Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) Read online

  I was starting to get angry at him. “If it’s too much to bear, just leave,” I said.

  “That’s fine with me,” he shouted. “I’m sick of playing these goddamn detective games.”

  He took three ferocious steps toward the door. Then he stopped suddenly in his tracks.

  “I’m going to calm down,” he said ruefully, “my face is beginning to hurt.” He laughed at himself and ran his fingers softly over the bruises.

  “Let’s both calm down.”

  “We need a script,” he said, chuckling.

  “Right. We could never improvise.”

  “We need a script by a one-legged forty-two-year-old playwright who supports himself by selling T-shirts in front of Carnegie Hall and is desperately in love with a ballet dancer who supports herself by riding an elephant in the circus. The elephant’s name is . . .” He paused and cocked his head.

  “Alice,” I offered.

  “No, too American.”

  “Greta.”

  “Too European.”

  “Honey.”

  “Too hard to remember.”

  “Lutzi.”

  “Now, that’s a beautiful name. How the hell did you think of that, Swede?”

  “I don’t know. I think there was a friend of my grandmother’s named Lutzi, but I don’t know how to spell it.”

  “What does it matter. It’s an elephant’s name.”

  “I like the plot, Tony.”

  “What plot?”

  “The one your one-legged playwright is going to come up with.”

  “So do I.”

  “It’ll be sort of working-class romantic.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Like you.”

  “Exactly. Being torn to pieces by unrequited love and a copying business I can’t seem to get rid of.”

  I walked up to him. We locked hands and went back to the sofa, sitting down in unison like an old farm couple.

  Bushy picked up his tail in a huff and moved to the geographic center of the carpet.

  Tony grasped my hand tightly. “Swede, do you remember that first term we knew each other in the Dramatic Workshop?”

  “Tony . . . that must have been around 1971.”

  “Probably . . . twenty years at least. But do you remember that workshop performance we did? A sort of abbreviated script based on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “It’s about a devoted Communist arrested during the Soviet purges. He’s brainwashed into confessing he was a traitor.”

  “I know the story, Tony, it’s just that I don’t remember the production.”

  “Sure . . . you must remember. It was during the summer term and the air-conditioning broke down.”

  The bell rang in my head. I did remember. Of course I remembered it. “And they brought in that huge prehistoric fan which that like a plane propeller, and the minute it was turned on it blew all kinds of paper out the window,” I recalled, and we both laughed at the memory of absurd notes flying down onto Broadway.

  “Do you remember the set I designed for that performance?”

  “Vaguely. It was like a blanket. Right?”

  “An enormous horse blanket. I stretched it across the stage. It was very beat-up. And then I stenciled an enormous hammer and sickle on the blanket in brilliant red . . . but I obscured half of the design. And that was the entire set.”

  “Now I remember.”

  “It was obvious even then that I was a genius.”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, the set overwhelmed the stage . . . the actors . . . the whole damn building.”

  “It was cosmic, Tony.”

  “Sure,” he continued, his eyes glinting with playfulness, pride, self-mockery, “thirty-two people were overcome the moment the curtain went up.

  “There was no curtain,” I reminded him, “and the entire audience was less than nine.”

  “Well . . . the whole point being that I have always been addicted to the Obscure. And, as we both know, Swede, the obscure, done well, can overwhelm all common sense.”

  “Are you making a point about me, Tony?” I asked, laughing.

  He leaned forward and pressed his lips against my neck. The touch of his mouth was warm. But it wasn’t eros. It was need. It suddenly dawned on me that he, Tony, needed me as much as I needed him. I needed his help. He needed my obscurity. I needed his body sometimes. He needed my love sometimes. I was his mother. He was my father. We were both our own children. It was all so confused that none of it meant a damn thing. Then his mouth moved between my breasts. I opened my blouse. My fingers went through his hair, pulling him closer. Brooklyn could wait a bit.

  Chapter 16

  It was a long bumpy ride into and through Brooklyn to Sheepshead Bay. The cab dropped us off on a deserted street with no streetlights visible. The street was lined on both sides with small one-family houses set very close to each other. The houses seemed to squat onto the ground. They had once been just wooden frame dwellings but at some point in time most of them had been given shingles or stone fronts.

  I followed Tony, who was moving slowly up one side of the street, peering at the houses to find the numbers. Finally he pointed. “Twenty-three-oh-five. That’s the number. That’s it.” Bonaventura’s house had bluish shingles; at least they seemed that color in the night.

  “Now what do we do?” Tony asked.

  “We walk up to the front door and ring the bell,” I said.

  So we did that. There was no answer. I rang again and then kept my hand on the buzzer for a long time.

  “Now what do we do?” Tony asked.

  “You take out your Swiss Army knife. You pull out that funny little pick from the side. You put it in the keyhole and try to get the door open,” I replied, turning the doorknob to emphasize my instructions for an increasingly reluctant Tony.

  The door popped open! We both stared at it. “Maybe,” Tony said, “other thieves beat us to it.”

  We walked inside, closed the door behind us, and switched the hall light on. It was nothing like his sister’s apartment shrine. It was a series of dingy little rooms that led into a back kitchen. Karl Bonaventura had obviously spent a lot of time turning his dead sister’s apartment into a shrine while ignoring his own place or sacrificing it.

  “What happens if he just shows up?” Tony asked.

  “Well, we came to see him. We rang the bell. There was no one home but the door was open so we were afraid he had been burglarized . . . so we came in.”

  I started in the living room and proceeded to search the entire room carefully. I looked in and under every object. I checked all the framed pictures on the walls—none of them were crooked and none of them had anything taped to them. Tony watched me from an easy chair, clearly believing that he had fulfilled his entire responsibility just by getting me there and into the house.

  There was nothing of interest in the living room. I moved into the long hallway. More pictures on the wall. I longed for a crooked one, but they were straight and true. I went through the small dingy cabinets that lined the hall. There were tools and tablecloths and old newspapers, but no leaf bouquets. Nothing.

  There were two bedrooms, one on each side of the hall—small, cramped bedrooms, each of which contained a single narrow bed, a single chest, and no pictures at all.

  I walked into the west bedroom and sat down for a moment on the narrow bed. The mattress was tight and springy, as if it had rarely been slept on.

  “Do you smell anything?” Tony asked. He was standing in the hallway.

  I sniffed the air. There was a faint odor in the house.

  “It’s stronger in the kitchen,” he said.

  “Maybe he left a gas
jet on when he left,” I said.

  “No, it’s not gas,” Tony replied.

  We both walked into the kitchen, which was the last room in the small house, with a door opening onto the backyard. The kitchen was in disarray—pots and pans and cartons on the tables and chairs. There was a badly dripping sink faucet.

  “For a guy who fixes cars for a living, you’d think he’d be able to fix his faucet,” Tony noted.

  “Our psychotic friend has other things on his mind.”

  “Maybe that’s why he became psychotic . . . the Chinese water torture—drip, drip, drip.”

  I opened the refrigerator. Maybe it was spoiled food. The refrigerator was empty except for two macaroni-and-cheese dinners in the freezer.

  “Damn! This place has a basement,” Tony exclaimed. He walked to the tall narrow door that I had thought was a closet when I first saw it. There was a light just inside the door. Tony flicked it on.

  We started gingerly down the unsteady staircase. The smell was heavier now.

  We never got to the bottom of the stairs. Our vision was suddenly blotted out.

  Hanging from a twisted rope at the bottom of the stairs was the decomposing body of Karl Bonaventura.

  The rope had been attached to a fixture in the ceiling. Then he must have climbed to the top of the stairs and jumped forward. The body was turning slowly.

  I ran back up the stairs and into the kitchen. Clenching my fists, I leaned against the wall. Tony came up after me. We looked at each other and said nothing for a long while.

  Finally Tony asked: “Should we call 911?”

  “Why call anyone? What does it matter?” Then I dimly reconsidered. “We’ll call before we leave.”

  Tony sat down wearily on one of the kitchen chairs. “Swede,” he said softly, “I’m afraid this knocks all your theories to hell. He’s been dead awhile. That’s why the body smells. He must have killed himself right after he left us in his sister’s apartment. He must have come home and hanged himself. And that means it wasn’t Karl who shot at me.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Tony,” I said. He nodded his head in agreement. But neither of us moved. My legs were still rubbery. I closed my eyes. Philoctetes was dead. He could no longer stand the pain of his wound.

  ***

  Two hours later Tony and I were sitting dumbly in my apartment. It was between two and three in the morning. All the lights were out. Some light did filter in through the windows from the street.

  Bushy was in my arms. He wasn’t too happy there, but he understood that I needed to be comforted. Pancho knew it, too—he had stopped his constant flight and was now sitting on the dining table cleaning his right paw. Tony was next to me on the sofa, his eyes closed, his arms behind his neck, and his long legs stretched out.

  “Tony,” I said, “I’m not going to take the part.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have other things on my mind.”

  “You’re deluding yourself. You have nothing else on your mind except getting yourself deeper and deeper into an NYPD case where you’re not wanted. And that’s unhealthy. Take the part, Swede.”

  “It would be unseemly,” I replied, using a very old-fashioned word.

  “What is unseemly?”

  “Doing a theater piece in a landscape littered with the murdered.”

  “You have to start getting hold of yourself, Swede, you’re starting to sound like some kind of avenging angel . . . like you have a personal responsibility for seventeen corpses. And you’re also going to have to accept the fact, Swede, that sooner or later you were going to come face-to-face with a problem you couldn’t solve. And it may very well be these murders.”

  I buried my face in Bushy’s extravagant ruff. Then I dropped him back onto the carpet where he wanted to be and walked quickly to the phone and dialed Tricia Lamb’s number.

  “Swede, it’s three o’clock in the morning. Who the hell are you waking?”

  But I didn’t wake anyone. Her machine was on. I left a simple message. No Philoctetes for me at this time. Then I hung up.

  As I turned to go back toward the sofa, I was suddenly struck by the loveliness of my apartment in the gentle darkness and the creatures in it—Bushy and Pancho and Tony. I stood still. Tony was right. My imagination had gone out of control with poor Karl Bonaventura. I had been acting like an ingenue—all filled with my own glory. As if I believed that the first wild things that rushed into my head were eternally valid. As if my interpretation of the play was so acute, so intuitive, that I could not err.

  “Swede, why are you standing there?” I heard Tony ask.

  “Just thinking, Tony.”

  Had I become obsessed with this case to the point of irrationality? Had I slipped into a delusion that I was the Captain Avenger for all those poor people . . . for all the sadness of their deaths? Or was it just hurt pride? I mean, in a few short days I had uncovered more hard evidence than all the people and machines in Retro. They had discovered only one thing: that a toy mouse was left at each murder scene. I had found out a lot more. That all of the victims’ cats had vanished . . . that at least one of the cats had been sent on an incomprehensible journey to Desolate Swamp . . . that at least one of the victims had been involved in a love affair characterized by a bizarre valentine of leaves . . . that the murderer had left a trail of crooked pictures in the apartments of the victims . . . that the time sequence of the murders was related to the mating, gestation, and birth cycle of cats . . . that one of the relatives of the victims gave the victim twenty-five-hundred-dollar payments for nothing. And after all these revelations, I knew nothing. Retro knew nothing. Tony knew nothing. The world knew nothing. Yes, my pride was hurt.

  I turned and looked at the long table. Pancho was still on it. That was strange. He had never stopped for so long. “Pancho,” I whispered to him, “are you ill?” He studied me. How his eyes always glinted! “Do you need help, Pancho?” He went back to his paw. I went back to the sofa.

  The night slipped away as we sat on the sofa. Tony was alternately silent and talkative. When he spoke, it was about a growing guilt he felt at leaving his wife and children and about how he was afraid to go back to them and afraid not to go back to them. All I could say in response was that it was inevitable he would.

  I fell asleep, fully clothed, with my head draped over the side of the sofa, like a kitten on a tree limb.

  When I awoke, my whole side was cramped. The morning light had flooded the room. Where were Tony and Bushy?

  “Just stay there, Swede, and be served,” I heard Tony call out from the kitchen. And then he came into the living room with coffee for me. I sipped it.

  “You forgot the sugar, Tony.”

  He went back into the kitchen. I stood up and stretched, walking slowly to the window while rotating my neck.

  “Here’s the sugar,” Tony called out, returning with two packets. He placed them on the dining-room table.

  I turned toward him, away from the street scene, and then burst into laughter.

  He had brought the sugar packets from the kitchen to the living room with Bushy draped around his neck like a fur stole. Both seemed quite happy with the arrangement.

  “I see you two are becoming intimate,” I said.

  Tony laughed. He pulled gently at Bushy’s back feet, which were hanging over his right shoulder.

  “I have been asking his advice on various matters.”

  “Be careful, Tony. Bushy has a very strange sense of humor.”

  Tony walked back into the kitchen with Bushy. I opened the sugar packets and dumped them into the black coffee. I sat back down on the sofa and sipped the coffee. It was a strange morning. Tony walked back into the living room, Bushy still wrapped around his neck. He held a small bag of garbage in his hand.

  “A bou
quet for me, Tony?”

  “Where do I dump it?”

  I stood up, walked to the door, opened it, and pointed into the hallway toward the compactor chute. He carried the bag out and was back in seconds. I closed the door behind him.

  “Are you okay, Swede? You look suddenly pale.”

  I did feel weak.

  “Sit down, Swede,” Tony said with urgency. I sat back down on the sofa. Tony handed me the cup of coffee. I sipped it.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked, letting Bushy climb off his shoulders.

  “No, I’ll be all right. I was just kind of overwhelmed with a memory.”

  “What kind of memory?”

  “That you and I were lovers.”

  “Well, we are.”

  “No, Tony, I meant that we had somehow become another pair of lovers.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Tyre and Georgina Kulaks.”

  “You’re sounding a bit nutty again, Swede.”

  I didn’t respond. It would be best to say nothing else, I realized. Tony wouldn’t understand the connection. He had offered me a bouquet of garbage. Georgina had offered her lover a bouquet of leaves. Tony had walked toward me with a cat draped around his neck. Jack Tyre had walked into the Ramble each weekend with his cat wrapped around his neck.

  What had made me weak was the realization that there were such obvious parallels between us and them. It was one of those odd things that are very unnerving for no good reason at all.

  “I wonder what the cops are going to do with Karl Bonaventura’s body,” Tony said.

  “Cut him down.”

  “I mean where he’ll be buried?”

  I didn’t feel like talking about Karl Bonaventura. The horror of seeing his body swinging on those basement stairs was fresh in my memory. And besides, I was still smarting internally from having gotten it all wrong. I mean, it was obvious that Karl Bonaventura could not have attempted to kill Tony at the bypass on the New York Thruway. It was either someone else with a purpose or it was a random shooting. And if it was not Karl, then the slips we found in his sister’s apartment were authentic and there was a Desolate Swamp somewhere . . . maybe in the woman’s mind . . . maybe in the Adirondacks . . . maybe in Central Park, for all I knew.