When the Cat's Away (24 page)

Early Friday afternoon, while I was waiting around for Lobster to call, I made the mistake of telling Ratso about my joshman dream. Now, as he walked back into the room wearing his hockey kneepads, I began to wonder about the wisdom of my disclosure.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a latent homosexual,” said Ratso, as he adjusted his kneepads and walked over to the refrigerator.

“I’m not one,” I said curtly. “It’s just … the gentler, more sensitive side of me manifesting itself. The actual dream definition of joshman means nothing. It just reflects a longing.”

“Tell that to Hilton Head,” said Ratso. “I’m sure he’s quite an authority on joshman.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It was just a dream.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it none,” said Ratso, as he took a pork pie out of the refrigerator. “Them ol’ dreams are only in your head.” He closed the refrigerator door. “Bob Dylan,” he said.

“That’s an unusual source for you to quote from,” I said.

“Beats Rita Mae Brown.”

The phones rang. It was 1:15
P.M.
It was Lobster and she had the goods. It was just as I expected. I put down the blower and allowed myself a deep sigh of relief. I took a cigar from Sherlock’s head and lopped the butt off it with the guillotine.

Then I called Jim Landis.

Fortunately, he wasn’t at lunch or at a sales conference, the two places where people like him seemed to spend most of their lives. Unfortunately, he didn’t want to speak to me.

“This is a matter,” I told the secretary, “of life or death.” I was put on hold.

I made a cup of espresso and found and put on my brontosaurus foreskin boots while I waited. What you do with the hold time in your life is an index of how successful you’ll be when your call finally comes through. A wise old judge told me he’d once heard of a Jew, an Italian, and a person of the Polish persuasion who all had been sentenced to twenty years in prison for bank robbery. The Jew had wanted a telephone, the Italian had requested conjugal rights, and the Polish individual had demanded four hundred cartons of cigarettes in his cell. Twenty years later, the Jew had built a worldwide corporate empire, the Italian left prison with a family of eight, and the person of the Polish persuasion came out of his cell with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip and said, “Got a match?”

At least I had a match. I lit the cigar. The secretary came back on the line.

“Mr. Landis wants to know
whose
life or death,” she said.

“Tell him
his
life or death,” I said with some intensity. “If he doesn’t pick up the phone right now, I’ll call a hit on him by the Jewish Defense League. And don’t think I can’t.”

This is the kind of thing you get used to when you’re dealing with professional people in general. They have their lives just a little out of perspective and sometimes you have to tell them what is important and what isn’t. You have to be aggressive.

“Yes, Kinky?” Landis said like a patronizing aunt.

“Where’s Jane?”

“Out,” he answered brusquely.

“Sorry about last night,” I said. “You don’t like charades?”

“Only with eccentric, best-selling British mystery writers in drafty old manor houses.”

“I can see how you’d be disappointed,” I said, “but the little charade had its little purposes. You see, it helped me identify the killer.”

Landis didn’t say anything. I took a puff on the cigar and looked over at Ratso. He was sitting across the room on the couch with the screwdriver in his hand. He’d been ready to turn on the television, but my last sentence apparently had gotten his attention. Now he looked over at me. I nodded to him.

“Jim,” I said, “tell me about this manuscript that Eugene supposedly has given Jane and that Jane supposedly’s been squirreling away, threatening to read for over a month.”

“Oh, that,” laughed Landis. “I looked at it once briefly when it was lying on Jane’s desk. Eugene’s masterpiece.”

“What was it about?”

“It was a book about dogs,” said Landis lightly. “The
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
of dog books.”

“That tears it,” I said grimly. “Jim, this is important.
Where is Jane
?”

“She’s been acting a little spooked lately, so I let her take the afternoon off. I think she went to the circus at Madison Square Garden. Maybe she thinks she’ll find her cat. Is anything wrong?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I got my coat and two cigars for the road and walked over to Ratso. I looked at the overly large hockey kneepads he was still wearing.

“Either take those fucking things off or put on the rest of the uniform. And hurry.”

“Where we goin’?” he asked.

“Back to the Garden,” I said. “The circus is in town in more ways than one.”

67

There is a time to live and a time to die and a time to stop listening to albums by the Byrds. Now, as we hurtled uptown toward the Garden at high speed in a hack that rattled like a child’s toy, I only prayed that my unorthodox assemblage of what Ratso still rather archaically referred to as clues was correct.

I thought of the last phone call I’d made just before we’d left the loft. It had been to Sergeant Cooperman and it had made the previous call to Jim Landis seem like spun cotton candy.

Heroes, it seemed, had a rather short wingspan in New York. Either that, or Cooperman did not believe what he read in the
Daily News
. I felt like Sly Stone’s lawyer. When Sly had suddenly found his house surrounded by police cars, he’d called the lawyer and reportedly said, “You get over here now. And you better be heavy and you better be white.”

Being white is an accident of birth. Being heavy is spiritually relative. What I had to be, in no uncertain terms, according to Sergeant Cooperman, was right. And right is sometimes the hardest thing to be in the world.

As we stepped out of the hack and into the throng, I wondered, not for the first time, if I could be making a terrible mistake. It was the kind of case where logical deduction hardly followed logical deduction. Philip Marlowe, with his dogged perseverance, would’ve had a better shot at cracking it than Hercule Poirot, with his little gray cells. I’d started looking for a cat, stumbled across two stiffs along the way, gotten shot by a lion tranquilizer dart, been sidetracked by a Jaguar, and now, with any luck, I was finally closing in on the killer.

Train schedules and comments by the butler were not going to catch a murderer in 1988 in America. We’d been to the movies. We’d grown up on television. And to make things even harder, in the words of Mark Twain: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

And yet, when I went over it again in my mind, I was sure I had it right. Like Inspector Maigret, walking the rainy streets of Paris, smoking my pipe, my hands in my pockets, watching the people caught up in the problems of their lives, I would solve this case. After all, like Maigret, I was a serious student of human nature. And, come to think of it, not-so-human nature.

* * *

I didn’t see Cooperman or Fox in the foyer, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time to waste, so I gave Ratso forty bucks, told him to buy two tickets, and then I went over and talked to a uniform who was picking his nose near the doorway. I told him Detective Sergeants Cooperman and Fox from the Sixth Precinct were on their way, and I told him the vicinity where I thought Ratso and I would be. That was the best I could do under the circumstances.

Ratso returned with the tickets. I don’t know what circus tickets cost these days, but I didn’t see any change. Maybe Ratso threw in a service charge.

We went in.

Going to the circus as an adult is not the same as going to the circus as a child. The difference is, when you’re an adult, all the clowns tend to look like John Wayne Gacy.

It was now pushing two o’clock, when the show was supposed to start. Martha Hume, a sassy, southern, circus-going friend of mine, had told me some time ago that there are holding cages in the basement where you can see the animals up close before the circus starts. The place is called the menagerie, and if I was right, I thought, as we headed down the Dantean ramps into the noisy bowels of the Garden, it would certainly be one today. If I was wrong, Jane could be sitting in the third row eating peanuts and watching normally rational animals making fools of themselves for other animals who already were fools. Life’s a circus, or it’s a carnival, or a whorehouse, or a wishing well. Or a winding, muddy river. One of those things. About the only thing we know life isn’t is a Norman Rockwell painting. But don’t tell your dentist that. Dentists have their dreams.

We were coming to the end of the last ramp, and the suspicion I held was getting stronger as we progressed downward. Evil has its logic, I thought. Mental illness has its patterns. I was betting Jane’s life that I had accurately gazed into the mind of a maniac.

I hoped Cooperman and Fox would show up soon. If not, it looked like Ratso and I were going to be working without a net.

68

“Looks like it’s closed and we’re hosed,” said Ratso, as we tried vainly to open the two locked doors at the end of the ramp.

“Think, Ratso,” I said. “You’re a pro at getting backstage at rock concerts. What do we do?”

“I’ll tell Dumbo the Elephant that I know Ron Wood,” said Ratso.

I banged loudly on the metal doors. Nothing. It was two o’clock. Upstairs, we could hear the grand parade kicking off. There had to be somebody around. I kept pounding the doors.

Finally, an old man with a funny hat opened the doors. It could be said that Ratso and I were wearing funny hats, too, but we were wearing very serious faces.

“Detective Sergeant Cooperman,” I said. “Sixth Precinct. Undercover.” I flashed the idiot button inside my wallet at him. It was a courtesy badge that had been given to me by Lieutenant Scott Grabin of the NYPD, one of the few cops on the force I still enjoyed good relations with. That was because I rarely saw Grabin. He worked out of a precinct in Harlem. Maybe if somebody burned a watermelon in my front yard we’d have the opportunity to work on a case together.

“This is Sergeant Fox,” I said quickly, nodding toward Ratso. “We’re looking for a small boy who’s on special heart medication. Been missing for over an hour. We’re runnin’ out of time.”

The only other occasion on which I’d ever used the idiot button was when I’d gotten drunk once in a Mexican restaurant and tried to arrest some of the patrons. It hadn’t worked then and it didn’t look like it was going to work now.

Then Ratso, drawing heavily on his New York background, pushed the old man to the side and shouted authoritatively, “C’mon, gramps! Get out of the way!” The old man did. Ratso and I walked purposefully through a length of empty corridor and started searching around. We didn’t look back.

“Not especially kind,” I said.

“It gets results, Sergeant.”

We turned a corner and entered what seemed like a large, dank, dark hall. The circus music coming through the ceiling sounded distorted and rather eerily similar to something the hunchback of Notre Dame might’ve selected for his Walkman.

“Smells like a zoo in here,” said Ratso.

“That’s what it is, Sergeant.”

We came to a cage with a lone elephant. As Ratso walked up to it, the animal gave forth with a loud fart, apparently signaling its displeasure.

“You’ve made a friend for life, Ratso.”

“I have that effect on people.”

I had stopped downwind from the elephant and was lighting a cigar when I first heard the laughter. It was toneless and void of joy and it came cascading out of the gloom with the chill and suddenness of a Texas blue norther. It was the kind of unearthly, almost unspeakably evil sound that caused ice to begin forming along your spine.

“My God,” said Ratso. “That better be a fucking hyena.”

“It is,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s of the two-legged variety.”

When you’re frozen in your tracks, one of the easiest things to do is listen. We listened.

The next two sounds we heard, if it is at all conceivable, rattled our cages even more.

The first was the roar of a lion.

The second was the scream of a woman.