My throat was dry, my palms slick with sweat. I was doomed.
I fingered the small scrap of metal, took a breath, and began counting, silently. I was hoping to escape detection. Six hops and I was there: Pacific Avenue, two houses.
The owner, Kevin O’Neill, was busy negotiating a house purchase and so was momentarily distracted. But my redheaded tenant was a long-time bartender whose blue eyes didn’t miss much. Another tenant and my business partner in Fogg & Caliban Investigations, retired cop Moses Fogg, was serving as banker, so he was also distracted and his cop’s instinct for criminal activity hadn’t yet kicked in; his bifocals were aimed at a small pad of paper he was scribbling on as he fingered his moustache with the other hand. Melanie Carter, who, as a potter and martial artist, constituted the artistic wing of the Catatonia Arms Apartments, appeared to be daydreaming. Her head was down and her curly dark blonde hair hid her expression, but she wasn’t much interested in real estate, I knew, and I suspected from the way she was eyeing the tiny silver-gray horseman in her palm that she was designing something in her head. I looked left and met the alert gray eyes of her partner and roomie, Alice Rosenberg, whose cocked eyebrow told me what she was thinking: I might soon need her services as an attorney for Legal Aid. But I didn’t know whether she handled bankruptcies.
Al snatched up the dice, winked at me, and rolled. She landed her Scottie on Community Chest, set the yellow Get Out of Jail Free card next to her pastel piles of cash, and placed the dice in front of Mel with a gentle poke from her elbow. I held my breath.
Kevin turned back to the board to place his two green plastic houses. Mel set down the horseman as her eyes swept the board, looking for her wheelbarrow. Al gave her a stronger poke. Kevin opened his mouth to speak.
A small object whizzed past his nose and landed on the pile of Chance cards: a blue denim catnip mouse. Kevin flinched. Mel rolled the dice.
I took a deep breath. Under the table, my little black furry rescuer butted his head against my ankle and purred as I reached down to give him a pat.
“Hey! No fair!” Kevin groused. “You can’t use Sidney as your henchman.”
“Take it up with my attorney,” I said, nodding at Al. “Two people rolled the dice before you asked for rent.”
Kevin looked at Moses.
“Nothing in the rulebook about it,” Moses said mildly.
Kevin narrowed his eyes. “What’s the year on that rulebook? I don’t want to hear about the rules from the fifties or sixties when your kids were little and you were all sitting around in your pajamas eating Cracker Jacks and drinking Kool-Aid. This is 1987, for god’s sake. We should play by the latest rules.”
“This is Cat’s game,” Moses said. “We using her game, so we play by those rules. When we use your game, we’ll play by your rules.”
He knew, of course, that my goose was cooked anyway. Everybody knew it. I was living on borrowed time, not to mention borrowed money, my two purple-striped deeds lying facedown in disgrace, a railroad and luxury tax between me and my next two hundred dollars. Not to mention Boardwalk and Park Place. If I evaded those traps, I would probably land on Chance and be forced to pay a goddamn poor tax. A bank error in my favor? That would never happen.
Cheered by collecting rent from Mel, who despite her inattention to the game could well afford it, Kevin patted my hand. “It’s okay, Mrs. C. I forgive you. It’s always more fun with you in the game.”
But that situation was, as I’d predicted, temporary. Boardwalk finished me off and my boot and I retired bankrupt.
“Cheer up, Cat,” Moses said. “It’s just a game. You just having one of your menopause meltdown moments. Kevin will fix you another drink.”
“It’s not just a game,” I countered. “The stakes are too damn high.”
Everybody knew this, too. The loser of this Monopoly game would be the one to take a small terror of our acquaintance to see Santa Claus in the near future and go Christmas shopping with his sisters. Somewhere on my refrigerator was a photograph from last year of a small boy sitting on Santa’s lap. Santa’s beard is slightly askew and his right eye is red and rapidly swelling shut from a sharp, pint-sized elbow jab thrown in a scuffle when Santa’s helper tried to move things along by elf-handling Brother and showing him the exit. I had a similar photo from the year before, capturing Santa’s expression as he realized that the child on his lap was leaving a large damp stain on his red velour trousers.
You might think that we could just tell Brother that Santa wasn’t real and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, he had once encountered Santa outside of the department store setting and talked with him. He now believed that he had an inside track on the jolly old elf and could not be persuaded otherwise. Santa was his pal.
“And anyway,” I added, “it’s not fair! I took him last year and the year before. I don’t know what else he can do to Santa, but I’m sure he’ll think of something.”
“You ought to be good at Monopoly, Cat,” Al said. “You’re the only real estate mogul in the room. You’re the only one of us to collect monthly rents on your actual property.”
“But I’m terrible at board games. I spent a lifetime deliberately losing to my children and grandchildren, and now I couldn’t win if my life depended on it, which might be the case here. We always pick something I’m bad at. Why can’t we pick something I’m good at for a change?”
“Like what?”
Kevin was not challenging, just curious, but he stopped me. What was I good at? Certainly not marriage or motherhood or housekeeping, despite my years of practice. Not basketball, because I didn’t have the height or skill to shoot a basket, not even at our non-regulation hoop in the parking lot out back, and I kept blocking my own team members because I couldn’t remember who was on which team. I had once been adept at jacks, but now my arthritic knees vetoed any suggestion that I might return to my former glory.
“You right, Cat,” Moses said, conscious of the uncomfortable silence that had followed Kevin’s question. “You took the kids for two years on your own. This year, I’ll go with you.”
“Me, too,” Mel said.
We’d just hit the seating capacity of Moses’s Ford Fairlane. Kevin and Al exchanged a guilty look.
But nobody had answered the question for me. Nobody had rushed in to list the many things I was good at. In fact, nobody had proposed a single one.
The phone rang and I left them to their wheeling and dealing. I passed my two tabbies, Sophie and Sadie, snoozing on the couch, but little black Sidney followed me to the bedroom, chattering, eager to get in on the conversation. It was my buddy, Mabel Hofstetter.
“Cat, you know that writers’ group I belong to? I joined it to work on my mystery novel, remember? Well, we’ve got a real murder on our hands and we need your help. We want to hire you to find the killer.”
At last: something I was good at.
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