“He was caught red-handed. Why wouldn’t he be the right guy?”
“Cause those two idiots Max and Dooley are still hanging around the chateau, making nice with Flake’s flock of barnyard animals. And let me ask you this: would they bother if the case was cracked? Let me answer that for you: no, they wouldn’t!”
“Max and Dooley are idiots. They wouldn’t know how to find a clue if it stared them right in the face.”
“They may be idiots, but they still manage to solve a lot of cases, bud, or haven’t you been reading dear Odelia Poole’s articles?”
Chris had. In fact those articles were what had put him on this career path in the first place. He’d always had the knack of being able to communicate with his pets, even from a young age. And it had taken him a while to understand how unique this gift was. The truth had probably only dawned on him when his folks had sent him to his first shrink. Dr. Jinx had found nothing particularly wrong with him, apart from a childish belief he could talk to animals, which he described as the Dr. Dolittle Complex, a rare disease for which there was, alas, no cure. The advice Dr. Jinx had given Chris’s parents was to simply ignore the affliction, and it would go away all by itself as he got older.
It hadn’t gone away, but Chris had become hip to the fact that he was always going to be considered a weirdo if he kept insisting he could talk to animals, so from one day to the next he’d simply stopped mentioning the strange gift he had and that had elicited twin sighs of relief from his parents, not to mention the rest of his family. The revelation had come to him when Bethany Kernick, who was in his class, had told him he was a weirdo. Since he was deeply, madly in love with young Bethany at the time, he’d decided then and there that talking to animals was probably not the babe magnet he’d thought it was, and had decided to stop mentioning it to anyone. He’d even gone so far as to admit to Bethany that the only reason he’d told her he could talk to her pet hamster was to make an impression on her because he liked her so much. It had worked, and he and Bethany had gone steady for the rest of the semester, until she met Ernesto Hair and had declared him her boyfriend. It had been a valuable lesson for young Chris, though: don’t let the world know that you’re different, for it can only result in being bullied, or in girls like Bethany Kernick spurning your well-intentioned advances.
It had taken him well into his adult life to embrace his gift. Only when the rumor had reached his ear that Odelia Poole, of Hampton Cove Gazette fame, got a little help from her cats when researching her articles, did he finally realize his was a marketable trait, and so he’d gotten his PI license, hung out his shingle, and hadn’t looked back since.
“So you think there’s more to this story than meets the eye?” asked Chris.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure there is,” said Tank in that gruff voice of his.
For a detective’s pet sidekick Tank was a little on the belligerent side, but Chris didn’t mind. As long as they got the job done, that’s what counted.
“So let’s poke around some more,” he said. “Have you talked to Pussy?”
“Nah. Haven’t been able to track her down.”
“Talk to her. If anyone knows what’s going on it’s her. Spread some of that charm of yours. Put your winning personality on display.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tank grumbled.
“Just… be nice, okay?”
“I’m always nice!”
“You weren’t very nice to Max.”
“Max is a fat dumbbell,” said Tank, narrowing his eyes at the recollection.
“He’s also the main competition. And if we’re going to wipe out the competition, we’ll have to be smart about it.”
And then once Odelia Poole and Max were out of the picture, the world was their oyster. There was no limit to the heights they could rise as the only man-and-cat detective combo in the business, and soon the money would start rolling in like nobody’s business. In fact he couldn’t understand how Odelia Poole hadn’t tapped the mother lode yet. Probably too dumb to understand that a private sleuth who could talk to animals was the cat’s meow. Soon they’d be making Uncle Scrooge money, and the Bethany Kernicks of this world would weep bitter tears for turning him down for an Ernesto Hair.
Vengeance was his—and would be even sweeter than he’d imagined.
But first they needed to get rid of Odelia Poole and her dumb chums.
Chapter 16
The meeting was about to commence, and Dooley and I were ready to attend and take copious notes so our friend behind the curtain would know what had been discussed in regards to her future fate.
People had been arriving in droves, chauffeured in by fancy cars, as we had been able to witness from our vantage point behind the second-floor window, and judging from the buzz downstairs things were hotting up quickly.
Pussy had already shown us the setup so we could follow the meeting as if seated on the first row. It was a room only Pussy appeared to have access to. Off Flake’s bedroom, she simply put her paw against a hidden security pad, a section of the wall slid open, and we found ourselves in a secret room!
“Wow—real James Bond type of stuff,” said Dooley.
Inside, a wall-to-wall row of screens showed us every part of the house. Apparently Flake had installed it a long time ago, as a parallel system to the official security setup. It was a fairly small space, and probably had to be, or else people would notice this architectural funny business. The state-of-the-art surveillance equipment could take a peek inside every corner of the chateau. Flake had cameras in every room, even the bathrooms, and according to Pussy the designer had spent hours in there, spying on guests and associates.
He liked to organize weekend getaways for the company’s upper crust, and spy on them while they held secret meetings in their rooms, gossiping about Flake, or plotting against him. Many an executive had been given the boot after such a weekend, for scheming against the boss. It had been a way for the designer to keep his fingers in every possible pie, and hold the company reins firmly in hand. According to Pussy all of his other houses were equipped with the same setup, and even the company headquarters in Paris.
With another flick of the paw, Pussy booted up the system, and all the screens flickered to life—in black and white, of course. She handled the joystick with remarkable ease, and brought up one screen in particular: the main meeting room in the basement, where the conference was about to begin.
She flicked a button and now we had sound, too. She hopped down from the console and moved swiftly to the door. “Watch and learn, you guys.”
“Maybe you should stay,” I suggested.
“I told you, Max—I can’t,” she said, with the same pained look she’d displayed before. The loss of her human had hit her hard, that much was obvious, but the uncertainty about her future was even harder to bear.
“We’ll tell you everything you need to know,” Dooley promised.
She smiled. “You’re good cats, both of you. Never change, will you?” And with these words she left the room, and allowed the hidden panel to swing back into place. Now we were effectively cut off from the rest of the house.
“Never change?” said Dooley. “What does she mean, Max?”
“I have no idea,” I said, jumping up onto Flake’s chair—the one where he spent all those hours spying on his own people—hunting down the plotters.
“Because we do change, don’t we? I noticed this morning that a black hair is growing out of my left ear. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there yesterday.”
“A lot of hair grows out of your ears, Dooley. It’s because you’re a cat.”
“Yeah, but like I said, this particular hair wasn’t there before. And I know this because it’s black, and I don’t have black hairs growing out of my ears.”
I wasn’t going to discuss the color of the hairs in Dooley’s ears, for judging from the buzz sounding from the speakers, the meeting was about to start. And since I didn’t want to miss a thing—for Pussy’s sake—focus was key.