How to Wash a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  A shadow stepped into the room. The faint light illuminated the strong bulky shoulders, the chiseled face . . . the red, knitted tissue of the scar that framed the rim of his jawbone.

  “Step away from the kangaroo,” Ivan paused, savoring the next word, “Oscar.”

  Monty’s eyes bulged. A trickle of sweat slid down his face as Ivan lurched forward and grabbed his shoulder.

  “Ivan, that’s not Oscar.”

  It was a sharp, female voice we all instantly recognized. “Or Frank, for that matter. He’s not that tall, even with that ridiculous turban.”

  Ivan whipped around as Miranda Richards stepped into the basement, her evening gown and heavy makeup seemingly unruffled by the trip through the tunnel.

  Tucked inside the wardrobe, I shuddered as the floral fog of her perfume seeped through the crack between the doors. I put my hand over my nose, trying to form a barrier against the sticky sweet aroma, but its forceful fingers pried their way in. A faint trickle of irritation ran up and down my throat as the skin on the inside of my nose swelled in reaction to the offensive odor.

  “Miranda? What are you doing here?” Ivan’s hardened features rippled with uncertainty.

  Monty shrunk out from under Ivan’s loosened grip, dipping his shoulder as he rounded the kangaroo, careful to keep his face blocked by the animal’s stuffed head.

  “Following this ill-conceived circus, obviously,” Miranda replied sharply.

  She glowered at Ivan. “I warned Oscar about you. I knew what you were up to—but Oscar wanted to give you a chance.” She glanced in Monty’s direction, her eyes piercing through the stuffed kangaroo. “He always gave people a second chance.”

  Ivan wiped a thin layer of sweat from his brow as Miranda stepped into his face and poked a long, red fingernail into his chest. “I watched you work your way through Jackson Square on all of those renovation projects—looking for the entrance to the tunnel—looking for that wretched Ralston diamond. I knew you’d eventually worm your way into the Green Vase.”

  She sniffed, jabbing her nail at Ivan’s ill-fitting suit. “But I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to fall for this little caper.” She stepped around the kangaroo to glare at Monty. “I’ll get to you in a minute, Mr. Carmichael.”

  Monty stepped sheepishly around the kangaroo, his narrow head comically balancing the wobbling turban. “Ah, Miranda, Ivan, good to see you,” he said, his fingers nervously twiddling the fake mustache.

  Miranda circled in front of the wardrobe. The intensity of her perfume surged around me. I began gulping in air through my mouth, desperately trying to avoid a sneeze.

  “How can you think Oscar’s still alive?” Miranda’s scornful voice ilked accusingly at Ivan. “You were here the morning he died. Or, shall I say, when he died. You saw him go down, and you used the opportunity to search his basement. Then you left him on the floor and locked the door behind you.”

  “No,” Ivan said, stepping back from Miranda’s frightening glare. “No, he was perfectly fine when I left. It’s your mother you should be talking to. Oscar kicked me out when Dilla arrived.”

  Miranda’s eyes slanted into charcoal-colored slits as Ivan drew himself up, his lips firming resolutely. “Oscar’s not dead. I’m sure of it. He found the recipe to Leidesdorff’s sleeping potion. He used it to fake his death . . .” Ivan’s face hardened again. “. . . after he found the diamond.”

  Miranda grabbed Ivan by the tie and bent him down towards her. “You fool. Leidesdorff didn’t fake his death—he faked the symptoms leading up to it. Leidesdorff drowned the day after his fake funeral . . . just as the side effects from the toxin were about to kill him. Oscar found his body buried in the lot behind us.”

  Miranda shoved Ivan back towards the wall. “The potion doesn’t work.”

  A feverish sweat dripped down my face as Miranda’s perfume waged a second assault on the wardrobe. My nose blistered from the burning vapors. I couldn’t hold back the sneeze much longer. I braced myself for the inevitable blast.

  But the silence in the basement was broken by another sound—one that emanated at my feet.

  Everyone turned towards the wardrobe as Rupert belched out a cupcake-smelling hiccup.

  Chapter 43

  “IT DOESN’T . . . WORK?” Ivan’s voice murmured through the basement, dazed and disbelieving.

  Three short footsteps slammed against the concrete. The door of the wardrobe flew open, and Miranda’s furious face leaned in. “I tried to put you off this,” she spit out at me as a gagging wave of perfume gushed into the wardrobe. “I tried to warn you.”

  But as I looked up and over Miranda’s shoulder, the sneeze begging to be released from my nose was suddenly snuffed out—by the sight of the pale, de-turbaned man standing in the open door to the tunnel. Miranda read my stare and snapped her head out of the wardrobe.

  The group of us stared in silence at the half-Frank Napis, half-Gordon Bosco figure who had just entered the basement.

  Freed of the towering blue turban, his bare, balding head glistened in the dim light of the basement. The furry, orangish-red mustache hung lopsided from the flat plate of twitching skin above his thin, vanishing lips.

  His demeanor was surprisingly unconcerned. “That’s very interesting, Miranda,” he said, calmly removing the limp mustache from his lips. “But I disagree.”

  Minus the fuzzy Napis mustache and the protruding Bosco nose, the man’s face faded almost into nothing, a soft lump of un-molded, shapeless clay.

  Ivan shook his head, as if trying to clear his vision. Half-formed words sputtered out of Monty’s mouth like water from a faulty sprinkler.

  “Fra—? Gor—? Nooo . . .” The turban wobbled on Monty’s head as he slapped a hand on one of his bony hips. “Well, I’ll be a purple-legged hinky bird.”

  Miranda scowled. “Of course it doesn’t work.” Her thickly painted lips scrunched up derisively. “I should know. Leidesdorff’s fiancée—the maid he brought here from New Orleans—is my great aunt, several times over.”

  I stumbled out of the wardrobe, my legs cramped and stiff. Rupert hopped out behind me and took a seat in front of Monty, curiously staring up at his wobbling turban and fake mustache. Isabella circled the room, her costume twinkling in the dim light as she paused to sniff at a small puddle of water collecting near the entrance of the tunnel.

  Miranda glared callously at the un-masked man. Unfazed, he gazed steadily back at her.

  “Did you really think I didn’t know,” she spat bitterly, “that it was you parading around in that turban, causing all of the trouble with the board?”

  “To the contrary, Miranda” he replied, his voice calm and even. “I was counting on it.”

  She stepped back from him, shaking her head. “Oscar wouldn’t let me confront you. He told me not to worry. He said that he had a plan.”

  Monty’s right forefinger swung into action. “Aha!” he exclaimed, pointing at the ceiling. “I knew it. Oscar did fake his death!”

  Monty dove behind the kangaroo, deflecting the blunt of Miranda’s withering glare.

  “I told you,” she said, gritting her teeth, “all of you. The potion doesn’t work.”

  Ivan gulped and tugged on his collar, his eyes nervously flitting back and forth between me and Miranda.

  The short, featureless man stroked his chin thoughtfully. The pale skin above his thin lips twitched in the eerie glow of the basement. “Tell us then, Miranda,” he said, his voice clear and deliberate. “Tell us what really happened to William Leidesdorff.”

  She glowered at him for a moment. Then, with a deprecating sigh, Miranda began to tell the story—the same one Dilla had relayed to me earlier that afternoon.

  Chapter 44

  “WILLIAM LEIDESDORFF MADE—and lost—his first fortune in New Orleans. It was the gambling. He couldn’t walk away from a game of chance.” Miranda swished through the basement as she spoke, filling it with her red velvet gown and swamping perfume.

&nb
sp; “He was flamboyant and charismatic . . . worldly and charming . . . and, for a brief period, wildly rich. All of the women in New Orleans had their eye on him, but there was one French debutante who was particularly infatuated.”

  “Hortense,” Monty and I said in unison.

  Miranda nodded, her eyes registering a slight irritation from our interruption. “As Leidesdorff’s gambling debts mounted and threatened to sink his business empire, he was quickly dropped from most social circles.”

  Miranda sighed sourly. “But Hortense was young and naive. She only became more obsessed with him. When her family rejected their proposed marriage, she ran away with him to California. The family told everyone that she had died to try to mitigate the resulting scandal.”

  The high heels on Miranda’s feet stamped across the increasingly wet floor of the basement. The pool of water trickling into the basement from the tunnel seemed to be spreading.

  “I suppose they were happy for a while, but the trouble that had started in New Orleans eventually followed them here. Leidesdorff never really kicked his gambling addiction. The seed of that sickness was always in him.” Miranda shook her head. “Everything went downhill when Leidesdorff met Joseph Folsom.”

  “Ah,” Monty interjected. He raised his forefinger as if he were about to contribute a thought, but Miranda silenced him with a throttling glare.

  “Captain Folsom came to California to make a name for himself in the war with Mexico. But while there was plenty of fighting in other parts of the state, Northern California was relatively quiet. Folsom found himself stuck in an un-glamorous, low paying customs officer assignment. He grew frustrated standing by while everyone around him made fortunes buying and selling real estate. Even before the Gold Rush, the value of land in San Francisco had begun to dramatically appreciate—no one made more money off of that rise than William Leidesdorff.”

  Miranda’s courtroom persona had taken over from her otherwise abrasive personality. For a moment, I found myself lost in the story, detached from the unpleasant harshness of the speaker.

  “Folsom scraped together every penny of his meager earnings, trying to purchase a piece of land in the growing town, but he couldn’t compete with the loads of money Leidesdorff could bring to the table. Folsom lost bid after bid.”

  Miranda paused to take a breath, and the silent room waited anxiously for her to continue. I brushed my fingers against my cheeks—they had begun to pulse with a faint inner heat. I must be coming down sick, I thought, swallowing thickly as Miranda resumed the story.

  “When Folsom found out about Leidesdorff’s gambling addiction, he knew he’d found his way in. It wasn’t long before Leidesdorff lost his house, his warehouse, and most of his savings—all of it in games of chance.”

  A dull pounding began building inside my head. I

  thought wistfully of the aspirin bottle in the kitchen, two stories above.

  “Hortense finally convinced Leidesdorff that they had to skip town. Leidesdorff collected a much gold as he could from his last piece of land up in the Sierras. They planned to sell it and hop aboard one of the sugar cane steamers en route to Hawaii. They’d have enough of a nest egg to start over somewhere new.”

  Miranda and her sweet, flowery perfume circled behind me, fueling the sickening wave of nausea in my stomach. My head swooned with lightness, and I grabbed on to the furry shoulder of the kangaroo.

  “But Folsom was relentless. He organized a horse race and named Leidesdorff as the honorary sponsor. It was an historic event—the first one to be held in Northern California. Leidesdorff couldn’t refuse.

  “The race was held out by the Mission Dolores. Leidesdorff quickly got caught up in a bet on the main race. Despite the vast amount of gold sitting on it, Leidesdorff was about to ante up his land in the Sierras on a bet with Folsom when Hortense intervened.”

  Miranda drew up her breath, ran her tongue over the pasty coating of her lips, then continued. “Leidesdorff often wore a pair of tulip-shaped cufflinks. They were a present from Hortense. She’d bought them at a voodoo shop in New Orleans. You see, she was the one with the tulip fixation.”

  Miranda swung her curvy figure in front of the balding man standing in the corner of the basement. “The cufflinks had been specially designed, so that the interior of the stem was hollow. The head of each tulip could be twisted off to access a vial of sleeping potion inside the stem.”

  The balding man’s pudgy fingers tugged on the tulip-free cuffs of his shirt. His thin lips curved up in a confident smile as Miranda pushed herself closer in towards his flat, featureless face.

  “Leidesdorff never knew what hit him. His temperature jumped up; his face turned a bright, tomato red. He crumpled to the ground from the throbbing pain inside of his head. They carried him into the Mission to wait for a doctor, but he slipped into a coma before one could be summoned.”

  I was feeling more and more sympathy for the drugged Leidesdorff. My own head felt as if a dozen firefighters had pushed their way in to quench a five alarm blaze.

  “Hortense confessed what she’d done to the Mission’s priest, and he took pity on her. The priest pronounced Leidesdorff dead, and they hastily arranged the funeral. Hortense and the priest dug a rabbit hole under the wall of the church to feed ventilation into Leidesdorff’s shallow grave. As soon as the funeral was over, the two of them hefted Leidesdorff’s comatose body into a small dingy, and Hortense began rowing it through the bay.”

  Miranda’s long, crunchy eyelashes were now only inches away from the balding head.

  “She was a small woman. It took her all afternoon to get the boat back around to the small inlet cove near the entrance to the tunnel. She was planning on pulling in there for the night to let Leidesdorff recoup from the potion; then the two of them could row out to one of the steamer vessels the next morning.”

  Miranda’s voice intensified sternly.

  “Needless to say, the potion didn’t perform as advertised. Leidesdorff did come out of the coma—but he was consumed by a delirious, drug-induced hallucination. The boat was just inside the cove, only about forty to fifty yards from the bank when all of Leidesdorff’s thrashing about flipped it over. Hortense tried to save him . . . but it was all she could do to get to shore herself.”

  Miranda’s sharply outlined eyes stared into the inky blackness of the tunnel. “It was just as well. Leidesdorff drowned before the toxin could kill him.”

  Across the room, Ivan glanced uneasily at me, a flicker of emotion cluttering the strong lines of his face.

  The sharp, eagle eyes of the de-turbaned, un-mustached man narrowed skeptically.

  “Of course, Hortense blamed herself—but she never forgave Folsom for his role in Leidesdorff’s demise. Hortense haunted him for the rest of his life. Folsom never understood why his luck took such a precipitous downward turn.

  “Hortense sent Folsom on a wild-goose chase to the Virgin Islands to look for Anna Spark, the woman Hortense had paid to pose as Leidesdorff’s mother. Folsom mortgaged everything he had to purchase the Leidesdorff land in the Sierras from the woman posing as Leidesdorff’s mother, presumed to be his sole surviving heir.

  “Hortense took on a disguise and obtained a position at the Tehama Hotel. She began spreading the rumor that Leidesdorff had faked his death—the mere thought of it nearly drove Folsom mad. Of course, the endless years of litigation over the Leidesdorff estate pushed him completely over the edge. By the time it finally concluded in Folsom’s favor, he was bankrupt.”

  Miranda’s dominating voice leveled the basement with its steely, shoveling tone.

  “Folsom eventually died at the age of thirty-eight, the exact same age as Leidesdorff on his passing—from the sudden onset of a mysterious fever and unexplained brain swelling.”

  Chapter 45

  “WHAT ABOUT THE tunnel?” Monty could stay quiet no longer. A squeaking peep piped out of his mouth as Miranda spun around at him and spiked the underside of his bouncing chin with one of h
er razor sharp nails. The turban teetered on his head as he stretched his long neck towards the ceiling. “Was Hortense responsible for that, too?”

  “Yes,” a deep, confident voice sounded through the basement before Miranda had a chance to respond. The balding man stepped forward into the center of our circle, his self-assurance apparently un-rattled by Miranda’s revelations. Despite his altered appearance, I still thought of him as Gordon Bosco.

  “Hortense never really accepted Leidesdorff’s death. She always held on to the hope that the potion worked—that he might be revived—if only she could find him.”

  Monty collapsed against the wall of the basement as Miranda released him from her hooking fingernail.

  “Hortense met William Ralston while she was working at the Tehama Hotel,” Gordon continued. “She knew he could help her. He was one of the few people with the influence and capital to extend the tunnel through the landfill towards the area where Leidesdorff had drowned, where he was now buried.”

  My feverish vision blurred as I stared into the flat, rolling contours of Gordon’s face. Dizzying, I glanced down at my feet where the icy pool of water seeping in from the tunnel had begun to soak my running shoes.

  “Ralston was intrigued by Hortense’s story—particularly when she told him about the underground tunnel. Ralston purchased the Tehama for the site of his new bank. He had the old building lifted up from its foundation and carted off, so that the substructure remained undisturbed.”

  The cool water crept up over my shoes, lapping frigid shackles around my ankles.

  “Hortense pleaded with Ralston to extend the tunnel through the new landfill to the area where Leidesdorff had drowned. Ralston wanted to keep the tunnel a secret, so he agreed—in exchange for her silence.”

  A frigid tension crept up my legs, tightening the tendons that ran behind my knees.