A Cat Tells Two Tales (4 page)

I touched the mirror with my fingers, running them along the glass just as I had run my hands along the top of the money in the safe-deposit vault.

Jo’s offer had been financially generous. Two hundred dollars a day for two weeks ran to twenty-eight hundred dollars tax-free. That was a lot of cat food. Plus, the offer came at a good time. The first few weeks of the new year were always depressing and empty of possibilities.

I smiled at myself in the mirror, a bit grimly. An old lover of mine had once told me that my smile was terrible; it was totally dishonest. I made a face. It was irritating but true that I often evaluated myself by what men I had known told me. Why did I believe them? I was too old for such nonsense.

A blur flashed across the mirror. Pancho was on the move.

I picked up a hairbrush and balanced it in my hand. It was a beautiful tortoiseshell brush with fine, stiff bristles.

It was perfect for a head of thick hair like that stable girl had, I realized. Ginger had that gorgeous thick red hair. I remembered her with a sudden flash of hatred. My reaction was so bizarre, I stood up and walked away from the mirror. I sat down on the bed.

Why wasn’t I feeling compassion for that girl, like I felt for Jo?

Ginger’s grief had been stupefying. She had wept like someone who had lost everything. No, I realized, I did not hate her. I was jealous of her.

Why? Because Harry and she had been lovers!

Agitated, I left the bed, walked into the hallway, and then back to the bedroom.

Why was I jealous? Harry had been a surrogate absent father—kindly, eccentric, wise, comforting,
safe
. Was that the way I had really felt? No, I wanted to be in that girl’s place. I wanted to mourn Harry as a lover.

I walked quickly down the hallway and into the living room. I scooped Bushy off the sofa and hugged him. He accepted the attention stoically.

“Bushy!” I called his name. He looked past me. I whispered into his ear, “You knew all along I would accept Jo’s offer, didn’t you? You knew it all along.”

I lay down on the sofa, still holding him. There was no reason not to go back out there. I had discovered Harry’s corpse. Why shouldn’t I discover his murderers? What else were fantasy lovers for?

5

I left the cottage and walked hastily toward the main house. It was a wet, cold morning. The trees were threatening—naked, precarious, hovering over the property. I had no qualms about leaving the cottage because Pancho and Bushy had settled in nicely; although Pancho seemed perplexed at the lack of space in which to flee. He would have to develop a circular flight.

“Is that you, Alice?” Jo cried out from the kitchen when I entered.

Then she appeared in a ludicrous outfit. She was wearing a huge leather apron with deep pockets—like a blacksmith would wear—and around her neck was an enormous and very frayed kitchen towel. “You arrived just in time. I was making eggs,” she said.

Her ancient kitchen table with its splintered wooden legs was piled with utensils and condiments, as if she was embarking on a major feast rather than a modest breakfast for two. She pointed to the clutter and said, “Harry always made the eggs. He used to say I didn’t know how to fry them, scramble them, poach them, or even boil them. I never knew whether he was serious or not. Well, here I am, without Harry, and I’m going to make eggs. How would you like them, Alice?”

“Scrambled would be fine, Jo,” I replied, sitting down at the table to watch her. It was zany, but that was one of the Starobins’ most wonderful qualities: they always did things outlandishly.

Carefully, almost painfully, she broke five eggs in a saucer and then proceeded to whip them with a flourish, her blacksmith’s apron continually getting in the way. When the scrambling was finished, she collapsed suddenly into a chair.

Two of the long-haired Himalayan cats leapt onto her—one on her lap, one on her back. Two more leapt on the table, prowling, inspecting. One nuzzled my foot. In the space of seconds, they all changed places in a macabre, swift game of musical chairs. Then they all ran from the kitchen as if they had sensed the ghost of Harry Starobin in the eggs. It was very sad. The cats seemed lost.

“God, I’m tired,” Jo said, and then she broke into tears, choked them back, and stood up. “It’s doing all those stupid things around the barn. I find it very, very hard. I hadn’t mucked out a stall in ten years.”

“What about Ginger?”

“Oh,” she said with an airy flip of her whisk, which she had not relinquished after scrambling the eggs, “she left two days ago.”

“Left? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? She quit.”

This was totally unexpected. I had thought the girl would stay on, if only to assuage some of her guilt for being Harry’s lover.

“Did she say why?”

Jo started to butter a pan, making a lot of clanking noises at the enormous black range. I could see that she had put much too much butter into the pan.

“She didn’t say why,” Jo replied, gazing thoughtfully into the melting butter, “but I know why. She was sad. Harry was like a father to her. And she was sad about the calico barn cat, about Veronica. That’s stupid, though. Barn cats always vanish—sometimes for months. Especially when they have kittens. Veronica is probably living with some neighbor down the road now, quite happy, and one day she’ll just meander back. I told her what Harry used to say—that cats can predict earthquakes and other natural disasters long before they happen. And they vanish. I told Ginger that maybe Veronica knew that Harry was going to be murdered so she ran away with her kittens. But Ginger wouldn’t stay.”

Jo poured the eggs into the sizzling butter and leaned over the pan, her tiny frame dwarfed by the gigantic apron.

I would have to tell her that Ginger was Harry’s lover, I realized. Of course, I had no proof of it, only very circumstantial evidence—desperate weeping in seclusion. But Jo and I could go nowhere unless at the outset we were totally honest, unless even informed intuition was honored. What was the point of any other approach?

She finished the eggs triumphantly and shoveled them onto the plates. Then she stepped back and shook her head. She had been so engaged with the eggs that she had forgotten everything else—bread, coffee, juice. Clumsily she covered the eggs on the plates and proceeded to make the remains of the meal. I should have helped, but I didn’t. My mind was on how to approach the matter of Ginger and Harry Starobin.

Finally we ate, amidst the clutter, the eggs cold, the coffee weak, the bread stale.

When we were finished, Jo heaved a great sigh, as if she could not handle such an assignment again for a long while.

“Jo,” I said, moving my chair closer to her, “I want to tell you something, but I don’t really know how to go about it. I don’t want to . . .” I stopped, at a loss for words.

“Then just tell me. I’m too old for nonsense, Alice. Don’t you know that?”

I started to pile the plates, moving the condiments, gathering the dregs. “I think Ginger was having an affair with Harry.”

“You think?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“What you know.”

“I knew nothing of that,” she said quickly, and began to clear the table.

“Jo, please, tell me what you know.”

“Listen, Alice,” she said, leaning against the sink, undoing the leather apron, “Harry was a very strange and wonderful man. He had many enthusiasms. Sudden enthusiasms. He would suddenly take a fancy to a person or an animal or a house—anything—and he would give that person or thing his total attention. He would do anything for people. A lot of people loved him. He loved a lot of people. But that Harry and the girl were sleeping together . . . well, no, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said, flaring angrily, “he would have told me.”

“He didn’t tell you about the money,” I noted.

She had removed her apron and the towel, and began looking out the window, anything to avoid looking at me. Obviously she was trying to control her anger toward me.

“Do you want more coffee?” she asked stiffly. I shook my head. It was a very awkward moment. But I had done the right thing. I wasn’t there to be a nursemaid.

“Look how gloomy it is out,” she exclaimed, and shook her head as if the world was truly deranged.

“Maybe it’ll clear up,” I said tritely. “Maybe the afternoon will be better.”

“I want to show you his files,” she said abruptly. Relieved, I stood up. We walked together through the long kitchen and into an adjoining storeroom. Flanked by two small, filthy windows, a door at the far end led out into the yard.

The room was filled with cardboard cartons piled on top of one another. Between the cartons, in haphazard fashion, lay ropes, old boots, pots and pans, and piles of clothing that obviously hadn’t been worn in years. Jo opened one carton and beckoned me to peer inside. It was filled with letters and correspondence of all kinds. On the side of the box was written in now-fading Magic Marker: “1984.”

“Everything,” she said, “he kept everything. It’s all here. Harry never threw anything away—not his letters, not his bills . . .”

I saw that each carton had a year written on the side. There were also many large manila envelopes among the cartons, and these too had dates. But there was no order to them at all. They just lay randomly in that damp, cold room, which was illuminated only by a single overhead light bulb.

“I can bring it all out to the living room and you can work there when you are ready,” Jo said tentatively. We both realized that we had embarked on a problematic task—it could all be worthless as a key to his death. And even if we found one or two or three pieces of paper mentioning the source of Harry’s newfound wealth, how were we to recognize them when they passed through our hands?

“Look,” Jo said, pulling a sheaf of photographs from a carton marked “1975.” She flipped through them and held up one for me to see. “That’s Harry and some friends of his in Vermont. Look at the porch of that hotel . . . so lovely . . . do you see the rocking chairs?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She pushed the photos back into the carton. She was trembling and trying not to cry.

“I’ll start on it tomorrow, Jo,” I said, wanting to get her out of this room that was causing her such pain.

She made a motion with her hand for me to stay put. Then she said, “What if Harry lied to me only once in his life? About the money. And he didn’t tell me only in order to protect me from something terrible. What if the only lie Harry ever told me in his life killed him?”

There was nothing I could say to her. She was babbling. Husbands lie to wives, wives to husbands, children to parents, everyone to everyone.

Someone called out from the kitchen. It was the old long-haired handyman—his name was Amos. He was saying something we couldn’t hear. Jo shrugged and walked back into the kitchen. I followed.

Amos looked as pale as a ghost. His hands were clasped behind his neck as if he were about to try some exotic calisthenics.

“What’s the matter with you, Amos?” Jo asked, half-angry, half-solicitous.

“I just came from down the road,” Amos said, his voice scratchy and broken, “and they told me what happened. They murdered Mona Aspen last night, just like Mr. Starobin. They murdered her and hung her on a door.”

6

All the heaters in the cottage were on, but it was very cold. What a bizarre way to spend New Year’s Eve, I thought. I sat in the rocker, two blankets around me, like an old whaling woman in New Bedford waiting for the fleet to return. Bushy was lying on his back in front of one of the heaters. Pancho was cautiously circling the room, still confused because there were no high cabinets.

The small traveling clock beside the cot read 11:25. When, in fact, was the last time I had a good New Year’s Eve? It was a long time ago, when I had been in New York only about two years. I had gone to a party in the West Village, filled with young actors and actresses and designers and writers, all hungry, all dedicated, all expounding youthful theories. As I rocked, I pictured the apartment and the food and the drinks, but I couldn’t remember a single name. Where were they all now?

A knock on the cottage door brought me out of my reverie. For a moment I was afraid. Then I heard Jo calling my name. She walked in carrying a bottle and several manila envelopes.

“I just couldn’t be alone on New Year’s Eve,” she said, “and I found some old table wine.”

I went into the small kitchen and brought back two glasses. The wine was terrible, but so what? Seeing Jo slump into the rocker, I sat on the cot.

“Last New Year’s Eve, Harry and I consumed a whole bottle of pear brandy.” She paused and rocked. “Well,” she added, “maybe it was the year before.” She laughed crazily, despairingly, and then: “But there won’t be any pear brandy ever again . . . will there?”

Pancho began to circle the rocker. Jo put her glass on the rocker arm, then decided it was not secure and placed it on the floor. Pancho flew away.

“I thought,” she said, tapping the manila envelopes she held on her lap, “that we should start looking through it all tonight.”

She stood up, walked to the cot, placed the envelopes down on it, and returned to the rocker. I could see the writing on the top envelope: “1980–1981.”

Her request startled me. It was New Year’s Eve, almost midnight. She had brought in some wine, seeking company. It wasn’t the right time to start digging through old letters.

I looked at her skeptically. She stared back at me—defiant, a bit frightened, a bit pleading.

Suddenly I realized why she had brought the envelopes to me. If her neighbor—that woman Mona Aspen—had been murdered in the same manner as Harry, it might mean that the police were right. Perhaps a pack of homicidal house thieves was prowling the area, breaking into houses for valuables. Harry’s murder might have been just a random event; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jo didn’t want to believe that.

I opened an envelope and shook a few items out onto the blanket. The first was a letter in a torn envelope. It was written to Harry from a woman in California who asked for advice in the raising of Russian blues. Her handwriting was very hard to read. I could see a mark on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter, signifying that Harry had answered it and noting the date when he had answered it.

The next item was a request from a man in Madison, New Jersey, who wrote that he had met Harry at a cat show in Philadelphia and now he needed an out-of-print book on eye disease in cats. Did Harry know where he could get hold of a copy? Again there was the telltale mark on the corner indicating that Harry had responded—but there was no way to tell what his response had been. I started to look at the next item—a note attached to a newspaper clipping—when I heard Jo say: “Please, I didn’t mean you should start right now. I thought . . . I mean, we must drink the wine, at least until midnight.” I put the clipping down.

Jo started to rock furiously in her chair. She closed her eyes and said, “Mona Aspen was a wonderful woman. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t know her at all,” I replied.

“I thought maybe you had been to see her horses and met her.”

“Was she a breeder?”

“No. Mona’s place is down the road. It’s a layover barn. Trainers send their sick and broken-down racehorses to her. She nurses them back to health. Years ago there used to be many horse farms around here—layover barns, breeding barns, and all kinds of horses. Now, only Mona was left.”

I looked at the clock. We had missed the moment. Happy New Year.

“Such a wonderful, kindly woman,” Jo said, “and such a good friend to Harry and me.”

“Her husband. Is her husband still alive?” I asked, remembering that the handyman had, during his disjointed conversation, once referred to her as Mrs. Aspen.

“I don’t know. He lives in Connecticut, I think, or he did live there. They were divorced ages ago. Mona’s nephew and his wife live on the farm with her.”

“How old was Mona Aspen?” I asked.

“Oh, about five years younger than I. But much more vigorous. She still mucked out stalls.”

“Did she keep valuables in the house?”

“No, I don’t think so. Oh, wait—antiques, yes, a lot of old things like vases and writing desks and paintings and such. Mona was a great one for horse paintings. But I don’t know if they were really worth anything.”

She drifted off into a private reverie. I returned to the items on the blanket for a moment, and then lay back—I didn’t feel like going through them anymore at that time. I was tired and cold. The wine was playing tricks in my nose.

“I must get back to the house now,” Jo said a bit grimly. But she didn’t move off the rocker.

Then she said, “Will you come to the cemetery tomorrow for Mona’s funeral? There will be only a short graveyard ceremony.”

I nodded. She got up, smiled in a motherly, almost beatific fashion, and left with the empty wine bottle.

I started to undress, then noticed that I had hung my winter coat on the hook behind the door. Just as the killers had hung Harry there after they were through with him. The coat had to come down. If I woke during the night, as was my fashion, and saw it hanging in the darkness, there would be an ugly panic. I removed the coat from the hook and placed it on the back of the rocker.

What a strange little cemetery it was! The headstones were ancient, chipped, obscured. The grounds lay behind a huge new shopping center just off the main east-west road. A strong, swirling wind whipped the overgrown weeds against the legs of the eight or ten mourners. A minister with a large muffler wrapped around his neck said the words over the open grave. Two men with shovels and one with a small earthmover stayed about twenty yards behind the mourners, waiting for the ceremony to conclude. One of them cupped a lit cigarette in his hand.

Jo held on to my arm tightly. She said in a desperate whisper so close to my ear I could feel her lips, “I’m glad I did what Harry asked. No funeral. No burial. I cremated him and spread the ashes on the gravel driveway from the road to the house. I could not have survived him being buried in this place.”

The thought struck me as grotesque. I shivered, realizing that every time I walked to the main house I would be crunching Harry deeper into oblivion.

As the minister began the final prayer, Jo continued to hold tight to me. She was beginning to restrict the circulation in my arm, but I didn’t have the heart to pull away.

“God, Alice,” she said, her voice breaking, “what a good friend she was to us . . . to me and to Harry and to Ginger. What a wonderful and kind woman she was.”

It was over. We threw some dirt on the grave and started back to the car. A couple came up and began to speak to Jo. Feeling out of place, I walked to the car to wait for her.

A large man was leaning against the fender. It was Detective Senay. Another plainclothes detective sat in an unmarked car near the cemetery entrance.

“Cat-sitting again?” Senay asked.

“Something like that.”

“Did you get that list from Mrs. Starobin?”

“What list?” I asked.

“The inventory of valuables.”

“No.”

“You know, Mrs. Aspen’s nephew is cooperating with us. I don’t understand why Starobin’s widow isn’t.”

“Maybe, Detective, it’s because there were no valuables in the house.”

“What were they looking for? Chicken soup?”

I was about to tell him that Jo didn’t believe Harry was murdered by random breaking-and-entering thieves. But I didn’t. “Were the killings the same?” I asked.

“Close. Mona Aspen was murdered by a blunt instrument. We’ll get them. They’ll have to sell what they took. We’ll get them. And we’ll get them quicker if Mrs. Starobin helps.”

“Ask her yourself. I’m not really working for the Nassau County Police Department,” I noted.

“I have asked her, and I’ll keep asking her. By the way, who are you working for, Mrs. Nestleton?”

“I’m not married,” I said.

“Too bad.”

“Sez you.”

“You know, I have a funny feeling about you,” he said, taking off his hat and passing it from hand to hand.

“That’s your problem, Detective.”

He nodded, smiled, waved his hand, and walked toward the unmarked car.

Jo and I drove back to the house in silence. I made no mention of my brief strange conversation with Senay. As we approached the drive, Jo said: “Do you think that Mona’s nephew will find in their deposit box what I found in my safe-deposit box?”

The logic of her question was so startling and so plausible that I almost laughed out loud in discomfort. Why not? I thought.

I didn’t get a chance to answer. Jo laughed suddenly. Then she said, “How stupid of me! If Mona had that kind of cash she probably gave it to her nephew straight out to bail him out of his gambling debts. That young man was always in trouble, and poor Mona just kept cleaning up after him as best she could. He looks and talks like a gentleman, but believe me, he’s not housebroken.”

She laughed again, a quieter, almost wry laugh this time, then continued. “Harry used to say that we old Long Island families were like carefully piled stacks of kindling. Lovely on the outside but a world of maggots underneath.”

She dropped me off where the path to the cottage began. As I walked toward the cottage I saw the caretaker, Amos, staring at me, leaning against a short ladder right outside the garage. He didn’t wave. He made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like him and I think the dislike was reciprocated.

I went into the cottage and fed the cats. They were sulking, unhappy. “Get used to it, my friends,” I said. “Momma has to make a living.” Then I relented and promised Pancho some saffron rice when we got back to Manhattan.

I spent the next two hours attempting to straighten up the cramped cottage. As I did, I felt increasingly as if I had missed something important. I made a cup of tea and sat down on the rocker. Bushy leapt onto my lap to get scratched.

I knew it was something that Jo had said.

As the day progressed, that “something” began to fester in my head. I kept closing my eyes and reconstructing the conversations I had had during the past twenty-four hours. The clue was very close to consciousness but kept slipping away, like the name of an old friend or an old restaurant.

It finally caught up with me, as usual, after I had stopped worrying about it. I was doing the dishes in the tiny sink with one of the Brillo pads that Jo had so kindly left me.

On New Year’s Eve Jo had told me what a good friend Mona Aspen had been to herself and Harry. But at the cemetery Jo had told me what a wonderful friend Mona Aspen had been to herself and Harry
and
Ginger.

It could mean, of course, absolutely nothing. But it could mean an awful lot. Two people had been brutally murdered, and a stable girl was friend to one, lover to the other. I had to find out where Ginger had gone.