It was a gorgeous day, as we say in New York, even if you’re standing at the kitchen window of your loft anticipating that many men will come hurt you. The buildings looked gorgeous. The pigeons looked gorgeous. The prostitutes looked gorgeous. Actually, these things always have had an inherent beauty, but people have just tried too hard to look at them wrong. You come to see what you want to see.
I wanted to see this whole tension convention blow over. I wanted to continue with the case—find Slick Goldberg’s killer, find Rocky. I wanted a lot of things and it didn’t look like I was going to get them. I had about as much chance of coming out of this situation a happy American as Oliver Twist had of getting more.
The phone call that was to fling us headlong into something that nobody would think was gorgeous came at around three-fifteen that afternoon.
Interestingly enough, it was from Jane Meara.
41
It was Friday evening and the shadows were beginning to fall on Central Park as Ratso and I, who had reached at least some form of rapprochement, stood looking at a tall building on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Central Park South.
“Too bad,” said Ratso. “We’re only two blocks from the Carnegie Deli.”
“If we get through this alive, I’ll buy you a bowl of matzo ball soup.”
“I really wanted a Reuben sandwich.”
“Fine.”
It was cold and dark and it was getting colder and darker and I was trying to explain to Ratso what we were doing there.
“Jane Meara called me today and she was quite distressed.”
“So what’s new?”
“My dear Ratso, one would think you could dredge up a little more sensitivity for a person who’s lost a cat.”
“Go on, Mr. Sensitivity.”
“Well, Landis called Jane in and said her work was falling down since all this started, and Eugene was coarse enough to suggest she forget about Rocky and get a dog.”
“How thoughtless.” Ratso’s eyes were straying in the direction of the Carnegie Deli.
“But the real reason we’re here is that Jane was supposed to have lunch today with an editor from another publishing house whose name is Estelle Beekman. I know Estelle slightly myself. She’s the author of a recent, critically acclaimed novel and she’s sort of a recluse, but a very responsible person in the publishing business. She comes from an extremely wealthy family and she lives in this building. One of the things she wrote about in her novel is that she has been deathly afraid of cats since she was a child. To this day, she abhors them.”
“I like her already,” said Ratso. “But why are we here?”
“She did not show up for her luncheon meeting with Jane, no one at her office knows where she is, and her telephone has been busy for about four hours now.”
“Maybe she’s talking to her shrink about a Tom and Jerry cartoon she once saw when she was a child.”
“I don’t think so, Ratso. There’s no conversation on the line. I checked with the operator myself.”
“Why don’t we call the police?”
“It may come to that, but with this broad and this building, Jane thought it might be better if we were to run a quick check on the situation first ourselves. We wouldn’t want to create any social embarrassment, would we?”
“Of course not,” said Ratso in a voice that was possibly not quite as sincere as one would have hoped.
“Okay,” I said, “there’s about fifteen doormen and all of them are surly. I’m going to call a friend of mine who also lives here and then we’ll go up and see the lay of the land.”
“The lay of the broad is what we’ll probably see,” said Ratso.
“This is a very respectable broad, Ratso. She told me once that she hardly believes in social intercourse, much less sexual. I’ll be right back.”
I went to a pay phone on the corner of Seventh Avenue next to the building and put in two bits. Nothing happened. No dial tone. No change. I took it in stride. The more storms one rides out in life, the better the captain one becomes of one’s soul.
I tried the next pay phone. This wasn’t easy because an escaped gorilla had ripped the receiver completely off the machine and left the wire dangling in the night air like the withered arm of a peasant.
The third pay phone worked fine and after three rings I got through to my friend. What hath God wrought?
Nick “Chinga” Chavin, the guy I was calling in the building where Estelle Beekman lived, was a country singer turned ad exec. I knew the building, one of the poshest in New York, because I’d stayed a couple times with Chinga as his house pest there before I grew up and rented a loft and had to deal with house pests of my own.
One of the things Chinga liked to do late at night was to fire Chinese bottle rockets from his fourth-floor balcony at the New York Athletic Club just across Seventh Avenue. According to Chinga, the New York Athletic Club has, to this day, never admitted Jews or Negroes as members. They don’t much like Chinese bottle rockets either. But on many occasions I’d witnessed Chinga laying siege to the club, aiming particularly at the Aryan shadows jogging along behind the tinted glass.
Now, Chinga agreed to call down to the concierge and tell him Ratso and I were his guests so we could get past the fifteen surly doormen.
He did and we did.
I told the elevator guy to take us to the sixteenth floor. We found the stairs, walked up three, didn’t meet anyone. We wandered down a hallway awhile and found 19G, Estelle Beekman’s apartment. The door was slightly ajar.
“Oh, shit,” I said, “I don’t like to see this.” I’d seen some things behind slightly ajar doors in my time, and none of them had turned out to be a free trip for two to Acapulco. “What is it?” Ratso asked.
“We’re about to find out,” I said.
I opened the door.
42
We walked in as gingerly as two astronauts stepping onto the moon. The place was quiet as a library and almost as big. We listened. There was a soft but persistent electronic sound coming from somewhere on our left. It was quiet and discreet, but it was there. Sort of like a coke dealer’s beeper going off at a backgammon tournament.
We followed the sound for about half a mile and wound up in the kitchen. The telephone receiver was lying forlornly on the drainboard. I took my snot rag out of my hip pocket, picked up the phone, and put it back on the hook. Sorry, nobody home.
We wandered back into the living room. It was dark, so we turned on a few lights. There were several big ornate lamps. There was track lighting. None of it removed the gloom, the visceral sense of foreboding that seemed to cover the pores like sweet, death-scented, coconut sun-tan oil. There was death all over the place. The only thing missing was the body.
Ratso and I made a cursory tour of the lushly furnished living room. It was like a rather macabre open house where you couldn’t find the homeowner but you knew she must be hanging around somewhere. Or lying in one of the bedrooms. Or tied up.
There was expensive-looking chrome and leather furniture, Persian rugs, several large pieces of sculpture that must’ve meant something to somebody somewhere. Large vases, jade carvings.
“Jesus Christ,” said Ratso, gazing at a picture on the wall, “look at that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“You know what it is?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a picture of some fat naked ladies dancing with each other.” I took a cigar out of one of the little stitched pockets on my hunting vest.
“It’s a Matisse,” said Ratso.
“It’s a triumph of art over life,” I said, as I lit the cigar.
“I’m glad you appreciate it,” said Ratso. I blew a cool stream of cigar smoke in the direction of the painting.
“I don’t,” I said. “I just think those fat, naked ladies dancing with each other have outlived Estelle Beekman.”
* * *
We walked from one posh room into another. No Estelle. Even the bathroom was
something to see. She didn’t have a twenty-seven-foot jade toilet seat like Kenny Rogers, but it was definitely a five-star pissoir.
“Since there’s no dead body in the bathtub,” said Ratso, “I think I’ll use the facilities here.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s all right with Estelle, wherever she is. It could be seen as a trifle gauche under the circumstances.”
“I’ve got to urinate like a racehorse.” Ratso unzipped his fly and I zipped out into the hallway.
“Don’t whiz in the bidet,” I shouted through the partially closed door.
“I’m surprised you even know what that is.”
“Of course I do. Bidet lived a little before the time of Matisse. Many people feel that Matisse stole a lot of Bidet’s ideas. Bidet had a splashy style and Matisse was kind of jealous—”
“All right,” shouted Ratso, “that’s enough. But what’s she doing with a goddamned bidet if she doesn’t believe in sexual intercourse?”
“We find her, we’ll ask her,” I said. Never trust a person who’s afraid of cats.
I walked into Estelle Beekman’s bedroom and turned on the light. There was no dead body on the bed either, but lying on the floor there was a key that I didn’t particularly like the look of. I was about to pick it up when I heard a sound that turned my blood to Perrier on the rocks with a little twist of something I didn’t need at all.
It was a cat’s meow. It was coming from the closet.
I listened. It came again. It was joined by another meow.
Normally, the cat’s meow does not turn my kneecaps to Smucker’s. Even after the dart gun incident and the meow message on Jane Meara’s answering machine, I had not felt that the voice of the cat could be, in itself, a manifestation of evil. Now, in this place, I wasn’t so sure.
I got out my snot rag, picked up the key, and opened the locked door of the closet just as Ratso came walking in from the boudoir. For a moment, nothing happened. Then two scrawny street cats came toward us as if they were walking out of a Disney movie. One of them purred and rubbed itself against Ratso’s legs. He moved away in disgust.
“What’re these two cats doing in here?” Ratso fairly screamed.
“Maybe they’re two homosexuals and they’re just coming out of the closet,” I said.
I turned on the light switch in the closet with my snot rag. Nothing happened. I stepped inside the closet. Ratso followed. It was a big closet, crowded with furs and long evening gowns, and it wasn’t easy to see with the subdued lighting of the bedroom. I took out my Bic and I gave it a flick.
What we saw on the floor of the closet did not look like a Disney movie at all. It looked more like something brought to you by the people who killed Bambi’s mother.
Estelle Beekman’s eyes were wide as shiny new nickels, and they reflected pure, polyunsaturated terror. The body was already cold to the touch. The face was blue; the throat muscles looked constricted. One hand had scratched the wall repeatedly in several places, somewhat reminiscent of wall markings I’d heard about elsewhere. For a moment I had a fragment of a picture of an old man walking into a gas chamber playing a violin. Then the Bic became too hot and I let it go.
A few minutes later, I’d opened the sliding door to the private balcony and we were breathing the cold night air and looking down on the New York Athletic Club.
“Let a little of the cigar smoke out of here,” I said. “When I call the police I’m going to strive for anonymity.”
“So she was frightened to death,” said Ratso. “Killed by two cats.”
“More likely by Fred Katz. Or the person we think is Fred Katz.”
For a few minutes we watched a horse and buggy and a driver in a top hat fighting their way through the taxis, buses, and limos down Seventh Avenue. Happy trails.
Ratso was shaking his head, leaning on the railing. “Literally frightened to death,” he mumbled, half to himself, half to Central Park.
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s a shame,” Ratso said. “Estelle Beekman leaving behind all that beautiful shit she’s got in there.”
We’d only been out on the balcony for a few minutes, but I was feeling colder than I had in years.
I took a last puff on the cigar and flicked it across Seventh Avenue at the New York Athletic Club.
“You never see a luggage rack on a hearse,” I said.
43
It was after eleven when Ratso and I climbed out of the hack a few blocks past Sheridan Square and began walking briskly up Vandam Street. It had been a rather gnarly night, cold enough to make a penguin remember his mittens, and it wasn’t over yet.
I’d asked Ratso to put a sock on it conversation-wise, so I could use the walk home to sort things out a bit. Sometimes a walk in brutal weather could freeze extraneous sensory input and make you AWOL upstairs, leaving you with the ice-cold truth. Sometimes all you got was a runny nose. But that, along with not leaving fingerprints, was what snot rags were for.
I let my mind run free. I thought of Eskimos. Two Eskimos rubbing their noses together. Nine months later they’d probably have a little booger. I thought of icebergs. I thought of Goldberg. Goldberg had liked cats. He’d been killed. Estelle Beekman had been afraid of cats. She’d been killed. Jane Meara loved cats. Her life, it appeared, was in danger.
Something was wrong here, I thought. I’d have to call Lobster and find out more about Slick Goldberg. Maybe cats weren’t the common denominator here. If not—what was? … And Leila … why in the hell hadn’t she called? I knew she might be lying low after the bust and the Daily News story, but I missed her. Maybe even …
“Kinkster,” said Ratso suddenly, “the fucking door to the building’s open.”
It was true. It was nudging eleven-thirty at night and the large metal door to the building was standing wide open. You left a door open in New York, you’d be lucky if a family of Rastafarians was all you got.
“Could be a careless lesbian,” I said.
As we rode up in the freight elevator with the one exposed light bulb, the hairs on the back of my neck began to rise as well. I was visited by a trapped, desperate, doomed feeling. It’s hard to run away when you’re in a freight elevator.
“Next time,” I said, “remind me to take the stairs.”
“If there is a next time,” said Ratso.
When the doors opened on the fourth floor we fairly leaped out of the elevator into the dimly lit hallway. I already had my key in the door of the loft when something made me stop. I looked back and saw Ratso standing stiff in his coonskin cap in the middle of the hallway like a chunky, slightly Semitic statue of Davy Crockett. With his right hand, he was pointing at the door.
On the door to the loft was a paw print of what looked like a jaguar or a large jungle cat. It was red and still dripping and, almost certainly, done in blood.
“Careless lesbian?” Ratso asked.
“Maybe somebody knocked too hard,” I said.
44
In pre-Colombian times, life was much simpler.
That was the thought that was in my head when I woke up early Saturday morning with a ringing in my ears. It was the blower.
I grabbed the blower and looked at the clock by the bedside. It was 6:15 A.M., a fairly obscene time for anybody to be awake. It was also, it emerged, a fairly obscene phone call.
“I want you,” said Leila. She sounded like she was right next to me in bed with no guitar case between us.
“Do I have your little heart in my hip pocket?” I asked. That was as coy as I got at six-fifteen in the morning.
“Yes,” she said, “but I have you right here.”
“Where’s here?”
“I’ll give you a hint—it’s right where I want you.”
Great waves of passion rolled over me. I didn’t know if it was Leila’s Palestinian, Colombian, or New York background that enabled her to have such an effect on me. All three cultures seem to have sort of a jaded, hedonistic attitude toward love and sex. Tha
nk God I’m a country boy.
“Hold the weddin’,” I said.
“Wedding?” said Leila. “This is awful sudden. I need some time. If we do get married, though, I think I’m going to make you wear a veil.” She laughed confidently.
“Castrating bitch.”
“I’m not a castrating bitch,” she said. “I just want the West Bank.”
“It’s yours,” I said, “if you promise to always walk ten steps behind me.” I got out of bed, took off the sarong, and put on some jeans. I managed to zip them up without killing myself.
“Honey,” said Leila, “Carlos promised me he’s not going to hurt you. He may just try to scare you a little.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He scared me a little last night.”
“Don’t worry, my brother won’t hurt you. They’re having some kind of meeting tonight, but I’ll keep you posted. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
There was a pause. Finally, Leila said, “I’m with my Uncle Abdul—don’t laugh, that’s not his real name. I have to be very careful just now. We can’t be seen together. There is another family that hates our family and would do anything to harm me and those I love.”
“Okay, Juliet.”
“It is a little like that, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “except all the warring families are on your side.”
“I don’t want to get you in any trouble. I don’t want anything to happen to you. And Kinky—”
“What?”
“I think I love you.”
There was a long pause and Leila might’ve been crying.
As I hung up, I wondered why I couldn’t just meet a broad at the mailbox on the day her Visa card arrived. Why did things always have to be so melodramatic and convoluted?
“One of these days,” I said to the cat, “they’re going to make a life out of my movie.”
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When the Cat's Away Page 10