Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729) (4 page)

I walked quietly but purposefully down the aisle, feeling oddly oppressed by the high solemnity of it all, until I stood next to the priest.

“Father . . .” I began. That was right, wasn't it? You could address any priest as “Father.”

“Father, I'm Alice Nestleton. May I ask you some questions?”

The priest looked at me. He was not a young man, but there was vitality in his cool green eyes and a solidity to his big body, even with a paunch showing through his robes. He smiled, nodding his pure white head.

“Well,” he said gently, “my name is Father Baer. And yes, you may ask me any question you like.”

It occurred to me then that he was probably expecting a query about St. Peter or fasting or proper behavior in the confessional. I hoped he wouldn't be too disappointed.

“Do you know this woman?” I brought the picture up close to his face, pointing to the grinning Barbara.

“Yes, I know Barbara Roman.” He did not touch the photograph. “Has she been ill?”

“Why do you ask that?”

He looked at me for a long moment, no doubt evaluating my motives. Finally he said, uncomfortably, “Are you a friend or relative of Barbara's?”

“A very good friend,” I answered.

“Is she in some sort of trouble?”

“A great deal,” I said, not worried about the lie—not even a lie, really, more like a paradox. After all, death was about the biggest trouble a person could ever be in. But at the same time, the dead were beyond all trouble. “Please tell me, Father, how you know Barbara. Please.”

“Something's happened.” It wasn't a question. He stated it as fact. I nodded in affirmation.

“Barbara was taking instruction with me in the Catholic faith. She came in every morning at seven, before the seven thirty Mass. She told me she wished not to tell her husband about it until after formal conversion, so she pretended to go out jogging in the mornings. I advised her to tell him now, but she wanted it the other way.”

I was so astonished by his words that I sat down at the end of the aisle, saying nothing.

“Is there anything I can do for Barbara? I want her to—”

“She's dead.”

Father Baer brought his hands together up near his mouth, the pain and amazement seeming to flow from his face right into his clenched fingers.

“What happened . . . to Barbara?” he finally said. “When?”

“About ten days ago. She killed herself.”

“No. Oh, no,” he spluttered, indignant. “That cannot be true.”

“Do you think I would lie about such a thing!” I knew that I was fairly shouting at the priest.

But then I felt him touch me gently, just for a second, on my shoulder.

Calmer now, he said, “I just find that very difficult to believe. You see, Barbara was new to the Church, but very devout. She was serious about instructions, knew the Church's teaching on suicide. She was just short of conversion. She would not kill herself. She would
not.”

I remained in the pew, ignoring the Mass that was still in progress. Only when the communicants started to move forward to receive the Eucharist from Father Baer did I rise from my seat, move past the others in my row, and head up the aisle toward the towering church door.

So, my imagination really had been mired in the mud of Soap Opera Land. There was no secret lover. Well, there was . . . but not one of this world. Barbara had been filled with the love of God, a love of life, and a newfound love of her church-to-be. And if Father Baer was to be believed, all these precluded the possibility that she had taken her own life. His words still echoed in my ears:
She would not.

I understood it dimly, only dimly. But I knew, as I'd known, somewhere inside me, all along, that the priest was right. She would not. She did not. I was there that night. I didn't see it happen, but Barbara was pushed off that terrace.

Someone had murdered my friend.

I walked back to Second Avenue and headed downtown. And there was Edie, struggling with the knot on her dog's leash. Briefly I toyed with the idea that I should stop and tell her that Barbara was dead. I knew that would be the right and decent thing to do, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I strode past her without stopping. But at the corner, I turned to look back at her in her Tibetan hat. Bent over that way, tugging at the patient animal's rope, she seemed so fragile. I started back. After all, Edie was old and alone. She needed help. And so did I.

Chapter 6

I called Basillio. I'd found his Stratford number, dialed it, he'd answered, and there I sat with the receiver in my hand, talking. In other words, all the elements of a conversation were present—except that he wasn't listening to a single thing I said.

Instead, his responses smacked of the high-handed born-again. He was back in the milieu of the church-of-the-theater, and all else was nonsense. I wanted to talk about the murder I had uncovered, and he wanted to analyze me out of it.

“Swede, you're grief-stricken,” he said, “and people in the throes of an overwhelming emotion like grief can become paranoid—at the very least, paranoid—and even delusional.”

“What on earth,” I asked acidly, “is that supposed to mean, Tony?”

“It means,” he said languidly, “that your friend killed herself and you're unwilling to confront that fact.”

I hated that tone! It was as if he were deigning to roll a few pearls of wisdom my way while he reached for an apple in a fruit basket, or a woman on a divan.

“Barbara committed suicide,” he reiterated. “Don't you see that you're insisting that she
didn't
because the fact that she
did
is some kind of commentary . . . some kind of judgment . . . on your friendship with her? Your ego won't let you admit that you couldn't save her, that you failed her. But it isn't true, Swede. It wasn't your—”

That's when I hung up. Then I grabbed Bushy and held on to him for a while.

Of course I understood Tony's point: that it made me feel better to think Barbara had been murdered than to think she'd taken her own life. That way, no finger could be pointed at me. It was a fairly elementary analysis. That doesn't mean I accepted it, however. If there was any ego stuff going on, it was that I thought
I
could discover why Barbara had killed herself—when no one else could. And then I'd been brought up short by the very strong possibility that she hadn't killed herself at all.

I looked at my grandmother's old green jade clock, meant to sit on a mantelpiece, I suppose; it was ugly as sin, but rather valuable. It was two in the afternoon, give or take a few minutes. Unbelievable—just seven hours ago I was talking to Father Baer, receiving the stunning news about Barbara's religious conversion. I was still agitated. I'm no ingenue in regard to crime—it takes a great deal to discombobulate me. But the shock waves of this case—and it was strange to think of Barbara's death as a “case”—were hitting me so hard they felt like an assault on my professionalism. And my ego? Damn that Basillio.

He was useless now as a sounding board, and that was exactly what I needed: someone to talk to, run my ideas by, help me piece things together. I needed a dialogue . . . a kind of Socratic encounter.

So, preposterously, Detective Rothwax of the NYPD came to mind. On the other hand, why
not
him? We had worked together during my brief stint as consultant for the department's major-crimes unit, Retro. Granted, they had fired me. But in the end it was I who solved their most perplexing case: the Egyptian Cat Murders, in which the killer's practice had been to leave a toy mouse beside each corpse.

I saw Detective Rothwax as a chance I should take. He always left the Centre Street office around four in the afternoon, unless he was working outside. But even when he was busy with legwork, he usually came back in the afternoon for at least a few minutes.

I left the apartment and splurged on a cab to Centre Street. Then I stationed myself right next to the revolving doors and waited. The streets pulsed with the legal system's usual mix of titans and mendicants: the wily cops, the up-and-coming lawyers, the hollow-eyed accused.

About the time that the hot dog vendor was closing up his cart for the day, Rothwax emerged, alone, looking just a little weary around the edges. He was wearing his customary outfit, a business suit that was spiffy but very much out of fashion. It was ten past four.

He walked past without noticing me. I caught up with him at the curb.

“A minute of your time, Detective?” I said demurely.

He turned quickly, and his eyes widened in surprise. “I'll be damned! It's Cat Woman! How the hell are you?” At least he didn't look unhappy to see me.

“I'm well, Detective. Just fine.”

“Everybody at Retro keeps asking what happened to you. They don't know whether to look for your name in the drama reviews or on the police blotter.”

I obliged with the little chuckle he was looking for. It had been months since I'd seen him, or anyone else from Retro. But he looked exactly the same, down to the scant number of wispy hairs to be found on his balding head.

“I need some help,” I confided, and gestured to one of the empty stone benches that line the small park adjacent to the building. “Why don't we sit?”

“You need help,” he mused. “And I thought the Cat Woman,” he boomed in a mock-heroic voice, “always worked alone.”

But he followed me to the bench and sat listening without any further teasing or jokes. I outlined the events leading to the “suicide”—the peppermint tea party, the last few moments I had spent with Barbara, the scream, the realization that the speck on the road below was my friend, Tim Roman's delivery of the jogging paraphernalia—everything up to and including my talk with the priest and the conclusions I had drawn about Barbara's death.

Having heard me out, Rothwax was staring down at his nails.

“Alice, you've lost me.”

“Where?” I asked, suspicious.

“You've lost me, Feline One.” His eyes met mine then. “Are you really saying that just because a woman was taking instructions in Catholicism, it must mean that she was murdered? Is that what you're saying?”

“No, Detective, I'm not. I'm just saying that my friend Barbara Roman, having embarked on instructions in a faith that says thou shalt not kill yourself, would not kill herself. That's just the way it is. And if she didn't jump off the terrace of her own volition, then someone else pushed her.”

Tonelessly, he asked, “What did the autopsy say?”

“There wasn't one.”

“Um,” he grunted. “Well, it still may not prove anything, but you could get a court order to dig her up.”

“We can't ‘dig her up.' She was cremated.”

A little smile crossed his lips then, and he turned his hands palms up. “Game's over, CW. Fat lady just sang.”

I managed not to reveal the irritation I was feeling and pressed on. “What could the autopsy have shown, if there had been one? Could it have proved she was forced off the terrace?”

“Not at all. But it might have shown that she was drunk or something. Or shown some other trauma not connected to a fall . . . like a knife wound.”

“Oh . . . Well, as I said, she was cremated.” I sat without speaking, looking pathetic.

“Let me just ask you this,” Rothwax said with a sigh. “Is there a single other person who was at the peppermint party who thinks she was murdered?”

“No,” I hissed, “of course not. Only me.”

Rothwax threw his head back. “This sounds like a case for . . .
CAT WO-MAN,”
he bellowed and meowed.

I could tell that he immediately regretted this last bit of insensitivity, because he was suddenly somber when I reached over and placed my hand on his arm.

“I know you don't mean to be cruel,” I said. “And I know what I'm saying may not sound convincing to you. But I . . . loved . . . her very much. She was a great friend.”

“Okay.” He let my hand rest where it lay. “Okay. Then listen to me. Remember a while ago—that dumb conversation we had about the wisdom of the street? How you know how to do certain things real good, but I can do a lot of other things even better? Because I know the difference, intuitively, between the good guys and the bad guys? Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Alice, as a guy of flawless intuition, I'm here to tell you that you're way off base on this one. You don't have a prayer—no pun intended—of convincing anyone that your friend was murdered. You may have a little ego problem, but you're a very good investigator; and I may rib the hell out of you, but I know that you are. But right now, you're so hurt and sad about your friend that you're not thinking straight. You're confusing your feelings with the facts.”

“But maybe we don't have all the facts. Why can't anyone see that?”

“You have enough of them, CW.”

I tried interrupting again, but he talked on.

“Facts versus feelings! You've gotta sort them out. Like that nonsense with the priest. That's nothing, Alice. It's trivia. It's like a lot of bits and pieces of steel wool. Nothing . . . You get it?”

I pulled my hand back slowly. Rothwax was correct about one thing and one thing only—the bit about sorting things out. For instance, he was a cop, and I'd lost sight of that for a while. He was a cop and not a shrink, a cop and not an advisor, a cop and not Socrates. Socrates would have considered the possibility of just about anything before he shot you down.

I'd turned to two different men I trusted—Basillio and Detective Rothwax, who stood in radically different relations to me—and they'd both ended up telling me that I was grieving for a dead friend. Big news. Big insight. I knew bloody well what I felt, but that didn't make me feebleminded—or wrong.

“I have to go,” I said to Rothwax. “Thanks for your time. And give my best to everyone at Retro.”

But I didn't move off the bench.

“Everyone including Judy Mizener?”

“Sure,” I said. I bore no ill feelings anymore toward the head of Retro, who had dismissed me from the case. She had turned out to be a very smart, ambitious, and commendable woman . . . almost, one might add, a friend.

Rothwax stood up, inclined his head, and gave a courtly half bow. “See you around, CW.”

It was all too clear that I was alone on this one.

A little bit of the anger I'd just felt over Rothwax's relentless teasing resurfaced. I had half a mind to show him—and Tony—what a well-placed paw with a sharpened claw can do to that anatomical spot where the male ego resides.