Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729) (12 page)

Chapter 21

The housekeeper showed me in.

“Ava, what on
earth
is that!?”

I had not been back to the Fabrikant apartment since the night of “the tragedy,” as many people chose to refer to it. When I entered the apartment to question Les and Ava, I could see that the terrace doors were roped shut.

She was seated at the long dining room table. Les stood behind her, his arms resting protectively on her shoulders.

“What is what?” she asked from her chair.

“You know very well what,” I said. “There's a rope shutting off the terrace.”

“I tied it myself,” she said, “a few days after Barbara . . . a few days after it happened. I don't ever want to go out there again. In fact, I want to leave this apartment.” And with this she turned accusingly to Les, who, apparently, was content to stay.

A few minutes after we'd moved into the living room and I'd taken a seat on the sofa, it dawned on me that I was seated exactly where Barbara had sat as she played with the kittens. In my mind's eye I saw her giggle and point to Renee, who stood listening to someone across the room. But whom?

“Where are Winken, Blinken, and Nod?” I asked Ava.

“Locked in one of the bedrooms,” she replied testily. “I'm punishing them.”

“What for?”

It was Les who answered. “They somehow got into our bathroom cabinet. Tore open a bag of cotton balls and then knocked over the mouthwash, which shattered. All the cotton balls soaked up the mouthwash, and they played soccer with them all over the house. It was an unholy mess. And our room is going to smell like Listerine for months.” He suppressed a laugh. “This, on the heels of the Unfortunate Toilet Paper Adventure and the Ruined Negligee Affair, called for a little parental discipline. Right, Ava?”

She made no reply. Ava looked as though she might come apart at any moment. She sat ramrod-straight on her chair, her complexion washed out, her eyeballs like pinpoints.

“Who could believe this would happen to us?” she wailed. “First Barbara and now Tim. Who could believe it?”

“As far as Tim is concerned,” Les said, “maybe it's not so hard to believe.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Well, Tim was kind of a mysterious guy. I can believe he had a lot of skeletons in a closet somewhere. The police have asked us about that lawsuit he was part of years ago. They think someone may have had him killed as revenge. He was very secretive about it at the time—and not just about that. His fortunes seemed to rise and fall periodically. Maybe he was into something shady.”

“And do you think Barbara could have been part of something shady, too?”

“Never,” he said, shaking his head.

Ava turned on me then. “Alice, I think you're the most disloyal, hateful individual I've ever known. How
could
you say something like that about Barbara? Knowing how much she thought of you, cared for you! And how could you be so cruel as to try to make her true friends believe she was murdered? It's vicious; it's . . .
sadistic.
”

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Ava. But Barbara
was
killed. And I see my duty as a true friend as being to help find out who did it. I loved her just as much as you did.”

“Stop it!” She covered her ears. “Just stop it!” Then, in a fury, she rushed to the terrace doors and yanked the cord off them.

Les and I both ran after her, in a panic, as if we were afraid that she too might throw herself over the rail. But she stopped short of it, and when we reached her, she was looking down at the traffic, sobbing hysterically.

Les put his arms around Ava, and I put mine around each of them. She rejected me at first, but then she succumbed and hugged me tightly. It was a terrible few minutes. I heard the putterings of a traffic helicopter overhead. The strong wind from it sent my hair flying crazily, enwrapping the Fabrikants. We remained out there, embracing, while the traffic drummed steadily below.

***

Les had led us back inside. That rational, mediating air about him had helped us all to cool down. Les was the type of person one appreciated best in an emergency. And indeed, it was he who had taken charge of things after Barbara went off the terrace that night.

I told the Fabrikants about most of the developments, even the dead ends I'd run into, since Barbara's death—leaving out, of course, my sexual liaison with Tim. I was trying to make them acknowledge the probability that Barbara had been murdered, to make it seem like no more than common sense. But they remained loath to believe that one of our number could possibly have done something so terrible. I found it hard to believe myself, I assured them, but, I said, when I uncovered the killer's motive, the act would no longer be so impossible to comprehend. At any rate, it was clear that Ava and Les no longer thought me sadistic or mad, and I took some comfort from that fact.

In attempting to cooperate with me, Ava had enacted a strange pantomime in which she'd walked about the apartment touching all the places the guests had sat after dinner that night, as though the touching alone might call up some memories. Unhappily, the memories refused to cooperate. I got fewer hints from Ava than from anyone else I'd talked to.

Les began his own monologue, taking the pressure off his wife. “I will give you my recollections, Alice. Ordered not necessarily by sequence or intensity of experience. Ava and Sylvia spent a great deal of time preparing the tea. I believe that once, when I went into the kitchen for ice, they were in disagreement over the proper number of minutes for steeping peppermint. There was a toast before the tea was consumed. The cook had prepared roast duckling, risotto, and green salad. When it was time to eat, I sat at the head of the table. Ava was on my left, then Tim, then Barbara—no, the other way around—then Barbara, then Tim, then yourself, Alice, then Sylvia and Pauly, with Renee winding up on my right. That's clockwise, you realize. With the serving of dessert and coffee, we repaired to this room. People stood or sat talking in pairs or threes. I had a cigar. I heard what sounded like a major traffic tie-up. I asked Ava to take a look out. She cried out. Everyone rushed over.”

I was not unimpressed. Nonetheless, Les's account, though exhaustive, was of the same basic character as all the other accounts: It was cinematic. Brief descriptions of moments in time: A was here. B was there. C and D talked together. A through H ate together. It wasn't enough. I needed a stage director, not a film director. Someone with his eye on the next movement and the one after that and the one after that—all fluid. On the stage, you can't stop the camera. You don't freeze the frame.

“That was excellent, Les,” I commended him. “Now, did you see Barbara at the moment she walked out onto the terrace?”

“Ah, no.”

“And you, Ava? I don't suppose you did either?”

“No.”

“Why
is
it,” I said petulantly, “that no one can actually summon up an image of her going out onto that terrace?”

“Well, why can't
you
do it?” Ava replied sharply. “It's you who
should
remember. She was with you last, by your own admission. You said she handed you her drink and then left to get some air.”

There was no arguing with that. She was right.

“I have a possible explanation,” Les said shyly. “It may be because when the terrace doors are wide open, it isn't like a separate entity out there. The terrace is just an extension of the room.”

“Well, that's a very interesting concept, Les,” I said. “But a fairly abstract one. I'm looking to learn a few more facts.”

As I spoke, Ava got up and headed for the kitchen. When she returned, she was carrying a box filled with the small teacups we'd used for the peppermint fiasco that night.

“Here's a fact for you, Alice,” she said icily. And she flung the whole bundle against the nearest wall. “If we hadn't been so busy congratulating ourselves on that pathetic little crop of peppermint . . . if I hadn't insisted on giving that party . . . if we weren't bored New York sophisticates looking for something to occupy our time . . . Barbara would still be alive.”

I tried to tell Ava that that wasn't necessarily true. Remember, I cautioned, that someone had had a motive to kill Barbara. If that person hadn't done it here, they probably would have pulled it off somewhere else. Les may have bought the logic of that, but I couldn't tell about Ava; she was tearing up again when I left.

I did look in on the imprisoned cats before going. They were, respectively, sleeping, frolicking, and chewing at the quilt on a twin bed in one of the guest rooms. Not one of them seemed the least bit sorry for the crimes they had committed.

***

From the Fabrikants' apartment I wandered to that park at the foot of East Fifty-Seventh Street. It has a sandbox where, I suppose, the wealthier preschoolers play, and a few feet away from it there stands a gruesome statue of a wild boar.

I stared out over the uneasy river. To my left was the underside of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Across the water was the Veterans' Hospital on Roosevelt Island. And if I leaned out a bit, I could see all the East River bridges downtown.

That visit had been a hard one, but not because of Ava's tantrum. For the fact is that even as I empathized with her distress, I was making mental notes on how authentic rage and grief are expressed by a grownup—I was still an actress, after all, and couldn't help that distancing thing that clicks into place seemingly at will. No, what had made the visit a trying one was my recognition that all the others . . .
suspects,
for lack of a better word, I was prepared to alienate permanently. But I really would have hated to lose Ava's sweet friendship. I was so happy she didn't hate me anymore.

One queer thread had run through every one of those three awkward, painful sessions with Barbara's friends. They'd all ended with a confession of disappointment in, or hatred for, the peppermint tea we'd drunk. Now, what did that mean? Probably about as much as “The Garden of Love.” A garden of love. A tempest in a teapot. I couldn't read those tea leaves now anyway, because the cups had all been smashed.

But I could go to the garden of herbs. Tomorrow morning.

A tanker came into view. It must have had a full load of oil, for the hull was low in the water. Lord! Were my eyes growing old? The name of the vessel was stenciled in large letters, but I couldn't read them.

Chapter 22

I awoke with a start at about three in the morning. Another bad dream.

After I'd turned on the light and assured myself that the monsters were not real, I felt better. But I knew I'd have a hard time getting back to sleep. Instead of trying I read for an hour, drinking tea. Peppermint tea, in fact, but not the organic brew that had aroused such rancor in my friends. No, this was the pre-bagged stuff straight from the supermarket.

And it was while I was ineptly sewing missing buttons on a few blouses—pricking myself rather painfully—that I had the thought about “mistakes.” I realized how many mistakes all the people who'd been at the peppermint tea party had made in recounting the story of that night.

For instance, I now realized that we'd eaten the duck
before
drinking the tea. Then, too, it was Ava, not Les, who had first remarked on the traffic noise.

Everyone had misremembered the facts—
after
I'd told them I thought Barbara had been murdered. Big facts, little facts, everyone had told them a little differently, and everyone had gotten a few things wrong.

I was only waiting for it to be light enough to walk downtown to the herb garden—which was sort of the last terrain I'd left unexplored in this case. Strange that it should be the
last
place I looked. For hadn't the garden been at the very center of my relationship with Barbara?

In fact, that herb garden was central to all our relationships with her. It was just so sad and crazy that we'd all ended up cursing one of our first crops—the peppermint.

***

I unlocked the gate. It was misty and cool and quiet in the garden. My feet sinking into the dirt a little because of the dew, I stood inside the entrance and tenderly surveyed everything. This might very well be my last visit.

I walked past my catnip patch and over to the peppermint. I removed a plastic bag from my purse and peered into the peppermint to locate the most delectable leaves.

I picked the leaves from four plants and tucked them into the bag. Then I decided to take two more for good measure.

But it was hard getting the buds, the reason being that Ava or Sylvia—whichever was responsible for this patch—had neglected to do the weeding. Clusters of weeds were beginning to obscure the peppermint.

I ripped those weeds out impatiently and flung them onto the path that ran between all the beds. Then I picked my remaining leaves.

I grabbed my bag and headed out of the garden. But the clump of weeds I'd thrown onto the path bothered my conscience. I knew I should have put it on the compost heap near the gate. So I went back, picked up the litter, and walked with the weeds over to the heap.

They were awfully attractive for weeds. Almost elegant enough—in their delicate greenness and with their tiny oval leaves and white creepers—to put into a vase and place on the luncheon table.

I sniffed at them. A pungent, minty odor rose from them. I took another whiff. Well, they were just like peppermint—but so much headier. It was as if they were more pepperminty than the real peppermint.

I could not at that moment have laid claim to a full-blown revelation, but the smallest little ray of light did break through the fog in my brain.

I put the weeds into one of the sacks we used for catnip and went on my way.

There was a shop on Third Street—Esther's Herbs—that carried our catnip treats. It was almost time for the store to open for the day, but I suddenly remembered that the owners had said they'd soon be going on vacation for a week.

Bad luck. As I stood looking at the hand-lettered “Closed” sign, I spotted someone inside watering plants. I banged on the iron gate and called out until he noticed me.

A young man in a baseball cap, turned backward on his head, came and opened the inner door a crack. “They're closed till next week,” he said. “I'm just helping out with the plants.”

“I see.” I thrust the weeds at him. “Could you possibly identify these?”

“I couldn't identify a 1968 Corvette.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Sorry, I can't help you. Store's closed.”

“Wait!” I called when he tried to shut the door. “Do you happen to know of anyone who could tell me what these are? Any experts on herbs?”

He hesitated. “Just a second. Let me look near the phone.” When he returned a few minutes letter he handed me a business card through the spokes of the gate.

Claude Cervice

HERBAL PRACTITIONER

419 East 9th Street

I thanked the young man profusely, although I knew I had little time. Cervice's building was very far east—past First Avenue.

When I got there, I found that it was three stories of crumbling offices with an empty commercial space on the ground floor. It was difficult to read Cervice's name and office number through the grime and graffiti on the board in the lobby. By stepping close to it and squinting at his name, then taking a few steps back, then forward again, I finally made it out: He was in 3A.

I walked up the three flights. To the left of the door was a bell, over which were the hand-lettered words:
RING, WALK IN.

And so I did. The large anteroom was bare, except for several folding chairs leaning against a wall. It looked more like the social room in a church basement than a professional office.

The door to the other room was closed. Music floated out from there. Symphonic music. Then I heard a stentorian voice call out from behind the door: “Sit down!”

Opening one of the metal chairs, I obeyed. My first impression that the room was empty, I now realized, had been erroneous, for along one wall were piled several cartons with scratchy writing on their sides.

Then the music stopped. The door to the adjoining room swung open and a good-looking, marvelously lanky black man peered at me from the doorway. He was impeccably dressed, but on his feet were a pair of ugly and well-worn tan shoes with leather laces.

“You may come in.”

Hundred of books and magazines lay scattered all over—on the chairs, on the desk, on the shelves, on the radiator. A cabinet behind the desk held apothecary jars. And on the wall was an antique map of the Caribbean.

I was then able to put a name to his accent: Haitian. A melodic, French-accented English. A young actor I'd worked with once, who had a keen interest in the occult if not the keenest intelligence, had once confided to me that Haitian people “knew a bunch of strange stuff” that no other people did.

“Sit!” Cervice barked again. But his commands were oddly unthreatening.

I sat in the tattered easy chair across from him.

“Hands!” he said.

“Hands?”

“Show your hands . . . please!”

I stretched them toward him—instinct made me begin to withdraw them when he reached for me—but then I resolutely pushed them forward again.

He examined my left hand minutely, paying special attention to the nails. The same with the right.

“You are diabetic?” he asked, looking at my fingertips.

“No!”

“But consume sweets to excess?”

“No, I do not.”

“How much fruit?”

“How much? Well, I enjoy fruit, but I—”

“You will remove your shoes.”

I laughed out loud at this. His eyes sparked with anger, and he flinched. It dawned on me then what was happening and who Claude Cervice was. The young man at Esther's had sent me to a doctor.

“Please listen,” I said, in an attempt to soothe this insulted gentleman. “I'm not sick. I didn't come here for treatment. I just need some information.”

“To give information, I must examine you.”

“But you don't understand. I want information on a certain plant. I'll pay for your time.”

“How much will you pay?” he said, amused.

“Whatever one of your patients would pay for a visit.”

He considered this and then said, “Too much.”

“Then how much should I pay?”

“I will think about it.”

“But there's no time. Please.”

He sat down behind his cluttered desk and began to drum his fingers on the wood. Was he thinking about the price? My urgency didn't seem to bother him at all.

Before I could say another word, a huge orange tabby cat leaped from out of nowhere onto the desk and stood there, staring at me.

“What a beautiful cat!” I exclaimed.

The orange was so bright and so sleek that the cat's body literally seemed to shimmer. I had never seen such a healthy cat.

“He's beautiful,” I repeated.

“It's not a ‘he,'” the Haitian replied. “Her name is Madame Bovary.”

“She looks more like a Rita Hayworth.”

“Who is this Rita Hayworth?”

“An old-time movie actress. A redhead of great beauty.”

Madame Bovary finished her scrutiny of me, leaped off the desk, and vanished.

“She is the healthiest-looking cat I have ever seen,” I told him by way of a compliment.

“Of course she is healthy. She lives in the house of a physician.”

“But you are an herbal doctor.”

“Yes.”

It was very hard for me to believe that cats were treated herbally, by Dr. Cervice or anyone else.

“Do you treat cats also?”

“Yes.”

“Using the same herbs that you use to treat humans?”

“Yes.”

“But cats are meat eaters,” I said.

“So are humans,” he replied.

“Well, I guess it figures. After all, I feed my cats chopped-up greens. And they seem to like it.”

“The wild cat,” Doctor Cervice said, “kills quickly. And after it kills it rips open the stomach of its prey and devours the half-digested grasses within. So, if one wishes to feed herbs to cats or treat them with herbs, one must rot them first.”

“Rot them? How do you do that?”

“Wet the plants and then half bury them. The sun and the earth will rot them.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but then realized I had strayed far from the reason for my visit. I had to refocus.

“Will you tell me how much you want to look at my plant?”

“Show this plant to me,” Doctor Cervice said.

“Let me see it and I will calculate.” He seemed to find it all quite funny now.

I pulled the clump out of the bag and laid it on his desk. He sat down behind the desk and put on a pair of spectacles.

“This is what you wish for me to evaluate?”

“Yes. I pulled it up from the garden. I thought it was a weed.”

“Ah, well, what is a weed?” he said cryptically, and I thought there was some censure in his voice.

I didn't answer him, of course.

“Tell me: Why are you in such a hurry?”

“It's a long story, Doctor.”

“A long story. A short time. Interesting paradox, eh, Miss . . . ?”

“My name is Alice Nestleton.”

“And where is this garden you speak of?”

“Downtown.”

“Ah, yes?” The term did not seem to have a great deal of meaning for him. “This,” he said, picking up the weeds, “is pennyroyal. A member of the mint family.”

“So it isn't a weed? It's sort of like peppermint, is that it?”

“Yes. But it is not the American variety. This is true pennyroyal:
mentha pulegium.
It is a perennial. And it has many uses—medicinally.”

“Such as?”

“A few are obvious. The name
pulegium
comes from its ability to drive away
pulices
—body lice and fleas. The Greeks and Romans used it for stomach remedies. Also for seasickness. There are hundreds of uses for it.”

“Then I could make a tea out of it?”

He smiled. He was very handsome, but for the first time I realized he was not at all young.

“Yes. You can prepare tea from pennyroyal. But you must be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

“It would take a few moments to explain it to you. Have you that much time?”

“Please tell me.”

Cervice took out a thin cigar from a box on the desktop. He cut off the end with a tiny silver knife and then put the knife in a drawer. He lit the cigar with a large wooden match. He took three deep puffs, then blew the smoke ceilingward. It smelled almost as sweet as pipe tobacco.

Claude Cervice began to explain. As he talked, he kept an eye on the glowing tip of his cigar. I listened with increasing excitement.