Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729) (3 page)

Chapter 5

I rose very early, with the sky just beginning to lighten over the top of the high-rise across the way. The cats of course thought nothing of the earliness of the hour—as soon as my feet had hit the floor, they wanted to be fed.

There was still some of Pancho's favorite snack in the refrigerator—saffron rice—so I mixed it liberally with his regular food and watched him feast—even though I was on a tight schedule.

It was always a joy to watch Pancho in one of his rare moments of repose. As for the saffron rice, I admit that it's a very strange taste for a cat. Since I had obtained him from the ASPCA, which was located on the fringes of Spanish Harlem, I always thought of it as meaning that Pancho had spent his childhood with a Hispanic family. Hence the liking for saffron rice. But saffron is an Indian seasoning for the most part, so I never could be sure. A scientific inquiry would have demanded that I give him rice without saffron and then a saffron-flavored food other than rice, to see which element in saffron rice he craved. But I never experimented.

While Bushy ate leisurely, Pancho ate warily. He was tense. His long gray body, with the large ugly scar on the right flank from some ancient wound, was poised to escape if his nonexistent enemies came too close. His strange yellow eyes flicked back and forth. His rust-colored whiskers twitched ever so slightly.

“Good, isn't it, Pancho? You must admit I take care of you,” I told him. Did I detect a slight movement of what was left of his tail in response? Maybe. Poor Pancho. The loss of his tail had probably happened when he was a small kitten. He had obviously led a very difficult and a very dangerous life.

“No one will ever hurt you here, Pancho,” I assured him for the millionth time.

Time was fleeting. I had to dress. But something about Pancho that morning kept me glued there. Something odd.

I studied him as he ate. And then it dawned on me: He had grown gaunt again. Once again his ribs had begun to show. Just like when I had brought him home from the ASPCA.

“Your ribs are sticking out again, Pancho!” I exclaimed. I was just about to stroke him when I caught myself, realizing it would be cruel to interrupt his feast.

In the first three months of living with me, after I had rescued him from the gas chamber, Pancho ate voraciously. I mean he ate
anything
and
everything
—like a feral cat.

But as time passed, I realized that something was very wrong. No matter how much he ate, he didn't gain any weight. He stayed gaunt. His ribs continued to stick out. So when I took him to the vet for some shots, I mentioned it. They did some blood tests on Pancho. Lo and behold, Pancho was diagnosed as having a pancreatic insufficiency. His pancreas didn't produce a sufficient amount of digestive enzymes. So for the longest time I had to give him supplements, and finally the gauntness vanished.

“Pancho,” I informed him sadly, “sooner or later you're going to have to visit the vet again. Sorry.”

He didn't appear concerned. And I had other work to do.

By five thirty I was out of the apartment and flagging down a cab. I took it up to the corner of Sixty-Seventh Street and First Avenue.

Manhattan is most strange at that time of morning. All the hustle and energy has gone underground, all the threats are hidden. Everything is kind of clamped down.

I had pulled my long hair back into a basic spinster's bun. I was wearing sneakers, a pair of brown slacks, and a tan turtleneck. No jewelry, no scarves, no handbag. The lack of womanly hindrances gave me the desired aura of sleek, pared-down efficiency—a woman geared up for the task at hand.

But even with the tough lady-detective image put to one side, my purpose was indeed focused: to find out, somehow, where Barbara Roman had gone and what she had done after leaving her apartment building each morning around six dressed in a jogging outfit. For a moment, standing there alone on the deserted street corner, I felt not just peculiar but utterly silly . . . and not a little guilty. I knew that I was prying into things, in the wake of Barbara's death, that she, in life, had chosen to keep secret. But the mind of Alice Nestleton, girl detective, was made up. Okay, I couldn't bring my friend back to life, but I was going to discover the truth behind her suicide.

I patted the back pocket of my corduroy slacks. The snapshot was there, a Polaroid one of the East Village neighbors had taken of the five of us in the first days of the herb garden. In the picture, four of us—Ava, Sylvia, Renee, and I—all held up garden implements so that they formed a kind of wreath over Barbara's head. She beamed out at the camera, looking like a happy, be-laureled child. Yes, I think that was Barbara's special grace: to seem both innocent and very wise, sophisticated yet guileless.

The Romans had lived in the hulking old redbrick building just off First Avenue. It had been their home for most of their marriage. I waited on the corner for a few more minutes, my eye on the red building.

At ten past six a dark-skinned man emerged from one of the side entrances, pulling an immense plastic trash bag behind him. He lugged it to the curb and left it there. He went back into the building and a few minutes later appeared with another bag, repeating the activity again and again until there were seven parcels lined up curbside for the sanitation men to pick up. He stopped to rest, lighting a cigarette.

I walked swiftly over to him. “Excuse me.”

He looked up, startled, his eyes boring out of a sweat-stained face. The man was swarthy and much shorter than I.

“Excuse me,” I repeated. “I was wondering if you knew Barbara Roman? She was a tenant in your building.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, I knew Mrs. Roman.” He spoke with a slight Hispanic accent. “Some nice lady,” he added. Then the inevitable cynical New York shadow crept across his face. “What do you want?”

“I was a good friend of hers,” I said quickly, struggling for a coherent story. The man's obvious regard and affection for Barbara had thrown me. “We're putting together a little memorial service for her, and I wanted to talk to people in the neighborhood who knew her. You know, how she spent the day, where she shopped, all that sort of thing.”

He wasn't following my confused cover story, and with good reason—it made little sense. So I went on talking: “She jogged every morning, didn't she?”

“Jogged?”

“Yes, running, you know.”

“Oh, sure. I see her . . . saw her . . . every morning. About this time.”

“And which direction did she run in?”

“Well, you couldn't really say she ‘ran.' She would walk to Second Avenue and then go uptown. I figure she was heading for the park and would do her running there. I used to tell her, ‘Be careful, be careful. You don't know what kind of crazy people in that park.' But every day, she went. Nothing ever happened, I guess.”

He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt out onto the street.

“Lady,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “let me ask
you
one thing.”

“Yes?”

“You know Mrs. Roman well, right?”

I nodded.

“Did she really . . . jump? Off a building?” He asked it slyly, as if he were curious but also afraid, ashamed.

“Yes, she did,” I said. “And thank you.”

I walked to Second Avenue and turned north. Now what?

I decided to take the east side of the avenue first. Not many stores were open at this hour—a few luncheonettes, the dry cleaner, the newsstand, the all-night Korean green market.

I walked into each of the stores, showed the snapshot of Barbara, supposedly identifying her as a missing person, and asked if the proprietor knew her or could recall when he'd last seen her. I was trying to see the pattern of her neighborhood routine, trace her steps. I stopped in at every open establishment up to Seventy-Second Street, then crossed over to work the west side of the avenue. This was a long shot and really tedious work—especially since I'd have to come back at another time to interview everyone whose shop was not yet open—but it was the only way I could think of to proceed at six o'clock in the morning.

In a place called the Healthy Bagel—a little breakfast restaurant with a counter in the back and a few spindly tables near a front window that could have used a good washing—I found my first reward. Perhaps the long shot was going to pay off after all.

The Asian man behind the counter actually took the photograph out of my hands, saying, “I was wondering where she been.”

“Then you've seen her here?”

“One egg over,” was his answer. “Bagel toasted no butter schmeer scallion cream cheese on the side black coffee. Every day.”

Every day. He knew her order by heart.

“Hope she turns up okay,” he added. He had no reason to question my story that she was a “missing person.”

I took the cup of coffee I'd ordered and went to one of the tables in the front. So, obviously, my scenario had to be at least half right. No cab waiting to whisk her off to the rich guy's townhouse, but she hadn't been out jogging, either. No one about to take a two-hour run would breakfast on food like that. Maybe she would have a leisurely breakfast and then walk to the park, where he was waiting for her?

At any rate, I now had the first piece of her morning routine, the first six blocks of the route. She left the apartment, walked to Second, crossed over to the west side of the avenue and went north to Seventy-First Street, where she breakfasted at the questionably named Healthy Bagel. Then what?

It was going to take days, possibly weeks, to interview every store owner or employee in the neighborhood; I'd have to catch different people at different times of the day. And I couldn't stop there, of course. There were neighborhood acquaintances, bus drivers perhaps, maybe even the more civil homeless people who had little else to do but watch the world go by.

There was one other option for today's research: to stay put here in the restaurant for a while and see if any of the regulars knew Barbara, had talked to her, or noticed where she went when she left the Healthy Bagel.

They straggled in—the truck drivers, the cabbies, the young mothers who didn't work, all sorts of people. Those who ordered food and coffee to go I didn't bother with. To the few who sat down to eat I showed the photo and asked the rote questions. They couldn't recall her.

In a while an old woman, whom I'd seen harnessing her dog to a parking meter pole outside, entered the restaurant and sat down at a table with her coffee and cake. She was somewhat overdressed for the spring weather, her clothing that mixture of trash and treasure that single old ladies so often sport. Her hat, a kind of toque, probably one of those items from Tibet or Morocco that they hawk on the sidewalks downtown, was set off by a lovely rhinestone feather I certainly wouldn't have minded owning. She ate her cake with a fork, nibbling it as she gazed solicitously out at her old brown dog.

I slid off my seat and approached her. “Ma'am, I wonder if I could ask you to look at this photograph and tell me if you recognize this woman. She ate here every morning.” I placed the Polaroid next to her plate, my thumb near Barbara's face.

“Barbara!” she exclaimed. “Where is she?”

“She's missing,” I said. “We're trying to locate her.”

The old lady sighed enormously. “I've been waiting and waiting for her. We ate together every morning. Maybe she's in the garden—have you looked there?”

I made certain I registered no surprise at her knowledge of the garden. “Yes, ma'am, we have.”

“Well, if she isn't here and she isn't in the garden, she must be at church.”

“Church?”

She glared suspiciously at me then, as if I must be a charlatan if I didn't know about this church.

“Well, of course,” her voice grew a little harder. “She went there every morning when she left here.”

I had to admit, I was no longer so completely in control of my reactions. “What church would that be?” I asked.

“Around the corner,” she replied testily. Then she added, speaking slowly because there was an idiot across from her, “St. John's. The Roman Catholic . . . church . . . around . . . the corner.”

It turned out that Edie—that was the old lady's name—knew quite a few things about Barbara's life, even if they weren't the kind of deeply intimate things I knew about her background. She knew that Barbara had a husband and a cat named Swampy. That Barbara had founded and worked in a downtown garden. That she was an animal lover and a sweet, kind person. And—unless Edie was putting me on, or crazy—she knew Barbara to be a regular churchgoer.

Barbara had never once spoken to me of God or religion—hers or anyone else's. She had mentioned in passing that Tim had been raised a Presbyterian, but neither of them had been to church in more than twenty years, except to hear the occasional Christmastime concert or oratorio. We had talked about everything under the sun, or so I thought—sex and death, career, love, theater, cats, plants, parents, decorating—but faith, never.

I slid the photo back into my pocket. And I noticed that Edie was pointing her fork at the fly-specked wall clock over my head.

“Past seven o'clock,” she said. “It's already started.”

“What has?”

Edie seemed a little more kindly inclined toward me now. “Mass, dearie,” she explained. “Barbara always left in time for seven o'clock Mass.”

I walked the block to Seventy-Second Street and turned west. The church was just past the corner. The board outside said that weekday morning Mass was held at 7:30, 8:00, and 8:30. There was no 7:00
A.M
. Mass. I was perplexed, to be sure, but somehow not surprised.

I walked up the great stone stairs and opened the heavy door. Same thought as earlier: Now what?

***

The church was dim and cool and damp. And so much bigger and more imposing than it looked from the outside. A few people were scattered throughout the pews. They were in various degrees of prayer and contemplation, oblivious to me. Candlelight shone on the statues of the mournful saints. The ceiling rose high above a resplendent altar, where a single priest in full vestments stood. He seemed to be arranging papers in a missal.