Free Act of God by Jeremiah Healy Page A

living area past the table into the kitchen. Hard not to notice the table as I did.
    “Tigger, beat it, willya?”
    I looked back at Wickmire, who was trying to shoo the cat away with her sneaker.
    She said, “They can always tell when you can’t stand them, you know?”
    There was a strong smell of used cat litter in the air. “If it’s tough on your allergy, I can do this part without you.”
    “No. I mean, I’m okay as long as I don’t try to cuddle with him. Besides, you’re in here because I let you in, and so I’m feeling kind of responsible.”
    “Where’s the cat food?”
    “You serious?”
    “Yes.”
    Wickmire went past me into the kitchen. Bending down, she opened a cupboard next to the sink and came out with a box of dry cereal and two cans as examples. “Cat food.”
    I thought about Nancy’s Renfield. “Dry food in the morning, canned at night?”
    “Right.”
    “Are there as many cans as you saw Friday night?”
    “Of course not. I’ve fed Tigger ever since Monday.”
    “Monday?”
    “When Wild Bill called me about Darbra not showing up at work.”
    “What I meant was, are there any cans missing other than the ones you used?”
    Wickmire stared at me for a moment, then looked down at the cans in her hand and back into the cupboard. “I don’t know. There’s six, seven, eight—eight left now. I couldn’t tell you if there used to be nine or ten, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
    “What I’m getting at is whether Darbra might have fed him since she got back.”
    “Oh. Oh, I see what you mean. No. I mean, I can’t help you on that.”
    I walked around the living room. Something was bothering me. After not being occupied for a week, a room should be a little musty, and this one was, but there was something else.
    “Traci, any of the windows open when you came in on Saturday?”
    “No, not morning or night.”
    Odd, you’re away on vacation, come back to a musty apartment, then don’t air it out. But the room was different beyond that. Aside from the cat litter, it had no real smell, as sterile as a no-smoking room in a hotel.
    I moved back through the place to the corridor that I assumed led to bedroom and bath. I tried the door on the right first. A small bathroom with a tub/shower unit, hopper, and sink installed with a sense for space that would have done a submarine designer proud. The only available floor was occupied by the litter box, pretty full.
    I said, “Any spare kitty litter around?”
    “Beats me. Why, you want to change it?”
    No, but I’d have thought a person returning home from vacation and using this bathroom might have.
    Above the little box were blue and white tiles, blue and white towels. I felt the towels and a face cloth hanging from a wire shelf on the shower head. Bone dry. Same for the soap. I took a deep breath through the nose. Same sterile sense. I picked up the soap. No scent at all.
    Behind me, Wickmire said, “You’re getting warm,” with the teasing lift at the end.
    I turned and looked at her, then put the soap back into its dish and crossed the hall to the other door. It led to a bedroom with a mahogany four-poster high enough to need a little two-tiered step stool next to it. The posts had carved pineapples at the top. The bed was covered with a quilted comforter, the sheets underneath soft and supple. At the center of the bed an old hard-sided suitcase was opened, envelopes scattered next to it.
    I looked around the room. The bureaus, a highboy and a lowboy, were also mahogany and reminded me enough of Nancy’s new one that I felt it in my shoulder and knee. Wickmire used the stepstool to get up onto and sit at the edge of the bed.
    I walked to the lowboy. A four-by-six photo in a stand-up frame showed a man in his early twenties and a woman in her early thirties. The man had dishwater-blond hair worn long and parted in the center, a lecherous grin on his rugged, tanned face, and a chain of what looked like human teeth around