Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) Read online

  What to wear? I had to be, this time, a little more than Alice Nestleton out of an Edwardian used-clothing store. I had to wear the character of a consultant . . . which is . . . who knows? I would be working with corpses and computers. And cats, of course, always with cats.

  I giggled into my black coffee, remembering a theatrical story. A Hollywood producer once told Brecht that Charles Laughton was such a great actor he could hold an audience enraptured just by reading the phone book onstage. Brecht agreed, replying that the only audience Laughton would get for such a performance, however, was Peter Lorre—and Lorre would surely be enraptured. The joke being, of course, that Lorre was a notorious drug addict.

  I don’t know why I thought of that story or what it had to do with the way I should dress for my first day at the office. But it did, no doubt, subconsciously determine the fact that I ended up walking out of my apartment looking like Alice Nestleton.

  ***

  Retro had assigned me an office adjacent to the computer room. It contained hastily assembled chairs (three), desk, and file cabinets (four). There was a locked phone on the desk. Obviously I wasn’t being encouraged to call out.

  On the truly immense aged steel desk was a pile of office supplies: yellow pads, ball-point pens, paper clips in three sizes, index cards, a paperback dictionary, Scotch tape in a dispenser, and a stapler. There were no windows, just vents. I sat down in my office for about ten minutes, just as a formality, then entered the bustling computer room to interrogate the machines.

  Once inside, I grabbed a few of the white request slips and took them to a raised writing ledge along one wall to study and fill out. I knew the kind of information I wanted.

  “Will you marry me?”

  I looked up, startled, toward the source of that bizarre request.

  A small, almost miniature man was directly to one side of me. He was tiny in height only; his chest, encased in a starched white shirt, seemed to be grotesquely muscled. His hair was brushed back with a vengeance, and his face was wreathed in a threatening scowl. He wore a fat bright tie with an enormous stickpin in it. Beneath one arm he had a large blue looseleaf book.

  “I beg your pardon,” was all I could say.

  “Will you marry me? The moment you walked through the door, I fell in love with you. Desperately, totally, insanely in love with you. You are beautiful. You are intelligent. You are mysterious. And I am single. So, I repeat: will you marry me?”

  I laughed at his passionate but ludicrous proposal. “Let me think about it,” I replied goodhumoredly.

  His response was not in kind. He retorted angrily: “Make up your mind now! I can’t wait.”

  I stared at him. Was he insane? “Well, then, no,” I replied, and turned all the way around to be free of him.

  “Fine,” I heard him say, “so now let’s get down to work, Alice Nestleton, consultant extraordinary.”

  I turned back toward the strange little man. He bowed slightly. “My name is Bert Turk. Not Bert the Turk. Just Bert Turk. I am your resource adviser. And a very good one. But I am also a disbarred attorney with a felony conviction. A bad egg, as they say. So how is it that such a bad egg is working in the heart of the criminal justice system? Because Judy Mizener is a compassionate woman, and she also knows I can milk more crime data out of a database than any twenty nonfelons.”

  It was such an explosive nonstop speech that I didn’t know what to say.

  “In short, Miss Nestleton, what I am telling you is that virtually every bit of data you want has already been requested and retrieved by someone before you . . . and it’s all here.”

  He motioned to a small empty seating unit—the kind one sees in microfiche libraries, a chair with a three-sided wraparound desk—and then he dropped the large blue book onto the desk. It made an explosive noise.

  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, and walked quickly away. What a relief it was to get rid of that strange Mr. Turk.

  I opened the blue book, which was basically a compilation of printouts. It was very sobering indeed. Every one of my questions, which I had been so proud of formulating at the time, had indeed been answered regarding the seventeen victims.

  There was essentially no deep life-style resemblance among the victims. They came from all walks of life, races, classes. What they did have in common was trivial. They all lived in Manhattan . . . they all lived with cats . . . they all had no criminal records except for parking violations . . . they all participated in the city’s cultural offerings—from movies to parks to museums.

  The data on the mouse toys was much less extensive because it was only with the last two murders that a connection had been posed, and much of this information had been obtained years after the events.

  But all data pointed to the fact that none of the victims’ relations or friends, when contacted, could remember seeing such toys in the victims’ possession prior to the murders. Yet the police at the scene of each crime remembered it in retrospect, even if it wasn’t recorded at the time because it was so trivial. So someone must have put it there! Very few of the toys had been traced to the point of purchase . . . and when traced, no information on the purchaser had been obtained—probably because it was such an inexpensive purchase: no credit cards were used.

  And there was no correlation between the toys and the victims—between, for example, wooden mice and sex of victim . . . windup mice and sex of victim—so the computer said.

  There were dozens of reproduced verbatim reports and interviews with relatives and loved ones of the victims. They were riveting because they were conducted before the police knew the victims were part of a murder chain. And since in each case robbery was quickly ruled out, the detectives on the case had to probe for secret passions, secret vices, anything to explain the sudden death of the victim. In no case was that secret found.

  I read them until lunchtime, then took a long walk on Centre Street, then went back to the blue book, trying to avoid Mr. Turk at all costs.

  To my surprise, the cat data in the blue book was good. Page after page of tables showed that there was absolutely no pattern in the cats of the victims—no patterns and no correlations. The victims had all different kinds of cats, some purebred and some not, some purchased from breeders, some from pet stores, some adopted from agencies. There were Siamese, Persian, Manx, Russian blue, tabbies, shorthairs, and old-fashioned alley cats—males, females, neutered.

  And all had quickly been adopted by relatives or friends after the murders—said the blue book in a decidedly uncomputerlike aside.

  I slammed the blue book shut at 4:10 P.M. My head and my ego ached. Every question I had thought to ask the computer had been asked and answered.

  “We could have been so happy together,” I heard crazy Mr. Turk say. Then he reached over and grabbed the blue book away from me.

  “The file is updated with new data every three days,” he said, “and of course we are open to your requests,” then added archly, “if you have any.”

  I walked out of the computer room without saying a word and was about to return to my office when I suddenly felt the desire to see those photographs again.

  The classroom was empty and dark. I switched on the light. Seeing them again like that, suddenly, from darkness to light, took my breath away. I sat down. How beautiful and peaceful they all looked in their chronological order of death. How odd it was that they were up on the wall only because of a mouse toy found where and when they died. The thought upset me. The more I thought about it, the more horrendous it seemed—their repose seemed to vanish. It was as if their sacrifice had been trivialized by the mouse toy. What sacrifice? To whom? I was beginning to think like a minister or priest. I closed my eyes and tried to nap.

  ***

  “Abelard . . . oh, Abelard . . . Come out, come out wherever you are. It’s me, Heloise . . . your true love.�
�

  For twenty minutes I had been calling and crawling and groping amidst the furniture, peering over and under and between. He was there. I could hear him. I could hear him evading me.

  I now believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mrs. Salzman was mad, that she had filled her apartment to the brim with totally inappropriate furniture in order to give her cat more room to hide.

  Unable to coax him out or chase him down, I finally began to run through the entire lexicon of “dirty tricks” used by cat sitters since time immemorial to make cats appear.

  They included: opening of food cans; wrinkling aluminum foil; calling out to the cat in a foreign language; singing; standing absolutely still in a yogic-type trance, suspending all respiration and body metabolism (this sometimes piques a concealed cat’s curiosity); and others too embarrassing to mention.

  Abelard remained hidden. My frustration grew. It was bad enough accepting one hundred dollars for a brief visit—the least I could do was look at the cat, in person, to make sure he was well.

  I decided to use my number-one cat-sitting trick to make a cat appear.

  I sat down on a chair, closed my eyes, folded my hands demurely on my lap, and proceeded to mimic the low throbbing notes of a city pigeon resting in her nest on a high ledge . . . the same throaty sound that has driven untold millions of apartment cats mad with frustrated blood lust as they stare out closed windows at the succulent prey—so near, yet so far.

  Abelard did not appear. Angrily I called out to him, wherever he was: “Well, you’ll never be adopted by anyone if something happens to Mrs. Salzman. You’re too damn stubborn.”

  I stood up and started to make final preparation for leaving. But my movements were slowing down. Something was bothering me—something I had said to Abelard. I had threatened him with abandonment. He would not, I had told him, be adopted like the other cats. What cats? I was thinking about the sixteen cats of the seventeen victims who had all, the blue book told me, been quickly and readily adopted by relatives of the deceased.

  Why had I believed that “fact”?

  Because the computer told me.

  Because I had been so flattered at being hired as a consultant for Retro that the flattery had overwhelmed my common sense.

  But . . .

  If there is one great unalterable tragic fact of cat existence, it is that the hardest and most difficult task on earth is to find a new home for a cat who is not a kitten and who has lived in one home for a long time.

  The computer had lied. The computer had been misled. The police had been hoodwinked. There was as much chance for all those cats to have been quickly and painlessly adopted by loving relatives as I would have winning the New York Marathon.

  The extent of my gullibility made me cringe. I sat down again. At least now, I realized, I had the makings of my first presentation to Retro as a consultant. I had the correlation they had been looking for without success.

  Chapter 6

  I stepped up casually. The room was full. Judy Mizener was sitting in the front seat. Near the small window sat Rothwax and Arcenaux. In the rear, near the door, was that bizarre little man Bert Turk. They all looked a bit bored, not knowing that their cat lady was about to drop an evidential bombshell into their self-assured policework.

  I had planned my presentation as a theatrical event, a one-woman show.

  I began gently, with an anecdote.

  “A very famous and eccentric acting coach named Grablewski once made a speech to his students telling them that the real function of a good actor is to strip the stage of the junk the playwright burdens the event with. ‘What is missing in a play,’ he would say, ‘is more important than what is there.’”

  I waited a few moments to let the saying sink in and then proceeded.

  “Let me project this onto our situation. What is missing in these murders is more important, I believe, than what has been found.”

  I looked around at their faces. Now they seemed puzzled as well as bored.

  “Let me refresh your memories. Let me explain myself step by step.” I was moving into my pedagogic role and enjoying it immensely.

  “Each of the victims had a cat. After each murder the victim’s cat was quickly adopted by a relative or friend of the deceased.

  “At least that is what the computer records in the blue book.

  “Obviously no one in Retro thought this information important enough to double-check. I did. All adoption reports on all the cats are hearsay. There is absolutely no validation whatsoever. No one has seen any one of those cats in its new home.”

  I paused and let that sink in. I could feel now that the audience was keying to my lines. I could feel their anticipation.

  “In other words,” I said, lowering my voice, “the only legitimate correlation we have, other than the mouse toys, is that all cats of all victims have vanished without a trace.”

  I smiled. “And to take this to its logical conclusion . . . the vanished cats are not ephemera—they are the stuff of, and maybe the motives for, the crimes.”

  There it was—all laid out. Simple. Eloquent. Logical. Stemming from the facts we had and the facts we didn’t have. I stepped back to field the furious questions and comments I knew would be coming my way.

  There wasn’t a sound in the room. I waited, shifting my weight uncomfortably. I heard a nervous shuffling of feet. The faces in the room looked away from me. They stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at each other. What had gone wrong?

  Then Judy Mizener stood up. “Thank you, Miss Nestleton. We appreciate your comments.” And she made a gesture with her hand signifying that I should sit down. I did so, uncomfortable, embarrassed, confused. I was not used to misreading an audience reaction so totally.

  “Our next speaker,” Judy Mizener said, “comes to us from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Baltimore. As you know, they have a very sophisticated serial-crime unit down there, and we have been sending a lot of our information to them. Chandler Grannis is here to report on some interesting developments.”

  A thin, impeccably dressed sandy-haired man stood and came to the front of the room. He was wearing a gray suit with a gray vest, a brown shirt and a brown tie. He opened the button of his jacket, and the holstered weapon on his left side was clearly visible. He spoke with a soft Southern accent.

  “It is an honor,” he said, “to follow such a beautiful speaker. Miss Nestleton’s theory is fascinating. It’s sort of like saying that because Babe Ruth always visited brothels before a game, there was a correlation between the number of home runs he hit and the number of condoms he used.”

  The room exploded with derisive laughter. I flushed with anger and shame.

  After the laughter came applause, then a dozen scabrous comments from the audience to the speaker, affirming his description of my theory as a condom analogue . . . and going even further. No one looked at me, but all their comments were directed at me.

  The FBI man waited until the noise had died down and then turned for a moment to stare at the photographs of the dead on the wall.

  When he turned back, the room was silent again.

  “I am not going to pull my punches. From what I have seen of your investigation, you people are in outer space. Probably because there was no hint of any connection between all these murders until the last two, when you found the now infamous mouse. Do me a favor. Forget all this cat-and-mouse nonsense. Okay? You have a very ugly character to find. Okay?

  “In fact, you people are so hoodwinked by the cat-and-mouse nonsense that you overlooked the basic pattern in these serial killings.”

  He paused and stared straight at Judy Mizener, who was now getting very uncomfortable.

  He continued: “Me . . . I’m just an old-fashioned guy. So I came up with some old-fashioned facts. The kinds of facts that always hold u
p in these kinds of crimes—rhythm of the murders and times and sequences and dates.”

  He raised his hand toward the photos. “All of them were murdered between December and June. The murders were usually sixty-two to sixty-five days apart in each given year when there were two murders in one year. Let me repeat. Murdered between December and June. Murdered sixty-two to sixty-five days apart.”

  Several people in the audience began to write his data down.

  “So, what you have here falls into the very classic pattern of serial killers—numerological or astrological correlations of some kind. In short—a nut.”

  Agent Chandler Grannis grinned. He had finished his presentation. He had crucified me with scorn and showed everyone the power of the Bureau.

  He buttoned his jacket and left the front of the room to be engulfed by admirers. I sat still. Slowly the room began to empty out. Once, the agent shot me a sheepish, almost apologetic glance. I glared back at him. The fool. He thought he had mocked me out of existence. Yes, the Babe Ruth/condom analogy had been powerful and destructive. But his subsequent comments had confirmed my theory. And he didn’t even know it. No one in the room knew it but me.

  Soon, only Judy Mizener and I remained in the room. She stayed where she was, and I stayed where I was. The distance between us remained constant.

  “Look,” she said, “this is all very painful and embarrassing to me. I made a mistake in taking you on. A lot of the staff on Retro resent you. They don’t know how to deal with you. They don’t know what to make of you. They look on you as some kind of psychic . . . as a nut. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it turned out.”

  “Are you firing me?” I asked.

  “Yes. I think that’s what I’m saying. It would be foolish to keep you on, because you won’t get any cooperation from the staff . . . and it would be painful to you.”

  “Even though the FBI agent confirmed my theory?”

  She stared at me, startled. Her reply was almost a shout: “Confirmed? Are you crazy? He made an ass out of you and your theory!”