When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  “Well, first of all,” said Eugene, “there’s something I think you ought to know. I didn’t tell the police about it the other day for obvious reasons, but I’ve talked it over with Jane and I think I ought to tell you.”

  “Spit it,” I said.

  “Well, Jim Landis is my boss. I work with Jane, but he’s both of our boss. He’s the publisher. He’s got his own imprint. You know what that is?”

  “I’ve heard the word.”

  “It means he runs his own publishing company.”

  “So?”

  “So he wasn’t in a restaurant like he told the police— he was in Jane’s office.” Eugene looked at me nervously. I’d have to check it out but it seemed a bit too easy.

  “Maybe I’ll order some pie,” I said.

  “Landis can’t know we talked to you,” said Eugene. “Autism is my middle name,” I said. “What else have you got?”

  Jane reached into her purse, came out with a cassette tape, and handed it across to me. It was an incoming message cassette for an answering machine. “It’s the last message on side B,” she said. “It came in late last night—about two o’clock in the morning, actually.”

  “Okay,” I said. Two o’clock in the morning was about the time the cat had jumped on Ratso’s balls. The two incidents were probably unrelated, but it was a time-frame.

  “It’s a silly message, I know,” said Jane, “but it scared the hell out of me at the time. In fact, it still does.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Meow,” said Jane.

  “I’ve heard the word,” I said.

  26

  By the time I got back to 199B Vandam, it was pushing eight-thirty and Ratso was dunking a bagel into a bowl of wonton soup. The cat was sitting on my desk. Neither of them looked pleased to see me.

  The cat knew I was not carrying a grocery bag of cat food. She had a habit of looking in the cupboard with me every time I went to feed her, and she knew we were down to just two cans of Southern Gourmet Dinner. The cat hated Southern Gourmet Dinner.

  The cat was merely petulant, but Ratso’s expression combined equal components of fury and disgust. I knew he was truly angry when he left his food and began pacing up and down in the kitchen. I was glad I didn’t own a rolling pin.

  “You are not to go out,” he said with eyes blazing, “especially these first few days, without first checking with me. Even if you do check with me, I still don’t want you going out on the street alone. I’m to know where you’re at at all times. Do you understand?”

  I took the cassette tape out and put it on the desk. “Lot of rules for such a small company,” I said.

  Ratso continued to stare at me. “You’re goddamn right,” he said.

  “Why so hostile?”

  “Because you’re being an asshole.”

  “That’s Mr. Asshole to you, pal.”

  The bickering went back and forth for a while with the cat watching it like a slightly bored tennis fan. I played it out for a few more minutes and then Ratso somewhat grudgingly agreed to listen to the cassette tape with me.

  I took the ceramic hat off the top of the large Sherlock Holmes head I kept on my desk and reached inside for a cigar. The Sherlock Holmes head had been given to me by my friends Bill and Betty Hardin at the Smokehouse in Kerrville, Texas. I kept my cigars and other valuables in there. Ratso often said that it was hardly a safe place for valuables, but I always invoked the words of my friend Goat Carson: “Sooner or later, cats piss on everything.” The way things were going, the cat probably would’ve pissed on everything by now if it weren’t for the little ceramic hat.

  I took the tape out of my own answering machine and popped Jane’s in. I rewound the tape. Then I pushed the play button. The first voice we heard identified itself as Jim Landis’s. It sounded brusque and irritated.

  “Jane, it’s Jim Landis … It’s nine-thirty … What is this shit? A monograph on the Flathead Indians of Montana? You think they’re happening? You think anybody gives a shit about the Flathead Indians of Montana? I can’t believe you sent this on to me—the writing stinks, too—the whole thing sucks. Send the guy to the National Geographic. What the fuck’s the matter with you, Jane?”

  “Pleasant guy to work for,” said Ratso.

  “He’s got his own imprint,” I said.

  “If I worked for him I’d put my imprint on his forehead.”

  “Listen.” There was one hang-up and a message from Jane’s mother. Then we heard it. It began in a high register and cascaded evilly down to a bone-jarring growl. The same fiendish, half-feline half-human sound we’d heard at the Garden a moment before I’d been shot.

  “Any question?” I asked.

  “Not a doubt about it,” said Ratso.

  I lit my cigar with a rather feeble Bic. I’d had the Bic for four or five days. That was already pretty old in the lifetime of a Bic. I puffed thoughtfully on the cigar.

  “I agree,” I said. “That’s our man.”

  “Or woman,” said Ratso.

  27

  “I’m not tailing Hilton Head,” said Ratso as we sat around the kitchen table later that same day. “I’ve already spent too much time with that little fruitcake.”

  “That’s an alarmingly homophobic attitude, Ratso,” I said. I was working on my fifth or sixth espresso and I was starting to get a little buzz.

  We haggled back and forth for a while and gradually a division of labor was established. Ratso would, without alerting the parties involved, get a current rundown on Head and the Parks. Head lived in New York, but the Parks had several homes and it wasn’t even clear whether they were still in the city.

  For my part, I would explore the Fred Katz situation and the “meow” situation and I would contact Sergeant Cooperman. My investigations were to be conducted telephonically. At least for now, Ratso would do the legwork. It was a reversal of roles that neither of us particularly relished.

  It was Tuesday evening, about dusk. In New York in February, of course, it looks like Tuesday evening about dusk most of the time. Ratso was heading for the door with about half of Canal Street on his back. His shoes, pants, shirt, coat, and hat all were exclusively flea-market items. You could say that, in a rather seedy way, he was impeccably dressed. He was a man with deep loyalties to his clothier.

  “Don’t give up your day job,” I said.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Just check around a bit. I’d just as soon no one else knows about the dart incident or that we’re pressing on with the case.”

  “I know what to do.”

  Ratso had the door of the loft open when I thought of something else. “Oh yeah,” I said, “there’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Would you mind picking up some cat food?”

  Ratso closed the door.

  * * *

  Alone in the loft at last, I sat down at my desk and thought things over. If a Gray Line tour had come through 199B Vandam that night, it would’ve provided a colorful, rather eccentric portrait for the tourists. They would’ve seen a man sitting alone at a desk in the New York wintertime, smoking a cigar, taking occasional medicinal shots of Jameson from an old black bull’s horn, and saying “meow” repeatedly to himself. But there was no Gray Line tour. Only gray.

  The case, as I saw it, was pretty much at a dead end. The cops, according to what I’d read in the papers, had no new leads on the Rick “Slick” Goldberg murder. In the case of a murdered woman, I’d once read, at least 85 percent of the time the killer is the lover. In the case of a murdered literary agent, the killer could be half the civilized world. Using the word “civilized” advisedly, of course.

  I didn’t see what I could do to draw out Fred Katz that hadn’t already been done. Maybe skywriting would work. And as for Rocky, well …

  The slender thread of hope that Jane clung to was probably spurred on by the note, the knife, and the phone message. Maybe Jane thought someone had kidnapped Rocky and was keepi
ng her for ransom or reasons unknown. It was possible, but I doubted it. I’d heard the “meow” sound twice. Once in person and once on tape. There was something in the nature of the sound itself that made it hard to. tell much about the identity of the speaker. There was only one thing that came across loud and clear to me. And that didn’t bode well for Jane Meara.

  It sounded as if the person didn’t like cats.

  28

  Three cigars and half a bottle of Jameson later, the only thing that really seemed to be clicking was the lesbian dance class. The combination of the Irish whiskey and the residual lion tranquilizer was starting to feel pretty good. It was a rather unorthodox method of mixing drugs and booze, but if everybody did everything the same way it’d be a boring old world.

  I was feeling almost numb enough to call Sergeant Cooperman. The game was afoot all right, but with Ratso’s new rules in effect it would be impossible, not to say tedious, to try to go anywhere in the next forty-eight hours. Not that there was anywhere to go.

  I picked up the blower on the left and dialed the Sixth Precinct.

  The desk sergeant sounded tired and frazzled. Tough to be a cop, I thought. But I knew about tough, too, in a different way. Once you’ve been a country singer on the road for a while, there’s not a lot of things in life that you’d think of as tough. Maybe ordering from a wine list.

  I gave my name to the desk sergeant, told him I wanted to speak to Sergeant Cooperman, and got put on hold. I’d been there before. In fact, I’d been on hold for some pretty important people in my time. Now I was on hold for a cop.

  But on hold was on hold. I knew what to do. I took a few lazy puffs on my cigar and let my imagination fly like an endangered crane. I saw the world through the eyes of Agamemnon, flying into LAX, walking off the plane onto a carpet of blood-red Astroturf. I was Davy Crockett at the Russian Tea Room, fighting off literary agents with my salad fork. A little imagination can be a dangerous thing. You can just have met someone and ten minutes later you’re sitting cozily together in a breakfast nook listening to Arthur Godfrey. You can miss a lot of life that way, but it will kill some time when you’re on hold.

  A gruff, gratingly familiar voice came on the line, bringing me down and back to Vandam Street.

  “Well, well,” said Sergeant Cooperman, “how’s Bomba the Jungle Boy?”

  “Hangin’ in there,” I said.

  “The doctor said you were too ill to talk, but much to our joy here at the station house, you seem to’ve pulled through.”

  “Sorry, officer.”

  “Maybe you’ll do better next time. What do you need, pal?” You can say the word pal or you can spit it. Cooperman spit it like slow-moving phlegm from a fast-moving pickup.

  “Well, Sergeant, you know I’ve been looking for this missing cat of Jane Meara’s.”

  “Yup.”

  “And this guy that shot me, just before he shot me, he said the same thing someone left on Jane Meara’s answering machine last night. I was wondering if we couldn’t make a voiceprint or voice comparison of some kind and—”

  “It’s inadmissible. What’s the phrase?”

  “What?”

  “What’s the phrase?”

  “Well, it’s just a word, actually.”

  “Impossible. What’s the word?”

  “Meow.”

  There was a long silence on the line. It was so long that I thought maybe he’d gone out to answer a ten-four or something. Finally, he spoke.

  “Bow-wow,” he said.

  “You don’t have to bark at me.”

  He hung up.

  29

  It was 11:30 P.M. Ratso was still not back and the cat was not in a very talkative mood, so I picked up the blower on the left and dialed a number I’d recently conjugated from my right hand.

  “Hello,” came a sleepy voice.

  “Shit,” I said. “Are you asleep?”

  “Kinky?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I could smell your cigar,” she said dreamily.

  “Leila—you really like the way my cigars smell?” It was too good to be true.

  “I love it.” What a wonderful girl.

  One thing about cigars is they save a lot of time with broads. If you find a girl who likes your cigar smoke, it usually means she likes a lot of other things, too. And most of the time, but not always, it means you’ve got her in your hip pocket. Either she’s the kind of broad who loves not to like it, or she’s unconsciously trying to get closer to her grandfather who smoked cigars and was run over by a trolley when she was six years old.

  In either case, forget the Freudian implications, which is always good advice. What you’re left with is a wholesome, earthy, soulful, open-minded, old-fashioned, sensuous person of the female persuasion.

  It also means you can smoke your pie and eat it, too.

  When I hung up, Leila and I had agreed to get together at eight the following night at her place, which was fairly close by in the Village. She gave me the address.

  I put on my Borneo sarong from Peace Corps days, killed the light, and got into bed. I’d given up waiting for Ratso and I wasn’t worried about how I was going to slip out of the loft the following evening.

  I was just thinking about a certain Middle East hot spot that, with a little bit of shuttle diplomacy, was soon going to explode.

  30

  I did not dream of Leila that night. I dreamed of androgynous-looking cats doing a form of St. Vitus’s ballet around my bed. Many times during the night I willed them to go away. Jump on Ratso’s balls or something. Wherever he was.

  The cats would disappear for a while, but then they’d return, doing poisonous little pirouettes in ever-tightening circles inside my brain. They all wore masks, of course. And hideous Day-Glo leotards. They were supple and sinuous—sexy in a feline sort of way. The little bastards were macho about being androgynous.

  When the dancing cats had finally buggered off into the darkness, it was almost dawn and the garbage trucks were beginning to gnash their teeth outside my window. I was tired as hell but I couldn’t sleep. All I could seem to do was think. And what I was thinking was not very pleasant.

  By dawn’s surly light I was all but convinced that the androgynous dancing cats had been trying to tell me something. They were trying to tell me that all of this fit together somehow. It seemed as easy as connecting the dots that were dancing before my bloodshot eyes.

  There was no room for coincidence now. The man who called himself Fred Katz was a very sick puppy. He’d left the “cat got your tongue” note at the Roosevelt and he’d killed Goldberg and gotten his tongue. I felt certain it was he who was behind the series of pranks that had occurred—the knife, the phone message. Fred Katz had also, I believed, tried to kill me.

  Find Fred Katz, I thought, and you’d have the cat and the killer. The more I thought about it, the more desperate and deadly the situation seemed.

  I wasn’t worried about what was going to happen to Rocky anymore. But I was worried—very deeply worried— about what was going to happen to Jane Meara.

  31

  It took me longer than the prime of Miss Jean Brodie to find Leila’s street. I didn’t mind the little walking tour of the Village, though. It was a clear night and cold as hell. “Bracing,” as they say. It doesn’t matter how horrifically cold it gets in the city, New Yorkers always think it’s bracing. That’s one of the reasons New York isn’t Buffalo. In Buffalo, they think it’s cold.

  I was just thankful to be out of the loft where there was nothing to do but stroke the cat and Ratso’s rapidly developing ego. He seemed to be overidentifying with his Dr. Watson role. That morning we’d killed the remaining won-ton soup and knocked down about seven espressos at a breakfast power caucus.

  Ratso’s appetite for the case had increased dramatically. It was just over a week ago that I’d had to drag him by the heels to the Garden to help me find a missing cat. Now he couldn’t wait to get back on the track of the
mysterious Parks and Hilton “Fruitcake” Head. Amateur detectives are hard to figure.

  The other thing that had been irritating about Ratso at the power caucus was how close to the vest he’d played his cards. It was an “ongoing investigation,” he’d said. He’d “fill me in when he knew more.” Almost like talking to Sergeant Cooperman.

  The good thing about Ratso’s active involvement in the case, however, was that I had no trouble slipping out to meet Leila. I didn’t even feel too guilty about breaking the house rules. Besides, I was starting to feel better. It only hurt when I meowed.

  By the time I found Leila’s street the numbing cold had put Jane Meara’s situation out of my mind. I lit a cigar with a new pastel-purple Bic I’d bought from a rather hostile Pakistani at a corner grocery store. Now I was looking for street numbers and trying not to freeze my huevos off. Three more blocks and I stumbled on the place.

  Leila lived in a fairly modern building named after a French painter who’d once been fairly modern himself. That was over a hundred years ago and now he was dead and famous enough to have a wino urinating on a building named after him. A nice touch, if you belonged to the Impressionist school.

  I walked into a small lobby with a large doorman. He planted himself directly in my path.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. His eyes looked like little locked glass doors.

  “Twelve-K,” I said.

  “Name of the person you wish to see?” he asked, looking at my hat.

  “Leila.”

  “And your name is—?”

  “Kinky.”

  He went to the house phone, dialed a couple numbers, and said, “Mr. Kinky is here.”

  He listened, nodded, put down the phone, and motioned me in. I bootlegged my cigar into the elevator and pushed twelve. I stood back to enjoy the ride. Took a few puffs on the cigar. Thought neutral elevator thoughts.

  I took a left on twelve, found 12K at the end of the hall, and knocked on the door. After a moment the door opened. It wasn’t Leila. It was a stockily built, swarthy man with a large mustache. Looked like an organ grinder who’d just stomped his monkey to death.