Cat Crimes III (1992)

Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman's third collection of new cat mysteries was published by Donald I. Fine in 1992 with eighteen original stories, among them Nancy Pickard's "Fat Cat" and John Lutz's "Kitty" according to the jacket, with an introduction by Gorman on cats in the mystery tale and notes on each contributor. William L. DeAndrea's "Killed in Midstream" sends his television troubleshooter Matt Cobb to an island in a tributary of the Mississippi, and Jan Grape's "Neutral About Cats" puts her Austin private investigator Jenny Gordon on a hijacked flight from Dallas. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): In "Killed in Midstream", Matt Cobb, vice-president for special projects at a television network, is sent to persuade the jeweller Earl Rushton, survivor of the poison-gas diamond robbery the tabloids called the Golden Holocaust, to appear on the failing show Justice Quest. He explains that he knew Rushton not as a customer, since he wears a Timex and that is as far as any discussion of jewellery with him goes, but as the Whitten College alumnus who interviewed him for a scholarship over lunch at the Four Seasons. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Not as a customer. I wear a Timex watch, and that's as far as any discussion of jewelry you ever have with me is likely to go. But Earl Rushton is a prominent alumnus of Whitten College, in upstate Sewanka, New York, which is also my alma mater. (Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman, eds., Cat Crimes III, scan cataloged as Donald I. Fine, 1992, p. 175, in "Killed in Midstream" by William L. DeAndrea, which the contents page lists from p. 172; the narrator names himself on p. 174; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Timex (unidentified model): In "Neutral About Cats", Jenny Gordon, who took over her late husband Tommy's agency and runs G&G Investigations in Austin with C. J. Gunn, is flying home from a private investigators' convention when a masked man with a knife at the steward's throat has the flight attendants collect wallets and jewellery in pillowcases. Wearing only costume jewellery, she drops in her last twenty, two silver rings and her thirty-nine-dollar Timex, unfastened from her wrist, and is made to add the diamond studs Tommy gave her for their first anniversary. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Fortunately I was wearing only costume jewelry, a couple of silver rings. No need trying to explain they weren't worth anything, I thought, and slipped the rings off and also unfastened the clasp on my thirty-nine-dollar Timex watch and dropped all three in the pillowcase. (Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman, eds., Cat Crimes III, scan cataloged as Donald I. Fine, 1992, p. 233, in "Neutral About Cats" by Jan Grape, which the contents page lists from p. 228, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphens and reading its "1" as "I"; the narrator names herself and her agency on p. 229; Internet Archive scan OCR)