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“I’m in charge here now!” he cried. “And I don’t want you here! Capeesh?”

“Oh.” I finally saw what he meant now.

“You’re in charge now?” asked Dooley. “Charlie must like you a lot, Diego, to put you in charge of his house.”

“Not in charge of the house, you dimwit,” he snarled. “In charge of the Dieber Babes. And I’m forbidding you access to the house. So you better get lost or else.”

“Or else what?” asked Dooley, genuinely interested.

Diego held up a menacing paw, extending his nails. The scene reminded me ofNightmare on Elm Street, a movie I’d wanted to unsee ever since I watched it with Odelia. For some strange reason she loves horror movies. I most emphatically do not.

I gulped, and so did Dooley. Not only was there no pasaran in this house, there was no neighborliness either.

But just then, a second cat materialized from the relative obscurity inside and drew up next to Diego. It was Clarice.“Oh, why don’tyou get lost, Diego?” she asked irritably.

“You get lost,” Diego growled, harping on his favorite theme. “Or I’ll cut you.”

It was not something anyone had ever said to Clarice, I imagined, and I could see her expression darken into a vicious scowl. The next moment, a regular catfight ensued, and soon fur was flying and shrieks of pain were sounding. Within seconds, Diego bolted off in the direction of the garden, leaving a few drops of blood and a nice pile of orange fur on the floor. Clarice, who sat casually licking her paws, said,“There’s something you need to see.”

“Oh, we saw it,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed by an irrepressible sensation of unbridled joy and affection for this inimitable cat. “And we liked it. Didn’t we, Dooley?”

“I saw—I liked,” Dooley confirmed, a look of admiration on his furry face.

“Not that. Something else,” Clarice said with a frown. “Come.”

And come we did—into the house that was hitherto forbidden territory, and then up the stairs and down a long corridor.

“I thought you said you were through dealing with Diego?” I said.

“That was before he started throwing his weight around,” Clarice said as she sashayed across a nice white high-pile carpet. I had to resist the powerful urge to dig my claws in and start kneading. We were on a mission to save Harriet. Base urges had to wait.

“Is he really in charge of the Dieber Babes now?” asked Dooley.

“Of course he isn’t. He just wishes he was. That cat has the biggest Napoleon complex I’ve ever seen in any living being. It’s pathetic, actually, and a little sad.”

“Um, what’s a Napoleon complex?” asked Dooley.

“You may have noticed that Diego is a pretty short cat. To compensate he likes to act tough and whip other cats into submission. But not me. Uh-uh. If he tries that crap again, I swear I’ll slice him up so bad his own mother won’t recognize him. Oh, here we are.”

I gulped, and so did Dooley. I’d seen Clarice gobble up vicious rats whole without batting an eye. I did not want to be on her bad side. If Diego kept this up, he was a dead cat.

We’d arrived at one of the guest rooms, and Clarice jumped and grabbed the door handle with both paws. The handle twisted down under her weight and the door opened.

“Hey, that’s a neat trick,” said Dooley.

“Stick with me. I can teach you stuff,” said Clarice, pushing the door open further.

The room was smaller than I would have imagined in a house this size, and pretty messy. Magazines were strewn around, and when I checked the titles I saw they were all either gun-or baseball-related. A large poster of Alex Rodriguez adorned the wall over the bed, and a sizable banner of the New York Yankees covered the opposite wall.

“Looks like whoever lives here likes baseball,” I said. “And guns.”

“Over here,” said Clarice, and moved into a bathroom the size of a cubicle. Over the sink, the mirror was bedecked with pictures, and when I looked closer, I saw they all featured the same woman.

“She’s one of Dieber’s bodyguards,” Clarice said. “Her name is Regan Lightbody.”

“Looks like this guy is pretty obsessed with her,” I said. And then my eye fell on a few more disturbing details. The pictures of two guys had been marked with big red Xs over their faces.

Clarice had followed my gaze, and said,“Ray Cooper and Toby Mulvaney. The two bodyguards that were shot.” She raised a whisker when I stared at a message taped beneath the men’s pictures. It read, ‘If I can’t have you—no one can!’

“What does it mean, Max?” asked Dooley, who’d just spotted the same message.

“It means that whoever lives in this room is a double murderer,” I said.

Chapter 26

It is always a tough proposition to be faced with two incompatible tasks. On the one hand I wanted to run and tell Odelia what we’d just discovered, so she could induce Chase to apprehend the killer. On the other hand, we’d arrived at the Dieber house with a job to do, namely to save Harriet from the cat-collecting and cat-distributing singer. And since I couldn’t be in two places at the same time, I had a decision to make, and a tough one to boot.