When the Cat's Away (7 page)

When I came to there were two green garden snakes coming out of my stomach and three Ratsos sitting by my bedside. All of them looked hungry. The three Ratsos were eating bagels, and whatever the green garden snakes were eating I didn’t want to know, so I went back to sleep.

When I woke up the second time, there was only one Ratso and he was eating a large slice of pizza from John’s of Bleecker Street, the best in New York. Ratso ate like a starving boar-hog but he had taste.

“Where are the other two Ratsos?” I asked. I didn’t know if it was night or day, but it was beginning to dawn on me that I was in a hospital. Hell would have to wait.

“The other two Ratsos?” he said uncertainly. “Maybe they’re out playing with the other two Kinkys.”

I thought about it for a moment. My mind was clearing a little more slowly than my vision. It took a while to think about the other two Kinkys and the other two Ratsos. “Maybe they’re working on a case,” I said.

“Could be,” said Ratso, nodding his head. “What kind of case do you think they’re working on?”

“Maybe they’re finding the little missing children on the milk cartons,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Ratso. I could tell he was worried, because he’d stopped eating his pizza. “Look, Kinkster,” he said, “you just rest here a minute. I’m going to go find the doctor.”

Ratso walked out into the hall and I looked around the room. Everything came back to me like a buzzard on the highway. Obviously I’d been shot. Obviously I wasn’t dead. Obviously I was in a hospital room. Obviously my friends hadn’t sent a hell of a lot of flowers.

The tendrils of my brain were becoming a little less fuzzy and they were damn close to grasping onto something important. I tried to think again and this time I connected. Whoever’d shot me must’ve known I was at the Garden and must’ve known what I was looking for. That brought it down to a very small group of people. The Parks. Hilton Head. Leila?

I credited myself with enough native sensitivity to rule out the people I’d shown the Rocky pictures to. I’d seen nothing in their eyes beyond the pale of innocence, sympathy, admiration, boredom—each a normal cat fancier, if such an animal existed. I’d learned to beware of “normal” and “harmless” types. It was the “normal” and “harmless” types that usually did you in. And the women.

My spirits sagged a bit as I enlarged the field of suspects to practically everybody I’d shown the photograph to and his kid sister. And God knew what Ratso had stirred up interviewing the Parks and Head. It was hopeless. For all I knew the veterinarian could’ve shot me for walking out on his slide show on diarrhea. Men have been shot for less.

I shook my head, cleared a couple cobwebs, and my spirits lifted again. There had been something familiar about the figure behind the cat mask. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I wasn’t even certain whether it’d been a man or a woman. But whoever it was, I was very conscious of one thing. It had seemed to know me. That narrowed the field.

I was trying to remember what it was that had been familiar when the doctor came into the room briskly with Ratso tailing after him like a large jet stream. The doctor looked like Robert Young on a bad day. He adjusted a few knobs on something that looked like a sound system, put a stethoscope to what I’m pleased to call my heart, fondled one of the garden snakes, and smiled.

“You had a close call,” he said. “A very close call. I’m going to keep you here for a few more days.”

“Well,” I said, “at least we’ll find out if my Blue Cross has wheels on it.”

Robert Young laughed the same friendly, hollow laugh that he always used to tag the Sanka commercials with. The nervous window-washer who works on the ninety-seventh floor has just switched to Sanka. Robert Young asks how he’s feeling now. He says, “Great, now that I’ve switched to Sanka.” Robert Young laughs, ha-ha-ha. You didn’t exactly trust that laugh, but it was comforting.

“You know,” he said, coming nicely off the laugh, “you’ve been unconscious for over twelve hours.” Of course I hadn’t known it. I would’ve had to be the Three Faces of Kinky to have known it.

“Yeah,” said Ratso, “you were almost the Rip Van fucking Winkle of the Village.”

I looked at Robert Young. “Did you get the bullet out?” I asked.

Robert Young looked at me. Then he gave forth with another friendly, indulgent little chuckle. “There was no bullet,” he said. “You were shot with a tranquilizer dart.”

“A tranquilizer dart?” I couldn’t believe it.

“A tranquilizer dart,” said Robert Young. “The kind they use on the big cats.”

18

I spent Friday afternoon in a hospital bed dreaming of cigars. But I took a little time out to empathize with a dead literary agent whom nobody had liked and to overidentify with a lost cat whom one person loved.

But then, I was more sensitive than most Americans. In fact, most Americans were more sensitive than most Americans.

I’d had a phone hooked up in the room and I’d been working it like a hyperactive croupier most of the morning. I like telephones. On some occasions, I love telephones. They sometimes make it possible to travel cross the darkness in the distance of a dream. I like cats better than agents but I wanted to be fairly scientific about the thing, so I’d begun my calls in alphabetical order; that is, I made the calls pertaining to the dead agent prior to those pertaining to the lost cat. An organized mind solves an organized crime.

I called Esther “Lobster” Newberg, an agent I knew, and learned the worst.
Everybody
had hated Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Lobster didn’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and she didn’t wish to speak ill of other agents (many disgruntled writers would consider this to be the same thing), but even she had not much liked Rick “Slick” Goldberg. If I could’ve paged his mother at the Shalom Retirement Village,
she
probably wouldn’t’ve liked Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Well, it was a murder case, not a popularity contest.

I made another call or two and then called my friend Ted Mann in Hollywood, the glitzy graveyard of all talent.

Things were going so poorly, Ted said, that he’d had to hire a non-Jewish agent.

He’d never heard of Rick “Slick” Goldberg, so we talked cats coast-to-coast for a while. Ted said he’d once had a cat named Puss-Puss who’d lived to be twenty-five years old. Outlived most of his friends, he said. When I hung up, it was not without a certain pride. It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d really want to crow about, but I
had
outlived Puss-Puss. Of course, a few more tranquilizer-dart incidents like the day before and I might not beat out Puss-Puss by too much.

I was at St. Vincent’s Hospital, I discovered. According to Robert Young, the contents of the tranquilizer dart had been sent to the lab for analysis. He was eagerly awaiting the results. I told him I was, too. Everybody needs to look forward to something.

Earlier in the afternoon, I’d sent Ratso over to 199B Vandam to get some cigars and fresh clothes, feed the cat, tell her I’d be home soon, and check the messages on the answering machine. It didn’t seem like that difficult an assignment, but he still wasn’t back. Maybe he’d passed a garage sale on the way.

While I waited for Ratso, I took stock of things. There was only so much you could do from a telephone in a hospital bed. I needed to get out of there before I began relating to Robert Young as a father figure.

But the very fact that I was in a hospital bed and the sequence of events that had put me there were matters of significance in themselves. It all meant that I was getting pretty damn close to whoever it was I was looking for. It also meant that this dart-shooting devil was looking for me. And I had the unpleasant feeling that the hand that had fired the dart had already taken a life, nipped a cat, and severed a tongue.

19

In winter, men’s thoughts turn to Palestinians. I was not a great sympathizer with their cause, but why hold the sins of an entire people against one broad? This was not a time for ethnocentric thinking. Nonetheless, when dealing with foreigners of the female persuasion, it’s better to be safe than sorry, though it’s often more fun to be sorry. I decided I’d have Leila’s background checked. It wasn’t that I thought she was a spy for the PLO. It was just that some women are sometimes a little more adept than men at wearing masks.

I called Rambam, a friend of mine in Brooklyn who was a private investigator and a couple of other things. Rambam knew the kind of people most folks only watch on the late-night movies. I liked to think of him as a rather militant Jewish Jim Rockford. He was charming and likable, but there were aspects of his life you didn’t want to know about. Could land you in a hospital bed.

When I reached Rambam at the offices of Pallorium, his security company, I told him where I was and how I’d got there. “Interesting,” he said. I told him about the unsavory demise of Rick “Slick” Goldberg. “Even more interesting,” he said. I described my meeting Leila and told him she was half Palestinian.

“Forget her,” he said.

I told him Leila and I could be the last hope for peace in the Middle East. It wasn’t a bad line, but it was starting to wear about as thin as the Gaza Strip.

“Forget her,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, “but while I’m busy forgetting her, I’d like you to run a little background check on her.”

“No problem,” said Rambam. There was a certain finality to the way Rambam said “No problem” that was always comforting to hear. Especially when you thought there was a problem.

I was shaloming off with Rambam when Ratso came careening through the door like a border-town dog. He was obviously excited about something, but if I knew Ratso he was probably going to make me fish for it. I was right.

“Fresh clothes,” he said, putting my New York Rangers hockey bag on the table. “Probably won’t get you into the embassy ball, but they’re not as foxed out as whatever you’re wearing.”

“They shoot clothes horses, don’t they?”

“That’s a thought,” said Ratso. “Hey, maybe the guy with the dart gun was aiming for me.”

“Not likely,” I said.

Ratso shrugged it off. “Here’s your toilet kit,” he said. “A modern man-about-town can’t live without his toilet kit …”

“My dear Ratso, I’m eternally grateful to you for bringing my toilet kit, but what is it that you’re holding back?”

“… Oh yeah, and the cigars. I didn’t forget the cigars. But you must promise not to let Big Nurse know that you have them.”

“I’m more worried about the big nerd who’s standing here not telling me something I ought to know.”

Ratso feigned injury at my words but he recovered quickly. “Now really, Sherlock, the doctor says for you to relax and not—”

“My dear Ratso, you’re as transparent as a toilet seat cover, though not quite as hygienic. What aren’t you telling me? Spit it, goddammit.”

“Well, there were some messages on the machine— one from a broad in Texas—”

“Where in Texas?”

“Texas. I don’t know … Houston, Austin … one of those places.”

“Did you get her name?”

“Yeah. It begins with an
L
, I think.”

“Linda?”

“No.”

I looked over at the cigars affectionately. “Lydia?” 

“No.”

“Leda?”

“No, it’s kind of a Texas sort of name.”

“Bubbette?”

“No. It begins with an
L.
Keep goin’.”

“Lola?”

“No. You really know all these broads?”

“I do very well with women whose names begin with an
L
. I don’t know why. All except Lady Luck, of course—she can be a mean-minded, vacuous bitch … Leila?” 

“Keep dreamin’.”

“Wait a minute … I know who it is. That’s great.” “What’s so great about it?” Ratso asked.

“It’s the girl in the peach-colored dress,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know about that. On an answering machine,” said Ratso, “all dresses sound gray.”

* * *

As it turned out, there’d been one more message on the machine. Ratso described the voice as toneless, flat, and with something almost not human about it. Like death itself, he told me. The voice alone had given Ratso a chill, he said, as he handed me the message he’d transcribed onto a scrap of paper. I didn’t have the voice to work with, but the words I read did not radiate warmth to the little hospital corners of my bed. The message read as follows: “Hey, Kinky. When the cat’s away, the mice will play. The next time you sleep, it may be forever.”