A Cat Tells Two Tales

by Lydia Adamson

  It was only by chance, instinctively, that I had selected that particular garb. In fact, everything had ended up without reason. I had found Ginger by chance, and only by chance. My reasoning, my “getting into the part,” had gotten me nowhere, it was a chance walk at a chance time in a chance place—and a dalmatian dog barking for no bloody reason.

  The absurdity of it all gave me strength.

  I whirled around, walked ten steps, and was about to climb up into the carriage.

  I froze before the carriage steps. Ginger’s head was in repose.

  I turned and walked quickly away, five steps, ten steps, then stopped. Not the carriage. Not the carriage now. It was wrong. It was childish. What was I going to do in the carriage? What was I going to say? Where were we going to ride?

  It wasn’t a confrontation that was needed. It was information. Where was she living? Whom was she talking to?

  I took ten more steps away from her. What if Ginger wasn’t a victim? What if she wasn’t running but was pursuing?

  I walked toward the low wall that separated the sidewalk from the park. I turned. A couple had climbed into Ginger’s cab. They were pulling away. Fine. Ginger would be back to deposit her fares after the ride was over.

  I leaned against the wall and waited. From where I stood I could dimly see the waiter in the street café I had vacated.

  Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. She and her carriage would be back. Thirty minutes. Sixty minutes. The big white horse poked his nose out of the park, moving leisurely toward the line again. Ginger pulled the carriage up about ten yards from me and helped her fare down graciously.

  Then she climbed up again and started to move. But this time she didn’t rejoin the line. She pulled out into the street and headed west on Central Park South.

  She was going back to the stable. She was through for the day. I started to walk, easily keeping her in view, staying as far away from the curb as I could. Her pace was painfully slow, as if she was allowing the horse a leisurely stroll.

  The horse and carriage turned south on Broadway and then west again on Fifty-fifth Street, then south on Eleventh, and then stopped in front of a long, low, decrepit stable in front of which were dozens of broken-down, horseless carriages. Ginger climbed down and led the horse and carriage inside. I could see her disengaging the horse from the carriage and leading him into a stall. I moved away from the stable and waited near the corner, in front of a busy taxi garage.

  She was in there forty minutes. When she came out she walked briskly to a white stone house on Forty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue.

  I climbed the stairs into a cramped, filthy lobby. There were sixteen plastic buttons and under each one a nameplate. There was no Ginger Mauch. What name was she using? I didn’t know, but it had to be one of the newer plates. There were three of them: L & H Martinez; Jon Swan; M. Lukas. It had to be Lukas. Ginger Mauch was now M. Lukas. I walked out of the lobby and down the steps. Right next to the building was a small bodega. I walked inside, ordered a container of black coffee, and sipped it dourly, standing inside the store, by the front window.

  What was I waiting for? I had postponed the confrontation in the carriage. And now I was doing the same thing: waiting . . . making excuses. Now was the time to confront her. Now was the time to ask her all those questions I had stored up in my head: about Harry; about those damn calico cats; about Veronica the barn cat; about Cup of Tea and Ask Me No Questions; about her life on the racetrack and her life with the Starobins; about whom she was running from or running to.

  Why was I equivocating? What was I afraid of? Why couldn’t I confront her? What was the point of the whole investigation . . . what was the point of tracking her if I couldn’t finish it up?

  The coffee was horrible—bitter, with a funny taste, as if someone had poured some kind of syrup into it. I dumped the container into a carton of trash. But I stayed where I was and stared out onto the street. Children in parochial-school outfits were talking in front of the bodega. I could hear them dimly, but their words made no sense. Then I realized they were speaking in Spanish. I started to laugh at myself. I walked out of the bodega, up the steps of the house, into the small lobby, and pressed my finger hard against the M. Lukas bell. There was no answer. Maybe the bells didn’t work. The landlord had obviously long since given up on the building. Realizing this, I pushed at the lobby door. It opened easily. The lock was still in the door but was totally corroded. I cursed myself for not trying the door the first time.

  M. Lukas lived on the third floor. Up I went, slowly, trying to think of opening lines that would get me inside that apartment.

  A burly man walking down the stairs greeted me warmly. A woman passed me and didn’t say a word. The ceilings above the stairs were filthy. Chips and pieces of paint seem to flutter down in a steady stream, jarred loose by footsteps on the stairs.

  The first door I saw when I reached the third floor was 3E. Was this M. Lukas? The door was ajar. At the top of the landing I stared at the open door and felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. When Jo and I had traced Ginger to her apartment in Oyster Bay Village, we had found the same thing. The door ajar. Ginger gone. Was there a back door to the building? I wondered, cursing myself.

  I stopped at the doorway. “Ginger, Ginger Mauch?” I called into the opening. The sound of my voice was strange to me, as if someone else was calling.

  There was no answer.

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Ginger,” I called again, more softly.

  The apartment was a studio. And it had been ripped apart. Clothes and books and papers were flung all around. Things had been shattered. A tiny kitchen had been totally ransacked. The apartment stank of something I couldn’t identify.

  Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed.

  I walked to it swiftly, my feet crunching objects on the floor. I pushed the door open with my foot.

  And then I sank to my knees. Ginger Mauch was sitting in the rusted bathtub. The red roots in her brown-dyed hair were visible. Torrents of blood had flowed and dried on her naked body. The cut across her throat was a jagged white road.

  I remained kneeling on the floor, half in and half out of the bathroom. I knew what I had to do. Stand up. Go to the phone. Call the police. But I was paralyzed.

  I started to cry for Ginger. Not because she was dead, for death seemed to be irrelevant in that room. Because she had suffered. Because she had felt pain. Because some animal had slit her throat. I could see her as I had seen her that first time, in the cold gleaming morning, from a distance, brushing the aged horse on the Starobin farm.

  I stopped sobbing. I crawled out of the bathroom and found myself surrounded by her trashed belongings. What had they been looking for?

  A heap of books had been pulled off the bookcase and lay in a crazy pyramid. One of them caught my eye. I knew it. I was staring at a copy of the book I had found in the library, the one containing a photo of Ginger and Cup of Tea. The thought chilled me. My eyes swept in fear around the room. Not for her killer, but for the calico cat. There was none. Poor Ginger. The book was probably a precious memento.

  I reached out and pulled it to me. As I did, a piece of old thick cardboard slid out. It was taped around the edges to thicken it, like boys used to tape their baseball tickets.

  I found myself reading some kind of list or inventory on each side. The letters and numbers were indecipherable, written in red and black crayons and smudged.

  But I knew one thing. I was staring at something written by Harry Starobin. His scrawl had been indelibly imprinted on my brain, after sorting through hundreds of his papers at Jo’s request.

  Harry Starobin and Ginger Mauch had been part of some kind of conspiracy, and I had found the codebook.

  I was awakened by strange sounds. I stared at the clock in my bedroom. It was one in the morning. I had slept almost seven hours. The police, I knew, would have responded to my call in minutes and Ginger was by now a statistic, her apartment contents cata
loged, her walls and furniture swept for prints.

  Those strange sounds that woke me were the cats. They wanted to be fed. I climbed slowly off the bed, the back of my neck and shoulders stiff.

  After I fed them, I made myself a cup of coffee and then went into the living room, where the strange piece of taped cardboard lay on the long table.

  I sat down and stared at it.

  The front was a fourteen-line list:

  78/TTQQCC

  79/TTQCCC

  80/T CC

  81/TQCCC

  82/TC

  82/QQCC

  83/TTTQCC

  83/TQQC

  84/TQQCC

  85/TQC

  85/TTQC

  86/QCCC

  87/QCCC

  88/TTTTTCC

  It was obvious that the numbers were years: 1978–1988. There was only one line for each year except for the years 1982, 1983, and 1985—where there were two entries each.

  But what were those funny capital letters after each year—T or Q or C?

  They must mean something. They must be important. Ginger had carried them with her during her travels.

  Bushy sauntered into the living room and hopped up on the sofa, quite content with his meal.

  Pancho flew by once, paused, stared at me, and continued his journeys.

  I was chilly. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.

  I stared at the markings on the cardboard again. It was obvious that Harry was tallying something that happened in each year. It was an inventory . . . a count . . . like someone saying an apple tree produced eighty barrels of apples in 1986. Or a farm produced thirty barrels of peaches, twenty of plums, ten of pears, in a given year.

  But what had he been counting?

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, thinking of Harry. What had defined him? Humor. Kindness. Boots. Animals. Cats. Horses.

  But he didn’t grow any of those things. He didn’t produce.

  Harry wasn’t a breeder of anything. His farm was totally nonfunctional.

  Except . . . except . . . except for the Himalayans. No, he hadn’t bred them.

  Except for the barn cats. Jo had said there were always litters of barn cats. Veronica had vanished with her litter.

  I stared at the letters.

  Why would Harry list in coded form litters of barn cats over the years? And what did the letters mean?

  Of course! I flung my hand up to accentuate my own stupidity. T stood for tom—a male cat. Q stood for queen—a female cat. Old names that people didn’t use anymore.

  My fingers were trembling ever so slightly.

  According to my analysis, in 1978, the first year of the inventory, the barn-cat litter consisted of two male kittens, two female, and two Cs.

  But what was C?

  Calico. A delicious chill went right through me. I had broken the stupid code.

  Then I pulled back my enthusiasm. If my analysis was correct, there were calico cats in each litter, in most years more than one, and in some years more than half the litter.

  That was impossible. I had read a lot about calico cats over the years.

  There are only three multicolored cats, found only in females—blue cream, tortoiseshell, and calico. Calico is the most difficult to reproduce.

  To obtain a calico, one breeds a male with a dominant white color to a tortoiseshell female. The white male is crucial because calico is really only tortoiseshell plus the color white. White, in fact, is the dominant color of the calico cat.

  If the mating is successful, a calico female may appear in the litter—possibly even two.

  But over the long run, calico is very hard to produce. The accepted probabilities are one calico female out of every seventeen kittens.

  I stared down at the list again. How could Harry have bred so many calico cats in each litter of barn cats?

  Was Harry a magician? Had he somehow done what cat breeders considered impossible?

  I turned the cardboard over. This side contained dozens of entries, many of them faded.

  Among the ones I could make out were:

  RS/87C

  NA/83C

  LBD/86C

  COT/78C

  LK/81C

  ANQ/82C

  FG/84C

  GB/84C

  R/79C

  BB/79C

  The second part of each entry I now understood. C meant calico; 84 meant the 1984 litter; 84C meant a calico cat from the litter in 1984.

  But what did it refer to? What referred to it? What did FG/84C mean?

  It was the LK/81C entry I focused on most. For some reason it infatuated me. The letters LK meant something to me, or reminded me of something.

  I began to make up possibilities. Ladybird. LK. Ladybird in Kansas. LK. Larry Koenig. Lucifer Kills. LK.

  I kept at it . . . from the stupid to the sublime . . . from the known to the unknown. And then it tripped off my tongue—Lord Kelvin.

  Lord Kelvin! I looked down the list. If LK was Lord Kelvin, then there should be COT—Cup of Tea. He was there. And Ask Me No Questions. She was there.

  It was a list of abbreviated horse’s names and after each one was the year the calico cat it had received as a mascot was born.

  It was a list of horses that had had Harry’s calico cats as mascots.

  I stood up quickly and walked to the window. My arms were folded across my chest. I knew what Harry had done. The enormity of it . . . the scope of it . . . the sheer intellectual audacity of it was staggering. Harry had, indeed, changed his world. His laughter rolled gently over me. How I missed him!

  18

  Jo Starobin sat in her rocking chair. One Himalayan was on her lap. One was on her shoulder. The others were scattered about, at least one stalking the slow, steady rock of the wood.

  I was standing behind her. We both watched Detective Senay. He was holding up the piece of taped cardboard.

  “Sure,” he said, “I looked at it. I looked at it pretty damn carefully.”

  He held it at arm’s length, as if it was something ugly.

  “Let me get straight what you’re telling me, Mrs. Nestleton.”

  “I’m not married,” I corrected him for the fifth or sixth time.

  “What you’re saying is this,” he continued, brushing aside my objection, his voice rising just up to the limit of anger. “What you’re saying is that Harry Starobin was not the sweet, kindly man everybody thought he was. He was a kind of magician. He discovered a new way to breed calico cats. He found a way to get a whole slew of calico cats in a single litter because he had these special kinds of barn cats. But that was only the beginning. Not only was he a magician, but these calico cats were magicians also.”

  He looked at me, arching his eyebrows, grimacing, shuffling his body. The poor man.

  He continued. “If one of these calico cats starts to live with a racehorse as the horse’s mascot, that broken-down three-legged horse will turn into a champion runner sooner or later.”

  He stopped again, held out his hands, and asked, “Do I have it right so far?”

  “You have it right,” I said.

  “So Harry began selling these magical calico cats to horse trainers and owners. And he made a lot of money. But we don’t know where all that money is, do we?”

  Jo looked at me quickly. I said nothing. She knew I had said nothing about the money in her safe-deposit box. I would never say anything about that.

  Senay continued. “According to you, what happens next is something like this. Someone wanted this magical line of cats. That someone murdered Harry to obtain them. That someone ripped apart his house to make it seem like a robbery. And that someone killed Mona Aspen and Ginger Mauch because both of them worked with Harry on this scheme. Mona was the one who introduced Harry to the trainers and owners who needed the cats to turn lousy horses into champions. And Ginger was the bagman.”

  He walked to the sofa and sat down. There was silence for a long time.

  Then he grinned. “One of us is cra
zy, lady. Or, to put it another way, what you told me is very difficult to believe.”

  I grinned back at him, stiffly. I was not going to let him bait me.

  Senay said, “The real problem with stories like these is that when all is said and done, when all the smoke and fire and belief and nonsense clear, there’s simply no way to corroborate them.”

  It was the moment I was waiting for. I knew that Senay would bring up the paucity of demonstrable evidence. I knew that Senay would have to be cornered and recruited, otherwise there would be no chance.

  “They can be corroborated,” I said quietly.

  Senay exploded. “You mean we do a statistical study of racehorses that have calico cats for mascots? Or we subpoena the financial records of every trainer who has a calico cat to see if he paid ten thousand dollars for it when she was a kitten? Who gives a damn whether all that calico-cat nonsense is true or not? I’m investigating murders. Do you understand? Murders.” Senay had temporarily lost his cool; he was almost shouting at the end of his little speech.

  I handed him a small folded piece of paper. White memo paper.

  He opened the paper and read: calico kittens, new litter, very reasonably priced, ideal for barn and stable. write: starobin, p. o. box 385, old brookville, long island, new york.

  “I don’t understand this,” he said. “What is it?”