A Cat Called Cupid: A Romantic Comedy Novella (9 page)

Craig rushed
up the stairs, and I followed after. He made the first flight all right, but halfway up the second his shoe came off, and he tripped. He went down hard, his forehead making contact with the concrete riser with a sickening thud. He just lay there. It was truly a tragedy. He’d finally worked up the courage to play the part of Ann’s Knight in Shining Armor, and he wasn’t even going to make it onto the battlefield.

When he continued to lie
there inert, I started to worry. I licked his cheek in an attempt to revive him. When that didn’t work, I tried gently biting his ear. Nothing. I pawed at his head. Finally, I clambered onto his back and tugged at his hair with my teeth. This finally got results. Craig opened his eyes and made a clumsy attempt to shove me off. I jumped down. Slowly, he sat up.

I don’t know what had delayed Flavia in Craig’s apartment
. Perhaps she was looking around for a baseball bat or a cast-iron skillet to bean Cat Hater with, in case things got out of hand and Craig turned out to be as ineffectual a fighter as she feared he’d be. Or perhaps she’d felt a sudden urgent call of nature. Whatever had been keeping her, she came up the stairs empty-handed. She screamed when she saw Craig sitting in a crumpled heap on the stairs, blood streaming down his face and a large scrape festooning his left arm from wrist to elbow.

“Help! Somebody help!”
Flavia yelled.

Mrs. Jackson,
half a flight up, popped her head out her door.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Why are you yelling?”

“Jimmy tried to kill Craig! He pushed him down the stairs.” Flavia sounded hysterical.

Mrs. Jackson stopped looking irritable and moved on to looking
frightened.

“Where did he go?” she demanded. “Which way did he go? Is he armed? Does he have a gun?”

Flavia didn’t actually say that Jimmy had a gun, but somehow Mrs. Jackson got the idea that a heavily armed and homicidal Jimmy was hiding somewhere in the building, or at least that was the impression which Mrs. Jackson must have given the police when she called 911. I say this, not based on hearing the substance of her call, but on what happened soon after.

Five
minutes later, we were all in Ann’s apartment. Flavia was pressing a pack of frozen peas to Craig’s forehead while she glared at Cat Hater. Ann was cleaning the grit out of the gash in Craig’s arm while she glared at Craig. Cat Hater was glaring at me because—realizing that I might never have another chance—I’d taken this excellent but fleeting opportunity under the cover of chaos to finally fulfill my long-standing ambition to pee in Cat Hater’s shoes.

It was about then that we became aware that the police had the place surrounded.

“Come out with your hands in the air!” was our first clue. I peeked out the window. There were several officers with their guns trained on the apartment. The officer who was holding the megaphone repeated his order, “Leave your weapons and come out of the building.”

Immediately, stunned residents began to emerge.  
  

Mrs. Jackson came out,
wearing the world’s ugliest bathrobe and a mud mask obscuring her features—I’m still confused about when she found time to apply it and why she chose that task to perform after making a call to emergency services. Perhaps she was trying to soothe her rattled nerves. At any rate, she gave the officer-in-command such a fright that he dropped his megaphone.

The occupants of 12B came out accompanied by an agitated Fred who
, in an effort to calm himself, immediately set to work on liberating Mrs. Jackson’s geraniums from their pots.

Flavia and Ann, still holding ice
packs and gauze to Craig’s various injuries, stepped out onto the balcony. It was not until we were all assembled outside that I realized Cat Hater was not among those present.
 

I was the one
who finally located Mr. James Pigget, not that I was given any credit in the headlines the next day. I don’t think I was even mentioned in the police report. Nevertheless, it was I who flushed him from his hiding place.

While the human residents of the building were held under close observation in the courtyard, I was free to come and go as I pleased
. When a contingent of the police force—informed by a zealous Flavia that there was a malfeasant member of our party unaccounted for—went into My Lady’s apartment to investigate, I followed.

I discovered
Cat Hater’s whereabouts within seconds. I could detect his niffy aroma emanating from the closet.

The officers searched the apartment. They looked in the closet, turning over boxes and scattering
My Lady’s shoes and accessories. They did not find Cat Hater. I tried to push my way into the closet to assist them in their search, but I was roughly ejected.

I retreated under My Lady’s nightstand and observed the officers as they ransacked the
place. They were practically on top of Mr. James Pigget, and they didn’t even know it. I bided my time until all but one of the officers moved on to search elsewhere.

The remaining man—who
m I’d heard addressed as Al—was the best of the lot. Officer Al stayed behind in an attempt to restore order to My Lady’s shoe collection. I tentatively poked my head into the closet, and Al extended a hand in greeting.

Encouraged by this show of friendly feeling, I attempted to point Al in the right direction.

Obscured by a fabric pocket organizer hanging on the wall of the closet was a removable panel which led to a cavity in the interior recesses of the building’s plumbing system. I think it had been left accessible because of a chronic water leak. I knew it was roomy enough to encapsulate Cat Hater. I’d been trapped in there myself on one occasion. I had scratched and meowed for an hour before My Lady had realized what had happened to me and freed me from the musty confines of the cavity. In fact, it was probably that incident which had alerted Cat Hater to the existence of the cavity in the first place. I remember a lot of derisive and profane remarks regarding my intelligence being bandied about by him after I was hauled out, rumpled and covered in cobwebs.

This was my chance
to exact vengeance on Cat Hater for those spurious and uncalled-for remarks. I attracted Al’s attention with a firm and authoritative meow and made a leap at the pocket organizer. If I could get the organizer to fall, the panel—none too secure in the first place—would come down with it.

My first attempt was a dismal failure. I didn’t even make contact with the organizer. What I needed was a running start. Unfortunately, my runway was blocked by a friendly policeman, so I decided to appeal directly to
Officer Al for assistance. This direct approach had yielded very mixed results with other humans of my acquaintance, but I could come up with no better option. I could sense that Al was about to move on and there was no point in revealing Cat Hater’s whereabouts if there wasn’t an officer of the law on hand to apply the cuffs.

That was
what had me wondering. Why was Cat Hater hiding in the first place, and why was the local constabulary so set on finding him? This seemed to me to be evidence of a far greater malfeasance than taking the odd tenner from My Lady’s handbag.

I made another jump at the organizer, this time adding sound effects. I yowled a tremendous yowl
which resulted in a sore throat for days afterwards. This time, I managed to snag the corner of the fabric, but it still didn’t come down.

Al, who was obviously a little OCD when it came to neatness, came over with the twin objectives of
administering a calming pat to the top of my head and straightening the pocket organizer, which was now hanging eschew.

It was just as he reached up to straighten it that the whole panel—probably insecurely placed from the start by a panicked Jimmy—came crashing down.

I could have told Cat Hater—if he’d taken the time to acknowledge my presence—that trying to run was a bad idea. He made it no further that the living room before he tripped over the coffee table and was subdued by an officer wielding a stun gun.

My Lady’s porcelain puppy in repose got smashed in the process.
Later on, as she was sweeping up the remnants, Ann expressed regret over its demise. I think it was for the best, however. Not only was the porcelain puppy tasteless and tawdry as an item of décor, it also seemed to do nothing in the way of bringing out My Lady’s better nature.

It wasn’t until after the officers had taken
Cat Hater away and the remaining members of the party had reassembled in Ann’s wrecked apartment that I found out why Jimmy had been hiding.

“I can’t believe Jimmy would do that,” My Lady said.

“I can,” said Flavia. “I mean he’s been totally stealing from you like forever. Why are you like so totally surprised and stuff that he like tried to knock over a convenience store or whatever?”

“Tr
ied?” said Craig. “I got the impression he succeeded.”

Gradually the story came out. Remember those quarters
Cat Hater had stolen to buy beer and cigarettes? Well, he hadn’t bought beer and cigarettes. He’d bought lottery tickets at the corner convenience store instead. He’d scratched them off at the counter, and discovered he’d won nothing. He’d then requested the key to the bathroom, and, instead of answering the call of nature, he’d attempted to sneak out the service entrance with a twelve-pack of beer. When the clerk had confronted him, he—I suppose believing he had nothing to lose, she was going to call the police anyway—turned the thing into a stickup by pulling a handgun from his pocket and demanding that she empty the cash register and throw in a couple of packs of cigarettes.

The whole thing had been caught on surveillance cameras, but Jimmy would
probably have gotten away with it if Flavia hadn’t inadvertently turned him in for a crime she hadn’t even known he’d committed. Had she not put the police on his tail, I have no doubt that by the next day Cat Hater would have taken his ill-gotten gains and headed for parts unknown.

“Do you think
any
of that story he told you was true?” Flavia asked. “You know, about those guys being like after him and stuff?”

Ann just rolled her eyes.

“And this was the guy you dumped me for!” Craig said.

That was
completely untrue and Craig knew it, but it did open up an interesting line of thought. My Lady turned bright red and mumbled something about not having dumped Craig and there having been nothing going on between her and Jimmy.

“I think I’ll go,” said Flavia.

After Flavia had departed, Craig and Ann just sat there on opposite ends of the couch for a while.

“I’m sorry,” My Lady said, finally breaking the silence.

“I know,” said Craig.

“I behaved like an idiot.”

“True,” Craig answered.

Now My Lady certainly was sorry
, and it was true that there were elements of the idiotic to be found in her behavior of late; however, I wasn’t convinced that this frankness on Craig’s part might not backfire if he persisted in perpetuating the misguided assumption that My Lady was entirely to blame for their fractured romance.               

I leaped into
Craig’s lap and applied a restraining paw to his forearm—the one not swathed in gauze. He ignored me.

“There really wasn’t anything going on between Gwendolyn and me,” Craig said. “Not since about 2003, anyway.”

“I know,” said Ann.

“Then why did you get so mad at me?”

“Because you didn’t tell me about her.”

“
She just isn’t important to me anymore. That’s why I never mentioned her, and if she’s not important to me, then why should she be important to you?”

“I know, but I tell you everything.”

“True.”

I applied another paw of warning. Again, my warning went
unacknowledged.

“It’s just that
the whole thing made me scared that maybe I care about you a lot more than you care about me,” Ann said.

I dug my claws in a little. If Craig replied, “True” to th
is statement, I was going to make his good arm match the bandaged one. 

“But I do care about you,” said Craig. “I think I love you.”

I jumped off Craig’s lap. My work was done. I could have stuck around and witnessed the passionate scene which followed, but, as I’ve probably already mentioned, I’m not much of a voyeur. Besides, I could hear that the cricket which had escaped during Ann and Flavia’s scuffle had come back to roost among the remains of Mrs. Jackson’s potted geraniums.
I scratched to get out before My Lady became so enraptured by Craig that getting her attention became impossible. I trotted out into the dusk, tail upraised in triumph.
 

What followed
was a replication of My Lady and Craig’s previous love-life-cycle. For about three weeks, Ann and Craig ignored all of their friends, including their four-legged ones. It became a challenge just to get a can of cat food opened at regular intervals. Bella and I took to fending for ourselves. It came in handy that a bloom in the rat population coincided with the reunification of My Lady and Craig. I caught more than I cared to eat—the raw foodist craze has never really made sense to me—and I passed off some of my catch to Bella.