JM03 - Red Cat (3 page)

3

It wasn’t quite three when I returned home, but already light was draining from the sky. Gray bars of cloud were stacking in the west and the sun looked like a patch of old snow. I paused in my apartment doorway. There was a long black coat slung across the back of my sofa and an open bottle of tonic water on the kitchen counter, next to a bottle of vodka, a paring knife, and three-quarters of a neatly quartered lime. There was a midnight-blue Kelly bag on my long oak table. I smelled Chanel and heard the shower running. Clare.

I’d started seeing her again about six months back, after a long hiatus. Two years ago she’d decided that what passed for our relationship wasn’t particularly healthy, and that I wasn’t particularly fun, and I couldn’t argue with her. I hadn’t changed much since then, and certainly not for the better, so when Clare called me last July I could only assume that she’d revised her thinking on health and entertainment.

I’d given her a key in October. It made things more convenient, but I still wasn’t used to it. Not that she ever dropped by unannounced; Clare was nothing if not a considerate guest, always calling first and always bringing a little something— orange juice and croissants in the morning, cheese and grapes in the afternoon, and on those evenings when her husband was out of town, cut flowers, takeout Indian food, and an overnight bag. So it wasn’t surprise that unnerved me so much as a long habit of solitude. I was still unaccustomed to opening the door on anything other than silence and dust.

I hung my coat on the hook, and Clare’s as well, and checked my messages. There weren’t any, and hadn’t been for a while. David’s case was the first new work I’d taken on in a month, and besides him I hadn’t heard from any of my siblings in a year and a half. And the handful of acquaintances who used to call occasionally did so less frequently nowadays, maybe because I so rarely called back. I pressed my fingers to my temples. My headache had returned and I poured a glass of water and swallowed a couple of aspirin. I looked down the long line of windows and thought about running but had gotten no further than that when Clare came out of the bathroom.

She was wearing my terry robe, and her pale blond hair hung damp and heavy halfway down her back. She had a towel in one hand and an empty highball glass in the other. From across the room she was model pretty, with pointed chin, straight nose, sculpted cheeks, and a wicked widow’s peak, but on closer approach the impression changed. There was something skeptical in the arch of her brow, and something mocking in the curve of her lips, and altogether there was just too much irony and intelligence in her face to make her an effective shill.

“Your water pressure is great,” she said, “but you need some new shampoo. I used that green crap in seventh grade, and even then it smelled like funeral flowers.” Her voice was scratchy and intimate and always vaguely amused. Her laugh was single-malt. Clare kissed me on the mouth and barely stretched to do it. She left an odd mix of tastes behind— vodka, tonic, lime, and Crest.

There was an intent look on her face as she built herself another drink, and a scientific glint in her narrow gray eyes, as if she were repairing a watch or performing minor surgery. Her sharp features blurred and softened in the evaporating light, and her cheeks faded from pink to porcelain as the shower’s heat dissolved. She finished her work with a wedge of lime and some ice cubes from the freezer, and she looked me up and down.

“You look like shit— pale and tired, and look at the bags under your eyes. You’re going to screw up those nice pores if you don’t watch out.” She took a tiny sip of her vodka tonic. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone got hammered last night.” She reached out a long-fingered hand and patted my chest. “How about you come lie down for a while.”

* * *

Clare was gone when I awoke, and so was the day. Snow was falling in tiny flakes, lit pink by the streetlights. I fumbled on the nightstand for my watch. I’d slept for an hour but I wasn’t rested. My headache was still there, joined now by a soreness in my thighs and a tightness in my lower back: the aftermath of Clare’s athleticism. I rolled onto a cold, damp spot, and kept on rolling— out of bed and into the bathroom.

A long shower and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich revived me enough to get some work done. I dug through my coat pockets for the notes from my meeting with Victor Sossa and I picked up the telephone.

Victor knew his properties and their owners, and he’d told me enough about the apartments on the fourth floor of the building on Lispenard Street for me to identify which one David had visited: 4-C, the only one-bedroom on the floor.

The apartment was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Martin Litella, who had bought the place for their daughter, Jill. According to Victor, the daughter was an actress, a petite blond who went by the name Jill Nolan, and who was fortunate enough to have steady employment in the road company of a popular musical comedy about the Spanish Inquisition. Nolan had started touring four months ago, Victor said, and she had another three months left on the road. She returned to New York only infrequently— once every six weeks or so— and stayed for just a night or two. He didn’t recall her being back at all in November, and thought she was currently in Seattle. Best of all, he had her cell phone number. She answered on the third ring; I said my name was Fitch.

Jill Nolan told me I’d caught her during her no-fat, no-whip, extra-hot decaf mocha break, right between spinning class and her Bikram yoga session. Usually she was able to fit a box-ercise class in too on Tuesday afternoons, but not that Tuesday, because Mandy, the girl she was rooming with— the little redhead who plays the part of the rabbi’s daughter from Salamanca who dies at the start of act two— had her boyfriend in from Cincinnati, and to give the two of them space Jill stayed the night with Brittany from the chorus, who forgot to set the alarm and so they were late getting up and it threw off the whole effing day, from breakfast right through to picking up the dry cleaning and returning the boots she’d bought last week. It all came out of her in an endless rushing breath, in an almost hypnotic, singsong voice that rose and fell and tumbled and frothed, and seemed to fill my head with suds.

Finally, she inhaled. “You got my phone number from Victor?” she asked.

“I did,” I said, and I repeated my tale about the accident and the search for a witness who’d seen it all from a fourth-floor window. She seemed to take the story more seriously than Victor had.

“Was it a bad accident? Was it with one of those effing bicycle messenger guys? The way they ride, I swear it’s a wonder more people aren’t killed. Can you believe I actually dated one for a while? That was a trip, let me tell you.”

“I’m sure.”

“He called himself Storm, like he was a superhero or something. Can you believe it?”

“I’m struggling. Were you by any chance at home on the eighteenth?”

“November eighteenth, you said?”

“November eighteenth.”

“No, I wasn’t home at all that month.”

“Could anyone else have been in your apartment then?”

“Anyone like who?”

I tried not to sigh. “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“Well, I don’t know. My parents have keys and they use the place sometimes, but usually they mention it, and anyway they’ve been in Palm Beach since Halloween. They won’t be back till March.”

“There’s no one else?”

“No one else…?”

“No one else with a key.”

Jill Nolan thought about that, which must have been even more trying for her than it was for me. It went on for a while, but eventually she finished. “Well…there’s Victor, I guess— but you already talked to him. And there’s Holly. She has a key, but it’s only for emergencies— like if something happens when I’m out of town and my parents are away too.”

“Away, like in Florida?”

“Yes, like that. But nothing happened at my place. I mean, I’ve never called Holly to ask her to go over for anything. I haven’t even spoken to her for like five months.”

Listening to Jill Nolan hadn’t robbed me of quite all my ability to think. I looked at the jelly jar still sitting on my kitchen counter. “I understand,” I said. “And this would be Holly Welch you’re referring to, yes?”

“Who’s Holly Welch? I’m talking about Holly Cade.”

“Of course,” I said, and chuckled— silly me—while I copied down the name. “And you’re sure Holly would’ve told you if she’d gone there?”

“I’m positive,” she said.

“Is it possible she stopped by your place, but hasn’t had a chance to mention it yet?”

“That’s nuts. Holly knows my number— she would’ve called if she’d gone over.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Because I’ve known her since, like, second grade— that’s how.”

“I see. Could you describe Holly for me, Ms. Nolan?”

“Could I what? What does that have to do with your accident thing?”

“Maybe nothing, but my client is sure he saw a woman looking out on the accident scene from what turned out to be a window in your apartment. Tell me, does Holly have blond hair?”

She laughed. “You’re way off base. Holly’s got red hair, and she’s had it all her life. So your client must be wrong, Mr. Fitch. Maybe he got the windows mixed up.”

“I didn’t say that my client saw a blond, Ms. Nolan. In fact, what he saw was a tall, thirtyish woman with thick auburn hair, fair skin, a narrow face, and a slender build. Does that sound familiar?”

Her response was slow in coming, and when it did, confusion and surprise vied with anger in her voice. “That sounds like…But she would’ve…You…you tricked me.”

“And I’m sorry about that, but does the description fit Holly Cade?”

A few moments more of silence, and anger won out in Jill Nolan. It made her smarter. “How could your client see someone so clearly from all the way down in the street, anyway? You lied to me, Mr. Fitch— if that’s your real name— and I don’t think I’ll talk to you anymore.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. If you give me Holly’s number, I could finish up with her directly.”

I wasn’t surprised when the line went dead, and I wasn’t dissatisfied, either. I had a name to work with now, and maybe the name of my little bird. Holly Cade.

* * *

Holly Cade who had no listed phone number and no address, no car registration or voter registration, no real property in her name— almost no presence at all in the on-line world. Almost.

I found a reference to her on the website of some sort of performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on its calendar of events. The event in question was the staging of a play entitled Liars Club, by a theater troupe called the Gimlet Players. Liars Club was a one-act work, penned by one of the Gimlet’s founders, a certain Holly Cade. Unfortunately for me, the performance had taken place three Aprils ago, and in the meanwhile the Gimlet Players seemed to have disbanded.

The only other trace I found was a brief mention of her in a back issue of something called Digital Gumbo: The On-line Journal of Emerging Video Arts. Clicking through the website didn’t tell me much about “emerging video arts” or anything else, and most of the articles read like muddled pastiches of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. The reference to Holly was in a review of a group show at the Krug Gallery, in Woodstock, New York. Holly was one of four artists who had exhibited their video works there nearly two years ago. The review was lukewarm, and Holly’s piece rated barely two sentences. Like the Gimlet Players, the Krug Gallery hadn’t stood the test of time; it had closed last May. Which left me, as the evening wore out, knowing not much more about Holly Cade than her name. Except that I remembered what Jill Nolan had said.

“Because I’ve known her since, like, second grade…”

Holly Cade was mostly invisible on the Web, but Jill Nolan was not. I found a one-paragraph biography of her on the touring company’s website, and a headshot of her bland, pretty, bright-toothed face. The bio was mostly a list of stage and TV credits, but near the end was the nugget I’d been looking for. “Born and raised in Wilton, Connecticut…”

4

Forty-eight hours was more time than David wanted to wait for a progress report. I was happy to report what little progress I’d made over the telephone, but David wouldn’t have it. He was typically specific in his other demands too: no stopping by his office, no meetings south of Park Row or anywhere on the Upper East Side, and definitely no house calls— not to his house, anyway. In the end, we met at the Florida Room, an airy, high-concept diner around the corner from my place. It has a lot of jalousies and slow-turning ceiling fans, and enough background noise for private conversation. There’s a row of booths along the back wall and I was in one, working on a bowl of oatmeal, when David arrived. He kept his coat on and sat and stared out the windows at the pedestrians and cars.

“Holly Cade,” he said again, and shook his head. “Never heard of her.” He dug his hands into his coat pockets and seemed to shiver. The waitress came and David ordered orange juice and nothing else.

“How about Jill Nolan?” I asked.

“Not her either,” he said softly.

He was turned out in pinstriped navy, crisp and spotless despite the messy sidewalks. But David also looked smaller today, and older and more distracted too.

“Is this Nolan going to tell her pal about your call?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. And I don’t expect it will take Holly long to figure out what it was about.”

“That’s fucking great,” David said. “What happened to discretion?”

“You think she’ll be surprised that you’re looking for her? It’s not like she ordered you not to try to find her, after all. Hell, she might even be flattered. Maybe it’ll make her get in touch.”

“Fucking great,” he said again. David’s juice came, but he just looked at it for a while and went back to peering out the window. He looked east and west and east again, searching for something along the length of Seventeenth Street.

“Has she called again?” I asked.

David snorted. “Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it?”

I was by no means certain, but I nodded anyway. “Did something else happen, then?”