When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  Being white is an accident of birth. Being heavy is spiritually relative. What I had to be, in no uncertain terms, according to Sergeant Cooperman, was right. And right is sometimes the hardest thing to be in the world.

  As we stepped out of the hack and into the throng, I wondered, not for the first time, if I could be making a terrible mistake. It was the kind of case where logical deduction hardly followed logical deduction. Philip Marlowe, with his dogged perseverance, would’ve had a better shot at cracking it than Hercule Poirot, with his little gray cells. I’d started looking for a cat, stumbled across two stiffs along the way, gotten shot by a lion tranquilizer dart, been sidetracked by a Jaguar, and now, with any luck, I was finally closing in on the killer.

  Train schedules and comments by the butler were not going to catch a murderer in 1988 in America. We’d been to the movies. We’d grown up on television. And to make things even harder, in the words of Mark Twain: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

  And yet, when I went over it again in my mind, I was sure I had it right. Like Inspector Maigret, walking the rainy streets of Paris, smoking my pipe, my hands in my pockets, watching the people caught up in the problems of their lives, I would solve this case. After all, like Maigret, I was a serious student of human nature. And, come to think of it, not-so-human nature.

  * * *

  I didn’t see Cooperman or Fox in the foyer, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time to waste, so I gave Ratso forty bucks, told him to buy two tickets, and then I went over and talked to a uniform who was picking his nose near the doorway. I told him Detective Sergeants Cooperman and Fox from the Sixth Precinct were on their way, and I told him the vicinity where I thought Ratso and I would be. That was the best I could do under the circumstances.

  Ratso returned with the tickets. I don’t know what circus tickets cost these days, but I didn’t see any change. Maybe Ratso threw in a service charge.

  We went in.

  Going to the circus as an adult is not the same as going to the circus as a child. The difference is, when you’re an adult, all the clowns tend to look like John Wayne Gacy.

  It was now pushing two o’clock, when the show was supposed to start. Martha Hume, a sassy, southern, circus-going friend of mine, had told me some time ago that there are holding cages in the basement where you can see the animals up close before the circus starts. The place is called the menagerie, and if I was right, I thought, as we headed down the Dantean ramps into the noisy bowels of the Garden, it would certainly be one today. If I was wrong, Jane could be sitting in the third row eating peanuts and watching normally rational animals making fools of themselves for other animals who already were fools. Life’s a circus, or it’s a carnival, or a whorehouse, or a wishing well. Or a winding, muddy river. One of those things. About the only thing we know life isn’t is a Norman Rockwell painting. But don’t tell your dentist that. Dentists have their dreams.

  We were coming to the end of the last ramp, and the suspicion I held was getting stronger as we progressed downward. Evil has its logic, I thought. Mental illness has its patterns. I was betting Jane’s life that I had accurately gazed into the mind of a maniac.

  I hoped Cooperman and Fox would show up soon. If not, it looked like Ratso and I were going to be working without a net.

  68

  “Looks like it’s closed and we’re hosed,” said Ratso, as we tried vainly to open the two locked doors at the end of the ramp.

  “Think, Ratso,” I said. “You’re a pro at getting backstage at rock concerts. What do we do?”

  “I’ll tell Dumbo the Elephant that I know Ron Wood,” said Ratso.

  I banged loudly on the metal doors. Nothing. It was two o’clock. Upstairs, we could hear the grand parade kicking off. There had to be somebody around. I kept pounding the doors.

  Finally, an old man with a funny hat opened the doors. It could be said that Ratso and I were wearing funny hats, too, but we were wearing very serious faces.

  “Detective Sergeant Cooperman,” I said. “Sixth Precinct. Undercover.” I flashed the idiot button inside my wallet at him. It was a courtesy badge that had been given to me by Lieutenant Scott Grabin of the NYPD, one of the few cops on the force I still enjoyed good relations with. That was because I rarely saw Grabin. He worked out of a precinct in Harlem. Maybe if somebody burned a watermelon in my front yard we’d have the opportunity to work on a case together.

  “This is Sergeant Fox,” I said quickly, nodding toward Ratso. “We’re looking for a small boy who’s on special heart medication. Been missing for over an hour. We’re runnin’ out of time.”

  The only other occasion on which I’d ever used the idiot button was when I’d gotten drunk once in a Mexican restaurant and tried to arrest some of the patrons. It hadn’t worked then and it didn’t look like it was going to work now.

  Then Ratso, drawing heavily on his New York background, pushed the old man to the side and shouted authoritatively, “C’mon, gramps! Get out of the way!” The old man did. Ratso and I walked purposefully through a length of empty corridor and started searching around. We didn’t look back.

  “Not especially kind,” I said.

  “It gets results, Sergeant.”

  We turned a corner and entered what seemed like a large, dank, dark hall. The circus music coming through the ceiling sounded distorted and rather eerily similar to something the hunchback of Notre Dame might’ve selected for his Walkman.

  “Smells like a zoo in here,” said Ratso.

  “That’s what it is, Sergeant.”

  We came to a cage with a lone elephant. As Ratso walked up to it, the animal gave forth with a loud fart, apparently signaling its displeasure.

  “You’ve made a friend for life, Ratso.”

  “I have that effect on people.”

  I had stopped downwind from the elephant and was lighting a cigar when I first heard the laughter. It was toneless and void of joy and it came cascading out of the gloom with the chill and suddenness of a Texas blue norther. It was the kind of unearthly, almost unspeakably evil sound that caused ice to begin forming along your spine.

  “My God,” said Ratso. “That better be a fucking hyena.”

  “It is,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s of the two-legged variety.”

  When you’re frozen in your tracks, one of the easiest things to do is listen. We listened.

  The next two sounds we heard, if it is at all conceivable, rattled our cages even more.

  The first was the roar of a lion.

  The second was the scream of a woman.

  69

  “Damn everything but the circus” was the way e. e. cummings had once put it. Now, as Ratso and I dashed into the gloom, I was more than ready to throw the circus into the pot with everything else.

  The only thing I wasn’t ready for was the tableau of horror that lay in a pool of sick, yellow light at the end of the hall. Jane Meara’s body was lying on the floor of a cage and the biggest lion I’d ever seen in my life was turning her over with a bloody claw.

  I approached at a run and grasped the door of the cage. The lion tracked my movements with ancient, ruthless, storybook eyes. It was staring right at me and licking its chops.

  The cage itself was a fairly small enclosure—about the size of your average apartment in the Village—only it probably didn’t cost fifteen hundred dollars a month. Whatever it cost, it was going to be a bitch to collect the rent.

  I looked around frantically for something to put between me and two thousand pounds of biblical hate. I found a metal folding chair.

  When you know you’ll soon meet a lion in person with no bars between you, a lion’s eyes can tell you things about yourself that you might not pick up in a philosophy course at the university. How different in some ways, and yet how similar these eyes were to another pair of primeval orbs I’d recently encountered—the Jaguar’s. One pair at least had the physiognomy of a human being, while the other be
longed to a beast of the jungle. And yet both had a flat, glinting, mesmerizing quality. Of the two, it was Leo’s eyes that held more compassion, more humanity. Made you think twice about the theory of evolution.

  But there wasn’t time to think even once. The lion roared. A soft moan came from Jane Meara’s body.

  It was ironic, I thought, I wasn’t even a Christian.

  I opened the door.

  The lion stood its ground and there was something in its eyes akin to the cool, unwavering gaze of a hooker sizing up a potential john on the street. For my part, I thought of Earl Buckelew, the famous water witcher of the Texas hill country, knocking down a hornets’ nest with a straw cowboy hat. I thought of Tchaikovsky or Stokowski or whatever the hell his name was, who used to walk onto the conductor’s podium oblivious to the world. They say that if a brick wall had been erected across the stage, he could’ve walked right through it.

  Whether it was a hornets’ nest, an audience, or a lion, you had to use Judy Garland’s little trick—pretend it wasn’t there. Shake it off completely. Play only for the silent witness.

  The lion roared and I damn near dropped the chair. I was edging a little closer to Jane when the beast suddenly came at me with a jungle version of a left hook. I twisted my body sharply but I still caught some of it and my right arm went completely numb. I watched the metal chair go crashing against the bars. I watched the bright red blood splattering against the concrete floor. I didn’t feel too much like Judy Garland and this didn’t look a hell of a lot like Kansas.

  Suddenly, the lion’s attention seemed to be drawn to the far side of the cage. I looked over its shoulder and saw what appeared to be a human jack-in-the-box jumping up and down. It was Ratso.

  Incredibly, he was getting results. Even the lion appeared to be amazed to see somebody hopping up and down like a piston, waving a coonskin cap between the bars, and shouting, “Yo! Yo! Raw meat! Check it out!”

  . The lion leaped for the side of the cage, viciously swiping at the hat. I grabbed Jane with my good arm and dragged her to the door of the cage. I let go of her and awkwardly struggled to open the door, praying that Leo’s attention span would stretch for a few more seconds.

  It did. I got Jane out of the cage and closed the door behind us.

  Ratso was down, my arm was beginning to throb, and Leo was sitting in the middle of the cage chewing peacefully on the coonskin cap.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” I said to Jane.

  Her eyes fluttered open and I watched them turn into mirrors of horror. I looked over my shoulder and saw it coming out of the shadows toward us.

  It was another big cat, but this one walked on two feet and was carrying a gun.

  70

  “She wouldn’t even read it! She wouldn’t even look at it!”

  The voice seemed to echo dully in the room like a horrifying, atonal sob. The figure moved closer and into the light, trapping Jane and myself between the gun and the cage. The gun, which we couldn’t get away from. The cage, which we weren’t about to go back into.

  In the unhealthy, yellow light the garish cat mask looked like it came from a steam locker in some forgotten corner of hell. The gun, as near as I could tell, was not a tranquilizer gun this time. It looked a little like Rambam’s revolver, only smaller. But when a gun is pointed at you, the most important thing to be aware of is that a gun is pointed at you. The size and make and model can be established later. If there is a later.

  “Back in the cage! Both of you!” the creature screamed.

  “No,” Jane said. Her voice sounded like that of a small tired child who’d suddenly realized it was past her lifetime.

  “Yessssss,” hissed the voice, like an obscure Hindu demon.

  Suddenly, the mask was off and flying against the bars of the cage. The face that was revealed looked familiar yet unfamiliar. Like someone you always thought you knew but never did. It was cold, pale, twitching, and terrible. Almost like a mask under a mask.

  “Eugene!” said Jane with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Who’d you expect?” he said in a low, gravelly voice. “Robert Ludlum? Stephen King?” I couldn’t be sure but it seemed as if he was frothing a bit at the mouth.

  “Looks like the cat’s out of the bag,” I said.

  Eugene smiled. Right then he looked like the meanest son of a bitch who ever put on shoelaces.

  “None of you helped me!” he shouted. “You stood in my way with all your little cats! Now look what’s happened to you!”

  He pointed the gun straight at my head.

  “Eugene,” I said. “Eugene …”

  “Goodbye,” said Eugene. He paused. “… Kinky,” he added. I could see the muscles in his face tighten at the same time his hand tightened around the trigger.

  You never know what’s going to happen in life. You could pick up a newspaper and see where Lady Bird Johnson was caught swimming naked in the pool at the Holiday Inn. That’s what keeps us all in the game.

  Jane and I held our breath.

  A shot rang out.

  Eugene spun around in an awkward little last waltz and hit the sawdust.

  In the shadows I saw Sergeant Cooperman slowly rising out of a crouch. He and Fox walked over to us.

  “Nice shot,” said Sergeant Fox.

  * * *

  Jane, Ratso, and I were taken by ambulance to the same hospital. Ratso was fine. In fact, as he told the doctor, he’d just gone along for the ride. Jane was kept overnight for observation, and by the time I called in the morning she’d already been released. They treated my arm, said it was a flesh wound, gave me a few shots and a few prescriptions, and Ratso and I went home.

  Eugene had not been as fortunate. He’d taken a ride in the stiffmobile to a nice refrigerated drawer.

  Ratso never got his hat back and, quite uncharacteristically, he never even asked about it.

  71

  My attitude about life is you should always take the good with the bad. The game, of course, is to see if you can tell which is which.

  It was Sunday night, two days after our little trip to the circus, and Ratso was packing.

  “Seems like I’ve lived here a long time, doesn’t it, Daniel?” said Ratso. Daniel was what Ratso had taken to calling me in the days immediately following my brief excursion into the lion’s den. The name wasn’t that humorous, but it was shorter than Nebuchadnezzar.

  “Maybe Alex Haley will do a story about your stay here,” I said.

  I was sitting at the desk smoking an eleven-dollar Cuban cigar I’d once bought in Vancouver. I’d been saving it for a special occasion and this was it. Getting rid of a house pest. The cat watched dispassionately from the kitchen table as Ratso packed his things. She wasn’t going to believe it until she actually saw him leave.

  “Uh, Daniel,” said Ratso, “I can accept the idea of a spiritual hunch about Eugene and the circus, but run it by me one more time just how and when you began to suspect him.”

  “I told you, Ratso, the pattern was there all the time. Slick Goldberg, Estelle Beekman, and Jane Meara all had in common that they were literary types. They were in one way or another involved in the publishing business.

  “Eugene said something rather strange when he told Jane she should forget Rocky and get a dog. A more normal, if still somewhat insensitive, suggestion would have been to get another cat.

  “After Estelle Beekman got aced, I was convinced the killer lay somewhere within the literary community with which we were dealing. Then, when Eugene told me he’d written a novel that he was having trouble getting published, he really tipped his hand. I asked him in the coffee shop that morning what the novel was about. He sidestepped the question and went into some monologue about ‘if Hemingway were around today he’d probably be writing ad copy.’

  “Now I ask you, Ratso, from what you know about human nature, have you ever heard of a novelist—especially an unpublished novelist—who, when asked what his book is about, declines to tell you?
There ain’t no such animal. It’s almost clinical recall with these people.”

  “So you knew,” said Ratso, “that there was something strange about Eugene.”

  “Either something strange about Eugene,” I said, “or something about that particular manuscript that he didn’t want me to know. So I had Lobster find out if he’d ever been a client of Goldberg’s. He had, and Goldberg had dropped him. Also, he’d submitted the manuscript to Estelle Beekman, who’d rejected it. Meanwhile, here is Jane talking endlessly in the office about her cat, and taking forever to even read the thing. Then I find out from Landis that Eugene’s book is about dogs. A major opus—‘the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of dog books,’ Landis called it—that conceivably might’ve taken Eugene years to write.

  “When I heard that, it absolutely tore it A book on dogs.”

  “Amazing,” said Ratso, shaking his head as he packed up his hockey equipment. “I guess that means a foul wind is blowing for the future of my horse book.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  I got up and walked over to the kitchen, poured out a shot of Jameson into the bull’s horn, and killed the shot. I paced back and forth in the kitchen, leaving a rich trail of pre-Castro smoke in my path.

  “But aside from all of this,” I said, “what really nailed-Eugene had nothing to do with human logic or human perception at all. It was an inversion of Sherlock Holmes’s famous case of the dog that didn’t bark. Our case features a cat that did take action.”

  “Rocky?” Ratso asked.

  “Not Rocky, my dear Ratso, but this very cuddly little creature”—here I picked the cat off the kitchen table and briefly held it in my arms before it twisted away and tried to claw me on its way to the floor—“this cuddly wuddly little …”

  “Spare me,” said Ratso.

  “… creature who once jumped on your balls. Remember?”

  “It’s emblazoned on my scrotum forever.”