“I couldn't smell anything, the jasmine was too strong. And it was so dark in the bushes. Just a darkly dressed figure, a thin figure, standing in the shadows where the bush and the vine blocked the light.”

A tremble shook her, and she snuggled closer. “I saw the killer leap at you and swing his wrench. Then you ran, and a police light caught me in the face, I couldn't see where you went. I heard the police radio. When they shone their lights in, the killer moved toward me away from the street and stood still, his face turned toward me.

“He was looking right at me, Joe. He saw me, but then he turned back and chased you.” She pressed her face harder against him. “He knows about us. He knows we saw—and more. He knows that we can tell what we saw.”

She stared at him in the darkness. “I think that man knows more about us than we know about ourselves.” And she curled down tight against him in a hard little ball.

He licked her face and ears. In a little while, he said, “If the second man was a witness, why hasn't he gone to the police?”

“I don't know. Maybe he's afraid.”

“Or maybe he has other plans,” Joe said. Then, “Maybe
he
found the wrench. Maybe he came back and found the wrench, before the police ever discovered the body. Maybe he's keeping it for his own reasons.”

“Blackmail?”

“Maybe.” He pawed at an itch on his shoulder. “Then again, maybe he didn't find it.”

“Could it still be in the alley, somewhere the police didn't look? But how could the police miss it?”

“I don't know that, either. But it's a place to start looking. If it is hidden there, we need to find it before someone else does.”