Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) (9 page)

“Why?”

“That's where we would have found something important.”

“But you thought that slip of paper was important at the time. Or you wouldn't have sent me on that crazy trip to the Desolate Swamp.”

“I told you before. Karl probably forged that. To kill you . . . or both of us. He knew we would follow it up. He wants us out of the way.”

“Why? Do you think he killed his sister? Man, the guy is psychotic from grief.” He sat up and looked at me wide-eyed. “Or do you think he killed the others?”

I took another sip of the brandy. It was spring in New York. I usually drank brandy only in the winter. How old-fashioned I am.

“A lot of things were going through my mind during lunch with that producer, Tony. A lot of things.”

“You mean you discovered that Karl Bonaventura is a reincarnated Philoctetes. What would Sophocles think about that? He wrote the goddamn play.”

“Be serious, Tony. We have a lot of dead people to care for.” My comment bit into him. He cursed under his breath and lay back down on the sofa.

“Just relax and listen, Tony. Okay? Just hear me out. First of all, there are really only two pieces of information that seemingly have nothing to do with the murders. The first is those damn leaf bouquets that I found in Jack Tyre's apartment.”

“You mean the valentines from that lady?”

“Right. And the second is what Karl Bonaventura told us about his sister. The money.”

“What money?”

“The twenty-five hundred dollars he said she asked for the year of her death and the two years previously.”

“I remember.”

“Two pieces of information. Two things. And both of them are decidedly unfeline. They seem to be outside of the case. Like burrs on a tail.”

“I think, Swede, you're around the bend. Who ever heard of assigning importance to evidence because it
doesn't
fit in with any other evidence? It's sort of a bizarre criterion.”

“Well, I'm doing it anyway. And I'm taking it one step further. I have this strange feeling that Karl Bonaventura and Georgina Kulaks know each other.”

“But they don't.”

“How do we know?”

“What you are really telling me, Swede, is that you have this crazy intuition that they have become, in your mind, prime suspects.”

“If the shoes fits, Tony, wear it.”

“There is no shoe. There is no fit.”

“Let's go to Bonaventura's apartment.”

“It's not an apartment. It's a small house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.”

“Well, let's pay him a visit. Let's look the place over. Let's see what we can find.”

He swung his legs over and sat up again, throwing up his hands in despair. “Don't you see how crazy you're talking, Swede? You're telling me that Karl and that woman Kulaks are in cahoots because each of them is connected to a piece of irrelevant evidence. Your logic is crazy.”

“We have nothing to lose, Tony.”

“Why don't you just accept the fact that Retro fired you and this case is beyond you and me and the whole goddamn police department?”

“Let me be the judge of that,” I replied.

“I'm talking too much, Swede. My face is starting to hurt.”

“Call Karl Bonaventura, Tony.”

He stared at me angrily for what seemed the longest time. Then he sighed wearily, took out his wallet, extracted a card, and walked to the phone. He dialed. He listened for a while. Then he hung up the receiver.

“There was a message on his answering service. He'll be away for a few days. Just leave your name and phone number, and he'll return the call as soon as he gets back.”

He walked back to the sofa and sat. I smiled broadly.

“What are you grinning at?” he asked. “I did what you told me.”

“Tell me, Tony. What is the iron law of life in New York in regard to the telephone?”

“You tell me.”

“Thou shalt not leave a message on your answering machine that you will be away for a few days. It is an open invitation to thieves.”

“Well, Bonaventura is not an intelligent psychotic,” Tony replied.

“Or maybe he went up to that overpass in Kingston to blow you away. And he had to give himself a couple of days' leeway to stand on the overpass to make sure he got you.”

“Assuming that he followed me to the car-rental place and knew what kind of car I rented,” Tony replied skeptically.

“Yes, assuming that. And then he decided to break the iron law because he knew his compatriot would call and he wanted her to rest easy, knowing that he was taking care of business.”

“His compatriot being Georgina Kulaks, I imagine. Oh, hell, Swede, this is really stretching it. Why would these two people murder seventeen innocent men and women? Including their loved ones.”

“Humor me, Tony. Let's go to Sheepshead Bay.”

“But he's not back yet from wherever he went.”

“I know that. So what?”

Tony took another sip of brandy. He looked at me suspiciously.

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“What am I saying?”

“That we should break in.”

“Yes.”

“I'm a law-abiding citizen, Swede. I may have left my wife and children. I may have delusions of theatrical grandeur at an advanced age. I may be throwing my copying business down the drain. But I'm not a thief.”

“Neither am I,” I responded.

“Then what do you call it?”

“I call it a necessity.”

Bushy had ambled back into the living room, tail up. He walked to the half-eaten chicken sandwich on the carpet, sniffed it, and turned away. Then he sniffed the brandy. He didn't like that either. He stretched, sat down, turned his large, lovely head in my direction, and gave me one of his unfathomable stares.

“Even your cat thinks you're crazy,” Tony said.

“My cat, Tony,” I corrected him, “thinks I am a good woman with very loyal friends.”

“You see, this is what happens when you confide in people. If I hadn't bared my soul to you, Swede, and told you that at a certain point in my disheveled childhood I was rather expert at breaking into cars, you never would have brought this damn thing up.”

“Do you have any cash on you, Tony?”

“Some,” he said warily.

“It's about ten dollars to Brooklyn, isn't it?”

“More like twenty-five, Swede. That's the tip of Brooklyn.” He paused. “When do you want to go?”

“Now, Tony, now!”

He looked very sad.

“What's the matter, Tony?” I asked, suddenly concerned about his sadness.

I sat down beside him on the sofa, and my right hand touched his bruised cheekbone for just a moment. Then I pulled my hand away but stayed close—our legs touching.

“Swede, if you want me to take you to Bonaventura's house in Brooklyn, I'll do it. If you want me to break in, I'll do it. If you want me to go upstate again, I'll do it. Whatever you want me to do, I'll do. But you're going to have to start being honest with me.”

“About what, Tony? How have I been dishonest?”

“About what you feel for me.”

“It's hard to talk about,” I replied.

“Since when are you shy, Swede?”

“Maybe you don't know me as well as you think.”

“Obviously.”

“Why are you getting mad, Tony?”

He pushed me away from him suddenly, stood up, and walked across the room to the window that fronted the street.

He turned. “I want to know what's going on. We make wild passionate love in a hotel room, and it's just like it never happened. You start treating me like I'm your brother or your secretary—not your lover.”

“You are my brother, Tony . . . and my friend and my helper and my lover—you're all those things to me, I think, Tony. Why do you need definition now? Why do you need confirmation?”

“Why? Because nothing is happening.”

“What should be happening?”

“I don't know. But something more. Look, Swede, remember when you came to my hotel room and we made love? Remember how bad I looked, how confused I was, how distraught because I had left my wife and kids to go back to a life that had crushed me once before? Well, after we made love that time, I was no longer frightened. Everything was going to be okay.”

He laughed one of his silly laughs, a self-mocking laugh that made me very uncomfortable.

“And then,” he charged dramatically, “you withdrew.”

“I didn't withdraw, Tony. You're forgetting about Jill Bonaventura's apartment, aren't you? We made love there.”

“Anecdotal evidence,” he replied wickedly. “And that kind of evidence doesn't change the fact that you've withdrawn.”

“I hate that word, Tony. It sounds like I'm some sort of official injection. Like insulin. Like I'm either injected or withdrawn.”

“Well, what would you call it?”

“Other things are happening.”

“People get murdered every day, Swede.”

“Don't pressure me, Tony.”

“I'm not pressuring you. I'm just trying to get a rational explanation.”

I walked to the window and stood beside him. We were both on edge, upset. I didn't want to talk any more about him and me. I didn't want to make love with him. But I also didn't want him angry. Not now. I needed him for a lot of reasons.

“Tony, did it ever occur to you that we're both middle-aged people who keep trying to recreate a postadolescent romantic fantasy. But no matter where or how we look, it simply isn't there.”

“I'm not interested in theory, Swede. Why aren't we sleeping together now? Right now. Get it? Okay. I'll take you to Brooklyn later on . . . to that lunatic's house. Okay? But let's go to bed now.”

I shook my head.

“Yes,” he said bitterly, “that's precisely what I'm talking about. Why has this almighty NO surfaced? When there had been that wonderful YES. Can't you just tell me the truth? Or maybe you've been hanging out with cops too much and everything comes out in the form of a report—like Retro.”

“It is very hard to describe, Tony.”

“Well . . . do you desire me when I'm gone?”

“Sometimes.”

“What determines ‘sometimes'?”

“I don't know, Tony.”

“I desire you all the time, Swede.”

“Maybe it's these awful murders.”

“And maybe it's the weather,” he retorted bitterly.

“What do you want me to do, Tony? Fake it? Lie about it? I'm trying to tell you the truth. The whole thing is as confusing to me as it is to you. Sometimes I want you. Sometimes I don't.”

“Sex as strawberries—in season, out of season.”

I was starting to get angry at him. “If it's too much to bear, just leave,” I said.

“That's fine with me,” he shouted. “I'm sick of playing these goddamn detective games.”

He took three ferocious steps toward the door. Then he stopped suddenly in his tracks.

“I'm going to calm down,” he said ruefully, “my face is beginning to hurt.” He laughed at himself and ran his fingers softly over the bruises.

“Let's both calm down.”

“We need a script,” he said, chuckling.

“Right. We could never improvise.”

“We need a script by a one-legged forty-two-year-old playwright who supports himself by selling T-shirts in front of Carnegie Hall and is desperately in love with a ballet dancer who supports herself by riding an elephant in the circus. The elephant's name is . . .” He paused and cocked his head.

“Alice,” I offered.

“No, too American.”

“Greta.”

“Too European.”

“Honey.”

“Too hard to remember.”

“Lutzi.”

“Now, that's a beautiful name. How the hell did you think of that, Swede?”

“I don't know. I think there was a friend of my grandmother's named Lutzi, but I don't know how to spell it.”

“What does it matter. It's an elephant's name.”

“I like the plot, Tony.”

“What plot?”

“The one your one-legged playwright is going to come up with.”

“So do I.”

“It'll be sort of working-class romantic.”

“Exactly.”

“Like you.”

“Exactly. Being torn to pieces by unrequited love and a copying business I can't seem to get rid of.”

I walked up to him. We locked hands and went back to the sofa, sitting down in unison like an old farm couple.

Bushy picked up his tail in a huff and moved to the geographic center of the carpet.

Tony grasped my hand tightly. “Swede, do you remember that first term we knew each other in the Dramatic Workshop?”

“Tony . . . that must have been around 1971.”

“Probably . . . twenty years at least. But do you remember that workshop performance we did? A sort of abbreviated script based on Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon.”

“No. I don't.”

“It's about a devoted Communist arrested during the Soviet purges. He's brainwashed into confessing he was a traitor.”

“I know the story, Tony, it's just that I don't remember the production.”

“Sure . . . you must remember. It was during the summer term and the air-conditioning broke down.”

The bell rang in my head. I did remember. Of course I remembered it. “And they brought in that huge prehistoric fan which that like a plane propeller, and the minute it was turned on it blew all kinds of paper out the window,” I recalled, and we both laughed at the memory of absurd notes flying down onto Broadway.

“Do you remember the set I designed for that performance?”

“Vaguely. It was like a blanket. Right?”

“An enormous horse blanket. I stretched it across the stage. It was very beat-up. And then I stenciled an enormous hammer and sickle on the blanket in brilliant red . . . but I obscured half of the design. And that was the entire set.”