When the Cat's Away (16 page)

It was a cat’s meow. It was coming from the closet.

I listened. It came again. It was joined by another meow.

Normally, the cat’s meow does not turn my kneecaps to Smucker’s. Even after the dart gun incident and the meow message on Jane Meara’s answering machine, I had not felt that the voice of the cat could be, in itself, a manifestation of evil. Now, in this place, I wasn’t so sure.

I got out my snot rag, picked up the key, and opened the locked door of the closet just as Ratso came walking in from the boudoir. For a moment, nothing happened. Then two scrawny street cats came toward us as if they were walking out of a Disney movie. One of them purred and rubbed itself against Ratso’s legs. He moved away in disgust.

“What’re these two cats doing in here?” Ratso fairly screamed.

“Maybe they’re two homosexuals and they’re just coming out of the closet,” I said.

I turned on the light switch in the closet with my snot rag. Nothing happened. I stepped inside the closet. Ratso followed. It was a big closet, crowded with furs and long evening gowns, and it wasn’t easy to see with the subdued lighting of the bedroom. I took out my Bic and I gave it a flick.

What we saw on the floor of the closet did not look like a Disney movie at all. It looked more like something brought to you by the people who killed Bambi’s mother.

Estelle Beekman’s eyes were wide as shiny new nickels, and they reflected pure, polyunsaturated terror. The body was already cold to the touch. The face was blue; the throat muscles looked constricted. One hand had scratched the wall repeatedly in several places, somewhat reminiscent of wall markings I’d heard about elsewhere. For a moment I had a fragment of a picture of an old man walking into a gas chamber playing a violin. Then the Bic became too hot and I let it go.

A few minutes later, I’d opened the sliding door to the private balcony and we were breathing the cold night air and looking down on the New York Athletic Club.

“Let a little of the cigar smoke out of here,” I said. “When I call the police I’m going to strive for anonymity.”

“So she was frightened to death,” said Ratso. “Killed by two cats.”

“More likely by Fred Katz. Or the person we think is Fred Katz.”

For a few minutes we watched a horse and buggy and a driver in a top hat fighting their way through the taxis, buses, and limos down Seventh Avenue. Happy trails.

Ratso was shaking his head, leaning on the railing. “Literally frightened to death,” he mumbled, half to himself, half to Central Park.

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s a shame,” Ratso said. “Estelle Beekman leaving behind all that beautiful shit she’s got in there.”

We’d only been out on the balcony for a few minutes, but I was feeling colder than I had in years.

I took a last puff on the cigar and flicked it across Seventh Avenue at the New York Athletic Club.

“You never see a luggage rack on a hearse,” I said.

43

It was after eleven when Ratso and I climbed out of the hack a few blocks past Sheridan Square and began walking briskly up Vandam Street. It had been a rather gnarly night, cold enough to make a penguin remember his mittens, and it wasn’t over yet.

I’d asked Ratso to put a sock on it conversation-wise, so I could use the walk home to sort things out a bit. Sometimes a walk in brutal weather could freeze extraneous sensory input and make you AWOL upstairs, leaving you with the ice-cold truth. Sometimes all you got was a runny nose. But that, along with not leaving fingerprints, was what snot rags were for.

I let my mind run free. I thought of Eskimos. Two Eskimos rubbing their noses together. Nine months later they’d probably have a little booger. I thought of icebergs. I thought of Goldberg. Goldberg had liked cats. He’d been killed. Estelle Beekman had been afraid of cats. She’d been killed. Jane Meara loved cats. Her life, it appeared, was in danger.

Something was wrong here, I thought. I’d have to call Lobster and find out more about Slick Goldberg. Maybe cats weren’t the common denominator here. If not—what was? … And Leila … why in the hell hadn’t she called? I knew she might be lying low after the bust and the
Daily News
story, but I missed her. Maybe even …

“Kinkster,” said Ratso suddenly, “the fucking door to the building’s open.”

It was true. It was nudging eleven-thirty at night and the large metal door to the building was standing wide open. You left a door open in New York, you’d be lucky if a family of Rastafarians was all you got.

“Could be a careless lesbian,” I said.

As we rode up in the freight elevator with the one exposed light bulb, the hairs on the back of my neck began to rise as well. I was visited by a trapped, desperate, doomed feeling. It’s hard to run away when you’re in a freight elevator.

“Next time,” I said, “remind me to take the stairs.”

“If there is a next time,” said Ratso.

When the doors opened on the fourth floor we fairly leaped out of the elevator into the dimly lit hallway. I already had my key in the door of the loft when something made me stop. I looked back and saw Ratso standing stiff in his coonskin cap in the middle of the hallway like a chunky, slightly Semitic statue of Davy Crockett. With his right hand, he was pointing at the door.

On the door to the loft was a paw print of what looked like a jaguar or a large jungle cat. It was red and still dripping and, almost certainly, done in blood.

“Careless lesbian?” Ratso asked.

“Maybe somebody knocked too hard,” I said.

44

In pre-Colombian times, life was much simpler.

That was the thought that was in my head when I woke up early Saturday morning with a ringing in my ears. It was the blower.

I grabbed the blower and looked at the clock by the bedside. It was 6:15
A.M.
, a fairly obscene time for anybody to be awake. It was also, it emerged, a fairly obscene phone call.

“I want you,” said Leila. She sounded like she was right next to me in bed with no guitar case between us.

“Do I have your little heart in my hip pocket?” I asked. That was as coy as I got at six-fifteen in the morning.

“Yes,” she said, “but I have you right here.”

“Where’s here?”

“I’ll give you a hint—it’s right where I want you.”

Great waves of passion rolled over me. I didn’t know if it was Leila’s Palestinian, Colombian, or New York background that enabled her to have such an effect on me. All three cultures seem to have sort of a jaded, hedonistic attitude toward love and sex. Thank God I’m a country boy.

“Hold the weddin’,” I said.

“Wedding?” said Leila. “This is awful sudden. I need some time. If we do get married, though, I think I’m going to make you wear a veil.” She laughed confidently.

“Castrating bitch.”

“I’m not a castrating bitch,” she said. “I just want the West Bank.”

“It’s yours,” I said, “if you promise to always walk ten steps behind me.” I got out of bed, took off the sarong, and put on some jeans. I managed to zip them up without killing myself.

“Honey,” said Leila, “Carlos promised me he’s not going to hurt you. He may just try to scare you a little.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He scared me a little last night.”

“Don’t worry, my brother won’t hurt you. They’re having some kind of meeting tonight, but I’ll keep you posted. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was a pause. Finally, Leila said, “I’m with my Uncle Abdul—don’t laugh, that’s not his real name. I have to be very careful just now. We can’t be seen together. There is another family that hates our family and would do anything to harm me and those I love.”

“Okay, Juliet.”

“It is a little like that, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “except all the warring families are on your side.”

“I don’t want to get you in any trouble. I don’t want anything to happen to you. And Kinky—”

“What?”

“I think I love you.”

There was a long pause and Leila might’ve been crying.

As I hung up, I wondered why I couldn’t just meet a broad at the mailbox on the day her Visa card arrived. Why did things always have to be so melodramatic and convoluted?

“One of these days,” I said to the cat, “they’re going to make a life out of my movie.”

45

Maybe I should’ve driven my car into a tree in high school, but I didn’t. Jesus or Allah or somebody wanted me to be drinking hot chocolate in a drafty loft and watching freezing rain slant down by the window at 8
A.M.
that Saturday morning. I thought I’d give the espresso machine a rest. When you drink too much espresso, you think too much. When you think too much, you can’t see the forest for the tree you should’ve driven your car into in high school.

I felt I was close to achieving peace in the Middle East, but no matter what I felt for Leila, I couldn’t let her assessment of her brother, Carlos, determine whether I was to live or die. According to her, Carlos was merely a macho practical joker. He had nothing better to do than go around scaring people who weren’t too secure to begin with.

What if she didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did? Maybe because she loved him, she couldn’t see what he really was. Maybe because she thought she loved me, she was shielding me from the truth. Maybe because I thought I loved her I was placing myself, Ratso, the cat, and an innocent lesbian dance class in grave danger.

That didn’t say much for love.

Something else was bothering me, too. I tongued a few more mini-marshmallows out of the hot chocolate. Had to keep in practice. I ate the marshmallows and thought about it. The bloody paw print on the door. I’d seen it before somewhere.

I fed the cat some tuna. They say if you feed a cat tuna all the time, you’ll turn the cat into a tuna addict. Makes the cat finicky and irritable. I say, “How can you tell?” My cat happens to have always been finicky and irritable and I’ve always been finicky and irritable and we don’t need other people telling us how to run our lives.

Hot chocolate and mini-marshmallows go well with cigars and rain. Of course, just about anything goes well with cigars and rain except asparagus tips or whatever they call them. Bean sprouts. I was sitting in the rocker, working on hot chocolate number three and cigar number one and watching Ratso sleep, when I remembered where I’d seen the red paw print.

So as not to wake Ratso, I padded quietly, like a jungle cat, over to the desk. Then I picked up the blower on the left and dialed a number in Austin, Texas.

46