“I’m not being mean. I’m just pointing out a physical fact: when you don’t have a brain, it can’t get damaged.” He gave up another wistful sigh. “I wish sometimes that I was like Dooley. As it is, I simply can’t stop thinking—can’t turn off the old noodle, you know. Keep thinking about the new mission.”

  “What mission?” I asked, giving our humans a keen glance, wondering when they would get up.

  “Well, we talked things through last night, while you guys were chasing that blackmailer—unsuccessfully, I might add—and we’ve come up with a sound plan of campaign.”

  “Is that so?” I said, not all that interested in Brutus’s plan.

  “Yeah, Harriet is going to teach Scarlett to talk to cats, while I start recruiting the Baker Street Cats.”

  “Baker Street what?”

  “You remember the Baker Street Boys, right?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Sherlock Holmes’s youthful helpers.”

  “Who are the Baker Street Boys, Max?” asked Dooley.

  “Well, Sherlock Holmes had a group of youthful street urchins who helped him tackle his cases and solve crimes. They’d spy the streets of London and report back to him.”

  “Homeless kids, mostly,” said Brutus. “Living rough on London’s mean streets. They were called the Baker Street Boys because that’s where Holmes lived: in Baker Street. And that’s what gave me the idea—”

  “What gave me the idea,” Harriet interjected.

  “What gave us the idea. Neighborhood Cat Watch sounds so boring, and Baker Street Cats has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “Shouldn’t it be Harrington Street Cats, since we live in Harrington Street?” asked Dooley.

  Brutus decided to ignore him and went on, “So like the Baker Street Boys reported back to Sherlock Holmes, our Baker Street Cats will report to their own brilliant detective: me.”

  “You mean me, snickerdoodle,” said Harriet.

  “We’re still working out the details,” said Brutus.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “So I’ll be teaching the human operators to talk to cats,” said Harriet, “and Brutus will train a network of cats to patrol the streets of Hampton Cove and bring us anything that might tell us that a crime is being committed or planned. Isn’t that just great?”

  It certainly sounded like a plan, I thought. “And how are all those cats going to communicate with you?” I asked.

  “Well, Gran wanted us all to wear our smart collars again, but I put my paw down and said no.”

  “We told her we hate those smart collars,” said Brutus.

  He wasn’t lying. Twice now our humans had tried to outfit us with collars—first the usual kind, and the second time around some snazzy high-tech collars with GPS tracking and the capacity to monitor our vital signs. In both cases the conclusion had been that cats and collars don’t mix, and I was glad the plan had been nipped in the bud this time.

  “I’ll go out there and talk to my lieutenants,” said Brutus, “and those lieutenants will talk to the soldiers, and so on down to the lowest echelon. I’m not going to bother you with the details, but it’s a complicated but highly effective structure. Like an army.”

  “So you’re building yourself an army now, are you?” I said.

  “Yeah, an army of cats, designed to keep our streets safe.” He thrust out his chest. “I think it’s going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and Gran thinks so, too. And when all is said and done, and we’re fully operational, Gran will get in touch with potential investors, and we’ll roll out the Baker Street Cats project to neighboring towns, then to the entire county, the state, the country, and finally the whole world.”

  “Global domination,” I murmured. “Very James Bond.”

  “I know, right?” said Brutus, glowing with pride.

  “There are cats everywhere,” said Harriet, pointing out the obvious. “There are cats in China, in Japan, in the Middle-East, in Africa, and even in faraway places like Europe. So there’s no reason the Baker Street Cats app we’re building won’t be a big hit all over the world.” She grinned at her mate, who gave her an affectionate grin in return, and they shared a smooch. “It’s going to be grand, snuggle pooh. Just grand.”

  “I know it is, sugar britches,” said Brutus.

  Boy, was I glad not having to be a part of this new global army of cats.

  “So how about it, Max?” said Brutus.

  “How about what?” I asked.

  “I need a second-in-command. A loyal lieutenant who I can trust implicitly, and who will carry out my orders unflinchingly and without asking questions. You up for the task?”

  “No, thank you, Brutus,” I said. “I’ll pass.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean, you’ll pass? Don’t you want the streets of Hampton Cove to be free from crime?”

  “Oh, absolutely, but I’m not sure this is the way to do it.”

  “What are you talking about? This is a fool-proof plan. In fact it’s the only plan.”

  I gave him a gentle pat on the back. “And I’m sure you’re the right cat for the job, Brutus. But frankly I have other things to do.”

  “What other things?!”

  “Yeah, Max,” Harriet chimed in. “What could possibly be more important than the Baker Street Cats?”

  “Protecting Rosa Bond from her blackmailer, for one thing,” I said. “And making sure she gets her five thousand dollars back.”

  Brutus made a throwaway gesture with his paw. “That’s peanuts, Max. I’m talking major crime prevention here. We’re going after the big guns. The people that are laying waste to our community, preying on the innocent and destroying the social fabric of this town.”

  “Well, I think catching Rosa’s blackmailer is a good start,” I said.

  Brutus gave me a nasty look. “I think you hit your head harder than you thought last night, cause this kind of thinking is indicative of some major brain damage right there.”

  “Oh, no,” said Dooley, slapping a paw to his mouth. “Max, you have to get an MIR as soon as possible!”

  “You mean an MRI?”

  “That one, too.”

  Just then, the doorbell chimed, and I was glad, for it saved me from having to contend with Brutus’s cat army, and Dooley’s concern for my apparently very feeble brain.

  Odelia stirred, and so did Chase, but it took another couple of attempts by our unknown visitor to finally wake them sufficiently to crawl from underneath the covers and head down the stairs to open the door.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Odelia without much enthusiasm. And when I arrived downstairs to see who this could possibly be, I saw it was none other than Uncle Alec.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a murder,” said the Chief as he took in his frumpy-looking niece.

  Chase, also stomping down the stairs, and looking much too refreshed for a man who’d only turned in late last night, frowned and said, “A murder? What do you mean?”

  Uncle Alec sniffed the air. “Is that coffee I smell?”

  The hint was obvious, and while a sleepy-looking Odelia popped a capsule into the coffeemaker, Chase had already popped back upstairs and moments later we heard the shower running.

  Brutus might be built like a brick wall, but so was his human, and all that brick needed regular maintenance to keep it in excellent shape. And while Uncle Alec took a seat at the kitchen counter, and proceeded to inform his niece about this most recent crime, the rest of the cat contingent made their way down, and I told Brutus, “There’s been a murder. Time to instruct your lieutenants and your soldiers to start looking for clues and such.”

  But Brutus held up his paw. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to deal with that right now, Max. You’ll have to handle this one on your own, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh? But I thought—”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand what an enormous undertaking the Baker Street Cats is, do you, Max? First we need to put an entire infrastructure in place. There’s meetings we need to conduct, people that need to be trained, an organization that needs to be built. It will take time before we’re fully operational. But once we are, you better watch out, for here we come.”

  But instead of coming, he was going, disappearing through the cat flap.

  I glanced up to Odelia. “Is it all right if Dooley and I tag along, Odelia?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” she said, having trouble keeping her eyes open. That’s what you get when you spend half the night trying to catch a blackmailer: you look like a train wreck in the morning. And since Odelia has never been a morning person to begin with…

  Chase now came thundering down the stairs, looking like the Energizer Bunny.

  “Tell me all, buddy!” he yelled, causing Odelia to wince and shake her head.

  Chapter 8

  Turns out the victim of this latest crime had come to a sticky end in our very own street. And so two Harrington Street Cats—me and Dooley—found ourselves a couple of houses down from the one we call home, and staring at the body of the recently deceased.

  The house itself was of the dilapidated kind, and not nearly as nice as most of the houses on the block. Then again, once upon a time probably all the houses had been like this: a little cramped and not exactly up to modern specs. But over the years houses had been torn down and rebuilt, and others renovated. Willie Dornhauser’s house had escaped this remodeling craze, and I would like to say that it had stood the test of time but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Mr. Dornhauser, too, looked a little dilapidated, and I’m not saying this merely because he was dead. His hair was unkempt, and so were his clothes, and he had a ratty sort of facial growth on his chin and a ruddy face, now slightly less ruddy, presumably, than when he’d still been amongst the living.

  Abe Cornwall, the county coroner, sat crouched next to the dead man, examining him closely, as a country coroner does, then finally shook his head. “He’s dead,” he announced in a mournful baritone.

  “I know he’s dead, Abe,” said Chase. “But what made him this way, that’s what I would like to know.”

  “Well, that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?” said the heavyset coroner as he got up with some effort and some serious cracking sounds coming from both knees. He pointed to a sort of reddish spot on the man’s head. “He was hit over the head with a blunt object. Hit from behind, too. Likely fractured the skull and death would have been instantaneous.”

  Chase glanced around the messy living room: the tattered couch that had seen better days, the floral chintz curtains, the fast food cartons on the floor, the coffee table loaded with beer cans and the ashtrays filled to overflowing. It was clear that Mr. Dornhauser was a man who had believed in living dangerously, and hadn’t been taking advantage of the Surgeon General’s health advice. But what had ultimately killed him weren’t the cigarettes he’d obviously been fond of, or the beer, but a vicious smack on the head.

  “Any sign of the murder weapon?” asked Odelia as she walked in.

  “Nothing,” said Chase. Both he and Odelia had donned plastic gloves, and were deftly going through the man’s stuff.

  “Do you think we should wear plastic gloves, Max?” asked Dooley.

  “I don’t think so, Dooley.”

  “But what if we contaminate the evidence!”

  “I don’t think that’s an issue,” I said with a smile. You see, cats don’t have fingers, so we don’t have fingerprints either. We do have pawprints, but those are easily eliminated from the investigation.

  “Weird,” said Chase as he rifled through what looked like a small desk in the corner of the room.

  “What is?” asked Odelia.

  “No phone, no computer.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have a phone or a computer?”

  “He had an internet connection. And how many people do you know who don’t have a phone nowadays?”

  “None?”

  “And what have we here?” the detective murmured as he stuck his hands into the man’s jacket pocket and came away with a wallet.

  “Can he do that, Max?” asked Dooley, referring to Chase looking through the man’s wallet with keen interest.

  “They’re conducting a murder investigation,” I pointed out. “So I think it’s fine.”

  “But isn’t this man entitled to privacy?”

  “This man is dead, Dooley, and right now it’s more important to catch his killer than to protect his privacy.”

  “Oh, right,” said Dooley as he, too, glanced around, then sniffed the air. “It smells very bad in here, Max. I think they probably should open a window.”

  “Yeah, it does smell pretty terrible in here,” I agreed. The smell of thousands of cigarettes having been smoked in this very room. And the stench of stale beer, of course.

  “Look at this,” said Chase, as he held out a neat stack of crisp twenty-dollar bills.

  “Do you think…” Odelia began, as she took out her tablet and brought up a note she’d made. Odelia is a modern detective, you see. Used to be that police officers jotted everything down with pencil and paper, and Chase still does, but Odelia has one of those tablets on which you can write with a stylus. She and Chase now stood bent over her tablet, while they compared something on the screen to the bills Chase had liberated from Mr. Dornhauser’s wallet. Then they both looked up, a smile on their faces.

  “Bingo,” said Chase.

  “What’s going on?” asked Dooley.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, “if the bills in Willie Dornhauser’s wallet are the same ones Rosa Bond paid to her blackmailer last night.” I now remembered that Odelia had instructed Rosa to have the bank write down the numbers on the notes they gave her.

  “Absolutely right, Max,” said Odelia, throwing caution to the wind and for once talking to us even when in the presence of others. She immediately regretted it, though, for Abe Cornwall had pricked up his ears and stood regarding us curiously. But then one of the techies drew his attention and they disappeared into the kitchen together.

  “So Willie Dornhauser was Rosa Bond’s blackmailer, huh?” said Chase.

  “So where is the rest of the money?” asked Odelia.

  Chase quickly counted the small stack he’d discovered in the dead man’s wallet. “There’s five hundred here. So that leaves four thousand five hundred unaccounted for.”

  And so they proceeded to turn the place upside down, looking for the rest of Rosa’s money. When an hour had passed, and both the police and the crime scene technicians had searched everywhere, and the money still hadn’t been found, Chase removed his plastic gloves and walked out to confer with his wife. We followed them out into the front yard, where a hushed conversation was carried out.

  “Could be that he wasn’t working alone,” Chase suggested. “In which case his associate and Willie might have gotten into some kind of argument over how to split the money.”

  “The associate conked him on the head,” said Odelia, describing a possible scenario, “and got away with the rest of the cash.”

  “Or could be that somehow Rosa discovered her blackmailer’s identity, followed him here last night, and decided to exact some personal justice.”

  “Rosa isn’t the vigilante type, Chase,” said Odelia. “Besides, if she’d known who her blackmailer was, don’t you think she would have told me?”

  “We won’t know until we talk to her,” said Chase, very reasonably, I thought. He glanced up and down the street, where several people had gathered on the sidewalk, and stood talking animatedly, probably wondering what all the police activity was about. “First let’s do a house-to-house, and find out who Willie Dornhauser was.”

  Chapter 9

  Two of the people who had gathered in front of their house were Marge and Tex. So it stood to reason that we talked to them first. They’d lived on this street ever since they got married twenty-five years ago, and probably knew pretty much everybody on this block.

  “Willie?” said Marge, looking surprised. “Yeah, of course I knew Willie. Great handyman.”

  “Yeah, he was,” Tex confirmed. “Though we stopped using him a long time ago, didn’t we, honey?”

  “And why is that?” asked Chase.

  “Well, Willie had a bad reputation,” said Tex.

  “What kind of reputation?”

  “Let’s just say that when you hired Willie to work on your house, things had a habit of disappearing.”

  “You mean he was a thief?”

  “You can say that,” said Tex, “though nothing was ever proven, and we never filed a complaint against him. We just stopped using him.”

  “The thing is that Willie had hands of gold,” said Marge. “If you wanted something done in the house, and you asked Willie, he got it done without any fuss, and he wasn’t expensive either. Just…”

  “That things got stolen,” Chase completed the sentence.

  Marge nodded. “It’s a pity, because he was very talented.”

  “Willie did everything,” said Tex. “Electricity, heating, plumbing… When you wanted a wall stuccoed, Willie could do it in a flash. When your air conditioner broke down, he fixed it. He installed new windows, put in a new floor, driveway…”

  “The man could do absolutely everything,” said Marge, nodding.

  “So most people just put up with the occasional thing going missing,” Tex said with a shrug.

  “But not us,” said Marge, “since the thing he stole when he worked at our house was very valuable to us.” She glanced to her husband, a little smile played about her lips.

  “He stole one of my gnomes,” said Tex, and he wasn’t smiling.

  Tex is a big fan of gnomes, you see, and when you touch his gnomes, you touch a nerve with the good doctor.

  “Did he also have a reputation as a blackmailer?” asked Chase.

  Marge frowned. “Blackmail? No, I never heard that.”

  “Could be that lately he’d run out of customers,” Tex suggested, “and that he had to resort to some more illegal activities to supplement his income.”

  “No matter how good you are at your job, at some point people get fed up,” Marge pointed out, “and stop hiring you.”