A Cat in the Wings:

by Lydia Adamson

  “Calm down, Miss Nestleton! You must calm down!”

  “No! I’m not going to calm down! I’m just going to get out of here! But let me give you a small assignment, counselor, in order to check my fantasy level. Just call up your client and ask her for a letter from her vet certifying that her cat Splat was ‘put down’ as she has always claimed . . . or the cremation certificate. See if she can corroborate her story that poor Splat died of natural causes three years ago. You do that, Mr. Brodsky, and also, while you’re having that discussion, ask her about this check.”

  I motioned to Tony. He stood up and we both walked to the door. I turned to Madeline. “Send my best to Lucia. Tell her that I’m sorry I had to raise her hopes about Splat by advertising that he was found. Tell her there was no other way for me to flush her out. And also tell her, Madeline, that the odds of a house cat surviving abandonment on the city streets are greater than the distance between earth and the outer limits of the expanding universe to one.”

  Tony and I walked out of the room and started down the flight of stairs.

  “Wait! Please, Miss Nestleton, wait!” I turned and saw Frank Brodsky standing at the top of the stairs. He seemed extremely agitated, and I was suddenly ashamed that I had screamed at him. After all, he was an old man.

  I waited with Tony. Brodsky started to climb down a few steps, to get closer to me, then thought the better of it and stayed at the top of the landing, catching his breath and holding on to the staircase.

  “Please listen to me just for a moment! I am sorry I insulted you! It was not my intention! Hear me out, please!”

  I could see the sweat on his forehead and along his upper lip.

  “It will take but a moment! And then you can leave; yes, then you can do whatever you want!” He began to breathe more evenly. “Suppose, Miss Nestleton, that what you have told me is true. This would mean that Lucia Maury is a very disturbed woman, a woman who should be in a mental hospital for treatment. Only a madwoman would murder a man because he innocently lost her cat while it was in his drunken care. We can all agree on that, can’t we, Miss Nestleton?

  “Yet, as you well know, it is virtually impossible now to prove insanity to a sitting jury. And that means that Lucia Maury might well spend the next twenty years in prison. Oh, Miss Nestleton, no matter how deranged she may be, she does not deserve that! Who knows what else Peter Dobrynin did to her? You yourself told me that he routinely tormented and degraded women. No doubt he did the same to Lucia. No doubt he drove her to that insane act.” He wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his bathrobe. I waited for him to speak again, to continue, but he just stood there, staring at me imploringly.

  “I don’t understand you,” I finally said. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me. What do you want me to do?”

  “Do nothing, Miss Nestleton,” he replied.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, Miss Nestleton, nothing. I will go to the District Attorney and inform him of how Basil was coerced into his confession. That will clear Vol Teak of the murder charge, though not of the charges that he extorted money from ballet companies.”

  “And then what, Mr. Brodsky?”

  “Nothing. Let it become one of the thousand of unsolved crimes. As for Lucia Maury, I will see to it that she is committed to a psychiatric hospital in her native Delaware.”

  I turned and started down the steps again. Just as Tony and I were walking through the front door I heard him plead: “Think about it! Think about everything! Think of Lucia!”

  Once outside, we walked slowly down the deserted street, leaning into the cold wind. “What are you going to do?” Tony asked, holding my arm tightly.

  “I don’t know, but I want to be alone for a while.”

  Chapter 26

  The buzzer kept ringing. Whoever it was wouldn’t stop. I went into my bedroom and shut the door and buried my head in a pillow. But still I could hear it. Finally, exasperated, I buzzed the intruder in.

  Of course it was Tony. “What the hell is the matter with you, Swede? I’ve been calling you for two days! Why don’t you answer the phone or return messages?”

  “Nothing to say.”

  He came inside and started to prowl about. Pancho glared at him. Bushy ignored him. I made him a cup of instant coffee.

  “Well, have you made a decision yet?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “About whether you’re going to Paris in the spring. You know damn well what I’m talking about!”

  “I’ve done nothing,” I admitted.

  “It sure is, as they say, a tough nut to crack,” he noted, gulping down what was left of the coffee and then picking Bushy up in his arms and threatening, by means of pantomime, to fling him through the window.

  Then he gently dropped Bushy onto the sofa, telling my poor beautiful cat: “You’d last about three minutes as a stray, Bushy. You’re a decadent cat.”

  It’s odd how a silly little conversation can have a greater impact on a listener than a profound one. Particularly words said to a cat. I mean, for almost forty-eight hours before Tony told Bushy he wouldn’t last three minutes as a stray, I was in a very bad state. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t decide where my responsibilities lay. To call the police? To forget the police? To allow Lucia to escape the consequences of her actions? And I had also brooded over the facts of the case. Had I interpreted them correctly? Was any part of my analysis fantasy rather than fact? Had I caught the wrong person with the wrong bait? Was there any other conceivable motive for Lucia to have written and sent that check?

  On and on it had gone, with no light visible at the end of the tunnel. I could make no decision. I could find no finality. I couldn’t finish the role or the script.

  And then Tony had spoken those silly words, and his mentioning the word “stray” had reminded me of those poor stray cats in Riverside Park that had not eaten a good Russian meal, or perhaps any meal at all, since Dobrynin died.

  Right there, right then, I decided to feed them. Oh, I know it was stupid. It was an obvious attempt to postpone serious activity, a handy excuse for not dealing with the real problem at hand—but I wanted to do it. I suddenly had to do it. It became my immediate responsibility.

  I threw on my muffler, coat, and sweater. Tony had yet to shed his outer garments, so I just pulled him out of the apartment along with me.

  “What’s the matter with you, Swede? What’s going on?”

  “We’re going to feed some cats, Tony.”

  “What cats?”

  “The ones Dobrynin used to feed. The ones in Riverside Park, Tony. It’s time you and I did some good deeds.”

  “I don’t have enough cash for The Russian Tea Room.”

  “We have another option.”

  The cab-took us to Eighth Avenue in the fifties. I remembered a Russian takeout kitchen just west of Eighth Avenue, across the street from a post office.

  It was close to four in the afternoon, and cold. We moved in and out of the side streets until we found the place, nestling in a gloomy storefront, its windows all but papered over with dozens of rave reviews from the local food critics, including a splendid one from The Village Voice.

  Inside was a small, skinny, brooding man with an enormous checked apron. He had long sideburns and a flattened nose.

  “I’d like some blini with sour cream and caviar; an order of chicken Kiev, and a dozen pirogi.”

  He didn’t say a word after I’d ordered, just pointed a finger. I turned toward what he’d pointed at—freezers along the wall. Tony laughed. The place had what we wanted, but all of it was frozen.

  “Do you have a microwave?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  Five minutes later we were half walking, half trotting uptown toward Riverside Park.

  Tony kept muttering. “This is the stupidest thing I ever let you rope me into, Swede. Do you know how crazy this is? Two people past forty, racing uptown with heated Russian food to feed all
ey cats in Riverside Park!”

  “They’re not alley cats, Tony,” I cautioned.

  We entered the park at Seventy-second Street, racing against the lengthening shadows: We wouldn’t have dreamed of entering that or any other city park after nightfall.

  “What was that woman’s name?” I asked as we approached the boat basin.

  “What woman?”

  “The homeless woman with the shopping cart. The one who showed us the cats. The one who used to get the food for Dobrynin.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t there. The walkway along the boat basin was devoid of homeless people, empty of all people except the ever-present joggers, muffled against the cold wind but plodding on.

  “The cats were up there,” Tony said, pointing east. We walked away from the water up the path.

  “There’s the iron railing!” I called out, like an excited and happy child. I was carrying the pirogi. Tony was carrying the blini, the small containers of sour cream and caviar, and the chicken Kiev.

  I started to laugh out loud.

  “What’s the matter with you, Swede?”

  “It’s just making me giddy, thinking of all those lovely cats digging into the blini with caviar and sour cream. If I was a cat I would love any kind of crepes—and blini with caviar . . . my God!”

  We reached the railing. “Get sticks, Tony. Get some sticks.” He found us some branches, and even a broken sponge-mop stick with the metal hinge still attached.

  Like two mad people we ran the implements raucously along the iron railings, setting up a terrible racket. The cats’ dinner bell had sounded.

  We waited. Nothing. No movement at all. I stared at the rock outcroppings and brush on the other side of the railing—the spot from which the cats had emerged the last time we were there.

  Nothing. No movement. No cats. And it was getting darker.

  The giddiness had vanished. I grabbed Tony’s arm desperately. “Where are they?” I cried out. “Why won’t they come?”

  “Let’s leave the food and get out of here,” Tony said. He shook my arm off, knelt down and opened the packages, and slipped the food through the fence onto the ground. I bent down to hand him my parcel of pirogi, and he opened it and pushed it through the railing.

  “Let’s go,” he said, straightening up to take hold of my arm again and lead me out of the park.

  That’s when I saw the two points of light, deep in the brush.

  “Wait, Tony! Wait!”

  Then the two points of light vanished. But they had been cat’s eyes. I knew it.

  I stared hard into the growing darkness. Something was moving. Yes, a shape moving . . . It was a cat. A large, strong, dark cat. A smokey-blue cat with a chest ruff. A Maine coon.

  “Tony, look there! Look there!” I picked up one of the sticks and began to bang it against the railing, harder and harder.

  “Where Swede? Where? I don’t see anything!”

  “It’s Splat, Tony! It’s Anna Pavlova Smith! He’s alive!”

  I dropped the stick, exhausted, waiting. Silence. I stared. What had happened? The cat had vanished. It was gone. But I knew I had seen him . . . or one like him.

  “Please!” Tony said imploringly, placing his arm gently around my neck. “Please, let’s go. They’ll find the food.”

  We walked slowly out of the park. A terrible sadness descended upon me. It made my limbs weak and my step unsteady.

  Tony took me to a bar on Broadway. He ordered two bottles of ale.

  “Are you okay now?” he asked.

  I nodded, then poured some of the ale from the bottle into the glass. It was warm and quiet in the bar. I didn’t drink.

  “What did you really see there?” he asked.

  “Now, I’m not sure.”

  “It couldn’t have been Lucia’s cat. There’s no chance he survived three years on the city streets. At best, somebody took him in.”

  I didn’t reply. I sipped some of the ale. It was nutty and sweet.

  “And besides, Swede, you know what your grandmother says.”

  I burst out laughing in spite of myself. “But Tony, you told me that if you ever heard another line from The Wit and Wisdom of Grandma Nestleton, you were going to jump off the Chrysler Building.”

  Tony squirmed. “Well, Swede, since you’ve been reduced to seeing visions in parks, maybe one of her gems would help you to . . . you know . . . ease back into reality. That’s what old ladies on frigid Minnesota dairy farms are all about—reality. Hard, cold, unvarnished, wood-chopping reality.”

  “Okay, Tony, I’ll bite. Which gem?”

  “Oh, come on, you know the one, Swede! Your grandmother used to say: “It’s okay to die for a cat—but not to kill for one.”

  “She never said that, Tony!”

  “Well, maybe one of her friends said it. Or the farm-implements dealer.”

  “And maybe I saw Anna Pavlova Smith,” I replied bitterly.

  We were silent. I drank some more ale. It was a tad too cold for my taste.

  “Do you have any change, Tony?” I asked.

  “What for?”

  “It’s time I made a telephone call.” He leaned over and kissed me on the lips, then reached down into his right-hand pocket and produced a quarter.

  I looked around and saw a pay phone on the wall, near the rest rooms. I walked toward it, holding the quarter gingerly between two fingers.

  I remembered the phrase they always use in gangster movies: “drop a dime.”

  That’s exactly what I was going to do: Call the police. “Drop a dime”—a quarter, after inflation—on my friend Lucia Maury. She was a murderer. She had to be accused and charged with the crime. If she had been psychotic at the moment she pulled the trigger, that would be up to a jury to decide.

  Cats? Dancers? Passions? All that, I could at last see clearly, was beside the point. A human being had been murdered. As soon as I reached the phone I “dropped the dime”—quarter. But unlike the informers in all those gangster movies, I felt no glee whatsoever.

  Don’t miss Alice Nestleton’s next mystery adventure

  A CAT WITH A FIDDLE

  Available now from InterMix

  I know an actor who was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jerry has always said that the single scariest thing he could ever imagine was being alone on a dark night in the country. As someone born and bred on a farm, I’ve always laughed at his city paranoia.

  But that autumn night, lost in rural Massachusetts, I understood what Jerry meant. The darkness seemed to double every few minutes, and there was nothing I could do to hold it back.

  I couldn’t figure out which switch on the panel of knobs in my rented car was for the brights. And to make matters worse, Lulu was clawing at my ankles, down near the accelerator. I hadn’t attached the clasp on the cat-carrier securely enough, and she’d escaped from the box.

  Of course Lulu wasn’t my cat. Mine were safe at home, being watched over alternately by my friend Tony and my neighbor Mrs. Oshrin. Lulu was a brown tabby Scottish Fold with knockout gold eyes and the sweetest ears on earth—they folded down over themselves. She was my cat-sitting charge and she lived ordinarily with Beth Stimson, a woman about my age, the second violinist with the Riverside String Quartet. Beth had asked me to pack up Lulu and bring her up to western Mass., where she was vacationing—or “retreating,” as she’d described it—for a few weeks. The place where she was staying, Beth said, was overrun with field mice, and Lulu’s talents as a hunter were needed. I knew better, though. I knew she was just lonely for her kitty.

  But when she proposed that I turn the trip up there into a little holiday for myself, why did I agree to it so eagerly? I needed a break, is why, a vacation. I needed it bad. Not only had the play I’d been starring in way off-Broadway closed ignominiously after eleven performances, but my performance had been singled out and roundly panned. Not just panned. Excoriated. By a very well known guest drama
critic writing in The New Yorker.

  He had said, among other things:

  Alice Nestleton has a deserved reputation as one of the best underappreciated actresses in the American theater, but this performance does nothing to mitigate her dilemma.

  Granted, it is very difficult to translate Henry James onto the stage (though some brilliant exceptions prove this rule). Granted that James’s Beast in the Jungle is one of the most perplexing of his later works, being a story of two people caught in an opaque obsession that prevents them from consummating their love. All this aside, Miss Nestleton’s claustrophobic, motherly portrayal of the doomed heroine May Bartam is deadly, and the most wrong-headed interpretation of a major role this reviewer has witnessed in many a season.

  I had managed to cope. Friends had been most supportive. But I needed a vacation.

  Obviously I’d missed a turnoff somewhere, or misread a road sign. The tall trees overhanging the road from both sides seemed to pursue me on this drive to nowhere. And now Lulu was really misbehaving.

  I pulled over onto a shoulder of the road and got her back inside the carrier. I fumbled around until I could locate the overhead lights and then consulted the maps of the area that Tony had purchased for me at the travel book store near Rockefeller Center.

  It was turning cold, and I could feel the wind slicing through the little compact. But as I studied the map, I began to feel a little better about my situation. If the small white sign telling me that I was just entering the hamlet of Hopewell was to be believed, I wasn’t really so very lost. All I had to do was focus on getting to Northampton—which apparently I had overshot by a few miles. Beth Stimson had in fact mentioned Northampton to me before I set out. She was staying at a place called Covington Center—whatever that was—which was on the outskirts of a small village called Covington, which in turn was a forty-minute drive from the larger entity of Northampton.

  Now, Northampton I knew because it was the home of Smith College, where I’d not only attended a workshop once but been guest lecturer to a group of drama students—through the good graces of my friend Amanda Avery, who was a professor in the drama department.