They covered the parking lot at a tedious crawl, then Charlie pulled into an empty slot in front of the drugstore. Cuddling Joe under her arm like a little lapdog, she headed inside to walk the aisles.
They saw no man even close to Joe’s description, and their search didn’t last long once people noticed him. “Oh, look at the kitty!” “Mama, that woman has a cat!” “You take your cat shopping with you? How cute.” Soon Joe’s claws were out, ready to bloody the next reaching hand that tried to stroke him. He could feel Charlie shaking with laughter as they returned to the parking lot.
“Let’s walk it once,” Joe said. “Behind the cars.” She did that, and Joe sniffed at each trunk seeking the scent of swimming-pool mud or the stink of a dead body. He smelled dust; dirty clothes, as from someone’s laundry on the way to the Laundromat; and bananas and various other food items from recently stashed grocery bags. But no residue of a ripening body.
“Wild-goose chase,” Charlie said as she stepped back into the Blazer and dropped Joe on the seat. As she started the engine, a stout woman in the next car looked in and smiled, as if pleased to see someone talking to her cat. She pulled away, still smiling.
Joe said, “Why would he follow Clyde and Ryan from the Parker house? What was so interesting?”
“Maybe he drove up there to watch me while I checked the empty houses.”
Joe raised his ears. “You think that was your prowler? The guy who let Mango out? Then he had nothing to do with the murder at the Parker house.”
“The cleaning crew found a few little things missing in the vacationers’ houses. Or maybe they were only out of place. Not enough to be a burglary, but enough to make me wonder.”
“Dulcie and Kit and I could have a look. There was a strange smell around the Parker house-besides the body. Almost like catnip, or catmint. If he’s been in those houses…”
“Did you smell that in the Chapman house?”
He frowned. “No. But the smell of kittens and cat box, and cat food, can cover a lot of smells. That, and Theresa Chapman’s lemon room freshener. Who knows what we’d find in the other houses.”
She glanced over at him, wishing she hadn’t brought it up, hadn’t put the idea in his head. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but he hated that, hated to be coddled. “You want to call Ryan and Clyde, see if they had any luck on the freeway?”
Joe punched in Clyde ’s number. The phone rang once, then went directly to voice mail.
“Doesn’t have it on,” he growled. Clyde made him crazy when he did that. He tried Ryan’s cell.
“Flannery,” she said on the first ring.
“We’re headed back,” Joe said. “Nothing.”
“Ditto,” Ryan said. “I called Dallas, gave him a description, told him the guy was watching us and maybe watching him and Juana. Anything else you remember, anything you want to add?”
“Nothing,” Joe said, wishing he’d seen the guy’s face.
“We’re going on up to look at that vacant ranch,” Ryan said, “then check the remodel, then meet Helen Thurwell to look at the other houses. She wasn’t happy that we had to reschedule. You want to join us?” she said brightly. He could just see her smart-assed grin, knowing how he hated looking at houses.
“I’ll pass on this one,” he said. All those smells of strange humans and strange animals, of sour clothes and toxic cleaning solutions. Someone else’s empty house wasn’t his territory. If it had no connection to a crime scene, he wasn’t interested in exploring.
“See you at home,” she said, laughing at him. “Lupe’s Playa for dinner, if we get back early?”
Joe licked his whiskers at the thought of a Mexican supper. As she rang off, he imagined the yellow roadster turning off the freeway, going through an underpass or over a bridge and taking an on-ramp south again, heading up in the hills above the village to resume their maniacal new obsession of house hunting.
What good was it, he thought, if Clyde stopped collecting old cars and grew equally involved with old decrepit houses? Both pursuits were, in Joe’s opinion, the human’s mindless and futile attempt to revive and save the known world.
As Charlie turned down Ocean toward the village, he started thinking again about Juana and Dallas, wondering why they hadn’t made that guy when he’d been spying on them.
“What?” Charlie said, looking over at him as she slowed at a stop sign.
“How could they miss him? Down at the Parker place? And if they did see him, why didn’t they arrest him or at least question him?” The more he thought about that, the more irritated he became. It was the first time he’d ever felt anger at a cop, certainly at either of those two.
“You don’t have much faith in our detectives,” she said, pulling away from the stop sign. “Maybe they didn’t see him, with all the overgrown bushes and tall fences. Even the best officer might miss someone completely hidden, Joe. Maybe he slipped inside a house. Maybe…” She was silent a moment, turning onto her aunt Wilma’s street, then she reached to stroke his back. “Don’t be cranky. That guy might have been just some nosy neighbor, we might have gotten all excited for nothing.” She pulled to the curb in front of Wilma’s cottage. “If that guy was the housebreaker-or was your killer-dispatch has his description. Maybe one of the units will pick him up.”
Wilma Getz’s stone cottage stood beneath spreading oaks, with not a bit of lawn in front. A deep, richly flowered garden spread away to the house. The roof was dark slate, slippery to the paws when wet with rain, warm as a stovetop beneath the summer sun. In the window of Wilma’s living room, they could see Dulcie looking out, lashing her striped tail, and Joe brightened at the sight of his tabby lady. Her paw was lifted, her green eyes intent on him. Charlie watched them, and smiled. In spite of the human scum one encountered, one could always find honesty and truth among the animals-and find wonder. The world was an exciting place when you knew its secrets, when you could share in a feline miracle as real and amazing as a little speaking cat lifting her paw in greeting.
Stroking Joe and picking him up, Charlie got out of the Blazer and headed inside. In her arms, Joe wriggled with impatience, then leaped down, racing ahead to the cat door.
12
HE SAT IN his car above the deserted ranch feeling shaky. Why had those people followed him? What did they know? What had they seen? But maybe they didn’t know anything. How could they? Maybe they just hadn’t liked him standing down there in the bushes watching them. Though it would take someone really paranoid to get mad about such a little thing, get mad enough to follow him. He might have just been down there pruning bushes or gardening. That was his neighborhood, what he did there was none of their business.
They couldn’t have seen him earlier when they stopped to talk to those two detectives, he’d been too well hidden in the dense bushes between the houses, and with the corner of the house hiding him. But the house had blocked the cops’ voices, too, so he hadn’t heard much of what they’d said.
The cops had been doing something back by the pool, but hell, they couldn’t know anything.
Unless someone had seen him, early this morning? He daren’t think that someone saw him last night as he loaded her into the trunk. Maybe some neighbor thought they saw something, a shadow moving around, maybe glimpsed his car pulling in or out of the drive, but they couldn’t have seen anything, really. It was too dark.
Sure as hell, some crazy suspicion wouldn’t be enough to bring the cops. If someone had seen him and recognized him-everyone knew him in this neighborhood-the cops would have come straight to his house. Maybe someone saw a shadow or heard some little sound last night, maybe thought it was some homeless guy fooling around at the empty house, trying to get in. And this morning they’d woken up thinking about it and decided to call the law. Maybe that’s what this was about, maybe he was worrying for nothing.