As the waiter parked the cart at the end of the terrace and turned away, the cats sprang to its top shelf skillfully missing cakes and pies and tortes. Leaping to the roof, they dislodged one small piece of cherry pie, sent it skidding across the terrace. They heard it hit and didn't look back, sped racing across the roof and didn't stop until they reached the end of the block.
Pausing beside a warm heat vent, they had a leisurely and calming wash to settle their nerves. "What's that hussy up to?" Joe said, licking his paws.
"Don't forget, she worked for years as a secretary for the San Francisco probation office. That's where Wilma first knew her."
"So?"
"She must know a lot of probation officers and law enforcement people. And those guys, when they retire, sometimes start private investigative services. Wilma knows several P.O.s who…"
"You think she's investigating Dora and Ralph? Or investigating Jergen? Come on, Dulcie. Can you picture Bernine doing anything to help the law?"
"She would for money-she'd do anything for money."
"And what about the watcher?" He peered over the roof to see if the man was still there, but he had gone-or had moved to a new vantage. "He appears to have masterminded the copying of Mavity's financial statements," Joe said. "He could be some kind of cop-that's more believable than Bernine helping the law."
He began to pace the roof, across the warm, tarry surface. "And what about Pearl Ann, snooping on Jergen?" He looked at Dulcie intently. "Who's the cop, here? And who's the rip-off artist?"
As they discussed the puzzle, thirty feet below them the sidewalk was busy with tourists, the after-dinner crowd heading home, lingering at the shop windows, and late diners coming from art exhibits or leaving the local theater, heading for various village restaurants. They saw, scattered among the crowd, two women and an elderly man carrying library cat petitions, stopping each tourist to show newspaper clippings with Dulcie's picture.
"Who's checking those signatures," Joe said, amused. "These people aren't village residents."
"They use the library, though," she said defensively. "Lots of visitors do. Wilma makes out temporary cards all the time."
Directly below them a couple in jeans stood arguing about whether to drive on to San Francisco or stay in Molena Point, and up at the corner three college-age girls flirted with their male escort, each angling prettily for his attention. Ordinarily the cats enjoyed watching tourists, they liked hanging over the roof making fun of people, but tonight their attention returned quickly to Bernine and the Sleuders, worrying at the tangle as intently as they would worry at an illusive mouse.
But, as it turned out, they had little time to circle the quarry before Azrael's prediction came true. Before there was, indeed, a murder. An event that sucked in Joe and Dulcie like flies into a spider web.
17
I SEE DEATH around you… death before the moon is full, Azrael had told them-almost as if the black torn could himself bring death with his dark magic, as if this beast were indeed the Death Angel. Whatever the truth, two days after Azrael beguiled Joe and Dulcie into spying at Pander's restaurant, death reached out just as he predicted.
It was barely eight A.M., Tuesday morning, as they entered the empty library, slipping in through Dulcie's cat door, their bellies full of fat mice, meaning to curl up on the children's window seat for a little nap before opening time. The cushioned retreat, where the children listened to stories, was at this hour Dulcie's private domain.
According to Freda Brackett, Dulcie had turned the long window seat and the inviting tangle of brightly flowered pillows into a nest of cat hair, fleas, and ringworm, but the children thought differently. They loved finding Dulcie among the cushions to snuggle as they listened to the librarian's stories; they all fought to hold her and sit close to her.
But now this early morning there were as yet no children and the wide bay window was theirs, the only sounds the occasional whish of passing cars away across the garden and the distant purling of the sea; crossing the reading room, the cats could feel, through the floor and carpet, the sea's constant muffled heartbeat.
Dulcie thought it so odd that Wilma couldn't feel the surf beating unless she was right there at the shore. How sad, what humans missed. Nor had Wilma, just last week, felt the preearthquake tremors that sent Dulcie under the bed at two in the morning, yowling until Wilma took shelter in the closet, the two of them waiting for the earthquake to hit, for heavy objects to start falling.
The ensuing quake had been nothing, amusingly small, no more damage done than a few drinking glasses broken and a crack in the bathroom wall-by California standards, hardly worth getting out of bed for-though Dulcie had not been able to determine its severity by its preshock tremors.
Now, leaping to the window seat, kneading the pillows, the cats yawned and stretched, ready for a nap-and stopped.
They went rigid, hissing, backing away from the glass.
A smell assailed them, unnatural and alarming.
Not the sweet aroma of little children and candy wrappers and the librarians' subtle perfume.
A stink of death seeped in around the glass-nor was it the scent of a dead animal, not the smell of freshly killed rabbit or squirrel. No. The smell they tasted, flehming and growling, was the stink of human death.
Crouched and tense, they approached the glass, stood pressed against the window looking down into the depths of the tangled garden.
Beyond the window, the building's two wings jutted out to form a partially walled disarray of blooms that reached up thick as a jungle beneath the children's window. Spider lilies, tapping at the glass, were tall and thick, their delicate blossoms curled like reaching hands. Beyond the lilies, flowering bushes glowed, and tangles of blue iris. On the east wall, a mass of climbing yellow nasturtiums shone yellow as sunshine, and above the jungle of blooms the oak trees twisted their sturdy, dark limbs and jade foliage against the morning sky.
Beyond the garden stood Ocean Avenue's double row of eucalyptus trees and then, across the divided street, the crowded, two-story shops. But it was the flower bed beneath the bay window and what lay crushing the blooms, that held the cats' attention, that made every hair rise, that drew Joe's lips back in a keening snarl and made Dulcie catch her breath with a shocked mewl.
Below the jutting window a man knelt. As the cats watched, he reached to touch the two bodies that lay sprawled together unmoving, their fleshy, blue-veined, half-naked limbs shockingly white.
Greeley Urzey knelt stroking Dora's limp hand, reaching to touch her bare, white leg, her naked limbs heavy and comatose. Both Ralph's and Dora's clothes were half-torn off-not as if they had been attacked, rather as if they had flung off their garments in a wild and frenzied dance, an insane gavotte. And across the garden, an erratic path twisted, raw with crushed foliage and flowers, a maddened trail plunging in from Ocean Avenue.