Sherry Chandler

Study in Black and White

In Diane Demorney’s arctic living room, Melrose sat sunk in a shapeless white leather chair that reminded him of an ice floe. He did not like this chair and never had, but it was either this or the settee (Diane herself commanding suzerainty over the long sofa), and if he sat on the settee, he’d have to share it with the cat. Melrose despised Diane’s cat; the feeling (he knew) was mutual. It had squinty golden eyes buried in a mess of soft white fur and an enormous showy tail that it liked to flick in a warning gesture whenever Melrose looked its way.

…He looked around at the room, done so relentlessly in white—carpets, furnishing, slipcovers—that Admiral Byrd would have felt at home. Even the paintings were mysteriously white on white, form sinking into background, redundant against the white walls. Sunlight, in this room, did not bisect carpets in golden rhomboids, or stripe sideboards and walls with delicate lemony fingers. Rather, it flashed and knifed, sparred with mirrors, cut across paintings, looking for a duel. …Diane…stirred the martini jug with a long glass icicle-wand which was full of oil in which hundreds of tiny silver stars were suspended. A sudden flash of sun lit the glass stirrer and moved off in its laser search. Melrose only hoped it would rest its pinpoint beam on the cat. Zap.

…

The house on Ryland Street, only a short distance from the pub, had been their destination. …At the door they were met by a chewed-up black tomcat that looked as if it had just escaped from Borstal. Melrose at first mistook it for a piece of misplaced garden statuary, as it sat there looking scraped, chpped, and dusty.

The cat decided to bristle at the sight of the intruders, the hair along its back standing up like a Mohawk on a Piccadilly Circus punk. Actually (thought Melrose, tilting his head) the resemblance was remarkable.

“You wanna see the warrant? There.” Lasko unrolled the search warrant and held it out to the cat.

“Thank God you were first one in,” said Melrose.

The cat became very starchy, got up and turned its back and swayed out of the hallway.

—Martha Grimes, Rainbow’s End (Knopf, 1995)

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