When the Cat's Away

by Kinky Friedman

  It sounded, to quote my pal Tom Waits, “like Jerry Lewis going down on the Titanic.”

  After the fish began to sound more like ceviche, the three figures turned from the elevator and Rambam field-stripped them with the Uzi. He stepped over the bodies, threw the switch, and pushed the down button, which sent the stiffs in the elevator to the ground floor.

  “Lingerie,” he said.

  We could hear cops in the hallway now and random shots being fired in the street. We went back into Winnie’s place and collected Ratso.

  Winnie seemed calm and cool. “You want some Red Zinger tea?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some coffee downstairs.”

  Rambam casually gave his Uzi to the dead Colombian by the doorway.

  “Illegal,” he whispered to me.

  “I see,” I said. I gave the revolver back to him.

  By the time Rambam, Ratso, and I got back to the loft, the cops were swarming all over the place. There were more crushed Colombian Dixie cups lying around than I’d thought, but, like Rambam said, they were expendable.

  I conducted a rather agonizing search for my cat, finally locating her in the closet in the bedroom. She was fine. Just a little pissed off. I gave her some tuna.

  I took out about forty-nine cups and poured coffee for anyone who wanted it. I guessed that it would be a long, tedious debriefing, or whatever they called it, and I was right.

  I got myself a cup of coffee and walked through the loft surveying the damage. It didn’t look too bad. Of course, it hadn’t looked too good to begin with.

  I was able to observe only one casualty on our side: The puppet head had taken a direct hit.

  There was one other thing I noticed that bothered me almost as much as the loss of the puppet head.

  There was no sign of the Jaguar.

  59

  Two days later, on a crisp, cold Tuesday morning, I was having breakfast with Eugene in the little Greek coffee shop at the rather obscene hour of 8 A.M. I had asked for the meeting, not the other way around. I wanted to get this Rocky-Goldberg-Estelle Beekman situation spanked and put to bed. The sooner the better. Eight o’clock in the morning was a little early for my blood, but some people work for a living and Eugene was one of them. I wanted to meet with him away from the publishing house.

  “Eugene,” I said, “I need your help.”

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  You can stop wearing that yellow knit tie, I thought. I sipped a hot cup of coffee and mulled it over. “I need someone,” I said, “on the inside, so to speak. Someone more familiar with the publishing business than I am.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Jim or Jane?”

  “I’m going to talk to everybody, but Landis is being uncooperative and Jane is the one I’m worried about.”

  “I’m worried about her, too,” said Eugene. “I gave her a manuscript over a month ago and she hasn’t finished it yet. That’s not like her.”

  “What was the manuscript?”

  “A novel I wrote.”

  “No kiddin’? What kind of novel?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody’s ever going to find out, the way things are going. If Hemingway were around today he’d probably be writing ad copy.”

  “You’re right,” I said. And he was. Van Gogh had been able to sell only one painting in his lifetime. The painting was The Red Harvest and he sold it to his brother, Theo. Good ol’ Theo. Franz Schubert’s estate at the time of his death was valued at twelve cents. He didn’t have a brother around to buy the Unfinished Symphony.

  “It’s frustrating,” said Eugene. “Jane’s just got to come to grips with reality. She’s got to realize that that cat is gone. It’s not just affecting her work—it’s affecting her mind.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was affecting my mind, too.

  Eugene did not know Goldberg. Eugene did not know Estelle Beekman. Eugene had to get to work. Fine.

  * * *

  If Eugene had not been my ideal choice for a breakfast companion, Hilton Head for brunch was worse. I had to talk to these people. The battle of the Colombian drug cartels on Sunday night had convinced me that the Kukulcan angle, the possibility that the Colombians were behind Goldberg’s and Estelle Beekman’s demises for some reason that was connected with Jane Meara’s cat, was very doubtful to say the least. Men who kill with silenced MAC-10’s, who perform Colombian neckties, who perform Colombian butterflies, would be more creatively cruel and clever than merely to cut a man’s tongue out. And it had been a sloppy job at that. I didn’t see the mark of the Jaguar there, so to speak. But who knew?

  Sunday night had also convinced me that the Baby Jesus wanted me to live for some reason. To save Jane’s life? To find Rocky? I didn’t know, but I doubted if the reason was so that I could have brunch with Hilton Head.

  I had brunch with Head in the Village. Wanted him to feel he belonged. We ate at some chic European rabbit-food place that blew in more ways than one.

  I browbeat Head about what Leila was doing coming and going from his apartment. Finally, he told me.

  “Just delivering a little shmutz,” he said. He pronounced it like “fruits.”

  “Shmutz?”

  “Cocaine,” he whispered irritably.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Shmutz.”

  It was not uncommon, I’d learned, for people to give harmless little names to very deadly, dangerous things. Ted Mann had once told me about an heiress he’d known, from some spiritually bankrupt family, who also called cocaine shmutz. She’d snort about eight grams a day and drink about four bottles of vodka. She’d destroyed her mind entirely and her very life was hanging on a thread and here she was still calling it shmutz. “I’ll just have a little shmutz.” Well, we all have our blind spots.

  The only other interesting thing that emerged from the Head brunch was that Hilton, several years before he’d come out of the closet, had dated Estelle Beekman for a while. He didn’t seem in great grief about her death. He seemed more to think it was rather pathetic.

  I wasn’t a professional checkup-from-the-neck-up kind of guy. Just your normal dime-store Jungian. But I really thought Head’s sexual evolution let him off the hook. I couldn’t see a guy who’d finally come out of the closet ever wanting to put somebody else back into it.

  60

  I had lunch back at the loft with Ratso and the cat. I’d already had two meals, if you wanted to call them that, and I was still hungry enough to eat a tofu mattress.

  Ratso and I ordered in from a Nip place he wanted to try. Several hours later it nipped us back pretty good. It was a meal that would live in infamy.

  The cat had tuna.

  Ratso and I used chopsticks. The cat did not.

  I’d always felt that the Chinese were smarter than the Japanese, and one of the arguments that I frequently used to support this thesis was that they ate Chinese food instead of Japanese food.

  “So how’d it go with Hilton?” Ratso asked, affecting a slight lisp.

  I told him.

  “Could be some clues there,” he said.

  “Your rather obsessional quest for what you call clues, my dear Ratso, can sometimes be counterproductive, not to mention tedious. What we must ask ourselves is this: If Jane Meara is the killer’s next intended victim—and I, for one, believe she is—what does that tell us? What kind of pattern presents itself?”

  “Yeah,” said Ratso, “but what about Estelle and Head having an affair? What about your friend Leila running cocaine to Head? What about the discrepancy over whether or not Stanley Park ever visited Jane’s office that day?”

  “Pace yourself,” I said. “These things, I think you’ll find, are what we in the business of detection commonly refer to as red herrings.”

  “I’ve heard the term,” said Ratso in a somewhat miffed tone. “What about the possible involvement of the Colombians, though? What about Carlos?”

  “That’s a dead herring,” I said. “Rats
o, when this case is solved, I don’t think the killer will be a Colombian. It’ll most likely be a normal American just like you or me. It’ll probably be an average member of the white larval middie class. Of course, we may, in a deeper sense, never find the killer. There are those of us who feel that life itself may be a red herring.”

  “Let’s not get too metaphysical,” said Ratso. I poured us each a cup of the finest Colombian coffee in the world.

  “Is perla yi-yo,” I said. “Speaking of which, where the hell’s the other perla yi-yo?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” said Ratso. “You solve the case by the weekend, I’ll tell you where in the loft I hid the perla yi-yo.”

  “You’re not asking for much, are you?”

  “Is it a deal?”

  I took another sip of Colombian coffee. I shook Ratso’s hand grimly.

  It didn’t give me a hell of a lot of time. Of course, I didn’t have to solve the damn thing by the weekend. But it would be nice.

  61

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve just got this special knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Jane Meara and an attractive friend of hers, Lori Ames, were both cooing over a McGovern-bylined article on page 1 of the Daily News. It was part two of a multipart series about how a country singer who was a close personal friend of the journalist had almost single-handedly brought about the downfall of two of the largest Colombian cocaine cartels operating in the city.

  “You’re hot shit,” said Lori Ames.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We were sitting in a restaurant on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. It was late Tuesday afternoon and I was eating lightly. Sending some Wop food down to try to straighten out the little eruption by the pesky Nips. Or maybe it was the brunch with Hilton Head that had done it. Normally, I could eat anything without getting upset. I thought of Leila. She hadn’t called in several days now. Never trust a Palestinian.

  The restaurant the three of us were in was called Luna’s and was one of the best in Little Italy. It was run by a woman named Yola and I can’t remember how many times I’d seen Ratso, on very crowded nights, walk up to the front of a long line of people waiting to get in, and wave to Yola. She’d come over and get us a table right away. The people would mutter while we spread bread with butter.

  Luna’s was also the last place Ratso and I had had dinner with our friend Mike Bloomfield, the great blues guitarist, before he died. It was also where we’d once taken my friend Dennis McKenna, who on that occasion had been a very drunken Irishman. When the capo of one of the city’s major crime families had suddenly appeared, wearing vaguely sinister Old World garb, the whole place had gone silent. That was when McKenna had called out to the man, “Nice hat!”

  “The ASPCA has been very helpful,” said Jane Meara.

  “What?” I said.

  “In trying to locate Rocky.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “If there’s a way to run her down, they ought to know it. Pardon the expression.”

  “You don’t think we’ll find her, do you?” asked Jane.

  “I think we’ll find out where Rocky is when we find the killer. We could find the killer by this weekend,” I said. Of course, Dallas could melt by this weekend.

  “Jane,” I said, “why haven’t you read Eugene’s manuscript?”

  “Oh, he told you, did he? That little brat. He’s bugging me to death about it. I’ll read it when I find out about Rocky.”

  “You may find out something you don’t want to,” I said. I thought of how Rocky might look dying in an alley, the victim of a Colombian butterfly.

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Jane.

  Lori Ames had been reading the Daily News piece while Jane and I had been yapping. Now she looked up at me and, shucking all modesty, there was admiration in her eyes.

  “You know something?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re hot shit.”

  “Don’t put me up on a pedestal,” I said.

  I’d been on the human rodeo circuit long enough to know that you couldn’t change people’s minds by telling them the truth. If McGovern’s articles had half of New York believing I was a hero who’d cleverly and courageously contrived to bring two major drug cartels to their knees, who was I to say it wasn’t true? If I’d told Lori Ames the truth of how I’d stumbled into the whole mess, she probably wouldn’t’ve believed me anyway. So I might as well enjoy the ride.

  As the three of us left Luna’s, something Sherlock Holmes once said came into my mind. Sherlock was explaining to Watson his hesitance to reveal his methods, because once he’d done so, he’d in effect demystified himself. When he revealed his methodology to his clients, they tended to be somewhat blasé about the results. They said things like “Oh, I could’ve told you that.”

  What Sherlock actually said to Watson was “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people think you have done?”

  As the weekend grew ever closer, I’d probably have to borrow a page from Sherlock. If things got really rough, I thought, maybe I’d lift the whole book.

  62

  As it evolved, I borrowed a page from Nero Wolfe before I borrowed a page from Sherlock. It was like borrowing a cup of sugar from a yesterday that never was, but if certain things had worked for Sherlock and Mr. Wolfe, why not for the Kinkster? Indeed.

  The problem was that I was not a fictional person and I was not dealing with fictional people. When you work with flesh and blood, as God probably found out on day eight, things tend to break down a little. In real life, Cinderella tires of the prince and has an affair with the boy who comes to clean the swimming pool. In real life, Sleeping Beauty has insomnia. Of course, on the other hand, the Village was one of the few places, outside of certain dense forests in Ireland, where fairies could still often be seen. Sometimes they’d even grant you a wish. Like get out of your way so you could park your car.

  Late Tuesday night, after a couple of shots of Jameson, I told Ratso my plan. He was somewhat skeptical, but every Jesus needs a Doubting Thomas to sort of keep him on his toes. Not that I thought I was Jesus, of course. I was having enough trouble with Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe.

  “Here’s the plan,” I told Ratso. “Thursday night at eight o’clock we invite all the principals in the case here to the loft. The Parks, Head, Jane, Landis, Eugene, and maybe a special guest or two. We’ll also have Cooperman here. We’ll have Pete Myers cater the affair. You with me so far?”

  “Sure,” said Ratso. “It’s the only invitation I’ve gotten all week.”

  “Okay, now we get these people over here—”

  “What if they don’t come?”

  “Oh, they’ll come all right. Not showing up would amount to a tacit confession of guilt. Besides, who the hell are they? George Jones? Greta Garbo? Of course they’ll show. They wouldn’t dare not show. Anyway, when they get here, in the manner of Nero Wolfe we sit them all down, serve food and drinks, and then, with a little incisive probing and a little normal human interaction, we’ll get some interesting results.

  “Now, I’ve got some work to do myself tomorrow, so I’d appreciate it if you’d call the list and get the whole thing set up.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” said Ratso. “You can call me a homosexual pancake chef, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be your male social secretary.”

  “You can’t very well expect Nero Wolfe himself to make the calls. Our guests would find it highly unsatisfactory, not to mention rather gauche. This is really quite juvenile, Archie.”

  “Archie? Who the hell’s Archie?”

  “Archie Goodwin,” I said patiently, “was Nero Wolfe’s assistant. If you read anything other than books relating to Jesus, Bob Dylan, and Hitler, you’d’ve known that.”

  “God,” said Ratso, “what a horrible cultural gap in my very being. All because I didn’t read a certain dime-novel whodunit.”

 
“It is the kind of gap,” I said, “through which a clever killer can sometimes escape.”

  I poured a healthy shot of Jameson and puffed on a cigar. Ratso walked over to the door of the loft and bolted it. “Why are you doing that?” I asked.

  “Well, Mr. Wolfe, you forget that there’s a Jaguar out there somewhere and he’s familiar with this address.”

  “Ah, but Archie, you know that for the Jaguar there are no doors.”

  “I know that,” said Ratso, “but we don’t have to make it a fucking cakewalk for him.”

  I killed the shot. I killed the light. I killed the temptation to say something to Ratso. I walked into the bedroom, put on my sarong, and went to bed. As luck would have it, I did not dream.

  63

  Wednesday morning while Ratso slept, I ran a routine search for the perla yi-yo, just in case I didn’t find the killer by the weekend. I didn’t know what I’d do with that much cocaine if I found it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted any amount of cocaine. But I knew it was there somewhere in the loft. It was kind of like finding the afikomen.

  I didn’t find anything but an old letter I never sent to a broad I never really got to know. Nothing lost. A lot of things in life fall behind dressers and get lost in the cobwebs and we don’t even know the difference. Of course, there’s a lot of hip spiders walking around somewhere.

  At 10 A.M., the time all good agents should be in their offices, I lifted the blower on the left and posted a call to Lobster.