2.

I figured I’d better look busy while I was still within sight of the upstairs window, so I pulled a flashlight out of my car, went back below the balcony, and started looking for the cat, or at least some cat tracks.

Dumb idea. You know how long an eight- or ten-pound cat’s footprints last in a blizzard that’s dumping an inch an hour on the ground? Neither do I, but it sure as hell isn’t long.

I hung around, shining my light under every bush and in every possible hiding place, and after about twenty minutes in that weather I figured if I saw the cat camped out in some place that was warm and dry I’d join her, but of course only idiot detectives were out looking for cats they’d never seen before in the middle of a blizzard. Wherever the hell the cat was, I’d bet my bottom dollar that she was warm, dry, and someplace that surely qualified as “inside.”

When I couldn’t stand it any longer I went to my car, started the motor, waited until it heated up a bit, then turned the lights on, carefully backed out of the driveway—or where I thought the driveway was—and headed home. The plows were still working overtime, and the streets were actually a bit better than they’d been on the way over. I assumed that meant the snow was letting up, but you couldn’t prove it by looking through the windshield.

I crossed over Interstate 71, kept heading west, finally came to my street, wished as I did every time it rained or snowed that I had a garage (or maybe a limo and a chauffeur), and pulled into the parking space I’d vacated a few hours earlier, reasonably grateful that nobody’d been suicidal enough to try driving down the street and parking since I’d left.

I locked the car, not that there was anything in it worth stealing, and climbed up the stairs to my apartment. I figured the least Marlowe could do was give a warning growl when he heard footsteps in the hallway, but instead all I could hear was contented snoring.

I unlocked the door, walked inside, realized I’d left the television on, and saw Marlowe snoring to Lloyd Nolan shooting off wisecracks and bullets as Michael Shayne.

“I’m home,” I muttered.

Marlowe opened one eye, stared at me disapprovingly for a few seconds, and went back to sleep.

“I’m thrilled to see you too,” I said, and went off to the kitchen for a beer, but when I opened the fridge and laid my hand on the can of Bud I realized that both of us—me and the can—were damned cold, which was fine if you were a beer but less so if you were me, so I put the beer back and started making a cup of coffee. Of course, by the time it was ready I’d warmed up and wanted a beer again, but since I’d just poured the coffee I sighed and began drinking it.

I knew if I flopped down on the bed I’d fall asleep, and if I got seven or eight hours I’d probably get fired for showing up at noon or one o’clock to continue the search, so I sat down on the couch instead.

“Shove over,” I muttered. (Marlowe and I had been having a two-year battle about which of us had squatter’s rights to the beat-up leather couch, which was the only comfortable piece of furniture in the place). Finally he grudgingly moved over a (very) few inches, decided to pretend I didn’t exist, and went back to watching Michael Shayne outsmart the bad guys.

I envied him—Shayne, not Marlowe. Nobody dragged him out of bed at three in the morning. No one showed him a freshly killed mafioso and then told him to go find a cat in a snowstorm. No one expected him to look for a small, dark animal he’d never seen before on a large dark piece of property, armed only with a gun that he couldn’t use on the cat and a flashlight that had seen better days and certainly brighter ones. And the worst part of the comparison was that Michael Shayne always got the girl. Of course, so did the Saint and the Falcon and Boston Blackie. And Nick Charles started out with the girl, which was possibly less romantic but also a hell of a lot less time-consuming. Me, I had an ex-wife I hadn’t seen in years, a lady dog show judge who liked Marlowe better than me, and a lady cop from Kentucky who decided that shooting bad guys was more satisfying than smooching with a Cincinnati detective.

I was still feeling sorry for myself, or perhaps outraged at everything except myself, when I finally dozed off. I don’t know how long I slept, three or four hours maybe, when suddenly I opened my eyes. I didn’t know why for a moment, but I felt something was—I hate to say “amiss”—but at least not quite right.

And I realized that Marlowe was standing on the couch, his nose about four inches from mine, staring intently at me with an expression that said, “We have to go outside—now!”

I checked my watch. It was nine in the morning. “All right, all right, keep your shirt on,” I growled as Marlowe continued to stare at me and thoughtfully made no reference to the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. I was still in my clothes, so I got into my shoes, galoshes and coat, attached a leash to his collar, and took him outside. Made it with about eight seconds to spare.

“You know,” I mused as we began walking along in the morning sun, with him sticking his nose in the snow every couple of steps even though it damned near came up to his chest, “I’ll bet you’d be better at spotting a cat than I would. At least you could bring one more sense to bear.”

His entire attitude seemed to say: Don’t bother me when I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing when I keep burying my nose in the snow, so I just kept walking along with him wherever he was going and trying to wake up and ignore the cold. And of course where he was going was Mrs. Garabaldi’s petunias, which hadn’t bloomed in months and were totally covered by snow anyway, and he lifted his leg where he thought they were, like he’d done every day since I’d got him, and even though it’d be another few months before the petunias began growing again, Mrs. Garabaldi stuck her head out of her window and began cursing at both of us in Italian, just like she always did. I resisted the urge to yell, “Marlowe says hello!” and kept walking.

Marlowe finally got chilly and began pulling me back to the apartment while I uttered a silent prayer of gratitude that he wasn’t a collie or a Saint Bernard or something that liked the cold. As we neared the place he tugged me toward the door, but I figured I’d better get to work—or, more important, be seen getting to work—so I tugged him toward the car, and since I outweigh the little bastard by maybe a hundred and seventy pounds or so, I won (though not without a struggle).

I put the key in the ignition, turned it, and it took four tries for the damned thing to start. Then I realized that I hadn’t scraped the snow off the windshield or any of the windows, so I waited for the car to warm up, turned the heat on high and the defroster on full blast, waited a couple of more minutes, and then got the scraper and brush and had the windows cleaned off in under a minute.

The snow had stopped while Michael Shayne was molesting the bad guys and grabbing the heroine, or maybe it was the other way around, and the plows had finished their work, at least temporarily. It took me about twenty minutes to get to the Pepperidge house. A trio of cop cars were still there, I checked to see if the cat had shown up, nobody seemed to know one was even missing, so I left Marlowe in the car, walked inside, started climbing the stairs, was told that this was a police inquiry and private eyes weren’t welcome, determined that Jim Simmons had gone home to bed, explained what I was doing there, and asked them to send someone upstairs and make sure the cat was still missing.

I could hear Evangeline Pepperidge bellow through two or three closed doors that yes the goddamned cat was still missing, and an officer, looking like a young priest who had just mortally offended the pope, came to the head of the stairs and explained to me that I was still on salary.

I thanked him, went back outside, opened the back door so Marlowe could hop out, and walked him over to the area just beneath the balcony.

“Okay,” I said. “Do your thing.”

Maybe I should have worded it differently, because he proceeded to do his thing, then began pulling me back to the car.

I pulled back and began walking him around the area where the cat had to have landed. It was new territory to him, so he stuck his nose to the ground—or at least as close to the ground as the snow allowed—and began sniffing like there was no tomorrow.

I looked up and saw a cop looking down at me through the sliding glass door. There was no sign of my employer, but at least she knew I was on the job, and I figured I was as close to her right here as I cared to be.

Suddenly Marlowe began growling deep in his throat and began pulling me toward the back of the property. The going there was slower, since no one had plowed, shoveled, or even walked through the snow, but we made some progress. Then he froze, and just as I was wondering what the hell he had seen he began barking, and a dark cat shot out of somewhere and raced up a barren tree, reaching an icy branch and staring down at us.

“Damn!” I muttered, because now that I could see it clearly it was a plain brown, not a tabby of any kind, and more to the point, it didn’t have that distinctive white spot over its left eye.

Still, Marlowe had either figured out what we were here for, or else he just liked terrifying anything smaller than himself, so I decided we’d scout around a little longer . . . but two hours later we hadn’t run into anything except an occasional squirrel that was crazy enough to be out in the snow.

I decided to look a little farther afield, but after four servants—the owners were too busy to be bothered with such trivialities—told me to get the hell off their property, I figured I needed a different strategy before Simmons had to bail me out of Trespassers’ Prison.

I led Marlowe back to the car, started the engine, and began driving slowly around the area, looking for the occasional stray cat, but it was a futile undertaking. Maybe it would have worked in the summer, but not with a foot of snow on the ground. Besides, even if I’d spotted one, even if it was a mackerel tabby, there was no way I could tell from a moving car if it had a white spot over an eye.

“Marlowe,” I said, “I think your minutes as a full partner are limited. We’re going home.”

He showed his appreciation by growling and trying to dig a hole in the middle of the backseat.

I got home, put him back in the apartment, and looked up the SPCA headquarters in the phone book. Then I realized I hadn’t eaten, so I slapped a little peanut butter on a piece of bread, decided it didn’t look filling enough to substitute for breakfastand lunch, so I slapped some salami on it, and then some cream cheese, and then some grape jelly and a couple of apple slices, stuck another piece of bread on top of it, and carried it with me to the car, munching away and wondering why I hadn’t just gone to a Skyline Chili joint instead.

I drove over to the SPCA and was greeted by a middle-aged lady who took a quick peek over my shoulder to see if I had a stray animal in the car that I was going to foist off on her.

“May I help you?” she asked.

I flashed my detective’s license. Most people just take one look and assume I’m a cop and tell or give me whatever I want. Not this lady. She grabbed my hand as I was pulling it back and held it steady while she read every word of the tiny print.

“It expires in five weeks,” she noted.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, though of course I’d had no idea until she said so.

“So how may I help you, Detective Paxton, or is it just Mr. Paxton?”

“It’s just plain Eli,” I told her. “I’ve been retained to find a missing pet.”

“It must be worth quite a lot, for them to hire a detective,” she said.

“I have no idea about the pet,” I replied. “But the owner is worth quite a lot.”

She smiled. “And you are hoping that someone found it and turned it in?”

“If it didn’t freeze to death,” I said. “It’s a very small cat.”

“And it got out during last night’s storm?”

I nodded.

“Poor thing!” she said.

“I have some photos of it,” I said, pulling them out of a pocket. “As you can see, she’s got a pretty distinctive mark over her left eye. Has anyone brought her in?”

She shook her head. “Nobody’s turned in any cat at all during the past day.”

“Damn!” I muttered. “Pardon my language, ma’am.”

“I’ve heard worse,” she assured me.

“Anyway, I guess I go back to looking behind bushes and under porches in her neighborhood.”

“Not necessarily,” she said.

“Oh?” I said. It wasn’t much of a straw to grab at, but I wasn’t in much of a position to be choosy.

“There are half a dozen animal shelters in the area,” she replied. She reached behind a counter and pulled out a printed sheet of paper. “This is a list of them.”

“Thanks,” I said, studying the list. “One of them’s only a mile from where the cat lived. I’ll try that first.”

“Just a moment, Mr. . . . Eli,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Give me those photos for a moment. We have a color copier here. I’ll run them off and leave a note that if she should turn up here, we’re to call you.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, ma’am,” I said, handing her the pictures.

She took them, went into the next room, I could hear the copy machine going to work, and maybe two minutes later she emerged and handed them back to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I need your cell phone number,” she said, pen at the ready.

“My cell phone’s on the blink,” I lied. “I’ll have to give you my home number.”

“How about your office number, as long as you’re on a case?”

“I work alone, I’m on a job, and it could be two or three days before I fight my way through this snow to get to my office.” Or two or three weeks before I catch up with the rent and the phone bill.

“All right,” she said, scribbling down the number as I gave it to her. “Good luck.”

“Thanks for your help, ma’am,” I said, walking out of the building.

I went to the car, considered stopping for a couple of cheese coneys or a four-way, decided that “breakfast” was filling enough and that the last thing I wanted to look at was food, and drove back to the east side of town, to the likeliest of the animal shelters.

I walked in, prepared to show the photos, and found that I didn’t have to, that no cat had been brought in for the past three days.

Okay, so it wasn’t in the house, it wasn’t in the yard, it wasn’t at the SPCA headquarters, and it wasn’t in the closest, likeliest shelter. So what the hell was my next move? Cincinnati’s not the biggest town in the world, Chicago’s probably twice its size, even Cleveland’s bigger, but I remembered reading that one deer could hide from a pair of hunters on one wooded acre, so how the hell was I going to find a small cat in a modern city, especially one where 90 percent of the surface was covered by maybe a foot of snow?

And how many more days, or even hours, could I spend looking for it before the bombastic Mrs. Pepperidge fired me and maybe decided I hadn’t earned my money and refused to pay me?

I looked at the list. Five more shelters to go.

And when they all turned up negative, what then? I couldn’t even blame the weather. What if the snow all vanished? Hell, there were probably thousands of stray cats roaming the streets and alleys and yards.

For a moment I wondered if Mrs. Pepperidge would take Marlowe as a replacement. Then I sighed, started the car again, and headed off to the next shelter.