Alice has her suspicions when a woman named Mary Singer offers to pay her $2,500 to board a cat named Dante. With her bank account nearly bare, Alice says yes. No sooner does Mary arrive in a luxurious limo to drop off her pet than she is shoved out of the car - and shot to death right in front of Alice's horrified eyes. And the cat in the carrier? It's just a stuffed toy. With the police baffled, Alice feels duty-bound to lend a hand. She joins up with a neighbor of the dead woman, a hard-bitten old pulp writer named Sam Tully, the current caretaker of Mary Singer's pet, an exotic Bengal cat known as Pickles. Aided by Tully, Alice is stunned to discover that Mary Singer's past eerily intersects with her own. Now all Alice has to do is stay alive long enough to let the cat out of the bag.