A Cat Tells Two Tales (8 page)

12

I crept up on the small coffee shop at Thirty-fourth Street just east of Third because I felt in my heart that Jo Starobin wouldn��t be there as she had promised. I really don’t know why I was doing something so stupid, but all the same, darted a look in the window. I saw her waiting. I felt enormously relieved. When I had called her and told her I wanted to meet her, she had been distinctly unfriendly, talking to me in a polite tone as if we were shopping together in a supermarket. She offhandedly remarked that she had to come into the city to visit the bank vault. Was Thursday okay?

I snuck another look and saw that Jo was bent over, almost as if she was in pain. I kept staring at her through the window, worried now. But when she straightened up, there wasn’t really pain on her face—it was despair. It was as if the loss of Harry seemed to crush her from time to time—without warning, without explanation.

I walked inside and slipped into the chair across from her. She had chosen a small table along the wall. She smiled at me—a broad, wonderful smile—and she stretched her hands across the table and I grasped them and we both knew that everything was fine.

When the waitress came over, I ordered an espresso. Jo ordered a cappuccino. We decided to share a piece of dark chocolate cake with cherries.

Jo started to tell me about her train ride into Manhattan, but I broke right into her monologue. I couldn’t wait. I pulled out the photograph I had feloniously ripped from the book, and placed it down on the table in front of her. “I’ve found your barn cat, Jo.”

“Veronica? You found Veronica?” Jo asked, astonished, and then leaned over and studied the photograph of Cup of Tea with the exercise rider she recognized as Ginger and the calico cat sitting beside the water bucket.

“Look, Jo,” I said, “look at the markings: the exact same as the cat in the photo we saw at Ginger’s apartment. You said it was Veronica with Harry.”

“Alice, similar markings are very common in calico cats.”

“But look at her, Jo,” I pleaded.

Jo looked closely, then sat back. “Alice,” she said quietly, “this photograph was probably taken around 1981 or 1982.”

“So what?”

“Well, Veronica is about three years old now. She was born in 1985. I remember when she was born. It was a small litter.”

I had been so excited when I found the picture that I hadn’t even considered Veronica’s age.

“It could be Veronica’s mother,” Jo continued, “who was also a calico, if I recall. But how could she have gotten to Maryland? Those cats never left our barn. And Ginger worked in Maryland as an exercise rider before she came to Long Island. No, Alice, it’s just another calico cat. And even if it was Veronica’s mother—so what?”

I shook my head grimly. I had been so struck by the strange duplication of Ginger and a calico cat that I hadn’t considered that someone else would shrug it off. For the past two days I had been adding up facts. Ginger had been an exercise rider for a very famous horse. Subsequently, though, she had become a stable girl on a basically nonworking farm for less than minimum wage. Wasn’t that very strange? Now, however, it seemed as though I had gone off half-cocked.

Jo reached across the table, patted me gently on the arm, and said: “It’s just a picture of a horse and his mascot, who happens to be a calico cat. All horses have stable companions, Alice. They live with the horses, travel with the horses, play with the horses. Sometimes a horse will go crazy or just lie down and die if its mascot is killed or runs away. Most are dogs or cats, but racehorses have had goats, pigeons, canaries, turtles—and God knows what else—as companions. I once had a carriage horse named Sam who wouldn’t step out of his stall unless he was accompanied by a three-legged black cat who lived in the stall with him.”

The waitress brought our coffee and placed the piece of chocolate cake equidistant between us, along with two glistening forks. Jo handed the photograph back to me. I slipped it into my bag.

“It is very good to see you,” Jo said.

I smiled and nodded to show her the feeling was reciprocal. Just then I noticed a funny glint in Jo’s eye, and I wondered if she knew that Charlie Coombs and I had become lovers. She probably knew, I realized, but was too discreet to say anything unless I brought it up.

“Listen, Alice, can you come out to Long Island tomorrow?”

“Why?”

“There’s an auction of Mona Aspen’s house furnishings and her paintings and . . . everything. She has a beautiful house.”

The change in subject caught me by surprise, and I didn’t respond.

“Come out, Alice. You’ll love her house. I don’t want to go there alone. And besides, Mona would have wanted me to make sure some of her things didn’t get into the wrong hands. We can spend some of Harry’s money to make sure some of them get a good home. Say you’ll come. I’ll pick you up at the Hicksville station at the usual time.”

“I’ll come,” I said, caught up by her enthusiasm. I also wanted very much for our friendship to flourish again without the two-hundred dollars a day.

We played with our coffee in silence for a while. Then I asked her, “Have the police found out anything new?”

“Nothing. Whenever I ask them, they say they’re still investigating. I ask them what they’re investigating. They say they’re trying to trace the stolen valuables from a nonexistent inventory list. I don’t know who dislikes whom more. But it was my husband who was murdered.”

“Have you learned anything new, Jo?”

Jo arched her eyes. “Why would you ask me that, Alice? After all, I took your advice. Remember? You told me I should forget everything and just live.”

There was an awkward silence.

“But I couldn’t find it,” Jo said.

“Find what?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

Jo suddenly began to search frantically under her napkin, under her cup, and then under the table.

“Find what?” I asked again, now concerned about the old woman’s bizarre behavior.

Jo relaxed and grinned. “Life, Alice, life. The life you told me to live.”

We both laughed so loudly at the joke that the waitress threw us disapproving glances.

Mona Aspen’s house was indeed beautiful. Originally an eighteenth-century farmhouse, of which the kitchen, hallway, and dining room were still extant, it had been extended several times, and even its modern wing retained a colonial feel. Jo and I wandered from room to room, staring at the lamps and chairs and rugs, each of which were tagged with the same kind of yellow cardboard on which an auctioneer’s code was inscribed. A strange man in a black hat handed each of us a descriptive catalog of the house’s contents with prices.

Jo seemed to want to touch everything, to gather everything in, as if she was the sole trusted guardian of her late friend’s sensibility. Other people came and went, some greeting Jo, some just walking by with a smile and a nod.

“I’m going to have to sit for a while,” Jo said finally. Spotting an armchair by the fireplace, I guided Jo over to it.

She said, once she was seated, “I keep forgetting that you never were in her house before. You were in the stable area that time. Well, you ought to look at Mona’s bedroom. It’s really beautiful. And I’ll take a nap here.”

I hadn’t taken three steps away from her when Detective Senay slipped out of an alcove, oddly light-footed for such a large man.

“Well, well, the cat lady,” he said. I didn’t like the inflection of his voice. And I didn’t like the way he had moved right next to me, violating the space that was necessary to maintain a conversation. That, I realized, was one of the reasons I had always disliked him—his willingness to get too close physically. I wondered whether it was a trick of the trade he had learned while interrogating suspects. Did he consider me a suspect?

I smiled and started to move on.

“I made some inquiries about you,” he said.

I stopped and turned. “Inquiries?”

“Well,” he said, “not really. Let’s just say I spoke to some people out in Suffolk County and they said you interfered with a homicide case at Stony Brook.”

“No, Detective, you and your friends have it all wrong. I didn’t interfere. I just taught them the difference between suicide and homicide. They didn’t seem to know the difference.”

He didn’t like what I said. I don’t blame him. But he had started it. “God save us from another dilettante. Tell me, do you have a psychic approach to crime?”

“Right,” I said with an equivalent dose of sarcasm. “I solve murders by dissecting birds and reading their innards.”

“Birds sound like your speed. Anyway, you may be interested in knowing that two kids in Manhasset tried to sell an eighteenth-century silver tea service that may have come from the Starobin place.”

He grinned and started to walk away.

“Wait,” I said.

“You want to tell me something?” he asked.

“Yes. I want to tell you that you’re crazy if you think Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen were murdered by thieves looking for silverware.”

He winked at me as if I was some kind of pathetic eccentric. He strolled off.

It took me a few minutes to compose myself after he walked away, but then I acted on Jo’s instructions. I located a long hall which led to a parlor and then to a staircase which, I thought while ascending, had to lead to a dank, dark attic but which instead ended abruptly in an enormous bedroom flooded with light.

It took my breath away. For a moment I longed to be out of the city for good, to live in a room like Mona’s. I could envision Bushy and Pancho staring for hours out the room’s many windows in feline bliss as the squirrels and the birds danced on the tree limbs before their eyes.

Then I began to inspect the room. The furniture was old and simple and low—oak and cherrywood. The four-poster bed was tiny and fragile, graced by two frayed and no-longer-bright comforters. One of them had a sunflower design.

On the longest wall two oil paintings of horses hung side by side. Between the windows on the shorter walls hung bird prints, mostly waterfowl. One of them was a magnificent print of a loon, done in deep dull purple and black. Like the other rooms in the house, all the items in Mona Aspen’s bedroom were also yellow-tagged.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

The voice came from the stairs.

I whirled toward it. Mona’s nephew, Nicholas Hill, was standing at the top of the stairs. His sudden appearance frightened me. For a moment I remembered that feathered hat on Fifth Avenue. Or had it been someone else? He wasn’t wearing a feathered hat now. He was wearing nothing peculiar except for a very old-fashioned tie with some kind of insignia on it.

I fought back my fear, telling myself it was stupid. Why did I think he would harm me? Did I think he was the one who had driven that pickup truck? Jo had said he was a heavy gambler, but that didn’t mean he would murder his aunt. I remembered how grief-stricken he had been after his aunt’s death. I remembered how he and Jo had embraced spontaneously over their loss.

He walked into the room toward one of the windows, and his slow, almost lumbering gait kept me on edge. Weren’t gamblers supposed to be chipper, nervous little men? For a moment I caught myself measuring his build, wondering if he could hang people on door hooks. But no, that was silly.

If he had been following me that day on Fifth Avenue—if the hat with the feather in it had been his—then maybe he was in the room now to finish something. His hands seemed even more powerful to me than when I had first met him in the barn, cleaning a shovel.

“Do you like those?” he asked, pointing at the two horse paintings.

I looked at the paintings again. For the first time I noticed that the space next to one of the paintings was slightly paler. A third painting had obviously hung on the wall there. Had it been sold?

“Yes, I like them, but I doubt if I could afford either one,” I replied. “Or those waterfowl prints.”

Nicholas nodded and edged closer to the paintings. “My aunt loved these paintings. They were done by Becker. He painted those horses as they were chewing grass in the big field behind the second barn.”

“They were your aunt’s horses?” I asked.

“Oh, God, no. These are famous racehorses. The first one is Lord Kelvin. The other one is Ask Me No Questions. Both are multiple-stakes winners. Mona just took care of them for a while. One had a bucked shin. The other . . . I forget. Mona nursed them back to health. When they got back to the racetrack, they did nothing but win.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets angrily and turned, as if he had committed a felony by reminiscing. “But, as I think I told you before,” he continued, “my aunt only liked wounded things. So once they got better, she couldn’t have cared less.”

He was very close to me now and I began to feel apprehensive once again. I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Then the steps reversed themselves and the sounds vanished.

“I have to get back to Jo,” I said.

“Then go,” he retorted bitterly, as if I was betraying him in some manner. I slipped past him and down the steps.

By the time I finished accompanying Jo throughout the rest of the house, I was totally exhausted. I was sorry I had agreed to come out, even though I knew that Jo had considered it a reinstatement of the friendship. I begged off on Jo’s request that I come back to the Starobin house, so she dropped me reluctantly at the Long Island Rail Road station.