Dead Man (4 page)

When Eddie crossed the Golden Gate to their modest two-bedroom bungalow in Marin’s Tamalpais Valley, he found the household
in an uproar. Or at least found three-year-old Albie (christened Albert, in honor of Einstein) in an uproar. Marie was her
usual placid self.

“A kitten,” she explained.

Marie was Eddie’s age and tall; barefoot, only four inches shorter than his six-one and as limber as he, with the supple,
beautiful body produced in certain women by intense devotion to yoga. Her taffy-colored hair was worn long and straight down
her back in defiance of current fashions, her very clear hazel eyes were too large and wide-set under stern brows for absolute
beauty—but she also had the soft rounded cheeks and rosebud mouth of a fairy-tale princess.

“Kitten?” Eddie looked around the narrow kitchen as he stripped off his burrito-stained shirt. Albie was hanging on his pantleg
telling him about it also. “I don’t see any kitten.”

“It shall return,” she said with placid resignation.

“How do you know, if—”

“Albie knows.”

He believed her. Marie was a very sensual being, in touch with her body and the bodies of those she loved. In bed they made
each other come so hard and so often that he sometimes thought there must be something to her reincarnation musings: it seemed
that a love this rewarding spiritually and this intense physically just
had
to extend back through several lifetimes.

But now, Wisking the burrito stain before putting the shirt into the hamper, he said, “If the kitten does show up again, we
just can’t keep it. You know that, don’t you, darling?”

“I know.”

“If it’s a stray, it’ll be dirty and diseased—”

“I know.”

“Then we’ll just have to explain to Albie that—”

“I know.” Then she kissed him, a long kiss that made him want to get Albie to bed early. She stepped back and patted the front
of his pants and made a silent whistle, and laughed, “Tell you what, big guy.
You
explain to Albie why he can’t have that kitten, and I’ll give you something nice later.”

“You cheat!” exclaimed Eddie with feeling.

But after supper, he and his son sat out on the redwood deck he’d built the year before, at the same time that he’d built
an eight-foot-high wall between the driveway and the garage they’d converted to an office. The wall had a door that was locked,
so Albie could play in the backyard while Marie worked at the computer and kept an eye on him through the office window.

The deck was low, ideal for sitting on the edge with your feet in the grass. Albie sat in rapt attention beside him, staring
solemnly up into his face, swinging stubby legs as Eddie explained why they couldn’t keep the kitten.

“Even if he does come back, he probably belongs to someone who’ll want him to come home to them.”

“He’s black and white,” observed Albie.

“Or his mother was a cat gone wild. In that case he’ll be a feral cat himself and won’t want to live with us because—”

“His whiskers are white.” Albie held out demonstrative hands a foot apart. “Real long.”

“That’s long,” admitted Eddie. He shook his head in admiration. “But wild kittens have all sorts of diseases—”

“Mommy says he’s a puss-in-boots kitten. Black legs, white feet.” Then he added, in case Eddie was as dense about books as
he was about kittens, “Like in the fairy tale.”

“Even a puss-in-boots sort of kitten would be…”

He trailed off because his son had jumped off the deck and was running on stubby bowed legs over to the wall. Thrust through
the two-inch gap left under the fence for rainy-season runoff, a tiny delicate upside-down black arm with a white paw was
making what looked like beckoning gestures.

“It’s him!” cried Albie. He squatted and patted at the paw with one hand. The tiny paw convulsed about his finger, held on
without claws. The kitten started to mew. Piteously.

“Open the door, Daddy!” cried Eddie’s son. Piteously.

If he opened the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. If he didn’t open the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. So macho Daddy said
forcefully, “But it has to stay in the kitchen until we can housebreak it. And it goes to the vet’s tomorrow and…”

Marie stood in the darkened kitchen, watching her husband cave in to her son about their new kitten and chuckling deep in
her throat. So even though they had to make up a box with an old towel in it for the kitten to sleep on, and feed it, and
of course hold it, when they did get to bed she gave Eddie something just as nice as she’d promised. More than nice and more
than once, in fact, and then told him she loved him because he was a kitten freak in public while being a tiger in bed.

The kitten was little and skinny and black and white and full of fleas and scabs and rickety from lack of food, so for two
weeks it was touch-and-go. It could keep down milk but then immediately had diarrhea, every time. Dysentery, distemper,
a massive flea allergy, eye infections… All plans were put on hold pending its survival or the sad eventuality of its death.

Ten days later the dysentery was gone. The distemper was cured. Its eyes cleared up. It strode instead of wobbled. It
meowed!
instead of mewed. Suddenly it was a delicate demented huge-eyed black and white furball tumbling around the house.

The day they knew it would survive, they named it Shenzie. Shenzie was a Swahili word Eddie had got from Randy Solomon, meaning
crazy—but crazy in a goofy, nutty, oddball, wonderful sort of way that fit the kitten perfectly.

His survival ensured, Shenzie would watch by the hour when they played chess, sitting on the edge of the coffee table where
the board was permanently set up, his skinny black tail, white-tipped, loosely curled down around a table leg.

“Think he’s trying to learn chess?” asked Eddie.

“He’s studying the way it works,” said Marie firmly. “He wants hands instead of paws. He wants to be an engineer.”

Shenzie was Albie’s cat, of course, but on nights when Eddie was out in the field on his backlogged cases, and Albie was asleep,
he would lie below the screen on the computer box while Marie worked, and go to sleep—purring. If she was reading, he would
climb up on her chest and go to sleep—purring.

“He never does that with me,” said Eddie darkly. “Except for Albie, you’re the only person in the world he trusts enough to
sleep on.”

“We can take him to Point Reyes!” crowed Albie.

But this time Eddie was firm. “No we can’t,” he said sadly. “It might be a little too tough on him—he’s still pretty shaky.
Or he might get lost in the woods so we couldn’t find him again. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Tiger?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Or get all wet in the ocean and maybe get pneumonia?”

“No, but…”

“Uncle Randy’s going to take care of him while we’re
gone,” said Marie with comfortable finality. “That way, you’ll have him to come home to.”

“Okay,” said Albie in charming capitulation. He kissed Shenzie on the nose and put him into the cat carrying case, a plastic
one with holes, through one of which Shenzie’s black and white paw immediately came out to begin groping about. That patented
paw-grope was one of his best tricks to date.

While his wife still had been tossing her paycheck into the pot, Randy Solomon had scraped up the down on a tall skinny Victorian
on Buchanan just above Fell. Even after his wife left him (cops’ divorce statistics are horrendous), he managed to hang on
to it and even get it painted and fixed up outside and in.

Eddie climbed the exterior front stairs and rang the old-fashioned doorbell. He was carrying Shenzie in the plastic cat case.
Randy opened the door and stepped back so Eddie could enter by him.

“The famous Shenzie, huh?” He’d been hearing a lot about the kitten on the handball courts during the past two weeks.

“Himself,” said Eddie, as he put the carry case on the couch and started to open it.

The living room was beautifully furnished in an African motif. An elongated ebony head four feet tall, carved by the Pare
in Tanzania, dominated one corner; across from it was a ‘Kamba drum made of stretched zebra hide, the cords that kept it taut
made from thin rolled strips of antelope hide. Graceful cranes carved from Masai cattle horns stood on top of the TV cable
box; there were Kisii stools carved from rounds of tree trunk with tiny bright beads pounded into the soft wood in intricate
patterns. On a clear wall was a long Kalenjin spear and a handmade knife in a red hide scabbard.

Eddie gazed around, impressed as he always was, while getting the carry case open. Delicate puss-in-boots Shenzie leaped out
with a pissed-off
meow!
Randy shook the windows with his laughter and, quick as a synapse, scooped the
tiny furball up in his arms to cradle it upside down against his chest.

“Shenzie, my man, we gonna cook you for supper!” But Shenzie, knowing a soft touch when he felt one, merely purred. Randy
laughed again and stooped to set him right side up on the floor, asking Eddie, “Got time for a beer?”

“Marie and Albie are down in the car.”

Shenzie was twining himself back and forth around Solomon’s ankles. Randy laughed again.

“Guess me an’ old Shenz’ll get along just fine.”

“Thanks for taking him, Randy—I mean it. I’ve written out the direction to the place at Point Reyes if you think you can get
away for a weekend—”

Solomon snorted as he crumpled up the directions. “Listen, the way people are killin’ each other off in this city, I ain’t
gonna get any time off. An’ if I did, I’d spend it chasin’ gash rather than snipe or some damn thing at the seashore…”

He started walking Eddie to the door, then stopped, suddenly serious.

“Truth be told, Sherlock, I’m worried about this case of yours. You’ve sorta halfway convinced me that maybe somebody did
make old Grimes’s boat blow up. If you’re right, we’re talking murder for hire here.”

“I sincerely hope so,” grinned Eddie.

“Ain’t funny, Hoss. If—”

“If I turn up a hitman where you guys and the underwriters and the fire department thought there was just an accident, I’ll
be the hottest eye in town.”

“Or the deadest. You’d best remember what a hitman does for a living.”

“He won’t even know I’m there,” grinned Eddie.

“Aw, hell, you’re impossible.” Randy laughed and stuck out a big paw for Eddie to shake. “Just don’t make any moves while
you’re at Point Reyes, okay? Wait until—”

“We’re not even taking the laptop. Total downtime. But when we get back—watch out!” He started out, then turned back again.
Shenzie was atop the TV, sniffing one of the horn birds with brow-furrowed suspicion. “Anyway, Randy,
hitmen aren’t supermen—just guys with strange ideas about a fun time.”

Randy stood in the open doorway at the head of the stairs with a worried look on his face, watching Eddie bound back down
to his car with the bike rack and two mountain bikes on the roof. He waved at Marie through the window, she waved back. He
could see little Albie in his car seat in the rear.

He sighed and went back into the house. Shenzie was waiting to ambush his ankle. “Hey, crazy cat!” he exclaimed. “You’re bitin’
the foot gonna kick you you keep it up!”

Shenzie didn’t care. Eyes bugged out and wild, flopped on his thin black side, he sought to disembowel the side of Randy’s
size 13 leather shoe with pumping back feet while holding onto the highly shined and therefore slippery toe with his front
feet.

By definition Shenzie was, after all, nuts.

But Randy loved it. He laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor. He dug the little mulatto dude. Mulatto—black and white.
Get it?

Maybe he’d get himself a cat like this Shenzie one of these days. They sure were a lot more fun than he’d expected. Since
his wife had left he hadn’t been having a whole lot of fun. Just working, fucking when he could, with maybe a little moonlighting
thrown in on the weekends for some extra cash.

Life in the rustic cabin at Point Reyes quickly fell into wondrous routine. Wake up spooned together for warmth in the old-fashioned
double bed, whisper lazily until curious hands and mouths found familiar pleasure points, then the rising arc of passion until
they fell back panting to the sounds of Albie stirring on his little bed in the next room.

No phones to answer. No computers to work. No friends to visit. No television to watch. Just books to read. Incredible salt
marshes to tramp through. Sometimes at dusk as the fog rolled in, a driftwood fire on the beach in the lee of a washed-up
log, trying to identify night noises out of the darkness.

“I think it’s a… big bird!” Albie might exclaim.

“Tree frog,” Marie, raised on a ranch in the California coastal zone, would say with great authority. She would hold finger
and thumb half an inch apart. “About that long.”

“But it makes a bigger sound than that!”

Once they heard a dog bark, but Marie said it was a fox—
a gray, you didn’t find reds down by the ocean. Next morning, Eddie, up before dawn, saw the animal’s tracks: dainty little
pawprints hardly larger than those Shenzie might make. Fox.

Other nights, Albie asleep and the wind sighing in the trees behind the house, they would yawn over the chessboard until finally
falling into bed themselves. Only to feel fatigue drop magically away for velvet moments in the dark of the night, soft cries
of completion that never woke their son.

Perfect vacation days, with Marie’s birthday the most perfect of all. It dawned clear and warm and bright, without a wisp
of fog, and Eddie bare-legged in front of the open fridge calling out items for the grocery list.

“I think we should have steak tonight in honor of the occasion. And baked potatoes—”

“No oven.”

“Okay, write down aluminum foil for the potatoes so we can stick ‘em in the coals. And corn on the cob if that little grocery
store is up to it—”

“And whatever crucifer they have fresh there.”

Eddie turned to his son, who was waiting for the piggyback bicycle ride to the store. “Eat-your broccoli, dear,” he said.