Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  And I was aware of Lily. I remembered the feathery kiss she had brushed on to my cheek, and her scent, flowers and perspiration.

  I also remembered Maroney’s suspicions. She could have planned it. He was right. She could have.

  Out on that pond, I didn’t believe it. Nobody who handled a canoe so effortlessly, who honoured so fully the silence of the place and the gentle art of fly casting for evening trout, could be a criminal.

  So we drifted and I cast and I let the darkness absorb me until, inevitably, I struck too hard at a trout that might have been bigger than the others, and the frail leader snapped. I sat there for a moment, letting the limp line trail out on the pond. Then I reeled in.

  ‘Had enough?’ said Lily softly.

  ‘I never get enough of this. Busted off my fly. Too dark to tie another one on.’

  I lit a Winston—my first since I had stepped into the canoe. I always suspected that if I could do nothing but fish I would quit the cigarette habit instantly. I hoped someday to test my theory.

  Lily paddled us slowly back to the dock at the foot of Jeff Newton’s hill. Trout continued to break the surface ahead of us, some of them almost close enough to touch with my rod tip. Occasionally one would burst completely out of the water, and the sound of the splash would ride across the water towards us.

  She eased the canoe alongside the dock. I climbed out and snugged the painter to a ring. Then I held down my hand to Lily. She took it, braced one knee on the dock, and hauled herself out of the canoe. She didn’t let go of my hand. Instead, she tiptoed up and kissed me beside my ear. ‘That was the most fun I’ve had in years,’ she said quietly. ‘For a while out there, I didn’t think of anything except being there. Thank you.’

  ‘They say fishing is the most fun a man can have standing up. I guess that goes for a woman, too.’ I gave her an awkward one-armed hug. ‘You’re an accomplished guide,’ I added. ‘Thanks.’

  She turned and relaxed against me, and I could feel the fronts of her thighs pressing against mine and her breasts soft against my chest. She burrowed her face into the hollow of my throat and muttered something I couldn’t understand. I felt her mouth against my skin. I leaned back and nudged her chin with the crook of my forefinger. She looked up at me. ‘I couldn’t understand what you said,’ I said.

  I heard her chuckle. ‘I said, you really love fishing, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s my passion.’

  ‘I like that. A man with a passion. Most people don’t have a passion.’

  I hugged her. ‘Fishing helps me see things straight. It works as a kind of metaphor for me. A metaphor for life.’

  Her lips pressed against my throat.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think it’s the other way around. Life is a metaphor for fishing.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ she whispered. ‘I understand perfectly.’

  She touched the back of my head with the fingers of one hand, and then her other hand reached up to my neck and she moved against me.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  She tilted back her face and smiled at me and then angled her head so our mouths would meet. I stroked her hair. Her hips pressed against me.

  After a long moment she twisted her mouth away from mine and ducked her head. ‘Oh, boy,’ she whispered into my throat.

  I held her against me, gazing up at the dark sky, suddenly feeling awkward. ‘Oh, boy?’

  She looked up at me. ‘Yeah. Oh, boy. Something wrong with oh, boy?’

  ‘No. Oh, boy is perfect.’ I kissed her again. We dragged it out, improvised a little. I moved my hand up and down her back. I could feel the tenseness of her muscles.

  Standing on a dock by a little Cape Cod kettle pond, holding a woman seemed the natural way to end an evening of fly fishing for trout. But after a few minutes, one either proceeds to the next step or else breaks the embrace. Lily seemed inclined to do neither, so it was I who gently held her by the upper arms and pushed her away from me.

  She looked at me with her head cocked to the side, smiling. Then she shrugged. She picked up the two trout and the paddle and I gathered up the fly-fishing gear and we trudged up the path to the house. We were careful that no parts of our bodies touched along the way.

  When we got back to the house, she disappeared in the direction of her room. When she came back, I was cleaning the trout in the sink. Her face shone as if she had just scrubbed it. She had brushed her hair. The top of her shirt was still unbuttoned. She stood close to me, her hip firm against mine.

  ‘Hi,’ she said softly.

  I nodded. ‘Look at this.’

  I slit the belly of one of the fish from anus to pectorals, hooked out the entrails with my forefinger, and then pricked the stomach with the tip of the knife. I sorted out the bits of matter that burst out and showed them to her. ‘Damselfly nymphs,’ I said. ‘They were gorging.’

  Women, in my experience, have stronger stomachs than men, but the residual chauvinist in me still assumes that when they are shown the entrails of a fresh-caught trout they will avert their eyes, perhaps gag, or at least say, ‘Yuck! Gross!’

  Lily reached into the sink and poked at the gunk with her forefinger. ‘There’s other stuff in here, too,’ she said.

  ‘Sure. A few mayflies. Lots of midges. Diptera, to us entomologists. Mainly, though, these big things. The damselflies. That dry fly I was using they must’ve mistaken for emerging adults.’

  She looked up at me and grinned. ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘We anglers like to understand what’s going on.’

  ‘It seems like magic to me.’

  ‘Juju,’ I said. It was the African word Jeff often used. ‘All fishermen believe in juju.’

  ‘Lots of juju out there tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Look, Lily—’

  She smiled. Sadly, I thought. ‘For a while there I didn’t even think about Jeff, or the jaguars, or anything. Except…’

  ‘There’s all kinds of magic,’ I said. She frowned, so I added, ‘Once I found the filter from a cigarette in a trout’s stomach. A Parliament, it was. I caught him on a Red Quill. Looks nothing like a cigarette filter. After that, I had to believe in juju. Skill just wouldn’t explain it.’

  She shrugged and nodded. We weren’t talking about the same thing at all. I rinsed out the belly cavities of the two fish, dabbed them dry with paper towels, wrapped them in sticky plastic paper, and put them into the refrigerator. Then I washed my hands.

  ‘Nightcap?’ said Lily.

  ‘Sure.’

  We took our glasses of Old Granddad and ice on to the patio. Somehow, on top of the hill far from the water, it seemed different. The mosquitoes still zizzed and the night birds swooped and the traffic swished in the distance. But the stars looked dimmer than they had from the pond, and up there on the hilltop a breeze sifted through the pines, bearing on its currents the aroma of salt fog from the sea.

  It was different. Different juju.

  We sat apart and stared up at the sky and didn’t talk. I smoked. Once in a while Lily slapped at a mosquito.

  I heard ice cubes click against her teeth. She sighed and stood up, ‘Bed for me.’

  ‘I guess I’ll sit awhile longer,’ I said.

  She bent and kissed my forehead. ‘Night,’ she murmured.

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘I had fun.’

  ‘Me, too. Thanks.’

  I lit another cigarette, telling myself it would be my last of the day. I watched a cloud drift across the face of the moon. I thought about the theft of the jaguars. It could not have been a random housebreak. It must have been what Maroney had called an inside job. But who? Lily? The doctor, Sauerman? Jeff himself? There were no other candidates that I knew of. Except me.

  None of them, I concluded. Everybody on the Cape probably knew about the jaguars. Word gets around. Dr Sauerman, or the meter reader, or the exterminator, one of them would mention it to a stranger at a party in Sandwich, who’d tell the guy who rep
laced his muffler in Barnstable, who’d pass the story of the golden jaguars and the vicious Dobermans and the old invalid and the sexy housekeeper on to the boys on the bowling team in Falmouth.

  It could have been anybody. To suspect Sauerman himself, or Lily, or me—that was naïve and simplistic.

  But somebody had smashed in Jeff’s skull, and someone had held a knife to my throat, and the fear I had felt remained with me. I realized it was mingling with anger, and I knew that was a dangerous sign.

  Let go of it, Coyne, I told myself. Chalk it up.

  Good advice, I replied. But hard to follow.

  I crunched what was left of the ice in my drink between my molars and went into the house. Lily had left the lights on for me. I put the glass in the sink, brushed my teeth in the bathroom, shut off the lights, and went to bed. I closed my eyes and drifted on thoughts of rainbow trout sucking in white-winged dry flies and Lily’s soft, eager mouth and the way the canoe rode on the pond’s liquid surface and the smooth curve of her back, and I began to float, only it seemed as if it were on her liquid skin…

  The click of the doorlatch sounded like a gunshot. It yanked me up from the beginning of my descent into sleep, reminding me all at once of a knife at my throat and the taste of fear. ‘Who is it?’ I said loudly.

  The door cracked open. I saw her shape against the dim light in the hallway. She was still wearing jeans and flannel shirt.

  ‘Lily. For Christ sake.’

  The door opened wider. Her shadowy form entered. The door closed. I sensed rather than saw her move towards me.

  ‘Go away,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. I felt her rump hard against my hip when she sat beside me. Her hand touched my face, and she bent and kissed me softly on the mouth. Then she stood up.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just want to be held. Do you mind?’

  ‘I suppose I could handle that.’

  ‘Then for Christ sake don’t talk anymore.’

  She unbuttoned her shirt and dropped it on to the floor. Then she sat beside me and shucked off her pants. She stood up again. She was still wearing her bra and panties. She fumbled for the covers. Her skin slicked against mine as she slid in beside me.

  She burrowed against me, one arm over my hip. I kissed her throat.

  ‘Just hold me is all,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said.

  She burrowed and squirmed against me. I trailed my hand down her back, over her rump. I could feel her muscles tense as I touched them.

  She moved her head. Her mouth was soft against my jaw. She kissed my mouth and pushed against me. Her nails dug into my shoulders. My hand moved along her back. ‘When I was a kid,’ I said into her hair, ‘I could unsnap these things one-handed.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

  Afterward, we held each other for a long time, until I felt myself twitch and I knew I had been drifting into sleep.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘Did I kick you?’

  She kissed my throat. ‘It’s OK. Sleep.’

  I hitched myself into a half-sitting position with the pillow bunched under my neck. ‘I think I was dreaming,’ I said. ‘Someone was coming at me with a knife.’

  ‘Aw,’ she said. She rubbed my chest.

  ‘I didn’t know Jeff rode bikes,’ I said.

  ‘Bikes?’

  ‘Motorcycles.’

  ‘Me neither,’ she said.

  ‘He did. There’s one in the shed.’

  ‘Must’ve been a long time ago.’

  She adjusted herself against me. She was making a purring sound against my shoulder. I stroked her back.

  ‘Tell me about your husband, Lily.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What was his name? What did he do? What happened?’

  ‘It wasn’t a husband,’ she murmured. ‘It was just a man. His name was Martin Lodi and he wasn’t very good for me and it was a long time ago. He’s all gone now.’

  ‘Dumb guy.’

  ‘Dumb lady,’ she said.

  I woke up suddenly and all at once. Lily was gone and grey light suffused the room. Just outside my window a bobwhite whistled, a human sound, easily imitated. I got up and went to the window. Fog blurred the trees. It was hard to guess what time it was. The bobwhite sat under a pine outside, strutting and pecking among the needles. I whistled to him once through the screen. He lifted his head quickly and peered around. Then he resumed strutting and pecking. I watched him until he wandered out of sight among the trees. Then I went back to bed.

  I lay there, cradling my head in my hands, staring at the ceiling. I thought about making love to Lily. I couldn’t remember when we stopped and when I had gone to sleep. Then I remembered Jeff and the stolen jaguars, and how those two men had come into my bedroom and pricked my throat and sliced my collarbone with their knife and taped my hands to the bed and slapped that big band of tape across my mouth and frightened the piss out of me before they gratuitously smashed the side of my head.

  And all the anger and indignation that had been simmering in me for two days bubbled over.

  You see things with particular clarity in the very early morning when you first wake up after having made love to a beautiful woman.

  Jeff was going to die.

  Tondo and Ngwenya, nasty animals that they were, didn’t deserve to be murdered.

  Maroney and the Orleans police and perhaps the state police would all go through their motions. When Jeff died, they’d approach it differently, but that would probably take a while. By then it would be too late. The trail would be too fuzzy to follow. Crimes like this, I knew, were rarely solved, except by luck.

  And Lily—maybe Maroney was right. Maybe she had set up the burglary. Maybe she had left the gate unlocked, and maybe it was she who advised the two intruders to shoot Tondo and Ngwenya and slit their throats and then tape me up and scare me with a knife and hit me on the head. And, if necessary, to hit Jeff hard enough that he’d never be able to tell what he had seen.

  Maybe she thought if she came to me in the night I would not pursue it. If she could make me love her, I would not suspect her.

  The longer I lay there thinking about it, the angrier I became. I wanted to pursue it. Not for Jeff. For me. Somehow, it had become personal.

  I recognized it as a decision, and that recognition allowed the anger to metamorphose into its mature form—something like stubbornness, or commitment, or resolution. I still visualized holding a knife at a man’s throat until he wet his pants. That was the anger in its immature stage. But it was a vision I wanted to hang on to. I didn’t think that would be a problem.

  I would find out all I could about Lily.

  Finally I padded into the bathroom and took a long hot shower. Then I shut off the hot faucet and forced myself to stay under the water for a full count of sixty, going one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two… This was my daily—and, on a good day, my only—exercise of willpower.

  I shaved and dressed. Then I packed up my stuff and lugged it out into the kitchen. It was twenty minutes after five. I switched on the coffee machine. I found a piece of paper and a pencil and sat at the table.

  ‘Lily,’ I wrote. ‘I’m going to practise doing it one-handed. I’m heading back. Keep me posted on the Hunter. I’m borrowing a coffee mug. You get to eat both trout. Be well. Brady.’

  I put the note in the middle of the table. The coffee machine had finished chugging. I poured a mugful and, balancing it carefully in one hand, gathered up my fishing gear and overnight bag in the other and left the house.

  The paddles and cushions were still on the porch where we had left them in the dark. I put my stuff down and gathered up the boating gear. I could save Lily one chore, anyway.

  I took them around back to the shed. When I opened the door, I could see more clearly than I had the previous night. I wedged myself between the lawn mower and the wheelbarrow and leaned over the motorcycle to return the p
addles and cushions to their places.

  Out of curiosity I folded the canvas off the motorcycle. It was a big Harley. Powerful and fast. Just like Jeff, I thought. He’d want a big hog between his legs.

  As I tugged the canvas back down over the rear of the bike, I noticed the licence plate. Montana.

  CHAPTER 7

  COLLECT PHONE CALLS FROM Montana. Now Jeff’s motorcycle. It probably had no bearing on what had happened to Jeff and his jaguars. But it made me realize I knew less about my old client than I had thought.

  I headed out on 6A. The traffic wasn’t bad on the way back to the city. I listened to Beethoven and tried to ponder the questions of wills and estates I would face at the office. The more miles I put between myself and Quashnet Lane, the easier it became.

  I pulled into the parking garage under my apartment a little before seven-thirty. I changed my clothes and made it to the office by eight-thirty.

  Monday morning. Another week.

  I was on my second mug of coffee when Julie came in. Nine o’clock on the button, as usual. She glowered at me. Her morning face. I poured coffee for her, stirred in one sugar, no cream, and placed it on her desk. She sat down, wrapped both hands around her mug, lifted it about an inch off her desktop, and lowered her face to it. She alternated blowing and sipping for several minutes. When she looked up at me she was no longer glowering. But she did frown. There’s a difference, at least when Julie does it.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your mirror must’ve been all steamed up this morning. You nicked yourself.’

  I touched my throat. ‘Oh, that’s a knife wound.’