“Are you scared to talk to your neighbors?” she asked.
I snorted through my nose to indicate derision and disdain. “Scared! Scared! HA.”
Wendy’s eyebrow remained skyward.
“No, not scared,” I doth protested. “I just have a better plan.”
The plan was simple and elegant. Tibby would go door-to-door! After all, Tibby knew the neighborhood. He knew exactly who he was visiting. We would tie a note to Tibby’s collar. “Dear Neighbor,” it would say. “Are you feeding my cat (this cat)? If so, please call me so I can thank you.”
“See, I’m pretending to be interested in food,” I said proudly.
“Very smart,” murmured Wendy.
We laminated the note with tape and tied it to his collar with a red ribbon. We opened the back door and watched him saunter away.
19.
20.
If you had asked me about the block I lived on, I would have told you that it was friendly, family-friendly even, but I would have had very little evidence to back this up. The truth was, my neighbors and I simply didn’t have a lot of contact. We greeted each other from our sealed cars like parading prom queens, mouthing soundless hellos, contorting our faces into wide smiles, waving enthusiastically as we pulled into and out of our garages. Every now and then one of us might be caught wheeling our garbage can to the curb, and a few hearty words would be exchanged, about the garbage can, about the weather, about nothing in particular. Otherwise, most of my neighbors were strangers with familiar faces.
Today I agreed to visit the Suspicious Area. But I had no intention of confronting anyone there. I agreed only to case the joint; all good PIs need to know the lay of the land before they corner the bad guy.
I was full of crime lingo but empty of bravado.
Wendy piled me and my crutches into the car, and we slowly cruised down the street, like cops on patrol. “Here,” I said, and we pulled over. For a moment we stared at the three houses the GPS maps had pinpointed.
Wendy said, “It’s time to knock on doors.”
I’d been backstabbed!
“No!” I cried.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“Afraid!” I scoffed. And then in a smaller voice: “Let’s just look.”
So we exited the car, to look. Heated whispering ensued.
“Let’s just ring the doorbell NOW,” Wendy hissed.
“But what if we lose our leverage?” I whined.
“What leverage?”
“The . . . I . . .”
Look, I wanted to say, I’m on crutches. I’m weak, ungainly, unsure. Why would I want to talk to my neighbors in this debilitated state? I don’t even talk to them when I’m healthy. Yes, I’d gone to great lengths to connect to my cat, but when it came to humans in near proximity, I preferred to keep a distance.
It was pathetic that Tibby knew my neighbors better than I did. He knew the state of their fences, the layout of their patio furniture, their gardening skills, the fights they had with their loved ones, the hours they rose, the hours they went to sleep, their tots, their dogs, the aromas of their meals.
We went back and forth like this, me shaking my head and glancing up at the windows, Wendy trying to pump me up but keeping her voice low. She was like a trainer in the corner at a boxing match; in a moment she would be putting Vaseline on my face and stuffing Kleenex up my nose.
“Okay,” I finally said.
Wendy rang the doorbell. We peered past the gate, up the garden stairs.
No one is going to answer, I was about to say, when someone answered.
The man seemed to be naked. He was leaning out a side door. I recognized him immediately as the figure in a suit who walked his lanky Doberman past the house in the evenings. Now all we could see was his large white torso, the rest of him disappearing behind the doorjamb. For a moment both Wendy and I were stunned. But his face was not unfriendly.
“Hey!” I said, enthusiastically, sure he was going to
A. draw a gun,
B. yell at us to take our gas cans elsewhere, or
C. pelt us with something he had in his pockets, if indeed he was wearing something, and therefore had pockets.
None of this happened. Instead he looked at us expectantly. “Yes?”
I cleared my throat and held up Tibby’s photo. “I’m looking for my cat. I mean, I’m not actually looking for him now. But I want to know if you’ve seen him.”
The man’s face softened. He reintroduced himself—we had exchanged names in the past but both of us had forgotten the other’s. He’d lived on the block longer than I had, for almost thirty years.
Mr. Naked squinted at the picture and said he had never seen Tibby. He remembered the flyer. He said that since he had dogs, cats didn’t usually visit. But the resident two doors up had a cat, he said. Maybe he would know something.
“That was easy,” I whispered to Wendy as the door closed behind Mr. Naked.
“That was nice,” Wendy agreed. “Now let’s try the resident with the cat.”
I was sure that this time no one would answer—what were the odds?—but after a few minutes, Cat Resident peeked out from his doorway with the same quizzical look as Mr. Naked had, slightly wary but not unfriendly. And he was wearing clothes. I explained that we were looking for whoever was feeding my cat. I tried not to make it sound like a capital offense, that I was fine that someone was feeding him, in fact, I was happy—no, ecstatic. Over the moon! Wendy knocked me with her elbow and whispered, “He gets it,” to redirect me.
Cat Resident said that no, it wasn’t him, he didn’t own cats, that it was the guy downstairs, but they’re indoor-only cats, and the guy downstairs wouldn’t feed someone else’s, or at least he didn’t think so. Wendy asked if he had any other ideas. Cat Resident, who was now No-Cat Resident, pointed to his backyard and said that Russell, who lived behind him, had cats. “Try there too?”
There was no answer at the lower apartment in the No-Cat Resident’s house. “See,” I whispered, “people just don’t answer their doors in the big city.” But Wendy gave me a withering look, so I went quiet. We drove around the block and rang Russell’s doorbell, then the next doorbell, and the next, but our luck had run out. No one was answering. But now we had covered part of the Suspicious Area.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” Wendy said. “That’s your chance.”
“I’m ready,” I said.
The day was sunny and warm. I donned clothes that suggested I was a PTA mom on the way to the health food store, took a deep breath, and set out to stalk my neighbors.
I had never noticed how lively my street could be. On this fine day, at least, garages were being cleaned, dogs walked, and kids in strollers rolled to the park as if in some finely staged play. I took another deep breath, mined my list of excuses for one valid enough to quit and return to bed, came up with none, and crutched toward the activity.
The crutches, it turned out, were not a hindrance. Instead, people stopped when I hailed them, gazed with surprise, then advanced, seemingly ready to open any door or carry any grocery bag or call an ambulance. To each I offered Tibby’s photo and told my convoluted sob story as quickly as possible. Cat lost! Cat returned! GPS! I ended with this: Seems he was in this area. Have you ever seen him?
At first I didn’t have any luck. No one recognized Tibby. But I did have lots of lovely conversations with sympathetic people who crumpled into their How Cute! face at his photo and listened to the story of my quest with interest.
Hello Alastair! Hello Daphne! Hello John! Hello Lorraine! Tibby had now introduced us. I had finally spoken to my human neighbors. Yet Tibby had never been seen, though the GPS showed that he’d been crisscrossing these yards every day for months, probably years. Humans, it was becoming clear, were oblivious to much of their surroundings.
Finally, my neighbor Alastair had a suggestion. “You might try here,” he said, and pointed to a house I had seen often; it was smack-dab in the middle of the GPS activity.
“Yes. They once had fifteen feral cats in their house. They’re real cat lovers.”
Or cat stealers, I thought.
There was no doorbell, and no way to knock on the iron gate, so I stood outside on the sidewalk for a few minutes, gathering the remnants of my courage. I called up to the house.
“Yoo-hoo! Hello?”
There was no answer or movement. I waited anyway. I had had a nice day in my neighborhood, and calling “yoo-hoo” was starting to suit me. I didn’t have to wait long. A roly-poly man with a Santa Claus beard, wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, appeared above me on the threshold of his front door. He walked down the outside stairs and squinted at me through the gate.
“Yes?”
I held up Tibby’s photo.
“I know that cat,” he said.
At home, I was in a tizzy. “I found the perps!” I told Wendy. “Their names are —— and —— ! They live in the Suspicious Area! They once had fifteen feral cats! They were feeding Tibby, they told me!
And that’s code for ‘we locked Tibby in our closet!’ It’s lucky he escaped!”
Wendy, calm-headed and reasonable, waited for my rant to end. Then she said, “Let’s have them over for tea and find out what really happened.”
* The names have been redacted because everyone is innocent until proven guilty. From here on in, they will be known as the Cat Stealers.
21.
When you have cat stealers over for tea, you clean the house, buy bagels and cream cheese, and try to figure out how to trap your guests in a lie. You make a list of questions that will ferret out the truth like a drug test ferrets out certain chemicals.
1. When you picked up Tibby and brought him into your house and locked him in there for five weeks, did you wonder why he had a collar on him with a name, an address, and a phone number?
2. When you heard a cracking, warbling female voice calling out the name “Tibby” each night, which matched the name on said collar, did you consider there might be a connection?
3. When Tibby seemed sad and withdrawn and homesick, clearly missing his owner, did you
a. brainwash him
b. feed him crap food to make him forget his sorrows
c. ignore him and the facts
d. all of the above
Wendy said I couldn’t use any of these questions.
“Be nice,” she said. “We don’t know anything yet. We’ve let the GPS unit, the camera, the animal communicator, the notes, the flyers, and the pet detectives talk. Isn’t it time to let our neighbors have their say?”
So I jotted down a few things that we wanted to cover:
Children in household (per the psychic’s reading)?
Address and phone number on Tibby’s collar—readable?
THREE FLYERS IN MAILBOX
Various objects hanging from Tibby’s collar—comments?
Wendy looked at this list and agreed to cover these points. She told me not to interfere; she’d handle the interview from here.
The Cat Stealers arrived for tea. I peered at them with narrowed eyes. This is what they looked like:
Yes, they looked like nice people. They even proffered a gift: a leafy sprig of catnip, which they said they grew in their yard.
Wendy was pleased, but I was not fooled. Wasn’t growing catnip in one’s yard the kitty equivalent of giving candy to children? Yes, it was.
The Cat Stealers were happy to see Tibby, who was lying on the sofa and raised his head when they approached. Aha! This was the true test. Tibby’s kitty brain was whirring, trying to place where he had seen these two. Once everything clicked, he would flee from his former captors.
He let himself be petted.
Cat Stealer A must have seen my shocked face. “Cats like me,” he said. “I’ll go someplace and be sitting, and if there’s a cat in the neighborhood, it’ll find me.”
“So Tibby found you,” Wendy said softly. She glanced at me to make sure I was hearing this. They were not Cat Stealers, her look said. They were Cat Whisperers.
Here is their story:
Tibby had shown up one day last summer. He had waited in the shrubbery until the other strays ate the food the Cat Stealers routinely put out; only then did he approach. No, they had never brought him into their house, or even petted him. He always fled when they got too close. If there was an address on his collar they couldn’t get close enough to read it. Later, they noticed a large blue box under his chin. They did not have any children. They didn’t realize Tibby was missing or lost. They thought he was just there to snack.
But what about the three flyers we’d put in their mailbox?
They had never seen them.
None of them?
None.
The Cat Stealers seemed anxious to help. They discussed it back and forth and finally supposed that the downstairs tenant had disposed of the flyers before bringing up the mail.
Really? Really? Could it be this simple—a skittish kitty, an unreadable collar, a careless tenant?
I wasn’t supposed to ask any questions, especially accusing ones. But I couldn’t hold back.
“Well, if he wasn’t in your house, where did he sleep?” I sniffed. “He certainly wasn’t at home.”
“My guess is that he was taking a meal from us and then going to the run-down banya next door,” Cat Stealer B said, and explained that the neighborhood had once been filled with Russian immigrants. It was not uncommon to find the detritus of their banyas, Russian saunas, listing into the weeds.
I was hardly listening. Instead I was making a mental checklist. On one side of the paper that floated in my brain was the word “Crazy.” On the other was “Not Crazy.” The list under “Crazy” was long.
Feeds strays
Grows kitty drugs in backyard
Rents to unreliable tenant
“He must have slept in the banya,” agreed Cat Stealer A. “Lots of cats go there.”
Tibby had been living in a San Francisco bathhouse? This was too much.
“Didn’t you have fifteen cats once?” I cried, and then shot Wendy a triumphant look.
The look said, Crazy cat people.
It said, Fifteen cats!
It said, We can’t trust them.
“Oh yes,” Cat Stealer B said, unfazed. “We had a neighbor who had a whole colony of cats in her backyard. She was very old, only spoke Russian, partly blind, completely deaf, very wary of people. We tried to convince her to bring us the kittens. Then we would spend three or four weeks with each one, play with it, love it, before adopting it out. I would sometimes cry when one was adopted. And we’d tell everyone, ‘If you don’t want the cat anymore, bring it back to us. Don’t abandon it at the pound.’”
Fifteen cats
Hangs out with blind hermit
“We used to keep files on each one. We once adopted out twenty-five in a year,” added Cat Stealer A.
Files on each cat
Blackie, Rippy, Nessie, Kbar, Elliott, Buford, Princess, Chloe, Jones—these were just some of the cats our neighbors had either owned or watched over. There had been an especially beloved cat named Lord Brandoch Daha, after a character in a novel. “He used to wander, so I would go to the backyard and call him,” Cat Stealer A said, pausing at the memory. “Some people thought I was some sort of weird Christian. There I was yelling, ‘Lord! Lord!’ at the sky.”
They no longer had so many cats in the house. Now there was only one, a big, gentle Maine coon. But they kept food in their backyard, they explained, because there were so many strays and abused animals.
I ignored the pang I felt at the mention of strays and abused animals.
“What kind of food?” I asked, thinking, Food that was drugged?
“Friskies,” they said.
“Oh, Friskies,” I said and raised my eyebrows at Wendy, to be translated as “Friskies is Halloween candy for cats.”
Friskies
The list under “Not Crazy”
was suspiciously empty. If you looked hard enough, there was some small type. It read:
Adopts out kittens
Gives freely of food to strays and abused animals
Takes care of hermits
I refused to look at this list. I went back to the Crazy side and add 25 cats in a year
I knew I was grasping. But I was resentful. The truth was, I needed someone to blame for Tibby’s disappearance. I needed to be redirected from the uncomfortable realization that I was not enough for my cat and that he was keeping secrets from me. I’d thought he was pathologically shy, scared, unadventurous. Instead, he was taking up with strangers and spending time in bathhouses. By heavily weighting the Crazy column, I could shrug off this whole disappearance as an anomaly. “Of course it didn’t make sense,” I would tell my friends, twirling a finger next to my temple. “Crazy people don’t make sense.” And that would be that.
“We have a cat that comes and eats the food in the backyard, and sometimes he even comes into the house and sprays,” Cat Stealer B said. “One day I just tied a note to his collar, asking his owners to please take better care of him, and to get in touch.”
“You tied a note to his collar?” My face drained.
“Why, yes,” she said.
And that’s when my mental tally crumbled. My resentment, once hot, now boiled away. Denial slumped into a corner, drunk and passed out. My jealous side agreed to hide under a blanket. Suspicion was leaving, furtively boarding a Greyhound bus.
The little that was left of my good sense rallied.
The Cat Stealers weren’t cat stealers. They were cat lovers. They went to great lengths for cats, and even tied notes to their collars. If they were crazy, it was normal, honest, hardworking cat crazy.
Ties notes to collars
They were just like me.
Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology Page 5