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 (5 page)

“Here, kitty!” Felicity crooned. “Nice kitty! Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!”

Sirens finally sounded. Time was short if the drama was to open as Felicity had just scripted it. She ran from room to room—there were twenty-two—and eventually found the cat under a guest room bed. Flattening herself on the floor, she cooed in Prissy LaChatte fashion, “Nice kitty! Come on, kitty!”

Instead of emerging to “communicate” the solution to the murder, the cat hunched itself yet more tightly into a big gray ball of fur.

Undaunted, Felicity snatched one of the pillows off the bed, ran to the kitchen, and sacrificed her lovely clean pillow by putting it on the floor next to the dishes of tuna and water, thus creating as perfect a picture of the throughly pampered cat as she could achieve in the absence of the cat itself. Whether the damned cat liked it or not, it was going to assist Felicity in solving the murder that beneficent literary luck had deposited on her doorstep.

FIVE

Ears flattened, eyes
simultaneously narrowed and closed, Edith huddles under the bed. Her expression is sour, and her heart rate is elevated; neither emotionally nor physiologically has she recovered from the shouting of the dangerous male. At first, the female, too, frightened Edith. The lifting-up-in-the-air females also dressed formally and exuded peculiar and unnatural odors. This female had, however, redeemed herself by squeezing Edith in a reassuring manner.

Still, the safe course is to remain under the bed. Edith has never before taken refuge under this particular bed, but recognizes beds as such and appreciates the cleanliness and warmth of her present situation. Also, although apprehension triumphs over hunger, she smells tuna in the air.

SIX

When pressed about
the precise location of Newton Park Estates, Felicity and her neighbors described the area as “all but in Newton.” It now seemed to Felicity that if her house truly were in Newton, cruisers and ambulances would have arrived a long time ago. Still, the scene she’d set in her kitchen proclaimed her as the caring and presumably noble rescuer of the poor, traumatized cat, and she was ready to face the public as represented by the Boston police and any emergency personnel who might show up. With luck, these representatives would include members of her very own public, which is to say, avid followers of the somewhat unadventurous adventures of Prissy LaChatte. Should anyone ask why the cat wasn’t actually in view, Felicity had a plausible explanation ready: The poor animal, which had clung to her in its sorrow and terror, had, alas, been frightened away by the wails of the sirens. Cats were sensitive beings, she intended to explain. This one would return to her loving arms once peace was restored.

Having thus outlined the promotional aspects of her plan, Felicity was free to concentrate on fulfilling a secondary goal, which was the gathering of material for her next book. Mindful of certain critics’ unkind remarks about the fanciful nature of her “crime” novels, she now resolved to take careful note of police procedure at the scene of a real crime. Eager to dress for her part, she put on a black trench coat and, stashing her keys in one of its pockets, set forth to present herself in a Prissy-like way while collecting useful details about official vehicles, law enforcement jargon, and other matters that she had often found herself glossing over or simply inventing.

To Felicity’s satisfaction, three official vehicles drove up: a cruiser, an emergency medical van the size of a large delivery truck, and a sort of medical Jeep, as Felicity thought of it, a white sport-utility vehicle reminiscent of her neighbors’ BMW and Lexus SUVs, their Lincoln Navigators, and, indeed, the late Uncle Bob’s defunct Cadillac Escalade, but smaller than the recreational models and undoubtedly lacking such amenities as real leather upholstery and heated seats. In Felicity’s books, political correctness dictated that there be at least one woman and one person of color among the officials at such a scene. Furthermore, the Fat Is Beautiful movement or whatever it called itself demanded that any character who weighed more than deemed ideal in the medical height-weight charts be a good guy; obese villains drew angry letters from readers, and, to play it safe, Felicity kept all of her characters lean or described them as appealingly heavyset or attractively plump rather than as overweight or just plain fat. To Felicity’s annoyance, the police and EMTs who’d arrived were in blatant violation of her literary rules. The two police officers were male, the only people of color in sight were the Wangs, and the EMT who stood just outside her vestibule was a man who weighed more than she could begin to guess. There were apparently two or three other EMTs in the vestibule. She hoped that they were especially dark-skinned African-American women of inoffensively medium weight or, if heavy, gorgeous, charming, and medically heroic.

The main source of Felicity’s dissatisfaction with the reality of her very own crime scene was, however, the absence of anyone of obvious importance. Ideally, there’d be a police chief remarkably like the one who confided his findings to Prissy LaChatte and solicited her assistance in solving cases that baffled him. Too bad about the “all but in Newton.” The City of Newton just might be in the habit of dispatching its police chief to murder scenes, but Boston assuredly was not. Felicity’s knowledge of police hierarchies beneath the level of chief was vague. What’s more, her great and happy familiarity with British mysteries meant that she understood the titles and responsibilities of detective chief inspectors, superintendents, constables, and such far better than she understood anything about the ranks within American forces. Still, she knew a pooh-bah when she saw one, and there was, alas, none in view.

Prominently in sight and sound were a uniformed police officer of some sort and Felicity’s trash-fussy Russian neighbor, Mr. Trotsky, who was shouting at the officer even more angrily than he’d ever shouted at Felicity about allowing her recycling bin to trespass on what was, in fact, condo association property. The object of Mr. Trotsky’s rage was the police cruiser, which had two of its wheels on his lawn. Its front doors were open, its lights were flashing, and its siren was still screaming.

Undeterred, Mr. Trotsky was shaking a fist at the officer—constable? sergeant?—and yelling in accented but fluent English, “You know what my lawn service costs me? You wanna take a guess?” Answering his own question rather anticlimactically, he finished, “Plenty, that’s what.”

Mr. Trotsky looked nothing like the Trotsky of revolution and assassination. Rather, he bore what Felicity found to be an alarming resemblance to Joseph Stalin. He had the same heavy features, the same thick, dark hair combed straight back from his face, and the same oversized moustache. Felicity was certain that he cultivated the likeness as a way to intimidate people.

The policeman was apparently unintimidated. At any rate, he didn’t move the cruiser.

“This is private property!” Mr. Trotsky hollered. “It’s not a public street! That car is on my property, and it’s compacting the soil. The grass is never going to recover.”

Approaching the men and butting in, Felicity said loudly, “Then it doesn’t matter whether it’s moved, does it? If it’s too late now?”

Turning to the policeman, she smiled, pointed at the cruiser, and held her hands over her ears. Having mimed her meaning, she shrieked, “Is the noise necessary? There was a darling cat left with the man in my vestibule, and the poor thing is very frightened. The siren isn’t helping!” Back-tracking, she bellowed, “I’m Felicity Pride. I’m the one who called.”

The policeman nodded to Felicity and complied with her request by getting in the cruiser and silencing the siren. In one of her books, he’d have been astonishingly young or had an embarrassingly large nose or a marked stutter. In fact, he had to be thirty-five or forty. Worse, he was maddeningly ordinary, with no oddity of feature, speech, or manner to distinguish him from other characters.

“We’ll want to talk to you, ma’am,” he said.

“Of course you will,” Felicity said. “And the cat is evidence. It . . . he, the cat, the very beautiful and sweet cat—strikingly beautiful and very lovable, irresistible—was in my vestibule with the man. The outer door was closed. The man and the cat were obviously left at the same time by the same person.” After allowing a few seconds to pass, she added dramatically, “At
my
doorstep.”

The pause failed to achieve its intended result: The policeman did not ask about the significance of
Felicity’s
doorstep. Furthermore, Mr. Trotsky gave him little time to mull over the implications of her remark. Instead, he demanded, “You gonna move the car now?”

“This is a crime scene,” the officer replied with an air of authority and dignity that surprised Felicity, whose low-ranking law enforcement characters tended toward the buffoonish.

As Mr. Trotsky was composing his face in an apparent attempt to increase his already hideous resemblance to Stalin, a silver sport-utility vehicle approached from the Norwood Hill end of the street and pulled up in back of the cruiser. The driver rolled down her window, and Felicity recognized a woman named Brooke whom she’d met at condo association meetings. Brooke, like her vehicle, was large, showy, and silvery. “What’s going on here?” she called out.

In the cozy mysteries Felicity devoured, neighbors reliably nurtured the friends and relatives of the victim by brewing pots of tea, a beverage that they oversweetened and dispensed in warm kitchens. Sometimes they even insisted that the traumatized survivors couldn’t possibly stay alone, but must move into guest bedrooms and be treated by sympathetic doctors who made house calls and dispensed sedatives or sleeping pills. Felicity was not, of course, a friend or relative of the little gray man. The only drink she wanted was a second shot of Laphroaig, she wanted to sleep in her own king-size bed between Aunt Thelma’s luxurious sheets, and she had no desire to see a doctor. She was curious about the medications doled out in the English mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and would probably have been happy to sample them—what on earth was in a
cachet blanc
? and how had aspirin lost the power to induce deep sleep?—but didn’t want contemporary prescription drugs, all of which had modern and thus uninspiring names. Still, she longed to be offered any of the familiar comforts.

Replying to Brooke, Felicity announced, “Murder! Someone has left a dead man and a cat in my vestibule!”

“A dead cat?”

“No, the cat is alive. The man is dead.”

“Who is he?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen him before. A little man in a gray suit. I’ve taken the cat in and given him some tuna. And water. And I’ve made a little bed for him. He’s very frightened. Someone must have known that I, of all people, would make sure that he was all right.”

Mr. Trotsky interrupted. “What about the no-pet clause? You’re not allowed—”

“That means dogs,” Brooke informed him.

“No
pets,
” he replied.

“Well, I didn’t deliberately go out and get a pet,” Felicity informed Mr. Trotsky. “It was left at my door. He. He was left at my door. And he’s evidence in a murder. He’s a very important cat. He probably holds the key to solving the crime.” A Very Important Cat. Useful in her next book, perhaps? V.I.C.

“Probably has worms,” Mr. Trotsky said. “Diseases. Did it scratch you?”

“No. He’s very friendly. And sweet. Besides, he took to me right away.”

“They always know who hates them,” Brooke said. “Cats do. They have a sixth sense about it.”

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