The Death of Blue Mountain Cat

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “Why did you go to the reception?”

  “To see him. He’d been avoiding me—we used to be lovers, before he met that belagana bitch.”

  Thinnes waited.

  “I just wanted to see him—you know?” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I wanted to see what he was doing artistically. I was out of town when he had his last show. He used to do tourist stuff when we were together—Arizona Highways landscapes, stereotyped Indian portraits, that kind of crap. I wanted to see how he could get rich and famous doing that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure! He sold shit to suckers.”

  “You know who killed him?”

  “No.”

  “Who might have wanted to?”

  “Anyone who knew him well.” Thinnes waited. “He had this way of making everything your fault. Nothing was ever his fault. He’d drive you to the edge of distraction, then ask you why you were upset.”

  “Specifically, who might have wanted him dead?”

  “How about that developer he made fun of?”

  “Wingate?”

  “Yes. The publicity he was getting can’t have been helping his business.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “It’s the custom of my people, when someone is being—like he who was killed—to avoid him. Whoever did it wasn’t one of us.”

  “How long ago were you and he an item?”

  “Five years ago. For a summer. Then she got her hooks into him and it was good night, Irene. To give her credit, though, I think she loved him. I think she’d have killed for him. And she could do more for him than I could have.” There was a grudging tone to the last sentence that made what she said sound true.

  “When was the last time you talked to him—prior to Thursday night?”

  “When he told me he was dumping me for that belagana.”

  Thinnes remembered what Caleb had asked Bisti’s mother. “What was the significance of Blue Mountain Cat? Why a cat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there such a thing as a blue mountain cat?”

  “It would have to be a cougar. Blue Mountain is Tsodzil, in New Mexico. I have no idea what significance it had for him.”

  “Why a mountain lion?”

  She shrugged. “I would have thought he’d have chosen a coyote.”

  After she’d left Thinnes said, “So if you can’t be Navajo unless you live in Navajo land, what’s Irene Yellow doing in Chicago?”

  “The pot calling the kettle black,” Oster said. “Why don’t we get her back and ask her?”

  “Next time. We haven’t dealt with this Ivan character yet. Let’s get that over with.”

  “You want me to go pick him up?”

  “Sure.”

  According to the receptionist, Jack Caleb was with a patient when Thinnes called, but he rang back within fifteen minutes. When they’d gotten past the hellos, Thinnes asked, “What more can you tell me about this Ivan?”

  “I don’t know him very well. He writes reviews for several art magazines that I know of, and serves on the boards of a number of nonprofit corporations. He manages to get in the society pages.”

  “What kind of reviews does he write?”

  “Witty but brutal.”

  “Bisti, too?”

  “I don’t recall. But I don’t remember ever reading a positive review. In his own way, he’s as much of a satirist as David was, and as skilled at manipulating perception.”

  “Where can I get one of his reviews?”

  “I subscribe to a research service that’s pretty efficient. I could have them fax you something.”

  Thinnes said, “Thanks,” and gave him the fax number. “Yellow made the argument that no one would’ve bought Bisti’s stuff if he hadn’t claimed to be an Indian. What about that?”

  “‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ And I don’t buy that ‘he wasn’t born here’ argument. Joseph Conrad—one of the greatest writers of English prose—was born in Poland.” There was a short pause, then Caleb added, “No. David’s work is brilliant satire, and the fact that it infuriates both Navajos and whites indicates he had a foot securely on each continent.”

  Thirty-Three

  “Barbaric waste of talent,” Ivan said when he’d accepted a cup of coffee and was seated in an interview room. Ivan the Terrible. Male Cauc, five seven, maybe 180 pounds. He had blue eyes and thinning brown hair—with blond highlights, Thinnes noted sourly. His three-piece suit was flamboyant but expensive. His shirt was silk. His tie, hand painted with flowers. He’d thrown his raccoon coat over one of the chairs.

  Thinnes had trouble thinking of him as a man, though there was certainly nothing feminine about him. He seemed to use the stereotypical limp wrist as a weapon—an offensive one. Likewise the coy tilting of his head and his mincing walk.

  His reviews had arrived twenty minutes before the man himself, so Thinnes had had time to skim them before Oster brought him in. Caleb hadn’t exaggerated his negativity. Even a recommendation—like the one he’d given Bisti’s work—came out as a put-down. It was even more obnoxious than the way he flaunted being gay.

  Oster had elected to watch the interview from a distance—behind the two-way mirror, so Thinnes was on his own. He took a seat facing the reviewer and said, “I read your piece on David Bisti.” The coffee must’ve been to give Ivan something to do with his hands; he wasn’t drinking it. “I didn’t think you liked his stuff.”

  Ivan pretended surprise, exaggerated it. “My dear, you didn’t think I was referring to his artistic abilities!”

  He was doing it to make Thinnes uncomfortable, and he decided to call him on it. “What abilities were you referring to?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” The flippancy masked enormous tension.

  “Try me.” When he didn’t, Thinnes said, “Tell me about your relationship with David Bisti.”

  “Purely professional, alas. He created things; I reviewed them.”

  “You ever proposition him?”

  “I?”

  Thinnes looked around the room as if to see who else Ivan might have thought he meant.

  Ivan said, “Of course not.” A lie. He wasn’t good at it.

  “What happened when you propositioned him?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Did he laugh at you?”

  “How dare you?” Thinnes raised his eyebrows. “I came in here to offer my help and you insult me!”

  Thinnes stifled the urge to laugh. “Cut the crap. You came in here because Detective Oster brought you in. Save your—” He stopped himself before he said “fucking faggot routine.” Not politically correct. And in a city with as many gay registered voters as Chicago has, career suicide. “Save your injured-innocence act for your fans. We both know you propositioned Bisti.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want to know what you can tell me about David Bisti?”

  “He was a minor talent who could have made it. If he hadn’t gotten himself murdered, he might have lived long enough to develop a following and create a body of work that’d outlast him.”

  The statement, or maybe the way he said it, gave Thinnes a reason for Ivan’s vicious “reviews.” Envy. Envy for artistic talent. Maybe even envy for straight men. The insight didn’t make Thinnes dislike Ivan any less, but it made playing head games with him seem as mean-spirited as poking at a snapping turtle with a stick.

  Thinnes said, “That’s more like it.”

  And while envy is an occasional motive for murder, he thought, there’s no evidence it was the motive in this case.

  As if reading his mind, Ivan said, “Were you seriously thinking I might have killed David?” When Thinnes didn’t answer, he slapped the air in Thinnes’s direction with a limp-wristed hand and said, “Please. If I were going to kill someone, I’d use gas or poison—something less messy.”

  Thirty-Four

  When Caleb entered his condo, there was a yellow Post-it note
stuck to the wall near the door, above the alarm panel.

  Dear Dr. C. Einstein attacked my ankles today. I think he’s bored. You should consider getting him a friend. L

  “L” was Lucile, Caleb’s housekeeper. She could never remember Freud’s name and called him Einstein because Caleb had once told her the Freud was a genius. Caleb’s Freud didn’t seem to mind.

  Caleb waved the note at the cat, who was perched on the chair back nearest the door. “What about this?”

  Freud batted at the paper, tentatively at first, with one front paw, then ferociously, sitting up on his hind legs to grab it with both. He seized it with his teeth and bounced to the floor with it, mauling it, and rolling on the floor to disembowel it with all four feet. Then he streaked behind the chair and pounced, from the other side, on the unsuspecting paper, savaging it again.

  “Freud,” Caleb said, “I think Lucile’s diagnosis is correct.”

  The fact of his sexuality wasn’t constantly uppermost in Caleb’s mind, nor did it color many of his casual relationships. He met men he found attractive whom he simply recognized as off-limits because they were straight or committed. And there were many he discounted because they were seriously flawed—something he was perhaps quicker to notice because of his profession. He recognized that he hadn’t found an intimate because he wasn’t looking, hadn’t even been haunting places where he might be seen. He didn’t frequent bars, in fact, hadn’t been in one since before Christopher died. He was becoming like one of his female patients, who read romances and dreamed of tall, dark strangers appearing—like the answer to prayer—to solve her problems and give her drab life meaning. Magical thinking. He would never meet anyone by hiding out in his comfortable routine. And if he wanted to alleviate his awful loneliness, he would have to meet someone.

  Not that his social life was lacking. He was often invited out. Couples asked him when they had an extra lady guest, male colleagues frequently asked him to squire their wives, happy he wouldn’t seduce them. And he liked women, eighty-year-old grandmothers no less than teenaged ingenues. He enjoyed escorting most of them. But they didn’t fill his needs.

  Saturday, he forced himself to go out despite his misgivings. It took him all afternoon to get up the nerve.

  The bar was on Clark, the northeast corner of an X-shaped intersection. He’d been there before, but not for years. Even as he was walking in, he felt great resistance. But what could happen? Some guy might make a pass? Wasn’t that what he was hoping for? Some regular patron might challenge his right to enter? He could deal with confrontation. And the bar was a public accommodation. They’d serve even the most obnoxious homophobe if he didn’t start a fight.

  He stopped inside the door to analyze his reluctance. He recognized the illogic of his situation. He’d traveled some distance and set aside an afternoon to meet people, but couldn’t cross the room to make the final connection. He hadn’t thought of himself as shy since the service. After ’Nam, he’d thought he could face anything. But if merely talking to someone was so difficult, getting to the point—to intimacy—seemed a light-year distant.

  Two men were playing darts. The bar was moderately full. Its patrons were integrated, assorted, mostly male, mostly in their twenties or early thirties. A few glanced at him, most didn’t notice his arrival.

  The decor was Southwestern—cowboy boots and cow skulls, Indian artifacts and old photographs. The music was contemporary and not unbearably loud, the ventilation good—air decent despite a number of smokers. Caleb made his way around the zigzag-shaped bar and took a stool between a papier-mâché totem pole and a woman wearing a man’s shirt and suit jacket over Levi’s. As he took Caleb’s order, the bartender—cheerful, middle-aged but well kept—seemed almost too eager to please.

  While he waited for his beer, Caleb studied the patrons. A dozen men flanked the north side of the bar in groups of two and three. A young black man in a dashiki leaned on the video game by the men’s room, talking to an older black man wearing a Bulls jacket. Two women were playing pool in the back of the room, while waitresses hustled back and forth between the bar and the adjoining restaurant. A man with dark-framed glasses sat by the south window, watching passersby out on the street. And an urban cowboy sat at the bar with his back to the window and his arms around his lover.

  The couple made him think of Christopher.

  He was still discovering what he’d lost when he’d lost Chris. Before that, he’d been able to walk into a strange place and, without hesitation, initiate conversations with strangers. Losing Christopher, he’d lost the feeling that he was unique, that he was loved and treasured by one special person. He was liked well enough, now, by those who knew him, but he was indispensable to no one.

  The bartender put a beer and a smile in front of Caleb, then began simultaneously mixing two tall, exotic drinks. The woman sitting next to Caleb watched with the avidity of Freud stalking birds. She had short, dark hair, thick glasses, and cat earrings by Laurel Burch. Caleb watched her twist her Sharps around in her hands as she visually fondled everyone and everything in the bar. She emptied the bottle and left a dollar for the bartender as she departed.

  Before the door closed on her, a familiar figure swung it wide and entered like Melodrama, wearing a full-length raccoon coat. Ivan.

  He minced his way across the room and took the seat the woman had vacated, gesturing to the bartender before giving Caleb a supercilious inspection. “So-ooo I was right about you. The great Dr. C is one of us after all.”

  “Just a bit of the continent.”

  Ivan slipped out of the coat and let it fall back over the bar stool. “Oh, don’t go literary on me.”

  “Well, then drop the flaming-faggot routine and let me buy you a drink.”

  “I never pass up a freebie.”

  “It’s not free.” Caleb leaned into the angle between Ivan and the bar. “I want something.”

  “Me, I hope.” He gave the bartender his order and turned back to give Caleb a simpering smile.

  Caleb ignored it. “I want to know how David Bisti got a showing at the museum.”

  “Oh, that.”

  They both watched the bartender mix Ivan’s drink—an electric-blue concoction—and set it in front of him. Caleb pushed a ten-dollar bill toward the barman, who smiled and nodded and deducted the price.

  When he’d moved away, Ivan told Caleb, “A brilliant bit of misdirection, my dear.”

  Caleb waited.

  “I showed Andrews the brochure Anita made up for the show at her gallery and let him believe that Blue Mountain Cat was still in his Arizona Highways period.”

  “Why go out of your way to promote David?”

  “Cultivating my investment. I do own more of his work than anyone, including the widow.”

  It made sense. Gushing on paper about an artist in whose works he’d invested would destroy his carefully crafted reputation for impartial, critical savagery. Instead, he’d guaranteed priceless free publicity by setting up a situation that was bound to cause controversy. A brilliant strategy.

  “Naturally, if you quote me, I’ll deny it.”

  “Naturally.” Caleb sat back and sipped his beer, then said, “I wouldn’t think this was your sort of venue.”

  Ivan smiled, then leaned around him to speak to a waitress handing in drink orders on the other side of the totem pole. He pointed to a sign by the restaurant door—PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED—and told her, “My dear, I’m waiting.”

  She was a petite, conventionally attractive brunette. As she raised an eyebrow at Ivan, she seemed to be trying not to laugh. “Sure thing, hon.” She took her drinks from the bartender and went back in the restaurant.

  Ivan continued talking to Caleb as if without interruption. “It most definitely is not my kind of place. But the sweet young thing I’m dining with won’t go near my watering hole.”

  “What would that be?”

  “My dear, if you have to ask, you’re too young…” He took a sip of his dr
ink, managing to put the maximum of sexual innuendo into the gesture. Then, leaving the nearly full glass on the bar, he picked up his fur, said, “Ciao,” and minced out. When Caleb turned back around, there was a new occupant on the next stool. Another acquaintance. Rick Patrick.

  Nodding in the direction Ivan had taken, Rick said, “A perfect example of ‘What’s the use?’” He was wearing a turtleneck and slacks instead of a dress shirt and tie. He looked even more like a model for Dockers. Stunning. Too good to be true. Caleb felt a sensation akin to decelerating sharply in an elevator. His mind fogged and he could almost see the nervous vibes he was emitting. He took a deep breath.

  Rick was saying, “Do you come here often?”

  Caleb shook his head then forced himself to say, “No. First time in a long time.”

  “Serendipity, then,” Rick said.

  To Caleb’s amazement, he seemed content to be making small talk. And he was attending closely to the conversation and to Caleb, not cruising the bar visually, not—apparently—marking time until someone more appealing wandered in. Caleb was almost flattered. But Rick had made it clear at their first meeting that he had an agenda, so Caleb withheld judgment and observed his own discomfort—the dissonance between what he wanted and what he believed possible—with proper scientific detachment.

  “I haven’t been here in years,” Rick continued.

  “What’s special about today?”

  “Luck?” He smiled, and Caleb imagined his own blood pressure rising. “I had an interview not far from here, and nothing special to do tonight. So I thought, what the hell…”

  “And you spotted me and thought you might still get an interview?” Caleb observed his own alarm at the prospect and could see that Rick noticed it, too.

  “Are all shrinks so paranoid?” He smiled.

  “Why do you ask?” Caleb rolled his eyes from side to side as if looking for enemies.

  Rick laughed. Other drinkers looked—stared actually. Caleb didn’t blame them. He felt as if he’d won the office football pool. Rick was easily the most beautiful man in the bar.