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 (7 page)

Felicity gestured to one of the leather armchairs. “Have a seat.” Dave Valentine’s presence made her absurdly aware of the big couch, which, she reminded herself, didn’t even convert into a bed. Avoiding it, she took the other chair, but nonetheless felt aware of the man, as if she were seated a few yards from some powerful but safe animal: a tame lion. In leonine fashion, this animal wore no rings. In particular, she observed that the third finger of his left hand was bare.

Instead of immediately asking her about the body and the cat, Valentine nodded in the direction of the shelves above the desk. “You’re the writer,” he said. “
The
Felicity Pride.”

As a means to establish rapport with the witness, referring to her books was dandy, she thought, far better than making small talk about the rain and fog.

“Yes,” she replied modestly, “I write about cats.”

“I know. My wife used to read your books.”

But she stopped?
Felicity longed to ask.
She developed an intense dislike for Prissy? Found a series she preferred? Developed early-onset Alzheimer’s and became unable to follow a story line? Got religion and quit reading anything except the Bible? She got tired of going to the Highland Games and watching you toss the caber, so she left you for . . .

Occupied with her unspoken questions, Felicity said nothing.

“I need to ask you a few things,” Valentine said. “I take it you’d gone out.”

Valentine, she thought, was doing well: Interviewers were urged to avoid leading the witness. “I was at a book signing. At Newbright Books. It’s on the Newton-Brighton line. I left here at about five-thirty. And I got home at . . . eight? Somewhere around eight. I put my car in the garage, and when I got to my vestibule, there were the man and the cat. I knew he was dead. Or I thought so. And I couldn’t stay there, obviously, so I went outside and called nine-one-one. On my cell phone. The call got cut off, and I . . . I guess I started to panic. I was worried that he might be alive, and I wasn’t doing anything. So I went next door and got the Wangs. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. Mr. Wang went charging into the vestibule, and he touched things, he tampered with evidence, and he shouted at the cat. It nearly ran away. So I picked up the cat and brought it in. It’s very traumatized. It won’t eat. It’s hiding somewhere.”

“Cats do that,” Dave Valentine said. “The man. Did you recognize him?”

“No. I’ve never seen him before.” Seizing the opportunity to regain control of a plot that was escaping her, she said, “Or the cat. It’s a beautiful cat. A very large gray cat. Someone left that cat for me, you know.”

“Could be a coincidence.”

“And there’s the vestibule, too. There’s a mystery called
The Body in the Vestibule
. By Katherine Hall Page.”

Valentine shrugged. “Does anyone else live here?”

“No.”

“Big house.”

“I inherited it. I’ve only been here a few months. It belonged to my uncle and aunt. They were killed by a drunk driver. Last July, they were on their way to the airport, and they were killed by a drunk driver.”

“Any children?”

“Me? No.”

“Your uncle and aunt.”

“No.” In Felicity’s opinion, Uncle Bob had been too tightfisted to produce offspring he’d have had to support, but she didn’t say so. According to Felicity’s mother, he’d been stingy with Thelma, and it was certainly true that he and Thelma had given miserly Christmas and birthday presents: cheesy sweatshirts, ten-dollar checks.

“The outer door. When you left the house, was it locked or unlocked?”

“Unlocked. If I lock it, packages get left outside. So I leave it unlocked for UPS and the post office and so on. The inner door was locked. So were all the other doors and windows. I’m careful about that. But the alarm system was off.”

“So, what did you do when you got home? Walk me through it. Start with leaving the bookstore.”

“I got in my car and drove home.”

“Did you give anyone a ride? Stop anywhere?”

“No. I just drove home and put my car in the garage. I didn’t get out of the car first. I used the garage door opener. Then I went to the front door.”

“The front.”

“I always use the front door unless I have packages to carry in.”

“Did you notice anyone around? Any cars? Anyone out for a walk? Anything?”

“No. I mean, there wasn’t anyone, and I didn’t see any cars anywhere near here. I would’ve noticed.”

“Any strangers around earlier today? Or this week? Anything unusual?”

“No. There’s hardly ever anyone around here except lawn services. Oil trucks. People repairing things. Some of the people who live here have second or third homes and practically don’t live here, and the others work all the time. You hardly ever see anyone.”

“Sounds lonely,” he said.

“I’m a writer. I need time alone.”

“You might want to get someone to stay with you tonight. These things sometimes have a bigger impact than you expect. Anyone you could go and stay with? Friends? Relatives?”

“I couldn’t leave the cat here all alone.”

“Oh, we’ll take it off your hands.”

“No! No, it needs to stay here. He does. He was left for
me
. I can’t abandon him. He’s had a terrible time. He needs to be with someone who understands cats. Please! He needs to stay with me. I’ll be fine. I’ll set the alarm.”

To Felicity’s surprise, Dave Valentine didn’t fight for possession of the cat. He did, however, return to the matter of her staying alone. Pressed, she admitted that she did have a friend she could call. When Valentine had taken down her phone number, the names of her late uncle and aunt, and a few other pieces of information, and when he had warned her that the police would be in her vestibule and yard for some time yet, he insisted that she call the friend she’d mentioned.

“A couple of other things,” he said. “You’re going to need to avoid talking about any of this. Don’t discuss the details with your neighbors. Or the media. You need to avoid any contact with the media. If they call you, just tell them you’ve been asked not to talk about it.”

Felicity felt the blood rush up her throat to her face, as if Dave Valentine had read her thoughts and decided to ruin her grand plans.

Before she had the chance to say anything, he thanked her for talking with him and handed her his card. “I’ll be in touch,” he added. “And if you think of anything else, call me. Anything. If it’s something small, some little detail, call me anyway. And get that friend of yours over here.”

With some relief, Felicity decided not to trail after the detective to observe the real investigation of an authentic crime scene. Instead, as soon as she’d ushered him out the back door, she called Ronald. She had no intention of asking Ronald to spend the night, but Ronald would certainly know what to do about the cat.

NINE

In the British
mysteries that Felicity read at bedtime, the characters who nurtured and soothed the unfortunate finders of dead bodies fell into two categories, the first being loud, jolly women with large families and the second, blatant eccentrics. The eccentrics sometimes turned out to be murderers, as did the apparently traumatized body finders. In Felicity’s experience, the fat, jolly women never killed anyone, probably because they were too busy taking care of their large families to have time to perpetrate so demanding a crime as murder.

Although Ronald clearly belonged in the category of eccentrics, Felicity had little doubt of his innocence in the slaying of the gray man. The vestibule had been empty when Felicity left for Newbright Books. Even if Ronald had already stashed the corpse in the trunk of his car, there hadn’t been time for him to leave his shop, drive to Newton Park, deposit the body in the vestibule, and drive back. Or had there? Could he have done it while Felicity was on her way to the signing? While she was in the shop? In any case, in Felicity’s view, Ronald lacked sufficient interest in his fellow human beings to go to the bother of killing one. Also, he doted on cats and would have been far more likely to claim and keep the beautiful gray animal than to abandon it anywhere, never mind to incarcerate it in Felicity’s vestibule with the remains of its presumed owner.

Felicity’s reflections on Ronald’s eccentricity made her think of Dave Valentine’s question about strangers she might have noticed in her neighborhood. In the eyes of the police, Ronald would be a suspicious-looking character. His ancient gray Volvo sedan would be out of place in Newton Park, as would Ronald himself, with his straggly ponytail, his handmade leather sandals worn over loudly patterned fleece socks, and, most of all, his odd demeanor. Even when engaged in some wholesome and blameless activity such as restocking the shelves in his store or eating one of his natural-foods lunches, he somehow managed to look as if he were lurking. Somewhat belatedly, Felicity put on her trench coat and went out the back door to try to intercept Ronald before he aroused the attention of the police. By the time she reached the street, however, Ronald was speaking to Dave Valentine.

“. . . a friend of Felicity’s,” Ronald was saying as if passing along a state secret to an enemy agent. “She called me.”

Rather than undertake the impossible task of explaining Ronald, Felicity greeted him in a fashion meant to confirm his statements. “Ronald, you’re here! Thank God!”

“Thank me,” he said with a glance upward at the fog obscuring the view of the heavens.

In an effort to smooth over her friend’s dedication to voicing his atheism, she said, “Ronald has a dry sense of humor.” She made quick introductions: “Ronald Gershwin. Dave Valentine.” The detective was looking at the cat carrier and the bags suspended from Ronald’s hands. A devoted environmentalist, Ronald never allowed shops to place his purchases in paper or plastic bags, but provided string bags of the type popular in Europe before the introduction of the plastic bags to which Ronald objected and unpopular in the United States except among socially out-of-it intellectuals who hadn’t been abroad for decades. Felicity considered telling the detective that Ronald had gone to Harvard and thus couldn’t be expected to behave like a normal human being.

“Ronald, you’ve brought cat food. Thank you.” The weird fishnet bags had the advantage of making their contents plainly visible. “And cat litter.”

“I knew you’d never think of it.”

“Of course I would.” The fictional Morris and Tabitha managed their bodily functions in complete privacy, which is to say, never on the pages of Felicity’s books. The litter needs of a real cat hadn’t occurred to her. “But for obvious reasons, I haven’t exactly had a chance to run errands. We’d better go inside. The poor cat may be in desperate need.”

Satisfied to have ended Ronald’s contact with police on the ordinary, practical note of feline excretion, Felicity hustled Ronald indoors to the kitchen, where he unpacked cat supplies and spread them on the table. Without consulting Ronald, Felicity opened a bottle of a wine called Mad Fish. Although Bob Robertson had been a drinker of single malt scotch and the occasional beer, the basement of the house had a small, cool room that served as a wine cellar. Felicity, who knew nothing about wine, had originally selected Mad Fish when she’d invited Ronald for a housewarming dinner. Her choice had been based less on his liking for red wine than on her sense that Ronald might accurately be described as something of a mad fish himself. The wine had been a success, and she’d taken to serving it whenever he visited. By the time she had uncorked the bottle and poured two glasses of wine, Ronald had placed a disposable cardboard cat box on the floor, added litter, and set out two dishes of cat food. One dish contained dry food; the other, wet pink glop that smelled remarkably like the salmon odor left by Felicity’s own dinner.

“Ronald, I’m not having a litter box in the kitchen,” Felicity said. “It’s unsanitary. Besides, you haven’t seen this cat. He’s huge. He’s twice the size of that little box.”

“Once he knows there’s litter here, you can move the box. He won’t like it near his food, anyway.”

“As if my opinion didn’t matter! Ronald, what a horrible ingrate I am. I’m sorry. I’m in shock. Thank you for coming over. Sit down.” She took a seat at the table. Ronald sat opposite her. Although he was examining a variety of cat toys he’d left there instead of paying attention to her distress, she said, “Ronald, someone did this to me! Why would anyone do that? Who hates me so much?”

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