Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889)
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Authors: Lydia Adamson
Alice Nestleton Mystery Series eBooks from InterMix
A Cat in the Manger
A Cat of a Different Color
A Cat in Wolf's Clothing
A Cat By Any Other Name
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A Cat Tells Two Tales
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A Cat in Wolf's Clothing
An Alice Nestleton Mystery
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Lydia Adamson
INTERMIX BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not have any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
A CAT IN WOLF'S CLOTHING
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Signet Books edition / November 1991
InterMix eBook edition / November 2012
A Cat in Wolf's Clothing
copyright © 1991 by Lydia Adamson.
Excerpt from
A Cat By Any Other Name
copyright © 1992 by Lydia Adamson.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-57888-9
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Chapter 1
Why was the woman whispering?
I had been in the Salzmans' apartment for about twenty minutes when I finally realized that Mrs. Salzman had whispered to me from the moment I entered. And that I had whispered back. The entire conversation was being conducted in whispers.
I was there to be interviewed for a cat-sitting job. Mrs. Salzman needed someone to visit her lonely feline three mornings a week while she was seeking medical treatment in a neighboring state. In other words, she would be sleeping elsewhere and her cat had to be reassured. The nature of the medical treatment was never mentioned, nor was the whereabouts of Mr. Salzman, if, indeed, he existed at all.
The cat's name was Abelard.
When the cat's name was revealed to me, I had a sudden insight that Mrs. Salzman was quite mad . . . that her cat had been surgically altered and the poor woman was caught in a delusion that her cat had been altered for love of Heloise. She was acting out a medieval castration romance. But the thought vanished as quickly as it had emerged; it was only one of my dramaturgical fantasiesâan occupational hazard for actresses.
Mrs. Salzman kept whispering to me what a lovely cat he was.
The problem wasâwhere was he?
I couldn't see him.
“He's very frightened of people,” Mrs. Salzman said, which was the first rational reason she had presented for this whispering.
Mrs. Salzman lived in a very confused apartment on East Thirty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. The furniture, and there was a lot of it, lined the walls like a military procession. Abelard could be under any one of the pieces.
If I couldn't see Abelard, maybe I could hear him. Maybe I could hear his movements. Maybe that was another reason she kept whispering . . . so as to be aware of Abelard's movements.
“I am so happy to be able to deliver Abelard to a real professional cat sitter,” Mrs. Salzman whispered.
I burst out laughing, very loudly. I couldn't help myself. Mrs. Salzman drew back, shocked, her hand involuntarily smoothing her hair. She was an impeccably dressed woman except for garish green leather shoes.
It was impossible to explain to her why her remark had collapsed me into laughter. But only two hours before I had entered Mrs. Salzman's Murray Hill apartment, I had been reading a short squib about myself in the neighborhood newspaper
Our Town
. The anonymous “People” columnist had mentioned me as a neighborhood resident and noted that: “The stately, long-haired, still-beautiful Alice Nestleton is one of our finest little-known actresses . . . little known because of her penchant for obscure roles in obscure off-off-off Broadway plays.”
The anonymous columnist then went on to add: “Alice Nestleton has long been a cult heroine to theater buffs.”
The comment was absurd. Where were these “buffs”? In the supermarket on Third Avenue? I never met them.
Anyway, the whole point about that ludicrous description of me in the newspaper was that it
didn't
make me laugh. But it laid the groundwork. And when Mrs. Salzman characterized me two hours later as a “real professional cat sitter,” the cumulative effect made me laugh out loud, heartily, raucously.
Mrs. Salzman quickly forgave my outburst and took me on a brief tour of her convoluted apartment. She pointed out the location of the cat food and the watering can for the plants and the lists of emergency numbers and several other key locations and objects.
There was still no sign of Abelard.
“What kind of cat is Abelard?” I asked.
“A lovely cat,” replied Mrs. Salzman, thinking I was asking about his disposition rather than his breed.
“What color is Abelard?” I persisted.
She paused, cocked her head, and smiled. “Mixed.”
“Mixed what?” My question came out a bit testy.
She ignored that question and led me into one of the hallways. “There are your three envelopes,” she said. They lay on a small elegantly carved French cherrywood table.
“One for each day you'll be cat sitting next week,” Mrs. Salzman explained. She picked up one of the envelopes and opened itâI could see there was a single hundred-dollar bill inside.
My God! Three envelopes! Three hundred-dollar bills! For three visits of about forty-five minutes each to a cat I hadn't even seen yet and might never see! Was this woman mad? It was a truly exorbitant rate of pay. Unless of course . . . unless there were problems associated with Abelard that she hadn't disclosed.
I was about to ask for a modest reduction in pay when Mrs. Salzman suddenly and dramatically put her finger against her lips, urging silence.
Had she heard Abelard? Was the mysterious cat about to emerge from the shadows?
We waited. Mrs. Salzman closed her eyes and seemed to go into an anticipatory trance. What a strange woman she was: gray hair; thin, serious face; tall, with a stoop at the shoulders; the very slightest hint of an Austrian accent clinging to her whispers; an abstracted manner, as if she were very far away.
We waited. And we waited. And we waited. Where the hell was Abelard?
“Maybe we should call him,” I suggested gently.
Mrs. Salzman opened her eyes in horror. I had obviously said the wrong thing.
“He does not like to be called,” she said in a compassionate voice, as if, even though I was a professional cat sitter, I was suffering some kind of mild learning disorder.
“What
does
Abelard like?” I retorted a bit sarcastically.
The sarcasm passed blithely over Mrs. Salzman's head. “He likes flowers and fruit and fresh turkey and music and birds . . .” She stopped suddenly in the middle of her hysterical list, a bit self-conscious. She smiled and led me to the door, telling me that Abelard wanted more than an employeeâhe wanted a friend.
I walked home quickly, thinking about
my
cats, Bushy and Pancho.
Granted, they were a bit peculiar. Bushy, the Maine coon, was no doubt one of the drollest beasts ever created. And Pancho, my stray rescued from the ASPCA, well, he was borderline psychoticâspending most of all day and all night fleeing from imaginary enemies.
But at least my cats were visible! Not like Abelard. And my cats obviously had a grudging affection for me.
I climbed the stairs quickly. Thinking about Bushy and Pancho always made me miss them fiercelyâeven though I had been away from the apartment for less than two hours.
“Alice! You're finally home!”
I stopped suddenly and peered up the badly lit landing toward the voice.
It was Mrs. Oshrin, my neighbor, the retired schoolteacher.
She was standing at the top of the landing. On either side of her was a very dangerous-looking man.
Kidnappers? Rapists? Junkies? Neighborhood derelicts?
I panicked. I turned sharply on the stairs and started to run back down to seek help.
“Alice!” I heard her call out. “Wait! There's nothing wrong!”
I turned back, confused, still frightened.
“They're police officers, Alice! They want to see youânot me!”
I waited, tentative.
“It's all very hush-hush,” Mrs. Oshrin pleaded, as if that was an explanation. There was something about the way she used that very old-fashioned phraseâ“hush-hush”âthat sent an anticipatory tingle along my spine. But it wasn't fear.
Chapter 2
Mrs. Oshrin brought them to my door as I fumbled with the keys. Obviously they had originally rung the wrong bell.
One was a short, thick man with bright red hair who introduced himself as John Arcenaux, a detective with the Manhattan district attorney's office.
His companion was taller, a wiry bald manâhis name was Harold Rothwax, and he was a detective with the Manhattan South Division of the NYPD, temporarily assigned to a special unit.
They entered nervously. Both were wearing bluish suits and reddish ties, although the styles and shades varied.
The moment we were all inside, Rothwax said, “Detective Hanks has spoken highly of you.”
So it was Hanks, my old friend/enemy, who had been a perpetual problem during that bizarre case of the aged Russian émigrés from the Moscow Art Theater who had taken to smuggling diamonds to enhance their lifestyles in an alien land along with their strange white cats.
Mrs. Oshrin excused herself, smiling cryptically at me. The moment she left, the detectives became very nervous. I don't think they knew how to proceed with this tall, thin actress with the long golden-gray hair, dressed in an almost floor-length Virginia Woolf dress with gathered shoulders. But I knew they were there for my help, so I could afford to be benevolent.
“Won't you sit down?” I offered formally.
They sat carefully on the sofa, eyed by Bushy, who was lying regally on the rug and swishing his tail lethargically, or was it contemptuously. They sat as if I was about to serve them poisoned coffeeâwhich I wasn't.
Arcenaux looked around the room intently and then said, “We need your help. Did you read about the Fourteenth Street murders?”
“The two brothers?”
“Yes.”
I had indeed read everything I could find in the papers about them. It was very sad. Two brothers, both in their sixties and unmarried, who lived together in a new high-rise on Fourteenth Street. They were both recently retired city workersâone in the Department of Parks and the other in the Fire Department. They had been shot to death by a burglar. The police had apprehended a suspect. The brothers had lived with a beautiful Siamese cat who had not been harmed at all. The cat's picture had been in all the papers.
“But I've forgotten their names,” I said.
“Jack and Arthur Tyre. Anyway, we arrested and charged a kid, Billy Shea, who works at the local supermarket. But it now turns out that all the kid did was rob the apartment after the brothers had been murdered by someone else.”
He stopped and looked at Rothwax as if soliciting his colleague's help in soliciting my help.
Rothwax stood up and walked around the sofa, behind Arcenaux.
“May I call you Alice?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, though I'd be damned if I was going to call him Harold.
Something struck me very funny; I was in a drawing-room comedy; these men were investigating something absurd. The two detectives continuously shot quick glances at each other. It was as if they had been forced to visit me against their best judgment. And now that they were in the den of the cat woman, me, they were confused as to what was real and what was theater; they were confused about who I was and why they had been sent to seek my help.
Rothwax continued: “Let me get to the point. Over the past dozen or so years we've had a helluva lot of unsolved homicides. But we now believe that seventeen of these homicides were committed by a single individualâthe one who murdered the Tyre brothers.”
“A serial killer, as the movies say, Miss Nestleton,” Arcenaux noted, “or a mass murderer. Either name would fit.”
Rothwax continued: “We have never run across anything like this before because in every one of the cases, the mode of the murder was different. Each homicide was different in regards to weapon. The murderer killed seventeen times, differently.”
I was confused. “Then how do you know it was the same person?”
“In each of the homicides there was no forced entry, and the victim owned at least one cat, and that cat was not harmed.”
“A lot of people live with cats,” I replied skeptically.
Rothwax leaned forward urgently, conspiratorially. “You see, we found something at the scene of the murders that, for the first time, ties them all together.”
“Something?” I mimicked.
“We'd like to show this âsomething' to you. We want your opinion. Detective Hanks says you're very sharp. And very knowledgeable about cats.”
Pancho whizzed by and both men flinched. I laughed out loud.
“He moves fast,” I said. They nodded.
“Now,” Rothwax said, “can you go with us now?”
For the first time I truly sensed and believed the urgency in his voice.
“Why not?” I replied. The detectives smiled. Or were they grimacing? I looked at Bushy, who was now giving me one of his aloof treatmentsâstaring either a million years back in space and time or a million years forward. That strange tingle came over me againâthe one that had so mysteriously emerged after Mrs. Oshrin characterized the visit by the detectives as “hush-hush.” But now the tingle itself could also be characterized. I was tingling like I always did when I landed a part . . . a role . . . a juicy but difficult portrayal. I had slipped into the most prevalent delusion of the aging, perpetually out-of-work actressâconfusing anything and everything with a role . . . the delusion of an always struggling actress who had hitched her fading star to a kind of theater of the absurdâto a kind of stretching of the theatrical envelope that simply no longer existed.
But this was a murder investigationânot a role! It was something that had to be remembered. Just as I sometimes had to kick myself to remember that Bushy was not a cat-sitting client . . . he was my cat.