Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) (13 page)

“Who is Hy?”

She shook her head. “Old Hiram Kenally. Rest his soul. He had a . . . weakness . . . for the girls. For the
young
girls, if you know what I mean. Not that my husband or I had anything to do with that sort of thing, but we figured what Hy Kenally did was his business. He was quite the regular here at the Dolphin—he and his lady friends. The thing was, his wife Vera always seemed to know exactly what he was up to. She'd wait and time it perfect, and just when Hy and his friend were . . . well, Vera seemed to get a kick out of calling the police on them. We had a ruckus going on here many a night, I'll tell you. It got to be pretty silly.”

“I take it Mr. Kenally is dead,” I said.

“Long dead. More than ten years. And Vera went the next year. They were something, the two of them Funny part is, I think she really loved that old bastard. Had've been my husband, I'd have killed him long before his heart did.”

I brought out the little photograph of Beth Stimson then. “Do you recognize this girl as one of the ones Mr. Kenally brought here?”

She took a brief look at the picture. “Not really. But I never took that much notice. Besides, my husband was probably the one on duty the night she was here. He worked nights more than me.”

“Would it be possible to speak to him?”

“Be a pretty good trick if you could. Bill passed away too.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't suppose you'd know anyone else who might talk to us about the arrest? Anyone who'd remember what happened?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “I guess you could try Tom Scott. He's the one who usually came to pick up Hy and the girl. He retired from the force a while ago. But he still lives out here, in Bridgehampton. It's not far.”

“Think he'd talk to us?”

“I don't see why not, honey. But with Tom, who knows? He's about as nuts as Hy was. Spends all his time fooling around with old wrecks instead of other people. Probably do him good to see two human beings for a change.”

She wrote down the directions to Mr. Scott's home for us. I thanked her profusely, and Tony said something to her I couldn't hear. Whatever it was, it made her laugh. “See you soon!” she called out as we left.

We followed her driving instructions carefully: east to Bridgehampton, north along the main street, past the war memorial—though we couldn't see which war was being memorialized—turn left, and two miles on, look for a little gray house.

The place was easy to spot. It was as the innkeeper had said—strewn with old cars.

“Oh, brother,” Tony sighed. “Do you suppose that's Tom Scott?” He meant the lanky man in shirtsleeves leaning against a fender, calmly smoking a cigarette. “He looks about as friendly as Dan Duryea.”

We parked just off the road, then got out and approached the tough old man cautiously.

“Mr. Scott?” I inquired.

After a long, critical look at us, he touched the brim of the baseball cap turned backward on his head. “The very one,” he said.

“Nice to meet you. My name is Alice Nestleton.”

I might just as well have announced that I was an extraterrestrial. He waited for me to go on.

“Mr. Scott, I was wondering if I could talk to you about an arrest you made years ago, in 1974.”

“Who sent you out here?”

“The proprietress of the Dolphin Inn in Southampton.”

“That old bat always did have a big mouth.”

I thought perhaps he was waiting for us to laugh. But we didn't, and he fell silent again. Obviously he had no intention of inviting us inside, and no curiosity about our reason for being there. I decided to dispense with the cover story about our being journalists, to just tell the truth to this wiry old policeman and hope for the best.

“Mr. Scott, I'm an investigator looking into a murder—and frankly, time is short. I believe that one of the suspects was a young girl you arrested on a prostitution charge at the Dolphin in 1974. The man involved may have been someone named Hiram Kenally. I realize it was eighteen years ago, but . . . this was the girl.” I held the photo up close to his face. “Does she look at all familiar to you?”

He didn't look at it.

“Half the prostitution arrests I ever made had to do with that idiot Kenally.”

“Please look at the picture.”

He studied it for a minute. “Looks familiar.”

“Is it possible the whole thing was a mistake?”

“Mistake!” He grunted. “That old bastard with his pants around his ankles was a mistake, I guess.”

“So you
are
sure you saw the girl there?”

“Had on nothing but her socks. A mistake, yeah! That's what
she
claimed. Guess those six twenty-dollar bills on the dresser were a mistake, too. Arrogant little twist, she was. She had the gall to threaten to sue me for false arrest.” Scott laughed nastily then. “Old Kenally had the nerve to deny it, too. I let the two of them bitch all they wanted to. I still took them in. Guess he thought his money could actually change what
is
real to what
ain't
real. You'd think he'd get tired of playing the John after a while, but not that old bastard. Heard he even died with his pants down. They found him out in Montauk with a fourteen-year-old from one of the migrant camps.”

“Sounds like a real sweet guy,” Tony said under his breath.

“Mr. Scott,” I said, “can you tell me what happened after you took them out of the Dolphin Inn?”

“Happened? What do you mean, ‘what happened'? What usually happened. He was
Mr.
Hiram Kenally. They were released. She got off on a misdemeanor loitering charge. Twenty-bucks fine, or something. Walked off to turn another trick.”

“And what about the money you saw? Wasn't that rather a lot for Mr. Kenally to spend on a prostitute?”

“You didn't know that bastard. If he had three dollars in his pocket, he'd pay three. If the charge was three thousand, he'd have paid that just as easy. Whatever it took.

“Now, as for you investigating a murder, lady”—he flicked his cigarette away brutally—“I don't know whether I believe a single word of it.”

“I can appreciate your position, Mr. Scott. But the important question is, can
I
believe
you
?”

He didn't answer. He only spat onto the frozen ground, and then drifted into his house.

I walked back to the car slowly. Tony climbed in and asked what our next stop would be.

“Nowhere just yet, Tony. Let's just sit here a while and get warm.”

“What is it, Swede?” he asked, concern in his voice.

“Well, that's it, isn't it? That's what I was after. Tom Scott just confirmed everything. Little Beth turned a trick with a dirty old man for a hundred and twenty dollars.”

“Yeah. Just like the computer said. But what does it mean? It's just the way of the world, isn't it?”

“Not the world of the Riverside String Quartet—not the one I witnessed just last month. And you know, Tony, Southampton is a very small world, isn't it?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, if Beth was plying her trade out here, then why not in Manhattan? Why be so specialized? And I also mean, what if she wasn't the only one? What if Miranda did it too—and Darcy—and Roz? In fact, maybe that rich old Aunt Sarah wasn't a Scottish Fold cat at all.”

“So do you think the stolen cats had nothing to do with anything?” Tony asked.

“What I think, Tony, is that we'd better come up with some tricks of our own. And like I said, time is short.”

Chapter 22

Will Gryder was in his shallow grave in some restful spot in southern California.

The Riverside String Quartet was no more.

The clock was ticking.

The egg was broken.

Now it was time to make the omelet.

I sat waiting for Tony to return from the mission I'd sent him out on. Bushy and I were tossing the catnip ball around, just to pass time. I was singing an old standard that I'd recast to fit my feline preoccupations: “I Want a Tabby Kind of Love.”

The doorbell sounded then.

“Here comes Tony,” I told Bushy on my way to the door. “Getting excited?”

He walked off slowly but firmly, the ball in his teeth.

Basillio's jacket seemed to give off the scent of the cold outdoors. “Well, here the filthy things are,” he said, dropping a paper sack filled with books onto the sofa. “Do me a favor, will you, and never send me over there again.”

“Oh, come on, Basillio. I thought you'd enjoy being in the Forty-second Street area. I thought it would bring back fond memories of your dark and misspent youth.”

His face took on a grim, wounded expression. “I do not like browsing in pornographic book-stores for tawdry paperbacks about prostitutes. It demeans my serious erotic feelings for you.”

“Such high-flown language from you, Basillio.”

“Here,” he said, stepping up to me and encircling my waist, “let me put it to you . . . in . . . ah . . . layman's terms.”

I laughed. “Later, Tony.”

I looked down at the things he'd tossed onto the sofa: five identical copies of some trash entitled
Hookers
. The book was about a hundred and fifty pages in length, printed on cheap stock and purporting to be actual case studies of “working girls.”

The cover design was suitably lurid, showing the grotesque sexual posturings of three over-endowed women in various states of undress.

Tony picked up one of the copies.

“Isn't that amazing?” he said. “These things haven't changed in the past twenty years! They just keep recycling the same covers.”

“So much the better,” I said. “Both the cover and the title. I sent you out for something on prostitution, but I never thought you'd find something called
Hookers
. It's absolutely perfect.”

Carefully, I began to rip the cover off each of the books.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, astonished.

“You'll see in a minute.”

I gathered the five covers and brought them to the dining room table, Tony following in my footsteps.

“Well, you've been a busy bee, haven't you?” he said, looking over my shoulder at the five stamped envelopes laid out on the table. Each was addressed to a member of the Riverside String Quartet, the last one to Mathew Hazan at his West Fifty-seventh Street office.

“And just what are these—your show-and-tell homework?” Tony had picked up a couple of the five-color xeroxes I had had made from an old
Scientific American
.

“What do they look like?”

“Pictures of mice.”

“Exactly. Tufted field mice. Some of the world's most adaptable creatures, particularly when they displace house mice. The way they did at Covington.”

Tony folded his arms and began what can only be described as a peculiar little dance. He circled the chair I sat in, looking at me from different angles. He appeared to be making some kind of mock evaluation of me.

“I think, Miss Nestleton,” he pronounced, “that the years of scratching out a living—the endless hard times—have finally taken their toll on you. In other words, you have finally cracked, baby.”

“Hardly,” I said. “You'll see.”

I picked up my scissors and cut out the five tufted little creatures from their verdant backgrounds. Then, on the back of each
Hookers
cover, I affixed one of the mice with Scotch tape. Finally, I popped each cover into one of the neatly typed envelopes.

“I think the clouds are beginning to clear a bit,” Tony said. “You're about to play a little game of post office, aren't you?”

“That's right. A
serious
game of post office. One of the five people who are going to get this cryptic greeting card is the murderer. I want that person to be confused about whether the sender is friend or foe.

“I want that person to feel that the sender knows a lot about a lot of things. About the Dolphin Inn in Southampton, for instance.”

“You mean you want them to think they're about to be blackmailed?”

“Well, no . . . and yes. I want them to look at the card as both a reminder and a threat. Because what it's really saying is that they had better get up to where the tufted field mice play and find Will's manuscript. Because it's still hidden there: somewhere at the Covington Center for the Arts.”

“But, Swede, you have the manuscript, what there is of it. The outline only hints at an exposé, and Gryder never mentions prostitution specifically.”

“He was murdered before he could. And besides, the murderer doesn't know how far Will had gotten on the book. Only you and I know that—and Ford Donaldson.”

Tony watched me silently as I sealed each letter. When I'd finished, he asked me rather gravely, “Are you really going to mail those things?”

“Yes, of course I am.”

He shook his head. “I don't know, Swede. To be honest, it seems to me that you kind of blew it up there with that state cop and that first trap of yours. And now you're clutching at straws. And I mean
clutching
.”

“We'll see.”

“So you're really going to mail them?”

“Yes, I
really
am—that is to say, we are. But not from here. From Northampton. So that the killer knows this anonymous correspondent knows whereof he or she speaks.”

Tony slammed his hand down on the table. Bushy flew out of the room. Pancho flew in.

“
Now
I know why you wanted me to hang on to Greg's old heap, even after we got back from Southampton! Damn! I should have known you had something up your sleeve.”

I gently smoothed back the hair on poor Tony's head. “I knew you'd love being in the country with us for a few days.'

“Us?” he asked.

“Yes. Me and Pancho and Bushy.”

“God.”

“You're looking very pale, Basillio. Some sun and some fresh country air will do you a world of good. We'll walk in the woods, roast chestnuts, maybe—”

“Get killed by a killer,” he finished for me.

“We're not going to be killed, Tony. Besides, I can't put these in the mail until I check something out up there. A white duffel bag with a broken lock.”

“What's in it?”

“Nothing.”

He was silent for a few beats, unwilling to delve further. Then he asked, “Wouldn't you rather go to Atlantic City?”

“Basillio, you're going to love it up there. Covington is wonderful. It absolutely reeks of dreams.”

“Dreams? What dreams?”

“Artists' dreams. Great ennobling projects.”

“Like ‘Still Life of Piano Player with Chisel in Chest'?”

“Not exactly. But that's a good title.”

“This case is making you macabre as well as crazy, Swede. I really hope you know what you're doing.”

Did I? Did I
really
?

“Didn't you leave something out of that stuff we're going to be doing up in the country?” Tony asked. “Aren't we going to make insane love in front of a roaring fire?”

“Aren't you going to help me catch Pancho and get him in the carrier?”

“Why don't you just hold up a picture of a tufted field mouse near the door?”

“Pancho is far too busy to hunt,” I said.

We began to stalk the wily Pancho. He was, oddly enough, quiet once he was inside the box. Bushy, on the other hand, walked right in, cooperating fully, only to metamorphose into a shrieking holy terror as soon as the lock had clamped shut.

So many contradictions. So little time.