A Cat Tells Two Tales (13 page)

I wanted to leave the house. I wanted to talk to Bushy and Pancho in the cottage. They didn’t like it there.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll turn in before the curfew, Jo.” It had been decided that we would stay together in the living room of the house from the moment it got dark until midnight, and then leave the vigil to the police officers hiding in the barn loft.

Jo nodded. It was fine with her. I left quickly and walked back to the cottage. Poor Pancho. Poor Bushy. All alone in a strange cottage again.

I had just reached the door of the cottage when a scream split the night air.

And then a crack, as if something had been broken in a sound chamber.

I turned, petrified.

I saw lights switching on in the large house and the barn.

Jo was walking toward the barn as fast as she could.

I started to run.

When I reached the barn I saw the police officer crouched against the barn door, blood streaming from a wound on the side of his head. His gun was drawn. He seemed crazed, disoriented.

He shouted at Jo, who was pressing what seemed to be a dish towel against his wound: “I got him! He hit me with a flashlight! But I got him!”

I could now see blood all around in the flickering lights. Blood on the officer. Blood on the barn door. And a trail of red blotches leading from the barn into the overgrown field, as if someone had placed red doilies on the ground.

“Get him,” the officer pleaded, unsteady. “He’s hurt bad. Get him!”

Jo and I walked into the field, holding each other. Then we stopped. Where were we going? It was dark. How could we find him? What would we do if we did find him?

We huddled together. We waited. We stared back at the barn lights.

Something came to us on the night breeze.

It sounded like a cricket. No, it sounded like a night warbler.

No, it was a human sound. A moan. At first we thought it was the wounded policeman, but he was too far away.

We moved toward it, our shoulders touching.

Now we could see something alien in the grass; a heap.

Jo’s foot kicked something metallic.

“Flashlight,” she whispered.

I picked it up and flicked it on, grabbing Jo’s hand with my own free hand.

The heap was a body. Alive. Knees brought up to the chest in pain. A blood-soaked thigh.

We moved closer.

It wasn’t a man. It was a woman. The beam of the flashlight was full force on her face.

I stared in horror at her writhing.

My legs could no longer hold my body. I sank beside her.

I placed my hand on the face of my old friend—Carla Fried.

Then there were sirens. And feet crashing through the field.

People surrounded us, loaded the woman on an aluminum rack, and wheeled her out of the field.

Senay helped me up. Jo was hanging on to a uniformed policeman. I felt affection for Senay—an impossible-to-explain affection.

I said to him very slowly and precisely, “The man who sent her . . . the man who sent others to murder . . . the man who now has the barn cat Veronica and her calico litter . . . is a Canadian millionaire named Thomas Waring.”

Senay said, “Yes, I’ve heard the name.”

I added, “He’s also a patron of the arts,” and then began to laugh hysterically at the dirty little joke. But the laughter died in my throat when I saw someone wrap a blanket around Jo and lead her very slowly and very tentatively out of the field. I was suddenly frightened that she would have to walk over Harry’s ashes to reach the house.

19

“How is Mrs. Starobin?” Senay asked.

“Fine. She’s fine.”

I sat down on the sofa. Jo was upstairs, tucked into bed and sleeping. The first rays of morning sun were beginning to filter through the house.

In front of the rocking chair on which Detective Senay sat was a large paper bag. He reached in, brought out a container of coffee, leaned over, and handed it to me.

Three of the Himalayan cats quickly surrounded the paper bag and inspected it carefully.

“This is out of my own pocket,” he noted ruefully.

Then he reached into the bag again and came out with a toasted corn muffin wrapped in aluminum foil. He handed that to me also.

It was, I suppose, the only way Detective Senay could apologize to me for his past behavior toward me. I wanted to be gracious. I was too exhausted to be anything else.

We sipped our coffee, nibbled our muffins, and stared at each other and at the Himalayans.

Finally he said, “So this woman Carla Fried is a good friend of yours.”

“An old friend,” I replied.

“Well,” he noted, “if she lives, which she probably will, she’ll cut a deal. All she has to do is name her associates��she couldn’t have murdered Starobin and Mona Aspen and the young girl alone. And then finger that Canadian, Waring, as the man who pulled all the strings. When all the smoke clears, she’ll end up doing five years . . . if that.”

“How can we be sure she’ll talk?” I asked.

“Simple. If she doesn’t, we’ll hang an attempted-murder charge against her for attacking the cop in the barn. No, your friend will play ball with us. She has no other option.”

He finished his coffee, crushed the container, and dropped it down beside the paper bag for the cats to play with.

Then he straightened up on the chair. “What’s right is right. You did a helluva job, lady. You broke the case.”

I didn’t respond. He grinned and added, “To be honest, when you set up that calico-kitten trap, I thought you were a stone lunatic.”

He was starting to squirm. Poor Senay.

I closed my eyes. He was right. I had broken the case. But never in my wildest dreams had I suspected Carla Fried.

She had pulled the wool over my eyes completely. I had thought she was visiting me and calling me only because of the part, or because we were old friends . . . but in fact, she was in New York to orchestrate a different kind of drama—murder and theft for her patron.

I had thought she was flying in and out of New York, but all the while she was probably in town, keeping tabs on things, telling her associates just when it was the right time to run her old friend down with a red pickup truck because she was getting too inquisitive.

And I really had no idea why she had done it. Had it been a quid pro quo? Had Waring said: I’ll give you 1.5 million dollars for your theater if you do something for me? Or had Waring and she been lovers?

Had the promise of a well-funded independent theater company been so important to Carla that she would participate in murder?

How could she, in fact, have anything to do with a man who was so obviously obsessed with winning at all costs—even horse races?

Why? Why? Why? What made Carla run? Passion? Ambition? The promise of artistic freedom? A whim? Psychosis? All of the above?

The more I thought about it, the more I had to face the nagging, hard-to-accept, but harder-to-deny possibility that Carla Fried was just another talented woman who had been crushed to death by theatrical fantasies . . . who had become so deranged and so confused by the need to achieve something in the theater that she would do anything to fulfill that need. Anything!

“You know,” Senay said quietly, “your crazy friend probably didn’t even know Harry Starobin or Mona Aspen or Ginger Mauch.”

I opened my eyes. He was right. And that was the most pernicious and ugly fact of all.

As for Waring! How obsessed with winning he must have become. And how twisted. With his money, he could have bought the cats from Harry, like others had. But no! Waring had to be the sole possessor of the cats. He had to guarantee exclusivity by having Harry and Mona and Ginger murdered. He had to relish the sense of secret power as his thoroughbreds began to win . . . and only he would know the reason why. His wealth had not brought him virtue or wisdom. It had turned him into a murderous, psychotic fool.

“Maybe she didn’t even like cats,” Senay added.

“She liked my cats.”

“Do you have calico cats?”

“No.”

I stared out the front window of the Starobin house. Amos, the old handyman, was walking slowly up the drive. I shivered and reached for one of the blankets on the sofa. Amos was walking over Harry Starobin’s ashes.

“How about another muffin?” Senay asked, reaching down into the paper bag.

“No thanks.”

“Danish, then?”

“No thanks.”

Senay sighed wearily and commenced to rock.

The Himalayans abandoned the paper bag. They had found nothing of value there.

Amos walked into the house, through the large living room, and into the kitchen. He didn’t greet us.

I heard all the Himalayans moving toward him. They were hungry. I heard him preparing their food. Before I fell asleep on the sofa I remember thinking that they sure feed cats early in Old Brookville.

20

I opened the cat carriers the moment I closed the apartment door behind me.

Bushy ambled out. Pancho flew out to begin his frantic dashes in order to find, identify, and flee from the many enemies that had invaded Manhattan while he was away.

I walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a container of low-fat milk, and poured myself half a glass. I sat down at the tiny table. My body felt as if all the musculature had been sucked out.

The green light on the phone machine indicated there had been messages while I was away. Pancho’s enemies. I ignored them.

I sipped the milk. My hands were shaking. I was becoming agitated.

Reaching for pencil and pad, I made a soothing list:

1. Pick up hat left in bar

2. Write nice note to Charlie Coombs

3. Call Anthony Basillio and thank him again

4. Buy saffron rice for Pancho

5. Cash check

6. Buy toothpaste and regular cat food

I put the pencil down. It was musty in the apartment. I left the kitchen and walked to the windows in the living room—heaving both of them open as far as the cracked wood allowed.

Turning back, I saw the paperback copy of
Romeo and Juliet
on the long table.

Poor Carla Fried, willing to do anything for anyone to fund her dream of a theater. Poor, sick, crazed Carla.

I went back to the kitchen to finish my milk.

Strange thoughts came to me as I sat there.

What if Carla’s theater group in Montreal had already been funded?

What if, in spite of the fact that Thomas Waring and his associates would be convicted of murder, the funds were already in place, in possession of the theater group, inviolate?

What if the season would go on as planned . . . without Carla Fried . . . without Thomas Waring?

What if they would still need an actress to imaginatively interpret the role of the Nurse in a Portobello production of
Romeo and Juliet
?

I picked up the pencil and added another item to the list:

7. Contact Carla’s theatrical group in Montreal

A part is a part, I said to myself grimly.

And Portobello would appreciate my interpretation of the Nurse as a middle-aged woman whose eccentricities hid the fact that she loved Romeo just as passionately as Juliet loved him. Portobello would find the idea intriguing . . . chewable . . . dramaturgically innovative.

“I’ll discuss it in detail with Bushy before I discuss it with Portobello,” I said to the pencil in my hand. Then I walked into the living room to join Bushy on the sofa.

A Cat of a Different Color

1

The woman, whose name was Francesca Tosques—she was vaguely attached to the Italian legation—had told me before I started the cat-sitting assignment that Geronimo was a lovely cat but he had some peculiarities.

“Don’t go near the fireplace,” she said mysteriously. “Fine!” I replied. Francesca was going to be away for three days: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. All I had to do was go up to her large old apartment on West End Avenue and Ninety-seventh Street in Manhattan . . . feed Geronimo . . . talk to Geronimo . . . kill some time. That’s all. A very good assignment as these things go.

I arrived on Sunday at three in the afternoon, walking all the way from my East Twenty-sixth Street apartment, through the park. It was hot outside but the apartment was cool without air-conditioning, utilizing only one large, slow ceiling fan. The view from the apartment was spectacular: out over the Hudson to Jersey, or north up the Hudson, or downtown. Pick a window, pick a view. She had left me twenty-three notes on the dining-room table, complicating the simplest procedures. But I was used to that.

As for Geronimo—I was expecting a Balinese or a Cornish Rex or some other exotic feline, but when I finally met him—he was lying on the Formica kitchen table—well, Geronimo was simply an old-fashioned black alley cat. You couldn’t call him anything else. He was big and brawny and ugly, with scars up and down his flanks, and he walked—when he did walk, like alley cats do—as if he had some kind of testicular problem, to put it kindly.

That first day, I stayed in the apartment about an hour, talking to Geronimo, who really wasn’t listening. After eating, he had gone back to the Formica table and I had to almost shout to get my points across. I joshed him, telling him that I was a famous actress, a famous sleuth, and above all, a famous cat-sitter, and I’d be damned if he was going to be standoffish. I just wouldn’t tolerate it.

On the third day, we weren’t any friendlier; it was live and let live. Anyway, on that third and last day of the assignment, Geronimo was beginning to irritate me. And my pride was hurt. Everyone always said I had a magical way with cats. Ask my own cats—Bushy and Pancho. They’ll tell anyone. So it started to bother me about what his mistress had told me—that I should not go near the fireplace. Very strange. The fireplace was an old large one, set in the north wall of the apartment. It was obviously a working fireplace but it was also obvious that it hadn’t been used in a long time. I had kept away from it because of what she had told me and because it was in a far part of the apartment. I mean, one really had to want to go there to end up there. So I sat and stewed at the living-room table, staring at Geronimo, who was staring at me from the kitchen table. Instead of a forty-one-year-old woman, I was thinking like a twelve-year-old adolescent. Something had been denied me. Authority had spoken. It was necessary to subvert authority. It was a decidedly adolescent impulse.

I got up slowly, theatrically, elegantly, and sauntered over to the fireplace. Reaching it, I placed one hand gently on the mantelpiece and smiled.

A moment later a blur seemed to explode across the room. And then I felt a short intense pain in the thumb of the hand resting on the fireplace.

Startled, I looked down. Geronimo was standing there. He had flown across the room and bitten me. Can you imagine that?

Then the cat turned and sauntered back toward the kitchen table, very much the macho alley cat.

In a state of semishock from the attack, I stumbled into the bathroom and let running cold water clean the small wound. Geronimo stared at me from his kitchen table, bored, implying that I had been duly warned and that since I had obviously wanted to play with fire, it was simple justice that I got burned.

After I washed and dressed the wound I felt exhausted. I walked into Francesca Tosques’ bedroom and lay down on the bed, closing my eyes and flicking on the radio. The station was set on 1010 WINS—news all the time.

I lay there wondering why Geronimo attacked people who stood in front of the fireplace. It was very perplexing. I must have dozed off and then awakened with a start. My mouth was dry. A bad dream? No. A name on the radio was being repeated, and I knew the name. The announcer was saying that one of the last famous Greenwich Village bohemians was dead. Arkavy Reynolds had been shot to death on Jane Street. Reynolds, the announcer said, was a well-known denizen of the lower Manhattan theater scene. He was a producer, publisher of a theatrical scandal sheet which he hawked himself from coffee shop to coffee shop, and one of those outrageous individuals who at one time were so much a part of bohemian life in New York. The announcer ended with the comment that the police were investigating the murder but had no leads or witnesses at this time.

Poor Arkavy! I had bumped into him often over the years and we always chatted, or rather I listened to his monologues. He was a huge fat man who seemed to roll down the street. In all seasons he wore the same outfit: a cabdriver’s hat, white shirt and flamboyant tie, vest, farmer’s overalls with shoulder straps, and construction-worker shoes. Of course, he was quite mad. Rumor had it he came from a wealthy family. He was always looking for space to perform some play far off-off Broadway. He was always talking about some brilliant new playwright whom no one had ever heard of. And his newsletters were often about people who simply didn’t exist. Each issue of his newsletter also carried reviews written by him, which were filled with typographical excesses—he loved asterisks and exclamation marks and dots and dashes.

I got up from the bed and walked into the kitchen. There was Geronimo. He no longer interested me at all. I ignored him. I opened and closed the refrigerator a few times absentmindedly, thinking of Arkavy, trying to remember the exact time I had last seen him. It might have been on East Fourth Street and First Avenue one night in the fall of 1989. I was going to a dramatic reading by an East German woman. Yes, it might have been then.

I left the kitchen and walked back into the living room, where I fell wearily into a chair. My wound was beginning to throb. Geronimo was still looking at me. It dawned on me, right then, that if Arkavy and Geronimo had by chance met, they might have become the best of friends. After all, poor Arkavy was a man who had spent his life looking to be bitten.