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 (9 page)

Although a concern for hygiene was, Felicity thought, an admirable trait in a hairdresser, it seemed to her that Naomi was nearly obsessed with germs. The overwhelmingly white salon could safely have served as an operating room. Naomi’s sanitary bent seemed to account for her hair, which was no more than two inches long and so devoid of color that Felicity suspected her of treating it with chlorine bleach. Fortunately, Naomi was only twenty-five and had excellent skin, so she carried off the startling effect. Felicity had never seen Naomi turn a client into a grotesque version of herself. Felicity considered her a gifted colorist and a clean one, too, of course. Naomi went through pair after pair of disposable latex gloves and always used freshly disinfected combs.

“This is no stray cat,” Felicity said indignantly. “She is very well cared for. And what could I possibly catch from her?”

“Something she got from the dead body! You said yourself she was right there with it. It gives me the willies to think about! You ought to be careful. That cat could be carrying some kind of awful disease. Was the body decomposing?”

Felicity’s corpses were fresh or embalmed. She’d lately come to favor skeletons. Halloween, skeletons, candy: Bones had a happy association with food. As the author of works of light entertainment, Felicity believed in honoring the needs of her readers, some of whom devoured Prissy LaChatte over dinner or snacks. Decomposition was disgusting and therefore did not occur.

“No,” Felicity said. “He had died recently. And there is nothing wrong with the cat. On the contrary, she is obviously healthy.”

“She could be incubating something.”

“You know,” said a woman seated in the next chair, “it’s not a bad idea to take the cat to a vet.”

Felicity’s eyes had been fixed on her own fascinating image in the mirror before her. With most of her hair wrapped in pieces of foil and standing out from her head, she looked to herself like a freakish lion. She reluctantly turned her eyes toward the woman who’d spoken, a client who was having what was known as a “one process.” Her long hair was thickly coated with black and foul-smelling stuff.

“If you don’t know where the cat came from,” the woman continued, “you might want to check for parasites. And have a vet give the cat a general going-over. What kind of cat is it?”

“Big,” said Felicity. “A big gray cat.”

“Longhaired?”

“No. Uh, normal.”

“A blue shorthair. You know, you might have a Russian Blue.”

Ashamed of the paucity of her knowledge of real cats, Felicity shrugged her shoulders. If the cat turned out to belong to some breed, she could always say that the information was vital to the murder investigation and that the police had ordered her to keep it to herself. She was now spared the need to respond. The colorist darkening the woman’s hair handed her a kitchen timer, and the woman left for another part of the salon.

For the remainder of her hair appointment, Felicity avoided any detailed discussion of the cat and silently vowed to remedy her ignorance. She had intended to go directly home, but when Naomi finished blow-drying her hair, she drove to an ATM and then to a large chain bookstore. Out of loyalty to Ronald, she ordinarily bought books exclusively at Newbright, but now felt the need for privacy, as if she were shopping for sex manuals or treatises on hemorrhoids. The chain bookstore was in a mall and had all the newness and brightness that Newbright lacked, as well as six or eight times the floor space of Ronald’s shop, and a coffee bar, too. Surveying the employees and customers, Felicity saw no familiar faces. After only a short search, she found the pet books, of which there were many more than she had expected. Suppressing the urge to hunt down the manager to suggest the wisdom of shelving some of her cat mysteries with the nonfiction cat books, she indiscriminately gathered a tall stack of works on cats and cat care, hurried to a register, paid using the anonymous cash from the ATM, and escaped with only a hint of disappointment that no one had asked, “Aren’t you Felicity Pride?”

Driving home, she reminded herself that anonymity had, after all, been her goal, a goal achieved in part because her publisher always put her photograph inside the back flap of her books instead of placing it prominently on the back of the dust jacket. Newly possessed of the splendidly photogenic cat, Felicity would have to get an author-with-feline-muse photo that would simply demand to occupy the entire back cover of the next Prissy LaChatte. The mythical nature of her very own Morris’s existence had its conveniences, but, by virtue of nonexistence, Morris had been unable to pose before the photographer’s lens. And the real cat was far less trouble than she had imagined. In her haste to keep her appointment with Naomi, she had rushed out of the house without even bothering to open the door of the room it occupied. Furthermore, once she, Felicity Pride, had truly become an expert on all things feline, the gray cat really might enable her to solve the murder. Effortless promotion would follow. Felicity Pride and her crime-solving companion would be written up in the Boston papers, the stories would be picked by the wire services, and the term
mass market
as applied to paperback editions of the Prissy LaChatte series would become accurately descriptive of the hundreds of thousands of copies loaded into mammoth vans and transported to bookstores and mall department stores throughout the United States. Not to mention supermarkets! Throughout the country, supermarkets, the true mass outlet, would dump their copies of Isabelle Hotchkiss’s silly mysteries and replace them with Felicity Pride’s light entertainments.

Preoccupied though she was with visions of fame, Felicity managed to drive Aunt Thelma’s Honda through the narrow streets of genteel Norwood Hill and into Newton Park, where there was no sign of the police and, as usual, no sign of anyone else, either. Especially notable for their absence were vans emblazoned with the names and logos of local television stations. But maybe the police and the media politely called first instead of just dropping in? Damn the taboo on interviews!

Felicity entered the house through the back door. When Prissy LaChatte got home, Morris and Tabitha leaped from the windowsill where they had been watching for their beloved owner, to whom they sometimes had important crime-busting messages to communicate. Having yowled in joy and transmitted their messages, they meowed for food and dove into the bowls that Prissy filled. Locked in an unused bedroom, the blue-gray cat could not emulate the delightful behavior of Prissy’s cats. Instead of letting the cat loose or even saying hello to her, Felicity checked her answering machine, found no messages, made herself a tuna sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk, and settled down at the kitchen table with her lunch and her new cat books.

She began by looking up the Russian Blue. The photo illustrating the breed showed a cat not entirely unlike the big gray cat, but according to the text, Russian Blues had large, pointy ears and bright green eyes. Damn! But there were more alley cats than purebreds, weren’t there? Therefore, the majority of her readers probably owned . . . What
was
the correct, inoffensive term? Another book supplied three possibilities:
domestic, mixed-breed,
and
nonpedigreed
. Considering herself to be a quick study, Felicity switched to a book about cat care that emphasized the need for physical, mental, and social stimulation. Illustrations showed carpeted cat trees, repulsively realistic plush mice, and feather-and-bell teasers like the one Ronald had used. Having mastered the topic of stimulation, Felicity picked up another book and had only begun to read about the sanitary needs of cats when she remembered her complaint to Ronald about the inadequate size of the disposable litter box he’d brought.

Abandoning her course of study, she ran upstairs and into the cat’s room, where she found that the small box had indeed been used. Yuck! Morris and Tabitha never made such a stench! The cat herself was huddled under the bed, where, far from communicating the solution to the murder of her defunct human companion, she was communicating nothing except her wish to be left alone. Well, physical, mental, and social stimulation would shape her up! Then, too, there was the urgent need for a large litter box and a fresh supply of litter.

An hour later, Felicity was back home after a trip to a large pet-supply store. In uncharacteristic fashion, she had spent more money than she’d have believed possible on the props required to present herself to her public as the very model of the modern cat owner: a gigantic gold litter box with a hood, a bag of litter, a molded plastic cat carrier with a quilted pad, a velvety cat bed, premium dry and canned food, two brushes, feline cologne, nail scissors, and a dozen toys that ranged from colorful bits of artificial prey to a battery-operated device that whirled feathery lures enticingly through the air. She comforted herself with the reflection that these ghastly expenses were tax deductible.

Although the representatives of the media were still infuriatingly absent, she was gratified to find three messages on her answering machine, one from Dave Valentine and two from members of the local mystery writers’ community, Sonya Bogosian and Janice Mattingly. Valentine’s message was nothing more than a request to return his call. Sonya Bogosian was the president of the New England branch of Witness for the Publication, an organization of mystery writers and fans that met at Newbright Books. Felicity served on the board. Sonya’s message was not, however, about board business. Ronald, she said, had told her about Felicity’s misadventure, and she wanted to touch base before the Witness meeting tonight. Until recently, Janice Mattingly had been a “wannabe,” an unpublished writer with hopes, but her first mystery had been accepted. She edited the local Witness newsletter, saw to the food and drink offered at meetings, and otherwise made herself useful. She, too, said that Ronald had told her what had happened. She hoped that Felicity’s creativity and concentration weren’t affected by the terrible experience. Would Felicity please call her? Felicity intended to return Sonya’s call but not Janice’s. Eager to hear that the baffled police were finally seeking her advice, she called Dave Valentine back immediately.

“Miss Pride,” he said, “thank you for getting back to me. I just wanted to let you know that we’re all done. You can use your front door again.”

Struggling to keep the disappointment out of her voice, Felicity said, “Who was the man? Who killed him? Why was he left here?”
And how soon am I going to be able to milk this murder for its full promotional value?

“We don’t know just yet.”

Felicity cursed herself for having failed to check the pockets of the gray suit. “You don’t even know his name?” Should Prissy LaChatte ever find a corpse at
her
door, she’d be braver than her creator had been.

“Not yet.”

“He didn’t have a wallet? Did his shirt have a laundry mark?” A tailor-made suit with a name stitched in was too much to hope for, wasn’t it? Did American tailors even do that?

“So far, we don’t know anything.”

“The people who were here this morning, searching the yards. Did they find any . . . evidence?”
Clues
were strictly for Nancy Drew and Miss Marple, weren’t they? Even Prissy LaChatte avoided them in favor of evidence.

Without giving a direct answer, Valentine said, “The body was probably transported there in a vehicle.”

“And the cat?”

“The cat, too. Probably.”

“Was he murdered in my vestibule?”

“Sorry if that’s been worrying you. No. No, he wasn’t.”

“That’s not what’s worrying me! What’s worrying me is that a murder victim was left at my front door! What’s worrying me is
me!
So, where do we go from here?”

Felicity’s literary experience led her to feel certain that Valentine would insist that the murder was a police matter in which amateurs should remain uninvolved. Ignoring the
we,
he said, “Miss Pride, in real life, most homicides have simple solutions.”

“Then why aren’t they all solved?”

“Sorry, Miss Pride, but I’ve got run. Like I said, it’s okay to use your front door now.”

Infuriated, Felicity managed a loud but anticlimactic response: “I will! I definitely will!”

The ban on discussing the murder had convinced Felicity that as publicists, the police were useless. It now seemed to her that they were equally useless as homicide investigators.

TWELVE

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