The Purrfect Murder

is.” Harry accepted that.
    “Makes you wonder if we’ll ever know the truth about Japan or Germany, doesn’t it?” Robert shrewdly remarked. “Not that both countries weren’t guilty of creating hell on earth, but it does become difficult to accept official histories when every American is a hero and saint, every German a bloodthirsty Nazi, every Japanese screaming, ‘Banzai,’ or whatever they are reputed to have screamed. I become dispirited.”
    “Don’t.” Harry suddenly smiled. “We’re still swallowing lies from the War of the Roses, and that was in the fifteenth century. Never ends. I just nod, smile, and go on my way. But I do try to read original sources and not interpretations when I have time. Character is fate. Character creates history. That’s why I believe, believe like a fanatic, that Tazio did not kill Carla Paulson. It makes no sense in terms of character.”
             
    Back in the house, the three musketeers located the tittering. It came from behind a wall in the large room behind the south portico.
    “I know you’re in there.”
Pewter slashed her tail back and forth.
    “We know you’re out there,”
a deep voice responded.
    “Big.”
Tucker’s ears moved as far forward as they could go.
    “Show yourself,”
Mrs. Murphy requested.
“We’ve seen the work of your ancestors. I suppose you are all FRV, First Rats of Virginia.”
    “Of course we are, you silly twits.”
Another voice answered, this one slightly higher.
    “Did you see anyone in here the night of the murder?”
Mrs. Murphy got right to the point.
    “Three hundred people,”
the deep voice replied, and then a sleek nose and clean whiskers appeared just underneath the window west of the door out to the south portico.
    Pewter began to wiggle her hind end, but Mrs. Murphy commanded,
“Don’t.”
    “You can try, fatso,”
the male rat taunted.
“I’ll duck back in here so fast…”
    “Sooner or later the humans will find this opening.”
Tucker peered at the spot.
    “Doesn’t matter. They’ll close it up, we’ll chew a new one. We know this place better than they do,”
he sassed.
    “What if they put out rat poison?”
Pewter sounded tough.
    “What? Kill Mr. Jefferson’s rats? Heaven forbid,”
he joked.
    “Was anyone in here? Anyone besides the staff person?”
Mrs. Murphy kept to business.
    “Melvin spent most of the night with his face pressed to the window—until the murder, that is.”
The female voice chimed in, and now she stuck her head out.
    “Did you see anyone else?”
Tucker sounded pleasant.
    “No, someone was here, though, because when we went downstairs—we have passages everywhere, you know, we don’t have to show ourselves—well, anyway, I found a cigarette. Fresh. Hadn’t been smoked.”
The female rat was jubilant.
    “My wife likes to chew tobacco, and it gets harder to find these days.”
    “Randolph, they don’t have to know that,”
she chided him, then by way of explanation said,
“Soothes my nerves. You try living with him.”
    “You didn’t see the person. It could be Melvin’s cigarette.”
Tucker made conversation.
    “Oh, no, no one is allowed to smoke in here. Even the workmen have to stop and go outside for a smoke or a chew. Then again, not as many people smoke as they did in Grandma’s day.”
The lady rat, Sarah, sounded sorrowful about that.
“Even Melvin, who smokes, doesn’t cheat and smoke in the house when he’s here alone.”
    “You say you found it downstairs?”
Mrs. Murphy asked again.
    “Not a puff.”
She beamed.
    “Well, maybe whoever ducked inside knew there was no smoking,”
Tucker posited.
    “Maybe.”
Pewter’s brain started turning over, but she was behind Murphy.
“Then again, maybe they needed to move on and put it aside.”
    “Where’d you find it?”
Tucker inquired.
    “On the floor. It might have been on the table and rolled off. Right by the corner it was, very convenient to snatch up.”
She came out the whole way now, and she was quite sleek, gray and fat.
“You know, Randolph and I and our ancestors have even more treasures than what they’ve found in the bedroom wall. They’ll never find ours, though. We learned when they started removing walls.”
    Mrs. Murphy, surprised at how big the rats were, remembered the conversation Cooper had had in Harry’s kitchen.
“Ma’am, do you remember what brand it is?”
    “Virginia Slims.”
             
    Little Mim drove down the long, twisting drive