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“Maybe it got lost,” Dooley suggested. “Hi, there, badger,” he said. “Can we help you, sir?”

“Who are you?” asked the badger, eyeing us suspiciously.

“My name is Max,” I said. “And this is Dooley. We’re cats.”

“I know what you are,” said the badger, still continuing to be suspicious.

“Do you live around here?” I asked, trying to strike up a conversation.

“What’s it to you, cat?” asked the badger.

“Max,” I repeated. “My name is Max. And what’s yours?”

But my question was greeted with hostile silence.

“He’s not going to eat us, is he?” I asked Dooley. Since my friend watches the Discovery Channel all the time, he’s better placed than me to know about the habits of strange creatures like this.

“Badgers don’t eat cats,” said Dooley. “At least I don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t eat cats,” said the badger. “And cats don’t eat badgers—or do you?”

“No, we don’t eat badgers,” I hastened to say.

“We’re vegetarians,” Dooley said with an ingratiating smile. “We only eat kibble and wet food pouches supplied by our humans. And a piece of fish from time to time. Or a piece of sausage when our humans organize a barbecue.”

“You do know that your kibble and wet food and those sausages are made of meat, don’t you?” said the badger.

Dooley frowned.“Pretty sure that’s not the case,” he said. “You see, I love all creatures great and small, and would never eat them. That’s not how I roll.”

“There’s chicken in your kibble. Chickens are animals. So how can you call yourself a vegetarian if you eat chicken?”

“Pretty sure I don’t eat chicken,” Dooley insisted.

“God, you’re dumb,” said the badger, who wasn’t the most friendly badger I’d ever encountered. Then again, he was also the first badger I ever met, so maybe all badgers were like this.

“I’m not dumb,” said Dooley kindly. “I’m a vegetarian.”

Suddenly I got an idea.“You didn’t happen to see a guy fall out of a window last night, did you?” I asked, gesturing in the direction of the nearby building.

“Sure,” said the badger, much to my surprise. “Though he didn’t actually fall from that window.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, experiencing that tingle in my tail I get when a case suddenly presents itself to me.

“I mean he was pushed.”

“Pushed? You mean pushed by some other person?”

“He wasn’t pushed by a badger, if that’s what you mean,” said the badger with a touch of acerbity. “Yeah, pushed by another person. Plenty of screaming and shouting, too. Which is how I came to pop up from my burrow to take a look. I was just in time to see one person shove another personout of that window over there. And if that wasn’t enough, the person doing the shoving came out of the building a couple of minutes later, to check on the guy he dropped.”

“To see if he was still alive, you mean?”

The badger nodded.“Checked his pulse and then skedaddled.”

“Did you see this person’s face?” I asked, excitement making my heart race.

“Nah. He was wearing one of them black masks.”

“He? So it was a man?”

“When I say ‘he’ I don’t actually mean ‘he,’ you see. It could have been a she.”

“I see. And you’re absolutely positive about this?”

“Do I look like the kind of badger who would make up a story like that?”

“No, I guess not,” I admitted. He certainly didn’t look like the flaky type.

“Okay, so if there’s nothing else, I think I’ll take a hike now,” said the badger. “Badgers to see and things to do and all that.” And before we could stop him, he had disappeared into a hole in the ground.

“Hey, you haven’t told us your name!” I yelled after him.

But he was gone, with my voice echoing along the walls of the hole he’d dug.

“That’s a burrow,” said Dooley as he studied the hole. “Also called a den or a sett. Badgers are great diggers. That’s what they do. They dig. They use these dens to sleep during the day, and then they hunt during the night. Which is why he was up and about to watch Michael Madison fall out of his office window.”

“Or being pushed,” I said. “By a mystery person with a black mask.”

Dooley stared at me, dismay written all over his face.“So… he was murdered?”

I nodded thoughtfully.“That’s certainly what it looks like, Dooley.”

“Oh, dear. That’s not very nice.”

CHAPTER 20

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We were all gathered in Uncle Alec’s office. I’d told Odelia that a credible witness had confirmed Madison was murdered, which put a completely different spin on things.

“It’s tough,” said the chief of police as he placed two beefy arms on his desk blotter. “A badger is not a good witness. A judge is not going to accept his statement. And neither is a cat. So frankly we got nothing.”

“We know it was murder,” Odelia argued.

“I know we know it was murder. But not officially we don’t. Not with a badger as a witness.” He frowned darkly in my direction, as if I was personally to blame for this dilemma.

“But we have to investigate,” said Chase. “If the guy was murdered, there has to be a murder investigation.”