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“Can you believe that they tried to cut us out of this investigation?” she lamented. “By the time we got there the show was over.”

“Nothing you could do?” I asked.

“Oh, there was plenty we could do, and did. Brutus and I talked to any pet in the vicinity we could find, but of course they all had exactly nothing to contribute.”

“We did talk to one dog,” said Brutus, “who claimed to have heard the Wimmers fight so loud he could hear it all the way to the backyard of his own home. Nice doggie, too. His name is Earl. Very perceptive.”

“Yeah, Earl was most helpful,” Harriet admitted, “though he was of the opinion that Dino Wimmer must have done this to himself. Earl thought he was looking a little ragged lately when he arrived home from work. Careworn, you know. Looking very much like death warmed over. Especially after that big fight he and Rose had last week.”

“That’s right,” Gran chimed in, having listened in on our conversation. “Father and daughter engaged in some kind of screaming match, after Rose invited her boyfriend round to meet her parents. Suffice it to say things did not go well.”

“The boyfriend told me the same thing,” said Odelia.

“So we’re still leaning toward the suicide theory?” asked Chase.

“A man like Dino Wimmer would never take his own life,” Scarlett now posited. “He wouldn’t!” she added when Gran and Odelia and Chase all looked at her. “The man had it all: a lovely wife, a great kid, a successful business, a nice house in a great neighborhood… Okay, so he quarreled with his teenage daughter over her choice of boyfriend. What father doesn’t? And so maybe he was having some issues with an unhappy investor he refused to bail out. So far I see absolutely no reason for the man to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills and go gentle into that good night, if you ask me.”

“So we can’t prove he killed himself, for lack of a trigger incident,” said Odelia, summing things up succinctly, “and we can’t prove that someone killed him either. So where does that leave us?”

“With plenty more sleuthing to do,” said Gran. “Which is exactly what we’ll do—tomorrow.” She glanced at the clock over the sink. “Now it’s time for more important things.”

“Dinner?” Chase hazarded a guess.

“Jeopardy,” she snapped.

Chapter 17

That night cat choir was a languid affair. Usually when we’re in the throes of a murder investigation I like to take the opportunity to ask around and see if none of my cat choir colleagues might be able to make a significant contribution to the case. Now, though, since we didn’t have much of a case yet, it was a little harder.

“I really like this concept of doing good deeds, Dooley,” said Shanille, cat choir’s conductor and Father Reilly’s cat. “You have to tell me more about it.”

“Well, it’s very simple,” said Dooley. “You have to be really attentive all the time, and then when you see an opportunity, you strike.”

“I heard you set the Seabreeze Center on fire today?” said Brutus with a slight smirk. “Is that what you call striking? Cause if it is, you did good.”

“I didn’t set the Seabreeze Center on fire,” said Dooley, a little indignantly. “I just tripped the fire alarm.”

“You mean there was a fire at the Seabreeze Center?” asked Shanille. “And you tripped the fire alarm? Well done, Dooley. That’s the kind of decisive action we need more cats to adopt. If more cats were like you—”

“There was no fire,” said Dooley, now looking a little uncomfortable.

Shanille frowned.“No fire? But then why did you trip the alarm?”

“I saw a girl looking at the alarm and she couldn’t reach it and so I decided to give her a paw. She was very happy. She clapped her hands and laughed. It was wonderful.”

“And then all hell broke loose,” I murmured.

“Well, your heart was in the right place,” said Shanille. “That’s the main thing.”

“The main thing is that now we’re all cats non gratae at the Seabreeze Center,” I said. “Which means we’ll never be able to go and see a movie or concert there ever again.”

“Who wants to go and see a movie at the Seabreeze Center?” said Harriet. “Or a concert? I certainly don’t. It’s too dark and there are way too many people willing to trample all over your tail or step on your paws and those places always smell funny.”

“Besides, I don’t think pets are allowed in those kinds of places anyway,” said Brutus, “and I have made it a cardinal rule never to set paw inside a place where pets are not allowed.”

“You can’t set paw in a place where pets are not allowed,” I pointed out to him. “That’s the whole point.”

“I know!” he said. “That’s why I refuse to set paw in those places.”

“But you can’t set paw in there—it’s not allowed.”

“Which isexactly why I don’t want to go there, Maxie, baby,” said Brutus, moving closer to me and staring me down.

Brutus is a dear friend and a much-beloved housemate, but if he has one flaw in his character it is that he has a tendency to let his inner bully break through the thin veneer of civility he has acquired over the years. So I wisely decided not to press the issue.