Cat on a Cold Tin Roof Page 2

  “We hate to leave him like this,” said one of the detectives, “but the forensics guys asked us to keep the scene pristine until they got here.” He chuckled sardonically. “Pristine!” he repeated, shaking his head. “That tarp’s gonna collapse under the weight of the snow in another twenty minutes or so.”

  “So where are they?” I asked.

  “Sleeping, at least ’til we called them,” was the reply. “This isn’t Chicago, with three or four murders a day. I doubt we average as many as one a week.”

  “As you can see,” Simmons said, pointing to the corpse, “all he’s got on is his robe, his pajamas, a pair of unbuckled boots, and an overcoat that he threw on to protect himself from the cold. According to his wife and his staff, he was an avid stargazer. There are two bullets in his back. Clearly the killer nailed him while he was looking at something, though what the hell he could see in this snowstorm is beyond me.”

  “According to the weather reports, it let up from one-thirty to almost two o’clock, sir,” said one of the uniformed men. “It’s up to the coroner to fix the time of death if he can, but it’s a fair guess that he came out during the pause in the storm to see if it was done or if there was more coming.”

  “Makes sense,” agreed Simmons. “I don’t know if it’s right, but it makes sense.”

  I looked for a long moment as the wind whipped across the balcony, then started getting very cold. “Okay,” I said, “I’ve seen him. I’ve seen the balcony. I’ve seen the bedroom. And I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

  “Take a closer look,” said Simmons.

  “At what?”

  He pointed to some small tracks around the corpse’s head, leading to the edge of the balcony.

  I looked and I shrugged. “Squirrel?” I suggested, but I knew that made no sense. Why would a squirrel leave the safety of a tree to leap onto an open balcony in a snowstorm?

  “Cat,” said Simmons.

  “So where is it?” I asked, looking around.

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  I took another look at Pepperidge. There wasn’t much blood, but if the bullets had gone through him, gravity was probably pulling it out of the exit wounds. And if not, well, maybe he died instantly, the heart wasn’t pumping any blood after a few seconds, and it was pooled somewhere inside his body. I shrugged; it wasn’t my business anyway.

  Which reminded me that I did have some business to transact, no one had told me what it was yet, and I was freezing my ass off.

  I turned to Simmons. “Okay, you got a dead man. But you also got a bunch of cops and detectives, and probably more on the way, plus a top-notch forensics crew—so what am I here for?”

  “It’s Mrs. Pepperidge,” replied Simmons.

  “Oh?”

  He nodded. “She was playing in a bridge tournament all evening, and is the one who found the body.”

  “So?”

  He smiled. “I think I’ll let her tell you.”

  “Is she in any condition to talk?” I asked. “I mean, she just lost her husband.”

  “Tough broad,” said Simmons. “If I was a betting man . . .”

  “You are,” I interrupted.

  “Only on horses and football,” he answered. “Anyway, if I was inclined to bet on people, I’d say that she has a lot more in common with the Chicago Palantos than the Cincinnati Pepperidges.”

  “Somehow I don’t picture mob girls playing in bridge tournaments,” I said.

  “She hasn’t been a girl in thirty years, and the tournament just shows that she’s good at adapting to her surroundings.”

  “Okay, she’s not a teenager, if she was ever a floozy she outgrew it, and she likes to play bridge.”

  “She likes cats, too,” added Simmons.

  “Fine,” I said. “She likes cats too.”

  “Come on,” he said, walking through the massive room and heading to the hallway.

  I followed him, we walked past three empty rooms and still more paintings by artists who were probably known to everyone who could afford a house like this, and came to a closed door with a uniformed cop standing guard. Simmons knocked on it.

  “Mrs. Pepperidge?” he said.

  “Come in,” said a strong female voice, stronger that I’d have expected from a newly widowed woman.

  He opened the door, and I followed him into a paneled study with a carpet so thick you got the feeling they had to mow it every few days. She was sitting at an antique wooden desk, drinking from an expensive-looking glass while an even more expensive-looking bottle sat on the desk next to her.

  She was maybe five-foot-five or six, and she may have been slim and sexy once, but these days she looked more like a linebacker. She wore a tailored pantsuit, her face had been lifted at least once and probably a couple of times, and her auburn hair had some beautiful white streaks through it. I don’t know from hair, but I’d have bet whatever my fee for this gig was that those weren’t its real colors. The most lasting impression was that she wore enough gold and diamond jewelry to make your pupils contract once the light hit them.

  She looked me up and down, and finally got to her feet.

  “I am Evangeline Pepperidge,” she said, almost hiding the Chicago twang from her voice. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Paxton, ma’am,” I said, extending my hand. “Eli Paxton. I want to offer my condolences for your loss.”

  She looked at my hand as if it was diseased, and finally I let it drop to my side.

  “Mr. Simmons has recommended you,” she said.

  “Lieutenant Simmons,” Jim corrected her.

  She glared at him for a moment, then turned back to me.

  “Are you available to begin work immediately, Mr. Paxton?”

  “First thing in the morning,” I assured her.

  “I said immediately,” she repeated harshly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Immediately.”

  “Good. I’m not going to quibble about your fee. This is much too important.” She reached down behind the desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a wad of bills, and handed it to me.

  “That’s fifteen hundred dollars, Mr. Paxton,” she said. “It will serve as your retainer. I will pay you two hundred dollars a day plus all expenses while you are working for me, and a thousand-dollar bonus when you successfully complete your assignment.”

  Yeah, I decided, it was worth coming out in the snow. My usual fee was a hundred and a half a day, and as often as not I let it be negotiated downward when I was hard up for clients, which was usually the case. As for the retainer, it was the biggest I’d seen in three years.

  “I assume these terms are acceptable?” she said when I was still doing the math and seeing how soon I could get the Ford its transmission.

  “Perfectly, Mrs. Pepperidge, ma’am,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, opening another desk drawer, pulling out a bunch of four-by-six photos, and handing them to me.

  I thumbed through them. It was a normal, unexceptional-looking cat. A mackerel tabby, I think they call it, with a distinctive white spot over its left eye. It was lying on the dead man’s lap in a couple of them.

  “Looks like a cat,” I said.

  “Of course she’s a cat!” she snapped. “My cat.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s your cat. What’s its name?”

  “Her name is Fluffy,” she said somewhat distastefully. “My husband named her.” She paused. “She’s gone missing, and I want her back.”

  I had an almost irresistible urge to tell her that what she wanted was an animal warden, not a detective. Then I thought about the transmission and the overdue rent, and managed to resist the urge after all.

  “We know from the prints that she was on the roof when her husband . . . when . . . ah . . .” said Simmons uncomfortably.

  “I want that cat back, Mr. Paxton,” she said, ignoring Simmons. She handed me a card. “The top number is my cell phone, the bottom is my landline. I’ll expect a daily pr
ogress report. Mr. Simmons tells me that you once found a missing show dog.”

  “True,” I replied. I decided not to tell her that the dog was dead when I found it a couple of thousand miles from home.

  “Good. I assume that this is your métier.” She pulled one more sheet of paper out of the desk while I was trying to figure out what a métier was. “This is the phone number and address of her vet, and below it is the kennel we board her at when we’re abroad.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I wondered what the odds were of finding a very small, nondescript cat in very deep snow, especially in the dark. A thousand-to-one against sounded about right. “That spot above its—her—eye should make her easy enough to identify.”

  “Well?” she demanded. “You’re on my payroll now. Get to work.”

  I nodded and began backing out of the room. “Yes, ma’am. And let me say once more how sorry I am about your husband.”

  “Forget him!” she yelled, all trace of wealthy Cincinnati sophistication departed. “Just find the fucking cat!”

  2.

  I figured I’d better look busy while I was still within sight of the upstairs window, so I pulled a flashlight out of my car, went back below the balcony, and started looking for the cat, or at least some cat tracks.

  Dumb idea. You know how long an eight- or ten-pound cat’s footprints last in a blizzard that’s dumping an inch an hour on the ground? Neither do I, but it sure as hell isn’t long.

  I hung around, shining my light under every bush and in every possible hiding place, and after about twenty minutes in that weather I figured if I saw the cat camped out in some place that was warm and dry I’d join her, but of course only idiot detectives were out looking for cats they’d never seen before in the middle of a blizzard. Wherever the hell the cat was, I’d bet my bottom dollar that she was warm, dry, and someplace that surely qualified as “inside.”

  When I couldn’t stand it any longer I went to my car, started the motor, waited until it heated up a bit, then turned the lights on, carefully backed out of the driveway—or where I thought the driveway was—and headed home. The plows were still working overtime, and the streets were actually a bit better than they’d been on the way over. I assumed that meant the snow was letting up, but you couldn’t prove it by looking through the windshield.

  I crossed over Interstate 71, kept heading west, finally came to my street, wished as I did every time it rained or snowed that I had a garage (or maybe a limo and a chauffeur), and pulled into the parking space I’d vacated a few hours earlier, reasonably grateful that nobody’d been suicidal enough to try driving down the street and parking since I’d left.

  I locked the car, not that there was anything in it worth stealing, and climbed up the stairs to my apartment. I figured the least Marlowe could do was give a warning growl when he heard footsteps in the hallway, but instead all I could hear was contented snoring.

  I unlocked the door, walked inside, realized I’d left the television on, and saw Marlowe snoring to Lloyd Nolan shooting off wisecracks and bullets as Michael Shayne.

  “I’m home,” I muttered.

  Marlowe opened one eye, stared at me disapprovingly for a few seconds, and went back to sleep.

  “I’m thrilled to see you too,” I said, and went off to the kitchen for a beer, but when I opened the fridge and laid my hand on the can of Bud I realized that both of us—me and the can—were damned cold, which was fine if you were a beer but less so if you were me, so I put the beer back and started making a cup of coffee. Of course, by the time it was ready I’d warmed up and wanted a beer again, but since I’d just poured the coffee I sighed and began drinking it.

  I knew if I flopped down on the bed I’d fall asleep, and if I got seven or eight hours I’d probably get fired for showing up at noon or one o’clock to continue the search, so I sat down on the couch instead.

  “Shove over,” I muttered. (Marlowe and I had been having a two-year battle about which of us had squatter’s rights to the beat-up leather couch, which was the only comfortable piece of furniture in the place). Finally he grudgingly moved over a (very) few inches, decided to pretend I didn’t exist, and went back to watching Michael Shayne outsmart the bad guys.

  I envied him—Shayne, not Marlowe. Nobody dragged him out of bed at three in the morning. No one showed him a freshly killed mafioso and then told him to go find a cat in a snowstorm. No one expected him to look for a small, dark animal he’d never seen before on a large dark piece of property, armed only with a gun that he couldn’t use on the cat and a flashlight that had seen better days and certainly brighter ones. And the worst part of the comparison was that Michael Shayne always got the girl. Of course, so did the Saint and the Falcon and Boston Blackie. And Nick Charles started out with the girl, which was possibly less romantic but also a hell of a lot less time-consuming. Me, I had an ex-wife I hadn’t seen in years, a lady dog show judge who liked Marlowe better than me, and a lady cop from Kentucky who decided that shooting bad guys was more satisfying than smooching with a Cincinnati detective.

  I was still feeling sorry for myself, or perhaps outraged at everything except myself, when I finally dozed off. I don’t know how long I slept, three or four hours maybe, when suddenly I opened my eyes. I didn’t know why for a moment, but I felt something was—I hate to say “amiss”—but at least not quite right.

  And I realized that Marlowe was standing on the couch, his nose about four inches from mine, staring intently at me with an expression that said, “We have to go outside—now!”

  I checked my watch. It was nine in the morning. “All right, all right, keep your shirt on,” I growled as Marlowe continued to stare at me and thoughtfully made no reference to the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. I was still in my clothes, so I got into my shoes, galoshes and coat, attached a leash to his collar, and took him outside. Made it with about eight seconds to spare.

  “You know,” I mused as we began walking along in the morning sun, with him sticking his nose in the snow every couple of steps even though it damned near came up to his chest, “I’ll bet you’d be better at spotting a cat than I would. At least you could bring one more sense to bear.”

  His entire attitude seemed to say: Don’t bother me when I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing when I keep burying my nose in the snow, so I just kept walking along with him wherever he was going and trying to wake up and ignore the cold. And of course where he was going was Mrs. Garabaldi’s petunias, which hadn’t bloomed in months and were totally covered by snow anyway, and he lifted his leg where he thought they were, like he’d done every day since I’d got him, and even though it’d be another few months before the petunias began growing again, Mrs. Garabaldi stuck her head out of her window and began cursing at both of us in Italian, just like she always did. I resisted the urge to yell, “Marlowe says hello!” and kept walking.

  Marlowe finally got chilly and began pulling me back to the apartment while I uttered a silent prayer of gratitude that he wasn’t a collie or a Saint Bernard or something that liked the cold. As we neared the place he tugged me toward the door, but I figured I’d better get to work—or, more important, be seen getting to work—so I tugged him toward the car, and since I outweigh the little bastard by maybe a hundred and seventy pounds or so, I won (though not without a struggle).

  I put the key in the ignition, turned it, and it took four tries for the damned thing to start. Then I realized that I hadn’t scraped the snow off the windshield or any of the windows, so I waited for the car to warm up, turned the heat on high and the defroster on full blast, waited a couple of more minutes, and then got the scraper and brush and had the windows cleaned off in under a minute.

  The snow had stopped while Michael Shayne was molesting the bad guys and grabbing the heroine, or maybe it was the other way around, and the plows had finished their work, at least temporarily. It took me about twenty minutes to get to the Pepperidge house. A trio of cop cars were still there, I checked to see if the c
at had shown up, nobody seemed to know one was even missing, so I left Marlowe in the car, walked inside, started climbing the stairs, was told that this was a police inquiry and private eyes weren’t welcome, determined that Jim Simmons had gone home to bed, explained what I was doing there, and asked them to send someone upstairs and make sure the cat was still missing.

  I could hear Evangeline Pepperidge bellow through two or three closed doors that yes the goddamned cat was still missing, and an officer, looking like a young priest who had just mortally offended the pope, came to the head of the stairs and explained to me that I was still on salary.

  I thanked him, went back outside, opened the back door so Marlowe could hop out, and walked him over to the area just beneath the balcony.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do your thing.”

  Maybe I should have worded it differently, because he proceeded to do his thing, then began pulling me back to the car.

  I pulled back and began walking him around the area where the cat had to have landed. It was new territory to him, so he stuck his nose to the ground—or at least as close to the ground as the snow allowed—and began sniffing like there was no tomorrow.

  I looked up and saw a cop looking down at me through the sliding glass door. There was no sign of my employer, but at least she knew I was on the job, and I figured I was as close to her right here as I cared to be.

  Suddenly Marlowe began growling deep in his throat and began pulling me toward the back of the property. The going there was slower, since no one had plowed, shoveled, or even walked through the snow, but we made some progress. Then he froze, and just as I was wondering what the hell he had seen he began barking, and a dark cat shot out of somewhere and raced up a barren tree, reaching an icy branch and staring down at us.

  “Damn!” I muttered, because now that I could see it clearly it was a plain brown, not a tabby of any kind, and more to the point, it didn’t have that distinctive white spot over its left eye.

  Still, Marlowe had either figured out what we were here for, or else he just liked terrifying anything smaller than himself, so I decided we’d scout around a little longer . . . but two hours later we hadn’t run into anything except an occasional squirrel that was crazy enough to be out in the snow.