The phone started to ring. I ignored it. I went to the bedroom and lay down. When the phone began ringing again, I let it ring. I didn’t care at that moment for anyone or anything.
Turning my face into the pillow, I could sense Charlie Coombs’s recent presence. He had slept there; we had made love. I turned on my side, feeling bitterly that my life now consisted of making love with Charlie Coombs and cleaning up after Charlie Coombs.
The domestic fantasy was deflating quickly. It dawned on me that a single memory of Harry Starobin had negated what I had considered a profound joy.
As I turned over on the other side, I realized that nothing I had done in my life had provided the intense excitement I had felt during the few days I had spent searching for Ginger Mauch and searching for the source of Harry’s secret money. Not making love with Charlie Coombs. Not the theater. Nothing.
I had to do something, I realized. I had to rectify the betrayal. I had to go somewhere.
I sat up. I laughed to myself cynically, remembering the last two lines and the final stage instructions of Waiting for Godot.
Vladimir asks: “Well? Shall we go?”
Estragon answers: “Yes, let’s go.”
The stage direction reads: They do not move.
11
I opened my eyes and found myself staring into Charlie Coombs’s eyes. I started to turn away, but his hand reached quickly around my waist and pulled me even closer to him on the bed.
“It’s the first time that we’ve made love and you’ve had other things on your mind,” he said.
“Life is harsh,” I replied sarcastically, and then added: “What’s the matter, Charlie? Didn’t you enjoy it?”
He released the pressure of his arm around my waist. I turned away from him.
“Hell, Alice, I train horses for a living, remember? I know when a horse is keeping her mind on her business and when she’s not.”
I was about to retort angrily that I was not a horse and lovemaking wasn’t running—but I said nothing, because he was right. My mind was on other things. I touched him gently on the knee in a kind of apology.
My mind was on Harry Starobin. Maybe I had been wrong about the attempted murder with the pickup truck—maybe the driver had been drunk, as the police speculated.
I looked at Charlie. He still had that hurt expression in his eyes. I moved close to him and tenderly kissed him on the shoulder.
After I had made that gesture, it infuriated me. I edged away from Charlie. What was I doing? It was the same old story again. In all my relationships with men, I had always placated them. I had vowed never to do that again—and there I was, doing it. The moment a little tension had appeared, I had started accommodating his fears.
But I had to defuse the situation—it was too unimportant to keep me engaged with it. I had to defuse it . . . deflect it . . . and to do so, I indulged in a little harmless lunacy. I started to neigh like a horse. Then I asked him if I was now keeping my mind on business like I should. He found that very funny. I found it easy to do. Then we both started acting stupid together, neighing and whinnying like horses. And then we made love again.
We lay there in the dark stillness. Only faint noises from the street could be heard. Even Pancho had ceased his travels. And Bushy was curled up on the far side of Charlie Coombs’s pillow.
“Charlie,” I said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Ask.”
“Suppose I wanted to write a book about that horse you told me about.”
“You mean Cup of Tea?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t even know who he was, Alice.”
“Charlie, just imagine I’m writing a book about Cup of Tea. Where do I get information on him—stories, pictures?”
“In both the regular newspapers and the racing press. There have been thousands of stories printed about that horse.”
“What is the racing press?”
“I mean papers and magazines that specialize in the racing and breeding of horses.”
“Are there many?”
“Sure. There’s the Daily Racing Form, Chronicle of the Horse, Equus, Spur, Thoroughbred Record—hell, there must be at least fifty.”
Bushy, becoming upset because Charlie had raised his voice, contemptuously vacated the pillow and the bed, walking off stiff-legged down the hall toward the sofa in the living room.
“Your cat is telling me something,” Charlie said.
“Fool,” I said tenderly, and then added, “Go to sleep, Charlie.”
I turned away from him and waited to hear the slow, rhythmic breathing which signaled that he had indeed gone to sleep.
For my part, I was filled with anticipatory excitement. I was going to go back in time and find out about that horse called Cup of Tea whose exercise rider had been none other than Ginger Mauch. It was back again to sly Ginger, duplicitous Ginger, dangerous Ginger. Perhaps even dead Ginger. Or perhaps even innocent Ginger—child rider, child lover, fleeing only from a broken heart.
As I lay there in the darkness, I had this tremendous confidence that I had made the right decision. That it was necessary to complete the Harry Starobin file . . . that I had to find Ginger to do that . . . and if I couldn’t find her through regular channels, I had to take a different path. Yes—different path—the concept excited me, like it was some kind of Oriental truth or something like that. But it really meant that this time I was starting with a horse—Cup of Tea.
Alice Nestleton was now engaged in writing a book on Cup of Tea. A third career.
It was ludicrous. I stifled a giggle. I was never good at composition, although I had once won a prize in the very early grades for a cat limerick that was so bad it had to win:
There once was a cat named Lily.
Her face was sweet as Chantilly.
She milked the cow
and herded the sow
But her kittens were downright silly.
The next morning, Charlie, as always, gave me a long, desperate embrace before he left, as if he would never see me again. I drank my coffee standing at the window. I was happy that Charlie had left early. The whole affair was getting strange. I looked forward to Charlie’s visits. I wanted him to sleep over as often as he could. But on the other hand, I had absolutely no desire to share anything with him other than my bed. Perhaps I had been alone too long.
At ten I left the house to begin my new pseudo-career as biographer of a horse called Cup of Tea. I walked uptown toward the Mid-Manhattan Library on Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue. It was a clear, crisp morning, and I walked easily in a denim dress and wool sweater, my hair loose. Sometimes I slipped into a long-strided gait—what they used to call shit-kicking—the only thing that remained of my childhood on a dairy farm. It was the way my grandmother used to walk.
When I reached Thirty-fourth and Fifth I slowed down and began to window-shop. Something was bothering me. My anxiety, though, had nothing to do with where I was going or what I was going to do there. I felt that someone was watching me.
Pausing in front of a store which had an enormous selection of athletic shoes in the window, I turned halfway and saw that I had a clear shot of Fifth Avenue looking downtown.
There were so many people, and none of them were watching me. I must be getting weird, I thought. Even if someone had tried to kill me, I hadn’t been looking for Harry’s murderer for two months.
Then a flash of color caught my eye: a fishing feather in the rim of a man’s hat about two blocks away. He was turning off Fifth as I saw him. Then he and the feather were gone.
Was he the one who had been watching me? How could I be sure? Was it only paranoia induced by the fact that I was once again dealing with the murders of Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen?
I started walking again toward the library. When I reached the entrance I leaned against an outside wall. My hands were sweaty. I didn’t feel so good.
I remembered where I had seen a feather like that. At Mona Aspen’s place. A
hat like that had been worn by her nephew, Nicholas Hill.
I looked downtown quickly. He had not reappeared. Had Nicholas Hill been following me? If so, why? I remembered that when I had spoken to him about Ginger I hadn’t liked his attitude or response. He had made me suspicious then.
As I entered the library, though, I had to shake it off. I hadn’t been involved in the case for two months. Had he been coming in to New York every day to watch me go to the grocery store? No, it had to be a fluke.
The periodicals librarian, who had never heard of Cup of Tea, told me I should first search the New York Times Index before going to the specialty horse magazines.
To my astonishment, I found that there were literally hundreds of references to Cup of Tea. He had obviously been the darling of the Times’s sportswriters—there was an article every three days on average. The horse had even been mentioned prominently in an editorial.
I spent the entire day at the microfilm machine reading articles from the Times dealing with the horse’s rags-to-riches racing career.
All sorts of innocuous bits of information were scattered throughout the articles: Cup of Tea loved peanut butter spread over a carrot; one of his jockeys was a diabetic; his trainer had been married three times; he won his last three races, before he retired to stud, by a combined total of fifty-one lengths.
I spent two more days on the Times and then started on the specialized magazines. I learned much more about Cup of Tea: his stride, his breeding, his training, how he changed leads, how he acted in the barn, what he ate and why.
I really didn’t know what I was looking for, but whatever it was, I hadn’t found it after six days of intensive research. More important, I had not found a single reference to Ginger Mauch being one of Cup of Tea’s exercise riders.
The next week I moved across the street to the main reference library, concentrating on books rather than periodicals. During the years that Cup of Tea had been active as a champion, 1978–1984, dozens of books on horse racing and breeding had been published, and a great many of them at least mentioned him.
My days became very dreary: handing in slips, retrieving books, going through indexes and tables of contents and photo lists and credits. The only reason the stultifying routine was bearable was that I often thought about Harry as I searched the books. Harry would be proud that I had transcended fear and bad faith and returned to the puzzle of his death.
Charlie Coombs, on the contrary, was unhappy. He started complaining about how even on the two nights he slept over, I left him alone with the cats and stayed late at the library. He kept asking me, “Do you really expect me to believe that you’re writing a book on Cup of Tea?”
His discomfort started me really thinking about him. I remember one rainy Tuesday when the thought came to me: Where were Charlie Coombs and I going? Did he really love me? Could we live together? I started creating scenarios for both of us, from the ridiculous to the sublime—scenarios of shouting matches and furious lovemaking afterward, of stormy separations and silent reunions.
It was during one of those scenarios that I reached for a book with a beautiful blue cover. The book was titled Great Thoroughbreds and was one of those gushy, extravagant items for young girls who become fixated on horses during adolescence. I leafed through the table of contents—a roster of great racehorses: Man of War, Whirlaway, Stymie, Northern Dancer, Secretariat, Ruffian, Forego—it had them all.
Cup of Tea was also there, listed as being on page seventy-eight. I flipped to the page and froze.
In front of me was a picture of Cup of Tea being unsaddled after a workout. A groom was on one side, holding the horse while the trainer did the unsaddling. An exercise rider was crouching next to the horse, fixing something on her boot, helmet in the other hand.
It was Ginger Mauch.
On one side of the horse was a bucket of water, and seated beside the bucket, gazing at Cup of Tea, was a lovely calico cat. The cat had the exact same markings and appearance as the cat I had seen in the photograph Jo and I found in Ginger’s abandoned apartment.
Jo Starobin had said that the cat in the photo with Harry was the missing calico barn cat, Veronica.
12
I crept up on the small coffee shop at Thirty-fourth Street just east of Third because I felt in my heart that Jo Starobin wouldn��t be there as she had promised. I really don’t know why I was doing something so stupid, but all the same, darted a look in the window. I saw her waiting. I felt enormously relieved. When I had called her and told her I wanted to meet her, she had been distinctly unfriendly, talking to me in a polite tone as if we were shopping together in a supermarket. She offhandedly remarked that she had to come into the city to visit the bank vault. Was Thursday okay?
I snuck another look and saw that Jo was bent over, almost as if she was in pain. I kept staring at her through the window, worried now. But when she straightened up, there wasn’t really pain on her face—it was despair. It was as if the loss of Harry seemed to crush her from time to time—without warning, without explanation.
I walked inside and slipped into the chair across from her. She had chosen a small table along the wall. She smiled at me—a broad, wonderful smile—and she stretched her hands across the table and I grasped them and we both knew that everything was fine.
When the waitress came over, I ordered an espresso. Jo ordered a cappuccino. We decided to share a piece of dark chocolate cake with cherries.
Jo started to tell me about her train ride into Manhattan, but I broke right into her monologue. I couldn’t wait. I pulled out the photograph I had feloniously ripped from the book, and placed it down on the table in front of her. “I’ve found your barn cat, Jo.”
“Veronica? You found Veronica?” Jo asked, astonished, and then leaned over and studied the photograph of Cup of Tea with the exercise rider she recognized as Ginger and the calico cat sitting beside the water bucket.
“Look, Jo,” I said, “look at the markings: the exact same as the cat in the photo we saw at Ginger’s apartment. You said it was Veronica with Harry.”
“Alice, similar markings are very common in calico cats.”
“But look at her, Jo,” I pleaded.
Jo looked closely, then sat back. “Alice,” she said quietly, “this photograph was probably taken around 1981 or 1982.”
“So what?”
“Well, Veronica is about three years old now. She was born in 1985. I remember when she was born. It was a small litter.”
I had been so excited when I found the picture that I hadn’t even considered Veronica’s age.
“It could be Veronica’s mother,” Jo continued, “who was also a calico, if I recall. But how could she have gotten to Maryland? Those cats never left our barn. And Ginger worked in Maryland as an exercise rider before she came to Long Island. No, Alice, it’s just another calico cat. And even if it was Veronica’s mother—so what?”
I shook my head grimly. I had been so struck by the strange duplication of Ginger and a calico cat that I hadn’t considered that someone else would shrug it off. For the past two days I had been adding up facts. Ginger had been an exercise rider for a very famous horse. Subsequently, though, she had become a stable girl on a basically nonworking farm for less than minimum wage. Wasn’t that very strange? Now, however, it seemed as though I had gone off half-cocked.
Jo reached across the table, patted me gently on the arm, and said: “It’s just a picture of a horse and his mascot, who happens to be a calico cat. All horses have stable companions, Alice. They live with the horses, travel with the horses, play with the horses. Sometimes a horse will go crazy or just lie down and die if its mascot is killed or runs away. Most are dogs or cats, but racehorses have had goats, pigeons, canaries, turtles—and God knows what else—as companions. I once had a carriage horse named Sam who wouldn’t step out of his stall unless he was accompanied by a three-legged black cat who lived in the stall with him.”
The waitress brought our coffee and plac
ed the piece of chocolate cake equidistant between us, along with two glistening forks. Jo handed the photograph back to me. I slipped it into my bag.
“It is very good to see you,” Jo said.
I smiled and nodded to show her the feeling was reciprocal. Just then I noticed a funny glint in Jo’s eye, and I wondered if she knew that Charlie Coombs and I had become lovers. She probably knew, I realized, but was too discreet to say anything unless I brought it up.
“Listen, Alice, can you come out to Long Island tomorrow?”
“Why?”
“There’s an auction of Mona Aspen’s house furnishings and her paintings and . . . everything. She has a beautiful house.”
The change in subject caught me by surprise, and I didn’t respond.
“Come out, Alice. You’ll love her house. I don’t want to go there alone. And besides, Mona would have wanted me to make sure some of her things didn’t get into the wrong hands. We can spend some of Harry’s money to make sure some of them get a good home. Say you’ll come. I’ll pick you up at the Hicksville station at the usual time.”
“I’ll come,” I said, caught up by her enthusiasm. I also wanted very much for our friendship to flourish again without the two-hundred dollars a day.
We played with our coffee in silence for a while. Then I asked her, “Have the police found out anything new?”
“Nothing. Whenever I ask them, they say they’re still investigating. I ask them what they’re investigating. They say they’re trying to trace the stolen valuables from a nonexistent inventory list. I don’t know who dislikes whom more. But it was my husband who was murdered.”
“Have you learned anything new, Jo?”
Jo arched her eyes. “Why would you ask me that, Alice? After all, I took your advice. Remember? You told me I should forget everything and just live.”
There was an awkward silence.
“But I couldn’t find it,” Jo said.
“Find what?” I asked, thoroughly confused.
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