Cat Under Fire (7 page)

The cats could hear from the apartment below a series of thumps, as if Detective Marritt was opening and closing cupboard doors. They heard crockery clash—perhaps he was moving dinner plates, looking behind them—then a metallic crash as if he'd dropped the saucepans. Dulcie smiled. “He's really good at this, very smooth.” She shifted impatiently from paw to paw, then rose and began to pace, her ears swiveling with nerves.

“Settle down. He'll be gone soon.”

“If he finds the diary, we'll never see it.”

“It'll make a bulge in his pocket. So what's the alternative, go down there, snatch it out of his hand?”

She cut her eyes at him. “If I were alone, I'd charm him until he laid it down to pet me, then grab it and run like hell.”

She shook herself, scattering ashes. Curving round, she tried to lick ashes off her coat, but that was like eating out of the fireplace. She spit out flecks of ashes and cinder. Beyond the heaps of ashes that had been raked up by the police, the charred garage door lay across the drive. The police had hauled away the remains of Janet's van.

“I wonder if her diary will have anything about the museum opening,” Dulcie said softly. “I wonder if she wrote in it that night when she got home from San Francisco. It would be interesting to know her version
of the weekend, after the testimony her friend Jeanne Kale gave.”

Janet's friend from San Francisco had testified that Janet arrived in the city around seven Saturday morning, checked into the St. Francis, leaving her van in the underground garage, and the two women had breakfast in the hotel dining room.

“Imagine,” Dulcie said, “breakfast at the St. Francis. White tablecloths, cut glass bowls, lovely things to eat, maybe French pancakes. And to have a beautiful hotel room all to yourself, with a view of the city. Probably a turn-down at night, with chocolates on the pillow.”

He nuzzled her neck. “Maybe someday we'll figure out how to do that.”

She opened her mouth in a wide cat laugh. “Sure we will. And figure out how to go to the moon.”

Ms. Kale told the court that she and Janet had shopped all day Saturday, using public transportation, had ridden the cable car out to Fisherman's Wharf for lunch. “Cracked crab,” Dulcie said, “or maybe lobster Thermidor.” Her pink tongue licked delicately.

“I get the feeling your major interest here, is in the gourmet aspects of the case.”

“Doesn't hurt to dream. They must have had a lovely weekend.”

Late in the afternoon the two women had stopped at an art supply store, where Janet bought oil paints, four rolls of linen canvas, and a large supply of stretcher bars. She had had the supplies delivered to the St. Francis, where she gave a bellman her car keys, directing him to put the supplies in her van, in the underground garage. That night, Jeanne said, Janet had dinner with Jeanne and her husband and with the couple for whom Janet was doing a huge sculpture of leaping fish, the sculpture she had meant to finish the morning she died. They had eaten at an East Indian restaurant on Grant, walking from the hotel, taking a cab back to the St. Francis afterward.

Nancy and Tim Duncan had been friends of Janet and Kendrick Mahl before the divorce. Over dinner they talked primarily about the sculpture; Janet meant to deliver it to San Francisco early the following week. The Duncans owned a popular San Francisco restaurant, for which the ten-foot sculpture was commissioned. Janet had not taken her van from the parking garage that night, as far as Jeanne knew. After dinner she said she was tired, and had gone directly to her room.

Jeanne said that she and Janet spent Sunday sketching around San Francisco. Sunday night was the opening at the de Young, and Janet had dinner with three artist friends, not Jeanne. Jeanne had given their names. She said that Janet and her friends went directly from dinner to the de Young, in one car. There Janet received her two awards. They stayed at the reception until about ten, then drove back to the St. Francis. Janet changed clothes and checked out, put her suitcase in the van, and headed back to Molena Point. Jeanne said she saw Janet just before she left. That part of Jeanne's testimony was corroborated by the bell captain and several hotel employees. There was nothing in any of the testimonies to implicate Jeanne, or to imply that Janet had been worried about any aspect of her personal life, or that she was afraid to return home.

Dulcie tried again to wash off the ashes, but gave it up. The sounds from below were faint now—they could hear only an occasional thud, as if Marritt had retreated to the far end of the house. “We could slip in now, he'd never see us.”

“Cops see everything.”

“He's not a cop, he's a fraud. He shouldn't…”

“He's a cop. Good or bad. Cool it until he leaves.”

She moved away among the burned rubble, pawing irritably at the ashes, nosing at pieces of burned wood and twisted metal. The police had gone over every inch of the site, had bagged every scrap that looked promising,
even straining some of it through cheesecloth. They had taken Janet's burned welding tanks and gauges, Dulcie supposed those went to the police lab, too. The
Gazette
said the Molena Point police used the county lab for most of their work. The police had taken prints from the sculpture of leaping fish before Janet's agent took the piece away for safekeeping; it had been badly warped by the fire. The police photographer had shot at least a dozen rolls of film, must have recorded everything bigger than a cat hair.

Warily, she approached the hole in the center of the rubble-strewn slab, where the stairwell led down to the apartment. The steps, beneath fallen ashes and debris, were charred and eaten away, and the upper portions of the concrete wall were black. The lower part of the stair was relatively untouched, the door at the bottom hardly smoke-stained. She had investigated down there days before, finding nothing of interest. Now as she turned away, something sharp jabbed into her paw, causing a quick, burning pain. Mewling, she shook her hurt foot.

A blackened thumbtack protruded from her pad, with a bit of burned canvas clinging, the tack stuck so deep that when she pulled it out with her teeth, blood oozed.

She licked her pad, staring down at the tack and at the half-inch strip of blackened canvas, at all that was left of one of Janet's paintings, a pitiful fragment of burned metal and cloth. Dropping it, she crept back to Joe, to press forlornly against him, mourning Janet.

This summer, when she became aware for the first time of the riches of the human world, of music, painting, drama, and then when she discovered the Aronson Gallery, she had been so intrigued that she trotted right on in, and there were Janet's landscapes, a dozen huge works as exciting as the canvas that hung in Wilma's living room.

There had been only a few patrons in the gallery, and they were fully occupied looking at the exhibit and talking with Sicily, so no one noticed her. She prowled
among the maze of angled walls, keeping out of sight, staring up at Janet's rich, windy scenes. She was thus occupied when a patron saw her. “Look at the little cat, why the cat's an art lover…” And the gallery had filled with rude laughter as others turned to stare. She had fled, frightened and embarrassed.

She didn't go into the gallery again for a long time, but she would slip up onto the low windowsill and lie looking in, pretending to be napping, but fascinated with the rich paintings. Strange, they gave her the same high as did the bright silks and velvets that she liked to steal. Until this summer, stealing had been her only indulgence; she'd had no notion that anything else in the world would so excite her.

She wasn't the only cat who stole; Wilma had saved a whole sheaf of clippings about thieving cats. Some cats stole objects inside their own homes—fountain pens, hair clasps—but others stole from the neighbors just as she did. Their owners said that stealing was a sign of intelligence. Maybe—all she knew was that from kittenhood she loved
things
, and she stole them. Before she was six months old she had taught herself to leap up at a clothesline and slap off the clothespins, taking the brightest, silkiest garment, had taught herself to open the neighbors' unlocked screen doors, and she could turn almost any door knob. Once inside a house she headed directly for the master bedroom—unless there was a teenage daughter, then that room got top billing. Oh, the satin nighties and silk stockings and little lacy bras. Carrying her treasures home, she hid them beneath the furniture, where she could lie on them, purring. When Wilma found and returned the purloined items Dulcie felt incredibly sad, but she hadn't let Wilma know that.

Joe nudged her. “He's leaving. He doesn't have the diary. Not a lump in that tight uniform.” Marritt's jacket and trousers fitted him as snugly as a second skin.

Bang, bang, bang
. The concrete vibrated under their
paws as Marritt nailed up the plywood. The moment he was gone they fled down the hill and clawed their way underneath, ripping off hunks of the burned door, widening the hole Dulcie had started. She slipped under, flicking her tail through in a hurry though there was no one to grab her; her sense of helplessness at leaving her tail vulnerable was basic and powerful. Joe's short stub was not a problem.

Despite the bright sun outside, most of the room was dark. Blazing stripes of sunlight shone through the closed shutters, sharply illuminating a frosting of dust and ashes which coated the Mexican tile floor. The large living room must have been handsome before smoke and drenching water dirtied the white couch and white leather chairs, the white walls and white rugs. The floor was cold beneath their paws, but when Joe stepped onto a thick rug expecting a warm respite, he backed off fast; the rug was soaked with sour, stale water.

Marritt's footprints were everywhere incised into the dust, back and forth across the kitchen, and between the couch and chairs, as if he must have searched for the journal beneath the upholstered cushions. Six rectangles of clean white wall shone where Janet's paintings had been removed after the fire, the bare picture hooks clinging like dark grasshoppers.

The newspaper had said the paintings were being restored, that Janet's agent had taken them. Joe wasn't into the art scene, but he knew the monetary value of Janet's work. According to the Molena Point
Gazette
each of the forty-six paintings destroyed by fire was worth twenty to thirty thousand dollars. That added up to a nice, easy million.

He watched Dulcie sniff at the sodden chairs and couch, then leap to the counters of the open kitchen cube to paw at the cupboard doors. On the kitchen floor stood a bowl of cat kibble and a bowl of water, both scummed over with ashes and dust. Surely they hadn't
been touched since the fire. And how could they be, unless Janet had had a cat door.

The stairwell door, just beyond the kitchen, had been boarded up though it did not seem burned. From beneath it came the smell of wet ashes, and a chill breeze sucked down. Beyond the stairwell, the door on the far wall was closed but not boarded over. Marritt's intrusive footprints led to it, ripe with his scent, a combination of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. The crack beneath the door was bright with sunlight. The smell from within was not of ashes but of a woman's delicate perfume. Dulcie sniffed deeply at the bright space, then leaped up, grasping the knob between her paws. Swinging, scrabbling with her hind feet against the molding, she turned the knob, kicked against the doorframe. The door swung in. They were struck in the face by glaring sunlight, blinding them.

The cats narrowed their eyes, bombarded by sunlight. Sun blazed through treetops and bounced off burnished clouds. They stood at the edge of a terrace high above the hills, a tile expanse furnished with white wicker chairs, white wicker desk…a bed…bookcases…

Their eyes adjusted, their response focused, they saw clearly. They stood not on a terrace but on the threshold of Janet's bedroom, its two glass walls filled with trees and sky. To the left of the wide corner windows Janet's bed was tucked cozily into a wall of books. The white sheets had been tossed back in a tangle, the brightly flowered quilt lay half on the floor, as if Janet had just stepped away from the bed, had perhaps gone into the kitchen to make coffee; the sense of her presence was powerful. Her blue sweatshirt lay tossed across the wicker chair with a pair of jeans and a red windbreaker; beneath the chair lay a pair of jogging shoes leaning one atop the other, her white socks tucked neatly inside. Dulcie sniffed at the clothes of the dead woman and shivered; these would be the clothes she wore driving home from San Francisco that night after the opening at the de Young. The next morning she would have put on welding clothes, old scorched jeans, heavy leather boots, clothes that an accidental welding burn wouldn't hurt.

Three big white rugs softened the expanse of tile, thick and inviting and quite dry; the cats' paws sank
deep, inscribing sooty prints. Dulcie sat down to clean her pink pads, but Joe stood, absorbing the warmth of the room, heat from the sun pressing in through the glass, absorbing the powerful sense of the dead woman. The feel of her presence was so strong he felt his fur tingle.

Beneath the white wicker desk was a tennis ball, and clinging to the desk legs and to the legs of the chair were fine white cat hairs. As Joe scented the tomcat, an involuntary growl rose in his throat; but it was an old scent, flat and faded.

He leaped to the bed, onto the rumpled sheets, leaving sooty pawprints, then belatedly he licked clean his own pads. The sun-warmed sheets smelled of human female, and of Janet's light perfume. He flopped down and rolled, purring.

The bookshelves above the bed had been recessed into the wall. The bottom shelf, at bed level, was bare. When he reared up to study the books, he could see the names of writers that Clyde liked to read, Cussler, Koontz, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Pasternak, an interesting mix. Half a dozen scrapbooks and photo albums were sandwiched between these, but he saw nothing that looked like a diary—unless Janet had made her journal in one of the big albums. As he clawed one down, Dulcie leaped up beside him.

“Strange that there's no nightstand. Where did she keep her night cream? Her facial tissues and clock? And Wilma keeps a bowl of mints by the bed. They're nice late at night.”

Pawing open the album, they found newspaper clippings neatly taped to the pages, reviews of Janet's work and articles about awards she had won. Many had her picture, fuzzed and grainy, taken beside a painting or a piece of sculpture. There was a quarter-page article from the
L. A. Times
about Janet's top award in the Los Angeles Museum Annual, and another
Times
article gave her a big spread for a one-woman show at the
Biltmore. Northern California papers supplied clippings about an award at the Richmond Annual, and the San Francisco papers listed awards in Reno, San Diego, Sacramento. There seemed to be clippings for all the major exhibits, as well as for Janet's one-woman shows, many at the major museums.

“She's done—she did all right,” Joe said. “It wasn't easy. She put herself through school working as a welder in San Francisco, lived in a cheap room in the commercial district. That's a rough part of the city. I was born in an alley just off Mission. That's where I got my tail broken, that's where Clyde found me.

“She didn't have any furniture at first, just an easel, and she slept on a mattress on the floor. She kept everything in cardboard boxes.”

“How do you know all this?”

“From napping in the living room while she and Clyde drank beer and listened to Clyde's collection of old forties records.” Joe grinned. “She liked the big bands as much as Clyde does.” He'd loved those nights, just the three of them. He'd been comfortable with Janet, and, long before he'd discovered his super-cat talents, he had shared with Janet and Clyde a cat's normal pleasure in music. That heady forties beat seemed to get right under his skin, right in to where the purrs started.

“She was the only woman he ever dated who didn't pitch a fit about Clyde keeping my ratty, clawed-up chair in the living room. Janet called it a work of art.” The covering of his personal chair, he had long ago shredded to ribbons. The chair was his alone: no cat, no dog, no human had better mess with it.

After graduation Janet had moved to Molena Point, to another cheap room, had picked up welding jobs around the docks to support herself. Every penny went into paint and canvas, into oxygen and acetylene for her sculpture, and into sheets of milled steel. She had taken her work to every juried show in the state, and in only two years she was picked up by the Aronson Gallery.
She had lived better then, had bought some used furniture and a used van. She had been in Molena Point less than a year when she started dating Kendrick Mahl. Mahl was the art critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
then; he kept a weekend place in Molena Point. When they married, Janet moved in there, but she kept her old room for studio space. After the wedding, Mahl's reviews of her work were favorable but understandably restrained. After the divorce he called her paintings cheap trash. Months after she left Mahl, she started dating Clyde. Joe thought she'd needed that comfortable relationship.

He clawed down a second album, this one was filled with eight-by-ten glossies, publicity photos of Janet and of her work. In the first shot she stood turned away from a splashy landscape, a painting of the rocky sea cliff as seen from the level of the white, crashing waves. At the very top of the painting, just a hint of rooftops shone against a thin strip of sky. Janet stood before the painting looking directly at the camera, her grin mischievous, her hands paint-stained, her smock streaked with paint; her eyes were fixed directly on them, filled with power and life.

Shivering, Dulcie wrapped her tail close around herself and sat looking at the room where Janet had lived. Where Janet had waked that Monday morning with no idea that, within an hour, she would be dead.

Dead
, Dulcie thought,
and with nothing else afterward
? Ever since Janet died, that question had troubled her.

They found in this album dated photographs of Janet's recent paintings, and at the back was a picture of the white cat, an eight-by-ten color shot. He sat on a blue backdrop, a carefully chosen fabric the color of his blue eyes and blue collar. His fur was long, well groomed, his tail a huge fluffed plume. His expression was intelligent and watchful, but imperious, too, coolly demanding.

There were shots of the white cat with Janet, one
where he sat in her lap, and one where he lay across her shoulder, his eyes slitted half-closed.

“
Can
he still be alive? Maybe he's hurt. Is that why I dream of him, because he needs our help?”

“The volunteers looked everywhere, Dulcie. There must have been twenty people combing the hills. Don't you think if he were alive, they would have found him? Don't you think that, even hurt, he would have tried to come home?”

“Maybe he's too badly hurt. Or maybe he did come home, maybe he found the studio gone, flattened, nothing but ashes—and Janet gone, no fresh scent of her. He would have been terrified. He might have just gone away again, frightened and confused. The fire itself must have been terrible for him. Maybe he was afraid even to come near the house.”

“No matter how scared, if he were hungry, he'd go to the neighbors, at least to cadge a meal.”

“There's some reason I dream of him.” She gave him a clear green look. “The dreams have some purpose. They have to come from somewhere, not just from my own head. Before I dreamed of him, I didn't even know what he looked like, except from seeing him blocks away. I didn't know his eyes were blue, I didn't know that he wore a blue collar with a brass tag.” She looked at him a long time. “Where did those bits of knowledge come from?”

“Maybe you saw his collar some time, saw him close up and don't remember.”

“I didn't. I
would
remember.”

But he didn't answer, and she let it drop. Maybe there was something in the male genes that wouldn't let him think about such mysteries.

The rest of the album contained snapshots of Janet at a picnic, and at a party, and several shots of her beside an overweight, overdressed woman. “Beverly,” Dulcie said. “That has to be her sister Beverly—she's just the way Wilma described her. Looks like an overfed pug dog.”

There were three shots of Janet in a wet suit beside a rocky shore, then pictures of a baseball game, where Janet stood tanned and grinning, ready to pitch, and there was a shot of her at bat.

They went through all the albums, pulling them off the shelves until the big, leather-bound books covered the rumpled bed. They found no diary. Dulcie prowled beneath the bed, under the fallen sheets and comforter, then searched the bookshelves again, thrusting her nose behind the disarranged books. When, balancing on the bottom shelf, she felt it shift beneath her paws she dropped down and dug at it.

They worried at the shelf, wiggling and clawing until it moved, then slid back.

The space beneath contained a box of tissues, face cream, a jar of hand cream, two small sketch pads, pencils, pens, and a small folding clock. Half-hidden beneath the jumble lay a small, leather-bound book.

Dulcie touched it with a hesitant paw. The scent of leather was mixed with Janet's scent. She took it in her teeth, dragged it out, dropped it on the bed. Gently she pawed it open.

The cats glanced at each other and smiled. This was it, this was Janet's diary.

Janet's handwriting was small and neat. She had written as much as she could on each page, leaving only thin margins, squeezing the lines close together as if she had felt frugal about the space, as if she had wanted to make the journal last over as many years as possible.

The last half of the diary was empty.

She had begun the journal during art school days, but had made only occasional entries then, mostly random notes of scenes she wanted to paint…
Corner Jones and Lombard, white Victorian towering behind shops…The top of Chestnut Street when the storm sky is low and dark, and the East Bay seems so close you could touch it…The light against Russian Hill when clouds break the sun. Who can put that light on canvas
?

She had made brief notes about her move to Molena Point, and some memos as to moving costs. There was a page of notes about apartment hunting, then a lapse of time. Then later, during her stormy marriage to Kendrick Mahl, the entries were long and painful, a montage of hurts from Mahl, his sarcasm about her work—and his involvement with other women, the details meant for no one else's eyes, as Janet set down her painful disappointment in Mahl, and then at last her resolve to leave him. Her notes about the divorce were raw and ugly, filled with her growing hatred.

Joe hadn't thought of Janet as one to hold on to hurts, but she had held on, clinging to her anger, and who could blame her? Kendrick Mahl was a vindictive man, hurtful and cold. Joe had no reason not to believe Janet; he thought Janet didn't lie easily. She had not talked to Clyde much about Mahl.

The journal entries were all tangled together, her personal life, her painting notes, brief reminders of when and where each painting was hung and if it had received an award, all the fragments of her life jumbled into one entity like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In the occasional stilted notes about her sister Beverly, it was apparent that the two sisters did not get along. A year before Janet's death, Beverly had wanted to open a gallery and take Janet's work from Sicily, a proposal Janet had rejected. The entry reflected her anger with bold, dark handwriting. Not even when she was the most hurt by Mahl had she written in this little book with such obvious rage.

“How can they be sisters?” Dulcie said. “There's no love, there's no closeness at all between them.” She stared at Joe with widening eyes. “I had three sisters and two brothers, and I never saw them again after Wilma took me away.”

“And you're sorry she took you?”

She licked her whiskers. “If Wilma hadn't taken me, I probably would have died. I was the runt, they kept
pushing me away from the milk. I didn't know what it felt like to be really, beautifully full of supper until I went to live with Wilma.

“But I do wonder what it would have been like to have someone to play with, when I was little.”

“Maybe that's why you steal. You had a maladjusted kittenhood.”

She gave him a gentle swat, and returned to Janet's diary. Scattered through the journal were brief passages that did not seem to be painting notes but were simply written for pleasure, little pleasing word pictures, a drift of clouds over the darkening hills, the sea heaving green against the rocks, vignettes more detailed than her painting notes. The entries where Janet broke off with Rob Lake were written shortly after Mahl became Rob's agent.

Anyone's head would be turned, Kendrick was the most powerful critic in Northern California before he left the
Chronicle
to open his own gallery. He can make Rob's reputation, or prevent Rob from ever getting anywhere. Of course Rob's being used. Can't he see that? Or is he so eager that he doesn't care, that our relationship means nothing? I can't see him anymore, not when he belongs to Kendrick, I can't be comfortable with him now
.

Joe withheld comment. His remarks about Rob Lake only angered Dulcie. She would have to admit in her own time that Lake wasn't as pure as she'd imagined.