When the Cat's Away (2 page)

I pressed Jane for a little more information, made some reassuring noises, and gave her my word I’d hop right on it.

I hung up, walked over to the kitchen window, and watched the gloom settle over the city. Monday night and it looked like it.

The cat show, according to Jane, would be purring along all week and would be closing each night at nine. It was now nudging seven o’clock. I’d have to work fairly fast.

If the cat was still in the Garden, there was always a chance. She might wind up on the wrong end of a hockey stick, but there was a chance.

If Rocky’d gotten out of the Garden and into the street, getting her back would be tough.

Almost as tough as getting back a girl in a peach-colored dress.

3

Finding lost cats is not the most romantic, macho experience a country-singer-turned-amateur-detective might get into. But there was something rather poignant about the hopelessness of Jane Meara’s situation that I couldn’t bend my conscience quite enough to ignore.

I puffed on my cigar and reflected that I’d never much liked cats myself. Until one winter night about eight years ago in an alley in Chinatown when I’d met the first pussy that ever swept me off my feet.

Now I have a cat. Well, that’s not quite accurate. A cat and I have each other. We inhabit a large, drafty loft on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse at 199B Vandam, New York City.

In the summer the loft is hotter than Equatorial West Topsyland. In the winter it’s so cold you have to jump-start your electric toothbrush. The landlord has promised to do something about it. The cat and I live in hope.

Cats, country music, and cigars have become the three spiritual linchpins of my life. Actually, I have a few other spiritual linchpins and they also begin with a c, but we won’t go into that now.

If I was going to find Jane’s cat, I’d better get cracking.

I called Ratso, a friend of mine who, over the past few years, had accompanied me in solving several rather ugly murder cases in the Village. Ratso was loud, garish, and fiscally tight as a tick, but he was also warm, loyal, and blessed with an ingenuous spirit. He was as worthy a modern-day Dr. Watson as I was ever likely to find. Good help is hard to get these days.

Ratso was not home so I tried him at the office. He was the editor of the
National Lampoon.
Maybe he was working late, I thought. He answered the phone himself.

“Leprosarium for Unwed Mothers,” he said.

“Ratso,” I said, “it’s Kinky. I need your help. I’m looking for a lost cat. It got away at the cat show down at the Garden.”

My words were greeted by laughter and hoots of derision. It became quickly apparent to me that Ratso had put me on the speaker phone. I could hear Mike Simmons, the other editor of the magazine, shout, “If you find that pussy, give me a call.” There was more laughter. I was beginning to run out of charm.

“Ratso,” I said, “either you’re coming or you’re not.” Simmons shouted again, “That’s what she told him last night.” That one seemed to crack up the whole office.

“Listen, Kinkster,” said Ratso, “you and I’ve got better things to do than run around New York looking for a lost fucking cat. You’re a hero, Kinkster.” I winced slightly and took a puff on the cigar.

Ratso continued, “You solved the Worthington case. You got McGovern off the hook. Remember?”

“’Fraid so,” I said.

“You saved the girl at the bank from the mugger.” 

“Anybody could’ve.”

“But anybody
didn’t
—you did. That’s why you’re
somebody.
You’re hot. You’re happening! You can pick and choose, baby.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s just something I’ve gotten myself into. I’ll go down there alone.”

There was a moment of silence on the line. Then Ratso said, “All right, I’ll meet you at the Garden. Window eleven. Fifteen minutes.”

“Make it ten,” I said. “We take any longer, this cat’s gonna be out at LaGuardia asking for an aisle seat in the nonsmoking section.”

As I hung up I heard Ratso mutter something to himself. It sounded very much like “Fucking cat.”

I put on my hat and my old hunting vest and took three cigars for the road. I put them in the little stitched pockets of the vest where some Americans keep their shotgun shells.

“You see,” I said to my own cat as I left for the Garden, “he’s not such a terrible Watson after all.”

4

Ratso was waiting for me at window 11. He looked like an amiable pimp. He wore a coonskin cap minus the tail, fuchsia slacks, and red flea-market shoes that, as I often pointed out to him, had once belonged to a dead man. To round it off, he wore a blue sweatshirt that said
NATIONAL LAMPOON COHABITATION TEAM.

“Nice outfit,” I said. “You look like the Don Juan of all ticket scalpers.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Wardrobe by Hadassah Thrift Shop.”

We walked down the corridor toward the Felt Forum, with most of the people going in the opposite direction. They looked like harmless, happy cat fanciers. A few of them carried cats in cages, but under close scrutiny none of the cats were wearing little sweat socks.

Jane Meara was standing by the entrance to the exhibition hall. She looked like a biker gang had just raped her Cabbage Patch doll.

I introduced Jane to Ratso and the three of us made our way into the hall. The whole place had the air of a carnival that couldn’t make up its mind whether or not it was leaving town. All around us people were either packing up their cages or preparing their cats for last-minute judging. Every few moments someone would race by with a cat on his upturned palm like an Italian waiter with a rush-order pizza.

Rocky’s empty cage had food, water, a litter box, a bed, and lace curtains. If the rents kept going up, I might check in there myself.

Rocky seemed very gone indeed.

A woman came up beside us wringing her hands. “This is terrible,” she said. “I’m Marilyn Park, the producer of the show. This is the first time anything like this has happened at one of our shows. I know how you must feel, Jane, dear.”

Jane nodded and let go with a little sob.

“Look, Miss Park—” I said.

“Mrs.
Park,” said Mrs. Park. “My husband and I produce the shows together and I told Stanley security here at the Garden should’ve been tighter.”

“Mrs. Park—” I said.

“Call me Marilyn,” she said. “And we
will
find the cat. We have people checking right now into all the places a lost little pussycat could go.”

“Marilyn,” I said, “do you think the cat is loose in the Garden or do you think someone could’ve
taken
Rocky?”

“All the cats,” she said, “have identification numbers. They’re checked coming in and leaving the exhibition hall.”

“Well,” I said, “do you think …”

I stopped.

Something was winking at me from beneath the lace curtains in the corner of the cage. It was too short to be a Times Square hooker. It was too small even to be a cat. I reached into the cage, put my hand under the curtains, and withdrew a metal object.

It was the key to room 407 of the Roosevelt Hotel.

I turned the key over in my hand. I put my arm around Jane Meara.

“I don’t think Rocky’s in the Garden,” I said.

* * *

The cab ride over to the Roosevelt was a bit strained. Jane appeared to be fighting off a mounting hysteria. Ratso was behaving like a self-appointed member of a lost-cat support group.

“We’ll find him, Jane,” he said. “We’ll find him.”

“He’s a her,” wailed Jane.

“Don’t worry,” said Ratso. “There ain’t a cat alive that the Kinkster can’t find …”

“That’s what I’m worried about!” sobbed Jane. “Whether she’s alive!”

“… blindfolded,” continued Ratso, in a stubborn, almost toneless voice.

I was trying not to listen to them. I was trying to think. Why would someone want to steal Jane Meara’s cat? I couldn’t make head or tail of it.

Marilyn Park had told us that the Roosevelt Hotel was where all the out-of-town cats were staying for the cat show. Almost a thousand of them. One of the few hotels in the city that allowed cats.

As we got out of the cab in front of the Roosevelt, I looked up at the hotel. It looked like a giant gray ship in a children’s book, and I imagined hundreds of little cat faces staring down at us from the portholes. I wondered what was waiting for us in room 407.

We crossed the hotel lobby and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Room 407 was down the hall to the left. The hallway was gray, dusty, and smelled like buildings used to smell when you were a child.

I knocked sharply on 407.

Nothing. Not even a meow.

I inserted the key into the lock and opened the door. I hit the lights and we took a look around. The room was not quite empty.

On the bed was a note scrawled on Roosevelt Hotel stationery.

It read: “What’s the matter—cat got your tongue?”

5

We put Jane Meara into a cab. Exposure to a distraught woman was not healthy for Kinky. And my increasing surliness wasn’t likely to calm Jane’s heart. Somewhere there was a guy who could comfort her. A guy who could take her in his arms and tell her, “Don’t worry, honey, everything’s going to be all right.” Unfortunately, the guy probably sang in the Gay Men’s Chorus.

Ratso and I crossed Forty-fifth at Madison, took a left, and walked halfway up the block to JR Tobacco, home of the Jamaican “A” cigar. The Jamaican “A” has been aged for one full year. The cigar has more breeding than some people I know.

“Scratch one tabby,” said Ratso moments later as the two of us were walking down Fifth Avenue smoking our Jamaican “A’s.” 

“Eighty-six one mange-ridden mouser.”

“Not particularly spoken like a cat fancier,” I said.

“I hate the precious, preening, putrid little bastards.” 

I took a puff on the cigar as we walked along the avenue in the cold. “They speak very highly of you,” I said.

“I mean it,” said Ratso, poking the air vehemently with his cigar. “I hate the little bastards.”

“You’re not alone,” I said. “Brahms used to shoot them from his window with a bow and arrow. Napoleon hated cats as well.”

“The French hate everyone.”

“Except Jerry Lewis. Hitler hated cats, too.”

“He wasn’t real partial to Jews, either,” said Ratso.

“No,” I said.

We walked along in silence at a fairly brisk pace until we got to Thirty-fifth Street. I pointed to the right in the general vicinity of some old brownstones. “That’s where Nero Wolfe lives,” I said.

Before Ratso could say anything, a dark blur shot through the street directly across our path. A black cat.

Ratso made a hard right up my leg and tried to nest in my vest pocket. I didn’t think he was a Nero Wolfe devotee, so I had to assume that he was avoiding the path of the black cat. Couldn’t blame him.

We were only a few blocks from the Garden and I felt I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a friend and country-singer-turned-amateur-detective if I didn’t go back and look for Rocky one more time. Not that I figured we’d find anything.

I bribed Ratso to come along with me to the Garden. I offered him three cigars and promised I’d buy lunch next time at Big Wong, our favorite Chinese restaurant. It was almost shameful to have to tempt an adult in this way, but as Ratso pointed out, he hardly knew Jane Meara, and his dislike of cats was long-standing and rather intense. It would’ve been useless to try to reason with him.