When the Cat's Away (8 page)

“Fred Katz?” Ratso asked, looking over at me.

I read the words again and nodded somberly. “And I was just starting to like the guy,” I said.

* * *

Martin Luther King had a dream; I had a nightmare. It involved Fred Katz, a man I didn’t know.

In the dream, Fred Katz’s face was weak, fairly handsome, and characterless. He looked like the kind of guy you might see driving a Rolls-Royce around in a small town. But his eyes looked like two angry hummingbirds coming at you beak first. The smile didn’t look too healthy either.

He walked over to my hospital bed and spoke to me, but the words were unintelligible. His lips were beginning to look like a flower on Mars. Something even the FTD florist in Fort Worth wouldn’t have in stock. Maggotlike tendrils began growing out of his face—not entirely unattractive— and they wriggled like the pale toes of a woman you once loved. He stepped forward quickly with a shiny knife and cut the two green garden snakes in half. Something in mauve from the Dairy Queen began oozing out.

From the corner of my eye I saw him put the knife away and pick up my toilet kit. A deep, biblical-sounding voice, heavy on the echo chamber, boomed out from the sky of the hospital room. It said: “A modern man-about-town can’t live without his toilet kit.”

Katz took the toilet kit and headed for the door. I reached out from the bed to stop him, but suddenly I was tired as hell. Tired of life. Tired of hospitals. Tired of looking at a face that was as ragged as a death mask.

“Sleep well,” the face said.

Maybe I slept for just a few hours. Maybe it was long enough to fall in love, get married, have kids, get divorced, and fight for the custody of a seven-year-old child who looked, laughed, and acted exactly like the spouse you despised. It was only time, and time was just a magazine, and it cost two dollars, and you only had a dollar, and that was life, and life was just a magazine, and who the hell believed what they read anyway?

Eventually, I found myself swimming upward into the rather brackish waters of consciousness. Appropriately, I was doing the American crawl—back from a track-lit, neon nightmare into the pale careless light of the twentieth century. Coffee-colored cobwebs began to clear from my mind. The green garden snakes were back in place. That was nice. What passed for New York sunshine was streaming sluggishly in through the window. But there was something new in the picture.

I didn’t know if she was an angel of the morning or a straggler from the
Arabian Nights
, but she was sitting on my bed wearing the naughtiest smile I’d ever seen and not a hell of a lot else.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Try again,” said Leila.

20

There is something very attractive about the prospect of eating, or hosing, forbidden fruit. Leila wasn’t exactly forbidden fruit, but she was close enough for color TV. She was wearing a very diaphanous blouse and on her head was a red-and-white sort of scarf that looked like it’d started out in life as a tablecloth in Little Italy.

“I’ve got two questions for you,” I said, as the smile drilled right through me into the bed where it belonged. “The first one is, what is that thing you’ve got on your head?”

The naughty smile turned a bit mischievous, I thought. “We call it a
kaffiyeh
.” she said. I nodded as if I’d just been told some highly important piece of information. Her breasts filled out the front of the blouse like the humps of a small camel. Not the kind you smoke, but the kind you ride.

“The second question,” I said rather gruffly, after a small pause to study the terrain, “is, how in hell did you get here?” It’s a good policy to keep up a relatively tough-guy exterior. There’s always the broad who thinks she’s the only one who sees the gentle, sensitive side of you. Whether or not you even have a gentle, sensitive side is pretty much irrelevant. Women like guys who are hovering at death’s door, who’ve just been shot with a tranquilizer dart, or who’ve committed some particularly sickening heinous crime that no sane mind on the planet could sanction or absolve. My advice is, if they want to think they see this gentle, sensitive side of you, let them. There’ll be plenty of other people in your life who, when you’re doing what you believe to be right, will think you’re a shmuck.

“Maybe I’m just an ambulance chaser,” she said, “who’s a day late. They wouldn’t let me see you yesterday. After I was so curt with you I changed my mind and decided I’d like to get to know you.” She kept studying me. Her eyes were bold and curious.

“C’mere, baby,” I said, “let me show you where the rabbi bit me.”

She laughed. She may have blushed, but I doubted it. If she did, it got lost in the sunset somewhere west of Mecca. She leaned back on the foot of the bed. The camel rumpled its humps attractively as it crossed the linen desert. Leila had stopped smiling. You could tell she was one of those women who, when they wanted to, had pouting staked out.

Neither of us said a word as she pulled her knees up to her chin and sat on the bed gazing casually through the sheets. She had a beautiful bucket, and I knew damn well that I wasn’t the only one who could see that side of her. The construction worker on the ninth floor could see it from the other side of the street.

I thought I’d go for a laugh. Break the implicit sexual tension.

“Speaking of ambulance chasers,” I said, “my friend Sammy Allred in Austin, Texas, knows a hotshot lawyer who once got a charge of sodomy reduced to following too closely.”

“That sounds nice,” she said.

I might have blushed. If I did, fortunately, it was lost in the implicit sexual tension.

Leila proceeded to explain how, though I’d been rude when she first met me, she’d been strangely drawn to me. Then, as she was taking a break from the cat show, she’d seen the ambulance, and somebody’d told her that I’d been shot. She’d felt terrible. She’d had to see me.

When I asked her for her phone number, she looked at me in an Old World sort of way. Her eyes looked like clear beads on an abacus. Then she smiled, reached into her purse, took out a pink felt marker pen, and looked around either for a piece of paper or to see if anyone was watching.

“Give me your hand,” she said.

I did.

With an almost nasty, jerky little smile, she wrote for a while on the palm of my right hand, then put the pen away, picked up her purse, and stood up to go. My hand felt hot where she’d held it.

“I’ll call you when I’m better,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready.”

She walked to the door and I looked at my hand. Never be king of the Gypsies, I thought. Couldn’t even read my own palm. The writing looked like some kind of blurry, hot-pink hieroglyphics.

“Leila!” I shouted in a commanding, sandpaper voice.

She turned at the door and faced me. Her expression might have been one of fetching mischief. It might have been one of childlike wistfulness. I figured I’d wait until I got the lab report before I decided which. And something told me I might have to wait longer than that. There are some women you can never really get to know until you’re dead, and even then you can’t be too sure.

“What the hell does this say?” I asked.

“Can’t you read it?” she asked playfully. “It’s Arabic numerals.”

21

I remember once reading a newspaper on a sunny veranda on the left coast of our nation. I was having a mimosa cocktail and eggs bend-my-dick and reading an article about what certain prominent Californians planned to do on the Fourth of July. The mayor of Los Angeles was planning to attend a picnic in the park. Cal Worthington, the used-car dealer, was going to lead a parade in Pasadena. But when they asked Henry Miller what he planned to do on the Fourth of July, he said, “Sleep through it like a bad dream.” That’s what I’d planned to do with my Sunday morning. St. Vincent’s is a long way from St. Patrick’s.

I would’ve followed Henry Miller’s advice if it hadn’t been for McGovern. McGovern, for all his warm and easygoing nature, was positively brutal when it came to smelling a good, unsavory story. I don’t know how McGovern got on to me or knew where I was, but it didn’t take him long to go for the jugular. He called and wanted to know if the dart gun rumor was true, if it was connected to the murder at the cat show earlier in the week, and if they both were connected to the lost cat I was looking for.

“The hipbone is connected to the assbone,” I said.

“Well, obviously,” said McGovern, “you’re not in the hospital from overwork and exhaustion.” He laughed. “So the dart gun rumor must be true.”

“Okay,” I said, “say it is.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said McGovern.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” It was bad enough that the cat show was over and most of my suspects were probably scattered to the winds. I didn’t need McGovern alerting them further with sensational speculation in the
Daily News
.

“Did you get any response to the lost cat ad?” asked McGovern.

“None of your beeswax, corn bread, or shoe tacks,” I said coolly.

“I can’t believe you’re saying this. We’re in this thing together. MIT … MIT … MIT …” MIT was the name McGovern and I had once given to the “Man in Trouble Hotline” that we’d established so that if either of us died at home it wouldn’t take them eight months to find the body, like it did with some guy in Chicago that McGovern had read about. When things got unpleasant, we’d call each other and say, “MIT, MIT, MIT”

“McGovern,” I said, “the problem is that inquiring minds want to know, and if you write about it, inquiring minds may want to hurt Kinky.”

“Okay,” said McGovern, “this is off the record. Just between us girls. Who was that stone fox who came to see you at the hospital yesterday?”

“Jesus up a Christmas tree, McGovern. What are you doin’? Payin’ off the orderlies here?”

“You have your sources; I have my sources,” said McGovern with some little dignity. “I just heard that this mystery woman visited you in your room and evidently I heard right. They said she was fucking beautiful.”

“McGovern, I’ve got something for you,” I said. “It’s something you can print.”

“What?”

“Every time you see a beautiful woman, just remember, somebody got tired of her.”

* * *

Sunday had three other high points, if you wanted to call them that, besides the call from McGovern. The first one was the lab report. It looked like a doozy, because Robert Young brought it in himself from the eighteenth hole. At least I hoped he’d been playing golf. If not, he was working a string of hookers out of Times Square. Golf is the only opportunity that middle-aged Wasps have to dress up like pimps.

I had been shot, apparently, with an animal tranquilizer named supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Or something equally as long and tedious.

“Enough to put a lion under,” Robert Young told me and Ratso. “You can imagine what that would normally do to a man.”

“Kinky the Lion-hearted,” Ratso laughed. I smiled. I was kind of proud of myself in spite of it all. Maybe the years I’d spent abusing my body with drugs on the road had finally paid off—my system was conditioned to it.

“I think you have a very strong will,” said Robert Young.

“I want to live,” I said. “I want to paint.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I’ve spoken to Ratso here and he’s going to be keeping a close eye on you for the first week. You can go tomorrow, but Ratso will stay with you for a while.”

The idea of my being Ratso’s ward was not a pleasant one, but it looked like the only way Robert Young was going to let me out of the hospital. Ratso had moved into the loft with me for a few weeks several years before, when I had been trying to help McGovern out of a hideous snarl he’d gotten himself into. I’d had a little urban hunting accident. Ratso had been dedicated at that time, even devoted. He’d stood up well in the face of death threats, my incapacitation, and harassment from the police. But he was still pretty far down on the list of people on this planet that I’d like to have for a roommate.

To put it kindly, Ratso lacked certain social graces. In fact, he lacked all social graces. And people who lack social graces are the very ones who don’t know what you’re talking about when you tell them they lack social graces. Anyway, it’s not very polite to tell somebody he’s a gluttonous, niggardly, unhygienic animal. About all you can say is what a dowdy, humorless woman once told Ratso when he was burping rather loudly in an Indian restaurant: “Pardon the pig.”