When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  “Come in,” he said.

  32

  I peered around Jerry Colonna and saw a red sparkle-topped tennis shoe resting casually on a glass coffee table. A bare Arabian ankle was growing luxuriantly out of the tennis shoe like the stalk of a sexy tropical plant. I’d have to look it up in National Geographic sometime and find out if it was a man-eater. The guy backed up a little and I stepped into the room.

  The place looked like a whorehouse in Architectural Digest. There was a lot of glass, a lot of metal, mirrors everywhere, and a forty-foot couch done up entirely in bullfight-poster red.

  “Understated,” I said to the man with the mustache.

  He didn’t say anything. His eyes looked hot and distant. Staring at his face was like flying over a forest fire in the middle of the night at thirty-seven thousand feet. You knew it couldn’t bum you, but you also knew that one of these days they were going to have to land the plane.

  “It’s okay, Hector,” said a familiar feminine voice. The guy stepped to the side and I saw that the bare ankle was attached to an equally bare, slightly thin, sinuously gorgeous leg. Leila was attached to the leg.

  “Kinky’s harmless,” she said with a smile. She was wearing a pair of faded, delicious-looking cutoffs and a tight pink T-shirt that said something in one of the Romance languages. I gave her a harmless wink.

  I walked a little closer to the couch. “What’s a Hector?” I said.

  She gave a little papal sign with her right hand and Hector nodded once and left the room. “Hector works for my brother,” Leila said.

  “Maybe your brother’s taking being an equal opportunity employer a step too far.”

  She smiled a top-drawer mischievous smile, crooked her finger, and beckoned me around the coffee table.

  “Maybe I’ve got a job for you,” she said.

  “Like what?” I asked as I sat down next to her.

  “I don’t know,” said Leila, “but you’d look pretty cute handing me a dry towel.”

  * * *

  You might say that a forty-foot-long couch isn’t very cozy and you’d be right. But given a spiritually horny American and a rather randy Palestinian, it can be just about everything else.

  Leila had turned the lights down to low interrogation. She had turned me on to the point where I was one step away from making water wings out of her cutoffs. We were both trying to chew the same piece of Dentyne when a slender, vaguely sinister figure appeared in the hall doorway. When the lights came up we hardly noticed. Dentyne can be a very sexy gum.

  Leila recovered first. “Kinky,” she said, “… this is my brother, Carlos.”

  “Carlos?” I said. I sat up. It was a chore to get my breath back.

  “Carlos,” said Carlos. His expression hadn’t changed since I’d first seen him standing there. His face looked like a sweet, evil puppet that enjoyed pulling all the strings itself. I didn’t know if Colombians liked guys practically hosing their sisters on forty-foot couches but I doubted it, so I tried to leaven the situation.

  “Carlos,” I said. “Carlos … wait a minute … not Carlos the international terrorist?”

  His eyes took on the unmistakable glint of primitive obsidian tools used to bring death to small animals. A rather unpleasant hissing noise came from Carlos’s mouth. Then he was gone.

  “I don’t think he considers me a prospective brother-in-law,” I said.

  “He’ll get over it,” said Leila. “Wait right here.”

  I waited. Leila got up and walked out of the room into the hallway. Nice bucket, all right. I heard a door open and close. I took out a cigar and lit it and looked at a picture of the sad, lonely face of a bull in the ring. I didn’t like Spanish-speaking peoples because they were mean to bulls. Of course, maybe if the Krauts, Turks, and Communists had had some bulls around they would’ve left the Jews, Gypsies, Armenians, Cambodians, and everybody else alone. I puffed on the cigar and watched the reflections of smoke disappearing in one of the mirrors across the room. Life is but a dream.

  I waited. You’d think Hector would’ve come in and asked me if I’d like a nice cup of Colombian coffee. I waited.

  The next time I looked up I saw a vision coming toward me in a light-pink afghan coat with a red-and-black-checked Italian tablecloth on its head.

  “Nice gefilte,” I said.

  “Kaffiyeh,” said Leila.

  She put a rectangular cloth bag on the glass tabletop. It looked like a Gucci shoeshine kit. She opened it and began taking out some of the most ornate drug paraphernalia I’d seen this side of the East Village. A two-pronged silver coke spoon in the form of a sacrificial maiden with arms outstretched. A large seashell container with a mirror on one side and an inch of what looked like diplomatic-pouch-quality snow on the other. Finally, she took one end of a tubelike device that branched into two silver globes and handed it to me. The other end remained in the Gucci shoeshine kit.

  “This is for you, Kinkster. Do you know what it is?”

  “Looks like a stethoscope for a pinhead.”

  Unfortunately, I did not need a great deal of coaxing. I put one silver globe against each nostril, inhaled sharply, and simultaneously blew my brains out.

  It was so good it was very dangerous. Just like all the other good things in life.

  33

  I don’t remember how I got out of that room. Maybe I flew by Jewish radar. Maybe the faces of John Belushi and Lowell George guided me like Sherlock Holmes carriage lamps shining through the mist. Whatever it was that got me there, I was glad to be outside.

  It was America. It was 1988. I didn’t know it, of course. The right lobe of my brain was just beginning to recouple with the left lobe. I could feel the clumsy, gloved hands of Russian cosmonauts slowly piecing the machinery together somewhere in space.

  I could hear Leila’s voice, soft and intimate, somewhere next to me. Cocaine always sends men and women to different planets. “I could go for a man who doesn’t wear running shoes,” she said.

  I did a few impromptu deep-breathing exercises and looked around to get my bearings. Incredibly, we were still on Leila’s block, just a few houses down from where she lived. It was hard to believe that I’d felt brain-dead for what seemed like an eternity. How could I have almost allowed my childhood dreams, my dearest hopes for the future, my very existence on this planet to be reduced to a mere fossil record on the dusty, forgotten desk of some mildly interested, science-oriented graduate student who’d gone out for a pizza without anchovies?

  The wind began to blow a little harder and a lot colder. I began to notice a few things. Two of them were Leila’s legs. As the wind whipped up her coat I saw she was still wearing the cutoffs underneath. Her legs looked as pink as the house where The Band used to practice with Bob Dylan.

  “Your legs look cold,” I said. I took her hand and we walked a little farther. She didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe I could blow on them,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  We were each lost in our own thoughts on our own different planets when we came face to face with Sergeant Mort Cooperman and Sergeant Buddy Fox. They appeared to be in a hurry.

  “One side, Tex,” said Cooperman brusquely. Fox looked appreciatively at Leila, we both stepped aside, and they continued at a brisk pace up the sidewalk.

  Standing in the gutter I turned and saw cops getting out of several unmarked cars and heading in the same direction as Cooperman and Fox. Four of them were carrying a long metal pole with a sort of phallic knob on the end of it. There were two handles on each side. It was a battering ram.

  They all went into Leila’s building and they didn’t seem to be having any trouble with the doorman. I took Leila’s arm and hurried her farther down the street and around the corner.

  “What do you think’s happening?” she asked a little too coolly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody tore the tag off their mattress.”

  34

  Thursday morning broke cold, g
rim, and gray in New York. My hangover and I stepped gingerly around the cat litter box, which was blocking the doorway to the bathroom. I usually kept the cat litter box in the shower, except, of course, when I was taking a shower. The reason for the cat litter box displacement soon became evident.

  Ratso was taking his biannual shower. It was sort of a purification rite with Ratso and he followed it almost religiously whether he felt he needed it or not.

  And he was singing.

  Because of my years on the road as a country singer, I had come to hate the sound of the human voice singing. To make matters worse, Ratso was singing some half-punk, halfrap song by his favorite new group, Smoking/No Smoking.

  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, both the song and the band would be passe before Ratso stepped out of the rainroom, a visual experience I did not wish to have at that hour of the morning.

  I went to the sink, wiped some steam away from the mirror, and saw that my hair was standing straight up in the shape of a rocket ship. It was a fairly current New York hairstyle but it didn’t blow my skirt up too much. I got a brush and ran it through my moss a few times, brushed my choppers, drew a bye on shaving. My eyes would’ve looked good in a stuffed rabbit’s head.

  Ratso showed no signs of departing the rainroom, so I opted for a little trick I’d picked up on the road. It was known widely in country music as the Way Ion Jennings Bus Shower. You stand close to a sink and splash water on your face and your armpits. If there’s soap around you can use it, but then you have to splash a lot of water on your armpits to get it off.

  There was soap and I used it. The results left my sarong and the bathroom floor pretty wet, but when you thought about it, it was a small price to pay for being well groomed.

  I went back into the kitchen and looked out the window at the bleak warehouse walls and rusty fire escapes across Vandam Street. The hangover was starting to go, but I still didn’t feel like putting hotcakes on the griddle and taking down the ol’ fiddle.

  I stoked up the espresso machine and fed the cat.

  While I waited for the espresso I paced back and forth and thought about what had transpired on the previous night. It was the kind of situation where you hated yourself in the morning but you were still pretty damn glad that you’d done it.

  Before I knew it the espresso was ready.

  I poured a cup, lit my first cigar of the morning, and sat down at the kitchen table to read Ratso’s copy of the Daily News. On page 2 I saw a headline that almost made the espresso come out my nose. It read:

  MAJOR COKE RING BUSTED

  country singer thought to be finger

  35

  “Great follow-up,” said Ratso from over my shoulder. He was wearing some kind of New Wave bathrobe that hurt my eyes. I turned my attention back to the story.

  “Terrific sequel,” he said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Terrific sequel,” he said, “to ‘Country Singer Plucks Victim from Mugger.’” At this point Ratso leaned over and began to read the story aloud.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “‘Although law enforcement officers refused to comment, an informed source revealed that a well-known country singer was seen leaving the premises just prior to the time of the raid. The Texas singer, who has often performed at the Lone Star Cafe, is known to have been involved with crime-solving on an amateur level in the past …’” Ratso stood up straight and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “What you need is an agent, Kinkster,” he said excitedly. “What you need is a manager.”

  “What you need is a muzzle for Christmas,” I said.

  Ratso looked hurt. He stood beside the kitchen table like a large, wounded sparrow. I didn’t let it get to me.

  Ratso had carefully cultivated that hurt look and he was pretty damn good at it. When I was hurt, I only looked confused, nervous, or angry. So a hurt look wasn’t a bad thing to have. Could keep you from getting hurt sometime.

  “You see, my dear Ratso,” I said, “there was only one mugger. Surely you realize there must be thousands of Colombians in New York whose mustaches intersect in the illegal drug trade.”

  Ratso thought about it for a moment. So did I. The cat jumped up on the windowsill and watched a few toxic snowflakes crash-land on the East Side, far corner of the pane.

  “You don’t really think,” said Ratso, “that they’d put all of this together and come looking for us, do you?”

  I got up from the table, poured another shot of espresso into my Imus in the Morning coffee mug, and watched the cat watch the snow.

  “As Albert Einstein used to say, Ratso, 1 don’t know.’”

  * * *

  As the snow drifted down, our conversation drifted to other matters. I was midway into my second cigar and finishing my third espresso when Ratso unburdened himself of the results of his adventures in the past few days as an amateur detective. I listened politely.

  To hear Ratso tell it, he’d run a very thoroughgoing investigation into the three parties in question. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought about them in so long that they seemed like characters in an old Russian folk story. It was beginning to dawn on me that, even for an amateur, I had not been very professional. I had let Marilyn and Stanley Park and Hilton Head, as well as the better part of caution and common sense, be pushed to the back of my mind by Leila’s beautiful legs.

  “… and so Stanley Park’s been missing in action for almost a week,” Ratso was saying. “Nobody’s seen him, and get this …”

  “Don’t talk while you’re eating.”

  “… Head may not be as much of a winkie as we at first thought,” Ratso continued.

  “I’ll take that dry towel now.”

  “… at least three occasions coming out of Marilyn Park’s building …”

  “Yes, you can borrow my toothbrush, but in some cultures it means we’re engaged.”

  “… and on a fourth occasion—are you listening, Kinkster?—coming out of his own place with …”

  “Leila!”

  “That’s right. Hilton Head was coming out of his own place with Leila. How’d you know that?”

  “Call it cowboy intuition,” I said. “She was too good to be true.”

  It figured.

  36

  As Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s famous sidekick, once observed, “No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables.”

  I hadn’t been taken to hell yet, but I could sure see it coming. A lot of things were going on and I didn’t like any of them. If I was going to solve this case and live to hear Ratso take credit for it, I’d better be damn careful and lucky. Of course, if I’d really been lucky I’d’ve been in a park somewhere in Oregon throwing a Frisbee to a dog with a bandanna around its neck and I never would’ve gotten Jane Meara’s phone call in the first place. Of course, then I never would’ve met Leila.

  Around eleven Ratso went out for a while to check on things at his apartment. When you’ve got a stuffed polar bear’s head, a four-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, ten thousand books relating to Jesus, Bob Dylan, and Hitler, and a couch with skid marks on it, you can’t just run off and leave things.

  After Ratso had departed I hopped off the espresso and poured a stiff shot of Jameson into the bull’s horn. I toasted the cat rather briefly and killed the shot. I called Leila’s old number and got a recorded message saying that it had been disconnected.

  I called Rambam. He wasn’t home, so I left a message for his machine to call my machine and maybe the two machines could get together and have lunch at the Four Seasons. I also mentioned for Rambam to be sure to read page 2 of the Daily News and let me know what he thought about it.

  The more I thought about it myself, the less likely I believed it was that members of a major Colombian cocaine cartel, as the Daily News described the operation, would take the time and effort to ident
ify one country-singer-turned-amateur-detective. It seemed to me, as I sat in the loft that Thursday afternoon and knocked back another shot of Jameson, that it was even less likely that they would take any action. They had plenty of bulls to fight, and if they ran out of bulls there was always each other.

  As the morning wore on, I started to feel a bit more secure about the whole thing. I just wouldn’t throw the puppet head down to anybody wearing a big mustache.

  About noon I opened the refrigerator and was able to locate a residual bagel behind a small city of Chinese take-out cartons, some of them dating back to before the Ming Dynasty. The bagel was in surprisingly good shape. In fact, it felt better than I did.

  I took the bagel and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda over to the desk, and with the cat, two telephones, and an old typewriter, I had lunch. Fairly pleasant dinner companions, as they go.

  After lunch I opened the day’s correspondence with my Smith & Wesson knife. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to open. If you want a pen pal, you’ve got to be a pen pal.

  There was something that looked unpleasantly like a wedding invitation. I slit it open and sure enough it was. A girl I used to know named Nina Kong was getting married. In order to do this she must have straightened out her act in more ways than one. The guy she was marrying was Edward S. Pincus, a rising young urologist. The wedding was at the Pierre Hotel. Reception to follow.

  Apparently the happy event had taken place two days ago. You know the mails.

  I started to throw the invitation out and then thought better of it. Placed flat on the desk, it made a pretty fair coaster for the Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda.

  A house isn’t really a home without a coaster. I gave the cat a crooked smile. The cat smiled back.