When the Cat's Away (3 page)

In fact, the whole little affair didn’t seem to be making a hell of a lot of sense. Somebody, it would appear, was playing a pretty mean prank on Jane Meara. And Jane Meara was the kind of person who didn’t have an enemy in the world. Never much liked that kind of person myself. Still, I couldn’t imagine hating her. Evidently, someone could and did.

Or maybe it was Rocky they were after. But Rocky, from what I understood, was more of a house pet than a grand champion. Outside of her four little sweat socks, there wasn’t much about her that would whip your average cat fancier into a sexual frenzy. Of course, cat fanciers had been known to have rather strange appetites. Stranger even than the menu at Big Wong.

We got to Eighth Avenue and entered through the side doors of the Felt Forum. It was nudging nine o’clock and there was a steady stream of cage-carrying cat fanciers and assorted spectators leaving the Garden area. We had almost gotten to the entrance of the exhibition hall when I noticed a worrisome knot of people gathered in a corner off to the left-hand side of the lobby. At the center of the small crowd stood a big, burly man with a little notebook.

He looked unpleasantly familiar.

A large woman carrying a large cat in a large cage blocked my field of vision for a moment. When she stepped out of the way, I caught a brief but sufficient glimpse of the malevolent mug of Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman from the Sixth Precinct. Sufficient to remind me that Cooperman and I were not exactly chummy. And sufficient to tell me that something was terribly wrong at the cat show.

If they’d found Rocky, somehow I didn’t think it was going to be pretty. I was glad Jane Meara wasn’t around. “Ratso,” I said, “I think we’re too late.”

“Too late? What do you mean?”

“I mean I think we’ve got a dead cat on the line.”

6

When you look for something in life, sometimes you find it. Then you find it wasn’t what you were looking for. Then you wonder why the hell you went looking for it in the first place. Just curiosity, you figure. You rack your brains trying to remember what curiosity did to the cat. Did it make him healthy, wealthy, and wise? Did it help him get the worm? Oh, Christ! It killed him!

But by now it’s too late. You catch your reflection in a stolen hubcap—you’re a cat. The specter of curiosity, which looks like a large, seductive Venetian blind, stalks you across miles and miles of bathroom tiles … across the cold and creaky warehouse floor of your life … across a candlelit table in a restaurant that closed twelve years ago. Shut down by the city for being too quaint.

I killed what was left of the Jamaican “A” and Ratso and I walked across the foyer to where the people were standing. We were just in time to hear Marilyn Park say to Sergeant Cooperman, “Nothing like this has ever happened at one of our shows.”

Ratso nodded solemnly and winked at me. I watched the man standing next to Marilyn Park, a shadowy fellow whom I took to be her husband, Stanley Park. The one who thought the security at the show was adequate. He was introducing a third man to Cooperman.

“Sergeant,” said Stanley Park, “this gentleman is Hilton Head. He’s in charge of all our public relations. The spokesperson for the whole show.”

Head was a nervous, rather effeminate young man who ran a limp hand through limp hair and kept repeating the phrase “… such a pussycat … such a pussycat …”

Cooperman glowered at the young man and scribbled a thing or two in his little notebook. You can always tell a cop with a notebook from an angry young novelist with a notebook. Both of them are angry, but the novelist opens his notebook from the side while the cop flips the pages over the top.

Cooperman flipped a page over the top and looked up from his notebook. He was not pleased to see me standing there in the small crowd of cat fanciers.

He tried to pick me up by the scruff of the neck with his left eye.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “talk about a bad penny.”

“Did you find the cat?” I asked.

“Did we find the cat?” said Cooperman with a smile. “Yeah, we found the cat.”

“Where’s the cat now?” I asked.

“Where’s the cat now? The cat’s right back here in this office.” He jerked his thumb toward what looked like a small cloakroom.

Cooperman had a fairly sick smile on his face that I couldn’t quite cipher. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Wanna take a look?” he asked.

I shrugged and motioned to Ratso and the two of us followed his trucklike body into the small room adjoining the foyer. At first I didn’t see anything because a camera flash went off practically right in my eyes. When I could see, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The room was a beehive of activity. Cops and technicians all over the place. Rocky was nowhere in sight. But something else was.

On the floor in the center of the room was the body of a man. His chest was so red it looked like E.T.’s little heart-light.

There was a blood-encrusted, gaping hole where you kind of expected a mouth to be.

“How do you like that?” said Sergeant Cooperman cheerfully. “Looks like the cat’s lost his tongue.”

7

If life is but a dream, death is but a nightmare. That information notwithstanding, I was pleased to find, when I woke up Tuesday morning, that my cat was still in the loft and my tongue was still in my head. All things considered, not a bad way to start the day.

I fed the cat, put the espresso machine into high gear, and lit my first cigar of the morning. I looked out the window at the sun-dappled, grimy warehouses across the street. The billboards were glistening with dew. The rust was shining on all the fire escapes. It was a beautiful morning.

I sat down at the kitchen table for a quiet cup of espresso. If you ignored the constant rumbling of the garbage trucks, everything was fairly peaceful. One of the appealing things about this case, I reflected, was that a dead man with his tongue cut out couldn’t give you any lip.

I sipped the espresso from my Imus in the Morning coffee cup. I puffed the cigar and watched a blue wreath drift upward toward the lesbian dance class. Pretty quiet up there just now. Maybe they were getting into their little lesbian leotards. Or out of them. The whole world loves a lesbian, I thought, and nobody knows dick about her. Of course, when you’ve got ’em thudding on your ceiling all day long, even lesbians can lose a little magic.

If lesbians were a mystery, so was the dead man at the Garden. But I knew a little more about him. Just a little more. His name was Rick “Slick” Goldberg. He had a cat entered in the cat show. When he hadn’t been busy entering cats in cat shows, he’d been a literary agent.

I had not gotten this information from Sergeant Cooperman. When I’d asked him who the dead man was, he’d asked me if I was next of kin. I’d told him I didn’t know because I didn’t know who the dead man was. He’d told me to wait till tomorrow and ask a newsboy. That was that.

But if you hang around a few crime scenes you usually learn a thing or two, besides not to hang around crime scenes. Once you get behind the police lines into the crime scene search area, it is assumed that you belong there. Like being backstage at a rock concert—once you’re actually there, nobody questions your presence. So I’d gotten the information from a uniform who was standing there listening to his hair grow.

I poured myself another cup of espresso and thought it over. Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Cat fancier. Literary agent. Current occupation: worm bait. Nothing too slick about worm bait—we’re all worm bait waiting to happen. It’s what you do while you wait that matters.

Unless you wanted to count my laundry, there were only two things that I needed to do at the moment: find out all I could about the tongueless stiff at the Garden, and find out who’d occupied room 407 at the Roosevelt Hotel yesterday. I decided to call the Roosevelt Hotel.

Rick “Slick” Goldberg would keep.

8

“Good morning,” said the blower on the left, “Roosevelt Hotel.”

“Can I speak to the cashier, please?” I said.

“One moment, sir.”

“Fine.”

I waited. I puffed patiently on my cigar as I sat at the desk. I was going to get only one take on this and I knew it’d better be a wrap. I didn’t think the “cat got your tongue” note and the stiff
sans
tongue at the Garden were just one of death’s little coincidences. It was past time to turn the note over to Cooperman, but I wanted to take one little shot at the situation first. Maybe I’d hit the side of the barn.

“Cashier,” said an irritated, almost petulant voice. It was the voice of a woman you wouldn’t care to meet.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” I said in a bright voice. “This is the FTD florist in Fort Worth. Chuck speakin’.” Try to disarm her with a little southern charm. I thought briefly of how John Kennedy had once described Washington, D.C.: “Northern charm and southern efficiency.”

“Yes?” she said impatiently.

“We’re havin’ a little booger of a problem down here, ma’am. I thought like maybe you could help us with it.” 

“Yes?” Sounded like she was warming up to me. “Seems we sent our Silver Anniversary Cup Bouquet—it’s been a real popular item for us—we’ve got a lot of retired folks down here …”

“Sir …”

“… sent it out yesterday mornin’ to a Mrs. Rose Bush from here in Texas—I think they said she was related to the Vice President—second cousin or somethin’ like that….”

“Sir! What exactly do you want?”

“Well, now, we sent it to Mrs. Bush—to her room there at the Roosevelt Hotel—and somebody signed for it and took it and now I hear from the boss that Mrs. Bush never did get it. Boss’s madder’n an Indian who’s trying to take a peepee and can’t find a teepee.”

There was a silence on the line. Finally, the cashier asked in a rather curt voice, “What room was the—uh— Bush party in, sir?”

“Well now, let’s see … The Silver Anniversary Cup Bouquet was sent to—hold the weddin’, I’ll find it—here it is—room 407.”

“Just a moment, sir.” There was a pause while the cashier checked her ledger. “There must be a mistake, sir. There’s no Bush party registered.”

“Well, I’ll be hog-tied and branded.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Well, now, you see, if I could get the name of the party that
was
registered in that room—just for our records, you see—I’d be off the hook. As the catfish said to Little Black Sambo.”

There was a deep and somewhat disgusted sigh on the other end of the line. Then a silence. Then an abrupt decision was apparently made. “The party registered in room 407 was not from Texas,” said the cashier in an almost haughty voice. “The party was from Connecticut. The party’s name was Fred Katz.”

I took a thoughtful puff on my cigar. “Care to spell that?” I asked.

9