When the Cat's Away (22 page)

I had lunch back at the loft with Ratso and the cat. I’d already had two meals, if you wanted to call them that, and I was still hungry enough to eat a tofu mattress.

Ratso and I ordered in from a Nip place he wanted to try. Several hours later it nipped us back pretty good. It was a meal that would live in infamy.

The cat had tuna.

Ratso and I used chopsticks. The cat did not.

I’d always felt that the Chinese were smarter than the Japanese, and one of the arguments that I frequently used to support this thesis was that they ate Chinese food instead of Japanese food.

“So how’d it go with Hilton?” Ratso asked, affecting a slight lisp.

I told him.

“Could be some clues there,” he said.

“Your rather obsessional quest for what you call clues, my dear Ratso, can sometimes be counterproductive, not to mention tedious. What we must ask ourselves is this: If Jane Meara is the killer’s next intended victim—and I, for one, believe she is—what does that tell us? What kind of pattern presents itself?”

“Yeah,” said Ratso, “but what about Estelle and Head having an affair? What about your friend Leila running cocaine to Head? What about the discrepancy over whether or not Stanley Park ever visited Jane’s office that day?”

“Pace yourself,” I said. “These things, I think you’ll find, are what we in the business of detection commonly refer to as red herrings.”

“I’ve heard the term,” said Ratso in a somewhat miffed tone. “What about the possible involvement of the Colombians, though? What about Carlos?”

“That’s a dead herring,” I said. “Ratso, when this case is solved, I don’t think the killer will be a Colombian. It’ll most likely be a normal American just like you or me. It’ll probably be an average member of the white larval middie class. Of course, we may, in a deeper sense, never find the killer. There are those of us who feel that life itself may be a red herring.”

“Let’s not get too metaphysical,” said Ratso. I poured us each a cup of the finest Colombian coffee in the world.

“Is perla yi-yo,” I said. “Speaking of which, where the hell’s the other perla yi-yo?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” said Ratso. “You solve the case by the weekend, I’ll tell you where in the loft I hid the perla yi-yo.”

“You’re not asking for much, are you?”

“Is it a deal?”

I took another sip of Colombian coffee. I shook Ratso’s hand grimly.

It didn’t give me a hell of a lot of time. Of course, I didn’t
have
to solve the damn thing by the weekend. But it would be nice.

61

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve just got this special knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jane Meara and an attractive friend of hers, Lori Ames, were both cooing over a McGovern-bylined article on page 1 of the
Daily News.
It was part two of a multipart series about how a country singer who was a close personal friend of the journalist had almost single-handedly brought about the downfall of two of the largest Colombian cocaine cartels operating in the city.

“You’re hot shit,” said Lori Ames.

“Thank you,” I said.

We were sitting in a restaurant on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. It was late Tuesday afternoon and I was eating lightly. Sending some Wop food down to try to straighten out the little eruption by the pesky Nips. Or maybe it was the brunch with Hilton Head that had done it. Normally, I could eat anything without getting upset. I thought of Leila. She hadn’t called in several days now. Never trust a Palestinian.

The restaurant the three of us were in was called Luna’s and was one of the best in Little Italy. It was run by a woman named Yola and I can’t remember how many times I’d seen Ratso, on very crowded nights, walk up to the front of a long line of people waiting to get in, and wave to Yola. She’d come over and get us a table right away. The people would mutter while we spread bread with butter.

Luna’s was also the last place Ratso and I had had dinner with our friend Mike Bloomfield, the great blues guitarist, before he died. It was also where we’d once taken my friend Dennis McKenna, who on that occasion had been a very drunken Irishman. When the
capo
of one of the city’s major crime families had suddenly appeared, wearing vaguely sinister Old World garb, the whole place had gone silent. That was when McKenna had called out to the man, “Nice hat!”

“The ASPCA has been very helpful,” said Jane Meara.

“What?” I said.

“In trying to locate Rocky.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If there’s a way to run her down, they ought to know it. Pardon the expression.”

“You don’t think we’ll find her, do you?” asked Jane.

“I think we’ll find out where Rocky is when we find the killer. We could find the killer by this weekend,” I said. Of course, Dallas could melt by this weekend.

“Jane,” I said, “why haven’t you read Eugene’s manuscript?”

“Oh, he told you, did he? That little brat. He’s bugging me to death about it. I’ll read it when I find out about Rocky.”

“You may find out something you don’t want to,” I said. I thought of how Rocky might look dying in an alley, the victim of a Colombian butterfly.

“I’ll take my chances,” said Jane.

Lori Ames had been reading the
Daily News
piece while Jane and I had been yapping. Now she looked up at me and, shucking all modesty, there was admiration in her eyes.

“You know something?” she said.

“What?”

“You’re hot shit.”

“Don’t put me up on a pedestal,” I said.

I’d been on the human rodeo circuit long enough to know that you couldn’t change people’s minds by telling them the truth. If McGovern’s articles had half of New York believing I was a hero who’d cleverly and courageously contrived to bring two major drug cartels to their knees, who was I to say it wasn’t true? If I’d told Lori Ames the truth of how I’d stumbled into the whole mess, she probably wouldn’t’ve believed me anyway. So I might as well enjoy the ride.

As the three of us left Luna’s, something Sherlock Holmes once said came into my mind. Sherlock was explaining to Watson his hesitance to reveal his methods, because once he’d done so, he’d in effect demystified himself. When he revealed his methodology to his clients, they tended to be somewhat blasé about the results. They said things like “Oh, I could’ve told you that.”

What Sherlock actually said to Watson was “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people think you have done?”

As the weekend grew ever closer, I’d probably have to borrow a page from Sherlock. If things got really rough, I thought, maybe I’d lift the whole book.

62

As it evolved, I borrowed a page from Nero Wolfe before I borrowed a page from Sherlock. It was like borrowing a cup of sugar from a yesterday that never was, but if certain things had worked for Sherlock and Mr. Wolfe, why not for the Kinkster? Indeed.

The problem was that I was not a fictional person and I was not dealing with fictional people. When you work with flesh and blood, as God probably found out on day eight, things tend to break down a little. In real life, Cinderella tires of the prince and has an affair with the boy who comes to clean the swimming pool. In real life, Sleeping Beauty has insomnia. Of course, on the other hand, the Village was one of the few places, outside of certain dense forests in Ireland, where fairies could still often be seen. Sometimes they’d even grant you a wish. Like get out of your way so you could park your car.

Late Tuesday night, after a couple of shots of Jameson, I told Ratso my plan. He was somewhat skeptical, but every Jesus needs a Doubting Thomas to sort of keep him on his toes. Not that I thought I was Jesus, of course. I was having enough trouble with Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe.

“Here’s the plan,” I told Ratso. “Thursday night at eight o’clock we invite all the principals in the case here to the loft. The Parks, Head, Jane, Landis, Eugene, and maybe a special guest or two. We’ll also have Cooperman here. We’ll have Pete Myers cater the affair. You with me so far?”

“Sure,” said Ratso. “It’s the only invitation I’ve gotten all week.”

“Okay, now we get these people over here—” 

“What if they don’t come?”

“Oh, they’ll come all right. Not showing up would amount to a tacit confession of guilt. Besides, who the hell are they? George Jones? Greta Garbo? Of course they’ll show. They wouldn’t dare
not
show. Anyway, when they get here, in the manner of Nero Wolfe we sit them all down, serve food and drinks, and then, with a little incisive probing and a little normal human interaction, we’ll get some interesting results.

“Now, I’ve got some work to do myself tomorrow, so I’d appreciate it if you’d call the list and get the whole thing set up.”

“You’re out of your mind,” said Ratso. “You can call me a homosexual pancake chef, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be your male social secretary.”

“You can’t very well expect Nero Wolfe himself to make the calls. Our guests would find it highly unsatisfactory, not to mention rather gauche. This is really quite juvenile, Archie.”

“Archie? Who the hell’s Archie?”

“Archie Goodwin,” I said patiently, “was Nero Wolfe’s assistant. If you read anything other than books relating to Jesus, Bob Dylan, and Hitler, you’d’ve known that.”

“God,” said Ratso, “what a horrible cultural gap in my very being. All because I didn’t read a certain dime-novel whodunit.”

“It is the kind of gap,” I said, “through which a clever killer can sometimes escape.”

I poured a healthy shot of Jameson and puffed on a cigar. Ratso walked over to the door of the loft and bolted it. “Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Wolfe, you forget that there’s a Jaguar out there somewhere and he’s familiar with this address.”

“Ah, but Archie, you know that for the Jaguar there are no doors.”

“I know that,” said Ratso, “but we don’t have to make it a fucking cakewalk for him.”

I killed the shot. I killed the light. I killed the temptation to say something to Ratso. I walked into the bedroom, put on my sarong, and went to bed. As luck would have it, I did not dream.

63

Wednesday morning while Ratso slept, I ran a routine search for the perla yi-yo, just in case I didn’t find the killer by the weekend. I didn’t know what I’d do with that much cocaine if I found it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted any amount of cocaine. But I knew it was there somewhere in the loft. It was kind of like finding the
afikomen.

I didn’t find anything but an old letter I never sent to a broad I never really got to know. Nothing lost. A lot of things in life fall behind dressers and get lost in the cobwebs and we don’t even know the difference. Of course, there’s a lot of hip spiders walking around somewhere.

At 10
A.M.
, the time all good agents should be in their offices, I lifted the blower on the left and posted a call to Lobster.

I wanted Lobster to rifle Slick Goldberg’s files personally. Both those on his current clients, if you wanted to call them that, and his reject-letter files. Slick had worked for a large agency where, as was the rule, nobody really knew what anybody else was doing. Lobster’s job was to get into his office on any pretense, even that of seeing another agent, and finding the goods. Also, I requested that she worm her way into Estelle Beekman’s old publishing house and check those files as well. I told her what to look for and that I needed it by the weekend.