Bellingham Mysteries 3: Black Cat Ink

by Nicole Kimberling

  The ride home was cold and damp. Slivers of light mist hung over the winding, narrow road, obscuring the tops of the cedars flanking either side of Chuckanut Drive. The asphalt glistened with a sheen of treacherous moisture. Outside of town an eerie quiet settled in.

  As Peter made his way through the fog, he thought more on the idea of Hell House and of Shawn’s dealer. The thing about Satanists is that they do not just spring forth from the earth out of nowhere. Satanists believed, by definition, in the Christian universe and therefore might easily be former or lapsed Christians. It then followed that if anyone were likely to know the identity of Whatcom County’s Satanists—either genuine or simply poseurs trying to be provocative—it would probably be the regular churchgoers.

  Peter deliberately stopped himself from following this line of reasoning. He already had two articles he needed to write, and neither of them included Satanists.

  He pedaled onward into the gloaming, thoughts growing darker and returning, in spite of all his efforts not to allow it, to Satanists. He didn’t believe in Satan, but what if a person did? What might they do? Would they, for example, skin a cat?

  Peter’s musings, like the evening, grew so dark and the shadows so deep that the supernatural seemed easily within grasp. Peter would not have been surprised to see the Headless Horseman rounding the next bend.

  Instead, he saw a red Miata turning out of his own driveway. The car darted onto the open road directly into his path. Peter squeezed his brakes, skidded, and ditched his bike on the roadside, just a yard away from the Miata’s back wheel. The driver of the car, a gray-haired man in late middle age, never even looked at him as he sped away.

  Peter picked himself up, knocked the damp pine needles off his pants, and checked his bike for damage. Nothing seemed broken. He walked his bike the rest of the way up the hill.

  The moment he stepped through the door into the foyer, he called, “Do you know who was driving that Miata?”

  “His name is Bradley. He was here about the insurance claim for Untitled Five,” Nick responded from the living room.

  Like the rest of the house, the living room was a tall, airy space comprised of birch and stone. The vast expanse of an eight-by-twelve-foot De Kamp abstract dominated the far wall. Two-story windows lined the wall facing out toward the ocean. Peter had always thought this must give passing boats a nice view of their Spartan interior design.

  Not that anyone on a boat could see through this fog.

  Being an artist, De Kamp had understood scale. So since there was a huge painting and expansive windows, there was also a leather couch large enough to be a minor geological structure and a silk rug large enough to conceal at least two Cleopatras.

  Other, smaller pieces—sculptures and small paintings—lined the birch ledge that was the room’s only shelf.

  Nick lounged on the gigantic sofa with a sketchbook in his lap and an open bottle of ink on the side table next to him. Also beside Nick on the sofa was a chewed and mangled shoelace of mysterious origin.

  “He almost ran over me.”

  Nick looked up, gave him the once-over. “Are you okay?”

  “I had to ditch, but the shoulder was soft.” Peter shrugged. “You’d think a guy in the insurance industry would try harder to avoid hitting cyclists.”

  Nick went back to sketching. “Speaking of insurance, you might want to know that the cat clawed a hole in the corner of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar painting.”

  Peter looked down at the kitten, who sat innocently licking her front paw as if she could taste the money on it. Then she blinked and mewed and stalked over toward Nick with a bouncy lack of guile that triggered Peter’s protective instincts. He swooped her up in his hand just as she was extending her needlelike claws toward Nick’s pant leg.

  Nick gave him a brief glance. “How long did the vet say it would be until she’s recovered?”

  “She said that it would depend on the next couple of days.” Peter shoved her inside his jacket, as if removing her from Nick’s field of vision could make him forget about both the damaged painting and the kitten’s existence.

  Nick drew in a deep breath and laid his dip pen aside. “I guess we should take some steps to make sure she doesn’t destroy anything else. Want to give me a hand?”

  “With what?” Deep inside his jacket, the kitten let out a tiny, frustrated mew and then sank her claws into his right nipple, causing him to crumple forward and lose his grip.

  The kitten was away, boinging down across the great room clearly intent on some new misadventure. Peter rubbed his chest and tried to ignore the fact that Nick was smirking at him.

  “I’m going to move this painting to the studio. And I should probably get most of this other stuff out of here too.” Nick indicated the objects that lined the shallow shelves with a wave. “I think the more fragile pieces will be safer there.”

  He helped Nick maneuver De Kamp’s canvas into the guest room, understanding for the first time why De Kamp had designed the house with ten-foot doorways. Then they collected the small fortune of art objects, paintings, and miniatures and secured them as well. When they returned to the great room, Peter saw that the kitten had found a way to get up on the ledge and was stalking along, attacking the dust bunnies that had been accumulating behind one of the larger paintings.

  Nick regarded her levelly and remarked, “I somehow knew she’d find a way up there.”

  Peter repatriated the kitten to the floor. “What about this carpet?”

  “I figure since she’s already thrown up on it a couple of times, it might as well stay where it is,” Nick said.

  “She—” Peter stopped himself from arguing their tiny houseguest’s case, opting for a simpler approach. “I’m really sorry.”

  Nick shrugged, his expression softening for the first time. “It’s all right. She’s just a baby. And it’s just a carpet. I also decided to give her an interim name so that I’d have something to yell apart from No.”

  “What are you calling her?” Peter picked up the shoelace and attempted to engage the kitten’s attention.

  “Guerilla Girl.”

  “That’s not a very ladylike name.”

  “She’s not a very ladylike cat. And anyway, I call her Gigi for short.”

  “Why are you calling her Gorilla Girl? ’Cause she’s a little monkey?” Peter pulled the shoelace again, but not fast enough. Gigi had it in her maw and was viciously assaulting it with all four limbs.

  “It’s guerilla, like the Central American freedom fighter. The Guerilla Girls are a feminist pop-artist collective. This is one of their T-shirts.” Nick straightened so that Peter could read his shirt.

  In large letters it read DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO THE MET. MUSEUM?

  It featured a recumbent woman wearing a gorilla mask, and noted, in smaller text, that although less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern Art section were women, they accounted for 85 percent of the nudes.

  While Peter didn’t know if the kitten had any strong political feelings, feminist or otherwise, he couldn’t deny that Gigi was a pretty cute name.

  Plus it had the advantage of giving him an excuse to perform his Maurice Chevalier impression. He picked up the kitten and began to croon, “Thank heaven for lee-ttle girls, for lee-ttle girls get bigger every day.”

  Nick raised an eyebrow. “That’s the gayest, most old-man move I’ve ever seen you make.”

  “Singing?”

  “Singing a song from Gigi.”

  “I’d have gone for Lady Gaga, but this cat doesn’t really have that much of a ‘Poker Face.’” Peter let the squirming creature go, and she moved immediately to reengage her mortal enemy, the shoelace.

  Nick nodded. “She knows what she wants and goes to any length to get it. Kind of like you.”

  Peter couldn’t tell if that had been meant to be a compliment. Then again, he also couldn’t tell if Nick liked the cat, so he said, “Thanks… I think.”

  “It’
s not like I haven’t benefited from the frank and open single-mindedness of your pursuit.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “It’s true. I would have never had the guts to walk up to you and ask you out cold,” Nick said. “I would have overthought it and choked.”

  “Was it because you were covered in blood when we met? Because I would have overlooked that, given the circumstances.”

  “You think I’m being condescending, but you don’t know. I’ve never asked a guy out on a date.”

  Peter blinked. How was that even possible? Granted, Nick was handsome enough that he’d probably had customers lined up all his life, but still…

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “You haven’t, even once, asked anyone out ever?” Peter could not conceal the incredulity in his voice.

  “That’s not what I said. I’ve never asked a guy out. I’ve asked out plenty of girls just fine. It’s easy to ask someone out when you don’t really care if they say no.” As if too embarrassed to look him in the eye, Nick grabbed the shoelace and tugged gently at it. Gigi went into a sharklike killing frenzy.

  Peter considered Nick’s words. “I guess I forget that you weren’t out for a long time.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Not till you met Walter, I guess.”

  “Not even then.” Nick caught Gigi just as she was about to fall off the sofa, plunking her back on her tiny feet. She hopped down and went to stare fixedly at a spot on the carpet.

  “I don’t get it. I thought everybody knew about you two, and that’s why you were involved in the investigation into Walter’s death.” It was a subject Peter hated to bring up but couldn’t make himself give up on either.

  De Kamp had been nearly forty years Nick’s senior. After he had developed pancreatic cancer, Nick had allegedly assisted in his suicide, an act of compassion that had made him, for a time, a suspect in a murder investigation.

  “I guess it depends on what you mean by the word ‘everyone.’ Everyone didn’t include Walter’s family or anyone outside of his inner circle in Manhattan.”

  “But you lived with him. Didn’t his wife know?”

  “His wife lived in the Hamptons because she felt the city was unsafe. His sons are both older than me, so they were living their own lives elsewhere. Walter stayed at his studio in the city to work. I’m sure Walter’s wife knew he had a lover, but not that it was me,” Nick said. “I’m fairly certain she thought it was his agent, Felicity.”

  “And his wife didn’t wonder why he was building a huge, expensive house out on the west coast?”

  Nick smiled ruefully. “I think it’s fair to assume that she didn’t know he was building the Castle.”

  “How is that even possible? Didn’t she look at the bank account and think to herself, ‘Now, that’s odd…’”

  “Well, first, not everyone in the world is as nosy as you are.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as inveterately curious,” Peter interrupted primly. “Especially about what other people are doing and why.”

  Nick cracked a wide smile at that, but the smile soon became tinged with a sort of sadness that Peter didn’t comprehend. More than that, it hurt him to see Nick smile that way. He focused on Gigi, who had decided to lie down in order to stare at the carpet spot in a more relaxed, long-term manner. When he looked back to Nick, his lover seemed far away. Probably lost in some melancholy, sepia-tinged memory of the good times. And seeing Nick look like that, Peter found that his curiosity suddenly left him. He didn’t want to hear about those good times when he hadn’t needed to think about money or the damage incurred by somebody else’s highly destructive cat.

  Peter’s internal monologue became morbid.

  Years after the death of Walter De Kamp, Nick Olson was forced once more to confront the deep and everlasting internal pain of being cruelly separated from his one true love. Shacking up with broke reporter Peter Fontaine was not enough to ease him. No amount of consistent sex and reliable light dinner conversation could match the true communication one artist could have with another.

  Blinking, Peter forced himself to stop this morose internal typing. Maybe he should just find a reason to get out, get some space. Maybe go to Evangeline’s house and drink a bottle of pinot grigio. He was about to propose this very action when Nick said, “I was going to leave him, you know.”

  Peter blinked again, as if by doing so he could replay what he thought Nick had just said to make sure he’d heard correctly. Because that’s not how conversations work, he was forced to ask, “Come again?”

  “I was going to leave Walter. I’d gone to an artist’s retreat to work and just to try and get some perspective on my life. While I was there I made up my mind to break it off. I realized that even though he loved me, he was never going to see me as his equal, and I needed that.”

  “Everyone needs that.”

  Nick cracked a crooked smile. “Not really. But I did, and so I had made my decision. Then when I came back, he told me that he had been diagnosed and had about a year to live.” Nick stared at the blank wall in front of him. “He was afraid. I think he knew that I wasn’t happy and that if I left, he’d die alone. He told me he’d changed his will to leave me his artistic estate. Essentially, he bought me.”

  “I don’t want to seem insensitive here, but again I’d like to point out that he could have gone home to his wife. You know, the one who signed on for till death us do part.” Peter tried not to sound callous, but journalistic training took over, as it often did when he was confronted by blatant illogic. “And what about the sons? Didn’t they want to spend time with him?”

  “No, they didn’t want to see him. Especially not after the family lawyer leaked the information about the change in the will.” Nick kept his eyes fixed on the wall, as if he were revealing his darkest secret. And Peter supposed that for a person like Nick, admitting that he had been bought qualified as his darkest secret. Or if not actually darkest, certainly the one he was most ashamed of.

  “So the wife and kids didn’t get anything?”

  “Not from Walter. After he died there was a lawsuit. We eventually came to the agreement that I would remain the executor but all monies coming from the sale of Walter’s art had to be split evenly between me, Bradley, and Troy. Those are Walter’s sons.”

  Understanding dawned across Peter’s foggy and shifting thoughts. “So the Bradley who almost ran over me was Walter’s son?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He must be fifty, at least.” Peter knew he sounded slightly stupid stating the obvious as he was doing, but couldn’t help himself.

  “Walter was in his seventies when he died.” Nick finally looked at him, as if perplexed by Peter’s inability to draw the conclusion that a septuagenarian could have children half a century old. “But yeah, you can see how Bradley and Troy would have reacted to meeting me. He called me a gold-digging little faggot on more than one occasion. Today he wanted to make sure he and Troy get their share of the insurance money from Untitled Five.”

  “Asshole,” Peter murmured.

  Nick shrugged. “It’s not like he was wrong. I did fit all the criteria to be considered a gold digger…and a faggot.”

  Fury welled up in Peter. “You know, Nick, I think he was wrong. I don’t think you stayed for the money.”

  “Don’t you?” Nick asked drily. “Were you there?”

  “No, but I’ve lived with you for three fucking years now, and you’ve never done anything even slightly underhanded, let alone outright dishonorable. I think you would have stayed with him that last year even if he didn’t give you a dime, because that’s just the kind of man you are.” Peter paused for a breath and made another next logical leap. “Although I can see how if the whole thing ended with assisted suicide, that would have looked suspicious to everybody.”

  Nick smiled grimly. “Can you also see how this business with the statue is dredging up a lot of things I don’t real
ly want to think or talk about?”

  “I can, but…I’m probably going to keep asking.” Peter held up his hands helplessly. “It’s just how I am.”

  “Could you not ask me anything more about it today at least?”

  “Sure.” Peter laid his hand on Nick’s knee. “I can give you at least a twenty-four-hour reprieve from my relentless curiosity.” He slid his hand farther up Nick’s thigh. “I could even put my mouth to a more therapeutic use.”

  Nick firmly moved his hand back down. “I’m not feeling all that sexy right now, baby.”

  Peter withdrew, rejected, only to be pulled back. Nick rested one heavy, hairy arm across his bony shoulders. Peter moved to rest against him, perplexed. “I thought you said you didn’t feel sexy.”

  “I don’t.” Nick gave him a quick squeeze. “Can we just be together for a while? Would that be all right?”

  “It’s all right.” Peter leaned against his chest, listening to the steady thump of his heart for a few seconds, then said, “Is she finally asleep?”

  “Gigi?”

  “Yeah.” Peter had momentarily forgotten that she’d acquired a name since he’d been gone. “The cat.”

  “I think the motionless face-plant into the carpet tells us that she is.”

  After another moment Peter said, “I really think she’s cute.”

  Nick sighed, ruffled Peter’s hair, and replied, “I know.”

  They sat together for a space, not speaking. Peter would have thought that Nick had fallen asleep except for the tension in his muscles and the occasional distracted squeeze of Nick’s hand on his shoulder. Evangeline had told him that oftentimes people would bring cats and dogs into hospitals and nursing homes because the patients found it soothing to pet them. Therapy animals, they were called. He thought he might be acting as a therapy animal right now.

  A casual change of subject was definitely in order.

  “What’s your Halloween costume going to be this year?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.” Again, Nick rubbed his hand along Peter’s shoulder. “I’ll probably just get some unryu paper and acrylic polymer medium. Make a mask, like usual.”