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“Bitcoins, Dooley, not shitcoins,” I corrected my friend. “And I don’t think that’s what this laptop is doing. To mine bitcoin you need a much bigger computer.”

Still, my interest was attracted by that laptop. I just hoped it wasn’t protected with a password. It’s a very annoying habit humans have to protect everything with a password.

So I hopped onto the office chair neatly placed in front of that desk, and tapped the spacebar of the laptop with my paw. Immediately the computer sprang to life, showing a picture of a very large and very orange cat. I stared at the cat for a moment, wondering why Mr. Dexter would have put my image up on his computer as a screensaver, but then I realized this wasn’t me but some other orange cat. I just hoped this particular specimen wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity, for it looked huge!

As it was, though, the laptop was locked, as I had expected, and needed Mr. Dexter’s finger to unlock it. And since I didn’t have that particular finger at my immediate disposal, I heaved a sigh of disappointment and hopped down again from my perch.

And that’s when it happened: there was a loud snarl, a sort of whizzing motion, and suddenly our exit was blocked by a very large, very orange cat!

“Gotcha!” this cat announced, displaying a vicious sort of grimace as it uttered these fateful words.

“Oh, hey, there,” I said, trying to keep my cool, though inside I wasn’t feeling at all sanguine about this fateful meeting. If this cat started meowing and alerting its master, we were definitely in a pickle.

“My name is Max,” I said, by way of introduction, “and this is Dooley.”

The cat stared from me to Dooley and back again, and broke into a sort of wide grin.“Max! Of course! We’ve met before, remember? At cat choir? I was supposed to sing with the basses but Shanille told me my pitch was too high, so she put me with the tenors instead, and I ended up standing next to you. You were even kind enough to show me the ropes.”

“That’s right!” I said. “Now I remember. You have a very nice singing voice… um…”

“Dex Dexter,” said the cat, and held up his right paw. “Put it there, brother.”

And so I put it there, and so did Dooley, though the latter did so with a touch of trepidation. Dex was a big cat, easily twice my size, and I’m not a kitten myself.

“So Mr. Dexter is your human,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” said Dex. “He wasn’t always my human, you know. But I won’t bore you with the details. So how have you guys been? It’s been too long since I managed to squeeze cat choir into my schedule. Busy busy, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, though I didn’t. Then again, these billionaires probably jet around the world on a continuous basis. Tokyo today, St Barts tomorrow.

“We’re looking for something incriminating on your human,” said Dooley, who hadn’t forgotten our mission. “So that we can make him break up his non-existing relationship with our human. It’s all very complicated,” he admitted. “I don’t understand it myself.”

“Your human and my human? Hey, what a blast,” said Dex. “That means we’re going to be housemates from now on. How about that?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Mr. Dexter hired Odelia to find his daughter for him, and now Odelia’s grandmother thinks they’re having an affair, just because Odelia gave Mr. Dexter a hug. It’s all one big misunderstanding,” I explained.

“I’ll bet it is,” said Dex, looking puzzled all of a sudden. “Cause as far as I know, my human doesn’t have a daughter.”

CHAPTER 35

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“What do you mean, he doesn’t have a daughter?” I asked.

“It’s part of that long and complicated story I didn’t want to bore you with,” said Dex as he took a seat. “But if you insist, I might be persuaded to tell you all about it. But not now, and not here. Frankly I’ve been hoping to join cat choir again, and now with you guys showing up, I’m thinking this must be some kind of sign.”

“It might be,” I said carefully. I’m not big on signs, but if Dex thought our arrival on his doorstep was one, and it induced him to tell us the story of his life, I was all for it.

“Okay, so let’s get out of here, and I’ll tell you all about it on the way. How does that sound?”

“But we haven’t even found anything incriminating yet,” said Dooley.

“I think we owe it to Dex to take him to cat choir, don’t you?” I said, giving my friend a knowing wink, which I hoped he’d catch.

He didn’t, but still stopped harping on the incriminating part of our mission, and tagged along.

“Let’s head out the back door,” Dex suggested. And as we did, I caught a whiff of some powerful and faintly familiar scent. It was a yeasty odor of some kind, and when I asked Dex about it, he explained that Mr. Dexter’s gardener had complained about snails and slugs infesting his precious garden, and had been trying a true and tried technique to get rid of them.

“Our human’s backyard is also having a snail problem,” Dooley confessed. “And their solution is to catch the snails one by one and deposit them elsewhere.”