How to Wash a Cat (23 page)
Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
“Fine,” he said huffily, vigorously blotting his nose with the paper towel. He swung his feet to the floor, strolled over to the cashier counter, and dropped the mottled paper into a trash can. “The condensed version then.”
Monty leaned up against the counter, slowly tapping his toe against the floor, his mouth twitching in time with his shoe. Finally, he stretched his hands out in front of his face, thumbs touching to form a square viewing portal. “I was working late in my studio this evening, and I saw someone leaving Frank Napis’s store.”
“Who?” I prompted.
Monty bypassed the question. He strode around the back of the dental chair, his arms churning circles in the air above his head as if he were pulling down thoughts from the ceiling.
“I’ve had the sense all week that someone was sneaking in and out of there.” Monty swung back towards me, a long, bony forefinger raised to the rafters. “You know me—a keen eye for detail.” He vamped his eyebrows and smiled demurely.
I gripped the gold-headed cane in my hands, intensely wishing I’d walloped him over the head with it. Eying the cane warily, Monty resumed his pacing, taking care to trace a wide arc around me.
“So, I finally caught sight of him leaving Frank’s store.” Monty’s head shuddered with the image. “It didn’t seem right. He had no business being there.” Monty swallowed as a clot of blood ran down the back of his throat.
“Wait—who?” I demanded.
“I only saw his back,” Monty replied evasively, “as he was locking the door to the shop.”
One of Monty’s pale, lanky hands stroked the pointed cone of his chin as his eyes gazed, unseeingly, at the floor. I waited, bouncing the end of the cane against my palm. Monty’s head jerked up nervously, and he continued.
“I tracked him down Jackson Street to the corner—under the radar, if you know what I mean.” Monty doubled over and bounced along the floor in a motion that made him look like a long-limbed duck.
I sighed skeptically.
“That’s right, sister,” Monty confirmed, straightening and thumping his chest proudly. “He never saw me coming.”
I thumped my forehead against the curved end of the cane.
“I had to maintain a safe distance,” Monty said in a hushed voice, weaving his head back and forth, “so that I wouldn’t be discovered. I tailed him to Wang’s flower shop.”
I looked up at him sharply. “Wang’s?”
“Yes,” Monty nodded importantly. “Wang’s. I watched him open the door and step inside. It seems it wasn’t locked—although the store is generally closed on Sundays.”
Monty had reached the back of the Green Vase showroom. He drummed his fingers on the empty carcass of the kangaroo’s crate. “I waited on the sidewalk for a moment, trying to decide what to do.” Monty turned towards me, his posture questioning. “Should I follow him inside?”
Monty’s long, flat feet slapped against the wooden floorboards as he paced towards me with an intensely inquisitive expression. He drew up his breath, his narrow chest expanding; then he vented it out in a splurt of air. “Yes! Of course I should!” His voice dropped in tone and tenor. “So I followed him inside.”
“How did you keep this
person
from seeing you?” I asked suspiciously, unmoved by Monty’s dramatics.
person
from seeing you?” I asked suspiciously, unmoved by Monty’s dramatics.
Monty cleared his throat importantly. “It did get a bit trickier—what with the close quarters.” He leapt over the open hatch to the basement. “I had to come up with a disguise.”
“What kind of disguise?” I asked dubiously.
A superior smile spread across Monty’s face. “As luck would have it, Wang had left a stack of empty flowerpots near one of the front flower racks.” Monty brushed his hand over the top of his head and scratched loose a few grains of potting soil from his scalp.
“This—suspect—I was following. He kind of lurked around the flower stall for a couple of minutes; then he slunk to the back, behind a rack of tulips.” Monty crept towards me, his shoulders hunched up and his voice once again lowered.
“The store was empty except for the two of us. I peeked out from under my flowerpot and watched him sneak into the broom closet on the back wall.”
Monty had moved to within inches of my face. Dried specks of blood freckled his pale, tremulous skin. “I couldn’t figure out what he could be doing in there, so I waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. He didn’t come out.” Monty threw both hands up in the air. “I finally gave up and followed him into the broom closet.”
I glanced at the open hatch to the basement, anticipating where this story was headed.
“You’ll never believe it,” Monty said, an intensity rising in his voice. “When I opened the door to the broom closet . . .”
I cut in. “He wasn’t there.”
Monty whipped his long bony finger at my face. “What—how did you know?” he demanded.
I bit my bottom lip, contemplating how much to share with him about my own trip through the tunnel. “Finish your bit first,” I said, meeting his finger with my cane. “How did you wind up in here?”
Monty spun himself back into the room, determined to regain the suspense of his narrative. Striding slowly past Isabella’s bookshelf, he ran his fingers along its facing, retracting them quickly as she reached over the edge to swat at them.
“I noticed the floor of the closet was uneven,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “It threw me for a moment—but then I realized that there was a trap door in the floor, just like this one.” Monty thumped the edge of the open hatch. “I found the handle and pulled it open. I figured there must be a storage area of some sort beneath the store, so I decided to go down and check it out. I thought for sure I was about to have a nasty run-in with . . .” Monty paused, gulping.
I studied him, trying to fill in the gap he was so tenaciously avoiding. “The person that you were following?” I asked. “Monty, who was it?”
Monty’s whole upper body convulsed, as if his torso had been dunked in icy water. He pointed the palms of his hands at me, indicating his refusal to answer. His pursed lips parted, and he whispered, “but I climbed down into the hatch anyway.”
Monty had once again traveled to the front of the store and now stood facing me, on the other side of the still extended dental chair. He leaned towards me, crawling over the back of the chair as he spoke. “Do you know what I found?” he said, nearly squeaking in his excitement. “Guess, guess, you’ll never guess! It was the . . .”
“The tunnel,” I sighed.
Monty collapsed facedown on the chair, pounding it with his fists. “The tunnel! The tunnel!” he cried plaintively, curling himself up like a wounded animal.
Monty raised himself up on his elbows, his face reddened from his exertions. He ran his tongue over his top lip, pondering me for a moment. “And do you know where I came out?” he asked fiercely.
“My basement,” I said placidly.
“You knew!” he cried out indignantly. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me!”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I replied honestly.
Monty slid his feet to the floor, sitting himself up on the flattened dental chair. “This whole business with Oscar is a bit strange,” he said quietly, his pale face somber as he looked up at me. “You think something happened to him, don’t you? That his death wasn’t—natural.”
I leaned back against the cash register counter. Monty took my silence as an affirmative response.
“You’re not the only one,” he said as he stood up and walked towards the counter. I held my breath as he sidled up to the kangaroo and wrapped his right arm over its shoulders. He looked at the kangaroo’s face as he said softly, “I’ve been asking around about your tulip buddy Leidesdorff. Someone told me a very odd story about him. I didn’t know whether to believe it—until tonight.”
“What story?” I asked, cringing as Monty stroked the kangaroo’s head.
Monty raised one eyebrow suggestively. “That Leidesdorff used some crazy potion to fake his death. He assumed a new identity and lived on for many years—here, in San Francisco.”
I left the counter and walked towards the dental chair, desperately wishing Monty would step away from the kangaroo.
“I have a theory,” he said, scratching the animal’s chin absentmindedly.
“Let’s hear it,” I sighed resignedly, tucking my robe more tightly around my waist. I turned towards the back of the room, feeling Monty’s stare on my back.
“Oscar figured it out,” he said flatly.
“Figured out what?” I snapped, whipping around to face him.
Monty beamed a triumphant smile as he raised his overused forefinger in front of my face. “How he did it—Leidesdorff, that is. Oscar must have figured out how Leidesdorff faked his death.”
“I guess that’s possible,” I said tersely. I’d had enough of Monty for one evening. “What ever happened to this guy you followed into the tunnel?” I asked tiredly.
“Still alive, as far as I know,” Monty replied evasively.
I poked him in the stomach with the cane. “You followed him into the tunnel. Where did he go from there?”
Monty googled his eyes around the room, searching for the man he had followed into the flower shop. He made as if to turn back towards the kangaroo, but I grabbed his long face in my hands and wrenched it towards me.
“Monty,” I said firmly. “Who was it? Who did you follow into the tunnel?”
He swallowed hard, and I released him. He pushed past me, ambling to the back of the room. “I only ever saw him from behind, but—from that angle—he looked like . . .”
Monty’s face skewed up so that when he spoke, the name squeaked out of him. “Oscar.”
I rubbed my forehead, covering my face with my hands. “Out!” I said forcefully.
Monty’s fingers shook as he fumbled with the still open hatch. “You really should put a lock on this,” he advised.
“Out!” I reiterated, swinging my arm towards the door. I marched over to it and unhooked the padlock.
“Right,” he replied. He paused on the threshold to point at me one last time. “Shouldn’t you at least consider the possibility . . .”
I slammed the door shut on him, squashing his wingtipped toes with the metal frame.
I TURNED OFF the lights in the store and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Sleep, which had earlier seemed so close, had fled a million miles away. I placed my hands against the edge of the kitchen table and leaned over it, my eyes pouring into the swirling grooves on its surface as my head spun with images of Oscar.
Oscar cooking in his kitchen . . . commandeering a dozen chicken legs simmering in a wrought iron pot . . . preparing chicken broth for the cats . . . estimating the appropriate amounts of the ingredients as he siphoned them off into small bowls.
I looked up at the wall across from the kitchen table that held the shelf lined with cookbooks. Never, in all of the dinners I’d watched him prepare, had Oscar ever referenced a written recipe.
My eyes scanned the titles as my fingers danced along the spines. “The Art of Chicken” was particularly worn. I hooked the end of my finger into the top edge of the book’s binder and pulled it out. Isabella watched closely as I carried it back to the table.
“Wrao,” she said encouragingly, hopping up onto the chair beside me.
The cover creaked as I lifted it open. A faded sheet of paper had been tucked into the front flap. I pulled it out, my hands trembling as I examined the document. The ink was barely legible from watermarks and age, but I knew exactly what I was looking at.
It was an army death certificate—presumably the one mistakenly issued by the nurse when she had been about to send Oscar’s body to the morgue.
My eyes traveled down to the bottom of the page to the slot allotted for the cause of death.
One word had been typed in—encephalitis. The same brain swelling diagnosis that had been given to a comatose William Leidesdorff almost a hundred years earlier.
Chapter 27
LATE AFTERNOON MONDAY, I sat on the curb outside my apartment, waiting for the local moving company that was scheduled to transport the last of the larger items of furniture from my apartment over to the Green Vase.
Before long, a bulky, green moving truck with a large, Irish shamrock painted on the side double-parked in front of my apartment building, and an eclectic mixture of Spanish and Irish accents tumbled out of the crowded cab.
I bade goodbye to the empty shell of my apartment as the last of my belongings were hefted into the truck. I’d been sleeping over at the Green Vase for less than a week, but in the short span of that absence, my apartment had grown cold and foreign. With all of the furniture gone, the scuffed, dingy walls seemed harsh and unwelcoming; the previously unnoticed noise of the traffic below my window grated on my nerves. I climbed into my car to follow the moving truck to Jackson Square and didn’t look back.
Ivan’s bricklaying project was in full swing as we pulled up to the Green Vase. Already, the transformation was amazing. Bright red, neatly square, un-crumbled bricks formed the crisp outlines of the windows and door. Freshly smeared mortar oozed thickly between each brick, like the rich, creamy center of an Oreo cookie.
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