When the Cat's Away (5 page)

Leo met Ratso and me at the door like a white Joe Louis. He owned the Carnegie, but his greetings were so effusive he could’ve fooled you. He was equally enthusiastic even if you’d just been in the place that same afternoon. Of course, I hadn’t been in Leo’s place. I’d been in Sergeant Cooperman’s face.

“Kinky! Kinky!” said Leo, as he rushed over and took my hand warmly in both of his own. Shucking all modesty, I had to admit that very few patrons were greeted in this warm a fashion. Several customers looked up from their blintzes.

“When you playin’ at the Lone Star again, Kinky?” Leo asked.

“Well, not for a while Leo, if I can help it,” I said to the back of Leo’s head. He’d turned away from me to greet Ratso. Probably asking him how the magazine was going. Maybe admiring his wardrobe. I passed the awkward moment admiring the salamis in the window and presently Leo’s attention turned back to me. Patience is always rewarded.

“So Kinky,” said Leo, “so how’s the Broadway musical coming along?” I had written the score for a Broadway musical comedy but my collaborator, Don Imus, had been dragging his feet on the book for about four years. Lately, Imus had been showing a little bit of progress.

“Yeah … well,” I said unenthusiastically, “we hope to have a few homosexuals tap-dancing by late summer.” 

“Great, Kinky!” said Leo. “Great.”

Leo called a waiter over and got us a table. As Ratso and I sat down we heard Leo, in the best tradition of the stage whisper, shout to the waiter, “Give ’em linen!”

Ratso and I were seated across from each other in the middle of a long table, with people on both sides of us. The guy on my immediate right was so close that when he ate his smoked fish I could spit out the bones. Everybody at the table had paper napkins with the Carnegie logo: a picture of Leo holding a tray and saying, “I make a goooood sandwich.” I ordered seltzer and coffee and began looking over the miles of menu. Ratso began working on the bucket of pickles that was always on the table. Then the waiter brought our linen.

It created a mild ripple effect. A bit of whispering. A nervous chuckle here and there. A little resentment. A look of wonder on one lady’s face before she went back to her chopped liver. I put my linen napkin on my lap but Ratso, in an embarrassingly ostentatious gesture, tucked his into the neck of his shirt like a lobster bib. Each to his own, I thought.

But mainly, it felt good. In fact, it felt goooood.

Possibly very few people attach as much importance as I do to being given a linen napkin at the Carnegie Delicatessen. Most people, of course, spend their lives caring about the wrong things. They worry about South Africa or Nicaragua. They spend so much time finding themselves that they lose their taxicabs. They don’t see that what kind of napkin you get at a delicatessen is a matter of much significance in the world today.

That’s why they don’t get linen.

* * *

I’d knocked off a bowl of matzo ball soup and Ratso had eaten an obscenely large piece of gefilte fish and a pope’s nose, which isn’t obscene but should be because it’s a turkey’s ass. We were both still hungry. Ratso studied his menu like a handicapper looking at a racing form.

“A little more interesting crowd’s starting to drift in here now,” I said. “They look like either theatrical types or hookers.”

“Or Puerto Ricans from the United Nations,” Ratso said, looking up from his menu. “So tell me about the investigation.”

I told Ratso about Fred Katz. I told Ratso about the bloody butcher knife. I told Ratso about the cat show people who had come by Jane Meara’s office while she was out. I told Ratso I couldn’t make up my mind what else to order.

“So what’re you going to do?” Ratso asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m caught between corned beef and pastrami.” I looked at the menu.

“I’m talkin’ about the case,” said Ratso. “What’re you going to do about the case?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Sergeant Cooperman warned me off.”

“Ah, c’mon,” said Ratso, dismissing the issue with a wave of a pickle. “You’re not gonna let a little thing like that stop you, are you? This is America. This is 1988.” He took another bite of the pickle and thought about it for a moment. “This is the Carnegie Deli,” he said.

“I know all that,” I said. “I just don’t want to think about it right now. All I want to think about is what I want to order.” I looked down at the menu again.

Leo hovered in from the left like a Huey chopper, with his rotors rotating. “Kinky! How ya doin’, Kinky? What can I get you?”

“I don’t know, Leo,” I said. “I’m somewhat confused as to what to order.”

“I know the perfect thing,” said Leo, “I’ll be right back. Just a moment.”

He veered off in the general direction of the kitchen. When Leo came back he was holding a large, rather unpleas-ant-looking, purplish object.

“Here,” he said. “How about I cut you a nice tongue?”

13

That night, back at 199B Vandam, I had a heart-to-heart talk with my cat. I was sitting at the desk. The cat was sitting on the desk. So was a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey and the old bull’s horn.

I’d had a few shots. The cat hadn’t touched the stuff. Probably pacing herself.

“Have you ever wondered,” I said, “why Negro undertakers always drive white hearses and white undertakers always drive black hearses?”

The cat looked at me and blinked her eyes.

“I know it’s a tough question,” I said. While the cat thought about it I poured another generous slug into the bull’s horn. Then I poured the bull’s horn into my mouth.

“I’m not afraid to die,” I said. “I’m not afraid to live. I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to succeed. I’m not afraid to fall in love. I’m not afraid to be alone. I’m just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes.” The cat yawned.

“It’s not easy being who I am,” I said. “Sometimes I think of myself as a country singer. Sometimes as a Broadway composer …”

The cat shook her right front paw in an unmistakable gesture of irritability.

“… sometimes as a private dick,” I said.

The cat stood up on the desk and stretched. Starting to get restless. I pretended I didn’t notice.

“I’ll tell you,” I said, “it’s lonely in the middle.”

On an impulse I picked up the cat and held her close to me. Cats, like everybody else, are a fairly perverse lot. They wish to be held only by those who don’t wish to hold them. By the time I remembered this it was too late.

The cat scratched me severely on my right wrist. Then she jumped down and bounded away. I chased her, cornered her, and hit her with my open hand on top of her head. She screamed and ran under the couch. I glanced down at my arm. Looked like a nearly successful adolescent suicide attempt.

“You asshole!” I shouted. The cat had come a little way out from behind the couch so she could enjoy watching me. Technically, I thought, the cat was not an asshole. As my friend Biana is fond of saying, “Assholes are people [or cats] who don’t know that they’re assholes.” By this standard, the cat was not an asshole.

Neither was I.

I went back to the desk and poured another jolt into the bull’s horn. There are those who would say, I thought bitterly, that it is not right for a 170-pound man to hit an 8-pound cat. Even with an open hand. It’s not fair, they’d say. Hardly the appropriate response to the situation, they’d snivel.

Well, it didn’t make me especially proud to be an American, but you couldn’t always turn the other cheek. Life is a game of give and take. Dog eat dog. Cat scratch man. Man hit cat.

Hell, it’d be all right. Couple of days, everything’d be back to merely strange. Anyway, it was none of their goddamn business. It was an act of passion.

I looked down at my wrist. I glared across the room at the cat. It didn’t bring me a hell of a lot of satisfaction, though, because the cat had closed her eyes and was curled up asleep in the rocking chair.

I sighed, picked up the bull’s horn, killed the shot, and lit a cigar. I watched the smoke drift away and disappear like the dreams of a child who always wanted to be a fireman.

14

Wednesday morning I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a busy little New Yorker. I had the espresso machine, a cigar, and the blower on the left all going simultaneously. Somewhere out there was a lost cat. Somewhere out there was a killer. My plan, with or without the help of the police, was to find them both. If you had to have an impossible dream, you might as well make it a good one.

On the other end of the line, Jane Meara was telling me how sorry she was to have landed me in hot water with the police.

“They told me to tell them
everything.
” she said. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m still on the case, in spite of Cooperman’s warning.”

“Kinky,” she said falteringly, “I don’t think—” 

“This is America,” I said. “This is 1988.”

“This is dangerous.”

“I like danger. It gives me a buzz. It’s supposed to be good aerobically.” I puffed a few times on the cigar.

“It was horrible about Slick,” she said. “You know, I had lunch with him that same afternoon.”

“Didn’t know that. What’d you talk about?”

“Oh, just the usual. The big deals he was working on. Who he was touting this week.”

“Who was he touting this week?”

“Oh, some guy who’d written a book about how there’s an inordinate number of mass murderers who have the middle name Wayne. The author feels that their fathers overidentified with John Wayne, named their sons accordingly, and thus passed along a sort of festering internalized violence as well.”

“Coffee table job?”

“No. It’s a long-winded psychological tome. I passed.”

“So did Slick,” I said. I paused to glance over at the espresso machine. It looked and sounded like it was preparing to fly to Jupiter. “What kind of guy was Slick?” I asked.

“Well,” said Jane, “he wasn’t particularly well loved.”

“Apparently not,” I said.

Jane put in a fast plug for finding Rocky, said she had to run, and then we ciao-ed off. I beat a path to the espresso machine, poured a cup, went back to my desk, sat down, and took a sip. It was a lot of work for that hour of the morning.

I leaned back in the chair and thought about agents. Agents were people, too. Just like cats. Maybe not quite as thoughtful or sensitive sometimes. But who was?

* * *

Pieces were beginning to fall together. For one thing, the person who called himself Fred Katz had quite conceivably never occupied room 407 at the Roosevelt. He’d just left the “cat got your tongue” note there and headed for the Garden to take Rocky, leave the room key in the cage, and dispense with Slick Goldberg. That would make for a busy afternoon and it didn’t leave a lot of time to decide what to do with Rocky before inking Slick’s final deal. Of course he could’ve taken Rocky back to the hotel, but how would he get into the room without a key? And obtaining two keys, under the circumstances, would’ve risked arousing the desk clerk’s suspicion. So Rocky must’ve been set loose on the street or dispatched to kitty heaven in a rather rapid fashion.

It’d be too big an order to kill the agent without letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak.

I took a deep breath and called McGovern at the
Daily News.

“National Desk,” said a familiar voice.

“Yeah, National Desk,” I said, “I’d like to report a runaway garden slug out here in Westchester.”

“Is it an exclusive?” McGovern asked.

“McGovern,” I said, “this is Kinky. I need a favor.” 

“No shit,” he said. I took a patient puff on my cigar. It was important that McGovern not go into a snit. If he did, it could be unpleasant.

“It’s really a small thing,” I said, “but you could get it done a lot faster than I could. You’ve got the connections. Besides, I’m working on a case and I’ve got to be somewhere soon.”

“Where do you have to be?”

“The cat show at Madison Square Garden.”

There was no response.

“All I want is for you to place an ad in the
Daily News
for a lost cat.”

There was a stunned silence on the line. It was followed by hearty, incredulous Irish laughter. McGovern was one of the few people in the world who, even when being incredulous, could be hearty. He was always Irish.