If they did find a gun in Slayter’s room, and could hide it where the cops could find it, they might fit together a couple more pieces of the puzzle-a puzzle that seemed as nebulous as smoke on the wind.
They knew that Lucinda and Pedric were searching for Kit, that the old couple had been out since before daylight, and Dulcie was frantic for the kit; she alternated between feeling bad that she and Joe weren’t searching, and sensibly admitting that Joe was right, that this was Kit’s call, Kit’s responsibility. Though Joe had, Dulcie noticed, glanced up to the southerly hills several times with a listening and worried frown.
Now the two cats lay comfortably on a warm, tarred rooftop across the street from the Gardenview Inn, scanning the windows and balconies hoping to spot Slayter. Kit had not heard which room. They knew better than to call and ask for a guest’s room number; no respectable hotel would divulge that information. The building was a creamy stucco of Mediterranean style, three stories high, topped by a low, red clay roof and a dozen chimneys, implying that each large room boasted a fireplace. In the center of the long building three steps led up to an entry that opened directly into a small, bright lobby-they could see through it to glass doors at the back, opening out again to a garden and terrace between beds of roses. “You want to do the diversion?” Joe said. “Or shall I?”
Dulcie sighed. “You do it. I’ll slip up on the desk, see if I can find the room number.”
“Dulcie, if you don’t quit worrying about the kit, I swear�”
“Shecouldbe in trouble.”
“And if she is? How do you propose we find her out on a thousand acres of open land?”
“Lucinda and Pedric have gone looking.”
“Lucinda and Pedric have a car.”
“We could�”
Joe sat back down on the warming black rooftop, looking hard at her. “She’s a big cat now. She is not a kitten anymore.”
“But that Stone Eye� If she� I’m sorry, Joe. I just can’t get it out of my mind that she needs us.”
“That’s the mothering instinct. If you want to go look for her, fine. Maybe you can find Lucinda and Pedric, join up with them. I’m going to find that gun or whatever Chichi’s looking for.”
Dulcie sighed again, and followed Joe as he dropped down onto a copper awning, then to a raised planter, and to the street and across on the heels of a half dozen tourists.
Earlier this morning, coming from home, she had detoured by the Greenlaws’ second-floor terrace, had stood pressed against the glass door, looking in. The old couple’s apartment had been dark and empty. Wilma hadsaidthey were out searching. And Wilma would be, too, Dulcie thought, except that she was the only reference librarian on duty this morning. Trotting with Joe across the street, she paused beneath a little bench. She watched him strut into the lobby and on through, bold as brass, and out the back to the patio. In a moment, his tomcat yells and blood-curdling screams filled the hotel, the street, the block.
Joe himself couldn’t be seen among the roses; but with creative mimicking and plenty of pizzazz, he produced a fight between two tomcats that was so real, it was all she could do not to run before the two beasts found her. Gathering her wits, she watched the clerk and two more women hurry out into the patio with rolled-up newspapers, and one with a plastic wastebasket, which she filled with water at an outdoor tap.
The minute the lobby was empty she raced in and leaped to the desk, landing practically on top the guest register. She was pawing through, wondering how long ago Slayter had registered, how far back she’d have to turn the pages-and was keeping an eye on Joe in case those three women grabbed him-when Slayter himself appeared in the doorway, coming in from the street. Swallowing a hiss, Dulcie dropped behind the desk, then wondered why she’d done that. She was a cat, a dumb and simple cat!
In a moment she hopped casually up onto a file cabinet among untidy stacks of papers and books. Crouching where she could see through the window to the back garden, she pretended to pay no attention to Slayter. How could someone so handsome make her so uneasy?
He was dressed in pale slacks, sleek dark loafers, a dark shirt and a tan suede blazer. Pausing in the small lobby, looking out the window, he watched with amusement the scene in the garden. The three women had chased Joe up out of their reach onto a high wall. There the tomcat crouched among a tangle of ivy, licking angrily at his drenched coat. Slayter’s grin had turned sly and, she thought, cruel-his amusement made Dulcie’s fur crawl.
She hadn’t yet found his room number; as Slayter moved on toward the hall, she came out from behind the desk and sat down where she could see the elevator. She watched him enter, then watched the dial; when its swinging arm stopped on three, she fled for the stairs that peeked out from behind the elevator’s confining walls.
Racing up the two carpeted flights, she heard the elevator stop above her, heard the door open and close. As she hit the last step panting, she heard a door slam down the hall to her left. Peering around the corner, she scanned the hall in both directions.
Empty to her left, a maid’s cart far down to her right. No maid in sight, but near it the door to one room stood open. Turning away toward the sound of Slayter’s slamming door, she scented along the thick carpet, her nose and taste filled with the freshly laid smell of good leather and expensive, musky aftershave, the same aroma that had accompanied Slayter through the lobby. The trail ended at 307. On down the hall a narrow, carved table supported a potted plant beneath a large mirror with an old, hand-carved frame such as she had seen in the expensive antiques shops. Padding into the shadow beneath the table, she sat down, considering Slayter’s closed door.
The room was on the west, so would overlook the garden. She wondered if Slayter had been sufficiently entertained by the tomcat’s plight to be standing at the window now, looking down with that unpleasant smile. She hoped, if that was the case, that Joe got the hell out of there. How long would Slayter be in his room? If she waited until he left, and she was quick, could she slip in behind his heels?
If she failed at that, surely she could get in when the maid came to do up the room-but who knew how soon that would be?
Kit’s notion that there was something in his room that Chichi wanted might be all wild imagination. Except that Chichihadsearched Abuela’s house.Wasthe object of her search the gun she hadn’t found? Whatever, there was surely something definitely “off” about Chichi’s behavior-fawning all over Clyde, her dislike and aggression toward Joe, her surveillance and partner status in Luis’s crime plans. Her appearance running from the jewelry store with the black bag that later showed up in Luis’s pocket, then her search of Abuela’s house.
But then she had helped Clyde to free them all from the cage, and that puzzled Dulcie; except maybe Clyde had really forced her to do that. Edging deeper into the shadows beneath the little table, she curled down, waiting for Slayter, intent on getting into his room-and hoping Joe had made his sodden escape.
36 [��������: pic_37.jpg]
Half an hour after Dulcie settled among the shadows to watch Roman Slayter’s door, Joe found her there asleep on the hall carpet beneath the little table. Having waited for her in the garden as he cleaned himself up, after that fool woman threw water on him, he had at last gone looking for her. If she’d gotten into Slayter’s room, she’d better be well hidden. From the garden wall, he’d seen Slayter up at a third-floor window, sitting as if at a table. Then when he’d tracked Dulcie through the lobby and up the stairs, there she was asleep in the hall. He nudged her.
She woke at once. “Where have you been? He’s in there.” “I know, I saw him from the garden, sitting by the window with the TV on. What’s to watch, in the daytime? The soaps? He made two phone calls, and answered three; I could just hear the phone ringing, and saw him pick up. Could you hear anything? But you were asleep.”