A Cat Tells Two Tales (12 page)

But what was C?

Calico. A delicious chill went right through me. I had broken the stupid code.

Then I pulled back my enthusiasm. If my analysis was correct, there were calico cats in each litter, in most years more than one, and in some years more than half the litter.

That was impossible. I had read a lot about calico cats over the years.

There are only three multicolored cats, found only in females—blue cream, tortoiseshell, and calico. Calico is the most difficult to reproduce.

To obtain a calico, one breeds a male with a dominant white color to a tortoiseshell female. The white male is crucial because calico is really only tortoiseshell plus the color white. White, in fact, is the dominant color of the calico cat.

If the mating is successful, a calico female may appear in the litter—possibly even two.

But over the long run, calico is very hard to produce. The accepted probabilities are one calico female out of every seventeen kittens.

I stared down at the list again. How could Harry have bred so many calico cats in each litter of barn cats?

Was Harry a magician? Had he somehow done what cat breeders considered impossible?

I turned the cardboard over. This side contained dozens of entries, many of them faded.

Among the ones I could make out were:

RS/87C

NA/83C

LBD/86C

COT/78C

LK/81C

ANQ/82C

FG/84C

GB/84C

R/79C

BB/79C

The second part of each entry I now understood. C meant calico; 84 meant the 1984 litter; 84C meant a calico cat from the litter in 1984.

But what did it refer to? What referred to it? What did FG/84C mean?

It was the LK/81C entry I focused on most. For some reason it infatuated me. The letters LK meant something to me, or reminded me of something.

I began to make up possibilities. Ladybird. LK. Ladybird in Kansas. LK. Larry Koenig. Lucifer Kills. LK.

I kept at it . . . from the stupid to the sublime . . . from the known to the unknown. And then it tripped off my tongue—Lord Kelvin.

Lord Kelvin! I looked down the list. If LK was Lord Kelvin, then there should be COT—Cup of Tea. He was there. And Ask Me No Questions. She was there.

It was a list of abbreviated horse’s names and after each one was the year the calico cat it had received as a mascot was born.

It was a list of horses that had had Harry’s calico cats as mascots.

I stood up quickly and walked to the window. My arms were folded across my chest. I knew what Harry had done. The enormity of it . . . the scope of it . . . the sheer intellectual audacity of it was staggering. Harry had, indeed, changed his world. His laughter rolled gently over me. How I missed him!

18

Jo Starobin sat in her rocking chair. One Himalayan was on her lap. One was on her shoulder. The others were scattered about, at least one stalking the slow, steady rock of the wood.

I was standing behind her. We both watched Detective Senay. He was holding up the piece of taped cardboard.

“Sure,” he said, “I looked at it. I looked at it pretty damn carefully.”

He held it at arm’s length, as if it was something ugly.

“Let me get straight what you’re telling me, Mrs. Nestleton.”

“I’m not married,” I corrected him for the fifth or sixth time.

“What you’re saying is this,” he continued, brushing aside my objection, his voice rising just up to the limit of anger. “What you’re saying is that Harry Starobin was not the sweet, kindly man everybody thought he was. He was a kind of magician. He discovered a new way to breed calico cats. He found a way to get a whole slew of calico cats in a single litter because he had these special kinds of barn cats. But that was only the beginning. Not only was he a magician, but these calico cats were magicians also.”

He looked at me, arching his eyebrows, grimacing, shuffling his body. The poor man.

He continued. “If one of these calico cats starts to live with a racehorse as the horse’s mascot, that broken-down three-legged horse will turn into a champion runner sooner or later.”

He stopped again, held out his hands, and asked, “Do I have it right so far?”

“You have it right,” I said.

“So Harry began selling these magical calico cats to horse trainers and owners. And he made a lot of money. But we don’t know where all that money is, do we?”

Jo looked at me quickly. I said nothing. She knew I had said nothing about the money in her safe-deposit box. I would never say anything about that.

Senay continued. “According to you, what happens next is something like this. Someone wanted this magical line of cats. That someone murdered Harry to obtain them. That someone ripped apart his house to make it seem like a robbery. And that someone killed Mona Aspen and Ginger Mauch because both of them worked with Harry on this scheme. Mona was the one who introduced Harry to the trainers and owners who needed the cats to turn lousy horses into champions. And Ginger was the bagman.”

He walked to the sofa and sat down. There was silence for a long time.

Then he grinned. “One of us is crazy, lady. Or, to put it another way, what you told me is very difficult to believe.”

I grinned back at him, stiffly. I was not going to let him bait me.

Senay said, “The real problem with stories like these is that when all is said and done, when all the smoke and fire and belief and nonsense clear, there’s simply no way to corroborate them.”

It was the moment I was waiting for. I knew that Senay would bring up the paucity of demonstrable evidence. I knew that Senay would have to be cornered and recruited, otherwise there would be no chance.

“They can be corroborated,” I said quietly.

Senay exploded. “You mean we do a statistical study of racehorses that have calico cats for mascots? Or we subpoena the financial records of every trainer who has a calico cat to see if he paid ten thousand dollars for it when she was a kitten? Who gives a damn whether all that calico-cat nonsense is true or not? I’m investigating murders. Do you understand? Murders.” Senay had temporarily lost his cool; he was almost shouting at the end of his little speech.

I handed him a small folded piece of paper. White memo paper.

He opened the paper and read:
calico kittens, new litter, very reasonably priced, ideal for barn and stable. write: starobin, p. o.
box 385, old brookville, long island, new york
.

“I don’t understand this,” he said. “What is it?”

“An advertisement,” I replied, “that, with your consent, will be placed in the classified sections of all the leading thoroughbred racing and breeding magazines.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Whoever murdered Harry and Mona and Ginger and stole Veronica and her litter will think that there exists another line of magical calico cats. The murderers will find that unacceptable. They will try to get this new litter.”

“You mean we create a litter of calico cats?”

“We fake a litter. The litter box will be empty.”

“And wait for the thief to show up in the barn?”

“Exactly.”

“And the thief is the murderer?”

“Or has been hired by the murderer.”

“Did it ever dawn on you, lady, that you have been watching too many Miss Marple mysteries on Channel Thirteen?”

“No. My television set went on the blink two years ago and I never fixed it. But did it ever dawn on you, Detective Senay, that you know absolutely nothing about these murders after all this time—except what I told you today?”

I let that sink in, then continued. “If the killer is truly a madman, and I believe he is . . . if he is willing to murder to win races . . . then he is not going to let these mythical calico kittens go elsewhere.”

He stared at me. I could tell his defenses were beginning to crumble.

“What kind of departmental response are you talking about?” he finally asked.

“Nothing,” I replied, “but one police officer at all times in the barn between six in the evening and six in the morning. In plainclothes, in the old hayloft.”

“Does it have your approval, Mrs. Starobin?” Senay asked. Then added, “After all, it is your property.”

“I suppose so,” Jo said.

“Then I’ll set the damn thing up,” he half yelled, and strode out of the room as if I had offended him greatly.

When we were alone, the old woman pointed a shaky hand at me and said, “How dare you tell that policeman all those stories about Harry! How can you believe them?”

“You told me yourself, Jo, in the bank, that Harry must have been involved in something criminal. You asked me to help you find out.”

“But, Alice, not this . . . not selling kittens for exorbitant prices on the grounds that they make horses champions. It’s a fake . . . and Harry wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Harry would have robbed a bank if he was desperate enough—and our financial situation
was
desperate—but not this.”

I lowered my voice. I couldn’t bear Jo’s anguish.

“What if it wasn’t a fake, Jo? What if Harry really had bred such a line of kittens? What if all those racehorses began winning suddenly because of their mascots—the calico barn cats . . . what if somehow, in some way, Harry had pulled off a miracle, something that really can’t be explained scientifically? What then, Jo?”

Jo didn’t answer. She started to weep. The cats seemed to sense her grief and started an orgy of playfulness, as if trying to cheer her up.

Even in springtime the Starobin house was cold and damp in the evening, so Jo and I wore shawls as we spent each evening together, complementing the police officers who split two six-hour shifts in the barn.

I had moved into the cottage again, and slept there, with Pancho and Bushy.

There was a strange enmity between Jo and me—a silent one, as if we had both agreed to a truce in some long-standing struggle.

I didn’t understand why Jo avoided speaking to me, or I to her; I didn’t understand why the name Harry no longer was mentioned.

Three days after we had begun that evening vigil—after the advertisement had been placed in the six daily and weekly publications and we all waited for a murderous thief to attempt to steal a litter of nonexistent kittens—Jo broke the truce.

She turned on me with a suddenness and a ferocity that made me cringe.

“Don’t you think I know what went on between you and Harry?”

I didn’t know how to reply. Harry and I had not been lovers. Ginger had been Harry’s lover. And she was dead. For all I knew, Mona also had been his longtime secret lover. That might explain her fatal involvement; she might have helped him for love and not for money. And maybe there had been others—maybe there had been hundreds of others. But not I.

Had Jo, in her wisdom, intuited my secret fantasy passion for the old man . . . a strange oedipal passion that I had never articulated to anyone?

I didn’t answer. I bowed my head. She construed it as an admission of guilt and she was happy—she forgave me. The air cleared. The hostility dissolved. She mumbled and turned away, making a motion with her hand to signify that it meant nothing.

On the fifth day, as we were keeping vigil in the large house, Jo mentioned that she had spoken to Charlie Coombs and he had asked after me.

“How is Charlie doing?” I asked calmly, academically. It is the proper way to speak about old lovers.

“Okay, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about his father? His father was a wonderful man. He used to sleep in a stall with a horse if it was sick.”

I smiled. I wondered how Charlie Coombs was really doing. Had he bought a new pair of red sneakers? Had he cleaned up his cluttered desk in his small racetrack office? Were his horses winning? Did he miss me? But I could not muse abstracted for long on our affair without that old suspicion beginning to grow again—that Charlie Coombs was part and parcel of the whole mess—that Charlie was on a calico tightrope.

Jo changed the subject: “Should we get coffee for the policemen in the barn?”

“They’re being paid,” I noted.

“It’s been bothering me since the first night they started to stay in the barn. Shouldn’t we make them coffee? Amos can do it.” Jo was beginning to worry over trifles.

I laughed. “Amos couldn’t deliver an empty cup, much less one filled with coffee.”

“He’s a fine man.” Jo leapt to his defense. “It’s just that he really wasn’t cut out to be a handyman . . . He gets confused.”

My mind really wasn’t on Amos. I was thinking about what was coming. I was thinking that it would be someone close . . . perhaps Charlie . . . perhaps Nicholas Hill . . . it would be someone I knew who would try to take the nonexistent litter.

I was beginning to experience a profound sense of inadequacy and almost shame, as if, in the face of the bizarre and inexplicable conspiracy of magical cats and triumphant horses created by Harry Starobin, it would be best if the advertisement was ignored . . . it would be best if the guilty would not act and let time dissolve the memories.

“Harry used to love peaches,” Jo said, startling me with a comment that had nothing to do with anything. “We used to buy bushels of hard, unripe peaches on the roadside in front of the Mannigalt farm.”

It dawned on me that Jo was probably speaking about a farm that had closed its doors twenty years ago. She was talking about a Long Island that had long since vanished.

On the eighth day, at ten thirty in the evening, Jo began to act strangely again. We had nothing to do but play rummy together. Two or three letters had dribbled in about the nonexistent kittens and there had been a few phone calls. But the barn was still inviolable.

Suddenly Jo whispered, “Why calico?”

“What?”

“If what you say is true, Alice, if Harry did what you said he did . . . why did he breed calicos?”

“I don’t follow you, Jo.”

“Why not seal point or red tabby or silver mackerel? And why a short-haired barn cat? Why not a Persian or a Manx or a Maine coon or a Himalayan?”

Her questions were becoming hysterical.

“Calm down,” I said, gently but firmly reseating her.

Then I said, “Maybe he thought calicos were special. Maybe he loved them because they were so hard to breed.”

“Harry never told me that,” Jo said, her voice rising again.

I tried to be rational. “I don’t think he knew about their special qualities until Cup of Tea. I think he just bred calicos at first because he wanted to show that he knew more about cats than the people who wrote books about them. He wanted to do things that people said he couldn’t do.”

Jo picked up the cards again and started to play. She kept nodding her head and forming words with her lips—mutely, as if she was carrying on a very important internal conversation.

Then she stared at me and said, “Ashes.”

“What do you mean, Jo?”

“Ashes. Our marriage was ashes. It turned out in the end to be ashes.”

“He did it for you, Jo—for the money, for the house, for the way you lived, for you, Jo, and what you had been to each other all those years.” I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t believe it. If he did it for anyone other than himself, it was Ginger or Mona. But that was too sad to speak.

“It’s all over. And it’s all ashes. Just like Harry’s ashes on the gravel roadway,” Jo said, and her body began to be racked with chills. I wrapped a blanket around her.

I was beginning to intuit that whatever else was going on, we were performing a wake for Harry Starobin. The old man had burned his own peculiar life in each of us. He was a lover, husband, father, breeder, Merlin. A bizarre man none of us really knew in the end.

I closed my eyes. I could see him rising from the ashes of the roadway—funny, potent, sad, compassionate, inquisitive. And, above all, wise. Was it his supposed wisdom that so infatuated all of us, why we still hung on to his memory like drowning people?