“It’s a short play, isn’t it?”
“Well, I guess so. It depends to a great extent on how we use the chorus.”
“And the chorus also will be women?”
“Yes. As I already said, the only male part played by a male will be Philoctetes.”
“What about dress? Contemporary?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“But not Greek?”
“No, no togas.”
“Well, as long as we’re not nude,” I said. And Tricia Lamb threw back her head and laughed. At that moment, staring at this woman, I thought of the cat Abelard. I don’t know why. It was just the way Tricia Lamb moved. I had the weird feeling that if I ever got to see Abelard during my cat-sitting visits, he would look like her—that is, Abelard the cat would look like Tricia Lamb the producer. Maybe I wasn’t used to the Kirin beer. Or maybe I was having a blood-sugar explosion from the pistachio ice cream.
The waiter brought the check. Tricia Lamb studied it for a while, took out a credit card, put it back, took out cash, then put the bills back, produced the credit card again, and paid with that.
She smiled at me. It made me uncomfortable. It was the kind of smile that said I was wise and wonderful and much older than she. She didn’t know I had forgotten all my lines when it came to seventeen murders and seventeen toy mice and clues that were laughed at and interpretations that were considered bizarre and a dear, dear friend whom I had almost sent to his death.
“I’m going downtown. Can I drop you off in a cab?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I think I’ll walk.”
We had finished our business and finished our food and the bill was paid but neither of us made a move to leave. It was probably loneliness. Theater people on the fringe are very lonely. We have lost our theater friends.
“Did you know a New York actor named Bill Lukens?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“He was in New York about ten years ago. He used to do one-man shows downtown.”
“No, I didn’t know him. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I knew him. We lost contact.” Her brief explanation hid about every bad love story one would ever read about.
“What kind of stuff did he do?”
“It was pretty way-out. A combination of mime and song. He had a beautiful voice.”
“Where downtown?”
“I don’t remember.”
It was so odd sitting there making that kind of delicious small talk when I knew that poor Tony was recovering on my sofa under the baleful eyes of Bushy.
“He studied at the Yale Drama School,” she said.
“A nice place,” I noted, with a little twist of sarcasm.
“A nice guy for a nice place.”
“Was he wounded?”
She laughed out loud. “Yes. He was Philoctetes.”
“But who isn’t? Right?”
She nodded and her face grew grim, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But she didn’t.
“Let’s go,” she said. We got up and walked out of the restaurant.
“Here’s my phone and my address. But I’ll send you the translation first. Read it. Think about it. Then give me a decision.” We shook hands like businessmen. How odd.
***
It was eight o’clock that evening. Tony lay on my sofa; he seemed to be much better, though it was now obvious he wouldn’t win any facial beauty contests for a long time to come. I was sitting at the long wood table across the room. Bushy was out of sight, probably in my bedroom, on the pillow, protecting his space because he was nervous that Tony would requisition it.
On the floor beside the sofa lay a half-eaten chicken-salad sandwich and an empty wineglass that had been one-third filled with Martell’s.
“Tony, I want to read you something. A passage from Philoctetes.”
“Sure, Swede, read away.”
“The chorus is speaking about our hero. ‘I marvel how he kept his hold upon a life so full of woe . . . with no living soul in the land to be near him while he suffered . . . no compassionate ear into which he could pour forth the lament, awakening response, for the plague that gnawed the flesh and drained his blood . . . no one to soothe, with healing herbs, the burning pus oozing from his ulcerated foot. All he can do is creep with painful steps—”
“Enough, Swede, enough!” Tony interrupted. “The man has a problem. I agree.”
I closed the book. “Who does it remind you of, Tony?”
“Quasimodo.”
I ignored that comment. “Karl Bonaventura.”
“His feet seemed perfectly healthy to me.”
“The wound is in his heart. The death of his sister. Or maybe the death of the sister was an attempt to heal his wound. Maybe an incestuous wound.”
“What the hell are you saying, Swede? First of all, I don’t even believe that it was Karl who shot at me from that overpass. And you seem to be taking it a bit further.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Look, Swede. I think you’re starting to lose control here. Because you can’t accept one fact.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re not one step closer to solving those murders than you were at the beginning. All you came up with was a lot of funny little facts. Like some of the pictures on the walls of the victims were crooked, like a Mother Goose nursery rhyme; like most of the cats seem to have vanished at the time of the murders . . .” He stopped speaking for a moment, reached down for the glass, saw that it was empty, made a face, and continued: “Like a swamp somewhere in the Adirondacks. Look, Swede, the fact is that you haven’t done any better than those computer whizzes at Retro.”
I was angry. But I kept my voice down. “You forget the space between the crimes . . . and the seasons. They have to be cat related.”
“Well, it wasn’t you, Swede, who came up with those figures. You told me it was the FBI agent from Baltimore. But look, nothing you came up with is any more substantial than what Retro came up with . . . toy mice in dead people’s apartments. God, Swede, this is all crazy.”
“You sound just like Judy Mizener.”
“I sound like a man with a battered face who needs another brandy.”
I went to the kitchen, brought back the bottle, and gave him a little more brandy. I also took some for myself in a coffee cup, the way my grandmother used to drink it on cold evenings when she was bedding down her dairy cows for the night.
“Tony,” I said gently after I took the first sip, “I think we went to the wrong apartment.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We shouldn’t have gone to Jill Bonaventura’s apartment . . . that’s just a shrine. We should have gone to Karl’s apartment.”
“Why?”
“That’s where we would have found something important.”
“But you thought that slip of paper was important at the time. Or you wouldn’t have sent me on that crazy trip to the Desolate Swamp.”
“I told you before. Karl probably forged that. To kill you . . . or both of us. He knew we would follow it up. He wants us out of the way.”
“Why? Do you think he killed his sister? Man, the guy is psychotic from grief.” He sat up and looked at me wide-eyed. “Or do you think he killed the others?”
I took another sip of the brandy. It was spring in New York. I usually drank brandy only in the winter. How old-fashioned I am.
“A lot of things were going through my mind during lunch with that producer, Tony. A lot of things.”
“You mean you discovered that Karl Bonaventura is a reincarnated Philoctetes. What would Sophocles think about that? He wrote the goddamn play.”
“Be serious, Tony. We have a lot of dead people to care for.�
� My comment bit into him. He cursed under his breath and lay back down on the sofa.
“Just relax and listen, Tony. Okay? Just hear me out. First of all, there are really only two pieces of information that seemingly have nothing to do with the murders. The first is those damn leaf bouquets that I found in Jack Tyre’s apartment.”
“You mean the valentines from that lady?”
“Right. And the second is what Karl Bonaventura told us about his sister. The money.”
“What money?”
“The twenty-five hundred dollars he said she asked for the year of her death and the two years previously.”
“I remember.”
“Two pieces of information. Two things. And both of them are decidedly unfeline. They seem to be outside of the case. Like burrs on a tail.”
“I think, Swede, you’re around the bend. Who ever heard of assigning importance to evidence because it doesn’t fit in with any other evidence? It’s sort of a bizarre criterion.”
“Well, I’m doing it anyway. And I’m taking it one step further. I have this strange feeling that Karl Bonaventura and Georgina Kulaks know each other.”
“But they don’t.”
“How do we know?”
“What you are really telling me, Swede, is that you have this crazy intuition that they have become, in your mind, prime suspects.”
“If the shoes fits, Tony, wear it.”
“There is no shoe. There is no fit.”
“Let’s go to Bonaventura’s apartment.”
“It’s not an apartment. It’s a small house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.”
“Well, let’s pay him a visit. Let’s look the place over. Let’s see what we can find.”
He swung his legs over and sat up again, throwing up his hands in despair. “Don’t you see how crazy you’re talking, Swede? You’re telling me that Karl and that woman Kulaks are in cahoots because each of them is connected to a piece of irrelevant evidence. Your logic is crazy.”
“We have nothing to lose, Tony.”
“Why don’t you just accept the fact that Retro fired you and this case is beyond you and me and the whole goddamn police department?”
“Let me be the judge of that,” I replied.
“I’m talking too much, Swede. My face is starting to hurt.”
“Call Karl Bonaventura, Tony.”
He stared at me angrily for what seemed the longest time. Then he sighed wearily, took out his wallet, extracted a card, and walked to the phone. He dialed. He listened for a while. Then he hung up the receiver.
“There was a message on his answering service. He’ll be away for a few days. Just leave your name and phone number, and he’ll return the call as soon as he gets back.”
He walked back to the sofa and sat. I smiled broadly.
“What are you grinning at?” he asked. “I did what you told me.”
“Tell me, Tony. What is the iron law of life in New York in regard to the telephone?”
“You tell me.”
“Thou shalt not leave a message on your answering machine that you will be away for a few days. It is an open invitation to thieves.”
“Well, Bonaventura is not an intelligent psychotic,” Tony replied.
“Or maybe he went up to that overpass in Kingston to blow you away. And he had to give himself a couple of days’ leeway to stand on the overpass to make sure he got you.”
“Assuming that he followed me to the car-rental place and knew what kind of car I rented,” Tony replied skeptically.
“Yes, assuming that. And then he decided to break the iron law because he knew his compatriot would call and he wanted her to rest easy, knowing that he was taking care of business.”
“His compatriot being Georgina Kulaks, I imagine. Oh, hell, Swede, this is really stretching it. Why would these two people murder seventeen innocent men and women? Including their loved ones.”
“Humor me, Tony. Let’s go to Sheepshead Bay.”
“But he’s not back yet from wherever he went.”
“I know that. So what?”
Tony took another sip of brandy. He looked at me suspiciously.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“What am I saying?”
“That we should break in.”
“Yes.”
“I’m a law-abiding citizen, Swede. I may have left my wife and children. I may have delusions of theatrical grandeur at an advanced age. I may be throwing my copying business down the drain. But I’m not a thief.”
“Neither am I,” I responded.
“Then what do you call it?”
“I call it a necessity.”
Bushy had ambled back into the living room, tail up. He walked to the half-eaten chicken sandwich on the carpet, sniffed it, and turned away. Then he sniffed the brandy. He didn’t like that either. He stretched, sat down, turned his large, lovely head in my direction, and gave me one of his unfathomable stares.
“Even your cat thinks you’re crazy,” Tony said.
“My cat, Tony,” I corrected him, “thinks I am a good woman with very loyal friends.”
“You see, this is what happens when you confide in people. If I hadn’t bared my soul to you, Swede, and told you that at a certain point in my disheveled childhood I was rather expert at breaking into cars, you never would have brought this damn thing up.”
“Do you have any cash on you, Tony?”
“Some,” he said warily.
“It’s about ten dollars to Brooklyn, isn’t it?”
“More like twenty-five, Swede. That’s the tip of Brooklyn.” He paused. “When do you want to go?”
“Now, Tony, now!”
He looked very sad.
“What’s the matter, Tony?” I asked, suddenly concerned about his sadness.
I sat down beside him on the sofa, and my right hand touched his bruised cheekbone for just a moment. Then I pulled my hand away but stayed close—our legs touching.
“Swede, if you want me to take you to Bonaventura’s house in Brooklyn, I’ll do it. If you want me to break in, I’ll do it. If you want me to go upstate again, I’ll do it. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. But you’re going to have to start being honest with me.”
“About what, Tony? How have I been dishonest?”
“About what you feel for me.”
“It’s hard to talk about,” I replied.
“Since when are you shy, Swede?”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“Obviously.”
“Why are you getting mad, Tony?”
He pushed me away from him suddenly, stood up, and walked across the room to the window that fronted the street.
He turned. “I want to know what’s going on. We make wild passionate love in a hotel room, and it’s just like it never happened. You start treating me like I’m your brother or your secretary—not your lover.”
“You are my brother, Tony . . . and my friend and my helper and my lover—you’re all those things to me, I think, Tony. Why do you need definition now? Why do you need confirmation?”
“Why? Because nothing is happening.”
“What should be happening?”
“I don’t know. But something more. Look, Swede, remember when you came to my hotel room and we made love? Remember how bad I looked, how confused I was, how distraught because I had left my wife and kids to go back to a life that had crushed me once before? Well, after we made love that time, I was no longer frightened. Everything was going to be okay.”
He laughed one of his silly laughs, a self-mocking laugh that made me very uncomfortable.
“And then,” he charged dramatically, “you withdrew.”
/> “I didn’t withdraw, Tony. You’re forgetting about Jill Bonaventura’s apartment, aren’t you? We made love there.”
“Anecdotal evidence,” he replied wickedly. “And that kind of evidence doesn’t change the fact that you’ve withdrawn.”
“I hate that word, Tony. It sounds like I’m some sort of official injection. Like insulin. Like I’m either injected or withdrawn.”
“Well, what would you call it?”
“Other things are happening.”
“People get murdered every day, Swede.”
“Don’t pressure me, Tony.”
“I’m not pressuring you. I’m just trying to get a rational explanation.”
I walked to the window and stood beside him. We were both on edge, upset. I didn’t want to talk any more about him and me. I didn’t want to make love with him. But I also didn’t want him angry. Not now. I needed him for a lot of reasons.
“Tony, did it ever occur to you that we’re both middle-aged people who keep trying to recreate a postadolescent romantic fantasy. But no matter where or how we look, it simply isn’t there.”
“I’m not interested in theory, Swede. Why aren’t we sleeping together now? Right now. Get it? Okay. I’ll take you to Brooklyn later on . . . to that lunatic’s house. Okay? But let’s go to bed now.”
I shook my head.
“Yes,” he said bitterly, “that’s precisely what I’m talking about. Why has this almighty NO surfaced? When there had been that wonderful YES. Can’t you just tell me the truth? Or maybe you’ve been hanging out with cops too much and everything comes out in the form of a report—like Retro.”
“It is very hard to describe, Tony.”
“Well . . . do you desire me when I’m gone?”
“Sometimes.”
“What determines ‘sometimes’?”
“I don’t know, Tony.”
“I desire you all the time, Swede.”
“Maybe it’s these awful murders.”
“And maybe it’s the weather,” he retorted bitterly.
“What do you want me to do, Tony? Fake it? Lie about it? I’m trying to tell you the truth. The whole thing is as confusing to me as it is to you. Sometimes I want you. Sometimes I don’t.”
“Sex as strawberries—in season, out of season.”
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