When the Cat's Away (10 page)

I took another shot and looked over at my boots standing by the desk. They were long and narrow, like my mind. I visualized a person standing in them. Another Kinky, but not like the other Kinkys I’d seen when I first came to in the hospital. It was the Kinky that I could be with a little bit of luck and a hell of a lot of guts. He was a little weatherbeaten but he looked all right. You could tell that he didn’t have time to be lonely.

There’s not that much time left, I thought. There never had been that much time. Never enough to spend the rest of your life looking at the bland face of a child in a yellow station wagon.

The road could’ve ended anywhere, but it didn’t. So you keep driving life’s lonely DeSoto, looking ahead into the rain and darkness with the windshield wipers coming down like reaper’s blades just missing your dreams. And you don’t stop till you’re damn well ready. Till you come to the right place. Till you come to the right face. The place may be New York or Texas or it may be somewhere painted with the colors Negroes use in their neon lights.

The face will be smiling. So you take the key out of the ignition and you see if it opens her heart.

25

The phone call from Eugene came at about 6:15
A.M.
It was a trifle early and it was also a trifle unpleasant. “Our little friend,” according to Eugene, had not been idle during the night. Whoever he was, he was continuing his campaign of terror against Jane Meara. Eugene was at Jane’s place now because she was frightened to be alone. They wanted to meet me. They had something for me.

I didn’t want anything. Maybe another twelve hours of sleep.

I agreed to meet them in an hour at a little Greek coffee shop on Twenty-eighth Street around the corner from Jane’s office. I hung up, got dressed, found and fed the cat, and found and lit a cigar. I put on my old hunting vest, my hat, and my coat and I tiptoed across the living room like a guy sneaking out of the house for a poker game. It was my house—I could sneak out of it if I wanted. I locked the door to the loft behind me.

One rule I always follow in life is “Let sleeping rats lie.”

* * *

Vandam Street was windy, cold, and empty in the early morning. There was just a little old lady trying to hold on to a little pink hat and me trying to hold on to my cowboy hat. Deserted as it was, the place had an aura of urban prairie to it. Of course, these days I usually rode two-legged animals.

I drifted up Hudson and hailed a hack. Through a frosty window that wouldn’t quite close, I watched the city waken. A stout woman with a shawl unlocks an iron gate. A man in a woolen cap unloads a crate of oranges from a truck. Down the street another man sits by the gutter next to a whiskey bottle and blows on his hands. Two little children in mackerel-snapper uniforms come out of a building with a doorman. A man wearing a coat walks a dog wearing a sweater.

People walk dogs in Dallas. People walk dogs in California. But in New York sometimes you can see a real man walking a real dog, and there’s something timeless and rather beautiful about it. It’s performance art.

My mind was starting to wake up a little bit, too. A lot of things were happening to Jane Meara and she wasn’t the kind of person things always happened to. She wasn’t the kind of person whose junkie boyfriend beat her up or who didn’t know that her apartment was being used as a crack kitchen or who found a serial killer in her shredded wheat. She was normal as a blueberry blintze.

So why had somebody kidnapped her cat? Why had somebody left her a crank note at the Roosevelt Hotel? Why had somebody put a bloody butcher knife on her desk? I didn’t have any hard answers, but a garish mosaic was coming together in my mind’s eye and it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d want to hang in your sitting room.

The cab screeched to a halt at Twenty-eighth Street next to a man who was vomiting on a police car. The police car was empty and pretty soon so was the man. Make a nice picture postcard. I paid the driver, got out of the hack, and started walking up the street.

Halfway up the block I found the little Greek coffee shop. It wasn’t hard to find the place. You seen one Greek coffee shop, you’ve seen ’em all. Life imitates John Belushi.

It was a little after seven but the place was already crowded. Eugene and Jane were sitting at a table by the window and waved me over. Jane looked fragile. Eugene looked nervous. The waitress came to the table, Frisbeed a menu at me, and said, “Whad’ll you have?”

I said, “Coffee.”

She took the menu and went away faster than a dream you weren’t sure you had.

“I’m glad you were able to come,” said Jane.

“Let’s not get personal,” I said. As a rule, I tried never to appear too sophisticated until the coffee arrived. Jane looked like she was practicing her smile for the first time and Eugene made a let’s-get-on-with-the-show gesture.

The waitress brought my coffee. I took a sip and waited. Eugene looked at Jane and Jane looked at Eugene. I looked into my coffee cup and wished I were on a little Greek island instead of in a little Greek coffee shop.

“All right,” I said finally, “spit it.”

“Well, first of all,” said Eugene, “there’s something I think you ought to know. I didn’t tell the police about it the other day for obvious reasons, but I’ve talked it over with Jane and I think I ought to tell you.”

“Spit it,” I said.

“Well, Jim Landis is my boss. I work with Jane, but he’s both of our boss. He’s the publisher. He’s got his own imprint. You know what that is?”

“I’ve heard the word.”

“It means he runs his own publishing company.” 

“So?”

“So he wasn’t in a restaurant like he told the police— he was in Jane’s office.” Eugene looked at me nervously. I’d have to check it out but it seemed a bit too easy.

“Maybe I’ll order some pie,” I said.

“Landis can’t know we talked to you,” said Eugene. “Autism is my middle name,” I said. “What else have you got?”

Jane reached into her purse, came out with a cassette tape, and handed it across to me. It was an incoming message cassette for an answering machine. “It’s the last message on side B,” she said. “It came in late last night—about two o’clock in the morning, actually.”

“Okay,” I said. Two o’clock in the morning was about the time the cat had jumped on Ratso’s balls. The two incidents were probably unrelated, but it was a time-frame.

“It’s a silly message, I know,” said Jane, “but it scared the hell out of me at the time. In fact, it still does.” 

“What was the message?”

“Meow,” said Jane.

“I’ve heard the word,” I said.

26

By the time I got back to 199B Vandam, it was pushing eight-thirty and Ratso was dunking a bagel into a bowl of wonton soup. The cat was sitting on my desk. Neither of them looked pleased to see me.

The cat knew I was not carrying a grocery bag of cat food. She had a habit of looking in the cupboard with me every time I went to feed her, and she knew we were down to just two cans of Southern Gourmet Dinner. The cat hated Southern Gourmet Dinner.

The cat was merely petulant, but Ratso’s expression combined equal components of fury and disgust. I knew he was truly angry when he left his food and began pacing up and down in the kitchen. I was glad I didn’t own a rolling pin.

“You are not to go out,” he said with eyes blazing, “especially these first few days, without first checking with me. Even if you do check with me, I still don’t want you going out on the street alone. I’m to know where you’re at at all times. Do you understand?”

I took the cassette tape out and put it on the desk. “Lot of rules for such a small company,” I said.

Ratso continued to stare at me. “You’re goddamn right,” he said.

“Why so hostile?”

“Because you’re being an asshole.”

“That’s Mr. Asshole to you, pal.”

The bickering went back and forth for a while with the cat watching it like a slightly bored tennis fan. I played it out for a few more minutes and then Ratso somewhat grudgingly agreed to listen to the cassette tape with me.

I took the ceramic hat off the top of the large Sherlock Holmes head I kept on my desk and reached inside for a cigar. The Sherlock Holmes head had been given to me by my friends Bill and Betty Hardin at the Smokehouse in Kerrville, Texas. I kept my cigars and other valuables in there. Ratso often said that it was hardly a safe place for valuables, but I always invoked the words of my friend Goat Carson: “Sooner or later, cats piss on everything.” The way things were going, the cat probably would’ve pissed on everything by now if it weren’t for the little ceramic hat.

I took the tape out of my own answering machine and popped Jane’s in. I rewound the tape. Then I pushed the play button. The first voice we heard identified itself as Jim Landis’s. It sounded brusque and irritated.

“Jane, it’s Jim Landis … It’s nine-thirty … What
is
this shit? A monograph on the Flathead Indians of Montana? You think they’re happening? You think anybody gives a shit about the Flathead Indians of Montana? I can’t believe you sent this on to me—the writing stinks, too—the whole thing sucks. Send the guy to the
National Geographic
. What the fuck’s the matter with you, Jane?”

“Pleasant guy to work for,” said Ratso.

“He’s got his own imprint,” I said.

“If I worked for him I’d put my imprint on his forehead.”

“Listen.” There was one hang-up and a message from Jane’s mother. Then we heard it. It began in a high register and cascaded evilly down to a bone-jarring growl. The same fiendish, half-feline half-human sound we’d heard at the Garden a moment before I’d been shot.

“Any question?” I asked.

“Not a doubt about it,” said Ratso.

I lit my cigar with a rather feeble Bic. I’d had the Bic for four or five days. That was already pretty old in the lifetime of a Bic. I puffed thoughtfully on the cigar.

“I agree,” I said. “That’s our man.”

“Or woman,” said Ratso.

27

“I’m not tailing Hilton Head,” said Ratso as we sat around the kitchen table later that same day. “I’ve already spent too much time with that little fruitcake.”

“That’s an alarmingly homophobic attitude, Ratso,” I said. I was working on my fifth or sixth espresso and I was starting to get a little buzz.

We haggled back and forth for a while and gradually a division of labor was established. Ratso would, without alerting the parties involved, get a current rundown on Head and the Parks. Head lived in New York, but the Parks had several homes and it wasn’t even clear whether they were still in the city.

For my part, I would explore the Fred Katz situation and the “meow” situation and I would contact Sergeant Cooperman. My investigations were to be conducted telephonically. At least for now, Ratso would do the legwork. It was a reversal of roles that neither of us particularly relished.

It was Tuesday evening, about dusk. In New York in February, of course, it looks like Tuesday evening about dusk most of the time. Ratso was heading for the door with about half of Canal Street on his back. His shoes, pants, shirt, coat, and hat all were exclusively flea-market items. You could say that, in a rather seedy way, he was impeccably dressed. He was a man with deep loyalties to his clothier.