A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (7 page)

BOOK: A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix)
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Chapter 12

This is where it had all begun.

I was alone in Mrs. Timmerman’s apartment. I wasn’t sure where the family had gone. I hadn’t been paying very close attention when she phoned to ask me to come. And of course I wasn’t totally alone. There with me was the object of my visit—Belle.

Belle is a white manx. And as she hippity-hopped around the place, I couldn’t help believing in the lunatic theory that somewhere, deep in the primeval past—very deep—there was a biological connection between Manx cats and rabbits.

“It’s all your fault, you beauty,” I scolded her as I prepared her meal in the kitchen. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have boasted that I could get tickets to that blasted ballet.”

But she was accepting none of the blame. Nor was she concerned with eating just then. Instead, she let me know that her interest lay in playing her favorite game: kamikaze-leaping off the kitchen table and snagging Aunt Alice’s stockings in the process.

Despite the occasional strafing, I liked Belle a great deal. Even if, in her attitude toward me, she vacillated between extreme friendliness and extreme enmity. But then, that could have been due to a misconception on Belle’s part; perhaps she thought I was one of the Timmerman children grown up.

“Okay, Belle,” I announced, sidestepping her claws. “If you’re not going to eat, I’m not going to keep you company in here.”

I started out of the kitchen. Then I caught a glimpse of Belle on the table, positioning herself for another jump. For the first time I realized that she was a “stumpie” and not a “rumpie.” That is, she wasn’t completely tailless. She had the slightest stump of a tail, but a tail it was.

“Some day I’ll have to introduce you to Bushy,” I said. “He’s got the rest of your tail, you know.”

On my way out of the apartment, I stopped to look at a framed photograph that seemed to dominate all the others atop the piano. It showed the Timmermans as newlyweds, arms linked, both dressed in summer white in front of a little stucco guest house at some unnamed beach resort. I was unaccountably touched by the sweetness of their young faces. Then I thought of the hungry strength I’d seen in the face of Dobrynin. The juxtaposition suddenly wearied me. I sat down on the flocked sofa and placed one of the small throw pillows on my lap.

I knew that I would soon have to report to Lucia’s attorney on the progress of my investigation. There was precious little I could tell Mr. Brodsky. Peter Dobrynin was out of my league, out of my range of experience. All his adoring friends had loved him, they said, pitied him, mourned for him—and ultimately refused to help him. They had probably all had a sexual relationship with him. So if sex was some part of the motive for murder, any one of them could conceivably have killed him.

But so what? If Dobrynin had indeed been as promiscuous and irresponsible as everyone said, then the list of suspects might well fill up several pages on a legal pad. Any one of the dots in what our mayor had called the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York could have pulled the trigger.

As for his three lost years, if his closest friends had been unable or unwilling to find him, he must have really covered his tracks with a vengeance. If he had indeed become a classic derelict and been murdered by a peer for a motive as ordinary as a swig of Ripple—as Betty Ann Ellenville had suggested—it was doubtful the killer would ever be found. And that was the worst possible scenario for Lucia Maury.

The pillow in my lap was brocaded. I ran my palm over the raised design. There were so many questions that kept popping up. Sure, the derelict theory was attractive, and logical in some respects. After all, derelicts do kill other derelicts. The milieu itself is violent. But how many derelicts would be able to muster the skill and foresight needed to plant a weapon so fastidiously? And even if so, why under Lucia’s desk? This “derelict” would have had to have known that Lucia and Dobrynin had been fractious lovers in the past. But while I could picture two derelicts sharing a bottle on some frozen street corner, I couldn’t see them revealing to each other biographical details of their pre-derelict love affairs.

Belle peeped around the corner. I waved her in. She moved up onto the coffee table, settling on Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic study of the Masai. The cat’s cute, near tail-less rump made me smile. Somewhere in the past I had read about the number of vertebrae in the tail of the average feline. I wondered how many were missing from Belle’s truncated tail.

She leapt onto my lap. “You lack a good twenty to twenty-five vertebrae, my beauty,” I teased her. “Eat your heart out.”

She boffed my right shoulder then, only playing—her claws were held in check.

This white-paw attack was completely harmless, but for some odd reason it resurrected the terrible sight of Peter Dobrynin’s corpse. And in a split-second I realized why. White, bare feet. Clean white feet at the end of long legs, stretched out for all to see on the illumined expanse of the balcony.

I felt a surge of adrenaline.

Many derelicts go shoeless, even in winter.

But his feet were
clean
.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Dobrynin had entered the State Theater wearing shoes.

The murderer had removed them.

A bottle of wine was a stupid enough motive for murder. Was a pair of shoes a better one?

Or was there some much more convoluted explanation?

I had no answers yet. But that pumping adrenaline was a very good sign.

I gathered my things and scooped up the unalert cat for a kiss she rejected. “Belle, my
belle
,” I told her, “there just may be a little caviar in your future.”

Chapter 13

I saw the little red light blinking. Only one call had come in. One was enough.

“The ballistics report has been submitted.”

It was the soft, modulated voice of Frank Brodsky.

“The bullet that killed Mr. Dobrynin on Christmas Eve was fired from the weapon found taped beneath the desk in Lucia’s office. A .25–caliber, semiautomatic, Czech-made handgun.”

The attorney had spoken the words calmly, as if he were a TV newsreader forecasting mixed clouds and sun.

I felt a little sick to my stomach. I looked unhappily at Tony, who had hobbled along with me to Brodsky’s office. But Tony seemed more interested in the impressive array of Hudson River paintings than in police ballistics reports.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the grand jury will indict now,” Brodsky pronounced. “And given the circumstances, it will be for Murder One.”

“What circumstances?” I asked, a bit too aggressively, almost as though the lawyer and I were not on the same side. Then I tempered my response with: “After all, Lucia says it isn’t her gun. She doesn’t own a gun.”

He went on, in even more measured tones. “Ah, but the weapon—the
murder
weapon—was found in her office,
secreted
there, the prosecution will say. And of course there was, how shall we say, a troubled history between the two. The grand jury will be made aware that Lucia and the dancer had a romantic involvement years ago. That the affair ended badly. They’ll say Lucia brooded and became increasingly despondent—and vengeful. That she lured Mr. Dobrynin to the theater and murdered him there.

“Given these factors, and given the predisposition of juries to be severe in their judgments of people with wealth and power, the grand jury will surely find premeditation.”

He pronounced the word “premeditation” as if he were borrowing it from another, more vulgar, language.

“And so,” Brodsky continued, “your investigation becomes even more crucial. The process must be stepped up, if you will.”

He smiled at me and at Tony, as if in deference to our newly declared importance. An awkward silence ensued, until I realized the attorney was simply waiting for my report.

But what did I have to report? That I had constructed an incomplete biography of the victim? That it looked as if the murderer had made off with Dobrynin’s shoes? I didn’t think that was what Mr. Brodsky wanted for his money—or rather, Lucia’s money.

“I’ve interviewed several of Dobrynin’s closest friends,” I started. “They all paint a picture of a talented man of insatiable appetites—and utterly out of control.”

“Does any of them appear to have had a motive for killing him?”

I paused before answering and looked at Tony, who was grinning at me. He and I both realized from the attorney’s question that he had no idea what kind of person Peter Dobrynin had been.

“Motive? Oh, yes,” I said. “They all might have had a motive, I suppose. From what I’ve learned, virtually everyone who had any intimate dealings with him grew tired of him, or grew to loathe him, or fear him. He was promiscuous in every sense of the word. He used people. He . . . degraded them.”

The lawyer had no immediate response to that. Instead he poured himself half a cup of coffee and motioned that we should help ourselves to some.

Then he asked, “What about the line of inquiry you were following? The years in which he dropped out of sight. What have you found?”

“Not very much,” I admitted. “Just random stories of Dobrynin appearing briefly and then going back underground. Unsubstantiated sightings of him. And plenty of speculation. I think the only thing we can treat as fact is that he lived a sort of derelict existence on the West Side.”

“How will you proceed now?”

“Well, Mr. Brodsky, I’ve only scratched the surface of Dobrynin’s life. I plan to contact some of the dance companies he was affiliated with. And to find out more about his financial affairs. I thought I would now develop an in-depth profile of—”

Frank Brodsky held up his hand, interrupting me. “We haven’t time, Miss Nestleton. Lucia has no time.”

“I understand how pressed for time we are, Mr. Brodsky. But you cannot expect immediate results.”

“I do not. But I would think your focus—our focus—now should be not on Mr. Dobrynin himself but on Mr. Dobrynin’s assassin. Don’t you agree that the quickest path runs through the derelict briar patch?”

“I don’t know that I do agree, Mr. Brodsky. But I appear to be in the minority. Virtually everyone I spoke with is on your wavelength. They believe he was killed by another homeless person.”

“Quite. And so?”

“So?”

“So it appears, Miss Nestleton, that the best course might be to search out his derelict acquaintances.”

“That’s not as easy as it sounds, Mr. Brodsky. I mean, homeless populations are constantly shifting. Many of those people are addicts, criminals, released mental patients.”

“Yes,” he answered simply.

“And I don’t know that I’m really equipped to conduct that kind of investigation.”

“Why not? If I may ask.”

“For all kinds of reasons, Mr. Brodsky.”

“The potential danger, for instance?”

“There is that. But that isn’t the only reason I’d prefer to go about the investigation in my own way.”

Brodsky gave me another patronizing smile, but this time I saw the glint of steel behind it. “I think, Miss Nestleton, that if you are not presently ‘equipped,’ as you put it, then you should become so. Don’t you agree that, given Lucia’s predicament, any other course would be frivolous?”

I was stung by his criticisms and his manner. So much for the leeway he had claimed he would give me, the trusted professional.

“One other thing,” he continued.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Brodsky.”

“I’ve set up an expense account for you and your associate, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”

“Basillio,” interjected Tony, who had been circling the room up to now, paying not the slightest attention to what was going on. I had a most compelling urge to slap him across the face. But if Brodsky thought I had botched things before, I could imagine how he’d respond to my attacking my own colleague.

“Yes. Mr. Basillio, of course. As I was saying, a special fund has been set up to enable you to buy information from people on the street who knew Dobrynin—
if
you can locate them.”

Another barbed comment, I thought.

“I am certain Mr. Basillio can guarantee your safety, Miss Nestleton. As I’m sure he must have done countless times in the past.”

Tony chuckled appreciatively. I glared at him, but he didn’t notice.

The problem was, I just wasn’t ready for the kind of enterprise Frank Brodsky wanted to launch me on. Yes, certainly time was of the essence. He was right about that. And yes, I had accepted a huge fee for my services—five thousand dollars. But mine was a more intensive, cerebral style of investigation. Searching out arcane facts . . . making connections no one else seemed to recognize . . . unraveling knots . . . unearthing supposedly irrelevant tidbits of data . . . extracting the truth from among the ambiguities. Yes, it was that kind of inquiry that played to my particular strengths. It was not easy to see myself acting like an undercover street cop. But that was what Brodsky expected of me, apparently.

I looked over at him. He was waiting patiently. Waiting for my decision. Clearly, it was going to be his way or no way.

Tony was standing up very close to one particular painting—a magnificent rendition of a mountain gorge and waterfall, set in a festival of jagged cliffs.

Then he limped happily over to the two of us, exclaiming, “I’ve actually been there!” He pointed back excitedly at the painting. “That’s Lookout Mountain! In the Catskills!”

Brodsky and I both regarded him dumbly. I felt my face go hot. When the attorney made eye contact with me again, I noticed for the first time that he had lovely blue-green eyes. And they seemed like the eyes of a young man.

Basillio continued, oblivious to our lack of response, “I’ve always loved this kind of stuff. It almost makes you dizzy—like good brandy.”

“Well,” Brodsky replied, this time looking searchingly at Tony, “perhaps one day you will have the good fortune to own one, Mr. Basillio.”

Tony laughed heartily and hobbled back to his chair.

“No, Tony,” I said. “Don’t sit down. I think we have our instructions now. We can let Mr. Brodsky get back to work.” And then I said directly to the lawyer, “I will do my best.”

“Excellent,” he said quietly, watching us go. “That’s excellent.”

***

I’d agreed to stop for coffee and strategy-planning with Tony—in fact, I’d suggested it. But the explosion I felt rumbling in my chest wouldn’t hold long enough for us to reach the café. So I began shouting in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Basillio, if you’re going to fall apart from your midlife crisis, then so be it! But if you
ever
humiliate me that way again in front of a client, I will
kill
you!
Understood?”

Tony turned frightened, perplexed eyes upon me.

“Quit the ‘Who, me?’ act, Basillio! What the hell was that nitwit art-lover act all about? Didn’t you notice that Brodsky thought you were a moron? And don’t you see how behavior like that reflects on me? That it makes me look ridiculous?” I felt tears welling up in my eyes and angrily fought them down.

Tony’s face crumpled then. “I’m sorry, Swede.”

“So am I!” I barked. “I’m sorry you’re in trouble and I didn’t see it sooner. But I have a client—and a very old friend—in trouble, too. Lucia’s going to be sent to prison if we don’t do something, Tony. Prison!”

“I understand that,” he said.

“Do you, Tony? Do you really get that?”

“Yes!” he said, his own anger rising, then fading. “I just said I did.”

“Then, do you think you can hang in there with me until this is over? Because if you’re going to cave in, Tony, then . . . then . . . ,” I said hopelessly, “then I don’t know.”

He took me by the shoulders. “It’s okay, Swede. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to report for white knight duty, same as it ever was. You’ll see.”

I began to relent.

“And I’m really sorry if I lost it in front of whatsiz-name—the Claude Rains guy.”

“Patronizing old man . . .” I muttered.

We said we’d talk about “it”—“it” being whatever worries or demons seemed to be stalking Tony these days—when we got to the coffee shop. But we didn’t. We talked about the case.

BOOK: A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix)
8.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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