Authors: Susan Conant

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Detective and mystery stories, #Detective and mystery stories - Authorship, #Cats, #Mystery fiction, #Apartment houses, #Women novelists

Scratch the Surface (4 page)

FOUR

Although Prissy LaChatte’s
adventures were cozy rather than terrifying, it happened now and then that a character other than the brave, resourceful Prissy was startled into speechlessness, thus providing Felicity’s sleuth with the opportunity to ask,
Cat got your tongue?
As Felicity stared at the scene in her vestibule, the cat had, indeed, gotten her tongue: A choking sensation in her throat suggested that she was incapable of producing so much as a moan, never mind an intelligible word. The cat in question was presumably the big gray creature nestled next to the small gray man.

In less than a minute, Felicity shook off her state of mute immobilization. After stepping out of the vestibule and allowing its door to close, she reached into her tote bag, retrieved her cell phone, and dialed 911. Her greatest fear was that the police would make her check the dead man for a pulse or otherwise touch him. If she herself were writing the scene, either Prissy LaChatte or her police chief friend would ask,
And what makes you think he’s dead?
Alternatively, if the finder of the body did check for signs of life, in a later chapter either Prissy or the chief would lament the stupidity of the person who had tampered with evidence by ripping off the duct tape and uselessly applying first aid.

In any case, Felicity had no intention of touching the body, which she felt certain was just that, a dead thing. Still, she turned to face the glass door, peered in, and monitored the man for signs of movement, but the only motion was the rise and fall of the cat’s abdomen. After reaching the police emergency number and giving her name and address, she said, “There’s a dead man in my vestibule. I’ve been out. I just got home, and I opened the door, and . . . His mouth and nose are covered with duct tape, and his skin is gray. He isn’t breathing. I don’t know what to do! I need help!”

“Stay on the line.” A male voice calmly issued the order. “We’re on the way. Hang in there.”

Still facing the glass door and still clutching her phone, Felicity mindlessly acted on a desire to distance herself from the horror by taking a few steps backward. If she had been living in the house for a long time or perhaps if it had felt like home, her mental map of the front entrance might have led her to turn around or come to a halt. As it was, she took one backward step too many and ended up tumbling down the low flight of bluestone stairs. For a few moments, she lay flat on her back, the wind knocked out of her. Light rain fell on her face. Newton Park Estates, never noisy, was completely silent. Felicity briefly missed Somerville, where a neighbor or a passerby would have found her by now and where there’d have been hundreds of people in shouting distance. The depressing thought crossed Felicity’s mind that she had landed in her characteristic position in life: all alone on hard stone in the rain with no one to help her.

It was then that she remembered her cell phone. After struggling to her feet, she found it in the manicured grass beside the bluestone path, next to the tote bag she’d dropped. The phone was no longer connected to the police. She thought of calling Ronald but decided that he’d be useless. Neighbors? As usual, the nearby houses looked peculiarly uninhabited. Unlike the streetlights on Norwood Hill, those in the Estates had fresh lightbulbs and globes free of birds’ nests, and no mature trees blocked the light. Furthermore, every residence in Newton Park had more than ample outdoor lighting, with an expensive fixture above or next to each front door, motion-detecting lights by each garage, and artistically arranged spotlights that directed attention to walkways, foundation plantings, and little weeping trees. All this brightness served mainly to reveal a complete absence of people. Lights shone in the windows of some houses, but the residents were wary of burglars and often left on lights to deter crime. Three of the houses were, as Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s had been, gigantic and extravagant pieds-à-terre, presumably for wealthy people with really big feet. Those three places were almost never occupied, but lights on timers created the illusion that the owners were at home.

Felicity had met all the other owners at two condo association meetings but had forgotten some of the names and faces. The meetings had been brief and businesslike. When she had moved in, there’d been no welcoming get-together, and even her neighbors on either side, the Trotskys and the Wangs, had failed to show up at her door with the offerings of brownies or cookies she’d half-expected. She first met the Trotskys one trash day when she’d placed her recycling bin at curbside, and Mr. Trotsky had angrily accused her of putting it on his property. The Wangs spoke almost no English but had introduced themselves in a friendly way, and always smiled and waved when they saw Felicity. It seemed unkind to reciprocate by summoning them to help with a murder, but they were far more approachable than the Trotskys. For once, Felicity, who valued privacy, simply hated being all alone. Consequently, instead of using her phone to call Ronald or to redial 911, and thus risk being asked to touch a dead person, she walked slowly and carefully down her walk, along the street, and up to the Wangs’ front door.

With four stories and a three-car garage, the Wangs’ house was considerably larger than hers, and its front entrance had two light fixtures, a knocker, a mailbox, a mail slot, an intercom, and a doorbell, all brand new and shiny. As she pressed the bell, she realized that for all she knew, Mr. and Mrs. Wang, whose first names she had forgotten, were Dr. and Dr. Wang and would take charge of the crisis as they’d presumably been taught to do in medical school.

When Mrs.—Dr.?—Wang opened the door, Felicity remembered the woman’s first name, which was Zora. And the husband’s? Tom? Bob?

“Zora,” Felicity said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s an emergency!”

Zora was a little woman of thirty or so, with short black hair and no observable body fat. She nodded politely and gave a smile of complete incomprehension. Then she gestured to Felicity to come in. The front hall was the size of an assembly room. It had a bare fireplace and was empty except for a big vase of lilies on a Chinese table. There was a powerful smell of exotic food.

“An emergency!” Felicity repeated. She pointed toward the door through which she’d just entered.

“Dinner?” Zora asked. “Join us?”

“Thank you, but I need
help
!” The urge to shout at foreigners was uncontrollable. “A dead person! A person who is
dead
! Or hurt!
Emergency
!”

“Get Tom,” Zora said. “Wait.”

The tiny woman disappeared and reappeared with her husband, who was also very small and looked even younger than his wife. “Tom Wang,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Felicity Pride.” She shook the proffered hand and said, “There’s a dead body in my vestibule. A man. Dead or injured.”

“Police!” Tom Wang said.

“I’ve called.”

“Call police!”

“I
have
called. They are coming. Can you come with me now?” She pointed frantically to the door.

Tom Wang addressed Zora in Chinese, and in seconds, Zora opened a closet in the hall and produced short jackets for both of them. They continued to speak incomprehensibly to each other as they donned the jackets. Outside, Zora paused to check the lock on the front door. She again spoke to Tom in Chinese. Leading the way, Felicity took fast but careful steps. When the three reached the bottom of Felicity’s front steps, Tom marched up. Felicity paused for a moment. Zora was no bigger than a preteen. The corpse was no sight for childlike eyes. “Zora, wait here,” she said. “You wait here.”

When Felicity had finished speaking, she looked up to discover that Tom had opened the vestibule door and was now inside. She hurried up the steps to find him bending over the body and pulling at the strips of duct tape. “Hold good,” he said. “Duct tape. WD-40. Duct tape. Good. Fix anything.”

Felicity said, “Well, they won’t fix death! He’s dead, isn’t he? I don’t think you should touch anything.”

“Dead,” Tom pronounced. “Cold. Stink in here.”

With no warning, he stood up, brushed past Felicity, opened the vestibule door, and shouted at the cat in Chinese. The animal had been huddled in a corner but responded to the shouting by making a dash for the open door and would have escaped but for Felicity’s prompt action. Bending down while taking care not to drop her tote bag, she grabbed the cat and, finding it astonishingly heavy, wrapped both arms around it as if it were a heavy bag of groceries that would split unless supported on the bottom. Knowing nothing about cats that dwelled outside the pages of mystery fiction, she did not expect the animal to wiggle, scratch, and try to bolt, and was thus unsurprised when it settled itself in her two-armed grasp.

“This cat is evidence,” Felicity said. “I’m taking it in the house right now.”

Eager to escape the stench, she carried the cat down the steps, along the pathway, and to the back door near the garage. In this house that felt like Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s, there seemed to be doors everywhere: the front door, the door to the garage, this back door near the garage, and doors to more balconies and decks than she’d bothered to count. The house had an alarm system so complicated that she never turned it on. Squeezing the unprotesting cat with her left arm, she used her right hand to fish in her tote bag, find her large ring of keys, and open the back door. Once inside, she lowered the cat to the floor at the bottom of a flight of tiled stairs that led up to the kitchen. What had possessed her to summon the Wangs? Zora had been useless, whereas Tom had tampered with evidence. What would her adoring public think of her when it was revealed that she’d panicked at the sight of a body?

The thought of her public’s reaction set her heart pounding. The cat! Her public, consisting as it did of cat lovers, would be concerned with one personage in this horrible drama, and that one personage would be the big gray cat. Where was it? Hiding, no doubt. Having followed it up to the gigantic kitchen, Felicity took a deep breath, opened a cabinet, removed a low crystal glass, and then opened another cabinet and extracted a bottle of single malt scotch. Even the liquor cabinet remained Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s, especially Uncle Bob’s, and was so well stocked that it would remain theirs for a long time, Bob Robertson having been in the liquor business. Whereas members of other ethnic groups objected to stereotypes about national origin, Scots went out of their way, or so Felicity thought, to promote the image of Scotland as a land of tartan-clad pipers, single-malt sippers, and dancers of the Highland fling. As Felicity understood the phenomenon, Scottish chauvinism was such that it never occurred to Scottish-Americans that anyone could possibly think ill of the most intelligent and literate citizenry ever to grace the earth, the noble people who would, to a person, still be the Lairds of the Highlands if it weren’t for the treachery of the scheming English. In any case, every one of Bob Robertson’s liquor stores had had a neon sign showing a tartan-clad piper, and even now, after the chain had been sold to the DiStephano family, the pipers continued to brighten the night skies of eastern Massachusetts with what Uncle Bob had seen as a depiction of Scottish pride.

The taste of Laphroaig, combined with the happy image of her worshipful readership and her liberation from the stench of the corpse, gave Felicity a new perspective on the whole situation. Viewed with what she realized was good Scottish practicality, the position was this: She, Felicity Pride, Mistress of the Cat Lover’s Mystery, had found at her doorstep the body of a little gray-clad man so mousey that he might almost have been something the cat dragged in. As luck would have it, with him was a handsome and undoubtedly photogenic gray cat that looked almost big enough to have done the dragging. Prominent in Felicity’s musings was the memory of a painful fit of jealousy and self-recrimination she had suffered five years earlier when it had been publicly revealed that another famous mystery writer had, in her teenage years, served a brief prison sentence for having conspired in the murder of a friend’s mother. What lack of foresight the young Felicity had shown! Ah, squandered youth! Determined to compensate for her adolescent failure to establish grounds for future free publicity, Felicity resolved to make the most of her present opportunity by slipping into the familiar skin of Prissy LaChatte.

Ambition triumphing over inclination, Felicity set the scene that her readers would expect, which is to say, a picture of greater concern for the live cat than for the dead man. Having received chastising letters about Prissy’s error in giving milk to Morris and Tabitha, Felicity opened a can of albacore tuna, of which she herself was fond, and after mashing the contents in what she hoped was an appetizing manner, placed a dish of the tuna and a small bowl of water on the kitchen floor. In her books, the scent of cat food and the sound of a bowl hitting the floor always sent Morris and Tabitha scurrying in search of dinner; indeed, they often hung around begging Prissy for goodies. Instead of dashing to the kitchen and howling in glee before scarfing up the tuna, the large gray cat failed to appear at all. Damn the thing! Where was it?

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