Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902)

by Adamson, Lydia

  Rothwax used to tell any one of a dozen stories to illustrate his point. He particularly liked the one about the sociopath who has just been released from prison after serving eight years. He goes into a bar and gets drunk. The bartender eventually throws him out. On the street, he follows a man who he feels has insulted him. He picks up a thick wooden slat and brains the man, killing him instantly. He’s walking away from the corpse when he realizes he may as well take any valuables that may be on the body, so he empties the poor man’s pockets. The next day the newspapers report the murder and claim the man was killed during an attempted robbery. Point, set, match.

  But Rothwax’s world was not my world. I collected motives. I needed motives—big ones and small ones.

  I snapped out of my somber thoughts about the complexities of motive just in time to hear Darcy scolding her colleagues in a mock-serious voice, “We all behaved very badly last night, ladies.”

  “Whatever it is you’re referring to, Darcy dear, I’m sure we’re guilty as charged,” Roz said happily.

  “I mean, very badly,” Darcy reiterated.

  “Don’t get too carried away,” Beth cautioned. “I doubt we did anything that terrible.”

  Darcy, her mouth full of raspberries, said, “Oh yes, we did! We didn’t drink a single toast to Aunt Sarah!”

  A collective groan went up from the assembled. I didn’t understand a thing, and it must have shown on my face.

  “We’re being a little rude, people,” Beth admonished them all. “Alice doesn’t know what we’re talking about.” And then she leaned in to me and explained, “Aunt Sarah was Roz’s aunt. She’s the one who gave us the seed money we needed to get started as a group—fifteen thousand dollars—to buy clothes, rent halls, buy ad space, everything. She underwrote our first tour, which was New England, by the way, so she’s sort of our patron saint.”

  Miranda lifted her coffee mug high and intoned, “To Sarah, who was there when we needed her most.” Everybody drank to Aunt Sarah.

  “Has Aunt Sarah passed away?” I inquired.

  “Yes,” Roz told me, “several years ago. And we don’t honor her the way we used to. A shame.”

  Ben and Mat joined the table then. Not that they were responsible for the ensuing dissension, but soon after they sat down the conversation did turn acrimonious. Some members of the group wanted to abort the “retreat,” given the circumstances, and go back to New York. I listened for a while to their arguing, which seemed to result in a complete deadlock, and then, feeling very ill at ease, I left the table, grabbed the heavy coat I’d adopted, and walked outside.

  I walked to my rented car, climbed in, and ran the engine for a few minutes. I had been thinking of driving into Northampton alone, but then I thought better of it and decided instead to take a walk over to the sheds and pay a visit to my rocking friend, the toy camel. I gave Will’s studio extremely wide berth this time, frightened that I’d hear that music again. I was in no mood for occult experiences.

  My friend was right there on top of the cartons. Soulful as ever. I reached up and set him rocking. “Nice to see you again, you murderous dromedary,” I whispered. And it was good to see him. He was something concrete—visible, tangible evidence of the murder attempt. Well, maybe not to anybody but me. But at the very least he signaled the existence of a mad person somewhere in the vicinity, who thought it was fun to wreck moving vehicles.

  It was a little too raw in the shed to carry on an extended petting session with the stuffed beast. I stilled his rocking and started to leave. Obviously, I could come back and see him anytime I liked—he was going nowhere. And that suddenly struck me as very peculiar. If the camel really had been part of a murder attempt, why had the guilty party left it there in the shed for just anybody to find? Sure, the door to the shed was always closed, but it was easy for anyone to get in. The local kids did it all the time, according to Lieutenant Donaldson.

  If I’d been the one who’d caused a near-fatal wreck using the camel, I most certainly would have hidden it—buried it, burned it, given it to an orphanage, anything. Unless, of course, Ford Donaldson was right and it was just my delusion that the toy had been used to cause the accident. But I knew, all his logical objections aside, that Ford was not right, that someone had tried to kill the occupants of that Mercedes, me included, even if I was just an afterthought, a wild card.

  So why did he leave the damn thing here, more or less in plain sight? Maybe the man—or woman—was simply a fool. Many murderers are. Surely that’s why they’re caught.

  Was the camel’s master just careless, sloppy?

  Or was it quite the opposite? Perhaps the individual was wise rather than foolish, fastidious rather than careless. Perhaps the camel had been placed here on purpose, even methodologically, as in the “purloined letter” ruse. That old saw from the Poe story seemed to be timeless: If you want to hide something, place it in plain view.

  I thought of all the futile searches that had been made of Will Gryder’s room: the killer’s, the law’s, and mine. What if Will did have something in his room he wanted to hide? What if he knew the room might be searched, and so used the same purloined-letter procedure as the would-be killer who had “hidden” the toy camel?

  If any of that was true, I already knew exactly what constituted the purloined letter in this case: three booklets of sheet music, all by Chopin. Two sonatas that looked mighty daunting, and a “mazurka,” whatever that was, lay right out in the open, on Will Gryder’s pillow.

  ***

  They were still arguing when I walked into the house. They either didn’t know or didn’t care that I’d returned. Or perhaps they had never noticed that I’d left. I walked quickly upstairs without removing my coat. The moment I hit the second-floor landing I rose on my toes and moved along the wall until I was inside Will’s room.

  The music was exactly where I’d last seen it.

  In the first booklet, two pages from the end, was a small, tissue-thin envelope, the kind you sometimes get at the post office when you purchase stamps. It wasn’t even sealed. In the middle of the second booklet, there was an identical envelope. The third piece of music held some sheets of onionskin paper, not in an envelope at all but simply tucked in between sheets of music. My heart was beating like a drum. I had un-purloined the purloined letter.

  I slipped everything I’d found up my sleeve and walked back to my room, locking the door behind me. Sitting on my narrow bed, I opened the first envelope with hands that were just slightly trembling.

  Inside the first envelope was a photograph of each of the members of the Riverside String Quartet, all taken when the women were much younger. Their clothing and hairstyles made it a pretty good bet that the shots had been taken during the early 1970s, or maybe even a bit earlier, the late 1960s.

  The second envelope contained a computer disk. That was all.

  The two folded sheets from the last piece of music turned out to be badly water-damaged. They appeared to me to be some kind of genealogy, or breeding chart—of the kind one might see for thoroughbred racehorses, tracing sires and dams back several generations to the foundation stock. But nearly all the names on the paper had faded, washed away, and the only visible marks left were the lines that apparently signified the branching—like tree limbs—from one generation to the next.

  At the top of each sheet some lettering was visible—visible but cryptic. The first sheet was headed by the word SUZY in capital letters. The second carried the heading BRIT.

  None of it meant a damn thing to me. I was furious, disappointed, and swept the whole pile to one side, very nearly onto the floor. Then, a little embarrassed by my own petulance, I gathered the material and neatly reassembled it as I had found it. And then I placed it all under my pillow. Will Gryder had left it all on top of his pillow, but he knew exactly what these mystifying documents meant. And he was dead.


  Chapter 13

  “Why so sad?” Beth asked me.

  The others seated at the dining table for our evening meal all turned toward me, faces clouded with fake concern.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, smiling wanly. But I was sad, and tired, and distracted. Why shouldn’t I be? I had spent the last few hours again and again picking through the things I’d found in Will’s room, trying to understand what the items meant, either separately or together.

  “She just misses the big city,” Darcy said. “Some of us is country girls, and some of us just ain’t.”

  I did chuckle a bit at that. I had no intention of telling her I’d been raised on a farm.

  “Well,” Mathew Hazan noted, “she may miss the bright lights, but she certainly couldn’t find better food anywhere in Manhattan.” He seemed to have half forgiven me for my prying suspicions. Mat passed me the cruet of Mrs. Wallace’s special blue-cheese dressing. He was right about the food: It was the best salad dressing I’d ever tasted.

  The cook was serving up “Americana” that night, saluting the basic corn-fed goodness of the heartland. The salad was fantastic. Then came an enormous lean brisket, sliced paper-thin and served with garlicy little potatoes and glazed carrots.

  By the time Mrs. Wallace was clearing the plates from the main course, the wind outside had begun to howl. Someone had put on an old recording of the Riverside String Quartet performing Beethoven’s opus 59, no. 3, done some years ago in Germany. I got up to raise the volume ever so slightly, and used that as an excuse to look at the worn album cover, which featured a photograph of the women in the recording studio. Yes, they all looked young and fresh, but this photo wasn’t from exactly the same period as the snapshots I’d discovered in Will’s room.

  The cook reentered with her tray, and set before each of us a dish of stewed plums. Stewed plums—talk about comfort food! The meal had been so simple and delicious, I found myself wondering whether difficult Mrs. Wallace was really some renowned gourmet chef, moonlighting during her vacation to raise enough money for daily psychiatric care.

  The only problem of any note, as we all turned our attention to the lemon meringue pie and coffee, was that Roz had dropped her spoon on the floor. Ben put such frenzied effort into retrieving it that Roz, obviously embarrassed, said to the rest of us, “He has this knack for making me feel like a baby in a high chair.”

  Beth laughed wickedly. “But that’s how you prefer it, I always thought.”

  Roz’s otherworldly blue eyes flashed. And for a moment it seemed as if she really had the power to call the wrath of the gods down upon Beth’s head.

  “Nice work, Beeswax,” Miranda said through her teeth.

  I saw then that Beth genuinely regretted her remark. There were tears in her eyes. She jumped out of her seat and fairly ran to Roz’s side. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Please forgive me.” And she kissed the part in Roz’s hair.

  Roz swallowed hard. “It’s all right, Beeswax. Just sit down . . . You, too, Ben . . . please!” He had been standing nearby, the spoon dangling foolishly from his fingers.

  As I ate my dessert I surreptitiously watched each of the women, matching them in my mind with the old photos. Had each given Will a photo of herself? And why? Why had he packaged them like so many baseball cards in a little boy’s prized collection?

  There was no more talk for a long time. We sat listening to the music. These women had the uncanny ability to suddenly tune out the world—not to mention the ability to make the nonmusical guest feel like the fifth wheel. The record ended. Mrs. Wallace brought in more coffee and placed a bottle of Grand Marnier on the table. Most of the women looked at it with distaste—they’d drunk their limit the night before. Only Mat and Miranda helped themselves.

  “Mrs. Wallace,” Darcy called out before the cook had swung back through the doorway, “were those fresh plums that you stewed?”

  “Of course they were.”

  “But where did you get them this time of year?”

  “Darcy, you can get fresh anything if you know where to shop,” Roz chided. “I believe Mat when he says your cooking tastes like old sweatbands.”

  Darcy waved away the comment and then spoke directly to Beth. “Would your cat eat plums?”

  “Lulu? I doubt it. She might play with a plum, though.”

  Miranda said testily, “That’s about all she could do, play with fruit. She’s obviously afraid of mice.”

  They all laughed.

  Ben then added, “There are so many mice in this house now, they’ve started their own orchestra.”

  Mat picked up on the humor. “And a ballet company,” he said. “Last night I saw them do Swan Lake with a full corps.”

  Beth reached across the table and patted Hazan’s hand. “Be patient. Lulu will start to hunt soon, I assure you. She just needs a little time to acclimate.”

  “That’s nonsense, Beth,” Miranda said analytically, through the clouds of her cigarette smoke. “Your cat may be pretty, but let’s face facts: she’s a spoiled little house cat.” Then she sat back and said expansively, as if sharing her new theory of evolution with the world, “Besides, that breed are simply not good mousers.”

  Her manner irritated me no end. I put my two cents in. “I think the Scottish Fold breed is near the top of the line when it comes to mousing—usually, that is. After all, they’re basically farm cats. The line of cats that eventually produced the Scottish Fold earned their keep for hundreds of years on farms. So it stands to reason.”

  Miranda exploded in fury—anger so fierce that I instinctively raised a hand to my face as if to block a blow. “Who are you, the feline pope?” she screamed. “Who do you think you are to instruct us about anything? You ridiculous, snooping fool! Roz and I were working in the most exclusive cat shops in Manhattan while you were—Oh, why don’t you just get into your cheap little car and go home!”

  No one said a word. Beth couldn’t bring herself to look at me, though she tried. Miranda, who had gone chalk-white, seemed pinned to her chair, the coffee cup in her hand frozen in time and space.

  When I was able to rise, I excused myself and walked grimly upstairs. I entered my small room, closed the door, and lay down heavily on the bed. It had been a long time since I’d felt so humiliated. I was also frightened, in some unvoiceable way.

  But Miranda had asked a good question. Why didn’t I just get into my rental car and drive away from here? This was no vacation, no rural interlude to cure my wounded feelings over a bad review. Why was I dabbling in a murder when my help was not wanted—not by the victim’s friends, and not by the police? Why was I still enraged by an automobile accident in which no one had been seriously hurt, and which, though I believed it to have been a murder attempt, the professionals considered only a skid on a wet road caused by a farm dog? And even if it was a murder attempt, surely Roz or Ben had been the intended target. It could have nothing to do with me—I was the stranger here. But for some crazy reason, I seemed to think of myself as the personal one-woman security force for the Riverside String Quartet. When and where had I been given that responsibility?

  And why did these people dislike me so much? Was it because they knew I was investigating the murder? It had to be that. People usually like me. Particularly women my own age. Particularly other theater people—and musicians, like it or not, are theater people, performers, just like actors.

  What was the matter with that crazy woman Miranda? What had I said to incur her wrath? Nothing. I had made a few mundane remarks about a breed of cats.

  I turned toward the wall—a distinctly childish thing to do, almost primal. This house was making me regress into childhood. My loneliness had that helpless, aching quality to it.

  I heard a noise outside my door. I tensed. The house was also making a nervous wreck of me. Was someone spying on me now? Or perhap
s it was Beth, too ashamed to knock.

  I strode silently, quickly across the floor and opened the door suddenly to catch the intruder.

  It was only Lulu. Looking up tenderly at me.

  “Come on in, kitty,” I said. “The company down there isn’t very pleasant, is it? No wonder you can’t catch any mice.” I took her in my arms and sat down on the bed with her. We were both fugitives from Miranda’s ire.

  Why was I so frightened by that ire? I had probably been chewed out worse in drama class. Maybe it was because she had been the first of the group to exhibit the kind of rage that might propel a chisel into a man’s chest. Ford Donaldson had said that this kind of murder requires a special kind of violence, and a special kind of strength.

  I picked up Lulu and dangled her in front of me for a moment, looking at her lovely face framed by those lovelier ears. “Did what I said about your ancestors offend you, my pet? No, of course not.” So why should it so upset Miranda Bly? I was beginning to feel very uneasy about the whole episode, as if I had stumbled upon something ugly.

  I placed the cat on the floor and she amused herself by playing with my shoelace.

  God, I was beginning to hate them all—their formal dinners, their self-involvement, their terrible tempers, and above all their almighty talent, which they seemed to think gave them a kind of superiority over the rest of the world.

  Why didn’t I just leave? They wanted me out. Why didn’t I stay somewhere else in the area? I knew why. Because the hunt was more important than the hurt.

  “All I said,” I told Lulu in a hushed voice, “was that you Scottish guys are great mousers. Except for you, you little aberration . . . You’re just a little aberration, aren’t you?”

  What did I know about Scottish Fold cats, anyway? Just facts I’d picked up here and there. I knew that they had originated as a spontaneous mutation in Scottish farm cats in the 1960s. I knew they had become very popular in the U.S. in the early seventies, even though the influential cat-breeder associations had refused to recognize them as a breed. I knew the breed was established by outcrossing to British and American shorthairs. I remembered reading that all these cats traced their folded-ear trait to a single cat. And that the color range of Scottish Folds was expanding rapidly, as well as the range of fold on the ears. Certainly I knew they were all, even the ones in litters whose ears did not fold, adorable. And I knew that they all had those beautiful golden eyes. Or did they?