Betrayers(6)

“Well, all right. But I do wonder, dear. I really do.”

“About the poison incident,” I said. “That was the most recent happening, two nights ago?”

“Poor Spike almost died,” Mrs. Abbott said. “If Helen and Leonard hadn’t rushed him to the vet, he would have.”

“Arsenic,” Helen Alvarez said. “That’s what the vet said it was. Arsenic in Spike’s food bowl.”

“Which is kept inside or outside the house?”

“Oh, inside,” Mrs. Abbott said. “On the back porch. Spike isn’t allowed outside. Not the way people drive their cars nowadays.”

“So whoever put the poison in the cat’s bowl had to get inside the house to do it.”

“Breaking and entering,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “That’s a felony, not a misdemeanor. I looked it up.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Not to mention the final straw. That’s when I decided it was time to hire an investigator. The police weren’t doing a thing, not a thing.”

She’d told me all that before. I nodded patiently and asked, “Were there any signs of forced entry?”

“Not that Leonard and I could find.”

Mrs. Abbott said abruptly, “Oh, there he is now. He must have heard us talking about him. He’s very sensitive that way.”

I looked where she was looking, off to one side and behind where I was sitting. There was nobody there. I almost said, You don’t mean your dead husband’s ghost, but changed it at the last second to, “Who?”

“Spike,” she said. “Spike, dear, come and meet the nice man Helen brought to help us.”

The cat that came sauntering around the sofa was a rotund and middle-aged orange tabby, with wicked amber eyes and a great swaying underbelly that brushed the carpet as he moved. He plunked himself down five feet from where I was sitting, paying no attention to any of us, and began to lick his shoulder. For a cat that had been sick as a dog two days ago, he looked pretty fit.

“Mrs. Abbott,” I said, “who has a key to this house?”

She blinked at me behind her granny glasses. “Key?”

“Besides you and Mrs. Alvarez, I mean.”

“Why, Charley has one, of course.”

“Any other member of your family?”

“Charley is my only living relative.”

“Is there anyone else who—uff!”

An orange blur had come flying through the air and a pair of meaty forepaws nearly destroyed what was left of my manly pride. The pain made me writhe a little, but the movement didn’t dislodge Spike; he had all four claws anchored to various portions of my lap. I thought an evil thought involving retribution, but it died when he commenced a noisy purring. Like a fool I put forth a tentative hand and petted him. He tolerated that for all of five seconds. Then he bit me on the soft webbing between my thumb and forefinger, jumped down, and streaked wildly out of the room.

“He likes you,” Mrs. Abbott said, smiling.

I looked at her.

“Oh, he does,” she said. “It’s just his way with strangers. When Spike nips you, it’s a sign of affection.”

I looked down at my hand.

The sign of affection was bleeding.



One of those cases, all right. A bigger cutie, in fact, than I’d anticipated after Helen Alvarez started laying it out for me in my office. I’d tried to avoid taking it on, but Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez had been out on other business and Tamara was sympathetic to Mrs. Alvarez, so I had no backup. No backbone, either, when it comes to this kind of case. How do you turn down a determined seventy-year-old widow with a problem neither the police nor most other private agencies will touch?

Mrs. Alvarez was not someone who listened to “no” when she wanted to hear “yes.” She pleaded; she cajoled; she gave me the kind of sad, anxious, worried, reproving looks elderly women cultivate to an art form—the kind calculated to make you feel heartless and ashamed of yourself and to melt your resistance faster than fire melts wax.

I hung in there for a while, waffling, but Tamara put an end to my resistance. She’d established, with my blessings, an agency policy of taking on pro bono cases for individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford our fees—a worthwhile public service designed mainly for the benefit of ethnic minorities. Helen Alvarez was not really a minority, being an Angla married to a deceased Latino, and not exactly indigent, but that didn’t make any difference to Tamara. She said we’d take the case, in a no-nonsense voice, and that took care of that. She’d been in a grumpy, distant mood for the past couple of weeks, snapping and growling when something went wrong or she didn’t get her way, and arguing with her when she was like that was useless. The Good Tamara was on vacation. The Bad Tamara who sometimes replaced her was a pain in the ass.