Scratch the Surface

street! That car is on my property, and it’s compacting the soil. The grass is never going to recover.”
    Approaching the men and butting in, Felicity said loudly, “Then it doesn’t matter whether it’s moved, does it? If it’s too late now?”
    Turning to the policeman, she smiled, pointed at the cruiser, and held her hands over her ears. Having mimed her meaning, she shrieked, “Is the noise necessary? There was a darling cat left with the man in my vestibule, and the poor thing is very frightened. The siren isn’t helping!” Backtracking, she bellowed, “I’m Felicity Pride. I’m the one who called.”
    The policeman nodded to Felicity and complied with her request by getting in the cruiser and silencing the siren. In one of her books, he’d have been astonishingly young or had an embarrassingly large nose or a marked stutter. In fact, he had to be thirty-five or forty. Worse, he was maddeningly ordinary, with no oddity of feature, speech, or manner to distinguish him from other characters.
    “We’ll want to talk to you, ma’am,” he said.
    “Of course you will,” Felicity said. “And the cat is evidence. It... he, the cat, the very beautiful and sweet cat— strikingly beautiful and very lovable, irresistible—was in my vestibule with the man. The outer door was closed. The man and the cat were obviously left at the same time by the same person.” After allowing a few seconds to pass, she added dramatically, “At my doorstep.”
    The pause failed to achieve its intended result: The policeman did not ask about the significance of Felicity’s doorstep. Furthermore, Mr. Trotsky gave him little time to mull over the implications of her remark. Instead, he demanded, “You gonna move the car now?”
    “This is a crime scene,” the officer replied with an air of authority and dignity that surprised Felicity, whose low-ranking law enforcement characters tended toward the buffoonish.
    As Mr. Trotsky was composing his face in an apparent attempt to increase his already hideous resemblance to Stalin, a silver sport-utility vehicle approached from the Norwood Hill end of the street and pulled up in back of the cruiser. The driver rolled down her window, and Felicity recognized a woman named Brooke whom she’d met at condo association meetings. Brooke, like her vehicle, was large, showy, a nd silvery. “What’s going on here?” she called out.
    In the cozy mysteries Felicity devoured, neighbors reliably nurtured the friends and relatives of the victim by brewing pots of tea, a beverage that they oversweetened and dispensed in warm kitchens. Sometimes they even insisted that the traumatized survivors couldn’t possibly stay alone, but must move into guest bedrooms and be treated by sympathetic doctors who made house calls and dispensed sedatives or sleeping pills. Felicity was not, of course, a friend or relative of the little gray man. The only drink she wanted was a second shot of Laphroaig, she wanted to sleep in her own king-size bed between Aunt Thelma’s luxurious sheets, and she had no desire to see a doctor. She was curious about the medications doled out in the English mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and would probably have been happy to sample them—what on earth was in a cachet bland and how had aspirin lost the power to induce deep sleep?—but didn’t want contemporary prescription drugs, all of which had modern and thus uninspiring names. Still, she longed to be offered any of the familiar comforts.
    Replying to Brooke, Felicity announced, “Murder! Someone has left a dead man and a cat in my vestibule!”
    “A dead cat?”
    “No, the cat is alive. The man is dead.”
    “Who is he?”
    “I have no idea. I’ve never seen him before. A little man in a gray suit. I’ve taken the cat in and given him some tuna. And water. And I’ve made a little bed for him. He’s very frightened. Someone must have known that I, of all people, would make sure that he was all right.”
    Mr. Trotsky interrupted. “What about the no-pet clause? You’re not allowed—”
    “That means dogs,” Brooke informed him.
    “No pets, ” he replied.
    “Well, I didn’t deliberately go out and get a pet,” Felicity informed Mr. Trotsky. “It was left at my door. He. He was left at my door. And he’s evidence in a murder. He’s a very important cat. He probably holds the key to solving the crime.” A Very Important Cat. Useful in her next book, perhaps? V.I.C.
    “Probably