Cat In A Leopard Spot

“School, or grown?”

She shrugs again. “We traveled so much. All over the world. Didn’t see or hear much of them. Isn’t that how children should be, not seen and not heard?”

“Seen and not heard.”

“Oh. Well, Cyrus’s were ‘not’ both. When we married—”

“Which was?”

“Six years ago, here in Vegas. At the Goliath chapel. A very nice place. I recommend it.”

“I’ll tell all my friends.”

“I’m sorry. I still can’t grasp it. Cyrus. The leopard. How, when…”

“The medical examiner will do his best to tell us when. And how. I understand the maid found the body. You only arrived here afterward.”

“After the first police arrived, yes. I was at our suite in town.”

“Did you and your husband often stay in different residences?”

Those razor-sharp shoulder bones shrugged again. Molina had the irritating impression she was showing off.

“Cyrus loved to gamble as much as he loved to hunt,” the widow said. “So did I. But we didn’t pursue both hobbies at the same time. They’re a bit of the same thing, aren’t they? People like to see the heads. He probably had clients to entertain out here.”

“And a misplaced leopard,” Molina said.

The woman stares at the big cat, now pacing in the small cage. It stops to stare back.

Molina has the oddest feeling that it knows her, it knows Leonora Van Burkleo.

“I don’t know why or how the big cat got here. Cyrus admired them. He liked the fact that the big wild cats were so much more dangerous than any wild dog. The dog was a degenerate breed, he used to say. Only the domestic cat could claim a huge, savage ancestor still stalking the earth.”

“However many are left,” Molina said shortly. Dead bodies offended her sense of universal harmony. Even dead animal bodies.

The widow’s feral glance froze on her with deadly intent.

“Hunting is the world’s oldest profession. Oh, I know what they say it is, but they’re wrong. It’s not hustling. It’s hunting. My husband was proud to put himself up against the wiles of a wild animal, and win.”

Molina eyed the trophy heads. They were much more lordly-looking than the sorry lot of humans, alive and dead, gathered around the huge trophy suite in this trophy house so far from and yet so near to a city dedicated to the hunter and hunted, to the winner and loser. The hunted and the losers always outnumbered the others, even in the wild kingdom.

Is it poetic justice that a big cat has clawed the big game hunter into a corner? That the stab of a long-dead antelope’s horn has finished him?

Or was the means of death not only a medium but a message?

She takes a last look at the leopard. It has stopped pacing and regards her with an expression she recognizes. Feline sagacity.

She wonders how many other people would be glad that this time the animal has won. Or has it?

By four that afternoon, Molina was alert and ready for a break in the case. She had heard from several highly placed men in city government and commerce that Cyrus Van Burkleo was a highly regarded member of the community. Translation: they owe him, she had better deliver a killer soon, and it had better be someone—or something—whose identity will not rattle anyone’s cages. Enter the leopard.

Molina doesn’t believe in worms turning, not even on fishermen. She certainly doesn’t believe in leopards committing murder one.

Su and Alch think they have a prime suspect. In fact, they think they have three.

“Who found them?” Molina asked.

“Employees of the deceased,” Alch said amiably.

“‘Animal keepers,’” Su put in, her china doll face wearing a mask of hard-edged suspicion that Molina reads like a child’s book.

“You don’t think Mr. Van Burkleo’s employees are what they say they are.”

“They’re muscle,” Su said contemptuously, as contemptuously as a four-foot-eleven black belt in karate can say of large lumbering musclemen.

“Why did Van Burkleo need muscle?”

“Because of these three people,” Alch answers promptly, good Boy Scout that he was thirty-five years ago.

Alch and Su crack her up: such an unlikely team, and so effective for that very fact. The 180-degree difference in their ages, their sizes, their genders, their cultural background, Jewish and Chinese, makes them the perfect complement to any case, like sweet and sour sauce to pork loin. Except that, contrary to stereotypes, Alch is the sweet, and Su is the sour. Molina doesn’t show her amusement, or her approval, of course. They would be insulted.

“You think these ‘employees’ were itching to have these people found?” Molina asked.

“Of course.” Su stubbornly folded her arms, inadvertently displaying her Mandarin-long fingernails. Weapons, in her case.

Alch shifted in his chair, scratched his neck, put off an answer until Su’s elderberry eyes flashed imperial impatience.

“Maybe,” Alch conceded, with a wicked feint of a glance at his steaming partner. “But the fact is they were trespassers on private property. And they were armed.”

Su spat out an unspoken comment. “Flare guns.”

Molina nodded.

“They’re animal-rights activists,” Alch said.