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I felt a strong urge to dig in and take what wasn’t necessarily mine, but Odelia had raised me better than that. I would have liked to say the same thing about Dooley, but unfortunately I was wrong. The moment I turned my back, I heard distinct gobbling sounds, and when I looked back at my partner, I saw he was eagerly digging into a bowl that wasn’t his. According to the name printed on the bowl in gold lettering, it belonged to Princess.

“Dooley!” I hissed.

“Wha?” he mumbled between two bites.

“You can’t do that!”

“Oh, God, this is so good,” he muttered, and simply kept on eating.

Shaking my head at so much foolishness, I trotted over to the far end of the long line of bowls, and joined George, who’d plunked down in front of his own bowl, and was feasting on his own portion with leisurely licks of his pink tongue. As the resident Methuselah, George was easily twice my size, and I’m not a small cat myself. His own bowl, aptly labeled ‘George,’ was also bigger than the others, and the one closest to the fridge. It was obvious that George was theprimus inter pares in this small feline community.

I cleared my throat to announce my arrival. George looked up lazily, gave me a quick scrutiny, then dug his face into his bowl again and gobbled on.

“Hi, there,” I said, as chipper as I could muster. It’s hard to be cheerful when everyone is eating p?t? and you’re the only one left out, due to some personal moral code that I was now seriously starting to question.

This time he looked up long enough to utter a few words. He sounded like The Godfather, speaking as if he had cotton balls in his mouth.“And who are you then, brother?”

“The name is Max. I’m with Odelia Poole? She’s the one who found…”

He shook his head, his chins quivering.“Sad state of affairs. Very sad.”

“So you heard?”

“I did more than that. I actually saw how he died.”

Bingo!“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Thanks.” He heaved a rattling sigh and plunked down on his haunches. “It’s a sad day for all of us here at Xanadu.”

“Xanadu?”

“That’s how Johnny called this place. He was a big Olivia Newton-John fan. And Gene Kelly, of course.”

The reference completely went over my head, but then I wasn’t as old as George, of course. “So what happened? How did he die?” I asked.

“Too much happy juice,” he said, producing a tiny burp.

“Happy juice?”

“Oh, did he love the stuff. Took it all the time. I think it’s safe to say he couldn’t live without it, much to Jasper’s chagrin. He hated the stuff.”

“So too much happy juice, huh?”

“Yeah. It’s like catnip to us cats, but for humans, and, unlike catnip, it’s odorless. I should know. I once took a sniff of the stuff. No smell at all.”

My mind flashed back to the vials. Of course. Happy juice. It must be the stuff that was in those vials. Some kind of drug, apparently.

“What a meal,” sighed Dooley, sauntering over, still licking his lips.

I took one look at Princess’s bowl and saw that Dooley had eaten the lot. Uh-oh. If Princess discovered her bowl empty, there would be hell to pay.

“So you think Johnny drank too much happy juice and that’s how he died?” I asked, the exact order of events still a little fuzzy.

George nodded.“Like I said, I saw the whole thing. He was taking a breather after doing the horizontal mambo with one of those young hounds.”

I wondered why a human would dance the mambo with a dog, but then stranger things have happened, so I let it slide.“And then what happened?”

“Well, the whippersnapper decided to go to bed and Johnny said he’d join him in just a minute. And that’s when he took another one of his happy juice potions. He needed those to keep up with the young ‘uns, see?” The recollection seemed to affect the big cat powerfully, for suddenly his whiskers started trembling violently. “He knocked back that juice, standing at the edge of the pool, and looking as happy as I’d ever seen him.”

“Hence the name ‘happy juice,’” I supplied.

“Exactly. But then, suddenly, he gasped and clutched for his heart.”

“And then what happened?” asked Dooley, his own eyes also widening.

George shrugged.“He stiffened and pitched over into the pool.”

“That must have been a real shock,” said Dooley, hanging on the big cat’s every word.

“You can bet your whiskers it was. And I would have gone in after him, but I can’t swim. And I hate water. So I started screaming for help, but no one ever came. And that’s when I knew Johnny was a goner.”

“He drank his final happy juice,” Dooley supplied, quite unnecessarily.

George sighed.“Yes, he certainly did.”

“What about the boyfriend?” I asked. “Was he there when it happened?”

I already knew the answer to that one, of course, but it never hurt to double-check with an actual eyewitness.

“No, Jasper left in a huff after he made a fuss about the happy juice. And about those young hounds Johnny insisted on having over night after night.”