When the Cat's Away (23 page)

“I’m going to do this for you just this one time,” said Lobster. “I don’t really know why.”

“Maybe it’s my rural charm,” I said.

I left the Nero Wolfe party list on the desk where Ratso would be sure to see it, and I went out to lunch. I dined at a swank and fairly unpronounceable French restaurant on the Upper East Side where I had to take my hat off to get in.

Normally, I wouldn’t have stood for that, but then, normally I didn’t have lunch with Fred Katz.

64

Wednesday night I stayed up late with the cat and what was left of the bottle of Jameson. Ratso, having called the list and ordered a roast and two dozen pork pies from Pete Myers, had gone to play hockey. I sat at the desk. The cat and the bottle sat on the desk between the two red telephones to keep me company. I wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholics drink alone.

I was reading a clipping a friend had sent to me several weeks before. It wasn’t related to the case at hand. Well, let’s say it wasn’t directly related to the case at hand. The article looked like it was from the
New York Post
or the
National Enquirer
, the kind of paper that occasionally has the guts to print things that are not fit to print.

The source of the article was
The Compendium on Continuing Education for the Practicing Veterinarian
. The part of it that jumped out at me was a statement to the effect that “57 percent of cat owners confide in their cats about important matters.”

“What in the hell,” I said to the cat, “have I gotten myself into?”

The cat didn’t say anything. I downed a shot of Jameson from the old bull’s horn.

“What in the hell,” I said to the cat, “am I going to do if nothing happens tomorrow night?”

The cat demurred. I poured and killed another shot.

“And what do you think of Ratso?” I asked. “In his own stubborn, neurotic, New York way, he believes in me. His loyalty is almost poignant, don’t you think? Kind of like a gynecologist daydreaming of his wife …”

The cat licked her paw a few times and closed her eyes. I wondered what percentage of cats gave a shit about the confidences of their owners.

I knocked back another fairly stiff one.

“Nice of you to listen to all of this,” I said rather facetiously.

The cat yawned. I poured another shot.

“The way I see it,” I said, “we’ve been looking in the wrong places for the wrong things. We’ve misconducted the case in the same manner that most of us misconduct our lives. Of course, this time we’ve had more than our share of red herrings and blind alleys, but still, there’s no excuse. I think I see the solution. And it’s really very simple. The problem is going to be how to prove it without somebody punching Jane Meara’s dance card for the river Styx.

“Look at it this way. What strategy would Tom Landry, the coach of my second favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, have used if he were alive today? Are you listenin’?”

The cat was sitting with her back to me, which was something she occasionally did when a person or a situation greatly displeased her.

I ignored this rude behavior.

“Maybe I should’ve been a Buddhist or a dusty old Navajo. Maybe everything would seem clearer then. I just don’t understand people today. There’s a sign on the highway near our ranch in Texas that says ‘Waterfall for Sale.’ You ever hear of anything like that? Guy thinks he can sell a waterfall. Hell, maybe he can. You in the market for slightly used waterfalls? How about a guy who never quite made it to the top as a country singer so he tries his hand at something much more difficult and deadly? Sometimes it looks like a guitar picker just can’t tell what to pick. He rambles around the world until he suddenly stumbles head first into a situation that makes him a hero with feet of Play-Do.

“If I’m wrong tomorrow night, well … we can go on the road again. You and me and the old guitar and the pillowcase. You never did like traveling in a pillowcase much, but who said life on the road was gonna be easy? A middle-aged misanthrope and his cat playing county fairs and rodeos …

I killed the last shot. I looked at the cat. The cat was sound asleep. By the time Ratso got back from his hockey game, I was, too.

65

Thursday night rolled around like a battered beach ball. The loft, however, looked like a million bucks. Two rows of mismatched furniture, including folding chairs, the rocker, and a hassock that appeared to be left over from
The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet
, were arranged neatly in front of my desk. Nero Wolfe would’ve been proud.

The windows sparkled. That was because they were new windows, put in to replace the ones blown away by Rambam and the boys from Brazil or wherever the hell they came from.

I was wearing my formal black Italian tuxedo jacket, which had once belonged to a Puerto Rican coke dealer. A little class never hurt anything.

Pete Myers was standing in the kitchen with a long knife, cutting what looked like an obscenely large portion of a farm animal into paper-thin slices. Pork pies from his shop on Hudson Street were laid out all along the counter with hot mustard, chutney, and a few other things I didn’t recognize. Also, there were several large bottles of the ever-present HP sauce. I thought, but did not verbalize, the sentiment that a famous frog had once expressed: “In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.” It would’ve been in questionable taste.

“These friends of yours coming tonight, Kinkster?” asked Myers in his soft, northern English Lake District accent.

“’Fraid not,” I said.

“One of ’em’s a murderer,” said Ratso in his rather rodentlike, grating Queens accent. “Tonight Kinky’s gonna unmask the fiend. Right, Kinkster?”

“Right,” I said a little shakily as I reached for a bottle of Guinness.

“Pour enough of that stuff down your neck and you may unmask yourself,” said Myers.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Ratso.

“Right,” I said with a measure of dignity.

I took the Guinness and walked over to the kitchen window. With the puppet head out of commission, Ratso and I were going to have to do a lot of legwork going down to the front door each time to let the guests in. Of course, if you want to entertain, you have to be prepared to make sacrifices. I poured a little Guinness down my neck and looked out at the empty street. What if Nero Wolfe gave a party, I thought, and nobody came?

* * *

By ten-thirty only two pork pies and two detective sergeants were still hanging around. The two detective sergeants were leaving and Ratso was putting the two pork pies into the refrigerator.

“See you around, hero,” said Cooperman.

“Call us when you get another bright idea like this,” said Fox. I let them out the door, poured another Guinness down my neck, and sat down at the desk facing two little rows of disheveled, empty furniture.

Everyone had come and everyone had gone, and now everything was quiet except for a little garbage-truck activity starting up on Vandam Street. Like someone going over the minutes of a past Rotarian meeting, I ticked off the high points of the evening in my mind. During the course of the little affair I’d also managed to tick off some of my guests, but that can’t always be helped. Being a society host is not my long suit.

Jim Landis had shown up about half an hour late. As a result, he’d had to sit on the
Ozzie & Harriet
hassock and he wasn’t any too happy about it. Something else was eating him, too, but whatever it was, he didn’t want to share it with the whole class. Relations between Jim and Jane, and Jim and Eugene, seemed rather strained. Some internal politics were going on that did not look very pleasant, but what they were was anybody’s guess.

Jane and Eugene, for their part, said very little, though leading questions were asked and touchy subjects and confrontations were common during the course of the evening.

When I asked Eugene if the Parks and Hilton Head were the three people he’d seen up in the office the day the butcher knife was found on Jane’s desk, he said yes to Marilyn Park and Hilton Head and no to Stanley Park. Who was the third person? I asked. No reply.

Stanley Park became slightly
agitato
. In fact, the ugliness became so thick you could’ve cut it with a knife.

Finally, Head cleared the air. The third person had been his “friend.” Who was the friend? He’d rather keep the friend out of it.

I let it pass. The friend was out of it anyway. It was something the Parks could squabble over, or Head could fret over, on their own time.

Everyone was alert to questions regarding Estelle Beekman or Slick Goldberg. Many of them had probably read Nero Wolfe, too.

I was creative, clever, crude, caustic, conciliatory, conniving, and just about everything else that starts with a c, but none of them snapped their wigs and ran madly for the door into the waiting arms of Sergeant Cooperman. Everybody played it cool. Everybody had alibis for the times when Goldberg and Beekman had gotten aced.

It was quite a three-cigar problem. I watched for hands tensing, facial muscles twitching, other signs of noticeable discomfort, but it was hard to watch seven Americans at once. I learned little that I didn’t already know.

The only one in the room who seemed to be legitimately socializing was the cat. She turned her back on Marilyn Park’s advances and walked over to sniff at Jane Meara’s boots.

“Kinky’s cat has a leather fetish,” said Head. Landis chuckled. Most of the group, being cat fanciers, found little humor in the remark.

The cat walked over to Eugene and leaped into his lap. He tried to push her away, but if you’ve ever tried to push away a cat who doesn’t want to go away, you know it can’t be done. She preened herself, rubbed up against him, and pawed at his stomach in a friendly cat manner. Eugene, though obviously a bit stiff and uncomfortable about this sudden feline attention, held up pretty well under the circumstances.

“Enjoy it, pal,” said Cooperman. “It may be the only pussy you’ll get tonight.” Fox laughed. Marilyn Park pursed her lips in a little moue of distaste.

Just as the natives were starting to get restless, I introduced Fred Katz to the group for the first time by name. This brought about the strongest reaction of the night. Many in the small group were convinced from my
Daily News
advertisement and from talk they had heard that Fred Katz was the villain of the piece. I observed reactions carefully. Jane looked horrified. Nobody grabbed him by the throat, but Stanley Park and Eugene were both on their feet in outrage.

The cat went flying. She rubbed herself against my leg in an effort to regain her dignity.

I hushed the crowd. They returned to their seats. “Fred Katz is no cat-napper,” I said. “Nor is he a murderer.” The crowd oohed and ahhed a bit. I puffed on cigar number three.

“Fred Katz is a financial consultant, which, in some quarters, might be regarded as equally odious. But, for our purposes, he is innocent. The only thing he’s guilty of is checking out and leaving his key in his hotel room.”

The cat jumped back into Eugene’s lap. Eugene took the ordeal rather stoically this time. Cooperman leaned his mug into the group and said, “Hey, buddy, at least get her phone number.”

Jim Landis announced he’d “had enough of this charade” and he was leaving. Others got up to go. Some said thanks and good night. Some just beat it out the door. I poured another Guinness down my neck.

At the door, I hugged Jane Meara and whispered to her to be careful, we were getting close. She looked at me like I was an outpatient.

Now I gazed across the tiny ocean of empty chairs and puffed languidly on what was left of cigar number three. Ratso came over and slumped down across from me in the rocker. He looked at my face closely, almost sadly.

“Looks like a washout, Mr. Wolfe,” he said.

“Quite to the contrary, my dear Ratso,” I said. “Quite to the contrary.”

66