Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) (7 page)

“Well,” Tony said, “I know what hacked chicken is. A Chinese dish. I used to eat it all the time. But I liked it with the sesame sauce. What cat wouldn't like cold sliced chicken?”

I read the note again. Missy was going on a journey. A long journey, or there wouldn't have been mention of a crate. And she was going in a car or a truck. And Jill had promised Missy that she would be riding in the front seat next to the driver. I told my thoughts to Tony. He agreed at first. But then he said: “No. Wrong. The whole thing is some kind of fantasy.”

“Why fantasy?” I asked.

“Desolate Swamp. There's no such place except in the imagination. It's a romantic metaphor for something.”

“You mean like the veterinarian?”

“That's stretching it a bit.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know. I did hear of a place called the Great Dismal Swamp. I think it's in Georgia.”

I kept picking up the paper and putting it down. Was it possible that the neighborhood boy who had taken Missy was the one who had taken her on this journey to the Desolate Swamp? Yes. This was no romantic metaphor. Jill Bonaventura had given me something concrete—across time and space.

“Tony, I think there is a real place called Desolate Swamp.”

“In the land of Oz.”

“No, a real place. We're going to have to find it.”

“How?”

“Topographical maps. Atlases. I don't know, Tony. That'll be your job.”

“Swede, this is a long shot. A very pathetic long shot. We're grasping at straws. We're starting to look stupid.” I silenced him by putting my fingers on his lips.

Chapter 12

“So, Abelard, if you can hear me—and I am sure you can hear me, even under the furniture—answer me these questions. Why did her brother give Jill Bonaventura twenty-five hundred dollars each year? Why did Georgina Kulaks send Jack Tyre a leaf bouquet? Why did that neighborhood kid take Missy after Jill Bonaventura was murdered? Why did Jack Tyre take his cat into the park every weekend? Why did the murderer leave a toy mouse for each cat?”

I shut up, then cocked my ear and waited. I knew Abelard was hiding under the large mahogany desk I was seated at. I heard him. Of course, I had given up all hope of ever seeing him. But I could communicate with him other than by cat-sitting chores.

No answer. I tapped the top of the desk to get his attention. “And why did the murderer make the pictures crooked?” It was hopeless. Abelard would not help me.

I stared at one of Mrs. Salzman's many wall clocks. It was 11:20 in the morning. Tony was at the large library on Forty-Second Street trying to find something . . . anything . . . about a place called Desolate Swamp, which may not have been a place at all, but may have been some romantic knot in Jill Bonaventura's heart.

Tony had all three numbers—my apartment, Retro, and Mrs. Salzman. The moment he found something, he would call.

I left the sitting room, where I had been conversing with the submerged Abelard—if indeed he was in that room at all—and went into the kitchen to start preparing his food. I really couldn't remember when I had fed him last because I kept altering the times I visited him. Poor Abelard . . . he was saddled with an erratic cat sitter.

The moment I entered the kitchen, I saw the note pinned, or rather Scotch-taped, to the refrigerator door.

My heart sank. Had Mrs. Salzman terminated my services? Had she found out I was visiting poor Abelard in an erratic pattern?

No! It was not a termination notice. On the contrary, she asked if I could cat sit for Abelard a few more times,
YES
, I wrote in large letters with a red Magic Marker on the bottom of the note. God bless you, Mrs. Salzman, wherever you are, and whomever.

I opened the refrigerator door and laughed out loud.

Inside, on the second shelf, were nine tiny pink mice, all lined up.

Each one had a chocolate nose.

Each one had a chocolate tail.

Each one had chocolate ears.

Who were they for? Me? Or Abelard? I picked one up and sniffed it. Marzipan. Nine little marzipan mice. I closed the door. Maybe tomorrow I would consume them. Let them rest now. I listened for some sound of movement. None. It came to me . . . the idea . . . that I should one day bring Bushy and Pancho to Mrs. Salzman's apartment. Maybe they could flush out Abelard. If not they, who?

I was so lost in the possibilities surrounding this fantasy that I didn't hear the phone until it had rung three times. Then I picked it up. It was Tony, and he was so excited I could barely understand him. He told me to meet him in a bar on Madison between Fortieth and Thirty-Ninth Street. It had an Irish name—something like Emerald Rock. In an hour.

***

The bar was ghastly—crowded, noisy, stuffy. I spotted him at one of the tables eating a hot turkey sandwich with a knife and fork. In front of him was an enormous glass of what seemed to be ale.

“Swede,” he called out. I slipped into the chair across the table from him and stared at the sandwich.

“Do you want one?” he asked, smiling broadly. He was obviously enjoying it.

“What did you learn in the library?”

Carefully, almost ceremoniously, he laid his knife and fork down, took a sip of the ale, then wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.

“Fascinating stuff, Swede,” he said.

“What do you mean, fascinating?”

He lowered his voice. “Did you ever hear of the Goddess Astarte?”

“No.”

“A goddess in ancient Babylonia. A kind of ferocious lady who would drink blood on occasion. But she also had her kindly side. And according to ancient myth, once a year she journeyed into the bowels of the earth to bring back a god of fertility who was being imprisoned there. The moment he was safe on the surface of the earth, the flowers began to bloom, and poof—there was spring.”

“A very nice myth, Tony, but what does this have to do with Jill Bonaventura's note to her cat, Missy?”

“Well, Swede, according to the ancient Babylonian texts, the place where the God of Spring was always imprisoned in the underworld was called Desolate Swamp.”

I didn't know how to reply. I was dumbfounded. I didn't know what I had expected, but I hadn't expected this. I stared at Tony.

Suddenly the sides of his face began to quiver, and a moment later he burst into laughter. “You believed me . . . you believed it . . .” he kept repeating, laughing until the tears rolled down his cheeks.

There was nothing I could do but sit there and wait until he laughed himself out at my expense.

“I'm sorry, Swede,” he said after he had finally collected himself.

“Forget it, Tony, it's just that sometimes your perpetually arrested adolescence is tedious.”

“Well, you won't find this tedious,” he replied, slapping a road map onto the table.

I picked the map up. It read: “Full-Color Interstate 87 Map—New York to Montreal—Montreal to New York.”

“What is Eighty-Seven?” I asked.

“The New York Thruway.” He opened the map and spread it out.

His finger started moving north on 87. “Here we go, Swede, going north. We reach Albany in a couple of hours. That's halfway to Canada. We keep going. See, there's Lake George. Now we go a little further. Schroon Lake. You see it? Fine. Now, just get off the highway and go about ten miles east. What do you see?”

The letters were small and blurred and hard to read. I squinted. They began to make sense. I put the letters together:
“DESOLATE SWAMP
.
”

“My God, Tony, it's right on the map. It exists as a real place.”

“Right. That's the Adirondacks, Swede, that's a long way up.”

I studied the words again. There seemed to be a lot of ponds and small streams in the area. Next to Desolate Swamp was something called Glidden Swamp.

I sat back in the chair and smiled at Tony. It was the first real break we had made in the case. Or rather, it was the first destination we could see.

“You have to go up there, Tony.”

His face dropped. “Swede, this map is all very nice, but Jill Bonaventura wrote that note nine years ago. Her cat is long dead. So what am I going up there for?”

“I don't know.”

“Then why go up?”

“It seems to me to be the intelligent thing to do.”

“Intelligent? Fine! But what do I look for?”

“Anything.”

“I don't have a car, Swede. I left it with my wife.”

“Then rent one.”

He grimaced. Then he picked up his knife and fork, and proceeded to finish his sandwich, staring at me from time to time. When the entire plate was finished, he pushed it away and said, “I'll go up there, Swede, but believe me, I'm beginning to feel like a crooked picture on the wall.”

“Welcome back to the theater, love.”

Chapter 13

My tiny Retro cubicle had become crowded. I sat there grimacing at a thick sheaf of photos that I had somehow found room for. They were crime-scene photos, almost all the ones the computer could cough up after arguing with that madman Bert the Turk . . . I mean, Bert Turk. He didn't want to give me anything. It was hard to believe that the first time he saw me he had proposed marriage.

All the excitement had faded. I had asked for the photos to see if there were other crooked pictures . . . if the pictures hung in the other victims' apartments were crooked like the ones I had found in the Tyre and Bonaventura apartments. Mother Goose was very powerful. I did not play around with Mother Goose. The crooked man with the crooked cat could well have been in the mind of the madman who murdered seventeen people.

The joke, alas, was on me. The crime-scene photos, which had been taken over the years, did not cover the walls—just the victims. All I had on the desk were grisly photos of the bodies when they were found. No walls. No pictures. I recited the Mother Goose rhyme over to myself silently. It was logical to follow that up, but the threads were now lost.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” A voice rang out from behind me. I half turned in the cramped space. It was Judy Mizener.

“No. I didn't.”

She eased herself into the cubicle and leaned against my crowded desk.

“How are the Retro meetings going? Now that I'm no longer invited, I miss them.”

Mizener smiled. “The last one was pretty good. One of the detectives developed a profile.”

“A profile? Of whom?”

“Of the killer.”

“Based on what?”

“Well, based on the FBI data.”

“But I told you his figures may have been right but his interpretation of those figures absurd.”

“Yes, I know you did. I remember what you said—that they were related to physiological cycles in cats. Well, just because you say it doesn't make it right. No one else in Retro believes it either.”

There was an awkward silence. She turned awkwardly to stare at the pile of crime-scene photos on my desk.

“You know,” she said in an odd voice, “we're about the same age.”

“I thought,” I replied, “I was a little bit younger.” My reply had nothing to do with looks. And I had no idea at all how old she really was. It was a gentle rebuke at her stubbornness—an almost geriatric inability at Retro to enlarge their analysis.

“Probably,” she said thoughtfully, ignoring my quip, “if we had met under some other circumstances, we would have been good friends.”

“Who knows?” I replied.

“After all,” she continued, smiling, “we both like the same things.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Oh, I mean theater . . . and all that.” It was odd how many people one met in one's life who at one time or another aspired to the theater. It was like a plague.

“I didn't know you had any connection with the theater,” I said sarcastically. “You don't seem to understand the importance of terms like ‘integrity of the script.'”

“What the hell does that mumbo jumbo mean?” she asked, her eyes flaring in anger.

“Well, it seems absurd to me that the only reason this case is in Retro is that a toy mouse was found alongside the corpses. Since the toy mouse is still the center of your case, the next steps should concentrate on cats. Right? Mice and cats go together. That's what is meant by ‘integrity of the script.'”

“I didn't come here to argue with you,” she replied.

“Why did you come here?”

“To ask you if you are losing your mind.”

“I think I'm quite sane.”

“Sane? Then why are your computer inquiries keyworded with such items as ‘leaf bouquets,' ‘swamps,' ‘crooked pictures,' and a whole lot of other nonsense? You're starting to embarrass a lot of people, Alice. And I thought it was part of our arrangement to keep you on that you maintain a low profile.”

“How low?”

“It doesn't matter anymore. I came here now to tell you the arrangement is finished. Just submit your final bill and expenses, and we'll pay it.”

Her words stunned me. I hadn't expected to be fired. I had thought our differences were all ironed out. Besides, Tony was on his way upstate. Things were beginning to break open.

“Can we postpone this?” I asked gently. “Can you give me another week?”

“Why?”

“Because I have developed something . . . I have found out something.”

“That a cat has ten lives?” she asked contemptuously. “Look, Alice . . . Miss Nestleton . . . this has been a big mistake from the beginning. You're lost in some never-never-land, and this is basically a police investigation.”

“One would never know it,” I said gently.

She stared at me angrily. Then she said, “Be out of here in an hour! And remember, the moment you leave these premises today, you no longer have access to Retro data. Don't even try to make inquiries of any kind.”

She walked so quickly away that the draft from her departure sent loose papers spinning off my desk. I sat in that cubicle for about an hour without moving. Then the shock wore off, and I packed as best I could. When I left the building two hours later, I was carrying two stuffed shopping bags. No one said good-bye to me.

The moment I got out onto Centre Street my arms began to tremble. I put the shopping bags down. The weather looked threatening.

I felt little anger. Mostly sadness, a kind of numbing sadness. It wasn't like an acting part I had earned was being denied me. It was more like I had taken an examination and the examiner had failed me because she had misunderstood my answers.

It was the kind of sadness that comes when you realize that the logic of the whole situation was so disjointed that nothing good could come of it.

A familiar figure came in view—threading his way across the street between traffic.

It was Detective Rothwax. I didn't want to see anyone from Retro. I picked up my shopping bags and moved away from the entrance . . . to the uptown side of the building.

But it was too late. He had spotted me. He hesitated as if he couldn't decide to opt for me or the building entrance. Then he chose me.

He walked briskly up to me, stopped about two feet away, and said in an oddly stilted voice, “I'm sorry.”

“About what?” I replied.

“We heard that Mizener gave you the boot.”

“How could you have heard? It just happened.”

He didn't reply to that, but he gave me one of those infuriating cop looks that said he knew things before they happened because he was inside and I was outside and that's the way it always was . . . is . . . and will be . . . that he knew I was going to be fired even before Judy Mizener knew because Judy Mizener wasn't one of them either.

Then he turned away from me so that we were standing next to each other but not looking at each other . . . instead, sharing a view of the street.

“You know what I can do?” he asked, making a strange enveloping motion with his hand and then answering his own question. “I can point out the good guys and the bad guys.”

He waited for a response from me. There was none.

“I mean, even right now, here, on Centre Street. All these people walking by in front of me. If push comes to shove, I can point out to you the good guys and the bad guys.”

“Good for you,” I said finally, quietly, a bit sarcastically.

Rothwax pressed on. “That's the difference between you and me. I can read the street and you can't. I know what is going down and you don't. So I get a different perspective . . . a different way of looking at things . . . and when you start talking—”

“Spare me the tough-cop routine,” I said quickly, interrupting. This was getting to be a stupid conversation.

“All I'm saying is that there were bound to be problems.”

“Okay.”

“It was inevitable that you would irritate a lot of people.”

“Oh, come on . . . you and your friends got on me the moment I walked into that room. Before anyone had heard anything I had to say.”

“Because everyone knew what kind of approach you were going to take.”

“You mean they couldn't handle an intelligent approach?”

Rothwax didn't appreciate my quip. I could hear him swear underneath his breath. I realized in some strange sense that he was standing there like that in way of an apology. He was sorry that I had been fired because he didn't like to see anyone fired. It offended his Patrolmen's Benevolent Association's ethic.

“Listen, Detective, there is no doubt that you people are wonderful when it comes to street crimes. You're simply way out of my league. But when it comes to high crimes—”

“When it comes to what?”

“High crimes.”

“What the hell is a high crime?”

“Something like the toy-mouse murders. Or . . . let me put it another way—any crime that conceals some kind of grace.”

“Now you have lost me completely, lady.”

“Well, I lost Judy Mizener. Why shouldn't I lose you?”

He changed the subject. “That detective who recommended you . . . what the hell was his name.”

“Hanks,” I reminded him.

“Right. Hanks. Well, he told me you'd be a problem. He told me straight out.”

“Oh, did he? Poor Detective Hanks. Did you know that he also thought I was a fool at the beginning? Did you know that?”

“I don't know nothing about you and Detective Hanks, lady.”

“Well, he didn't think I was a fool at the end of the investigation, though. Oh, yes, Detective Hanks was a splendid street cop like yourself. He was really down and dirty. The trouble was that, although he was the first police officer on the scene after a grisly shooting in an East Village bar . . . although he had access to all the evidence and all the eyewitness testimony, when push came to shove, every bit of his brilliant street cop's report was wrong. He said it was a drug deal gone wrong. There were no drugs involved at all. He said it was A. It turned out to be B. He said C. It turned out to be D. He said apples. It turned out to be oranges. He thought the murder was about money. It turned out to be about a white cat. Do you understand, Detective Rothwax?”

“A white cat? No, I don't understand.”

“How about a whole string of white cats?”

“You've lost me.”

“How about a line of white cats that originated in the Moscow Art Theater? How about a line of white cats that people would murder for?”

“Calm down, lady. Calm down,” he said, moving away from me a bit.

“I am calm.”

“No . . . you're spinning your wheels. All I'm saying is that the whole deal went bad the first time you stepped into Retro.”

“Was that my fault? Was it my fault a bunch of juveniles started making catcalls?”

“You should have been prepared for it. You shouldn't have let it bother you.”

“Well, thank you for your advice, Detective.”

We were silent for a while. But Detective Rothwax didn't leave. And I didn't move. I wondered where Detective Arcenaux was. I wondered if he, too, knew that I had been fired.

“And I'll tell you something else . . .” he finally said, then paused, removed a roll of cough drops from his shirt pocket, offered me one, which I refused, and popped one into his mouth with a benevolent sigh, as if the world was now set right. “I think your theories are crazy. But I also think everything in that Retro blue book on the case is Grade A manure.”

“You mean the computer is inaccurate?”

“No . . . no . . . forget the computer. I mean I'm beginning to think that the toy-mouse connection is a scam. I don't think there is any connection between the murders at all. Nothing . . . nada.”

For some reason, he spat the cough drop out onto the street.

“You know,” he said, “when I was a kid, I had a cat.”

“That's nice,” I said. It came out sarcastic, but I hadn't meant it that way. I just didn't know how to respond. So what if he had a cat when he was a child? A lot of people do.

“But my mother made me get rid of him.”

“Why?”

“She was allergic to cats.”

“And you've been tormented ever since,” I teased.

“No. The cat had to go.”

“You mean like I had to go?”

“Sort of.”

“You mean I gave you people a rash?”

He got huffy. “Okay. All I wanted to say was I was sorry the way the whole stupid thing turned out.” And then he walked toward the building entrance and vanished through the swinging doors.

***

The shopping bags were so heavy that I decided to take a cab back to my apartment, and the moment I got into the cab the heavens opened and torrents of spring rain poured down. The cab crawled uptown through the rain. A block from my apartment the rain suddenly ceased, and by the time I left the cab the sun was out again.

I dragged my shopping bags up the stone steps, opened the outer door, and stepped into the vestibule, searching for my keys.

A man's hand reached out and touched my arm! Frightened, I dropped one of the shopping bags and stepped back against the door. The hand dropped away.

I turned and stared. Then I screamed. In front of me was the most horrible face I had ever seen—crisscrossed with white stripes.

“God! Shut up, Alice. It's me. Tony.”

I froze halfway toward the second scream. Yes, it was Tony. And those things on his face were bandages.