The Death of Blue Mountain Cat

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  It was in the papers, so Thinnes didn’t see any harm in saying, “Somebody stabbed him.”

  Wingate grinned. “I would have beat him to death.”

  Twenty-Six

  Caleb finished at the office early; it was still light. He got his car and headed to Uptown. Spaulding House on Wilson. As he pulled the Jaguar into the fenced rear yard, he noticed, for the first time in a long time, how depressing the building’s dirty stone looked, how the wire-topped Cyclone fence surrounding its weed-filled yard gave the exterior a concentration-camp ambiance. He would have to have the building cleaned in the spring, and maybe tuck-pointed. And ask a tax accountant if he couldn’t write off a wrought-iron fence. Spaulding House had had one, years ago, when it was a Roaring Twenties domicile for the very rich. Its present residents deserved no less despite their poverty. He’d have grass planted in the spring, too. And try to get the inmates to help him plant some trees. It would be an act of faith. And hope. Spaulding House was a hospice.

  He put the gearshift in first, turned off the engine, and let out the clutch. Too cold to use the parking brake. He hadn’t used it in cold weather since the time his brakes had frozen on. He locked the car, didn’t bother to turn on the alarm, but he closed and locked the gate.

  “Rafe’s a fucking burnt marshmallow!” Brian was saying as Caleb walked in. In case anyone missed the reference, he added, “Black on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside.” He spoiled the intended effect by looking around for the others’ reactions.

  Bill and Lenny and Paul hid their amusement with varying degrees of success.

  Rafe laughed. “What’d a honky faggot like you know about sof’n sweet?” He nodded at Caleb and said, “Jack.”

  Wanting to head off further wrangling, Caleb said, “It’s nice to see you still love each other.”

  Rafe laughed again. Brian said, “Shit,” but the ploy worked. It actually wasn’t far from the truth, although the two men could scarcely have been more dissimilar—Rafe was huge, healthy, black, straight, and HIV negative; Brian, emaciated, white, gay, and in the throes of AIDS.

  “I’m going out,” Rafe told Caleb. “You’re on.”

  “What needs to be done?”

  “The market called; van’s down. They can’t deliver nothin’ till tomorrow. You might could pick somethin’ up for the meantime.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll go if I can drive your car, Jack,” Brian said.

  “It has a manual transmission.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know how to set a car alarm?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  Caleb threw him the keys.

  Brian clenched his fists and shook them in a victory gesture. “Yes!”

  After Brian was out the door, Bill said, “You never let me drive your car, Jack.”

  “Do you have a license?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, Jack,” Rafe said.

  “You never asked.”

  “Jack, kin I drive yo car?”

  “Surely.”

  Rafe gave him a sly grin. “Jus axing. That car’s mo’ trouble’n it’s worth.” He lowered his voice so only Caleb could hear. “You’d best look in on Manny.”

  The walls in Manny’s room were covered with graffiti—whatever came to the minds of his many visitors. Caleb had started it off one night, when Manny was talking about giving up, by scribbling Dylan Thomas’s imperative just below the ceiling with a Magic Marker: “Rage, rage against the dying…”

  Someone had added, “Get well soon so we can go to the beach.”

  Advertising slogans probably not meant as double entendres soon followed:

  BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE.

  UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU—so DO I.

  THE MARINES ARE LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD MEN—

  ME TOO.

  JUST DO IT.

  To the cliché “God is dead—Nietzsche/Nietzsche is dead—God,” someone added, “But Manny’s still with us. Thank Whoever.”

  Even Rafe had put his two cents in: “Hang in there, Mann.”

  Manny took Caleb’s large hand in his small ones, which were like gloved skeletons. “Jack, I put on a good front but most of the time I’m terrified.”

  “Most of us are, Manny, even those without AIDS.”

  “But why? It’s not like I have a brilliant future.”

  Caleb had no answer. He shook his head.

  “I used to be so lovely,” Manny said wistfully.

  “You still are inside. Inside, you’re the most beautiful man I know.”

  “I’ve forgotten how it feels to make love, Jack. I’ve even forgotten how it feels to want it.”

  Caleb put his free hand over Manny’s skeletal one. “You haven’t forgotten how it feels to love? To be loved?”

  Tears brimmed over in the smaller man’s eyes. “Of course not.”

  Judging by his flourishing practice, Caleb thought, there were healthy legions who had forgotten, but Manny needed to figure that out for himself. He said, “Well?”

  “Why am I still so afraid?”

  “It keeps you fighting?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you’re ready to let go, you’ll stop feeling fearful.”

  “What will I feel?”

  Caleb thought about patients who’d been lucid at the end. “Peace. Acceptance.”

  Manny sighed. “We’ve had this conversation before. Why can’t I remember?”

  “Human nature. Sometimes when what we’re approaching is particularly awful or awesome, we can’t bring ourselves to go straight at it. So we spiral toward it.”

  “Like Skylab on a decaying orbit?”

  “I was thinking more of Dante in his descent into the Inferno.”

  “I never read that.” Manny let his tone speak for the hard fact neither could say—he never would. He was too weak to hold a book or concentrate on printed words.

  “I have a copy I’ll bring in and read for you if you like. Ciardi’s translation.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Manny’s eyes drifted shut and his grip on Caleb’s hand loosened as his breathing slowed. When he was finally asleep, Caleb turned off the light and went away.

  Twenty-Seven

  They needed a professional opinion, so Thinnes and Oster took Caleb along when they went back to reinterview the widow.

  “I remember waking up here,” she said. “That’s all.” She paused, as if checking the statement against her memory, then added, “And a woman with wild hair was asking me questions.”

  There was a long pause.

  Words leaked into Thinnes’s awareness from the BS of his life. The time Before the Shooting. The vacuum of space. Nature abhors a vacuum…Fools rush in…

  With words.

  Lauren Bisti’s spilled into the quiet. “I was dreaming, I think.”

  The silence returned, not an absence of sound, but the white noise from the heating system and the mind-numbing drug of daytime TV.

  Thinnes was about to interrupt it when Caleb said, “Tell us about the dream.” His voice was soft and comforting as a cat’s purr.

  Oster opened his mouth to protest; Thinnes stopped him with a look. Lauren Bisti didn’t seem to notice.

  “I was in jail. The cell was crowded with people yelling and pushing. And there was a window—not to the outside—but into another room full of people. Then a woman came running up to the window. She was covered with blood and screaming. And all the others in the room were trying to quiet her.”

  Caleb said, “Go on.”

  “That’s all I remember.” She smiled wistfully. “The rest faded away.” She looked at Caleb as if confirming that he understood. “When I was little, I used to see fairies out of the corner of my eyes. But when I tried to look at them directly, they disappeared.”

  Oster said, “Who killed your husband, Mrs. Bisti?”

  Carl must be getting tired, Thinnes decided. He was usually more subtle.

  “I c
an’t tell you.”

  Caleb said, “Tell us about your husband.”

  She pressed her fingers over the lower part of her face while she thought about him, and her eyes widened as if she were smiling behind them. Then she clasped her hands below her breasts. “He was beautiful. Physically, I mean, as well as talented. And smart. And considerate. Loving.” She paused. Her face seemed to crumple; she sobbed as she added, “He’s gone.”

  They waited for her to get herself under control. Caleb handed her a tissue, and she blew her nose.

  Oster said, “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Besides his own people—on both sides?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There were the developers his installations ridiculed. And black-market antiquities sellers, and the preservationists. And some of the Navajos may have thought his works mocked them.”

  “Didn’t they?” Thinnes asked.

  “They didn’t think he knew what it meant to be a Navajo. He knew! When he was out there, he didn’t try to pretend he was a native, but he felt their connection to the land. He studied the language. He learned about the culture. He felt he was an exile returned home for a visit.”

  “But he was never accepted as a Navajo,” Caleb said quietly.

  She shrugged. “He understood the Navajo mind—my word. He would have said the mind of the Diné. He knew how it felt to be a stranger to the mainstream culture.”

  “So why did he make fun of them with his work?” Thinnes asked.

  “Because he couldn’t stand to see the old ways forgotten or exploited. Is what he did any more irreverent than gluing sandpaintings to cardboard to sell to tourists?”

  They had her go over the twenty-four hours preceding the murder. Nothing had happened. They pressed her on the subject of stolen artifacts.

  “The ‘artifacts’ David used in his works weren’t real,” she said, “even if they did have certificates of authenticity. They were all carefully crafted fakes.”

  “Crafted by whom?” Caleb asked.

  “I don’t know. I suggest you ask the ‘experts’ who authenticated them or whoever allegedly dug them up.”

  “You saying the paperwork was forged?” Oster demanded.

  “The documents are probably as authentic as any you’ll find for artifacts in private hands.” She sounded defiant. “Though that’s not saying much.”

  “Think someone he sold one of these artificial antiques to went away mad?”

  “No one knew about that—except whoever he was working with.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. When I asked, he told me the less I knew the safer I’d be. I thought in case…I thought it was a tax thing or something.” She sobbed, nearly choking. “Maybe Todd can tell you. He handled all David’s business.”

  While they went over the story with her again, Caleb compared her to the assured individual he’d observed at the museum. He knew it was relatively easy for women to fake depression—they just had to leave off their makeup and let their hair go wild. But she hadn’t faked the shock that night. And he didn’t believe she was feigning now.

  He thought about names. David meant beloved. And there were ancient peoples who believed that knowing someone’s name gave you power over him. Even today, if you had a name, even an alias, you were a long way toward having the individual. Blue Mountain Cat. David had been catlike in some ways: Withdrawn, self-centered, and cruel, in an impersonal way.

  “What was the significance of the name Blue Mountain Cat?” he asked her.

  “I think Blue Mountain refers to Mount Taylor, one of the Navajos’ four sacred mountains. David told me but I’m not sure— It wasn’t important to me, so I didn’t pay attention. I think blue—turquoise, actually—is the color of the south, one of the four sacred directions. And everything is either male or female. Turquoise is male. The cat part refers to a mountain lion—David liked to play with words that way. I have no idea why he chose a lion.”

  They didn’t talk until they were in the car and Thinnes pulled it out in traffic.

  “Well, Doc,” Oster said. “What d’ya think?”

  “It may be my Freudian training, but I find it curious that she never said she didn’t know who killed her husband, just that she couldn’t tell us.”

  “So, you think this grieving-widow act is phony?”

  “No. And that makes it more curious. Her grief seems genuine.” Caleb shook himself. “So I may be reading something into what’s simply an awkward choice of words.”

  “Maybe,” Thinnes said. “But cops tend to believe in Freudian slips, too.”

  Twenty-Eight

  As long as we’ve got you out of your office, Doctor,” Thinnes said, “what say we make another stop? I’d like your opinion of the victim’s mother.” He glanced at Caleb in the rear-view and couldn’t tell from his face what Caleb thought about it.

  “Fine, as long as we’re back to my office by twelve-thirty. I have an appointment at one.”

  Oster said, “What do we know about her?”

  “I talked to three of her coworkers,” Thinnes said. “She’s a critical-care nurse at Weiss. According to everyone I talked to, an excellent employee, reserved, efficient, competent, and intelligent. Never talks about her personal life, though she sometimes mentions her son, the successful artist. Doesn’t talk about her ex, either. Doesn’t gossip, though she seems up to speed on what’s going on around the hospital. She’s good in a crisis. And her credit’s in good shape. I checked.”

  “You know anything about her, Doc?” Oster asked.

  “David told me his mother is Anglo-Irish,” Caleb said, “with a stronger sense of her family’s history than most third-generation immigrants. She was an army nurse when she met David’s father, Harlan Bisti. He was a full-blooded Navajo. David said she was smitten with Bisti senior, in part, because of his strong tribal affiliation. But since her people simply took their tribes with them when they emigrated, she never understood how her husband’s identity was so tied to his people’s real estate. She finally wrote him off as a drunk and divorced him.”

  “Did Bisti hold that against her?”

  “Not that he’d admit.”

  Oster twisted around in his seat to look at Caleb as he asked, “So he got on well with his mother?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You believed him?”

  “I didn’t have any reason not to.”

  Anne Bisti had herself under control when she opened the door for them. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked strung out. She looked her age. She stepped aside to let them into a pristine white apartment, with polished wood floors and few but expensive furnishings. One of David Bisti’s naturalistic paintings—one Thinnes wouldn’t have minded having in his own living room—hung over the couch that she invited them to sit on. Thinnes didn’t correct her assumption that Caleb was also a cop.

  “Tell us about Lauren,” Thinnes said.

  “They wouldn’t let me see her. I heard on the news that she’d been hospitalized and—I’m her only family.”

  “How do you feel about your daughter-in-law?”

  “She’s a very sweet girl, very fond of David.”

  “They ever have any trouble?”

  “Not that I know of. But let me be frank with you, Detective. My son wouldn’t have told me, even if he was planning a divorce. He just wasn’t the sort to discuss his personal life with anyone—not even his mother.”

  “What about his business affairs?”

  “I was led to believe he was doing well. And, in any case, Lauren has enough money—” She swallowed hard—the first sign she’d showed of any emotion. “Had enough for both of them.”

  “Have you had any thoughts, since yesterday, about who might have wanted to kill your son?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a woman named Irene?” Oster asked.

  “Irene what?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us—an acquaintance of your son’
s.”

  “He was once involved with a Navajo girl by that name. Irene Yellow.”

  “Was? What happened?”

  “He met Lauren.”

  “You know if Irene Yellow might be upset enough about that to harm your son?”

  She thought about it, going inside her head to work it out. Finally she said, “She struck me as a realist. I imagine she’d have been furious at the time, but my impression was that she’s some sort of neo-traditionalist. And the Navajos don’t believe in killing. I think she’d have gotten over it by now.”

  Twenty-Nine

  After they dropped Caleb at his office, Oster and Thinnes stopped at McDonald’s. Neither particularly liked eating there, so they brought their Big Macs back to the office. Thinnes signaled right for the Police Business Only parking lot east of headquarters for District Nineteen and Detective Area Three, which also housed the First Municipal District Circuit Court. As he slowed to make the turn, a black Infiniti zoomed past on the left and cut back right to beat the Caprice into the lot.

  “God damn it!” Oster said.

  Thinnes said, “Find out who that son of a bitch is. I’m giving him a ticket.”

  “Right,” Oster said—it had been years since he’d written a citation—but he did reach for the radio.

  The Infiniti pulled along the curb dividing the drive from the plaza fronting the building, stopping across from the ugliest abstract sculpture north of the Picasso.

  “Cancel that,” Thinnes said, as the driver got out and he recognized Todd Kent. “I’ll just hit him up with murder one.” He tapped the horn to get Kent’s attention and held up a finger to indicate Kent should wait.

  He did. While he waited, he lovingly inspected his car. When they got close enough for conversation, he asked, “Like it?”

  Thinnes had long since noticed the high correlation between expensive cars and incompetent drivers. And, since the war on drugs had turned drug dealers from every walk of life into millionaires, pretentious displays of money didn’t impress him. “Must be a bitch to park legally,” he said.