When the Cat's Away Read online

“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.

  In fact, the whole little affair didn’t seem to be making a hell of a lot of sense. Somebody, it would appear, was playing a pretty mean prank on Jane Meara. And Jane Meara was the kind of person who didn’t have an enemy in the world. Never much liked that kind of person myself. Still, I couldn’t imagine hating her. Evidently, someone could and did.

  Or maybe it was Rocky they were after. But Rocky, from what I understood, was more of a house pet than a grand champion. Outside of her four little sweat socks, there wasn’t much about her that would whip your average cat fancier into a sexual frenzy. Of course, cat fanciers had been known to have rather strange appetites. Stranger even than the menu at Big Wong.

  We got to Eighth Avenue and entered through the side doors of the Felt Forum. It was nudging nine o’clock and there was a steady stream of cage-carrying cat fanciers and assorted spectators leaving the Garden area. We had almost gotten to the entrance of the exhibition hall when I noticed a worrisome knot of people gathered in a corner off to the left-hand side of the lobby. At the center of the small crowd stood a big, burly man with a little notebook.

  He looked unpleasantly familiar.

  A large woman carrying a large cat in a large cage blocked my field of vision for a moment. When she stepped out of the way, I caught a brief but sufficient glimpse of the malevolent mug of Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman from the Sixth Precinct. Sufficient to remind me that Cooperman and I were not exactly chummy. And sufficient to tell me that something was terribly wrong at the cat show.

  If they’d found Rocky, somehow I didn’t think it was going to be pretty. I was glad Jane Meara wasn’t around. “Ratso,” I said, “I think we’re too late.”

  “Too late? What do you mean?”

  “I mean I think we’ve got a dead cat on the line.”

  6

  When you look for something in life, sometimes you find it. Then you find it wasn’t what you were looking for. Then you wonder why the hell you went looking for it in the first place. Just curiosity, you figure. You rack your brains trying to remember what curiosity did to the cat. Did it make him healthy, wealthy, and wise? Did it help him get the worm? Oh, Christ! It killed him!

  But by now it’s too late. You catch your reflection in a stolen hubcap—you’re a cat. The specter of curiosity, which looks like a large, seductive Venetian blind, stalks you across miles and miles of bathroom tiles … across the cold and creaky warehouse floor of your life … across a candlelit table in a restaurant that closed twelve years ago. Shut down by the city for being too quaint.

  I killed what was left of the Jamaican “A” and Ratso and I walked across the foyer to where the people were standing. We were just in time to hear Marilyn Park say to Sergeant Cooperman, “Nothing like this has ever happened at one of our shows.”

  Ratso nodded solemnly and winked at me. I watched the man standing next to Marilyn Park, a shadowy fellow whom I took to be her husband, Stanley Park. The one who thought the security at the show was adequate. He was introducing a third man to Cooperman.

  “Sergeant,” said Stanley Park, “this gentleman is Hilton Head. He’s in charge of all our public relations. The spokesperson for the whole show.”

  Head was a nervous, rather effeminate young man who ran a limp hand through limp hair and kept repeating the phrase “… such a pussycat … such a pussycat …”

  Cooperman glowered at the young man and scribbled a thing or two in his little notebook. You can always tell a cop with a notebook from an angry young novelist with a notebook. Both of them are angry, but the novelist opens his notebook from the side while the cop flips the pages over the top.

  Cooperman flipped a page over the top and looked up from his notebook. He was not pleased to see me standing there in the small crowd of cat fanciers.

  He tried to pick me up by the scruff of the neck with his left eye.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “talk about a bad penny.”

  “Did you find the cat?” I asked.

  “Did we find the cat?” said Cooperman with a smile. “Yeah, we found the cat.”

  “Where’s the cat now?” I asked.

  “Where’s the cat now? The cat’s right back here in this office.” He jerked his thumb toward what looked like a small cloakroom.

  Cooperman had a fairly sick smile on his face that I couldn’t quite cipher. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “Wanna take a look?” he asked.

  I shrugged and motioned to Ratso and the two of us followed his trucklike body into the small room adjoining the foyer. At first I didn’t see anything because a camera flash went off practically right in my eyes. When I could see, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The room was a beehive of activity. Cops and technicians all over the place. Rocky was nowhere in sight. But something else was.

  On the floor in the center of the room was the body of a man. His chest was so red it looked like E.T.’s little heart-light.

  There was a blood-encrusted, gaping hole where you kind of expected a mouth to be.

  “How do you like that?” said Sergeant Cooperman cheerfully. “Looks like the cat’s lost his tongue.”

  7

  If life is but a dream, death is but a nightmare. That information notwithstanding, I was pleased to find, when I woke up Tuesday morning, that my cat was still in the loft and my tongue was still in my head. All things considered, not a bad way to start the day.

  I fed the cat, put the espresso machine into high gear, and lit my first cigar of the morning. I looked out the window at the sun-dappled, grimy warehouses across the street. The billboards were glistening with dew. The rust was shining on all the fire escapes. It was a beautiful morning.

  I sat down at the kitchen table for a quiet cup of espresso. If you ignored the constant rumbling of the garbage trucks, everything was fairly peaceful. One of the appealing things about this case, I reflected, was that a dead man with his tongue cut out couldn’t give you any lip.

  I sipped the espresso from my Imus in the Morning coffee cup. I puffed the cigar and watched a blue wreath drift upward toward the lesbian dance class. Pretty quiet up there just now. Maybe they were getting into their little lesbian leotards. Or out of them. The whole world loves a lesbian, I thought, and nobody knows dick about her. Of course, when you’ve got ’em thudding on your ceiling all day long, even lesbians can lose a little magic.

  If lesbians were a mystery, so was the dead man at the Garden. But I knew a little more about him. Just a little more. His name was Rick “Slick” Goldberg. He had a cat entered in the cat show. When he hadn’t been busy entering cats in cat shows, he’d been a literary agent.

  I had not gotten this information from Sergeant Cooperman. When I’d asked him who the dead man was, he’d asked me if I was next of kin. I’d told him I didn�
�t know because I didn’t know who the dead man was. He’d told me to wait till tomorrow and ask a newsboy. That was that.

  But if you hang around a few crime scenes you usually learn a thing or two, besides not to hang around crime scenes. Once you get behind the police lines into the crime scene search area, it is assumed that you belong there. Like being backstage at a rock concert—once you’re actually there, nobody questions your presence. So I’d gotten the information from a uniform who was standing there listening to his hair grow.

  I poured myself another cup of espresso and thought it over. Rick “Slick” Goldberg. Cat fancier. Literary agent. Current occupation: worm bait. Nothing too slick about worm bait—we’re all worm bait waiting to happen. It’s what you do while you wait that matters.

  Unless you wanted to count my laundry, there were only two things that I needed to do at the moment: find out all I could about the tongueless stiff at the Garden, and find out who’d occupied room 407 at the Roosevelt Hotel yesterday. I decided to call the Roosevelt Hotel.

  Rick “Slick” Goldberg would keep.

  8

  “Good morning,” said the blower on the left, “Roosevelt Hotel.”

  “Can I speak to the cashier, please?” I said.

  “One moment, sir.”

  “Fine.”

  I waited. I puffed patiently on my cigar as I sat at the desk. I was going to get only one take on this and I knew it’d better be a wrap. I didn’t think the “cat got your tongue” note and the stiff sans tongue at the Garden were just one of death’s little coincidences. It was past time to turn the note over to Cooperman, but I wanted to take one little shot at the situation first. Maybe I’d hit the side of the barn.

  “Cashier,” said an irritated, almost petulant voice. It was the voice of a woman you wouldn’t care to meet.

  “Mornin’, ma’am,” I said in a bright voice. “This is the FTD florist in Fort Worth. Chuck speakin’.” Try to disarm her with a little southern charm. I thought briefly of how John Kennedy had once described Washington, D.C.: “Northern charm and southern efficiency.”

  “Yes?” she said impatiently.

  “We’re havin’ a little booger of a problem down here, ma’am. I thought like maybe you could help us with it.”

  “Yes?” Sounded like she was warming up to me. “Seems we sent our Silver Anniversary Cup Bouquet—it’s been a real popular item for us—we’ve got a lot of retired folks down here …”

  “Sir …”

  “… sent it out yesterday mornin’ to a Mrs. Rose Bush from here in Texas—I think they said she was related to the Vice President—second cousin or somethin’ like that….”

  “Sir! What exactly do you want?”

  “Well, now, we sent it to Mrs. Bush—to her room there at the Roosevelt Hotel—and somebody signed for it and took it and now I hear from the boss that Mrs. Bush never did get it. Boss’s madder’n an Indian who’s trying to take a peepee and can’t find a teepee.”

  There was a silence on the line. Finally, the cashier asked in a rather curt voice, “What room was the—uh— Bush party in, sir?”

  “Well now, let’s see … The Silver Anniversary Cup Bouquet was sent to—hold the weddin’, I’ll find it—here it is—room 407.”

  “Just a moment, sir.” There was a pause while the cashier checked her ledger. “There must be a mistake, sir. There’s no Bush party registered.”

  “Well, I’ll be hog-tied and branded.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Well, now, you see, if I could get the name of the party that was registered in that room—just for our records, you see—I’d be off the hook. As the catfish said to Little Black Sambo.”

  There was a deep and somewhat disgusted sigh on the other end of the line. Then a silence. Then an abrupt decision was apparently made. “The party registered in room 407 was not from Texas,” said the cashier in an almost haughty voice. “The party was from Connecticut. The party’s name was Fred Katz.”

  I took a thoughtful puff on my cigar. “Care to spell that?” I asked.

  9

  They say that death is just nature’s way of telling you to slow down a little bit. Whether or not that is true, it can certainly add a slightly bitter taste to your espresso.

  I listened to the lesbian dance class starting up over my head and I listened to some of the darker thoughts dancing around inside my head. Somehow I did not think that Fred Katz was related to Winnie Katz. In fact, I doubted that he was related to anyone. I doubted that he existed.

  The name was obviously a rather humorous alias. Or at least it might’ve been if Rocky hadn’t been missing. And if they hadn’t found a stiff in the Garden with his clapper torn out. Little things like that can kill a laugh pretty quickly.

  I thought over the whole situation. Somebody’s cat was missing and somebody’s literary agent had gone to Jesus. Which was more important depended on how you looked at the world. In the case at hand, however, the cat and the agent were closely interrelated. Whoever’d heisted the cat had written the note, and whoever’d written the note had iced the agent. He’d probably done a few other things, too. Could’ve picked up sticks. Buckled his shoe. Well, whatever he’d done and whoever he was, he had to be declawed and neutered fairly rapidly or things could get ugly.

  The first step, I decided, was to drop by the Sixth Precinct and lay the “cat got your tongue” note on Sergeant Cooperman. It promised to be an extremely tedious little visit, but if I didn’t go soon, I might be obstructing a lot more than my own slim likelihood of having a nice day.

  I had not forgotten about Marilyn Park, Stanley Park, Hilton Head, and the hundreds of other cat fanciers down at the Garden. They’d be there all week. I hadn’t forgotten that an agent like Rick “Slick” Goldberg had probably made a lot of enemies over the years. If he was like most agents I knew, half his clients would’ve liked to have croaked him.

  I remembered a little story my pal John Mankiewicz had told me about a writer in L.A. who came home to find his house burned to the ground. A neighbor came over and said, “Your agent came by. He raped your wife and daughter, killed your dog, and torched the whole house.” The writer was stunned. He stumbled through the ashes of his home and all he could say was “My agent came by?”

  I’d put on my hat, coat, and hunting vest, stuffed the note in the vest pocket, left the cat in charge, and was almost out the door when the phones rang. This was good for two reasons: one, I’d forgotten my cigars; and two, it was one of those calls that can change your life. I went back to the desk, picked up a few cigars, and collared the blower on the left.

  “Start talkin’,” I said.

  “Kinky!”

  “Yeah.”

  This is Eugene at Jane Meara’s office. I’m her assistant.” Jane, I knew, was an editor now for a large publishing house.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jane would like you to come over here right away if you can.”

  The cat had jumped up on the desk, and as I stroked her, a little shiver went jogging down my spine. “What seems to be the problem, Eugene?”

  “Well, this may sound crazy—like something out of Agatha Christie—but Jane just got back from lunch and there’s—”

  “Get to the meat of it,” I said irritably.

  “There’s a butcher knife on her desk. It’s covered with blood.”

  I stroked the cat one more time and tried to collect my thoughts. I fitted the last cigar into the little stitched pocket of the hunting vest.

  “Sharp move,” I said.

  10

  I took the Otis box to the seventeenth floor of Jane’s building, bootlegging a lit cigar the whole way. Things didn’t get ugly till fourteen, when a woman with a hypersensitive beezer got on and sniffed me out. Nothing lasts forever.

  I escaped into a small lobby and practically ran into the back of a tall, snakelike figure who’d been doing a fair impersonation of a man studying gourmet cookbooks in a glass showcase. The figure
uncoiled and sprang toward me just as the elevator doors closed.

  “What took you so long, Tex?” it hissed. It was Detective Sergeant Buddy Fox, Sixth Precinct.

  “Waitin’ for my nails to dry,” I said. Fox was probably my second favorite American. My first was everybody else.

  “I understand,” said Fox, “you been squirrelin’ some evidence in a homicide. Maybe you oughta fork over this purloined letter we been hearin’ so much about. Or would you like to hang on to it till Valentine’s Day?” There was a smile on Fox’s face but it seemed to lack a certain warmth.

  I reached into my vest pocket and handed him the note that Ratso, Jane, and I had found in room 407 of the Roosevelt Hotel.

  Dear Jane, I thought. Dear, sweet, innocent, little cat-loving Jane. Right then I could’ve killed Jane Meara with a pair of numb-nuts, or whatever they’re called. Any exotic North Korean martial-arts device would probably do. She’d gotten me into this mess by appealing to a sense of compassion I didn’t even know I had. Now, albeit unwittingly, she’d thrown me to the dogs, pigs, jackals, lions, wolves— whatever animal you’d choose if you could be any animal you wanted to be. As for myself, I felt like a swallow that had gone down the wrong way and stopped at a service station for directions to Capistrano. I needed either a road map or a Heimlich maneuver and I wasn’t sure which.

  Fox escorted me down a maze of hallways to a small office. He motioned for me to go in, stuck his head in the doorway after me, winked, and said, “Wait here, Tex.”

  I looked around the room. There was a sofa and a cluttered desk. On the wall were various book jackets. There was a little bulletin board with pictures of Jane Meara at a baseball game and several shots of a cat. I noticed rather grimly that the cat was wearing four little sweat socks. Rocky. I took down one of the snapshots of Rocky and slipped it into my pocket.

  I didn’t need Frank and Joe Hardy to tell me I was in Jane Meara’s office. I looked carefully at the desk. I did not see a bloody butcher knife. Of course, it’s a little hard to see one if it’s sticking in your back.