A Cat Tells Two Tales (17 page)

9

It was like a scene from an Edwardian melodrama. I sat on the edge of the bed. The love letters were scattered over the sheet in disarray. I was literally unable to read them except for very tiny snatches. It was too painful. He obviously hadn’t known me at all. He was fantasizing. The saddest parts of all were his erotic fantasies, which he described in painful detail. There were twenty-two letters in all.

The first one was obviously written immediately after he attended the first class in the New School. He described what I wore and what I said during that first class. Bruce Chessler was older than I had thought—about twenty-five. And it was obvious to me now that his bizarre behavior in class was a function of his condition. He was unable to make contact with the object of his deranged love—me—so he could only attack me. He understood that he was causing me distress, and his letters were full of apologies.

I wanted to read them thoroughly and carefully but I couldn’t.

Basillio called me about twenty minutes before midnight. He told me that he had checked out Swoboda, my old teacher, whose picture was inexplicably in Bruce Chessler’s belongings. She had died four years ago in Lakewood, New Jersey. When he hung up I gathered the love letters in a fury of frustration and literally stuffed them into one of my chests. The young man was dead. He had no family or friends. His cat, given to me out of disjointed love, was gone. At least John Cerise was fine.

I couldn’t fall asleep until two, and when I did fall asleep I had a whole series of dreams about my first boyfriend in Minnesota and necking in one of the dairy barns while my grandmother was twenty feet away behind the partition and didn’t know a thing was going on.

The first thing I thought of when I woke up was retrieving the love letters and reading them carefully. I fought back the impulse. It obviously had something to do with the dream.

I spent a great deal of the next hour staring out of my living-room window onto the street, hoping for a glimpse of Clara. Perhaps she had just run out onto the street and was living from garbage can to garbage can. Perhaps she was now living feral in one of the overgrown backyards that run like a scar between the two rows of houses that front the street—and can be reached and seen only through the basement apartments or the interior hallways on the ground floors or by fire escapes from the roofs. Why not? Maybe she was there. But I saw no beast that resembled the strange white cat Chessler had delivered to me.

When I finally pulled myself away from my obsessive nonsense of staring out the window to find Clara, I slipped into a very agitated depression. I started to pace back and forth across the living room, stepping over Bushy each time. I was pacing so quickly in my agitation that Pancho even aborted one of his rushes to stare at me reflectively. Maybe he was thinking: Ah, the fool now knows what I go through twenty-four hours a day. She finally realizes they are after her as well.

In fact, the last time I was feeling so bad in the head was when I started
Romeo and Juliet
rehearsals in Montreal and I was frightened that the director, Portobello, would nip my interpretation of the Nurse in the bud.

I ceased my pacing when it dawned on me that if no one of Bruce Chessler’s family had been found to claim his belongings or identify his body—it was the landlady who had done that—then there had to be no one to claim the body. And that meant that the young man, sport shirt and all, had been buried in one of those horrible derelict graves on small islands in the East River. I had once read about them—about how convicts from Rikers Island dig the graves, and the anonymous bodies, mostly from the Bowery and its environs, are slipped into them . . . like omelets.

I found that unbearable. But it was too late. The young man was already interred.

Things in my head were starting to get out of hand. I remembered part of one of the young man’s fantasies—a house made of reeds. For the first time the imagery seemed familiar. From Yeats? I couldn’t recall. From Euripides?

“Boom! Boom!” the landlady had said. Shot in a bar.

Why did Bruce Chessler die? That was the stupid question that aborted it all—that aborted my agitated depression; it was like a Zen koan, focusing all my energies. Why was it important to know? Because he loved me? Because I didn’t reciprocate? Was it guilt? Old-fashioned corrosive guilt?

Why did Bruce Chessler die? Forget the white cat. Forget the beating of John Cerise. Forget the photo of my old drama teacher. Forget the love letters. Forget the funeral of Arkavy Reynolds. Forget Bruce’s obnoxious behavior in my class. Forget everything.

Why had he died? Boom! Boom! Why?

No one asked me to inquire. No one paid me to inquire. There was no quid pro quo.

I just picked up the phone and called various numbers within the New York Police Department as listed in the telephone book. I was switched to an information officer and then to an assistant to a precinct commander and then to the civilian review board and then to a divisional spokesperson (whatever that meant), until finally, hours later, numb and dumb, I found myself talking to a detective named Harold Hanks. He was in a hurry.

He asked me if I was a relative of Bruce Chessler’s.

I said no.

Then he asked me if I had any information concerning the murder.

I said no.

Now he really was in a hurry to get rid of me. I went into one of my acting modes: a woman who has lost a “son” . . . a “child” . . . a student . . . a brilliant young mind cut off, et cetera, et cetera.

To get me off the phone he said that he had to be at the Gramercy Park Hotel at about two—and I should meet him on the corner, where Lexington ends at the park, right across from the hotel.

So that’s how I met Harry Hanks, a thin, nervous black man. He was waiting there for me when I arrived, with a scowl on his face as if I were late—which I wasn’t.

“So Bruce Chessler was a student of yours?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And he was a brilliant student . . . a kid with a real academic career ahead of him . . . isn’t that what you said on the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t lie to me, lady, I’m tired. Okay. Here’s what I know. What
we
know. The kid was a small-time ‘speed’ merchant—pills mostly, all kinds of meth and dex. He was shot to death in some kind of drug-related dispute. The kid was sitting at a back table in a bar called Halliday’s on Eighth and First. About three in the morning a character with a beard, about fifty, walks in and sits down next to him. He and Chessler talk. Then they argue. The guy shoots the kid in the head and walks out. The weapon used was a twenty-five-caliber semiautomatic pistol. We found four hundred ‘greens’ on the kid and six hundred dollars in cash.”

A twenty-five-caliber semiautomatic pistol? My forehead broke into a cool sweat.

He opened a stick of gum, folded it, and placed it into his mouth, signaling that he was finished with his information briefing; that it was all he knew and he really wasn’t exorcised over the whole matter.

Then he grinned and said: “Oh, yeah, I forgot. The kid was also an out-of-work actor.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” My voice was abstract.

“Well, what else do we got to say to each other?”

“Was the weapon a Beretta?” I asked quietly.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I guessed.” His mention of a twenty-five-caliber semiautomatic handgun had jolted me into a connection. It was suddenly very odd to me that Arkavy Reynolds and Bruce Chessler had both been murdered by the same kind of weapon. And one had showed up at the other’s funeral.

“These kinds of cases,” Hanks said in a patronizing way, “get solved eight years later by mistake, or they don’t get solved at all. Speed kills, lady, like the man says.” He walked away. It was very hot. I looked across the street into the posh park through the railings. Two white-coated nannies were pushing carriages, around and around and around. Why did Bruce Chessler die?

10

It took me six hours to locate and meet with Detective Felix of Manhattan South Homicide. He was one of the two police officers who had visited me in the New School after class and asked me to identify photographs of people who attended Arkavy Reynolds’s wake on Madison Avenue. Felix agreed to come to my apartment only after I told him I had important evidence concerning Arkavy’s murder.

He seemed nervous when he entered my apartment, staring at Bushy with a hint of fear in his eyes. “He doesn’t bite or scratch,” I said. Detective Felix was wearing a spanking-clean button-down blue shirt and a lovely soft gray suit. How different he was from Detective Hanks! He made a few inquiries about the current state of my theatrical career and then sat down gingerly on my sofa, very gingerly, as if the cats could give him some sort of communicable disease.

Once he had seated himself and demurely opened the buttons of his jacket, he asked: “Do you remember a play about Joan of Arc starring Julie Harris?”

“I do,” I replied, “but I forget the name of the play. Anyway, I think it was before your time. Did you see it?”

“No,” he admitted. Then there was an awkward silence. He was looking at me very intently.

“Well, what do you have for me?” he finally asked.

Have? Did he want coffee? Chocolate milk? A beer? Then I remembered that it was simply a police expression.

“That young man, that student of mine, who went to the funeral home for Arkavy’s wake . . . he was murdered by a twenty-five-caliber semiautomatic Beretta a short time later. The same kind that killed your informer.”

Felix guffawed. “It’s a very common street weapon now. These things go in cycles. One year the fad is twenty-two-caliber Longs . . . the next year all the bad guys are using .357 Magnums. This year it’s twenty-five-caliber Berettas. So what?”

“Did you do a ballistic check on the bullets?” I asked, trying to sound knowledgeable but not accusatory.

“No! Why should we have done that? There was no connection at the time. The murders were in different places and different jurisdictions. And it can’t be done now. It would require too much paperwork and too many goddamn signatures without enough jurisdiction.”

I finally sat down at the other end of the sofa. Detective Felix looked even more uncomfortable now. He ran one hand through his brilliantly cut short haircut. One could still see the scissor marks.

“You told me at the New School that Arkavy had become a police informant. I suppose you mean that he had been arrested on some charge and you let the charges drop in exchange for his continuing cooperation.”

“Right.”

“What was his crime?”

“Possession of amphetamines with intent to sell.”

I exhaled. “Well,” I noted, “that young man, Bruce Chessler, was an amphetamine pusher. When he was murdered he had a few hundred pills on him.”

“Do you mean the fat man and this student of yours were business associates?”

“Why else would he go to the funeral?”

Detective Felix grinned wickedly at me, as if I were some kind of bumbling idiot, and then said: “You mean there was speed stashed in the coffin? Or do you mean pushers like to pay their last respects because they’re so filled with compassion?”

I did feel like an idiot. Because I believed Bruce Chessler had gone to the funeral home for some nostalgic tribute to a lost tradition personified by the fat man. But the speed connection had seemed to me to be the right one for the detective—the one he would find logical, palatable. Wrong again.

“Besides,” Felix continued, showing a trace of alarm as big bad Bushy began to walk stiff-legged around the sofa, “Arkavy hadn’t touched or dealt that stuff for two years.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said contemptuously, “because I even tried to give him some stuff to keep him happy, but he said he was getting his kicks from other things now.”

“What things?”

“Maybe boys,” he said, “or maybe older actresses.”

I flushed. His comment infuriated me, but it may have been unintentional. He was beginning to act a little like Bruce Chessler. I hoped he wasn’t getting amorous.

I left the sofa and sat at the large dining-room table, along the wall, leafing through some papers.

“Well,” I finally said, “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

He stood up quickly. “Look . . . thanks for the information. If you hear anything else, let me or my partner know. Maybe they did know each other in the past. Maybe they did business together when the fat man was into speed. Why not? But as for the twenty-five-caliber Beretta . . . it’s meaningless. There are thousands of them on the street. If you’re going to get blown away—why not with one of those? And pushers and crazies always get blown away sooner or later.”

“But I thought you told me you wanted very much to get his killer.”

“We do.”

“Well, if there’s a good chance that the same man who murdered Reynolds murdered Chessler . . . or even a slim chance . . . shouldn’t you start looking into Chessler’s murder? I know the detective working on his case. His name is—”

Felix held up his hand, stopping me. “We’ll get the one who killed the fat man. Believe me.”

He carefully buttoned his suit jacket, signaling me that the interview was over. I let him out and heard him skip down the stairs as if he had been released from a mental ward.

The meeting with him had exhausted me. Once again I had discovered—a lesson I seemed to have to learn again and again—that police departments cannot handle obscurity. They flee from it. They need defined objects. They flee from obscure people and obscure deaths and obscure connections. Like a cat approaching a rosebush. It was I, not the NYPD, who was going to have to unravel these obscurities.

11

“Listen, Swede, you’re not acting rationally. This is not a rational decision,” Basillio said, nudging Bushy’s tail with his foot. Bushy ignored him. Pancho was staring at the stranger from beneath the long table, crouched, ready to flee.

I had called Basillio and asked him to come over even though it was a long drive from Fort Lee and his wife might go crazy. I had told him what I planned to do . . . to pursue the question: Why did the young man die? I told him that I wanted to start hanging out for a while at the bar in which Bruce Chessler was murdered. I had told him that I needed his help. I needed him to accompany me—to provide, as you will, the cover.

“Swede, listen. This isn’t like those murders out on Long Island. The cops there were baffled, and every conclusion they came to was stupid. You had to intercede. It was a question of . . .” He hesitated, searching for a word, then said: “. . . justice. If you hadn’t gotten involved, they never would have caught the murderers. Because the whole thing was bizarre and out of the cops’ comprehension. But here we have a pill-pushing kid murdered. This, the cops deal with every day. They aren’t obligated to understand what you’re talking about.”

“Do you want to help me or not?” I persisted.

“This kid, this Chessler. I don’t care if he was in love with you. I don’t care if he was an out-of-work actor who had a picture of your old acting teacher. He was a druggie, Swede, a hustler. There’s no confusion. There’s no puzzle. It was a goddamn drug deal gone wrong. The kid had hundreds of pills and plenty of bucks in his pocket. He was a dealer. You
know
why he died and how he died. Like the cop told you, it’s that old slogan: speed kills. God, I haven’t heard that slogan in years.”

He was getting agitated, almost yelling at me.

“Calm down, Tony.”

“Okay. I’m calm. Can we talk about this? Do you really think they snuffed him out because of a crazy white cat?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I really didn’t. The Arkavy Reynolds connection, real or imagined, had tempered a lot of my flights of fancy and intuition.

He started to walk about the apartment, shaking his head.

“Tony, do you remember Theresa Lombardo?”

“No. Should I?”

“Think back. Remember the Dramatic Workshop. Remember her?”

He stopped and stared at me. “That small dark girl. A very good actress. Right?”

“Right. You remember her.”

“So what?”

“Remember how crazy she was about being an actress . . . about how nothing on earth—and I mean nothing—meant a goddamn thing to her except the theater?”

“A lot of us thought like that then.”

“Sure. But Theresa was a very poor girl. Do you remember how she supported herself?”

“No.”

“She turned tricks.”

“Oh, here we go . . . hearts and flowers. Are you telling me this kid sold speed because of his great love for the theater?”

“I don’t know. I know nothing about him. Neither do the police. I’m just making a point.”

“About what?”

“About theater people. About actors and actresses and directors. About their heads and hearts.”

He sat down on the sofa. Our conversation had obviously exhausted him.

Then he said: “I’ll make a point. Here I am, a forty-two-year-old failed theatrical designer who makes more money than he knows what to do with, simply by making xerox copies of company reports—talking to a forty-one-year-old actress with enormous talent who is forced to cat-sit for a living because she can’t stand either Broadway or Hollywood and all they represent and she’s determined to blaze her own avant-garde path when she’s not solving bizarre crimes. . . . Here we both are, discussing a young pill pusher who gets blown away. . . . Don’t you see, Swede? The whole thing is crazy.”

He leaned forward and stared at Bushy, who was sitting up like an oversize Egyptian cat, perhaps startled by Tony’s rhetoric. Bushy didn’t like excessive chatter. It interfered with his naps.

“I hope, Swede,” he continued, “that when a disgruntled customer blows me away you’ll start an investigation as to why I died. After all, I loved you also.”

“But you never wrote me letters that you didn’t send,” I quipped.

“You should know,” he said, and I suddenly felt very uncomfortable.

There was a long awkward silence. Basillio started to play with his car keys.

“Okay, Swede, I’ll take the part.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

“But remember, my limit is two drinks. So if I’m sitting with you in that bar and you let me go over that limit and I start getting wild—it’ll be on your lovely head.”

He left without another word to me or to Bushy or to Pancho.