“Miss Bly, isn’t it?” Ford said. “Please explain what you’re doing here.”
She looked dumbly from Ford’s face to mine. Her own face seemed absurdly elongated in the horror-white glare of the flashlight.
“Let me explain, Lieutenant,” I said, moving in. “Miss Bly is looking for some papers discussing the lineage of a particular breed of cat. And for a computer diskette with the beginning of a book Will Gryder was writing. Miss Bly had to stop that book’s being written—at any cost. Isn’t that so, Miranda?”
She still did not speak.
So I continued. “The Riverside String Quartet did not get its start through the financial benevolence of Roz Polikoff’s Aunt Sarah—if indeed there ever was such a person. No, they raised the necessary capital by more shocking means. Miranda and Roz are the only ones who know that the Aunt Sarah story is a lie. It was the two of them who provided the money. And they got it by stealing litters of Scottish Fold kittens, back when they were young women working in an expensive pet store in New York. The kittens were commanding seven hundred dollars apiece back then, in the mid-seventies, even though the breed hadn’t even been officially recognized. The kittens were just adorable—and people with the money wanted them. Then, something much worse than theft happened. Didn’t it, Miranda?”
She didn’t answer me, but stared down at the flashlight she had dropped to the floor. Its beam was still shining on my boots.
Lieutenant Donaldson gestured for me to go on.
“A man looking after the grounds where some of the cats were bred was shot one night when he stumbled upon a theft in progress. He pulled through, but he was paralyzed for life. No one was ever charged with the crime. But somehow Will Gryder found out about Roz and Miranda’s involvement. And somehow Miranda found out that Will knew. Miranda may not have known what kind of book it was, but she thought Will was going to tell the whole story of what had happened, naming her and Roz. And she knew she had to stop him. Maybe she tried to bribe him. Maybe she thought sleeping with him would change his mind. But she failed. And one night, she killed him. It was Miranda who drove that chisel into his heart, and believe me, Lieutenant Donaldson, a woman who has been playing the cello all those years has the strength in her shoulders and arms to do it.”
I realized I was talking too fast, but I couldn’t seem to slow down. The two of them seemed to be crowding me. I started to move around as I talked.
“I don’t think it was premeditated. I just think she slipped out of the main house at a time when no one would notice, found Will in the barn and begged him, cajoled him, threatened him—whatever—and then when it didn’t work, killed him in a fury. Once she realized what she’d done, she wiped off the weapon, took his money and other effects, and disposed of them somewhere, to make it seem like a robbery. Then she went back and joined the others. I don’t know how, but the next day she caused that accident. It was some sort of warning to Roz—or maybe Miranda really did hope Roz would die—because she realized it could only have been Roz who’d told Will about the Scottish Fold cats, when he and Roz were lovers.”
I had finished my runaway analysis.
Donaldson blew out a long breath. “You’ve been a busy girl, Alice. I assume all that stuff about the cats and the assault on the watchman will check out?”
“It comes from an impeccable source.”
“Go and put the light back in, will you?” he asked me.
It was not until I’d done as Ford had asked that Miranda spoke. “Are you quite finished?” she said. “Both of you?”
I answered. “Yes, Miranda. Why?”
She shook her head slowly, then began to laugh derisively. “You should absolutely be under lock and key. You’re a public menace, you crazy bitch. And as for you, Lieutenant Donaldson, words fail me at the moment. But I hope that won’t be true when it comes time for your hearing before the police review board. You’re both insane—the both of you.”
Ford said nothing.
“Look,” she said impatiently to him, “put your hand in my pocket—go ahead. I’d do it myself, if I didn’t think you’d blow my brains out.”
He reached into her vest pocket and extracted what looked for all the world like a string of real pearls.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said disgustedly. “Look at it, you ass! It’s a pearl necklace, I wanted to send it to Will’s sister Carolyn. She and I had been best friends since we were ten years old. When we were in school Willy said he couldn’t afford to buy two necklaces, so he gave this to us to share—because we were so close. And we did. Except we had a horrible falling out more than fifteen years ago. We never spoke again. I’ve been in my room crying about it—about this whole horrible thing—all night, and I thought I could just come out here and put it into that bag with his things. She would know what it meant.”
Ford looked at me.
“As for the obscene charge that I murdered Willy,” Miranda said, almost screaming now, “this ridiculous woman has been trying to get something on us all from the minute she walked into our lives! But I didn’t kill him! How could I? At the time they say he died, I was in Mat’s room making love with him.”
The moment she spoke those words, Ford’s confidence in me collapsed. I knew it. And Miranda knew it.
“Why don’t I just give this necklace to you, Lieutenant,” she said. “You and your state troopers or whatever the hell you are can unlock that thing and . . . insert it—and you know where.”
The three of us walked in silence through the freezing night. Ford did not look at me once, but our two flashlights kept crisscrossing on the ground.
As soon as we were inside the house, Miranda wheeled on Donaldson, speaking through clenched teeth. “Let’s get this over with right now, shall we? I want you to confirm what I said this instant. Talk to Mat.”
By the time we were halfway up the stairs the whole house was up, wondering who was making the commotion at two in the morning. Miranda told them.
She told them in the most graphically scatalogical terms I’d ever heard used by an educated woman from a good home. And she ended the diatribe by saying it was all Beth’s fault for having asked me here.
I turned my back on the look Beth Stimson gave me. I stood watching Ford accompany Mathew Hazan into his room to speak with him alone. Now being calmed and comforted by the circle of her comrades, one of the nicer things Miranda called me was a “fiend.” Ford was out of Mat’s room in less than fifteen minutes. He finally looked at me, and it was with sadness rather than rage.
I went into my second-class citizen’s room and was packed in ten minutes. I looked around for Lulu, but I couldn’t find her. I wanted to say good-bye.
Ford walked with me to my car.
“Win a few, lose a few, Alice,” Ford said as I turned the motor over.
I had no trouble finding the road back to New York.
Chapter 18
I was trying to convince Bushy I was happy to see him. But I don’t think he believed me—probably because I was crying my eyes out.
As soon as I entered my apartment I fell onto the sofa and began to weep. But at the same time I was trying to embrace the befuddled Bushy. He backed away stiffly, his eyes never leaving my face. I knew I’d be paying for abandoning the cats for some time to come. Pancho wasn’t around, but I could hear him scrabbling around on the high cabinets in the kitchen.
I could see that Tony had piled the mail and messages on the long dining room table. He had obviously made an effort to be neat, but the piles had collapsed and mail was scattered everywhere.
His carefully built hill of letters had probably collapsed as quickly and thoroughly as my murder case had—as easily as Miranda Bly had punctured it.
Not only had my trap proved futile, even ludicrous, but I had literally been thrown off the premises. Yes, I’d been shown to be
less than a stellar crime solver. But my tears were also for the shame I felt—the humiliation. Start to finish I’d been patronized, tolerated, ignored, talked down to by that group of self-important musicians. They’d made me feel like an unwanted child. And why? Because I didn’t have any inside dirt on Lenny Bernstein. I didn’t go to cocktail parties with Jamie Laredo, or own any bootleg cassettes of Maria Callas. For the Riverside String Quartet, that was enough of a reason.
Of course, I knew now the nature of my mistake. I realized now why everything had gone wrong. It had all been based on a pivotal mistake: I had not understood that Mat Hazan was part of the original cat-theft ring; probably, in fact, the ringleader. And because I had left him out of the equation, it never dawned on me that they would cook up such a simple but persuasive alibi—that he and Miranda were making love in the house while Will Gryder was being murdered.
I knew in my bones I was right—knew what had transpired. I had shaped all the information John Cerise had fed me into a coherent explanation. But it was all ashes now—all of it. I’d never work for Beth Stimson again. She hated me now. The six of them had all come together in the face of my threat. But that is, I suppose, what a united group of any kind is all about, precisely what the critics had flayed the Riverside Quartet alive for failing to do: playing together, sticking together, acting as one.
Bushy was slowly moving toward me again, obliquely, as if on tiptoe. Pancho stuck his head into the living room for a minute. “Oh, so you’ve come crawling back to us,” is what he seemed to be saying. “So what?” And off he ran on his perpetual rounds.
There’s a lot I should do, I told myself: Call Basillio to let him know I’ve come back early; go over and thank Mrs. Oshrin for all her help; call my agent and various cat-sitting clients. I blew my nose and picked up a yellow pad and pencil. It was only then that Bushy deigned to join me on the couch. He liked to chew erasers.
Sitting there with pad and pencil in hand, the thought came to me that I ought to write Ford Donaldson. But what was I going to say to him? Sorry I couldn’t produce your murderer as promised? But I believed I had. Sorry you had to camp out for seven freezing hours in a dilapidated shed? Sorry I wasn’t quick enough to understand all the ramifications of the conspiracy?
No, I wasn’t going to write any of that. It was best to leave it alone.
I was punch-drunk with exhaustion. After all, I’d been up all night, had driven nonstop all the early morning. I fell fast asleep in the middle of scratching Bushy’s ruff.
***
“What is going on here, Swede?”
I was looking into Tony Basillio’s grinning face.
“Listen, madam, I was hired to feed two cats and two cats only. I come here in good faith to do my job, and look what I find. Well, I’m sorry, Swede, but my contract is quite clear—two cats.”
Still groggy, I felt Tony kissing the top of my head. Then he helped me to a sitting position and placed a cup of black coffee in my hand and stepped back.
“What time is it, Basillio?”
“One in the afternoon. Are you home to stay, or just grabbing a change of thermal underwear?”
“Oh, I’m back. Am I ever. I’ve been run out of the state of Massachusetts.”
I drank from the coffee cup. My head and body ached dully. I needed a bath in the worst way. And I was starving.
I handed the cup back when I was finished. “What’s your financial situation, Tony?”
“Relatively flush—hundred and thirty-five bucks, cash.”
“Know what I want? I want a glass of red wine and the biggest, bloodiest hamburger in town—with tomato and onion . . . and no bun.”
“It’s yours. I plight thee my troth. Let us away.”
“After my bath,” I said. “Can you feed the cats for me?”
Less than an hour later we were sitting in a booth in a serviceable bar and grill on Second Avenue. I was taking lusty gulps of my red wine and waiting for the burger to arrive.
“Boy, do you look unhappy,” Tony said.
“Well, I am.”
“Why don’t you tell Uncle Tony what happened up there?”
I guess I needed to do just that. I narrated the train of events that had transpired from the moment I’d picked up the car and joined the queue on the Taconic Parkway, all the way up to sobbing on my sofa this morning. In fact I got so caught up in my own story that when I’d finished it, my food—which had been delivered during the scene where Mrs. Wallace was force-feeding me English muffins—was now cold. I picked along the edges of the hamburger.
Tony was looking at me strangely. “Something bothering you, Basillio?” I said.
“Well, not exactly ‘bothering.’ But . . . well, I was just thinking . . . isn’t it possible that Miranda really was just feeling guilty about her friend and wanted to send that necklace to her?”
“Anything’s possible, Tony—theoretically.”
“What I mean to say is, no offense, but your whole trip up there seems so farfetched.”
“Farfetched? What an interesting word choice. What, precisely, do you find so farfetched?’
“To be honest, everything . . . the whole schmear. Stolen Scottish cats. The novel. Aunt Bessie, or whatever her name was supposed to be—who doesn’t really exist. The whole milieu, shall we say, is very unbelievable.”
“What are you saying, Tony? That nothing I described to you really happened? That it didn’t exist in the real world?”
“No, of course not. I just—”
“Look, don’t try to . . . evaluate it . . . like someone trying to be truthful onstage. Or like a stage set, in your present case. It wasn’t a piece frozen in time.”
“Okay. I’m just saying it’s hard to believe this Riverside Quartet—this group of serious, highly trained musicians, for godsake—is so collectively wicked. No, ‘wicked’ is not the word. I mean ‘conspiratorial.’ The way you tell it, it’s like you were thrown in among a pride of lionesses who were perpetually in some kind of feeding frenzy.”
I pushed my plate away, having eaten the sodden, pale tomato. Tony’s imagery struck some kind of chord. At first I hadn’t thought of the quartet and the men around them as raging lions, because what was between them was hidden, internecine. It was only after one spent time with them all, only after one became, for whatever reason, open to them, that one sensed their collectively predatory nature. And that was probably why the whole episode had so exhausted and defeated me.
“Hey, listen, Swede,” he said, pushing back his long black hair with both hands, “you can’t win em all. What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. It’s just that Ford Donaldson tried a very similar cliché on me. ‘Win a few, lose a few’ was the one he chose. Now you’re telling me I can’t win them all.”
“Why do you think they call them clichés? They’re common expressions.”
“Hmm. Spoken with uncommon valor,” I noted, not really knowing what I meant by that. Goodness, I was tired, when one glass of mediocre California red could make me so foolish. I ordered another.
“Should have taken me up there with you,” Tony said.
“Why?”
“Because I have a tin ear. I’d have been more objective.”
That was hilarious, I thought.
Well, in any case, it was good to be home.
Chapter 19
I have always liked that expression, “getting back in the swing of things.” It’s hard to say what it really means, but one always knows whether or not one has accomplished it.
It took about a week after my return from the Covington Art Center for the rhythm of my life to regain anything remotely resembling “swing.”
It was two weeks before I managed to stop poring over what I had found in Will Gryder’s room—the old photographs, the faded cat breeding
charts, the little computer disk—examining the items, over and over, in a kind of bewildered nostalgia. Had I really been all wrong about the case? Was my version of the facts “farfetched”? And what was I supposed to do with the things now—send them to Will’s sister?
By the end of week three, the memory of the Riverside String Quartet was like the memory of a toothache. I stopped talking about them, stopped worrying about them, and thought about them only to be thankful that the dull, throbbing pain of it all was gone.
Tony, however, had become obsessed with one element of it, and one element only: Lulu’s failure to chase the mice. For the hundredth time he asked me, “Why wouldn’t she go after the mice, Swede? Didn’t you ever figure out why not?”
No, I had to say again. I never did.
He said maybe the dog was blind, maybe she had lost her sense of smell. I reminded him that Lulu was a cat, not a dog. He replied that he knew that; he just liked that old country saying so much—“That dog won’t hunt”—that he used it for cats and people and elephants. In fact, the mystery of why Lulu wouldn’t hunt began to derange poor Basillio. He started demanding that I let him move in; he moaned that he was weary of occasional sex and occasional intimacy; said that my intermittent coldness toward him was the real reason his return to the world of stage design had been such a spectacular failure—even for him, a man who cultivated failure with a passion.
Tony’s incomprehensible flights were only part and parcel of getting back into the swing of things.
And then the swing broke, about a week before Thanksgiving.
My phone rang that cold Tuesday morning. I picked up, and was startled to hear the voice at the other end of the line.
“Alice, hello! This is Leo Trilby.”
Why was the director of the Beast in the Jungle fiasco phoning me? We were by no means friends. We hadn’t even gotten along as coworkers—not during rehearsals and not during the run—if those few pitiful performances could be called a “run.”
Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) Page 12