Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) (6 page)

Chapter 11

Tony and I sat in a coffee shop on 110th and Broadway. We were a bit early to meet Karl Bonaventura, who was going to take us to his sister's bizarrely preserved apartment.

Tony was not impressed by my interview with Jack Tyre's lover. “So what did you learn? That they made love in the park? That Jack was a bit weird?”

“What I learned, Tony, is that something is very wrong . . . odd . . . strange.”

He laughed. “Oh, come on, Swede. It was all wrong before you met this Georgina. I mean, toy mice and vanished cats and every victim dying in a different way, and time sequences between murders that mimic cat-gestation periods.”

“Then you don't think there was one killer?”

“I really have no idea. What do I know?” He looked at me slyly and then added: “After all, I'm just an out-of-work scenic designer.”

“How
is
your new life coming?” I asked.

He reached across the small table, grabbed my hand, and kissed it. I pulled my hand back. His face was all lit up.

“It's going to work,” he said. “I moved into the Wellington on Fifty-Fifth Street and Seventh, a monthly rate. My wife has calmed down. The stores are running themselves. And my kids—well, who knows? The fact of the matter is . . .”

He stopped in mid-sentence. I waited. He remained silent.

“The fact of the matter is what, Tony?” I asked.

His face clouded over. “The fact of the matter, Swede, is that you don't even remember this place.”

“What place?”

“This coffee shop.”

“Should I?” I didn't know what he was talking about.

“Yes, you should. Because the floor above this coffee shop used to be a cabaret. Me and you used to go here. In the seventies. Don't you remember? Eric Bentley started it . . . as a place for political theater. Guerrilla theater coming off the street and into the loft and made even wilder and more pungent.”

I leaned back. I remembered now. Oh, how long ago it had been! How very long. It always seemed to be raining when we attended a performance, and there was always the smell of damp clothes.

“That time, Tony, is dead and gone,” I finally said.

“Yes, with O'Leary in the grave.”

“And it is not coming back, Tony. There will be no Brecht revival in our lifetime, Tony. There will be no theater of the absurd. There is nothing around for us to do. Don't you understand that, Tony? LaMaMa doesn't exist anymore as we knew it. The Wooster Group is gone.
Dionysus ‘69
is a memory. That's why your move to dump everything and return to the theater disturbs me. Tony, there are no parts for me anymore because there is no audience. And it's going to be the same for you.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he replied, stirring his coffee reflectively.

The large, pained face of Karl Bonaventura suddenly loomed in the window behind Tony.

We quickly left the coffee shop and together with Karl walked to his sister's apartment. It was in one of those large old apartment buildings that fronted Broadway but had the entrance on the side street.

The moment I walked in, I realized that Karl had told the truth, as sad as it was. Nothing seemed to have been touched in nine years. It appeared that even the clothes Jill had dropped on a chair before her murder had been left. The apartment looked as if its tenant could return at any time and continue her existence.

I sat down quickly. The realization that I had entered a shrine of Karl Bonaventura's making made me weak.

The apartment was small. A living room. One small bedroom. Kitchen and bathroom. It had obviously once been part of a very large floor-through apartment and then divided and subdivided as many of the old West Side buildings had been.

“Nothing has been touched except to clean,” Karl said, and his face registered a little bit of shame, a little bit of defiance, and a great deal of grief. I looked quickly at Tony, who also seemed overcome by the shrine.

“Only these are new,” Karl said, pointing to a vase full of freshly cut carnations—red and white—on the small coffee table.

“I bring her flowers from time to time,” he said.

Tony stared at me. We both had the same thought. This large man with us was possibly deranged. That kind of grief and denial could not last nine years with such intensity.

I let my eyes wander about. Jill had liked bright bold colors. The furniture was all obviously secondhand—the computer had told me she was unemployed at the time of her death—but had been re-covered with bright fabrics. The lamp shades were particularly raucous in color—a few of them even striped blues, whites, reds, oranges.

“How did she support herself?” I asked.

“She's a songwriter,” her brother said. “She has a hard time. She can't get a break. She does all kinds of odd jobs—waitress, typist, you know.”

It was very disconcerting to hear him use the present tense—as if she was still alive.

“What kind of songs?”

“Not that rock-and-roll garbage,” he declared, wringing his large powerful hands together.

“Beautiful stuff—folk songs. I think you would call them folk songs.”

“Did you help her out financially?”

“She doesn't want my help. I keep offering, but she refuses. Only once a year would she take anything.”

“Why once a year? You mean at Christmas?” I pressed.

“No. It was funny. Once a year she needed twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“For what?”

“She never said. She just needed it. And she wanted it a certain way. She wanted twenty-five hundred-dollar bills.”

“Didn't you think that strange?” Tony asked.

“Sure. It was strange. But she wanted it and I gave it to her. I would have given her a helluva lot more.”

“So you gave it to her every year?”

“Well. The year she was murdered. And the year before that. And the year before that. I think three years in all.”

What an odd development. I didn't know what to make of it.

So I changed the subject. “Tell me about her cat.”

“Oh, Missy. I really didn't like that cat. She was crazy. A big old white cat with longish hair. Jill told me she was one-fifth Persian. But Jill loved her very much. Hell, she used to write notes to her.”

“Write notes?”

“Yes. I'm not lying. When you get a chance, go into the kitchen. All her unpaid grocery and cleaning bills are still tacked on the bulletin board. Turn them over. You'll see. She used to leave notes near Missy's food dish. She'd ask Missy how she liked her new songs. As if Missy could read.”

“What happened to Missy?”

He stood up suddenly and stared around the room as if he had heard something . . . as if in his deranged mind his sister was approaching or leaving.

“I don't know what happened to the cat,” he said. “My sister had a neighbor who held an extra set of keys to her apartment. After Jill was murdered a neighborhood kid showed up and said that Jill had told him to take care of the cat if anything happened to her. The neighbor let the kid in. And he took the cat. Well, at least Missy got a good home.”

“Who was the kid?” Tony asked.

“We never found out. A kid. Just a kid. From the neighborhood.”

Karl Bonaventura sat down again. Then he stood up again. He seemed to be getting more and more agitated by our questions.

“Do you want to look around?” he asked. I nodded but did not move. He stood up again. “Well, take your time. Look all you want. I have to get back to work. Just shut the door when you leave; it locks automatically.” He left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

“He frightens me and I don't trust him,” I said to Tony.

“He frightens me also,” Tony admitted.

I closed my eyes. The apartment was oppressive. It was not the kind of shrine or memorial that one could deal with rationally. Jill Bonaventura seemed to hover about every piece of furniture.

“We won't learn anything here, Swede,” I heard Tony say.

“I think you're wrong. I think we'll learn everything here.”

“That man is crazy, Swede. He really believes his sister is alive when he comes in here. He's hypnotized with grief over her memory, yet he really doesn't admit she's dead. Swede, you can't take anything he says seriously.”

“I took very seriously what he said about Jill's cat. And about the twenty-five hundred dollars he gave her for three years prior to her death.”

“Do you think a neighborhood kid stole the cat? And if he did . . . so what? Maybe he thought he could sell it.”

“Tony, listen, I don't know what any of what he told us means . . . but I feel that I'm in the center of things . . . do you understand? Just sitting here . . . don't you feel it?”

“You're getting very weird, Swede. What are you trying to tell me? That being here in this apartment is sending you into some mystical realm? Are you becoming a psychic, Swede? Don't we have enough trouble?”

I opened my eyes and looked around at the many multicolored lamp shades. I did feel something very weird. A sense that I was grappling with the entire evil . . . a sense perhaps that both Karl Bonaventura and Georgina Kulaks would kill, could kill—perhaps had killed.

It was as if all seventeen of the victims over the years were wired into that vase of carnations. It was as if they were watching me perform and they had the correct script . . . only they. I became more and more uncomfortable.

“Let's look over the bedroom,” I said to Tony.

We walked into the small room, dominated by a low double bed. There was a floor lamp, a chest, one bookcase, and a small dressing table with a mirror.

On the wall were three Japanese prints. Each one featured an ox. I had seen them before . . . they were prints associated with Zen Buddhism. The ox was the mind that had to be tamed and refined and brought to enlightenment.

Something else was familiar . . . something else I had seen before.

I sat down suddenly on the bed. All of the pictures were crooked.

“What's the matter, Swede? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Those pictures are crooked,” I replied.

“So what?”

“The Van Gogh print in Jack Tyre's apartment was also crooked.”

“A lot of pictures on a lot of walls are crooked, Swede. That's the way of the world.”

I ignored his comment. “Tony, do you remember that Mother Goose Rhyme, ‘There Was a Crooked Man'?”

“I wasn't a big reader, Swede.”

I recited it for him:

There was a crooked man,

And he went a crooked mile,

He found a crooked sixpence

Against a crooked stile;

He bought a crooked cat,

Which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together

In a little crooked house.

Tony stared at me. Then he quickly straightened the pictures and sat down on the bed beside me.

“That takes care of that, Swede.”

“It takes care of nothing, Tony. Don't you see?”

“See what?”

“All these tiny little crazy things . . . toy mice and crooked pictures and leaf bouquets and cats who vanish with nonexistent relatives and dingy apartments maintained as shrines. Don't you see?”

“See what?” he repeated.

I couldn't answer him. I lay back on the bed. Seventeen beautiful people had died in pain and terror. For what?

Tony lay down beside me. The moment he put his hand on my face I knew we were going to make love again, right there, on Jill Bonaventura's bed.

***

We lay in the bed afterward for a long time. Neither of us spoke. The afternoon shadows were beginning to envelop us. From time to time I heard sounds, as if Jill's cat Missy was prowling about—her large white cat whom she had loved dearly.

Finally Tony said, “Let's get out of here.”

“Not yet, Tony, not yet. I want to look at those bills in the kitchen. The ones her brother told us about. The ones on which she wrote her notes to her cat.”

Tony groaned. “Even you, Swede, don't write notes to your cats.”

“How do you know that?”

He didn't answer. We dressed quickly. Again I had that feeling that although we had made love, Tony was not my lover. Age? Was it age? Was I beginning finally to view sex as a function? As a necessary script? My God!

The bills were thumbtacked to a small bulletin board in the kitchen. They were nine years old. Bills from druggists and bodegas and cleaning establishments.

“I wonder if her brother paid them,” Tony said.

I spread the soiled bills out on the small table. On the back of each one was a sad silly note to her cat. “Dear Missy” each one started out. And then: “I hope you like your food. What do you think of these lyrics?” And then there was a stanza or two of a song she was writing—usually about love and mountain streams . . . or husbands dying in the war. Often mawkish. Often cliché. But sometimes lovely.

It was easy to imagine her writing the notes and then slipping them under the cat's food bowl. Yes, it was so easy to imagine it. Foolish. Charming. The kind of inexplicable behavior that cats seem to elicit in their glorious way. They make their humans into lovable fools.

The last bill was dated only two days before her death. It was from a pharmacy, and I couldn't read the druggist's writing. The bill totaled $11.60.

I turned it over. It was a different kind of note. It read: “Dear Missy. Your trip to the Desolate Swamp will be gentle. I promise you. You'll ride in the front. No crate for you. And you'll have all the hacked chicken you want. Without sesame sauce.”

I pushed the note away from me, toward the center of the table. Tony took it and read it. “What the hell was she talking about? These aren't song lyrics.”

“It was probably the last thing she wrote on earth, Tony. The very last thing.” We both stared at the small piece of soiled paper.