A Cat Tells Two Tales (3 page)

4

At six in the morning, four days after Harry’s murder, I heard from Jo Starobin again. Her call woke me from a deep sleep. As usual, at that time in the morning my apartment was freezing. As usual, Bushy was on the pillow next to me. Pancho was somewhere else, plotting his next escape attempt.

“Am I speaking to Alice Nestleton?”

That’s what I heard when I picked up the phone. For some reason, in my sleepy state, it seemed to be one of the funniest things I had ever heard. Is this Alice Nestleton? Is this Joan of Arc? Is this Ti-Grace Atkinson?

My laughter irritated the caller.

“Maybe I have the wrong number. I’m looking for Alice Nestleton.”

“This is she,” I answered, which seemed even funnier.

“Alice, it’s Jo. Jo Starobin.”

I felt stupid and ashamed. “Jo, I’m sorry. I just got up.”

“I’m sorry to call so early. I’m in Manhattan, at the Hotel Tudor.”

“On Forty-second Street?”

“Yes. Can you meet me this morning? At nine o’clock?” Her voice was hurried, demanding, hopeful.

Did I have any appointments? I couldn’t remember any. I said that I would meet her.

“At the Chemical Bank,” she said, “on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Third Avenue.”

And then she hung up abruptly. I listened dumbly to the dial tone. Then I replaced the receiver and pulled the blankets around me. I was glad she had called. In the days since the murder I had tried desperately to think of some gesture or some way to tell her that I understood her grief. But nothing had seemed authentic enough, so I had done nothing—not a card, not a flower, not a call; nothing. Now, at least, I could be of some assistance. Maybe she wanted a shoulder to cry on. Maybe she wanted to tell me about Harry.

The phone rang again as I was dressing. It was Carla Fried.

“Are you back in Montreal?” I asked.

“No,” she laughed, “Atlanta. Something came up. You know how it is with us famous theater people.”

I hoped she wasn’t going to press me about the part. I had other things on my mind.

“Look, Alice, I just wanted to tell you how wonderful it was seeing you and talking to you. I could talk to you for five days straight.”

“Like old times,” I said.

“Like old
good
times,” she corrected, and then said breathlessly, as if she was in a great hurry, “Look, Alice, I don’t know my schedule. But if I pass through New York on my way back, let’s get together again.”

I agreed. She hung up. Given the horror of what had happened in Old Brookville, the idea of my old friend Carla Fried dashing across the country like a Hollywood version of a theatrical entrepreneur seemed somewhat frivolous.

I left my apartment, which is on Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, at eight o’clock and walked slowly uptown. It was one of those peculiar days between Christmas and New Year’s Day when people seemed exhausted and confused. A black teenager’s boom box blared some rap song that I foolishly thought for a moment was an updated version of a Christmas carol.

I arrived at the bank around eight forty-five. Jo was standing there like a lost child, wearing a pair of old-fashioned earmuffs.

“We’re early. We’ll wait,” Jo said.

It had never dawned on me that Jo really wanted to go into the bank. I had thought it was just a place to meet. But she obviously was waiting for the bank to open. She looked terrible—exhausted, nervous, confused. She grabbed hold of my arm and held it.

When the bank doors opened, I followed Jo inside and down a flight of stairs to a large glass door obviously locked from the inside. Jo rang a buzzer. The door opened and an elderly man wearing a gray jacket with a white carnation ushered us into the safe-deposit-vault area. Jo signed a slip and handed him a key. He vanished into the vault area and returned quickly with a large steel box, which he carried toward the rear of the room, Jo and me following.

We entered a small carpeted room with three chairs and a long table. He set the box down on the table and left the room without a word, closing the door behind him.

We just sat there and stared at the box. I didn’t understand what we were doing there.

Finally Jo said, “I was down here yesterday to pick up Harry’s will. Do you know that it was the first time in fifteen years I had looked in the safe-deposit box?”

“I never had one,” I replied.

“Oh, they’re quite nice, quite functional,” Jo replied, and I caught a hint of sarcasm. Or was it bitterness?

“Would you please open the box for me, Alice?” she asked.

I leaned over, disengaged the latch, and lifted the heavy steel top. I straightened up quickly. Inside was more money than I had ever seen in my life. The box was stuffed with packs of hundred-dollar bills held together by rubber bands.

“Do you see it? Do you see it?” she asked in a hysterical whisper.

I passed my hand over the top layer, gingerly touching the money.

“Three hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars, Alice. Three hundred and eighty-one thousand! Where did Harry get all this money? Why didn’t he tell me? How did he get the money?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even fantasize an answer.

“Do you know what I think, Alice? I think this is why he was murdered. I think this is why.” She slammed the top of the box shut.

“Have you told the police?” I asked.

“No,” she replied abruptly. She paused, staring at me, and then said, “I was going to tell them. But I thought about it. And now I’m not. Look, Alice, Harry and I didn’t have a dime. Everything was mortgaged. We owe everybody. And I think Harry wanted this money to pay off our debts and give us the farm free and clear. Harry would want me to use the money for that. Whatever he did to get the money, I know he did it for us, and the cats, and the carriage horses. This was his Christmas present to all of us, and if I tell the police, they’re going to impound the money or do something like that or take half of it for taxes. Do you see what I mean, Alice? I’m not being a thief. I know what Harry would have wanted.”

“He never said anything about this, Jo?” I asked skeptically.

“Never. Not a word. I swear, Alice. Never, never, never.” Then she stood up, placed her palms on either side of her head, saying, “Do you think he robbed a bank? Poor Harry. Maybe he robbed a bank because he wanted a Christmas present for all of us. I said to him about a month ago, when we couldn’t pay the heating-oil people, that I was so sick of it I wanted to die. He just kissed me on the forehead and said I shouldn’t get upset.”

She started to cry, then caught herself and clapped her hands together as if she was a teacher and I was a boisterous kindergarten pupil. “I want a cup of coffee, Alice. Can you take me for a cup of coffee?”

Five minutes later we were sipping coffee from containers in the Citicorp Atrium. On the walk over, Jo had kept chattering nervously: “Have you ever seen so much money?” “Did you see the way it was packed?” “All those rubber bands. All those hundred-dollar bills!”

As hundreds of children raced through the atrium, brought there to view the Scandinavian Christmas decorations, which hung from ceiling to floor, Jo sent me for another cup of coffee and for something sweet. I returned with a raisin Danish. She began picking off the raisins with a plastic spoon.

“Now, listen to me, Alice Nestleton,” she said. “I called you for a reason, not just to stare at money or buy me coffee. I know a lot of people think I’m a little crazy.”

“No one thinks that, Jo. Everyone I ever met out there loves you, Jo, just like they loved Harry,” I replied, and I meant it.

“Well, I know why Harry was murdered now. It was for that money, right? But it doesn’t mean a thing unless we know how he got the money. Because if we know how he got it, we’ll know who wanted it. And I know how to find out who murdered poor Harry. He never threw anything away. He saved letters and bills and business cards and cat-show programs and scraps of paper. He saved everything and it’s all there and all I have to do is go through it all. But I can’t do that, Alice. I can’t see too well. And I don’t have patience. But you can come out for a few weeks, Alice—and your cats too—you can help me. I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars a day. And we can find out what Harry did and who murdered him. Can’t we do that?”

I didn’t know what to say. If the killers had been after Harry’s cash, why hadn’t they guessed it was in a bank vault? And why kill him? Only he could get the money out. They would want him alive to extricate the cash for them. No, it had to be something else.

Poor Jo! She looked so vulnerable sitting there, those ridiculous earmuffs all twisted up on the side of her head. I wondered what kind of old woman I would be if I ever reached her age.

“You don’t have to tell me right now. Take your time, Alice. You can call me at the hotel.”

When I have to think—I mean really sit down and think—I like to sit in front of my mirror. It’s a sort of reverse-narcissistic game I play that gets my brain working.

An hour after leaving Jo, I was staring at myself in the mirror. As usual, I found my appearance baffling. As usual, there was the confusion over which one of us was the audience.

Two plum offers had suddenly appeared. Should I play the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
? I no longer had any allegiance to classical theater. I was interested only in the far reaches of the envelope. I would rather be paid nothing to stand onstage stark naked reciting Baudelaire’s reflections on whores while eating a tangerine. No, I decided the theatrical offer was not pressing. It could wait.

Jo’s offer was more pressing. The money was certainly tempting. Yet the idea of spending a few weeks with Jo Starobin was unappealing. The woman’s grief was so pervasive that those around her simply couldn’t escape it.

I stared at my hair. There was a lot of gray in the golden flax these days. My eyebrows were getting paler. The face in the mirror was impassive. I had never understood how people could characterize me as beautiful. My face was too thin—wan, as they used to say. I chuckled. I squared my shoulders. It was my posture that they had always confused with beauty. When I had been younger and walked into a room, I always created a stir. Stage presence.

I saw a blur move across the upper-right-hand side of the mirror. Then it stopped. Pancho was on top of the bookcase, next to the volumes of the
Tulane Drama Review
, one of which contained a picture of me performing in a one-act play at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.

Pancho’s image was staring at me.

Without turning, I said, “Look as long as you want, Pancho.”

He didn’t answer. His half-tail was moving back and forth. His face was set.

“Oh, Pancho, why can’t you ever relax? Why can’t you ever play?”

No response. I longed at that moment to gather Pancho in my arms, but I remained seated. Pancho was a good teacher. His reserve, his peculiar sense of constant danger, made him a good teacher. Some people, some animals, could only be loved from a distance. Intimacy was impossible.

“Run, Pancho, run,” I whispered to his image in the mirror. All he did was lift a foot and begin to groom it with his tongue. He would flee when he was ready.