“She’s really pretty,” Joe said, gawking. “Who would have thought?”
Dulcie and Kit smiled. All females like to see a successful makeover; unless of course they are jealous.
“She told Clyde she might stay here,” Joe said, “after the trial. Look for a real job and a small apartment. Says she likes the village.” He watched her with interest. “Since the sting, since they arrested Slayter, she hasn’t come on to Clyde at all.” He yawned, full of Jolly’s delicacies, and sinfully comfortable among the cushions; and for a little while, the gray tomcat dozed.
He woke when Dulcie nudged him. “Come on, people are leaving, we can clean up the plates.”
He stared at her. “You can’t be serious. After what we just had to eat?” But Dulcie spun away through the window, Kit followed her, and the three cats headed across the oak branch and in through the dining-room window. They paused on the wide sill. People were shrugging on coats, carrying away little paper plates filled with leftovers. Charlie beckoned to them and as she cleared the long table, she filled clean paper plates for them.
“I don’t know how you can eat so much.” She set their suppers down on the windowsill, and stroked and hugged them. “Such good work,” she whispered. Though they didn’t dare answer, they let their looks warm her. From the kitchen door, Wilma watched them, smiling.
At the dining table, Pedric was saying, “� the faux jewelry, every gleaming diamond and emerald as fake as Grandma’s teeth.” The thin old man laughed with pleasure.
“Yes, it was,” Harper said, sitting down across from Pedric, patting Charlie on the behind as she passed. “Even the key-locked safe at Marineau’s was a set-up. We got some nice fingerprints off of it, and off the fake jewelry-some of those guys weren’t a bit careful.” Harper’s long, weathered face looked happier tonight than the cats had seen in a long time. “Store owners polished the jewelry all up before it went in the cases, not a trace of their own prints.”
Wilma and Lucinda came in from the kitchen and sat down. Lori and Dillon heaped their plates for the third time, and retired to the far corner of the living room, beside the tall bookcases. At the table, Detective Davis, who had resisted earlier and had eaten little, now filled her plate. If Davis was dieting, she’d lost the battle, this night.
“And all your reports are in, to the DA,” Pedric said.
Harper nodded. “Two weeks ago. We’re pleased that Judge Anderson denied all bail. And with this sleazy attorney Luis brought up from L.A� They don’t have much of a case.”
Lucinda said, “And not a civilian hurt, by the grace of God and the skilled way the department handled it.”
“Mostly by the grace of God,” Harper said. “And the information Chichi and a couple of snitches provided.”
Davis said, “We didn’t have enough on Luis or Tommie to lock them up before the sting. They’d have been right out on bail� only circumstantial evidence to the first jewelry store burglary.”
“What you did,” Lucinda said, “was amazing.” She looked at Chichi, who had come out of the kitchen with Charlie. “What Chichi did was very brave.”
“Not brave at all,” Chichi said, sitting down. “I was so angry, and hurting. I never believed the cops killed Frank, they knew he was on their side. But no one� Who was going to believe me? Luis swore at the hearing that hesawa cop shoot Frank. He did that for Slayter, lied for Slayter.” She looked up at Lucinda, a hurt, naked look. “I did the only thing I could think of, hang in with Luis until I had the evidence. I hated that, hated being nice to them. I was hoping to find the gun.” She looked at Harper. “But that turned out fine, that you found it.
“In L.A., when Luis ran out of the bank right behind Frank that night, I didn’t see Slayter at all.” She had balled up her fist, gripping her wadded napkin. “Slayterwasthere, in the shadows. Dufio told me, a couple of days before he� Before Slayter shot him.” She shivered. “Shot him in that cell like an animal in a trap! Poor Dufio. He told me he’d seen Slayter in the shadows near the bank, but that’s all he said. If he’d told me all of it, and sooner, you’d been able to arrest Slayter, and Dufio would be alive.”
Wilma glanced across to Dulcie. No one had mentioned Slayter’s scratch wounds; but the subjecthad been discussed earlier, more than Wilma and the cats cared to think about� As had the remarkably similar wounds on Hernando Rivas’s body. Wilma had been in favor of the golf-shoe theory. No shoe had been found.
It seemed more than strange, to those who knew the truth, that in neither case had the coroner found any cat hairs. Surely there must have been a few. Wilma wouldn’t think of broaching that subject to John Bern, though they had been friends for many years. If Bern did not care to mention cat hairs, that was fine with her. If he knew more than he should and was keeping it to himself, that was fine, too. She wasn’t going to rock the boat.
Pedric looked at Chichi. “And there’s no doubt that Frank Cozzinowasfurnishing information to LAPD?” Leaning forward, his elbows on the table, the thin old man looked very frail between the harder, young officers and Clyde.
Chichi nodded. “He informed LAPD for a long time.” She said no more. She did not offer an explanation as to why Frank had turned to helping the police, what had made him change his thinking, any more than she explained why she had changed.
The cats, cleaning their plates, were again so sated they could hardly keep their eyes open. Any normal cat would have been sick. Joe sat nodding on the windowsill until Clyde gathered him up, and Wilma picked up Dulcie. Kit had only to trot into the master bedroom and tuck down among the quilts-or leap out across the oak branch to slumber the night away high in her tree house.
But Kit thought it best to stay inside at night, for a while, best that the old couple would not awaken in the small hours to search among the blankets for her, then wonder if she had gone off with the wild ones again, perhaps this time forever.
I’m done with that, Kit thought.Thisis my home, with Lucinda and Pedric. Willow and Cotton and Coyote have chosen their way, they didn’t want what I want. She hoped they were safe, that they’d found a place of their own far away from Stone Eye.
She thought about her three wild friends the next morning when she woke before dawn to hear the first birds chirping, and when she went to sleep the next night and heard an owl hoot outside the window. She worried about them, as Lucinda and Pedric worried about her. And then, on the night of the next full moon, she dreamed so vividly about the ferals that the following morning, when she wentwithLucinda to see the finished pictures for Charlie’s book, she asked Charlie. The minute she and Lucinda were in the door, Kit asked her.
“Will you take me there? On horseback, up in the hills? I don’t want to go alone. Stone Eye� I want�”
But Charlie interrupted her. “I’ve seen them, Kit. Not up on Hellhag Hill at all, and not off beyond it. Right up there,” she said, pointing up toward the hills that rose away behind the house and barn. “Up beyond our own pastures, where that little brook comes down. I saw them there. Ten cats, and I’m sure your three friends were among them. A dark-striped fellow with long ears, creamy circles around his eyes and a face like a coyote? A pure-white cat with long hair and blue eyes? And a lovely bleached calico, sleek and creamy?”
Kit nodded to all three descriptions; and Charlie rose, reaching for her jacket. “Come on, Kit. I’ll take you, while Lucinda makes herself a nice cup of tea.”
Lucinda nodded. “I can look at the drawings again? And read a bit of the manuscript over again?”
“Of course you can.” Charlie hugged Lucinda and went to saddle her mare.