Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
How to Wash a Cat (24 page)
Ivan stood up from his stooped position near the front door to greet me. “Your neighbor’s looking for you,” he said as he helped one of the movers through the entrance.
“I’m sure he is,” I replied, ducking as my chest of drawers soared past. I had somehow managed to avoid Monty on my way out the door earlier that morning.
Twenty minutes later, most of the contents of my apartment had been squeezed into the flat above the Green Vase. What wouldn’t fit upstairs had been left in the showroom. I leaned against the cashier counter, surveying the crowded chaos, numbed by the magnitude of the mess.
Ivan cracked open the front door and called inside, “I should be able to finish up the brickwork tomorrow morning.” His tool belt jingled from the assortment of hammers and other implements hanging in its loops. “I’ll swing by to pick you up in about half an hour to go to the construction site.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”
He waved and turned to leave. “Full Monty, incoming, twelve o’clock,” he warned.
Smiling weakly, I braced myself for Monty’s entrance. I peeked through the glass sections of the door as it swung shut behind Ivan.
Monty was chugging across the street in high gear, the purple and green silk tie he’d cinched around his neck flapping in the breeze. A freshly cut, violet-colored tulip clung to his lapel as he vaulted up the steps to the Green Vase and barged through the front door.
“It looks like you’ve moved out of your old place,” he said, snooping through the piles of my belongings.
I nodded, wiping a film of grit from my forehead. “This is the last of it.”
Monty strode over to the closed hatch to the basement and began to hop up and down on it. “So, I was wondering,” he said, the floor squeaking as he bounced up and down. “Who else knows about the tunnel?”
Rupert peeked around the corner of the stairs, investigating the source of the commotion. His furry head jiggled as he followed Monty’s jack-hammering legs.
“Rupert and Isabella,” I replied, opting to leave Mr. Wang out of the picture for the time being.
Rupert decided to join in on the hop. He trotted up to Monty and began to bounce beside him.
“Ivan?” Monty asked, his gaze focused on Rupert, who was struggling to catch up to Monty’s energetic tempo.
“No,” I replied, shaking my head at the sight of them.
Monty stopped hopping and bent down towards Rupert’s panting fluff of fur. “I can’t believe
you
didn’t tell me about the tunnel, either. I thought we were mates!”
you
didn’t tell me about the tunnel, either. I thought we were mates!”
Monty walked back towards the front of the store; Rupert paced amicably behind him. “I want to show you something in my studio,” he said. “It’s a painting I’ve borrowed from Dilla.”
“What kind of painting?” I asked skeptically. I felt exhausted from the effort of the move.
“One of a warehouse,” Monty said with an air of exaggerated nonchalance. “With a line of tulips across the front.”
He leaned back against the cashier counter as I stared at him, a recognition triggering somewhere in the recesses of my memory.
Monty yawned into his hand and then stretched his long fingers out in front of his face, as if examining his manicure. “It’s the warehouse that was owned by that Leidesdorff fellow.”
“I saw that painting in Miranda’s office!” I exclaimed as the canvas on Miranda’s wall suddenly flashed into focus.
The corners of Monty’s mouth pushed down, an impressed look on his face. “Yes, I suppose Miranda had it in her office for a while. She doesn’t keep anything in there for long. Always looking to trade up.”
Monty slapped the side of his neck with the inside of his hand, releasing a whiff of his citrus aftershave. “So are you coming or what?”
WE CROSSED THE darkening street to Monty’s brightly lit studio. He unlocked the door and held it open, ushering me inside.
In stark contrast to the dusty, cramped, and disorganized Green Vase showroom, the smaller square footage of Monty’s studio felt spacious. Paintings were artfully spaced throughout the room on creamy, off-white walls. Four-inch spotlights had been carefully aimed to highlight each frame. Partitions crisscrossed the room to provide additional wall space.
Monty glided across the polished tile floor and led me to an easel at the back of the room. An arrangement of fresh flowers, mostly pink roses, perched on the corner of his desk, near a rounded divot that marked the spot where Monty propped up his feet when he leaned back in his chair.
Monty picked up the corner of a sheet hanging over the easel and, with a grand flourish, flipped it up.
It was the painting I’d studied in Miranda’s office. The same large, barn-like structure dominated the picture. It was situated on the edge of the water. I now realized that the lush row of purple flowers along the front of the building were tulips. Each tulip head was represented by three upward swinging brush strokes, creating the familiar three-petaled design I now immediately associated with Leidesdorff.
“How do you know this is Leidesdorff’s warehouse?” I asked, my eyes scanning the canvas.
Monty pumped his eyebrows. “Because it matches this.” He pulled out an ink sketch matching the building in the painting. “I copied this out of a book at the library.”
“And the writing in the bottom corner?” I asked, indicating the smudge I’d been unable to make out in Miranda’s office. “Who’s the painter?”
Monty raised a finger and pulled out a magnifying glass from his desk drawer. He walked around to the front of the painting and leaned over the writing. “It’s hard to say,” he said, squinting as he rotated the lens back and forth. “The name is kind of hard to read.”
Monty slid the magnifying glass towards the middle of the painting, running it along the stretch of tulips fronting the warehouse. Suddenly he stopped. His pale green eyes narrowed, and his small mouth puckered.
He shook his head back and forth as if to clear it and refocused the lens of the magnifying glass. A disturbed, shuffling sound bubbled up from where he had plastered himself against the painting.
“There’s a flashlight in the top drawer,” he said, his eyes not leaving their position inches away from the row of tulips. “Toss it over, would you?”
I fished the light out of the drawer and handed it to him. “What is it?” I asked. “What do you see?”
Monty grumbled bitterly under his breath. Finally, he leaned back from the easel and stretched his back, a sour expression on his face. “Someone’s having a go with us,” he said, handing me the magnifying glass.
I took up Monty’s position near the bottom of the painting. With the flashlight in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other, I leaned in to the spot he’d been studying.
There was something in the leaves, lurking just below the purple heads of the three-petaled tulips. Something white and round and fluffy—with orange-tipped ears and a pleasant, sleepy smile on his face.
“Rupert?” I asked, incredulous.
Monty sighed. “And Isabella. She’s a couple of inches to the left.”
I slid the magnifying glass down to the signature on the bottom corner that Monty had been unable to decipher.
As the writing expanded under the lens, I bit down on my lip to stifle the exclamation that nearly leapt out of my mouth.
The painting had been signed with a sloppy, looping “O,” trailed by a long, squiggling paraph.
Chapter 28
I’D BECOME SO engrossed in the painting, I’d nearly forgotten about Ivan. As Monty bent back over the canvas with the magnifying glass, I saw Ivan’s figure ambling up the street towards the Green Vase. If Monty caught sight of Ivan, there would be no way to keep him from joining us at the construction site.
“Well, that’s very interesting,” I said, stepping back from the easel.
Monty remained crouched over the canvas, absorbed in the rendering of the two white cats hiding in the tulip leaves.
“I, uh, hmm,” I said, scrambling for an excuse to leave. “I need to get back to the store to, uh, feed the cats.”
I began backing away towards the door, but something on the corner of Monty’s desk caught my eye. It was a small wire cage—just like the one I’d found in the mouth of the kangaroo.
“What’s this?” I asked, reaching for the wire object.
Monty glanced up, still distracted by the painting. “Oh, funny story,” he said, returning his face to the magnifying glass. “My dry cleaner said he found that in the front pocket of one of my shirts. I figure he got me mixed up with someone else.”
I turned the cage over in my hands, letting the light reflect off of the metal wires. It was the perfect shape for an acquisitive cat to have carried off in her mouth as she ran down the stairs from the kitchen to the Green Vase showroom—and leapt up onto Monty’s shoulders.
“Thanks for showing me the painting,” I said. My hand turned the knob behind my back as I slipped the second wire cage into my pocket. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Ivan had almost reached the Green Vase. “See you tomorrow, Monty.”
Monty mumbled something from behind the easel, but I didn’t wait for a clarification. I eased out the front door and scooted across the street to where Ivan was walking up the steps to the Green Vase. I scampered up behind him and swept him inside as quickly as possible.
“Get down,” I insisted. “Monty might see you.”
“Wha—,” was all he got out before I squashed his head down behind the counter.
Carefully, cautiously, I peeped over the edge and peered back across to the studio. Monty was still studying the painting.
“I was over at Monty’s,” I hissed to the crouching Ivan. “He almost saw you coming down the street.”
Ivan looked up, amused. “And you’d prefer not to bring him along?”
“I don’t want the entire population of Jackson Square to know about it by noon tomorrow,” I replied. Ivan chuckled.
My eyes were still focused on Monty. I watched as he stood up and raised his index finger into the air, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him. He strode briskly across the studio to the stairs that led to the second floor.
“He’s going upstairs to get something,” I reported down to Ivan. “This is our chance.”
“Great,” Ivan grunted from underneath the counter, “just give me the word.”
“Now,” I whispered urgently, swinging open the front door and whisking him through it. I quickly turned the tulip key in the lock, and the two of us sprinted down the street. We pulled up as soon as we rounded the corner, both of us breathing hard.
“I think we made it,” I said, peeking around the side of a building as I grabbed the stitch in my side.
IVAN LED ME into the financial district and its forest of dark, dozing office buildings. The closed eyelids of the unlit windows snored in a deep, restful silence, undisturbed by the blinking electronic signs persistently flashing time, temperature, and market measurements to the vacant streets.
A last, lawyer-looking type straggled wearily down stone steps to the sidewalk, lugging a pile of briefs that would steal half of tonight’s much needed sleep. His crisp, legal uniform had wilted from the day’s endeavors; it was crumpled with perspiration and mental fatigue. He fell in line behind us as we approached Market Street’s bright, wide-awake glare.
Ahead of us, a homeless man pushed a rusting, metal shopping cart, piled high with a pathetic collection of crinkling plastic bags and discarded cardboard. He turned onto Market’s main drag, filled, on such a clear tepid night, with a number of similarly bedraggled figures, shuffling to position themselves on the best piece of concrete. The rotting human forms huddled on the grimy sidewalk underneath filthy, lice-infested blankets, their bodies almost unrecognizable from the toll of poverty’s accelerated decay.
We walked past an uncountable number of these downtrodden shadows, carefully shading our eyes from their pleading faces and handwritten cardboard signs. A swirling wind whistled through the whole of us, stirring up an odorous stench of stale body odor and callous inhumanity.
Despite all of her fantastic, overblown stories of instant success and rapidly acquired wealth, San Francisco has not been kind to many, if not most, who have washed up on her shore. But that reality has never seemed to slow the relentless, ever-incoming tide chasing her illusion.
WE STOPPED AT the corner of Market and Montgomery, waiting for a traffic light to change. I looked down at my feet, noticing a bronze flagstone set into the sidewalk. It was a marker commemorating the city’s original shoreline. The rectangular inset included a map depicting the original delineation of the city’s boundaries. I stooped down over the marker, mentally comparing it to Oscar’s parchment until a laughing Ivan grabbed my hand and pulled me into the street.
“You’re turning into your uncle,” he yelled over the noise of the traffic. “He used to spend hours staring at that stone.”
Our feet found the curb on the opposite side of the street, and we headed down New Montgomery, past the Palace Hotel where Dilla’s cat costume auction would be held at the end of the week.
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