When the Cat's Away (26 page)

“Well, the cat was telling you something. When the cat took a Nixon in your red antique dead man’s shoe, it was also telling you something. Now you’re packing up and leaving and the cat is happy.”

“So am I,” said Ratso.

“Well, I’m sure in her own way the cat will miss you.”

“Fuck the cat,” said Ratso.

“It hasn’t got that bad yet. Now, as I was saying, there are some things that men still don’t and probably never will understand about animals. For instance, beavers. Beavers build underground exits in their dams in late summer and early autumn and they seem to know just how thick the ice will be long before the winter ever comes. It’s amazing, if you think about it. I saw it on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
.”

“That’s what I tried to tell my ex-girlfriend,” said Ratso. “Man still doesn’t know a lot about beavers.”

“Humorous, if somewhat crude,” I said. I walked back over to the desk and sat down again. The. cigar was killer bee.

. “Now, if you will, my dear Ratso, cast your mind back to last Thursday night, the little get-together that, in your words, was ‘a washout, Mr. Wolfe.’ That night was no washout, though at the time I let it be seen as one. Actually, it was a great, if somewhat accidental, triumph. One that I had nothing to do with, but was able, at least, to observe. Fortunately, seeing was believing.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you the cat went right to the murderer. It jumped in his lap several times; it pestered him; it wouldn’t leave him alone. Any cat owner will tell you how perverse cats can be. Quite often, they won’t come to people who like them. They seem somehow to know just who of all your guests might have asthma, or be allergic, or be afraid, or be uptight. Thursday night was like a living lie detector test, and Eugene, fortunately for us, failed. There was something about him that we couldn’t see, that was strange, evil, not right. I’ve seen the gentlest animals in the world become very upset around people who aren’t quite right in their heads.

“Animal behavior, Ratso—very important. Not only can animals predict earthquakes and natural disasters, but sometimes they can unmask the cold, cruel mind of the killer among us.”

I took a rather languid puff on the cigar and watched the smoke drift upward toward the lesbian dance class. “Now, where,” I asked, “is the perla yi-yo?”

72

If you’ve ever emptied a tray of cat litter, you know that you hold the tray at arm’s length and turn your head away as you dump the contents into the trash can. It was in this manner that I had managed to throw out possibly a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of perla yi-yo sometime earlier that weekend.

“Easy come, easy go,” Ratso said, after I’d returned from checking the trash Dumpster on Vandam Street. It was as empty as the sky in California.

I wanted to kill Ratso. I wanted to kill the garbage men. “Look at it this way,” Ratso said. “You’re probably the only guy in New York who’s bitching about prompt, efficient garbage collection.”

I killed off the bottle of Jameson mouth to mouth, lit a fresh cigar, and walked over to the window.

“And now it would appear,” I said, “that I’m about to lose a house pest.”

“Don’t worry,” Ratso said. “I haven’t left yet.”

73

It had been raining cats and dogs all evening. One of them must’ve literally fallen from the sky because on this night, at the windy tail end of March, Jane Meara provided me with the other bookend to the story.

I had stocked up on liquor and tuna and I was just kind of sitting around, not quite feeling sorry for myself, when the phones rang. I went for the blower on the left. It was Jane.

“I told you never to call me at home,” I said.

“You won’t believe it!” she said.

“You finished reading Eugene’s manuscript?”

“Stop it, Kinky. I went to a hockey game tonight at Madison Square Garden with a friend …”

I sat back and listened as Jane told me her story. When she’d finished, and I’d cradled the blower, I put my feet up on the desk and smiled to myself. All I remember thinking was, I wish I had another Cuban cigar.

* * *

“But it wasn’t really Rocky?” Ratso asked, as we stood close to the bar in the Monkey’s Paw. It’d been about an hour since Jane’s call and Ratso and I had already had a few rounds.

“All I know,” I said, “is that it followed her from the Garden for five blocks with a glint of triumph in its eyes. Then, when Jane got to her car—”

“Brahms shot it with a bow and arrow.”

“No, Ratso. It jumped in the car with Jane. She took it home, went to work on it with soap, water, and a washcloth, and guess what?”

“What?”

“Four little white sweat socks.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Ratso. “It’s enough to make you believe there’s a God.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “There are many things in nature that we don’t understand. There’s an old dead tree on our ranch in Texas that my dad won’t let anybody chop down because the hummingbirds live there. My mother always used to love the hummingbirds. Every year, right around March fifteenth, you can see them start to arrive. They fly all the way from South America to that same old dead tree where they were born.”

“Well, that proves there’s a God.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What does it prove then?”

“It proves, my dear Ratso,” I said, “that there is a hummingbird.”

* * *

Later that night, back at the loft, I was having a quiet conversation with the cat. The place looked oddly empty without Ratso’s belongings strewn all over the couch.

I was sitting at my desk when I got the call from Sergeant Cooperman.

“Tex,” he said, “I don’t know how close you were to that Palestinian broad. You remember the one?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She got whacked by one of the Jaguar’s boys. Happened sometime earlier this week, we think. She left a package, though, and it’s got your name on it. We went through it, of course. But I’ll send a car over with it now, if that’s all right.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Sorry, Tex.”

I put down the blower very slowly. There wasn’t really any hurry now. It was like being on spiritual hold without even being on the telephone. I waited.

In time, a squad car pulled up in front, a uniform got out, and I went down and got the package. I brought it back upstairs and opened it on the desk.

It was Leila’s kaffiyeh.

I put the kaffiyeh around my shoulders. It was a little cold in the room. I walked over to the kitchen window and stood there for a long time. The cat came by and jumped up on the windowsill. Everything was quiet on the street. Maybe the garbage trucks were observing a moment of silence.

Together, the cat and I watched the world. I pulled the kaffiyeh a little tighter around me and gently stroked the cat. Sort of a sad, scythelike Pakistani moon was falling in the east over the warehouses.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” I said.

* * *

I was folding the kaffiyeh and putting it in the desk drawer when Ratso came barging into the loft with a copy of the
Daily News.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “look at this.” He put the newspaper down on the desk and pointed to an article. The headline read:
MCGOVERN NOMINATED FOR PULITZER PRIZE.

“I don’t believe it,” said Ratso. “It’s for his series about you and the cocaine cartels.”

“McGovern’s got talent,” I said with some little satisfaction, “among other, rather more tedious qualities.”

“Yeah,” said Ratso, “but a
Pulitzer
?”

“Maybe there
is
a hummingbird,” I said.

A short while later, Ratso was pillaging an order, on my tab, from the Carnegie Delicatessen, and watching some obscure sporting event on television. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson, the bull’s horn, a tube of epoxy glue, and some black paint.

I was repairing the puppet head.

It was a very satisfying, almost meditative sort of work. Repairing a little black puppet head when you couldn’t repair your own.

Maybe the problem was that now I was between cases. Or maybe the problem was, as Sherlock himself had said, “I have never loved.” But that wasn’t really true for me.

I had loved. I could’ve loved. It just didn’t look like it was going to come my way again. Not everybody finds their Rocky in life, I thought. Some of us just find the courage to face the world alone.

The phones rang.

“I’m not here,” I said. Actually, it wasn’t too tar from the truth. In the background, I heard Ratso talking to someone on the blower.

“You’re kiddin’,” he said. “What took you so long?” I kept working on the puppet head.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Jesus.” I kept working on the puppet head.

“Kinkstah!” he shouted. “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s the girl in the peach-colored dress,” he said.

I stared intently at the puppet head on the table.

“What the hell’s going on?” shouted Ratso. “Aren’t you gonna talk to her?”

I turned the puppet head a little to one side and then a little to the other. You couldn’t even tell it had been wounded.

“I’ll speak to her,” I said, “when the glue is dry.”

The author would like to thank the following people for their help: Tom Friedman, Earl Buckelew, Marcie Friedman, and Larry “Ratso” Sloman; Esther “Lobster” Newberg at ICM; James Landis, Jane Meara, and Lori Ames at Beech Tree Books; and Steve Rambam, technical adviser. The author would also like to express his thanks to the following officials of the Garden Cat Club: Vicky Markstein, Peter Markstein, and Elinor Silverman.

Kinky Friedman lives in a ten-foot-long, lavishly furnished, green wooden trailer on the family ranch deep in the heart of the Texas hill country. He has three cats, Cuddles, Dr. Skat, and Lady. He is the author of
Greenwich Killing Time
and
A Case of Lone Star.

From the reviews of GREENWICH KILLING TIME:

“Brings Gain, Chandler, and Hammett all to mind”

—
LUCIAN K. TRUSGOTT IV, author of
Dress Gray

“If
Elmore Leonard lived in Texas, his name would be Kinky Friedman.”
—Don Imus of
WNBG Radio, New York City