When the Cat's Away (13 page)

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 identify 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.

It was downhill from there. A form letter from a Catholic priest in Nicaragua, which had come addressed to “Occupant.” A bill from Con Ed. A letter from a militant lesbian coalition called Sisters of Sappho, which I inadvertently opened before I realized it was for Winnie Katz.

Bringing up the tail end of the day’s correspondence was a postcard from the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. It was from my old friend Cleve, the former manager of the Lone Star Cafe. It read as follows: “Don’t believe the doctors. There’s nothing lamp carrot rocking-horse wrong with me. Wish you were here.”

That was the lot. One of these days I’ll reverse my zip code and see what happens.

I called McGovern at the
Daily News
and he vehemently denied having anything to do with the story on page 2. He asked me if I’d been at the scene of the bust. I vehemently denied having anything to do with it. We both vehemently hung up.

I got a screwdriver and turned the old black-and-white television set that was missing a knob on to
Wild Kingdom.
I moved to Ratso’s couch and the cat moved to her rocking chair. I lay down for a little power nap, and an idea gradually began forming in the back of my mind amidst all the debris that Leila’s legs had recently kicked there. The idea rose like a phoenix, no doubt from the ashes of several rather charred brain cells. It started off a little shaky, but it looked like it was going to fly.

I did not especially like
Wild Kingdom.
I always felt that the feeling was Mutual of Omaha. The cat, however, always seemed vaguely to enjoy the show, so I turned it on every now and then for her enjoyment.

It wasn’t a great sacrifice for me. Just part of the give-and-take of daily life. A little adjustment we make in order to ensure that the world becomes a better place for our children and our kittens. On the other hand, it could’ve been that, subconsciously, these little kindnesses I performed were a trick I was playing on God to make Him think I was a more sensitive American than I am. But could any man play a trick on God? Whose
Wild Kingdom
was it anyway? Was it God’s or Mutual of Omaha’s? Tune in next week.

Ratso walked in just about the time I got the phone call from Sergeant Cooperman.

37

After I’d established that Ratso was not going to interrupt his journey to the refrigerator to answer the phones, I walked over to the desk and collared the blower on the left.

“Start talkin’,” I said.

“Goodbye, Tex,” said Sergeant Cooperman.

“Going somewhere, Sergeant?”

“Yeah. Funeral of a guy. Used to be a country singer. Tried his hand at a little amateur crime-solving now and then. Got lucky a few times. Then he got in over his head. Colorful character, he was. Gutsy guy, too. Never liked him too much, personally … Never got off on funerals much, either. I’ll take a fucking wake any day.”

“I know what you mean. I’d rather go to an Irish wake than a Jewish wedding. They’re more fun.”

Ratso looked over at me inquiringly from the refrigerator. I shrugged and took a fresh cigar out of Sherlock Holmes’s head.

“Got a mick in the woodpile somewhere, do you, Tex?” While I listened to Cooperman chuckle I began preignition procedures on the cigar. For a while I thought he had the chuckle on an endless loop, but it subsided neatly right about the time I had the cigar ready for lift-off.

“Gonna wear a Colombian necktie to the funeral, Tex?”

“I must assume, then,” I said, “that this call’s in reference to ‘Country Singer Thought to Be Finger.’” I took a not-so-relaxed puff on the cigar.