Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) Page 2

  The rest of the apartment was just space, shelves, a few pieces of minimal furniture, and windows—my, what windows!—covering all the walls on three sides. Just standing in the apartment was a wild, visual, urban ride. I sat down on a chair in front of the sections of windows that looked south. I could see the Twin Towers. I could see all of the downtown area. A gentle spring breeze rustled the blinds and raced through the apartment. It was not the kind of apartment one would expect to be rented by two recently retired sixty-year-old middle-class bachelors.

  “There is where the bodies were found,” Arcenaux said, gesturing to a spot not far from where I was sitting. “No struggle. None at all. Just two .44-caliber slugs from a Colt. One in each brother. At the base of the skull. Execution.”

  “Clean, very clean,” Detective Rothwax added.

  I closed my eyes and let the breeze swell against my face. Sitting in that high apartment was like riding a roller coaster. Maybe there were too many windows.

  “Madam . . . your mouse,” a voice said.

  I opened my eyes quickly and saw Detective Arcenaux mimicking a waiter.

  He was holding a tray and bending over in a dramatic bow.

  On the otherwise empty tray was a mouse! A mechanical one!

  “Well? Look at it!” Rothwax ordered.

  I picked the strange little mouse up from the tray Arcenaux offered me. It was one of those small windup mice. The skin and whiskers were some kind of fabric.

  I wound it up and released it back onto the tray. It careened wildly from side to side for a short time and then stopped dead in its tracks. Not at all like the economy of motion of a real mouse.

  “At first,” Arcenaux explained, “we thought it had been purchased by one of the brothers. But no one we questioned ever saw it in their apartment.”

  I picked the mouse up from the tray again. Poor little mechanical mouse, I thought. So sad.

  Arcenaux continued: “Then, for no reason at all, someone ran it through the computer. The computer told us that in fifteen other murders there had been mouse toys inventoried at the scene of the crime.”

  Rothwax interrupted with his own thought. “Now, you may be thinking that wherever a cat lives in a household . . . there will always be mouse toys.”

  “I was thinking along those lines,” I admitted.

  “Well, then, Miss Nestleton, I mean Alice, tell me—do you have a mouse toy in your apartment?”

  “No.”

  “And, in fact, most cat families don’t have mouse toys.”

  Arcenaux made a gesture with his hand, dismissing his partner’s interruption as irrelevant.

  “So now we have seventeen murders linked by a toy mouse of some kind found at the scene of the crime, along with the victim’s cat or cats. No two of the mice are exactly alike—all are either windup toys or stuffed likenesses or plastic likenesses.”

  I laid the sad little toy mouse back down on the tray, feet up. It was becoming sinister.

  “Tell her about Retro,” Rothwax said to Arcenaux.

  “You tell her,” Arcenaux retorted.

  “What or who is Retro?” I pressed.

  “Well, its real name is Major Case Retrospectives,” Rothwax explained. “It’s a special new interdepartmental task force put together to deal with major unsolved crimes in the metropolitan area. It meets three mornings a week. We’d like you to attend.” He paused and then added: “As a consultant.”

  I didn’t respond at first. I started mentally listing all words that I knew beginning with retro: retrorocket, retrograde, retrospective, retroactive . . . not many at all.

  “Where is the cat?” I then asked.

  “What cat?” Rothwax replied.

  “The Siamese cat who lives here.”

  “Relatives took him,” Rothwax replied.

  “Well? Will you become part of Retro?” Arcenaux got back to the point.

  Why would a murderer give his victim’s cat a mouse toy? So strange! “Of course,” I replied to the detectives, “I’ll attend as many meetings of Retro as you wish me to attend. I want to help. I will try to help.”

  I stood up and started walking toward the door of the apartment. My eye caught a picture on the far wall—the north wall of the apartment.

  It was odd that I had been sitting in that apartment for more than thirty minutes and I hadn’t noticed anything on the walls. Of course, it was because the windows were overwhelming—the walls just a pathetic respite from the glass and the view.

  My God! The painting was a print—of Van Gogh’s painting The Sunflower. It was the same print that had hung in the kitchen of my grandmother’s dairy farm in Minnesota.

  I walked halfway across the large room—my head suddenly filled with memories of childhood . . . of seeing those wondrous Van Gogh yellows. How many millions of farm children over the years had watched those colors hung on their grandmothers’ walls? It was all so sad.

  I walked closer. Something was wrong with the print; it was crooked.

  It hung crooked on the wall. That was all. I closed the distance between myself and the wall quickly and righted the frame. When I turned around to walk back across the room toward the apartment door, the two detectives were staring at me.

  Their stares were discomfiting. “The picture was crooked,” I explained.

  The intensity of the stares didn’t diminish. What was the matter with them? Lusting? Vengeful? Suspicious? Angry?

  It was hard to tell. They weren’t, after all, felines.

  Chapter 4

  We were in the subbasement of a massive New York state courthouse building on Church Street in Lower Manhattan. The temporary home of Retro consisted of seven dark, dismal rooms. Everything was old and thick and damp—dark wood, stained marble, massive oaken furniture, huge doors with old-fashioned brass knobs.

  “And this is the computer room,” Arcenaux said, ushering me into a high-tech fantasy. The room was filled with whirring, cackling terminals and printers and phone lines. Several earnest-looking individuals in the room, working at their trade, ignored us.

  “Any kind of information you need—they’ll print it out for you,” Rothwax said. He picked up a small blank slip from one of the desk trays and held it up for me to see.

  “Just fill out what you want . . . name of victim . . . type of information sought . . . they’ll do any kind of computer search you want. Just sign your name and put your number on the slip.”

  “Number?” I was confused.

  Arcenaux dug into his pocket and pulled out a small clip-on badge.

  “You better put this on,” he said. I stared at the small card: “ALICE NESTLETON. RETRO CONSULTANT. #106.”

  I pinned the card on above my right breast.

  When I looked at them to signal I was ready to proceed, the two detectives averted their eyes. I was making them uncomfortable again. Maybe it was my dress—maybe they thought I had dressed inappropriately for my first appearance at Retro. I was wearing a dress I hadn’t put on in more than ten years. It was a long, thin, flannel shift—white with red flowers around the shoulders. In fact, it looked suspiciously like a nightgown, with sleeves and all.

  Why I chose it, I don’t know. The last time I wore it was when I was still married—during a vacation in Southold on the North Fork of Long Island, where I spent days walking dreamily along the shore of Peconic Bay.

  We headed toward the main reading room. Just before we entered, Rothwax said, “By the way, you’ll be getting three hundred dollars a day as a consultant, plus expenses. I’ll show you how to submit the vouchers later.”

  I nodded. What could I say? Between cat sitting for Abelard at one hundred dollars a morning and consulting for Retro, I was becoming independently wealthy.

  Rothwax opened the door and walked in. I followed
, Arcenaux behind me. There were about eight people in the room already, sprawled on chairs. It looked like an office that had been converted into a schoolroom. Rothwax pointed to several empty chairs by the window and started to thread his way there. We followed. Halfway to our seats I heard: “Meow.”

  It came from the front of the room. I froze. This kind of childishness was not what I had expected—not even from a group comprising primarily police officers.

  I started to walk again toward the window chairs. This time the “meows” burst out all over the room, and one voice even announced in a melodramatic roll, “The cat woman strikes.”

  I wheeled, furious. Arcenaux stepped between me and the seated antagonists. “Let it slide,” he whispered, “please . . . this time let it slide. Boys will be boys.”

  “You mean cops will be cops,” I retorted. He shrugged and led me to the window seat.

  The moment I sat down I forgot all about the petty harassment because I found myself staring at the front wall, over the blackboard.

  Seventeen large photos were hung there. Seventeen faces. They were mesmerizing. Below each photo in a large, almost childlike crayon writing was the name of the person in the photo . . . age . . . sex . . . race . . . occupation . . . mode of death.

  I was looking at the reason I was there—seventeen murdered people.

  I read the captions carefully.

  Laura Elrauch. Waitress. 24. White female. Shot .22 long.

  David Sprague. Physician. 54. White male. Throat cut.

  Jill Bonaventura. 31. Unemployed. White female. Strangled.

  Sekou Aman. 46. Writer. Black male. Shotgunned.

  Louise Wu. 61. Nutritionist. Asian female. Poisoned (strychnine).

  Patricia Saint-Rossy. 30. Police officer. Hispanic female. Strangled.

  Jonathan Berger. 71. Retired chef. White male. Shot. .38 caliber.

  Simon Baum. 66. Carpet salesman. White male. Shot. .32 caliber.

  Sylvia Bonney. 43. Legal secretary. Black female. Bludgeoned.

  Trent Apple Jr. 26. Unemployed. White male. Thrown from window.

  Dennis Mulholland. 28. Computer programmer. White male. Knifed.

  Harry Oakes. 77. Retired transit policeman. Black male. Shot. .25 caliber.

  Joanne O’Dell. 37. Editor. White female. Shot. .32 caliber.

  Shirley Wahr. 42. Department-store buyer. White female. Knifed.

  Charlotte Koltay. 38. Junior high school science teacher. White female. Shot. .25 caliber.

  Jack Tyre. 63. Retired city worker, Department of Parks. White male. Shot. .44 caliber.

  Arthur Tyre. 61. Retired NYC fireman. White male. Shot. 44 caliber.

  It was so bizarre, sitting in that subterranean classroom, surrounded by men and women determined to find the killers of the people photographed. For a moment I couldn’t care less about the killers. I wanted to do something for the dead. I wanted to . . . Oh, how stupid it sounds. I wanted to resurrect them in their daily lives. I wanted to hear them laugh or weep. And I never knew one of them.

  Arcenaux nudged me and pointed. A short stout woman with styled hair was striding into the room followed by a middle-aged gentleman with long eyelashes and a washed-out black turtleneck.

  “That’s Judy Mizener from the D.A.’s office. She’s the head of Retro. She okayed you. The guy with her is one of the NYPD shrinks.”

  Judy Mizener stood in front of the desk and studied the audience. Her eyes caught my eyes, and she smiled some kind of recognition. The photographs of the seventeen corpses stared at me from over her right shoulder.

  “Well,” she said to the assembled, “I hope you’ve all given a warm welcome to Alice Nestleton, who is going to be with us for a while. She’ll bring a whole new perspective to the investigation, which is—and I remind you—going nowhere.” She repeated the word “nowhere” very loudly and carefully as if dismembering it. Then she turned toward me and said, “We all look forward to your first presentation.”

  Presentation? I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Arcenaux picked up my perplexity. He whispered, “Everyone has to make short presentations. You just stand up and tell us your current thinking on the case.”

  Judy Mizener was now gesturing with her hand, and the turtlenecked man, who had been hovering in the background, stepped forward.

  “And now I’d like to present Dr. Sam Jassy, who is going to make some interesting points.”

  Judy Mizener moved away from the desk and sat down in a chair. Sam Jassy turned for a short while to stare at the photographs that hovered above him; then he began his talk.

  “To make a long story short, which my profession rarely does, no one has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that these murders are connected.

  “But if they are—and this Retro meeting wouldn’t be taking place if we didn’t believe they were connected—then there is no doubt in my mind that we are dealing with a psychotic.

  “And since these crimes span a thirteen-year period, there is a good possibility that we are dealing with an individual who moves in and out of mental hospitals and other primary-care facilities. You all know the routine. Acting out. Hospitalization. Medication. Stabilization. Release. Relapse. My guess is paranoid schiz.”

  He stopped talking and began to circle the desk. I realized he had an actor’s sense of pacing. Then he continued.

  “How do we know we are dealing with a psychotic? Two very strong reasons. First, no one has been able to come up with a rational motive for the crimes. There seems to be no reason why all those people were murdered. It seems to be random selection. And that is the surest sign of a psychotic personality.

  “Second, and most important: from my point of view, only a psychotic would attempt to conceal himself by using a different murder weapon in each attack while at the same time leaving a more or less identical calling card at the scene of each attack—some kind of mouse toy.”

  He then threw up his hands and smiled. “That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Any questions?”

  There were a lot of questions. But I wasn’t interested. I let my eyes wander back to the photographs, lined up, I now realized, in order of their corpsehood. The first victims first . . . the last victims last.

  I wondered what photo they would have used of me if I had been one of the victims. They had obviously just taken family snapshots and blown them up, trying to obtain the most recent one of each victim. That was probably what made the collage so eerie. It was like staring into a home movie on death . . . shot the night before. Well, there was no place for me up there—no one had taken a snapshot of me in a long time.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Arcenaux asked. Then he added: “These people can question Jassy for another five hours. It’s their way to get cheap short-term therapy.”

  We slipped out of the room and made our way from the cavernous building. It was a warm enough day to have our coffee on the street, with plain stale doughnuts purchased from one of the vendors who lined the sidewalk in front of the parks that adjoined the courthouse buildings.

  “Well, what do you think?” Arcenaux asked.

  “About what?”

  “About Retro. About what you heard.”

  “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m still a little flattered, a little frightened.”

  “I saw you staring at the photographs,” he said, dunking the doughnut into the coffee. What an old-fashioned way of eating a doughnut. He suddenly became much less distant.

  “Did you ever read The Good Soldier, a novel by Ford Madox Ford?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “It starts out with a line: ‘This is the saddest story . . .’ That’s what I was thinking about when I looked at the photos. Just the sadness of it all . . . the incomprehensible sadness.”

  “You’ll
never make it as a cop,” Arcenaux replied.

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “Sadness? What the hell is sadness? You sound like an actress now.”

  “I am an actress,” I replied.

  He nodded once, vigorously, and flung his remaining coffee into the street. “Actually the only sad thing about my life is that I couldn’t make a go of it as the owner of a trucking firm. I liked to drive trucks from point A to point B. But that’s a different kind of sadness . . . isn’t it?” He grimaced. “Let’s get back.”

  Chapter 5

  It was six thirty in the morning. I was sitting at my small kitchen table sipping half a cup of Medaglia d’Oro instant coffee, black with sugar, and staring up at Pancho. He was resting for the moment from one of his lunatic runs to escape imagined enemies—on the very top of my high kitchen cabinet. There he crouched, staring down at me, rust-whiskered, yellow-eyed, his scarred gray body mimicking some panther.

  One could imagine his tail switching ominously . . . if he hadn’t lost most of it in some undocumented tragedy as a kitten.

  “You know, Pancho,” I said to him, “now that I have all this money coming in, I can buy you a replacement tail . . . a prosthetic device. No one will ever know. Believe me, Pancho, they can do wonders nowadays.”

  He appeared uninterested.

  “If you had a tail, Pancho, you’d probably get along better with Bushy. You’d have something to talk about.”

  Still no response.

  “Well, if you don’t want a new tail, I can buy you tons of saffron rice.” It was, for some reason, his favorite delicacy.

  I took another sip of the coffee, and when I looked up, Pancho was gone. He was a very hard cat to know . . . but to know him ever so slightly was to love him . . . to coin a cliché. I spend half my waking hours longing to catch Pancho so I can hug him.

  It was time to dress for my first real day as a paid NYPD consultant. I had decided to visit Abelard in the late afternoon rather than the early morning.