My neighbor's cat Ozzie met his end today. I consider it a crime

I knocked on my neighbor’s door today with a grim task.

His wife answered.

“I’m so sorry,” I began, feeling more like a homicide detective than guy next door, “but I think your cat has been hit by a car. I hope it’s not yours. But I recognize him.”

She gasped that sound of sudden grief and quickly hurried out of her garage.

There, in the middle of the street in front of my house, lay Ozzie.

I’d seen Ozzie and his house pal Oreo around the neighborhood, traipsing along the towering stone wall that separates our properties. Ozzie would sit patiently for the longest time, the way cats do, watching the world, perhaps on the lookout for prey.

I joked with my neighbor that I wanted to hire his cats to patrol my backyard for the pesky desert rats that scurry here and there at night.

If I could, I’d have my own cats.

For years, I was the caretaker of Mr. Garbage and Ms Gee, two cats I’d collected from a shelter in Norfolk, Virginia. Mr. Garbage was the Pillsbury doughboy of cats, round and always hungry. Ms. Gee was dainty and totally deaf. She would sit quietly as I vacuumed the floor around her.

What cat would do that?

They were an odd couple, those two.

Back in the 1990s, on my paltry reporter’s salary, I spent thousands at the veterinarian after Mr. Garbage contracted feline diabetes. When I was traveling in China, my brother Frank watched as my cherished male cat took his final health swoon.

He couldn’t reach me, and didn’t know what to do.

He called our mother in Florida. Bless her, Jean was always a bony shoulder to cry on.

“Put that cat out of its misery,” she said.

Mr. Garbage died a few days later.

For her part, Ms. Gee survived her sibling by a few years. Then she contracted renal failure. She died in my arms one morning. I cried, took the day off from work and buried her in the backyard.

Since then, I’ve lived a cat-less life. No matter how I long to have another furry friend to purr on my chest and make my day with its antics, I travel too much. It wouldn’t be fair.

On the street, my neighbor’s wife and I looked at Ozzie's body. She brought a hand to her mouth, stifling tears.

“I always thought it would be a coyote that would take him,” she said.

Her husband came outside with a shovel and a plastic bag.

While his wife was emotional, he was angry.

“Goddammit,” he said, “they didn’t even stop.”

I felt his pain. Once, a cat ran under my car while I tooled down some street in suburban Orange County. I felt the bump and then saw a figure dash into some shrubs in the evening gloom.

I stopped and knocked on doors but could not determine the owner.

I went to bed miserable.

My neighbor was right: How could they not stop?

The entrails spread across the road. Ozzie’s collar lay 20 yards ahead. His mouth was clenched in a rictus of pain. There were wet tire tracks on the tarmac. I vowed to myself to slow down in my own car.

“How long has he been here?” my neighbor’s wife asked.

“Probably not long,” I said, trying to make her feel better.

My neighbor scooped up the body with a shovel.

It was hard.

“No,” he said. “This happened a while ago.”

Again, I offered my apologies and walked back into my home office as my neighbor used a bucket to wash away the remnants of the carnage.

Within minutes, the street was dry, 

Now Ozzie is gone.

I looked out my window at the spot and I shook my old cat-owner’s head.

It was a crime scene, if you ask me.