After last week’s misleadingly titled murder-free outing  The Deadly, we get back to basics.  Here we get three deaths, although all are off-screen and one is not human (although he thinks he’s people, yes he does).  Shut up — cats are bad-ass.  Crazy cat ladies have given them a bad rep.

Speaking of crazy cat ladies, Miss Paisley fits the profile.  Even though she does not start off with a cat, she has crazy to spare.  For one thing, she talks to herself . . . a lot.  One night as she is chattering away, a cat crawls in her window and she decides to keep it.

As she is leaving the next morning, she meets Jenkins the building super on the stairs. He asks if the cat is hers.  With an honesty that will cause her trouble later, she admits that it is.  Jenkins tells her to be careful because he saw the cat coming out the window of her downstairs neighbor, a bookie.

To keep the cat from straying, she feeds it raw meat and puts a collar on it with her name and address.  It doesn’t seem to work as one morning she sees her neighbor kick the cat out his door.

As the cat does the trot-of-shame up the stairs, she confronts the man, but he makes it clear that “if I catch him in here again, you won’t have no cat!”

She later sees the cat in the bookie’s window, and leans in through the window to retrieve him.  For a bookie that the super describes as handling thousands of dollars, he’s pretty cavalier about security, living on the first floor and leaving the window open.

When she comes home that night, the cat is missing, so she peeks in the bookie’s window again.  She doesn’t see the cat, but does see his collar in a trash can.  She reports this to the super and he reluctantly shows her the dead cat in a garbage can in the alley.

Back in her apartment she again talks at length to herself.  Eventually, she bores herself to sleep. When she awakens, she no longer has her coat on and the lights are off.  A neighbor tells her that Jenkins has been arrested for the killing of the bookie.

She somehow concludes that she must have blacked out and that she killed the bookie, not Jenkins.  For every reason the police give her that Jenkins is guilty, she has an alternate theory that incriminates herself.  For every reason they say she couldn’t have done it, she further insists that she is guilty.  She is the Anti-OJ.

The detective humors her, but still believes that Jenkins is the murderer.  The cops figure their work is done here — he tells her the brain can play all kinds of tricks and goes to get some donuts.

Six months and three days later, Miss Paisley still misses the cat.  When she finds the cat’s collar behind a chair cushion, all her memories come flooding back to her of how she did indeed murder the bookie and dispose of the evidence; along with six months of crumbs and loose change.

She cheerfully puts on her coat to go to the police station.  Then says: Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  A couple of 90 year olds left.
• Under 6 months from the murder to Old Sparky — gotta love AHP justice.  Oh, Jenkins was probably guilty of something.
• I’m not sure what to make of this constantly cheerful old woman.  Is she crazy from loneliness?  Does she have dementia?
• The detective was played by Jed Clampett’s banker, Mr. Drysdale.