Kansas City Noir (4 page)

CAT IN A BOX

BY
K
EVIN
P
RUFER

Country Club Plaza

At last the cat fell asleep and, because Armand still could, he drove his police-issue Crown Vic through the Plaza, down Main Street. He took a left on 47th, slid past Latte Land then Pottery Barn, past Barnes & Noble and Gap Kids, then left again. Three fat men stood outside a fake Irish bar and laughed while the snow came down, but Armand drove right past them too, over the bridge at Wornall and left again, to Ward Parkway then Main then 47th again.

Around and around he drove while the cat slept in the cardboard box beside him.

Sometimes Armand’s legs felt numb. Sometimes they tingled, as if he’d exercised too hard the day before, or a dull ache would curl up his thighs and settle around his hips. He knew he shouldn’t be driving.

It was two days before Christmas. He’d seen the 280,000 colored lights blink on at seven p.m., during his first pass, while the cat meowed plaintively and scratched at the little air holes he’d cut in the box. Still driving, he unwrapped a sandwich, tremblingly swallowed cold coffee.

After a while the stores closed, their windows dying away in the gloom. A pretty girl turned the key on Burberry’s and hurried to her car. The cat slept soundly again.

The restaurants went next, spilling their drunken yuppies onto the snowswept pavement where they fished in their coats for car keys or looked into the reflected Christmas lights in each other’s eyes.

Armand drove in circles, listened to slush part beneath his wheels.

Once, he stopped the car and tilted the seat back and closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. Instead, he concentrated on his fingers, willed them to open and close, played them awkwardly over the steering wheel, two taps of the ring finger, then the index finger, then the pinky, though they ached too. They were harder to control today than even ten days ago.

He’d given himself one more week. One week of driving, of East Patrol, of holding his coffee with both hands to conceal his tremor. Then he’d tell Jackson, who already knew something was wrong. And then he’d tell Balls, who would want his gun and his car keys, who would want his badge and his clip, who would nod gravely and say, “Armand, I don’t know what else I can do.” And there’d be a retirement party at Lew’s and, after that, he’d end up drinking with Jackson and Rorkisha at the Cigar Box as long as their babysitter would allow, and then he’d drink alone or go home where, slowly, slowly, the disease would finish him off.

But he wasn’t going to feel sorry for himself.

The Dollmaker had driven through these snows, smiling as the final stragglers exited the bars, slid into their cars. The Dollmaker had sucked on his Camel Menthol, peered through someone else’s window, smiled, smiled, smiled.

* * *

“That cat,” the boy had told him four nights before, “she get into everything. Everything.” He held it to his chest, rubbed its chin. He was maybe twelve or thirteen, said his name was Lamar. “Where’d you find her?” he asked, not looking at Armand, no, looking at the cat, stroking it behind the ears while it stretched and purred. “You so thin,” Lamar whispered to the cat, “you a thin little girl.”

And Armand wasn’t sure how much to say, what to tell Lamar, whose mother wasn’t home, whose mother danced at the Fantasy Ranch on Route 50 halfway to Sedalia, which was a euphemism for taking off her clothes for truckers rumbling along through Warrensburg, Lone Jack, and Kansas City, toward the great blankness of Kansas itself.

“You know how I can reach your mom?” Armand asked, but the kid shook his head, said she wasn’t answering the cell phone, but she’d call when she got her break.

“Where’d you find my cat?” Lamar asked again.

Armand sat on the front steps beside the boy, looking out over Prospect Avenue, unsure of what to tell him. Kids made him nervous—he didn’t have any of his own, though once he’d thought he would. But he liked Lamar, who lived in a neat house on a not very good corner of a bad neighborhood.

A patrolman found the third victim, Wilma Perrin, fifty-five, in a white Toyota Camry parked illegally near the east end of a construction site where Bannister Mall once stood. Satisfied that she was dead, he closed the trunk and waited for Armand and Jackson to arrive.

The woman’s eyes were open and glittered white in the streetlights’ glare. Her teeth also glittered behind the sad grimace of rigor, her face tight and strange and pale. She probably hadn’t been dead very long, though it would be hard to tell because of the cold.

She looked a lot like the little doll the killer had slipped into her mailbox before anyone noticed she was missing, a neatly sewn, three-inch-tall plump doll in a pale blue dress and tiny boots. The victims all looked too much like their dolls. The Dollmaker had studied them carefully, gotten the wardrobes just right, the freckles and the jewelry.

With the end of a pencil he carefully peeked under her collar at two thick welts. He’d choked her, but he didn’t kill her that way. He’d choked her to have fun. Probably after he gave her the injection, as it was taking effect.

Sodium thiopental takes some time to work, maybe two, three minutes. So, first she became dizzy, then her eyes closed, her muscles going momentarily rigid, then slackening, loosening. Completely limp. Maybe he brushed hair out of her face. Then he choked her for a while. Then he straightened her collar to hide the welts. Then he probably followed up the first injection with another, this one phenobarbitol, to prolong the effect.

And then he’d loaded her into the trunk of the Toyota Camry—all this flashed before Armand’s eyes quickly as he sat on the stoop with Lamar and the cat. He placed her lovingly into the trunk of a stolen Camry and drove her through the snow, down Hillcrest, where he parked the car and disappeared.

Armand told none of this to Lamar. Nor did he tell Lamar that when he and Jackson finally got that trunk open again—it had frozen shut—it was not the dead woman Armand saw first. No, it was the cat—Lamar’s cat—tired, hungry, and angry, sitting on the victim’s chest. Armand looked at the cat and the cat looked at Armand. Its eyes glowed greenly in the darkness.

Then Armand closed the trunk once more, lest the animal escape.

“Where’d you find my cat?” Lamar asked again.

And Armand shook his head. “Crime scene,” he said. “She was at the scene of a crime.”

* * *

Armand thought about all this as he drove around and around the Plaza, watching the last bars close. Through the windows, he could see waiters mopping floors, flipping chairs upside down atop the tables.

The cat mewed in the box beside him. When he turned onto Wornall, he heard pellets of food roll around.

From behind him came the long low moan of what might have been a cold wind. And the snow fell like a million little white angels in the night.

“Here’s what we do,” Jackson had told him, when they finally got Wilma Perrin to the morgue and the Toyota to forensics. “We put a tracker on the cat, then we let it go. The cat leads us straight to its home and there’s our crime scene.” He laughed, like it was joke, but it wasn’t. And after a moment he said, more seriously: “That cat got in the car at the same time Wilma did, to stay warm. And cats know how to get home.”

Armand was thinking it over. The fact was, they had three victims. Three little dolls and three dead bodies. But no crime scene. The Dollmaker clearly hunted victims away from their homes, picked them out of crowds, met them in shopping malls or movie theaters, followed behind them on highways, cornered them in unfamiliar territory. He knew them well, had watched them, probably photographed them so he could make their dolls.

And somehow he subdued them, injected them, played with them, loaded them in the trunks of cars, drove them elsewhere still, to odd corners of the city, to out-of-the-way parking lots where, after hours, his victims slowly recovered, then—from cold, from thirst, bound and unable to move or call out—died. To think of it made Armand tremble, made him hold the steering wheel a little tighter.

This was where he was going: paralysis, then nothing.

As if he could calm the cat, he patted the cardboard box. “Good cat,” he told it. “
Shhh
.”

Without a firm crime scene, they had no witnesses. If he knew where the victims had been abducted, he might find someone who had seen it happen, perhaps without realizing what he’d seen. But without witnesses, there was little to go on except the sodium thiopental and phenobarbitol, which led nowhere. And the dolls, which provided less than he’d hoped.

Armand was no cat person, but his wife had been, and when she died her cat had lived on another four, five years. And one day, when he’d brought the cat to the vet, the vet had offered to have it chipped. And this is how Armand came to know that lots of cats—all those adopted from the SPCA, for instance—came with a little microchip the size of a grain of rice embedded in the skin between the shoulder blades. And if this cat was chipped, that meant it could be scanned for the owner’s address.

And with an address, they had something close to a likely crime scene. And perhaps there they’d find a witness.

It would be easier than following the damned thing through the streets of Kansas City, anyway.

* * *

It had begun with a strange, dull ache in his joints, as if he’d had too much exercise the day before, though Armand exercised rarely, and then only under pressure from his doctor or from Balls, his immediate supervisor, who insisted all of them, even sixty-five-year-old homicide detectives, achieve “a
level
of physical fitness.” And quitting smoking hadn’t been enough. And mostly laying off the drink hadn’t done the trick, either.

But the ache remained, climbing up and down his legs, and then, a few weeks later, it was in his wrists. Sometimes it felt like handcuffs tightening over them. It was in his elbows, a sort of tingling pain, the sting of a bee. He’d grown unstable on his feet and, waking up in the middle of the night, had to hold the side of his bed to keep from falling while his legs attained their balance, while they caught up with the rest of him.

And his regular doctor looked concerned, as did the first specialist. And the next, and the third, a young Vietnamese woman who told him it was not going to get better, she was so sorry to tell him this. They could slow the process a bit, they would take an aggressive approach, there were a number of clinical trials going on right here at the KU Medical Center. “People live for years with this,” she said, smiling, by which she meant that people
went on
, slowly losing the ability to move their arms and legs, unable, at first, to drive safely. And then to walk, or feed themselves, or change the channel, unable to do anything at all but lie in bed or look out the window at the snow, which swirled now around his car as he took another left, and another, driving around and around the Plaza, two days before Christmas, a cat in a box on the seat beside him. It was midnight now.

He hit a bump and something rattled in the trunk.

It would feel like being locked in a trunk.

* * *

Lamar was a good kid, a sweet kid. He wanted to know about the crime scene and Armand told him a little bit, that he’d found the cat in a stolen car.

“Cat gets into everything,” Lamar said.

“What’s its name?”

“Cat,” Lamar said. “I thought you was dead,” he said to the cat.

Armand smiled. Lamar stroked the cat.

“Was it that white Toyota?” the kid asked after a moment.

Armand felt his pulse quicken. He was waiting for Jackson to show up. But Jackson was going to be late.

“Yeah,” Armand said. “You know the car?”

“Sure. Big Camry? It was parked right in front of the house for like three or four days and Cat pretty much lived underneath it. I had a feeling about that car. It didn’t belong to no one around here.”

“You see who was driving it?”

The kid thought about that. A Cadillac rolled down the street, stopped for a moment while the driver threw a can out the window, then emptied his ashtray onto the curb. “Yeah,” Lamar said at last. “I think I seen him. He came and went sometimes.”

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Did he steal the car?” Lamar asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did he murder those people? The ones they finding in the trunks of cars?”

“You know about that?”

“I read the paper,” Lamar said.

* * *

Lamar was sorry he couldn’t remember what the guy looked like. He’d seen him several times easing the white Toyota into and out of that spot in front of his house, opening the trunk, hunting around inside. But he hadn’t paid much attention.

Armand asked him lots of questions, told him to take a deep breath. The kid looked like he was going to cry. “If you don’t remember his face exactly, do you remember if he reminded you of someone?”

But Lamar didn’t know. “He was a white guy,” he said, “kind of average. That’s all. I didn’t really
look
.” And Lamar was really near tears now, he wanted so badly to remember, wanted Armand to think he was a good kid, a smart kid. And when his mother came home, he wanted her to know that he’d helped the cops with that big case, that he’d helped them catch the Dollmaker, but he couldn’t remember anything except a white guy walking to the car every now and then, opening the trunk—he’d seen it through his bedroom window—closing it. A white guy in a yellow jacket. Or a white jacket. And a baseball cap.

And then the car was gone and Lamar had thought of it no more.

And now he was helpless. And he wanted his cat back for good. Armand said they’d hold on to it for a few days, bring the cat back home as soon as a vet could surgically remove the chip from its neck. Armand said they needed to keep the chip to preserve the chain of evidence.

But something bigger was nagging at Lamar, some detail, and after Armand left he kept thinking about it. He thought about it while he made himself mac and cheese, and while he curled on the couch to watch TV, then closed his eyes. He thought of it when, through the haze of sleep, he heard his mother unlock the door and shake him awake and put him in his own bed.