How to Wash a Cat (13 page)

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Authors: Rebecca M. Hale

BOOK: How to Wash a Cat
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Chapter 14
I LAY IN Oscar’s old bed the next morning, groggily contemplating the events of the previous day. The cats slept at my feet, stretched out in the extra folds of the blankets I’d brought over from my apartment.
The air was wet with the thick chill of fog, sending me deeper into the warmth of the bed. One of Rupert’s tightly shut eyes cracked open a sliver, warning me that it was far too early to disturb his beauty sleep.
My head burrowed down into the pillow in agreement. Almost instantly, I fell back into a deep, pre-dawn slumber. Bundled in the cushioning cocoon of blankets, every joint thoroughly un-tensed, my head sunk down through the pillows and picked up the thread of an earlier, unfinished dream.
I walked towards a faint, glowing light as the uneven tile floor of the kitchen appeared beneath my feet. The peeling wallpaper rose before my eyes, along with a happily gurgling dishwasher. Happy, I saw, because its owner’s hunched back stood near the stove, cooking up a skillet of fried chicken. Oscar turned as I reached out to touch him on the shoulder, and the gruff exterior of his face broke into a broad, warm smile.
Oscar was holding something in his hand. He stretched out his arm to offer it to me. The object glowed a gold metallic in his rough, worn fingers—the image of a tulip flickered in the warm light of the kitchen.
I reached out to take it from him, my fingers curling around the hard metal surface. The object rolled in the palm of my hand. I looked down and saw that my fingers were wrapped around the tulip-shaped handle of the gold key.
My gaze bounced back up to Oscar, but his face was slowly changing. I watched, horrified, as his round, grizzled cheeks flattened into loose, flopping jowls. His gray hair darkened into oily, black strands. His cheery, blue eyes sunk into his skull, shrinking to dark, beady pupils.
Harold Wombler’s snarling voice echoed in my head as I stared at the worn, shredded overalls that had suddenly replaced Oscar’s stained, navy blue shirt.
“What are you up to Monkey-mery?”
I tried to speak but my voice remained silent, my vocal cords paralyzed, as the face in front of me morphed again. The cartilage of the nose grew into a sharp protrusion, beaking out over thin, nearly invisible lips, and I found myself face to face with Gordon Bosco.
I stepped backwards, trying to distance myself from his portly figure and finely tailored, double-breasted suit. He tugged on his starched white cuffs, revealing tulip-shaped cufflinks that twinkled in the light. . . .
“Whugh!” The sound squeezed out of my throat as Rupert jumped on my stomach and crawled up to my face. Apparently, it was time for breakfast.
I FILLED UP the cats’ food bowls and headed down the stairs to the showroom, grabbing the parchment map and a couple of San Francisco guidebooks along the way.
I passed the stuffed kangaroo on my way out the front door. In this misty light, it looked like a character from a B-grade horror movie.
“I’ve got to get rid of that thing,” I thought, shaking my head as I walked outside.
The fog covered everything like a trench coat. Figures as close as the opposite side of the street retained their anonymity, making it difficult to shake the eeriness of my dream.
A couple of blocks later, I entered the financial district. The streets filled up with crowds of lawyers, stockbrokers, secretaries, and salesmen, littering the sidewalks with the one-sided cackle of their cell phone conversations. The pumping gears of delivery trucks and the screeching brakes of Muni buses filled in a deafening white noise as an army of suited, stone-faced warriors flashed by me, white iPod tails dangling from their ears.
It was 8:55 a.m. on Montgomery Street, crunch time for the army of ants scurrying to their offices. I stood with my ex-brethren on a corner, waiting for the light to change, feeling the heated radiation of their stress and anxiety. The force of my old routine tugged at me, threatening to suck me back in. If I closed my eyes, I felt certain my feet would turn off towards the accounting firm—left at this corner, then two blocks down. I imagined my closet-sized cubicle, forlornly waiting for my return.
The signal turned to green, and everything started to move again. I continued straight across the intersection, bypassing the left turn, wrenching myself free from the siren call of my cubicle. By the time I reached the opposite side of the street, my head was up, my vision sharp and clear. A fresh breeze whistled through the fog-laden streets, chasing the murky spirit back to its ocean lair.
It’s funny the things you notice when your perspective changes. I must have passed that corner hundreds of times before, but—for the first time—I noticed a gold-colored plaque set into the brick wall of a bank building. To the consternation of the crowds rushing past me, I stopped to read it.
The marker commemorated the spot where, on July 9, 1846, Captain John B. Montgomery sailed the
USS Portsmouth
into the small settlement of Yerba Buena and disembarked. I leaned forward, squinting to read the raised text mounted on the block as the last office stragglers screeched around me, racing to make their elevators before the clock ticked nine.
From here, I read, the captain had marched his men up the hill a couple of blocks to the center of town and claimed the territory of California for the United States. The few Mexican soldiers on patrol had left a couple of days before his arrival. In that pre-Gold Rush atmosphere, neither the United States nor the Mexican government had much interest in the isolated backwater that would become San Francisco.
The streets emptied as the hour hand broke nine. I crossed the street in decadent luxury, skipping lightly over the cable car tracks, and walked a couple of blocks down to my destination—a nondescript alley fronted by a pair of stately stone office buildings. A narrow canyon of asphalt sliced between the two structures, providing outdoor seating for a coffee shop that occupied a commercial space on the street level of one of the buildings.
A small street sign hung off a lamppost, barely noticeable against the fog-enhanced backdrop. The sign labeled the shaded alley: LEIDESDORFF.
I took a seat at a small table in the alley outside the coffee shop. Sharp rays of sun began to slice through the fog as I pulled the parchment and the guidebooks out of my backpack and spread them out on the table. From the text of one of the reference books, I realized that Leidesdorff’s warehouse had been located just across the way, on the other side of California Street.
According to the book, the warehouse had been situated on the water’s edge so that at high tide, small runner boats could pull up to it and unload their cargo. The warehouse had been a transit point for raw materials from Northern California ranches, sugar cane from Hawaii, and manufactured goods from the East Coast.
In the present day geography, the city’s shoreline was several blocks to the east. Even without the fog’s impediment, the water was no longer visible from this location.
I tried to imagine away the towering masonry encircling my table, envisioning a damp bank of sand trafficked by burly frontiersmen hefting bundles of fur and skins. Their heavy boots thunked up the wide, wooden steps of the warehouse into a receiving area where a tall, swarthy, lamb-chopped Leidesdorff entered their goods into his ledger book.
My mental image evaporated with the jarring clang of a trolley car clattering along California Street. I returned to the book.
An American solider named Joseph Folsom had purchased the warehouse property from Leidesdorff right before he died. Folsom built a hotel on the site, expanding it into the landfill lot next-door.
In its day, the Tehama Hotel had been a landmark for the city’s social elite. Famous financier William Ralston and his wife lived there for several months after their marriage while they waited for their prestigious Nob Hill residence to be built. Ralston had been so taken with the hotel’s location that he later purchased the land for the site of his bank.
The bank’s first building had burned down after the 1906 earthquake, but its replacement was equally grand. I walked around the corner of the coffee shop to study it in person. Elaborate, stone pillars supported a Parthenon-like structure; Italianate detailing trimmed every edge. Despite the elaborate décor, the bank presented a solid, dignified front.
A delivery bike screeched up in front, and a slim, heavily tattooed man with bulging calves dismounted and clacked up the steps in his plastic biking shoes. I was still staring at the building when he returned moments later, whipped up his bike and pedaled off, iron leg muscles gaining momentum to pound him up the next hill.
I held up the parchment, searching the map for the location of Leidesdorff’s warehouse. Another red trolley car rolled by, its wheels banging loudly against the rails, the fog-piercing sunshine glinting against its brass finishings. As the ringing of its bell disappeared up the hill, I saw it.
On the bottom right-hand corner, an imprint had been pressed into the paper. I brought the map up close to my glasses, squinting at the mark.
It was a three-petaled tulip. The same design as the handle to the gold key. The same design as the sketch on Oscar’s renovation drawings. The same design as the gold cufflinks Oscar had traced back to Leidesdorff.
I wondered again about the gold, tulip-shaped cufflinks Gordon Bosco had worn at the board meeting the previous evening. The image of Oscar’s casket sinking into the deep, black earth flashed before me as the ubiquitous phrase echoed in my head—
in case something happened to him
.
I pulled out my cell phone and called the police station. A switchboard operator picked up. “Hello? Can I help you?”
“Yes, hello,” I replied, hesitating for a moment, intimidated by the spontaneity of my action. “I’m calling about an autopsy that was done on my uncle about a week ago.”
“I’ll transfer you.”
I waited as the line rang. The sound of plastic knocking on plastic banged in my ear as someone scooped up a receiver.
“Yes,” came the answer. It was a man’s voice, flat and pickled, as if it had been soaked in formaldehyde.
“Yes, hello, I had some questions about an autopsy that was done recently on my uncle,” I said and gave him Oscar’s details.
Computer keys clicked in an otherwise silent void.
“I don’t see any records of that here.” The voice was cold, sterile. “I’m sorry, you must be mistaken.”
“But—someone called and told me that there’d been a preliminary autopsy. That my uncle had died from a stroke,” I insisted, growing frustrated.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Ma’am. We have no records of any autopsy being done.” He coughed uncomfortably. “As far as I know, we don’t
do
preliminary autopsies.”
Chapter 15
I WALKED PENSIVELY back to the Green Vase, my brain more fuddled than when I left, unsure of how to process the information from the police department.
Someone
had called to assure me that Oscar had died of a stroke. That diagnosis now seemed less and less likely. My head swam with grim possibilities as I turned the tulip key in the door and walked inside.
Rupert was fast asleep on the cashier counter, soaking up the sun streaming in the window. A couple of stray pieces of litter had shaken out of his coat onto the counter. One paw hung lazily off the edge, swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a grandfather clock.
“Glad you’re keeping an eye on the place,” I said sarcastically.
A light snuffle was his only response.
Isabella chirruped a warning from her perch on top of the bookcase. A half-second later, the floor creaked behind me. I turned to find that my curly-haired, omnipresent neighbor had followed me through the front door.
“Afternoon, everyone,” Monty greeted us.
The feathery tip of Rupert’s tail twitched slightly in response.
“Hi, Monty,” I said, appreciating more and more the value of an underground tunnel that might allow me to come and go unnoticed by my nosy neighbor. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve come to see you about an opportunity.” He smiled winningly. “Actually, I’ve already put you up for it, so you have to accept.”
I cringed. “Um, you know, things are really busy right now,” I responded evasively. “I’ve got a lot of work to do here. . . .”
“Oh, this will be great for your business! I’m sure you can fit it in.” He began to pace back and forth. His hands stretched above his head as his long fingers gripped at the air, gathering his thoughts.
I could see that I was about to be treated to an in-depth presentation, so I began to look for a place to sit down. I glanced at the dental chair, but, remembering the episode with the recline lever, decided to aim for the stool behind the cashier counter instead.
Monty was just getting warmed up. “I’ve got this client who runs an auction house—her name’s Dilla. She’s a dear, you’ll love her. She dropped off a painting the other day that I think you’ll be interested in.” He waved his hand as if setting this thought aside on a mental shelf. “I’ll show it to you later.”
Rupert yawned and joined Isabella on the floor in front of the pacing Monty. Monty nodded to him, acknowledging the added audience.

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