How to Wash a Cat (16 page)
Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
It ended as quickly and as subtly as it had begun, and a gushing sigh of relief rushed through the city. I stumbled forward into the living room, rejoining the others.
Uncle Oscar had once told me that you could tell a lot about a person by how they responded to an earthquake. The scene in the living room showcased a wide range of reactions. Rupert and Monty were crowded together under the coffee table, Monty with his arms covering his head, both of them with their eyes tightly shut. Isabella hissed wildly at the room, her back arched, her hair spiking out through the chain mail costume. Dilla stood serenely in the middle of it all, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around her.
“That was a good, strong shake, don’t you think?” she said, sounding strangely pleased.
Monty opened his eyes to give her an exasperated look as I crouched under the table and retrieved a still quivering Rupert. A phone began ringing in the back of the house, and Dilla rushed off to the kitchen to answer it, cutting off the earthquake survival lecture Monty was about to launch into.
I freed both cats of their costume jewelry, carefully tucking the kits back into the wooden box. They jumped into their carriers, relieved to be heading home.
An edge of Dilla was barely visible from the living room. Parts of her conversation floated back to us.
“Yes, yes, dear. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. You’re coming to our little soiree at the Palace Friday night aren’t you?”
Monty looked at me, “Her daughter,” he guessed in a loud whisper.
“Daughter?” I asked, sensing Miranda’s searing stare from the hallway.
Monty nodded knowingly. “Miranda Richards.” He smirked. “I believe you’ve had the pleasure.”
Dilla reentered the room. “Well, that was something, wasn’t it?”
Monty opened his mouth to respond, but I cut him off before he could start in. “I think I should go ahead and take the cats home. They’re a little unsettled from the quake.”
I’ll take any excuse to get out of this place as quickly as possible, I thought.
Monty yawned, looking at his watch. “And I’ve got another appointment this evening, I’m afraid,” he added, “so, we really must be off.”
“Oh, it’s going to be a fantastic evening,” Dilla said, her eyes gleaming. “I’m so glad Monty suggested using your kitties. That’s going to make the whole event.”
Monty leaned in to give Dilla a kiss on each cheek. “Thanks for the lunch, Dilla.”
Dilla watched us from her porch as we headed back up the street towards the cable car stop.
The sun shone serenely down on the city’s citizens. Cars and buses scooted up and down the steep hills, undisturbed by the afternoon’s jiggling.
San Francisco had restarted as if nothing had happened. Her pearly, pastel-shouldered streets stretched up to reach the perfect blue sky, a dazzling display that masked the city’s precarious perch on the edge of a dark, menacing precipice.
I lumbered along behind a babbling Monty, carrying Isabella’s crate, silently pondering the significance of the tulip-embossed handle I’d seen out of the corner of my eye as we walked out of Dilla’s front door.
OUR LITTLE GROUP reversed its path back down the hill towards the Green Vase. It was just after 4 p.m. when I turned the tulip key in the door. Monty left Rupert’s crate on the floor inside and rushed off to get ready for his appointment. I let the cats out and went upstairs to the kitchen to make a late lunch.
The cats curled up together in the corner and were fast asleep by the time I sat down at the table. Munching thoughtfully on a salad, I flipped through a book on the history of San Francisco that I’d found in one of the bookcases downstairs.
As I cracked open the chapter on Leidesdorff, I realized that Oscar must have read this section before—the book fell open there naturally. I spread it out on the table and studied the photo on the page, confirming the identification of the man in Dilla’s tulip necklace.
The book gave a slightly less nuanced summary of Leidesdorff’s life than Oscar’s telling of the tale. William Leidesdorff was born on St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. His father was a Dutch sailor who had settled there and set up a sugar plantation. His mother, Anna Spark, was a native Caribbean woman. Their son had been born with a light, caramel-colored complexion that masked the Caribbean half of his heritage.
Leidesdorff left home in his teens and found work on a steamer vessel bound for New York. From these modest beginnings, he worked his way up in the shipping business, eventually building a prosperous operation transporting goods between New York and New Orleans.
A beautiful young woman named Hortense caught his eye, and they were soon engaged to be married. But on the eve of the nuptials, her aristocratic French family found out about his mixed ancestry, and the wedding was called off. The unfortunate maiden reportedly died of a broken heart the night Leidesdorff sailed out of town.
Isabella yawned, stretched, and walked over to the table. I reached down to scratch her back, still ruminating on the Leidesdorff story. As I picked up my salad bowl to take it to the sink, I accidentally knocked the book onto the floor. It narrowly missed Isabella, earning me an injured, offended look.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” I said, leaning down to pick up the book.
The collision with the floor had knocked loose a piece of paper that had been tucked into the inside cover. I unfolded it on the kitchen table. It was a printout of an article from the Internet.
The article focused on the efforts of Joseph Folsom, the army captain who purchased Leidesdorff’s warehouse from him before he died. After Leidesdorff’s death, Folsom tried to acquire the remainder of the Leidesdorff property up in the Sierras.
Since Leidesdorff died a bachelor without any children, Folsom traveled to the Virgin Islands to try to purchase the estate from Leidesdorff’s mother, presumed to be his closest living relative. He managed to locate Anna Spark and convinced her to sell him all of Leidesdorff’s remaining California assets for $75,000. It was a significant amount of money at the time, but nowhere near what the land was worth after the gold on it had been discovered.
Folsom returned to San Francisco, and litigation over legal title to Leidesdorff’s land began. The dispute bounced from court to court over the next decade, complicated by conflicts between Mexican, American, and Caribbean inheritance laws, as well as several factual discrepancies about Leidesdorff’s life before he came to San Francisco.
During the court proceedings, the leaves of an alternative family tree began to emerge, and questions arose as to whether Anna Spark really was Leidesdorff’s mother. Doubts were even cast on the tragic details of his New Orleans love affair.
I stared at the printout for several minutes after I finished reading the article. The date printed across the bottom, I noticed as I looked up at Oscar’s calendar, was only a week or so before he died.
Today’s date, a Thursday, was marked on the calendar with a large ‘D.’ I stared at the wall for a moment before its meaning hit me.
“Oscar’s dominoes game,” I said, translating the symbol.
Oscar had gone to his dominoes game the Thursday before he died—the same night Monty snuck into the Green Vase looking for the entrance to the theoretical tunnel.
Harold’s rusting voice echoed in my head. “Guess we’ll need to find another player for this week’s game.”
I pulled out the phone book from a drawer near the kitchen sink. The book was well worn—and at least five years old. Smiling, I remembered Oscar’s cranky commentary on the topic.
“They’re always sending me new ones, but I just throw them out. I’ve got everything in this one marked!”
I flipped through the brittle pages and found a listing under “dominoes” that had been circled.
“Maybe they’ll deal me in,” I said, grabbing my coat and heading out the door.
Chapter 18
DINNER CROWDS THRONGED the street as I rounded the corner onto Columbus, looking for a cab. The overpowering smell of garlic welcomed me to North Beach, the Italian neighborhood just north of Jackson Square.
At this point in the evening, cabs were easy to come by. They weaved in and out of traffic, dropping off patrons for the endless row of family run, Italian restaurants. In a couple of hours, the ratio would flip, and a starch-stuffed mob would swarm the few unoccupied taxis that stopped on this block.
I waited for a boisterous group to vacate a blue and black painted, DeSoto sedan. As I slid across the backseat, I gave the address of the bar hosting the dominoes game to a heavyset driver with spiked hair dyed a flaming, florescent red. Painful looking metal piercings had been threaded into every available inch of cartilage on her head.
The car fought its way through a couple of stoplights and turned down Broadway, its tired shocks bottoming out as we picked up speed and swooped down the hill towards the Embarcadero. Joggers chugged along the palm tree lined promenade in the flickering orange sunset, the billowing colors enhanced by the swollen clouds glowering on the horizon.
Pier after pier flashed by as we approached the undercarriage of the Bay Bridge. Rows of tiny, white lights formed the looping outline of its suspension lines, illuminating the sooty, gray structure against the darkening sky.
The cab pulled up in front of my destination as the dark storm clouds bullied their way into the bay. Another drenching downpour was on its way.
I tipped the driver and got out, cautiously surveying the tiny shack of a building leaning out over the water. It looked as if it might teeter off and splash in at any moment. A neon sign flashed in the grimy front window, illuminating a couple of beer-laden tables filled with gray haired men zealously guarding their black-and-white tiles.
“You sure you got the right place, doll?” the driver yelled at me through her open window.
I nodded skeptically as she drove off. Dodging traffic, I scurried across to the other side of the street. A moldy, fishy smell assaulted my senses as I pushed through the door marked as the entrance. Several wrinkled faces looked up at me suspiciously.
I smiled weakly and sidled up to the bar, pretending to survey the offerings. From the looks of the greasy, cracked glassware stacked on the back wall, it had been a while since the last visit from the health inspector. Trying to avoid the bartender’s attentions, I turned my stool towards the tables of clicking tiles.
A head of dark hair stood out from all of the gray ones. I studied it closely. I had been expecting to find Harold Wombler among the players, but it was definitely not his greasy black mop that caught my attention.
The man had rotated his head to hide his face, but I’d spent far too much time with those frizzy, brown curls in the last couple of days to be mistaken. My lips twisted together as I strode over to him.
“So,” I said, thunking the back of his chair, “I see you made it to your appointment.”
“Oh, hello,” Monty said meekly, turning to look at me. “I didn’t see you come in.”
A deep voice interrupted my glare. “Would you like a seat at the table, dear?”
I felt my insides seize up as I glanced at the occupant of the chair on Monty’s right side. In the dim, hazy light of the bar, the balding head seemed even smaller, the hooked nose even larger.
“I didn’t get a chance to meet you after the board meeting,” he said, extending a hand towards me. “Gordon Bosco. I’m so sorry about your uncle. Oscar was a good man.”
I met his hand, my fingers brushing up against the tulip cufflinks at his wrist.
“So good to meet you,” I managed to whisper, my lungs paralyzed by the hard lines of his thin lips.
“He was one of our best players,” Gordon said, the black pits of his eyes never leaving my flushing face. “It’s a shame he missed his last game.”
“He missed it?” I asked. “Oscar wasn’t here that night?”
Gordon shook his head sadly. “Something came up at the last minute, and he had to cancel.” The tulip cufflinks reached over and wrapped around Monty’s slender shoulders. “Carmichael’s offered to fill in, but I’m afraid he’s still getting the hang of the game.”
Monty’s face plumed a flamingo pink. “Never been my forte,” he mumbled. “What with all of the numbers.” He shrugged helplessly.
“Ah, well,” Gordon said smoothly, patting Monty on the back. “You can’t expect to fill a pro’s shoes on the first try.” His beady gaze returned to me. “I’m glad you stopped by tonight. There’s something here of Oscar’s that you should have.”
Gordon stood up, not that it gained him much of a vertical advantage. At full height, he barely topped the curls on Monty’s seated head. He walked over to the bar and leaned in to speak with the bartender.
I followed him. Without turning to look, I knew Monty was tracking right behind me. I could hear his shoes flapping against the concrete floor of the bar.
The bartender reached beneath the counter and handed a leather, rectangular case to Gordon. My breath caught as the rounded man swiveled towards me and placed it in my hands.
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