A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (16 page)

Chapter 25

It was one o’clock in the morning when Tony, the Haitian nurse (Madeline, by name), and I showed up unannounced on the doorstep of Frank Brodsky.

I had originally planned to contact the police directly, but I realized that I owed my employer an explanation first, at the very least. And I entertained the hope that I could leave it to him to make the presentation to the police, to tie all the loose ends together.

He greeted us in his bathrobe. Clearly we had roused him from sleep, but he was ever the gentleman, leading us all up the stairs to his small, elegant conference room. He apologized that he could offer us no coffee, but he went to great effort to provide us with water in glasses of sparkling crystal.

Tony, Madeline, and I sat down at the table. Frank Brodsky remained standing.

I began to tell my story in detail, culminating with the trap which had caught Madeline and which, with all other evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, clearly revealed that Lucia Maury had indeed murdered Peter Dobrynin.

The lawyer didn’t interrupt once. From time to time he circled the table, but he never sat and he never spoke.

By the time I’d finished my recitation it was a little after two in the morning. I drank some water and waited.

For the longest time Brodsky didn’t respond to what I had said. He inspected one of his paintings, then some scuff marks on a table leg, then a small mark on the ceiling. Finally he sat down wearily in his usual chair at the head of the long, lovely table.

“You look very tired, Miss Nestleton,” he said.

“It has been a long night,” I admitted.

He looked at Tony and Madeline. “You
all
look tired,” he said.

Again there was that silence; only this time it was making me distinctly uncomfortable. Why hadn’t he congratulated me? Where was his joy at hearing that this ugly murder had finally been solved? Where, in fact, was his appreciation for what I had accomplished?

He smiled at me broadly, kindly, as if my fatigue were causing him real concern.

“I have a very good idea,” he said. He paused. “Do you want to hear my idea?”

“Of course,” I answered. But then he looked at Tony and Madeline. He wanted them to hear his idea also. They made no response, which was enough for him.

“I think,” he said, “that you should stay here a little while and rest up. There is room for all of you to take a nap. Then you should all take a cab home at my expense, have a good meal at my expense, and go to sleep. In the morning, when you wake up, you should have some fresh orange juice. And then just forget everything you’ve told me this evening.”

I stared at him dumbly. Was he joking? Was this his idea of a folksy joke? Then I realized that he was quite serious. I looked at Tony. He looked at me, perplexed. I looked at Madeline. Her eyes were fixed on a painting hung high on a wall.

My response to his suggestion was nakedly venomous: “Didn’t you hear what I just told you, Mr. Brodsky? Weren’t you listening? Perhaps I can recite the whole story again when you’re fully awake.”

He smiled. “Ah, Miss Nestleton, I heard every word you said. Every word. I paid close attention. But I see you are not going to take me up on my suggestion. I see you are here, in a sense, demanding some kind of action.”

He shook his head from side to side, slowly and sadly.

“Doesn’t it strike you as strange, Miss Nestleton, that the same woman I hired as a criminal investigator to clear Lucia Maury’s name has ended up dirtying it? As bizarre, Miss Nestleton, that you were hired to help
defend
Lucia Maury but seem to have spent all your time and energy—
considerable
energy, I might add—trying to
convict
Lucia Maury?”

“What precisely are you saying, Mr. Brodsky?”

“Nothing very profound. It just seems to me that you are engaged in an odd form of betrayal.”

“Betrayal? How dare you accuse me of that! Lucia Maury is my friend, but I hired on to conduct an objective investigation!”

My fury subsided as quickly as it had erupted. In its place came a deadening realization: The lawyer was absolutely right. I was handing Lucia over to the hangman. It just hadn’t dawned on me to characterize this as “betrayal.” I had simply followed one lead after another. I had sought the truth. I had pursued a murderer. Yet, when all was said and done, I would have to accuse Lucia Maury. But there was no other way!

“Perhaps,” I finally said to him, “the difference between you and me is that I can’t be bought, intellectually.” It was a cruel thing to say, and a flash of hatred and anger creased his usually cherubic face. Then he smiled, inclined his head as if I had scored a point, and folded his hands in front of him.

“Well, Miss Nestleton, we shouldn’t get into personalities. So let us get back to reason. You come here at one in the morning with an outlandish, unproven, unsubstantiated tale about my client, and you expect me to do something about it. This tale you told me contradicts a signed confession, freely given, which clearly names Vol Teak as the individual who shot and killed Peter Dobrynin. May I remind you that Vol Teak had a rational motive for murder: blackmail. According to the police and the district attorney, this case is closed. According to all rules of evidence and procedure, this case is closed. According to all logic, this case is closed.”

Then Tony said: “That confession was coerced.”

“You mean I
beat
Basil?” Mr. Brodsky asked, sarcastically.

“You did worse than that! Basil is a frightened, borderline, strung-out street addict. I don’t think he had any idea what his life was twenty-four hours earlier. You planted the diamonds on him, said they were from a beaten diamond dealer, and he was crazed enough to believe that he did it. Hell, for people like Basil it doesn’t matter if they really committed a crime; if the police believe they did it, then they did it! You hustled him, Mr. Brodsky. You abused him! You terrorized the poor bastard. So he told you what you wanted to hear. And none of us complained, because we thought we knew that Vol Teak was guilty. But now we know something else. And the case against Vol Teak is airtight only for as long as Basil’s phony confession holds up. Which may be only another five minutes!”

Tony paused, angry, his voice breaking. It was obvious that Basil’s confession and the lawyer’s part in it had been rankling for a long time.

Frank Brodsky didn’t respond. He poured himself a few sips of water, then looked around expansively. He said something in French to Madeline, who just nodded. It dawned on me that for all I knew it might have been Frank Brodsky who had originally obtained the Haitian nurse for Lucia.

“I think, Miss Nestleton,” he finally said, pushing the water glass along the table as if it were a child’s toy, “I am going to have to reveal some confidences you have shared with me.” I had no idea what he could mean.

“My past isn’t so mysterious, though I’d like to think it is,” I replied good-humoredly, seeing as he seemed ready to reveal some desperate act I’d once committed.

But he didn’t smile. He said: “You once told me, Miss Nestleton, that you are friendly with a Detective Rothwax of the NYPD. I believe you also told me that you both worked together some time back in a special investigative unit, called RETRO, I believe.”

“Well,” I replied gingerly, not sure where this was heading, “that’s true.”

He smiled. “I hope you won’t be angry with me, Miss Nestleton, but I took the liberty some time ago of contacting this detective, although he wasn’t easy to find. I just wanted his evaluation of you. After all, Miss Nestleton, since I was spending money to hire you, I thought it wise to get an outside evaluation. In other words, when you introduced me to him just before Basil confessed, we had already met secretly.”

He looked around at all of us before he proceeded.

“Detective Rothwax shared with me his nickname for you: ‘Cat Woman.’ Naturally, when I heard this I was curious as to the origin of such a strange name for so beautiful and intelligent a woman as yourself, Miss Nestleton.”

He seemed to wait for affirmation from the assembled that I was, indeed, beautiful and intelligent. Then he continued.

“Detective Rothwax explained that while you were a crackerjack investigator—yes, I remember that he did use that charming old-fashioned word, ‘crackerjack’—you were obsessed with things feline. To such an extent, Detective Rothwax said, that once in a while you enter a fantasy world that has nothing at all to do with real crimes committed by real people in the real world.”

I stood up in a rage. My body was trembling. I literally shouted at the lawyer: “Obsession? Fantasy? Real?”

I looked at Tony. “Give me that check!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the folded check, and handed it to me.

Holding the check out in front of Brodsky so that he could clearly see it, I shouted: “Is this a fantasy? Is this an obsession? Look at it, Mr. Brodsky! Look at it! It is made out to cash! It is signed by Lucia Maury! It is in payment for the return of a Maine coon cat called ‘Anna Pavlova Smith,’ better known as ‘Splat’! And Lucia gave this check to Madeline last night to deliver to a hotel room, because an ad had been placed in the paper saying that someone had found Anna Pavlova Smith—the cat that a drunk Peter Dobrynin took barhopping and lost! The cat whose loss Lucia Maury eventually avenged by putting a bullet hole in the dancer’s forehead on Christmas Eve, after she had given him a ticket to
The Nutcracker
!”

“Calm down, Miss Nestleton! You must calm down!”

“No! I’m
not
going to calm down! I’m just going to get out of here! But let me give you a small assignment, counselor, in order to check my fantasy level. Just call up your client and ask her for a letter from her vet certifying that her cat Splat was ‘put down’ as she has always claimed . . . or the cremation certificate. See if she can corroborate her story that poor Splat died of natural causes three years ago. You do that, Mr. Brodsky, and also, while you’re having that discussion, ask her about this check.”

I motioned to Tony. He stood up and we both walked to the door. I turned to Madeline. “Send my best to Lucia. Tell her that I’m sorry I had to raise her hopes about Splat by advertising that he was found. Tell her there was no other way for me to flush her out. And also tell her, Madeline, that the odds of a house cat surviving abandonment on the city streets are greater than the distance between earth and the outer limits of the expanding universe to one.”

Tony and I walked out of the room and started down the flight of stairs.

“Wait! Please, Miss Nestleton, wait!” I turned and saw Frank Brodsky standing at the top of the stairs. He seemed extremely agitated, and I was suddenly ashamed that I had screamed at him. After all, he was an old man.

I waited with Tony. Brodsky started to climb down a few steps, to get closer to me, then thought the better of it and stayed at the top of the landing, catching his breath and holding on to the staircase.

“Please listen to me just for a moment! I am sorry I insulted you! It was not my intention! Hear me out, please!”

I could see the sweat on his forehead and along his upper lip.

“It will take but a moment! And then you can leave; yes, then you can do whatever you want!” He began to breathe more evenly. “Suppose, Miss Nestleton, that what you have told me is true. This would mean that Lucia Maury is a very disturbed woman, a woman who should be in a mental hospital for treatment. Only a madwoman would murder a man because he innocently lost her cat while it was in his drunken care. We can all agree on that, can’t we, Miss Nestleton?

“Yet, as you well know, it is virtually impossible now to prove insanity to a sitting jury. And that means that Lucia Maury might well spend the next twenty years in prison. Oh, Miss Nestleton, no matter how deranged she may be, she does not deserve that! Who knows what else Peter Dobrynin did to her? You yourself told me that he routinely tormented and degraded women. No doubt he did the same to Lucia. No doubt he drove her to that insane act.” He wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his bathrobe. I waited for him to speak again, to continue, but he just stood there, staring at me imploringly.

“I don’t understand you,” I finally said. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me. What do you want me to do?”

“Do nothing, Miss Nestleton,” he replied.

“Nothing.”

“Yes, Miss Nestleton, nothing. I will go to the District Attorney and inform him of how Basil was coerced into his confession. That will clear Vol Teak of the murder charge, though not of the charges that he extorted money from ballet companies.”

“And then what, Mr. Brodsky?”

“Nothing. Let it become one of the thousand of unsolved crimes. As for Lucia Maury, I will see to it that she is committed to a psychiatric hospital in her native Delaware.”

I turned and started down the steps again. Just as Tony and I were walking through the front door I heard him plead: “Think about it! Think about everything! Think of Lucia!”

Once outside, we walked slowly down the deserted street, leaning into the cold wind. “What are you going to do?” Tony asked, holding my arm tightly.

“I don’t know, but I want to be alone for a while.”

Chapter 26

The buzzer kept ringing. Whoever it was wouldn’t stop. I went into my bedroom and shut the door and buried my head in a pillow. But still I could hear it. Finally, exasperated, I buzzed the intruder in.

Of course it was Tony. “What the hell is the matter with you, Swede? I’ve been calling you for two days! Why don’t you answer the phone or return messages?”

“Nothing to say.”

He came inside and started to prowl about. Pancho glared at him. Bushy ignored him. I made him a cup of instant coffee.

“Well, have you made a decision yet?” he asked.

“About what?”

“About whether you’re going to Paris in the spring. You know damn well what I’m talking about!”

“I’ve done nothing,” I admitted.

“It sure is, as they say, a tough nut to crack,” he noted, gulping down what was left of the coffee and then picking Bushy up in his arms and threatening, by means of pantomime, to fling him through the window.

Then he gently dropped Bushy onto the sofa, telling my poor beautiful cat: “You’d last about three minutes as a stray, Bushy. You’re a decadent cat.”

It’s odd how a silly little conversation can have a greater impact on a listener than a profound one. Particularly words said to a cat. I mean, for almost forty-eight hours before Tony told Bushy he wouldn’t last three minutes as a stray, I was in a very bad state. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide where my responsibilities lay. To call the police? To forget the police? To allow Lucia to escape the consequences of her actions? And I had also brooded over the facts of the case. Had I interpreted them correctly? Was any part of my analysis fantasy rather than fact? Had I caught the wrong person with the wrong bait? Was there any other conceivable motive for Lucia to have written and sent that check?

On and on it had gone, with no light visible at the end of the tunnel. I could make no decision. I could find no finality. I couldn’t finish the role or the script.

And then Tony had spoken those silly words, and his mentioning the word “stray” had reminded me of those poor stray cats in Riverside Park that had not eaten a good Russian meal, or perhaps any meal at all, since Dobrynin died.

Right there, right then, I decided to feed them. Oh, I know it was stupid. It was an obvious attempt to postpone serious activity, a handy excuse for not dealing with the real problem at hand—but I wanted to do it. I suddenly
had
to do it. It became my immediate responsibility.

I threw on my muffler, coat, and sweater. Tony had yet to shed his outer garments, so I just pulled him out of the apartment along with me.

“What’s the matter with you, Swede? What’s going on?”

“We’re going to feed some cats, Tony.”

“What cats?”

“The ones Dobrynin used to feed. The ones in Riverside Park, Tony. It’s time you and I did some good deeds.”

“I don’t have enough cash for The Russian Tea Room.”

“We have another option.”

The cab-took us to Eighth Avenue in the fifties. I remembered a Russian takeout kitchen just west of Eighth Avenue, across the street from a post office.

It was close to four in the afternoon, and cold. We moved in and out of the side streets until we found the place, nestling in a gloomy storefront, its windows all but papered over with dozens of rave reviews from the local food critics, including a splendid one from
The Village Voice.

Inside was a small, skinny, brooding man with an enormous checked apron. He had long sideburns and a flattened nose.

“I’d like some blini with sour cream and caviar; an order of chicken Kiev, and a dozen pirogi.”

He didn’t say a word after I’d ordered, just pointed a finger. I turned toward what he’d pointed at—freezers along the wall. Tony laughed. The place had what we wanted, but all of it was frozen.

“Do you have a microwave?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

Five minutes later we were half walking, half trotting uptown toward Riverside Park.

Tony kept muttering. “This is the stupidest thing I ever let you rope me into, Swede. Do you know how crazy this is? Two people past forty, racing uptown with heated Russian food to feed alley cats in Riverside Park!”

“They’re not alley cats, Tony,” I cautioned.

We entered the park at Seventy-second Street, racing against the lengthening shadows: We wouldn’t have dreamed of entering that or any other city park after nightfall.

“What was that woman’s name?” I asked as we approached the boat basin.

“What woman?”

“The homeless woman with the shopping cart. The one who showed us the cats. The one who used to get the food for Dobrynin.”

“I don’t remember.”

It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t there. The walkway along the boat basin was devoid of homeless people, empty of all people except the ever-present joggers, muffled against the cold wind but plodding on.

“The cats were up there,” Tony said, pointing east. We walked away from the water up the path.

“There’s the iron railing!” I called out, like an excited and happy child. I was carrying the pirogi. Tony was carrying the blini, the small containers of sour cream and caviar, and the chicken Kiev.

I started to laugh out loud.

“What’s the matter with you, Swede?”

“It’s just making me giddy, thinking of all those lovely cats digging into the blini with caviar and sour cream. If I was a cat I would love any kind of crepes—and blini with caviar . . . my God!”

We reached the railing. “Get sticks, Tony. Get some sticks.” He found us some branches, and even a broken sponge-mop stick with the metal hinge still attached.

Like two mad people we ran the implements raucously along the iron railings, setting up a terrible racket. The cats’ dinner bell had sounded.

We waited. Nothing. No movement at all. I stared at the rock outcroppings and brush on the other side of the railing—the spot from which the cats had emerged the last time we were there.

Nothing. No movement. No cats. And it was getting darker.

The giddiness had vanished. I grabbed Tony’s arm desperately. “Where
are
they?” I cried out. “Why won’t they come?”

“Let’s leave the food and get out of here,” Tony said. He shook my arm off, knelt down and opened the packages, and slipped the food through the fence onto the ground. I bent down to hand him my parcel of pirogi, and he opened it and pushed it through the railing.

“Let’s go,” he said, straightening up to take hold of my arm again and lead me out of the park.

That’s when I saw the two points of light, deep in the brush.

“Wait, Tony! Wait!”

Then the two points of light vanished. But they
had
been cat’s eyes. I knew it.

I stared hard into the growing darkness. Something was moving. Yes, a shape moving . . . It was a cat. A large, strong, dark cat. A smokey-blue cat with a chest ruff. A Maine coon.

“Tony, look there! Look there!” I picked up one of the sticks and began to bang it against the railing, harder and harder.

“Where Swede? Where? I don’t see anything!”

“It’s Splat, Tony! It’s Anna Pavlova Smith! He’s alive!”

I dropped the stick, exhausted, waiting. Silence. I stared. What had happened? The cat had vanished. It was gone. But I
knew
I had seen him . . . or one like him.

“Please!” Tony said imploringly, placing his arm gently around my neck. “Please, let’s go. They’ll find the food.”

We walked slowly out of the park. A terrible sadness descended upon me. It made my limbs weak and my step unsteady.

Tony took me to a bar on Broadway. He ordered two bottles of ale.

“Are you okay now?” he asked.

I nodded, then poured some of the ale from the bottle into the glass. It was warm and quiet in the bar. I didn’t drink.

“What did you
really
see there?” he asked.

“Now, I’m not sure.”

“It couldn’t have been Lucia’s cat. There’s no chance he survived three years on the city streets. At best, somebody took him in.”

I didn’t reply. I sipped some of the ale. It was nutty and sweet.

“And besides, Swede, you know what your grandmother says.”

I burst out laughing in spite of myself. “But Tony, you told me that if you ever heard another line from
The Wit and Wisdom of Grandma Nestleton
, you were going to jump off the Chrysler Building.”

Tony squirmed. “Well, Swede, since you’ve been reduced to seeing visions in parks, maybe one of her gems would help you to . . . you know . . . ease back into reality. That’s what old ladies on frigid Minnesota dairy farms are all about—reality. Hard, cold, unvarnished, wood-chopping reality.”

“Okay, Tony, I’ll bite. Which gem?”

“Oh, come on, you know the one, Swede! Your grandmother used to say: “It’s okay to die for a cat—but not to kill for one.”

“She never said that, Tony!”

“Well, maybe one of her friends said it. Or the farm-implements dealer.”

“And maybe I saw Anna Pavlova Smith,” I replied bitterly.

We were silent. I drank some more ale. It was a tad too cold for my taste.

“Do you have any change, Tony?” I asked.

“What for?”

“It’s time I made a telephone call.” He leaned over and kissed me on the lips, then reached down into his right-hand pocket and produced a quarter.

I looked around and saw a pay phone on the wall, near the rest rooms. I walked toward it, holding the quarter gingerly between two fingers.

I remembered the phrase they always use in gangster movies: “drop a dime.”

That’s exactly what I was going to do: Call the police. “Drop a dime”—a quarter, after inflation—on my friend Lucia Maury. She was a murderer. She had to be accused and charged with the crime. If she had been psychotic at the moment she pulled the trigger, that would be up to a jury to decide.

Cats? Dancers? Passions? All that, I could at last see clearly, was beside the point. A human being had been murdered. As soon as I reached the phone I “dropped the dime”—quarter. But unlike the informers in all those gangster movies, I felt no glee whatsoever.