Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  I got up, went to the window, then went back to the chair and sat down. ‘And Sauerman. He was a prime candidate. The cops even had their eye on me, for God sake.’

  I looked down at him and resisted the impulse to shake him by the shoulder. ‘Well, I knew it wasn’t me. That left Lily and Sauerman. But there was one thing about it that bothered me, and even after I realized that McBride and his wrangler did it, that thing still was there. It was this. Why did they come into my room that night? There was no reason for it. It got me thinking. And the thought I had was this. I figured that my being there that night was no coincidence. It was a key part of the plan. Once I got that far, the rest was easy. And when I saw that telegram you sent McBride, that clinched it.’

  I touched his leg under the sheet. It felt soft and lifeless. ‘Look, dammit. I wish you could tell me why, that’s all. Why would you arrange to have your own jaguars stolen? Yes, OK, the insurance money. That’s obvious. And your good buddy Martin Lodi set it up for you with his Montana friend Tim McBride. Maybe it was even his idea. You needed money, you complained about it to him, and he had a surefire plan for you. But why? You had enough for your own meagre needs. And why, for God’s sake, did you let them slug you like that? Was that part of the plan, too? A gentle tap on your skull to fool us, except they hit you too hard? Or did they double-cross you? I don’t know, and I guess you’re not going to tell me. But here’s what I think. I figure you went after them when they killed your dogs, right? That was your last instruction to McBride. Don’t hurt the dogs, that telegram said. So it was one last quixotic act of courage, going after McBride and Hank the cowpoke in defence of those two nasty Dobermans.’

  I sat back and smiled. ‘Whatever it was that got your head smashed in, I’m sorry. Because this is a lousy way to finish your life.’ I stared out the window for a minute or two. ‘As for setting me up, I can’t really forgive you for that. I know. You needed a reliable witness in order to get the insurance money. I’m your lawyer. I was the perfect candidate for the job. So when you talked me into going down there for the weekend, you telegrammed McBride. You knew what they were going to do to me. I didn’t like it much. It made me fear death. It showed me a part of myself I’d just as soon not have seen. Same thing you learned after the leopard got you.’

  I had nothing left to say, but I continued to sit with him, trying to remember how he was before the leopard got him. I couldn’t do it. All I could remember was the mean, hollowed-out Jeff Newton that came home from Africa.

  After a few minutes I reached over and put my hand on his arm. ‘Be seeing you,’ I said. Then I got up and left. Lily was in the waiting room. She held a styrofoam cup in one hand. A magazine lay open on her lap. Her head was back and her eyes were shut. I sat beside her.

  ‘Hey,’ I said softly, touching her arm.

  She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at me. ‘I was just resting my eyes.’

  ‘Let’s go get some food.’

  ‘I’m not that hungry.’

  I held out my hand to her. She took it. ‘Come on. Let’s eat,’ I said.

  She frowned. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Me? I’m fine. It’s a little weird, talking to him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

  She nodded. ‘OK.’

  We walked along the brick sidewalks without talking. Lily’s heels clicked and echoed, and the evening air created misty orange halos around the streetlamps. When we crossed Cambridge Street, she held on to my arm. When we got to the other side she let it go. We entered La Trattoria, a little storefront restaurant at the foot of the Hill renowned for its Italian wines and homemade manicotti. We were led to a table near the back. We asked the waiter to select a wine for us, which he did with obvious pleasure, and after he opened it, presented the cork, sloshed a bit into my glass for inspection, and, upon my nod, poured our glasses full, and left.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I said to Lily.

  She shrugged. ‘He hadn’t changed much. They had decided they’d keep him there in Hyannis. Then I got a phone call. It was a week ago Friday. He’d had a heart attack during the night. A bad one. So they shipped him up here.’ She shrugged.

  ‘Only difference now,’ I said, ‘is that he’s one big step closer to death.’

  She stared at the candle that flickered on the table between us for a moment, then raised her eyes. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘But you still visit him.’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘It’s not much of a problem. I don’t have a helluva lot to do with my life.’

  I touched her hand. Her fingers twisted around my wrist and held tight. ‘You are a loyal person.’

  ‘You thought I was a crook.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m trained to be objective. I objectify. It’s a flaw, I know. The evidence, how I put it together—those phone calls from West Yellowstone, for example, I figured it was you who’d taken them—Martin Lodi, you know, the motorcycle, I thought you and he…’

  She smiled—a little sadly, I thought. ‘You don’t trust anybody,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I know. Including even myself.’

  ‘Especially yourself,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve been fooled too often to accept my own emotional reactions to people, to trust them and go with them.’

  ‘To take risks.’

  ‘Right. OK. To take risks.’

  ‘To love,’ she said. There was an edge to her voice.

  ‘That, too. Yes. Look. People I care very much for have done things that surprised me. Like Jeff, for example.’

  She had been staring into her wineglass, stroking its side with the edge of her forefinger. Now she looked up at me. ‘Jeff? What do you mean?’

  ‘He arranged the theft of the jaguars.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Actually, I think it was your former husband Martin Lodi who set it up for him. Lodi, I figure, knew McBride from his travels in the West, knew McBride liked Mayan stuff and wasn’t above a little burglary, especially when the victim was a willing accomplice to the crime. Jeff liked it. He organized his own theft. He needed money, and the cats were all he had. He had them stolen for the insurance money. He knew he couldn’t sell them legitimately. He’d smuggled them in when he was hunting in Mexico. The papers were forged. They’d never pass muster. Any legitimate buyer would know that, and instead of buying them would report Jeff to the authorities. Then he’d lose the cats and get nothing for them.’

  ‘That’s fantastic, Brady,’ she said. ‘Why would he do that? He loved those jaguars,’

  I shrugged. ‘Money, obviously. I don’t know why he wanted money, but it’s the only answer I can come up with. See, that’s why he wanted me down there that particular weekend. It was very important that I be there on the night of the theft. And that’s why McBride and Hank came into my room and did what they did to me.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘So there’d be a reliable witness. He wanted to be sure of my testimony. The insurance adjuster told me how easy this particular investigation was for him. Rarely are there witnesses to burglaries. But he had me, a lawyer, no less. As reliable as you could get. Remember the cop, Maroney?’

  Lily nodded.

  ‘He accused both of us. He believed it was an inside job. So did I, actually. I suspected you. We were both right.’

  ‘Except it was Jeff.’

  I nodded.

  ‘What makes you think it wasn’t me?’ she said.

  ‘McBride had no reason to come into my room if all he was after was the jaguars. What he did to me was completely gratuitous, unless it was to set me up as a witness for the insurance. If you were stealing the cats, you wouldn’t care about the insurance. The only one who would care was Jeff.’ I shrugged. ‘Q.E.D.’

  ‘It hurt me very much,’ she said after a moment. ‘You suspecting me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I mean,
that night, after we went fishing…’

  ‘I figured that was part of it. Your way of—’

  ‘Distracting you?’

  ‘Of making me’—I waved my hand in the air—‘of making me love you. So I wouldn’t suspect you.’

  She let out a long breath. ‘Shit,’ she said softly.

  ‘Yeah. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You really—’

  ‘I know. I don’t know much about women.’

  ‘I mean, I really needed you, and you…’

  I nodded.

  ‘I thought that we had gone beyond that.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m not sure I’m capable of going beyond that, Lily. It’s me, not you.’

  She smiled. ‘Yeah. I got that figured out. It’s your loss.’

  ‘I guess it is.’

  She had the manicotti and I had the cannelloni. I asked her what she planned to do after Jeff died. She said she hadn’t thought about it, didn’t want to think about it. She’d worry about it when the time came. It wasn’t exactly that she loved him, she said. It was just that her life would be different. She supposed one day she’d recognize it as a chance to begin over again. Just then, though, she felt lost. It was the second time a man had left her. ‘The third time,’ she said, gazing into the candle, ‘if I count you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t count me.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You don’t count.’

  She said that for a long time after Jeff was slugged on the head she was angry at him. After a while her anger made her feel guilty. She found it all confusing.

  I couldn’t think of anything comforting to say.

  We were sipping espresso when Lily suddenly reached across the table and gripped my wrist. Her fingernails dug into my skin. ‘Brady, Jesus!’ she said.

  ‘Lily, ow! What is it?’

  ‘Morphine. It was the morphine.’

  ‘Huh?’

  She shook her head slowly back and forth. ‘The doctor. Not Sauerman or the one in Hyannis. The new one, here. They did blood tests and so forth. He told me, he said that Jeff was a morphine addict. That he’d been taking huge amounts of morphine, or morphine derivatives, and he’d been doing it for a long time. It’s what brought on the heart attack, he thought. Not an overdose. The opposite. An acute opiate withdrawal, he called it. He asked me—hell, Brady, he practically accused me—he wanted to know where Jeff was getting all the drugs.’

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ I said. ‘Sauerman.’

  ‘Had to be,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet—’

  ‘Sauerman was putting the squeeze on him,’ I said. ‘Come up with some big money, pal, or I’ll cut you off.’

  ‘See,’ she said, ‘the morphine. That’s why he—he turned into the man he became. He was so different when he came back from Africa. Grouchy, nasty. Twisted. Those awful dreams that used to wake him up, when he’d want me to hold him while he slept. The morphine. It’s why he slept all the time. Why Dr Sauerman’s visits were so important to him. Why he lived for those shots on Friday nights. The pills I kept giving him. There’s a new kind, the doctor said. Morphine pills. It’s why he wouldn’t eat. Why he wouldn’t—couldn’t make love, and didn’t want to.’

  ‘All he wanted was his fix,’ I said. ‘Everything else—you, the jaguars, even his dogs—nothing mattered in comparison. So he was completely dependent on Sauerman. Sauerman says raise some big bucks or it’s the end of the happy trips. Jeff’d do anything. So he had the cats stolen. For the insurance money.’

  Lily reached across the table and covered my hand with both of hers. ‘Oh Brady,’ she said.

  ‘It’s kind of sad when you think about it, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘The real sad thing,’ she said quietly, ‘is that it makes you right.’

  I cocked my head. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you objectify, you don’t trust, you won’t risk your emotions, you don’t allow yourself to love. And something like this happens, and all that gets reinforced.’

  I nodded. ‘It keeps me from getting hurt, though.’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is a helluva way to live your life.’

  EPILOGUE

  ON A CRISP OCTOBER Sunday Dan LaBreque and Charlie McDevitt and I steered Cap’n Hook down towards Provincetown, where it had been rumoured that the blues were schooling up for their migration.

  The whales had already left.

  As far as we could tell, so had the bluefish.

  We drank quite a bit of beer and didn’t talk about pre-Columbian art at all.

  A squall came up on the way back to Gloucester. The three of us huddled in the cabin while Cap’n Hook slogged through the rolling seas. Charlie told a few jokes, but otherwise we watched the grey ocean through the rain-streaked windshield in comfortable silence, and when we finally pulled into Dan’s slip at the marina, darkness had already fallen. We agreed it had been a very good day of fishing. After all, there was no blood and slime to wash out of the boat and there were no fish to clean.

  I talked with Gloria on the phone a few times, mostly polite conversations updating each other on our respective businesses. She seemed to be enjoying the life of the professional photographer more than I liked lawyering. She offered no complaints about Joey, nor did I inquire.

  Joey brought Debbie to my apartment to try my famous chili one autumnal Friday evening. He introduced me to her as his old man. He found a sock under the sofa and he tried to tease me because he knew I’d tried to clean up the place for company. Debbie, I noticed, called him Joe. She exclaimed over my view of the harbour and claimed to like my chili. Joey pretended to sulk when I refused to serve them beer. I enjoyed having them there. Neither Joey nor I mentioned his moving in with me.

  Even with all the wires and tubes and machines, Jeff didn’t make it through his next heart attack. He died on the day before Thanksgiving. Maybe the doctors didn’t run to him as fast as they could have when the alarms rang and the red lights started blinking. Nobody had the inclination to inquire.

  Ellen and James donated what was left of his body to Harvard Medical School. Aspiring doctors could dissect it; study Jeff’s anatomy.

  They could study it all they wanted, and they’d never figure out what made him tick. Or what killed him. Or the fact that he had been dead for many years before his heart quit.

  The kids decided not to hold a memorial service. Perhaps they assumed nobody would attend, I don’t know. They didn’t consult me.

  Lily would’ve gone to it.

  I would have, too.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Brady Coyne Mysteries

  1

  I EXITED OFF THE eight-lane highway in Lexington so I could follow the cultural route to Concord, which traces the meandering trails where the Minutemen skulked on the morning of April 19, 1775, as they took potshots at the British lobsterbacks from behind stone walls and oak trees. On this particular September morning I saw only scattered farm stands with their mountains of pumpkins and hand-painted signs advertising late corn and early apples. In the boggy places beside the road the swamp maples reflected crimson in the water.

  Autumn in New England. It always depresses me. Dressed in its desperately spectacular colors, fall is the time of death, not to mention the end of the trout season.

  I steered past the old homes of the Alcotts and Hawthorne and Emerson, past the places where Melville holed up for a while and Thoreau mooched off his friends, and into the village of Concord. Cars with out-of-state plates lined the streets and retired folks from Iowa with cameras around their necks prowled the sidewalks. On this particular day, still summerlike, the men favored short-sleeved shirts and the women wore Bermuda shorts. Fall is high tourist season for historic New England places.

  Up on the hill most of the old literary boys were resting in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, another favorite tourist attraction.

  I took a right at the Colonial Inn and followed Monument Street past the rude bridge—actually the third or fourth inc
arnation of the original bridge—that, as Emerson immortalized it in his poem, “arched the flood” on the April morning that marked Concord on the map before he and his fellow transcendentalists were even born.

  I started to turn into the pea-stone driveway beside the old Ames house. I had to jam on my brakes as a shiny black Jaguar backed out past me. The driver either didn’t see me or had chosen to ignore me. I glimpsed his profile through the window—bony hairless head, beak-shaped nose, aggressive chin. A man obviously so important and busy that other vehicles were supposed to move aside for him. His Jag had several antennae sticking out of it. Cellular phone, CB, probably a stock market ticker.

  At the end of the driveway he shifted, spewed pea-stones at me, and glided away in the direction of Concord center. Then I pulled into the driveway. Susan Ames’s Mercedes was parked there. Beside it crouched a pockmarked old yellow Volkswagen Beetle. I tucked my BMW behind the Mercedes, climbed onto the front porch, and banged the brass knocker.

  She wore a short black skirt, black stockings, and a white blouse. She was slim and pretty and thirtyish, with chocolate-colored eyes and black hair cut short and parted at the side like a boy’s. She wore neither jewelry nor makeup. She didn’t need it.

  “You,” she said, eyeing my gray pinstripe and attaché case, “must be the lawyer.”

  “Bull’s-eye. And you?”

  “I’m sort of a secretary, maid, handyman, nurse, cook, confidante. Your basic all-round Friday-type person. General factotum.”

  “Well, General, sir, I’m Brady Coyne.” I held my hand out to her.