The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “The reign of Roosevelt is at an end,” Dewey said. “A Republican victory here in New York, in his own home state, will be a clear signal that the time is nigh.”

  “And if it isn’t, we can always start our own law firm, Dulles, Donovan, and Dewey,” Donovan said. “It’s got a ring to it.”

  Dewey shook his head. He seemed to take Donovan’s joke seriously. “Foster will never surrender his interest in Sullivan & Cromwell. He regards his firm the way a minister does his church. For my part, my interest is in public service, in cleaning out the crooks and corrupters and returning American government to the hands of honest, capable men.”

  Dewey seemed ready to slip into a campaign speech. Donovan declined the offer of a ride before it was even made. He promised to call Dewey as soon as he returned from a meeting with clients in the Midwest. They said goodbye in front of the building. Flanked by bodyguards, Dewey looked around, waiting to be noticed by the lunchtime crush of brokers, clerks, and secretaries. After a minute of watching the crowd and sensing their lack of interest in anything save stocks and bonds and ogling each other, he ducked into the car and was gone.

  42ND STREET, NEW YORK

  Dunne arrived back at Grand Central around seven. The stars painted on the ceiling above the station floor served as a substitute for those the city’s incandescence made invisible. There was no need for the occasional passengers who bothered to gaze up to trace the outlines of sky creatures the ancients claimed to see—bear, lion, lamb. The New York Central Railroad had done it for them. He exited on Forty-second Street and walked west along the Deuce, past the north side of Bryant Park. Beyond the flashing lights of the movie marquees, the horizon was streaked with the fading purplish-red remains of a sun that had just sunk behind the Palisades.

  At the corner of Broadway, a shill in a white hat tried to sell him a ticket for a bus tour of Manhattan. He waved him off. At the light, a voice behind him said, “Hey, mister, postcards from Paris. Interested?” He crossed the street without looking back. The usual crowd of pasty-faced ghouls loitered in front of the Rialto, eyeing the posters for the double bill of zombie-voodoo films. Male gawkers were everywhere, walking with the feral, furtive look of men hunting for forbidden thrills. Some stopped in front of the grind-houses and stuck their noses close to the glass-encased stills touting cut-rate reels, NEVER BEFORE SEEN ON SCREEN! SHOCKING! UNCENSORED! Slaves in Bondage, Girls of the Street, Forbidden Desires, Jungle Virgins. Two sailors studied the window of a dime museum and novelty shop. The banner above advertised “The Hidden Secrets of Sex as Approved by the French Academy of Medicine, Paris.” They paid their dimes and went in to be educated.

  Across the street, the belt of bulbs zipped around the Times Tower spelling out electronic headlines that almost everyone below ignored. One day Walter Grillo’s name would be up there, sharing the Square with the movie stars, headliners, and top billers. In Grillo’s case it’d be a once-only appearance. A tourist couple planted themselves in front of Dunne. The man posed the woman for a picture, her back to the huge sign across the Square advertising Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, the same spot Dunne stopped with Danny Cassidy when they returned to New York from France.

  The sign, a towering wall of light flashing its electric hymn to Mr. Wrigley’s sweetened chicle, hadn’t been there when they’d left. But it greeted their return. They’d come to Times Square directly from the regiment’s last march. They’d assembled by companies at 110th Street. Unlike most regimental commanders, Colonel Donovan didn’t ride a horse but walked with them down Fifth, then over to Lexington, for their formal dismissal at the 26th Street Armory. They stood around, awkwardly, congratulating one another on still being alive, leaving unmentioned their haunted, guilty recollections of the dead. Donovan walked the ranks. He stopped in front of Dunne and extended his hand. Neither of them had the words to express what had taken place between them.

  Nor the inclination.

  Dunne and Cassidy strolled up Park Avenue. “Let’s go to Gyp O’Connor’s and get drunk,” Cassidy said when they reached Grand Central.

  They drank beer in Gyp O’Connor’s saloon all afternoon. On the house. “You boys done your duty,” O’Connor said. “More than can be said for them bluenose sons of bitches in Washington who’ve enacted Prohibition and kilt the liquor trade! Drink up, boys, while you’ve the chance. Soon New York will be dry as the Sahara! Times Square will be as quiet as a Quaker meeting house. Mark my words, boys. Mark my words.” In the evening, O’Connor’s patrons took their beer mugs and went outside and bathed in the glow of Wrigley’s advertisement. One by one, they went back, got their coats, and joined the parade of strollers and theatergoers moving through the Square, people and traffic sharing Broadway’s biggest, grandest stage.

  The Square had a different feel now, but not that of a Quaker meeting house, unless the Quakers had converted to honky-tonk. The movies strangled vaudeville, Prohibition took care of the fancy restaurants, and the Depression made straight the way for Minsky and burlesquedom, the disrobing beauties who filled the seats the producers and playwrights couldn’t. Take it off, girls! Dunne shadowed his share of wayward husbands to the stage doors. The burlesque business prospered as steel and autos and the rest of the economy went south. The reformers squawked and complained without much effect until the Mayor and the holy company of gangbusters decided such displays of female flesh were a threat to public health and morals and set out to take away their licenses. Couldn’t even use the word burlesque for fear of the civic impurities it might instigate. But the crusaders had a ways to go from the look of the Deuce.

  A fat man in a gold velvet vest and a straw hat yellow with age barked outside a nearby theater, “The show is about to start! Hurree, hurree, see the most beautiful girls in New York! Yes, siree, tonight, straight from her special performance before the Sultan of Madagascar, the Magnificent Monique! Lookee see, my friends!” He rested his hand on a cardboard simulacrum of a turbaned woman, with a half-veiled face, wearing harem pants and a sequined vest. A crowd gathered.

  Dunne shouted over their heads, “Hey, Morrie, is the Professor in there?”

  “As usual, backstage.” Morrie went back to his pitch. When no one stepped forward to buy a ticket, he snared an elderly gent by the elbow and half led, half coerced him to the box office. “Money-back guarantee,” he said. “Monique don’t get your ticker beatin’ faster, show’s on me.” A line formed to buy tickets.

  Morrie joined Dunne at the curb. “Go ahead to the back, Fin. Max is at the door. Tell him I said it’s okay.” He took off his hat and mopped his bald head with his palm. “You followin’ someone?”

  “No, I just need to talk to the Professor.”

  “Gotta get back to work.” He put his hat back on. “Christ, who’d ever think it’d be so much work to get men to stare at naked women? Ask me, it’s gonna take another war to restore the red-blooded vitality of the American male.”

  “No thanks, Morrie,” Dunne said, “I already had my war.”

  At the rear of the theater, on Forty-third Street, Max, the stooped, ancient doorkeeper, mumbled hello and led him to a small, windowless dressing room. The walls were the same lifeless, defeated beige as the visitor’s room at Sing Sing. The Professor sat in a decrepit lounge chair, reading a book. Next to him was a tall multipaneled screen, various articles of women’s undergarments draped over it. The Professor glanced up, eyes fiery red, an expression of serenity across his face. “Dunne, my good man, what brings you to this seraglio of galluptious femininity?”

  “Corrigan thought it was a good bet I’d find you here.”

  “A pity my peregrinations have become so predictable.” The Professor reached beneath a skirt covering the dressing table, lifted out a bottle of Four Roses and two glasses. “The management discourages the consumption of spiritous liquors upon the premises for fear it might impair the concentration of the performers.” He poured a finger of whiskey into each glass and handed one to Dunne. “But since neither yo
u nor I fit into that category, I see no harm.”

  “Who you talkin’ to, Jack?” The question came from behind the screen.

  “A gumshoe extraordinaire and former member of the metropolitan gendarmerie.”

  “You in trouble?” A face peeked around the side of the screen, pretty beneath a heavy veneer of makeup.

  “No, Mr. Fintan Dunne and I are comrades.”

  “Hi, I’m Monique.” She flashed a smile at Dunne. “Jack, pass me them pants, will you?”

  The Professor handed her a pair of diaphanous silk harem pants from a rack beside his chair. Her head disappeared once more behind the screen.

  “I’ve yet to scare up any business for you, Fin,” the Professor said, “if that’s what brings you here.” He gently tapped his glass to Dunne’s. “But I haven’t forgot.”

  “I’m on a temporary assignment. Been hired to look into the Walter Grillo case.”

  “Grillo?”

  “Short-term tenant of the death house. Convicted in the murder of a nurse, Miss Mary Catherine Lynch.”

  “Ah, of course, ‘the West Side Ripper’ as dubbed by my colleague, Mr. Corrigan. Bit of an exaggeration since Grillo only struck once and was too inebriated to make his escape. Yet the Cubaño did manage to savage a sixty-year-old virgin, deflower her, and rip her apart with a stiletto. One needn’t be inspired by Melpomene to lament the nature of that poor woman’s demise.”

  Monique’s head appeared again. She’d put on a turban. “Mel Pomeno?” she said. “I knew his sister, Gina Pomeno. If I remember correctly, she works in Billy Field’s Follies.” She withdrew behind the screen.

  “Melpomene is the Muse of Tragedy. She has eight sisters, but as far as I know none has a position with the Follies.” The Professor refilled his glass.

  “You covered the murder for the Standard?” Dunne asked.

  “Who else? But why pursue such a piece of soon-to-be-forgotten history?”

  “Business, that’s all.”

  “Not much to tell.”

  “You were in her apartment?”

  “First of the crime scribes on the scene, as usual.”

  “Anything catch your eye?”

  “Something always does at a murder scene, usually the corpse.”

  “Other than the corpse?”

  “You’re fishing, Fin.”

  “Give me a nibble, I’ll go away.”

  “Have you talked to Brannigan about the Babcock case?”

  “Soon.”

  “Don’t goad the Minotaur, my boy. He’ll prowl the labyrinth until he finds you and take you apart when he does.”

  “A nibble, Professor, that’s all.”

  “Oh, well, it was a nicely done-up little appartement, with an elegant highboy, or chest of drawers, that showed, however small her means, Mary Catherine Lynch was a woman of good taste. And there was the jewelry box.”

  Monique came out from behind the screen, in a pink satin robe, tied at the waist, which reached down to her ankles. “Well, it’s time.” She bent over and kissed the Professor on his head. “We’ll get down to business soon as I get back,” she said. “No more dilly dallying. I promise.”

  “A promise to which I shall hold you.” He kissed her hand.

  “What about it?” Dunne asked.

  “What about what?” the Professor studied Monique as she went into the hall.

  “The jewelry box.”

  “It was odd the way the pieces were arranged atop the bureau, as though Grillo had been sifting for something in particular. Unusual for a drunken maniac in the grip of a sexual delirium to take such care. That’s all the nibble I can give. Now go offer some propitiation to Brannigan.”

  “Doc Cropsey do the autopsy?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Wasn’t sure he was still in the business.”

  “He switched from drinking whiskey to formaldehyde. It keeps him most wonderfully preserved.”

  The thump of a drum and a wave of raucous shouts reverberated from the hall. “There she goes,” he said. “The Magnificent Monique nightly fulfilling the prophecy of Job, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.’”

  Dunne put down his glass, the finger of whiskey untouched. “Better be off.”

  “I take it’s money alone draws you to this case.”

  “Pure and simple.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Now it’s you who’s fishing. For what?”

  “The Ripper’s sister. I was tipped off about her. I could’ve dragged her into the story. But didn’t. I hope she hasn’t lured you into this folly.”

  “His sister? Too young for me. Believe it or not, I think Grillo may be innocent.”

  “Never be afraid of youth, especially in a woman. Take Monique, for instance. A girl from the Jersey City proletariat, née Monica Mauro, without benefit of a high school diploma but gifted with an incisive intellect and a true enthusiasm for the classics.” The Professor opened the book he’d been reading. “Listen to these lines: ‘Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fiere sentio et excrucior.’ Has the torment of the lover’s mixed emotions ever been better expressed?”

  “Beats me.”

  “I think not, and as we read these lines earlier this evening, it was Monique who pointed out the poet’s genius in linking ‘odi et amo,’ love and hate. ‘They aren’t opposites,’ Monique said. ‘The et makes that clear. They’re Siamese twins. They share one heart, one spleen.’ A profound insight, beyond what any student of mine at Princeton ever managed, and one that belongs to youth, to those still in the grip of their passions.”

  The sound of the drumbeat grew louder, as well as the cheering and whistling. The Professor poured himself another whiskey. He handed Dunne his untouched glass. “Spare me the indignity of being forced to drink alone.”

  Dunne held the glass to his unparted lips.

  “Thirty-six years ago, yet the wound is still fresh. A quick end to my employment at Princeton and what seemed destined to be a brilliant career teaching the classics. A colleague’s wife and I were indulging our shared literary passion for Catullus. Cras amet qui numquam amavit; Quique amavit, cras amet. The intoxication of words! The seductive power of poetry! ‘Let those love now who never loved before; Let those who always loved now love the more.’ The irresistibility of those sentiments drove us to an act of spontaneous coition on my desk, alas, at the very moment the department head chose to speak with me on some trivial matter.”

  “Bad timing,” Dunne said. “We both seem to suffer from it.” He’d heard it all before, and seeing the condition the Professor was in, knew he’d hear it all again.

  “Not timing alone. Given my academic achievements and unblemished record, it might have been settled with a mild reprimand. Even the husband, a notorious wittol, agreed. The university’s president, however, that loathsome Presbyterian hypocrite, Mr. Woodrow Wilson, would hear none of it. He demanded my scalp, which he promptly got. Of course, his first wife was buried but an hour before he was off romancing another. I trembled for my country when that moralizer was elected president. Never doubted that once those guileful Europeans got their hands on him at Versailles, they’d pluck and dress him like a freshly killed turkey.”

  The Professor stared into his drink. The mix of drums and shouts from outside neared a crescendo. “I’m not a satyr, Fin.”

  “A what?”

  “‘Professor Lockwood is a sensualist and materialist, more satyr than man.’ That’s what Wilson said of me. I love beauty, in nature, in poetry, in the human body. I share that love with Monique. Unschooled as she is, she has a deeper, more genuine desire to know the beautiful than any academic I ever encountered.”

  Dunne stood by the door. He knew a longer lecture would follow. “Anything else comes to mind about the Grillo case, call me.”

  “Do me a favor, Fin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t turn into one of our modern-day crusad
ers whose invincible sense of right confers on him the conviction he must undo all that is wrong with the world.”

  “Just out to make a buck.”

  “Stay that way. There are enough crusaders as it is. Gotham is being scrubbed clean by Mayor Savonarola and District Attorney Oliver Cromwell. Slot machines and soubrettes alike are banished to ultima Thule. An artist like Monique faces imminent exile to Hoboken. The Guardians of Purity and Public Morality are winning the field. Still, if I were a wagering man, a vice I’ve had difficulty in indulging since my local bookie was dispatched to the new penal institution on Riker’s Island, I’d bet on sin. In the end, sin will be the winning horse, no matter what handicaps are laid upon it.”

  “Cross my heart, Professor, I’ll stick with sin.”

  The music was swallowed by a frenzy of shouting and whistling. The Professor joined Dunne at the dressing room door, stumbling as he approached. He steadied himself on the door. Monique sashayed down the hallway from the stage, naked except for a turban, high heels, and a wedge of spangled satin in the V between her legs. Her ample breasts bounced jauntily against her chest, up and down, like wave-riding buoys. She waved and smiled broadly. “Okay, Jack,” she said, “time to get back to our poetry.”

  “Ah, yes, our poetry,” the Professor said.

  The front door of the Hackett Building was bolted from inside. Dunne banged on it until Hubert, the Negro porter, came by steering a wheeled pail with the handle of a mop. Hubert peered though the glass. The minute he saw who it was, he pulled on the chain attached to his belt and fished a thick knot of keys from his pocket.

  “People askin’ where you are,” he said.

  “Nice to know I’m missed.”

  “Wouldn’t go that far.” White-haired and dignified, Hubert grew old trying to keep the building clean and shiny as it slid toward decrepitude. At night, the sound of his saxophone drifted up from the basement through the building, sometimes happy notes, an April day filled with the hope spring would stay forever; other times, it was solitary and haunting, memory of a voice, a face, a rainy winter morning. Nobody complained.