“An advertisement,” I replied, “that, with your consent, will be placed in the classified sections of all the leading thoroughbred racing and breeding magazines.”
“But what’s the point?”
“Whoever murdered Harry and Mona and Ginger and stole Veronica and her litter will think that there exists another line of magical calico cats. The murderers will find that unacceptable. They will try to get this new litter.”
“You mean we create a litter of calico cats?”
“We fake a litter. The litter box will be empty.”
“And wait for the thief to show up in the barn?”
“Exactly.”
“And the thief is the murderer?”
“Or has been hired by the murderer.”
“Did it ever dawn on you, lady, that you have been watching too many Miss Marple mysteries on Channel Thirteen?”
“No. My television set went on the blink two years ago and I never fixed it. But did it ever dawn on you, Detective Senay, that you know absolutely nothing about these murders after all this time—except what I told you today?”
I let that sink in, then continued. “If the killer is truly a madman, and I believe he is . . . if he is willing to murder to win races . . . then he is not going to let these mythical calico kittens go elsewhere.”
He stared at me. I could tell his defenses were beginning to crumble.
“What kind of departmental response are you talking about?” he finally asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, “but one police officer at all times in the barn between six in the evening and six in the morning. In plainclothes, in the old hayloft.”
“Does it have your approval, Mrs. Starobin?” Senay asked. Then added, “After all, it is your property.”
“I suppose so,” Jo said.
“Then I’ll set the damn thing up,” he half yelled, and strode out of the room as if I had offended him greatly.
When we were alone, the old woman pointed a shaky hand at me and said, “How dare you tell that policeman all those stories about Harry! How can you believe them?”
“You told me yourself, Jo, in the bank, that Harry must have been involved in something criminal. You asked me to help you find out.”
“But, Alice, not this . . . not selling kittens for exorbitant prices on the grounds that they make horses champions. It’s a fake . . . and Harry wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Harry would have robbed a bank if he was desperate enough—and our financial situation was desperate—but not this.”
I lowered my voice. I couldn’t bear Jo’s anguish.
“What if it wasn’t a fake, Jo? What if Harry really had bred such a line of kittens? What if all those racehorses began winning suddenly because of their mascots—the calico barn cats . . . what if somehow, in some way, Harry had pulled off a miracle, something that really can’t be explained scientifically? What then, Jo?”
Jo didn’t answer. She started to weep. The cats seemed to sense her grief and started an orgy of playfulness, as if trying to cheer her up.
Even in springtime the Starobin house was cold and damp in the evening, so Jo and I wore shawls as we spent each evening together, complementing the police officers who split two six-hour shifts in the barn.
I had moved into the cottage again, and slept there, with Pancho and Bushy.
There was a strange enmity between Jo and me—a silent one, as if we had both agreed to a truce in some long-standing struggle.
I didn’t understand why Jo avoided speaking to me, or I to her; I didn’t understand why the name Harry no longer was mentioned.
Three days after we had begun that evening vigil—after the advertisement had been placed in the six daily and weekly publications and we all waited for a murderous thief to attempt to steal a litter of nonexistent kittens—Jo broke the truce.
She turned on me with a suddenness and a ferocity that made me cringe.
“Don’t you think I know what went on between you and Harry?”
I didn’t know how to reply. Harry and I had not been lovers. Ginger had been Harry’s lover. And she was dead. For all I knew, Mona also had been his longtime secret lover. That might explain her fatal involvement; she might have helped him for love and not for money. And maybe there had been others—maybe there had been hundreds of others. But not I.
Had Jo, in her wisdom, intuited my secret fantasy passion for the old man . . . a strange oedipal passion that I had never articulated to anyone?
I didn’t answer. I bowed my head. She construed it as an admission of guilt and she was happy—she forgave me. The air cleared. The hostility dissolved. She mumbled and turned away, making a motion with her hand to signify that it meant nothing.
On the fifth day, as we were keeping vigil in the large house, Jo mentioned that she had spoken to Charlie Coombs and he had asked after me.
“How is Charlie doing?” I asked calmly, academically. It is the proper way to speak about old lovers.
“Okay, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about his father? His father was a wonderful man. He used to sleep in a stall with a horse if it was sick.”
I smiled. I wondered how Charlie Coombs was really doing. Had he bought a new pair of red sneakers? Had he cleaned up his cluttered desk in his small racetrack office? Were his horses winning? Did he miss me? But I could not muse abstracted for long on our affair without that old suspicion beginning to grow again—that Charlie Coombs was part and parcel of the whole mess—that Charlie was on a calico tightrope.
Jo changed the subject: “Should we get coffee for the policemen in the barn?”
“They’re being paid,” I noted.
“It’s been bothering me since the first night they started to stay in the barn. Shouldn’t we make them coffee? Amos can do it.” Jo was beginning to worry over trifles.
I laughed. “Amos couldn’t deliver an empty cup, much less one filled with coffee.”
“He’s a fine man.” Jo leapt to his defense. “It’s just that he really wasn’t cut out to be a handyman . . . He gets confused.”
My mind really wasn’t on Amos. I was thinking about what was coming. I was thinking that it would be someone close . . . perhaps Charlie . . . perhaps Nicholas Hill . . . it would be someone I knew who would try to take the nonexistent litter.
I was beginning to experience a profound sense of inadequacy and almost shame, as if, in the face of the bizarre and inexplicable conspiracy of magical cats and triumphant horses created by Harry Starobin, it would be best if the advertisement was ignored . . . it would be best if the guilty would not act and let time dissolve the memories.
“Harry used to love peaches,” Jo said, startling me with a comment that had nothing to do with anything. “We used to buy bushels of hard, unripe peaches on the roadside in front of the Mannigalt farm.”
It dawned on me that Jo was probably speaking about a farm that had closed its doors twenty years ago. She was talking about a Long Island that had long since vanished.
On the eighth day, at ten thirty in the evening, Jo began to act strangely again. We had nothing to do but play rummy together. Two or three letters had dribbled in about the nonexistent kittens and there had been a few phone calls. But the barn was still inviolable.
Suddenly Jo whispered, “Why calico?”
“What?”
“If what you say is true, Alice, if Harry did what you said he did . . . why did he breed calicos?”
“I don’t follow you, Jo.”
“Why not seal point or red tabby or silver mackerel? And why a short-haired barn cat? Why not a Persian or a Manx or a Maine coon or a Himalayan?”
Her questions were becoming hysterical.
“Calm down,” I said, gently but firmly reseating her.
Then I said, “Maybe he thought calicos were special. Maybe he loved them because they were so hard to breed.”
“Harry never told me that,” Jo said, her voice rising again.
I tried to be rational. “I don’t think h
e knew about their special qualities until Cup of Tea. I think he just bred calicos at first because he wanted to show that he knew more about cats than the people who wrote books about them. He wanted to do things that people said he couldn’t do.”
Jo picked up the cards again and started to play. She kept nodding her head and forming words with her lips—mutely, as if she was carrying on a very important internal conversation.
Then she stared at me and said, “Ashes.”
“What do you mean, Jo?”
“Ashes. Our marriage was ashes. It turned out in the end to be ashes.”
“He did it for you, Jo—for the money, for the house, for the way you lived, for you, Jo, and what you had been to each other all those years.” I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t believe it. If he did it for anyone other than himself, it was Ginger or Mona. But that was too sad to speak.
“It’s all over. And it’s all ashes. Just like Harry’s ashes on the gravel roadway,” Jo said, and her body began to be racked with chills. I wrapped a blanket around her.
I was beginning to intuit that whatever else was going on, we were performing a wake for Harry Starobin. The old man had burned his own peculiar life in each of us. He was a lover, husband, father, breeder, Merlin. A bizarre man none of us really knew in the end.
I closed my eyes. I could see him rising from the ashes of the roadway—funny, potent, sad, compassionate, inquisitive. And, above all, wise. Was it his supposed wisdom that so infatuated all of us, why we still hung on to his memory like drowning people?
I wanted to leave the house. I wanted to talk to Bushy and Pancho in the cottage. They didn’t like it there.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll turn in before the curfew, Jo.” It had been decided that we would stay together in the living room of the house from the moment it got dark until midnight, and then leave the vigil to the police officers hiding in the barn loft.
Jo nodded. It was fine with her. I left quickly and walked back to the cottage. Poor Pancho. Poor Bushy. All alone in a strange cottage again.
I had just reached the door of the cottage when a scream split the night air.
And then a crack, as if something had been broken in a sound chamber.
I turned, petrified.
I saw lights switching on in the large house and the barn.
Jo was walking toward the barn as fast as she could.
I started to run.
When I reached the barn I saw the police officer crouched against the barn door, blood streaming from a wound on the side of his head. His gun was drawn. He seemed crazed, disoriented.
He shouted at Jo, who was pressing what seemed to be a dish towel against his wound: “I got him! He hit me with a flashlight! But I got him!”
I could now see blood all around in the flickering lights. Blood on the officer. Blood on the barn door. And a trail of red blotches leading from the barn into the overgrown field, as if someone had placed red doilies on the ground.
“Get him,” the officer pleaded, unsteady. “He’s hurt bad. Get him!”
Jo and I walked into the field, holding each other. Then we stopped. Where were we going? It was dark. How could we find him? What would we do if we did find him?
We huddled together. We waited. We stared back at the barn lights.
Something came to us on the night breeze.
It sounded like a cricket. No, it sounded like a night warbler.
No, it was a human sound. A moan. At first we thought it was the wounded policeman, but he was too far away.
We moved toward it, our shoulders touching.
Now we could see something alien in the grass; a heap.
Jo’s foot kicked something metallic.
“Flashlight,” she whispered.
I picked it up and flicked it on, grabbing Jo’s hand with my own free hand.
The heap was a body. Alive. Knees brought up to the chest in pain. A blood-soaked thigh.
We moved closer.
It wasn’t a man. It was a woman. The beam of the flashlight was full force on her face.
I stared in horror at her writhing.
My legs could no longer hold my body. I sank beside her.
I placed my hand on the face of my old friend—Carla Fried.
Then there were sirens. And feet crashing through the field.
People surrounded us, loaded the woman on an aluminum rack, and wheeled her out of the field.
Senay helped me up. Jo was hanging on to a uniformed policeman. I felt affection for Senay—an impossible-to-explain affection.
I said to him very slowly and precisely, “The man who sent her . . . the man who sent others to murder . . . the man who now has the barn cat Veronica and her calico litter . . . is a Canadian millionaire named Thomas Waring.”
Senay said, “Yes, I’ve heard the name.”
I added, “He’s also a patron of the arts,” and then began to laugh hysterically at the dirty little joke. But the laughter died in my throat when I saw someone wrap a blanket around Jo and lead her very slowly and very tentatively out of the field. I was suddenly frightened that she would have to walk over Harry’s ashes to reach the house.
19
“How is Mrs. Starobin?” Senay asked.
“Fine. She’s fine.”
I sat down on the sofa. Jo was upstairs, tucked into bed and sleeping. The first rays of morning sun were beginning to filter through the house.
In front of the rocking chair on which Detective Senay sat was a large paper bag. He reached in, brought out a container of coffee, leaned over, and handed it to me.
Three of the Himalayan cats quickly surrounded the paper bag and inspected it carefully.
“This is out of my own pocket,” he noted ruefully.
Then he reached into the bag again and came out with a toasted corn muffin wrapped in aluminum foil. He handed that to me also.
It was, I suppose, the only way Detective Senay could apologize to me for his past behavior toward me. I wanted to be gracious. I was too exhausted to be anything else.
We sipped our coffee, nibbled our muffins, and stared at each other and at the Himalayans.
Finally he said, “So this woman Carla Fried is a good friend of yours.”
“An old friend,” I replied.
“Well,” he noted, “if she lives, which she probably will, she’ll cut a deal. All she has to do is name her associates��she couldn’t have murdered Starobin and Mona Aspen and the young girl alone. And then finger that Canadian, Waring, as the man who pulled all the strings. When all the smoke clears, she’ll end up doing five years . . . if that.”
“How can we be sure she’ll talk?” I asked.
“Simple. If she doesn’t, we’ll hang an attempted-murder charge against her for attacking the cop in the barn. No, your friend will play ball with us. She has no other option.”
He finished his coffee, crushed the container, and dropped it down beside the paper bag for the cats to play with.
Then he straightened up on the chair. “What’s right is right. You did a helluva job, lady. You broke the case.”
I didn’t respond. He grinned and added, “To be honest, when you set up that calico-kitten trap, I thought you were a stone lunatic.”
He was starting to squirm. Poor Senay.
I closed my eyes. He was right. I had broken the case. But never in my wildest dreams had I suspected Carla Fried.
She had pulled the wool over my eyes completely. I had thought she was visiting me and calling me only because of the part, or because we were old friends . . . but in fact, she was in New York to orchestrate a different kind of drama—murder and theft for her patron.
I had thought she was flying in and out of New York, but all the while she was probably in town, keeping tabs on things, telling her associates just when it was the right time to run her old friend down with a red pickup truck because she was getting too inquisitive.
And I really had no idea why she had done it. Had it been a qu
id pro quo? Had Waring said: I’ll give you 1.5 million dollars for your theater if you do something for me? Or had Waring and she been lovers?
Had the promise of a well-funded independent theater company been so important to Carla that she would participate in murder?
How could she, in fact, have anything to do with a man who was so obviously obsessed with winning at all costs—even horse races?
Why? Why? Why? What made Carla run? Passion? Ambition? The promise of artistic freedom? A whim? Psychosis? All of the above?
The more I thought about it, the more I had to face the nagging, hard-to-accept, but harder-to-deny possibility that Carla Fried was just another talented woman who had been crushed to death by theatrical fantasies . . . who had become so deranged and so confused by the need to achieve something in the theater that she would do anything to fulfill that need. Anything!
“You know,” Senay said quietly, “your crazy friend probably didn’t even know Harry Starobin or Mona Aspen or Ginger Mauch.”
I opened my eyes. He was right. And that was the most pernicious and ugly fact of all.
As for Waring! How obsessed with winning he must have become. And how twisted. With his money, he could have bought the cats from Harry, like others had. But no! Waring had to be the sole possessor of the cats. He had to guarantee exclusivity by having Harry and Mona and Ginger murdered. He had to relish the sense of secret power as his thoroughbreds began to win . . . and only he would know the reason why. His wealth had not brought him virtue or wisdom. It had turned him into a murderous, psychotic fool.
“Maybe she didn’t even like cats,” Senay added.
“She liked my cats.”
“Do you have calico cats?”
“No.”
I stared out the front window of the Starobin house. Amos, the old handyman, was walking slowly up the drive. I shivered and reached for one of the blankets on the sofa. Amos was walking over Harry Starobin’s ashes.
“How about another muffin?” Senay asked, reaching down into the paper bag.
“No thanks.”
“Danish, then?”
“No thanks.”
Senay sighed wearily and commenced to rock.
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 13