distracted now, Hilda reached into her jacket and pulled out a slim white cell phone. “I’d better call Tera right now and tell her. You know how young people are . . . they take things so personally. She shouldn’t find this out from anyone but her mother.”
Realizing she had been dismissed, Darla took the hint. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said as she headed toward the door. “And I’ll think about those compresses.”
Hilda nodded, but her attention was on her phone as she dialed. Before she stepped outside, Darla heard Hilda genteelly shout her daughter’s name—“Maria Teresa Aguilar!”—followed by a flurry of Spanish that Darla roughly translated with her minimal knowledge of the language to mean, “It’s your mother. Get your lazy butt out of bed and pick up the phone!”
Darla let the door close behind her on that little drama, her concern more over Hilda’s earlier reaction than what Tera might say or do. While Reese hadn’t specifically told her not to speak to Hilda, she suspected that he might consider it interference in police business. But as she started down the street toward her own store, another concern was on her mind: Hamlet. Some wily animal had been in the brownstone’s basement during the early morning hours. For her own peace of mind, she needed to know if Hamlet was the creature in question. She had an idea how to prove that that he’d been present—or else how to eliminate him as a four-legged suspect—but it would take Jake’s help.
She pulled out her cell phone and pressed the speed dial for Jake. The ex-cop picked up on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for Darla’s call. “Hey, kid, I heard via the blue grapevine that there was some trouble over at your friend Barry’s place.”
“You can say that again. Curt’s dead—probably murdered, according to Reese—and Barry and I were unlucky enough to find him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. A shame,” Jake replied, sounding like she meant it. “Are you back at the store yet?”
“I’m a block away. Can I meet you at your place in about fifteen minutes, once I make sure everything is okay in the store? I need your help with something related to this whole awful business.”
“Sure, what’s the problem?” Jake wanted to know.
Darla took a deep breath. “If you talk to Reese before I see you, tell him he’d better take a crash course in Meow 101. You see, I think I have a witness to Curt’s murder.”
NINE
“MR. BENEDETTO IS DEAD?” JAMES ECHOED IN WELL-BRED disbelief once Darla had broken the news back in the shop. “Are you quite certain?”
“Yeah, it was pretty obvious from that whole stiff-as-a-board-not-breathing thing he had going on.”
James shot her a long-suffering look. “I am not questioning your diagnosis of death, Darla, only your identification of the decedent.”
She gave a weary sigh. “Sorry. Yes, we’re absolutely certain it was Curt. He was still, um, identifiable.”
“And how fortunate that Officer Reese is the one handling the case,” her manager went on. “Do we know the official cause of death?”
“For the moment, the police are treating Curt’s death as a homicide until the medical examiner says otherwise. But I’m pretty sure Reese thinks he was murdered. Barry thought at first that he’d fallen, but there was a crowbar lying on top of Curt, and he had a crowbar-shaped dent in his head. So it’s a logical leap that someone whacked him with it.”
“I would assume so,” her manager agreed. “Even if the man had been holding the crowbar when he fell down the steps, what are the chances that he could hit himself in the head with it and manage to fall so that it landed on top of him?”
“I knew someone who, you know, did that,” Robert interjected, setting down the carton of paperbacks he was unloading and walking over to join them at the register.
When she and James both turned to stare at him, he shrugged, or rather, tried to. With Hamlet slung around his neck like an inky fur stole, the cat’s forepaws and back paws draping over either shoulder, it was not an easy gesture to make.
Darla shook her head. She wasn’t sure who had come up with this sartorial idea, Robert or Hamlet, but the latter was staring at her with gleaming green eyes that seemed to say, No way would I let you get away with carting me around like this. She shot him a sour look in