When the Cat's Away (15 page)

“My dear Ratso, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“So you think they iced Goldberg.”

“Actually, my conclusions are quite the opposite of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean these are early days, Watson. Too early in the case to idly discuss it with you.”

“You’re a sharing, caring kind of guy, Sherlock. It’s inspiring to work with a guy who gives so much of himself.” I puffed on the cigar a bit and looked at Ratso. “As Marco Polo said on his deathbed in 1324: ‘I have not told one half of what I saw.’”

“Yeah,” said Ratso, “but those were the Dark Ages. Today inquiring minds want to know.”

“In this case,” I said, “curiosity might just kill the rat.”

* * *

Not long thereafter, Ratso departed the loft in somewhat of a snit. I let him go. It was probably safer on the streets of New York than it was these days at 199B Vandam. Who the hell knows what’s safe anymore? Some people claim the smoke from my cigar is drifting over to them and creating a health hazard, but I don’t let it bother the Kinkster. The main health hazard in the world today is people who don’t love themselves.

To cover all bases, I went to the desk, got the number of American Airlines, and gave it a call. All the American agents were busy so I had to listen to some tape-recorded Musak by the Captain and Toenail. Where were the Disappointer Sisters when you needed them?

It would be somewhat ironic if I were to net myself a Colombian butterfly while waiting for the next available agent to answer the phone. For about two or three minutes I listened to the kind of crap that would make an elevator blush. Then I just said to hell with it.

40

The call that was going to change my life did not come that afternoon. There were two others, however.

The first was from Rambam, who felt I was laying my life on the line by not going to Texas. I told him I was laying my life on the line every time I ate a frankfurter at Madison Square Garden, but I wasn’t leaving town because a cop and a private investigator were getting a little nervous in the service. He said something, probably to relieve his frustration and disgust, and then hung up.

It was a gorgeous day, as we say in New York, even if you’re standing at the kitchen window of your loft anticipating that many men will come hurt you. The buildings looked gorgeous. The pigeons looked gorgeous. The prostitutes looked gorgeous. Actually, these things always have had an inherent beauty, but people have just tried too hard to look at them wrong. You come to see what you want to see.

I wanted to see this whole tension convention blow over. I wanted to continue with the case—find Slick Goldberg’s killer, find Rocky. I wanted a lot of things and it didn’t look like I was going to get them. I had about as much chance of coming out of this situation a happy American as Oliver Twist had of getting more.

The phone call that was to fling us headlong into something that nobody would think was gorgeous came at around three-fifteen that afternoon.

Interestingly enough, it was from Jane Meara.

41

It was Friday evening and the shadows were beginning to fall on Central Park as Ratso and I, who had reached at least some form of rapprochement, stood looking at a tall building on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Central Park South.

“Too bad,” said Ratso. “We’re only two blocks from the Carnegie Deli.”

“If we get through this alive, I’ll buy you a bowl of matzo ball soup.”

“I really wanted a Reuben sandwich.”

“Fine.”

It was cold and dark and it was getting colder and darker and I was trying to explain to Ratso what we were doing there.

“Jane Meara called me today and she was quite distressed.”

“So what’s new?”

“My dear Ratso, one would think you could dredge up a little more sensitivity for a person who’s lost a cat.” 

“Go on, Mr. Sensitivity.”

“Well, Landis called Jane in and said her work was falling down since all this started, and Eugene was coarse enough to suggest she forget about Rocky and get a dog.” 

“How thoughtless.” Ratso’s eyes were straying in the direction of the Carnegie Deli.

“But the real reason we’re here is that Jane was supposed to have lunch today with an editor from another publishing house whose name is Estelle Beekman. I know Estelle slightly myself. She’s the author of a recent, critically acclaimed novel and she’s sort of a recluse, but a very responsible person in the publishing business. She comes from an extremely wealthy family and she lives in this building. One of the things she wrote about in her novel is that she has been deathly afraid of cats since she was a child. To this day, she abhors them.”

“I like her already,” said Ratso. “But why are we here?”

“She did not show up for her luncheon meeting with Jane, no one at her office knows where she is, and her telephone has been busy for about four hours now.”

“Maybe she’s talking to her shrink about a Tom and Jerry cartoon she once saw when she was a child.”

“I don’t think so, Ratso. There’s no conversation on the line. I checked with the operator myself.”

“Why don’t we call the police?”

“It may come to that, but with this broad and this building, Jane thought it might be better if we were to run a quick check on the situation first ourselves. We wouldn’t want to create any social embarrassment, would we?”

“Of course not,” said Ratso in a voice that was possibly not quite as sincere as one would have hoped.

“Okay,” I said, “there’s about fifteen doormen and all of them are surly. I’m going to call a friend of mine who also lives here and then we’ll go up and see the lay of the land.” 

“The lay of the broad is what we’ll probably see,” said Ratso.

“This is a very respectable broad, Ratso. She told me once that she hardly believes in social intercourse, much less sexual. I’ll be right back.”

I went to a pay phone on the corner of Seventh Avenue next to the building and put in two bits. Nothing happened. No dial tone. No change. I took it in stride. The more storms one rides out in life, the better the captain one becomes of one’s soul.

I tried the next pay phone. This wasn’t easy because an escaped gorilla had ripped the receiver completely off the machine and left the wire dangling in the night air like the withered arm of a peasant.

The third pay phone worked fine and after three rings I got through to my friend. What hath God wrought?

Nick “Chinga” Chavin, the guy I was calling in the building where Estelle Beekman lived, was a country singer turned ad exec. I knew the building, one of the poshest in New York, because I’d stayed a couple times with Chinga as his house pest there before I grew up and rented a loft and had to deal with house pests of my own.

One of the things Chinga liked to do late at night was to fire Chinese bottle rockets from his fourth-floor balcony at the New York Athletic Club just across Seventh Avenue. According to Chinga, the New York Athletic Club has, to this day, never admitted Jews or Negroes as members. They don’t much like Chinese bottle rockets either. But on many occasions I’d witnessed Chinga laying siege to the club, aiming particularly at the Aryan shadows jogging along behind the tinted glass.

Now, Chinga agreed to call down to the concierge and tell him Ratso and I were his guests so we could get past the fifteen surly doormen.

He did and we did.

I told the elevator guy to take us to the sixteenth floor. We found the stairs, walked up three, didn’t meet anyone. We wandered down a hallway awhile and found 19G, Estelle Beekman’s apartment. The door was slightly ajar.

“Oh, shit,” I said, “I don’t like to see this.” I’d seen some things behind slightly ajar doors in my time, and none of them had turned out to be a free trip for two to Acapulco. “What is it?” Ratso asked.

“We’re about to find out,” I said.

I opened the door.

42

We walked in as gingerly as two astronauts stepping onto the moon. The place was quiet as a library and almost as big. We listened. There was a soft but persistent electronic sound coming from somewhere on our left. It was quiet and discreet, but it was there. Sort of like a coke dealer’s beeper going off at a backgammon tournament.

We followed the sound for about half a mile and wound up in the kitchen. The telephone receiver was lying forlornly on the drainboard. I took my snot rag out of my hip pocket, picked up the phone, and put it back on the hook. Sorry, nobody home.

We wandered back into the living room. It was dark, so we turned on a few lights. There were several big ornate lamps. There was track lighting. None of it removed the gloom, the visceral sense of foreboding that seemed to cover the pores like sweet, death-scented, coconut sun-tan oil. There was death all over the place. The only thing missing was the body.

Ratso and I made a cursory tour of the lushly furnished living room. It was like a rather macabre open house where you couldn’t find the homeowner but you knew she must be hanging around somewhere. Or lying in one of the bedrooms. Or tied up.

There was expensive-looking chrome and leather furniture, Persian rugs, several large pieces of sculpture that must’ve meant something to somebody somewhere. Large vases, jade carvings.

“Jesus Christ,” said Ratso, gazing at a picture on the wall, “look at that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s nice.”

“You know what it is?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a picture of some fat naked ladies dancing with each other.” I took a cigar out of one of the little stitched pockets on my hunting vest.

“It’s a Matisse,” said Ratso.

“It’s a triumph of art over life,” I said, as I lit the cigar.

“I’m glad you appreciate it,” said Ratso. I blew a cool stream of cigar smoke in the direction of the painting.

“I don’t,” I said. “I just think those fat, naked ladies dancing with each other have outlived Estelle Beekman.”

* * *

We walked from one posh room into another. No Estelle. Even the bathroom was something to see. She didn’t have a twenty-seven-foot jade toilet seat like Kenny Rogers, but it was definitely a five-star pissoir.

“Since there’s no dead body in the bathtub,” said Ratso, “I think I’ll use the facilities here.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s all right with Estelle, wherever she is. It could be seen as a trifle gauche under the circumstances.”

“I’ve got to urinate like a racehorse.” Ratso unzipped his fly and I zipped out into the hallway.

“Don’t whiz in the bidet,” I shouted through the partially closed door.

“I’m surprised you even know what that is.”

“Of course I do. Bidet lived a little before the time of Matisse. Many people feel that Matisse stole a lot of Bidet’s ideas. Bidet had a splashy style and Matisse was kind of jealous—”

“All right,” shouted Ratso, “that’s enough. But what’s she doing with a goddamned bidet if she doesn’t believe in sexual intercourse?”

“We find her, we’ll ask her,” I said. Never trust a person who’s afraid of cats.

I walked into Estelle Beekman’s bedroom and turned on the light. There was no dead body on the bed either, but lying on the floor there was a key that I didn’t particularly like the look of. I was about to pick it up when I heard a sound that turned my blood to Perrier on the rocks with a little twist of something I didn’t need at all.