The Man Who Understood Cats

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  Much later he pulled into the doctors’ parking lot at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and parked where he could keep an eye on the Jaguar. He took the lid off the last plastic coffee cup and threw it on the dashboard, where there were already three others. On the floor there were two empty fast-food bags and the three empty cups. Thinnes sipped his coffee and yawned.

  What a hell of a way for a man to spend his working hours, he thought, sitting on the base of his spine, staring at the only sign in the city that motorists paid any attention to: LINCOLN TOWING.

  He wondered when, exactly, it had started to go all gray. He’d used to use the time he spent on stakeouts putting the case together. It still went together, somehow, but now he spent most of the time fighting off the sandman. Cops called it burnout; he wondered how a shrink would classify it.

  The restaurant’s plush waiting area had a long line and a bar to pacify the waiting diners. A uniformed bartender presided at the bar, and an officious maître d’ guarded the restaurant proper. Through the doorway, Thinnes could see Caleb sitting with friends at a very good table.

  Doors near the bar were labeled MEN and LADIES. As Thinnes made a beeline for the men’s room, the maître d’ hurried to head him off. Thinnes flashed his star; the maître d’ backed off, allowing him to dodge into the restroom.

  Fifteen

  Uptown. Dumping ground for the lighter-skinned unwanted—dispossessed Native Americans, Hispanic and Asian immigrants, the elderly poor, alcoholics and other addicts, the mentally and physically handicapped. It was an area of seedy bars, cheap stores, trashy streets and weedy empty lots, a few short light years from the Gold Coast.

  Caleb only half noticed the surroundings as he negotiated Wilson Avenue, until he had to brake to avoid a thin black man in jogging attire who dodged from behind a double-parked van to run in place while he waited for a break in oncoming traffic. Bright letters on his shirt proclaimed NAPA VALLEY WINO—LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO DRINK CHEAP CHAMPAGNE.

  Caleb grinned and mentally told the man, you got that right. He caught the fellow’s eye, and the man flashed a peace sign and a smile that showed a gap between his top front incisors.

  Serendipity Street, Caleb thought, but as he read the come-ons that cluttered the storefronts in English and Spanish on either side of Broadway, he sobered. Life in Uptown is too cheap for the good stuff. Buy a piece of the American dream, ten dollars down, ten dollars a month. And if you end up paying five hundred dollars for a two-hundred-dollar TV, nobody gives a damn. Caveat emptor. But how’re you gonna keep ’em south of the border after they’ve seen VCRs?

  He turned left onto a side street, then right into the alley behind the hospice.

  Spaulding House had been a mansion in the twenties. Over the years, its wide lawns had been subdivided, its white stone walls blackened with grime, its ornate wrought iron fence had been scrapped, replaced with chain link. The former home of the wealthy had become a place for some of the city’s most wretched poor to live, where some came to die. The house was home to AIDS victims who had nowhere else to go.

  Caleb worked there four nights a week. He’d volunteered to treat their heads but gradually discovered that they needed more: jobs, housing, nursing care, help with housework and shopping and meals. He’d been revolted at first—they were an unlovely bunch with their purple Kaposi’s blotches, open, suppurating herpes sores, and concentration-camp emaciation—but he’d gotten past the surface features to the human persons, and he found their care rewarding. He’d started small, emptying bedpans, changing sheets. Now, he did what was needed, gave them rides, advice, a shoulder to cry on, sometimes a hug, occasionally money.

  He found that no matter what he did for them, they were always testing. They had to see if he’d abandon them, as their friends and families had. To that end, they were always needling.

  “What about you, Jack? How long before you come in here and say, ‘Fellow lepers?’”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Jack’s a saint. Saint Damien. You know none of them has a sex life.”

  “You’ll make someone a great wife someday, Jack.”

  “I’m still trying to figure your angle, Jack. This some kind of research project?”

  “He’s a masochist, that’s it.”

  Very few—only Manny, really—had come to terms with it. Even the suicidal ones feared it and spoke of it with euphemisms: the Undertoad, the Green Ripper, the Big Sleep, or “having your number pulled.” He thought of Finley. Young. Healthy. Dead. He wished he could get them to stop wasting their lives grieving for what they’d lost and get on with them, stop pushing the river.

  This evening no one was home except Rafe, the house mother, a huge black man, silent and belligerent, who’d come two years earlier with a wife dying of the disease. After he’d buried her, he’d stayed. He smiled when he called them fags and gave them excellent care. Caleb never touched him. Rafe hated to be touched, except by the sickest and most feeble. The well ones respected his wishes—those who didn’t got decked. He had on several occasions been found harboring stray animals in the basement, and he had twice brought home human strays. “Jus’ pickin’ up bizniz,” he’d said, to which Brian retorted, “You and Jack!”

  Brian was the neediest of the lot, the most sarcastic and the most defensive. He was also probably the healthiest. Brian was out for the evening with Paul and Bill and Lenny.

  Rafe was putting the dishes in the dishwasher when Caleb came in. He said, “Donald’s gone again,” without taking his eyes off the twelve-inch TV next to the sink.

  “I know,” Caleb told him. “I saw him earlier at the hospital, when I did rounds.” He studied him. He wasn’t really watching TV. “You look tired. Why don’t you take the night off?”

  Rafe yawned. “I am tired. But who’s gonna put these chumps to bed? Briggs din’ show. An’ Maria’s got a sick kid.”

  “I think we could manage without you for one night. Where are they, anyway?”

  “Went to a film.” He looked at Caleb out of the corner of his eye. “Think Donald’s comin’ back this time?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Rafe was silent for a moment—fighting his emotions, Caleb suspected. Finally he got himself in hand enough to say, “I thought, after Leona died, I wouldn’t let no one get close again. ’Specially no fag.” He swallowed. Caleb waited. Rafe sounded angry as he continued, “But that boy…” He shook his head and looked at Caleb as if defying him to comment on his lack of self-control.

  Caleb gave him a bleak smile. “Welcome to the human condition.” Rafe glared suspiciously. “Do you feel like talking about it?”

  “No!” He must have realized how defensive it sounded because he added, more casually, “Maybe I’ll just go out for a beer.”

  “You might want to stop in and talk to Donald.”

  Rafe shook his head. “Wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. Just hold his hand. Or say good-bye. This may be your last chance.” Rafe looked at him sharply. Caleb continued. “His mother finally came by. She was terrified, but even more afraid he’d die before she saw him.”

  “You didn’t have nothin’ to do with that, I bet.”

  Caleb gave him a half blank who-me? look, and Rafe laughed. As he was going out, Caleb said, “Don’t let them give you any BS about keeping visiting hours.”

  He spent the hour, after Rafe left and before the others returned, playing orderly. He changed Manny’s sheets again and wrote a letter for him and gave him his medication, noting it on his chart. He kept his mind strictly in the present. Some things you practice in your head, rehearse, but certain things it didn’t pay to think about too much. The dreary and the dreaded things. Thinking ahead was like going through them twice. Manny’s future would be awful enough when it arrived, but being with him in the present was pleasant enough. He hadn’t let anything destroy his joie de vivre. He seemed to count every trifle a gift, from the crystal prism Rafe’d hung in his window to cat
ch the sun to clean sheets when he was too weak to make it to the bathroom. He’d explained it to Caleb once.

  “There isn’t any real time out there. For us there’s only our subjective time that’s sometimes slower but usually faster than that of healthy people. And this death sentence—for that’s what the diagnosis of AIDS has come to mean—is what puts us out of sync with the rest of world. Each of us has a dream, or a picture of himself in the future—doing things, having a life—that’s threatened by the disease. That’s what’s so frightening—that there’s not enough time. And they—the healthy ones—seem to have more of it than we. The inequity paralyzes us with rage. We get so angry, so afraid of losing that mythical future that we can’t live in the time we do have.”

  As Caleb had suspected.

  Manny had discovered how to stop time by living in the present.

  Caleb stayed with him until he fell asleep. When he came downstairs the others had returned.

  Brian greeted him characteristically. “Hey Jack, don’t you know there’s no future treating fags? No money in it either.”

  “Ah, but it keeps me out of bars.”

  “You must be getting hard up.” Brian shot a look at the two young men sitting together on the couch. “But around here that’s safer than getting a hard-on.”

  Caleb understood. The two young men, Bill and Lenny, were in love, a situation made more poignant, desperate, melodramatic by their disease. Most of the others were jealous, especially Brian.

  Paul said so, indirectly. “Brian, why do you have to be such an asshole!”

  “Someone has to keep all you butt-fuckers from getting too smug.”

  Paul made a gesture of exasperation and stalked out.

  As Brian watched him go he raised his voice to ask, “Jack, if Paul asked you to help him go straight, would you?” Paul slammed the door behind him.

  Caleb responded in a normal tone. “Why are you asking?”

  Brian gave him a grin that said plainly he was asking to make trouble. Caleb got up and followed Paul into the kitchen. Paul was leaning over the sink, sobbing. Caleb walked over and put an arm around him.

  Paul said, “Donald’s dying. Donald’s dying and that asshole’s making jokes!”

  “Everyone deals with it in his own way.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. He doesn’t give a damn.”

  Caleb gently steered him to a chair and sat him down, massaging his neck and shoulders, listening, not talking. Paul gradually began to relax. His sobs trailed off, though tears kept leaking down his face.

  “I don’t know why I’m so upset. I hardly know him,” he said finally. Caleb kept working on his shoulders. “Sometimes I’m not sure I know me. I mean, who am I?”

  “Who do you feel like?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m a freak—just a walking disease. Whoever I was died when I got—when I found out I had it.”

  “We could talk about it.”

  Paul looked grateful and relieved but shook his head. “Maybe some other time. I can’t deal with anything more tonight.”

  Caleb nodded.

  When he went back in the other room, Brian raised his eyebrows and said, “What would Fraud say, Jack?”

  “What do you think Freud would say, Brian?”

  Sixteen

  The rear of Spaulding House had an eight-foot cyclone fence around it with barbed wire on top. A sign next to the gate said PRIVATE PROPERTY—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Inside the fence, near a back door lit by a single bulb, Caleb’s Jaguar had been parked for several hours. And Thinnes had been parked in the alley behind the fence, where he could see the rear and one side of the building, for just as long. From time to time he searched the windows with binoculars. For variety, he amused himself by counting rats in the ally and scouting uncurtained windows in the area for exhibitionists.

  Suddenly a police patrol car turned up the alley, shining its spotlight on Thinnes’s car, and one of its occupants used the loudspeaker to tell Thinnes: “Get out of the car and keep your hands where we can see them.”

  Thinnes obeyed cautiously, leaving his car door open, keeping one eye on the squad, the other on the hospice. The two officers got out and approached him with hands on their guns. The cop who’d been driving said, “See some ID?”

  Thinnes carefully took out his wallet and flashed his star.

  The cop said, “Sorry, Detective.”

  “What’s up?” his partner demanded.

  At that moment, Caleb came out of the building with another man. Thinnes turned quickly, putting his head down and his hands on the hood of the car and spreading his feet. “Guy just came out of the building’s the one I’m tailing,” he said tersely, “and I don’t want him to make me. Make like arresting officers.”

  The driver said, “What…?”

  The other cop got the idea and quickly but unobtrusively pulled his gun, pointing it at Thinnes. “Frisk him,” he told his partner as Caleb and his companion watched. The driver caught on and did a creditable job of patting Thinnes down without “finding” his gun. When he finished, his partner told him, “Okay. Cuff him.”

  He cuffed Thinnes’s hands behind his back, then closed the Chevy’s door, and the two officers bundled him into the back of the squad, keeping themselves between Thinnes and their two observers. Then they got in the squad and backed it out of the alley and pulled past the building on the corner. Thinnes shifted around and presented his cuffed hands to the cop in the passenger’s seat before the car stopped, and as soon as the cuffs dropped, he was pushing the door. “Take it easy,” the driver told Thinnes as he got out to open the door. “If your subject takes off, we can pull him over for you.”

  “My suspect. He’s still just a suspect. And thanks, but that would make him suspicious.”

  Signaling the coppers to wait, Thinnes peered cautiously around the building in time to see Caleb get into the Jag. The man with him opened the gate, and after Caleb drove away, he closed it and went back in the building. Thinnes turned to the squad and told the driver, “I owe you guys one. Thanks.” Then he hurried back to his car to resume the chase.

  The tail ended where it began. As Caleb pulled his Jaguar into his garage, Thinnes continued past the building to avoid being obvious and waited half a block down, next to a hydrant. But it seemed Caleb was done for the day. Thinnes waited another hour, then went home.

  Rhonda was asleep when Thinnes came in. He started to undress and paused to look at her longingly. If he’d had to describe the way she made him feel, he would have said light-headed. The way you feel hyperventilating. She’d always had that effect on him, and he’d never been unfaithful, never wanted another woman.

  He sighed and wondered how they’d separated so completely. She’d been his best friend when he was writing home from Nam. She’d been the beacon to sight on for the way back. Her letters were little packages of sunlight keeping the darkness away. (He’d read Conrad; he understood—better after years of police work—about the darkness within.) But he’d had more time then, and no close buddies. Now there was the police fraternity and the customary silence.

  Thinnes finished undressing and crawled into bed without waking her.

  Seventeen

  Thinnes stood in front of Miss Baynes’ door, holding his I.D. up for inspection through the security peephole. The door opened on Ms. Alicia Baynes, Caucasian, five seven, 130 pounds, blond. Typical yuppie career woman in her twenties with a CPA, working on a M.R.S. She’d been crying. Her face was puffy, her eyes swollen as she stood aside to let him in.

  “You heard about Allan Finley?” he asked.

  “Dr. Caleb, Allan’s psychiatrist, told me last night.” She paused to fight back tears. “That’s why I called in sick again today. I couldn’t face…” She swallowed, getting herself together. She pointed to a chair and sat on the edge of the couch.

  Thinnes took the chair. “Did he seem upset or depressed lately?”

  “No! Allan didn’t kill
himself.”

  “Dr. Caleb told you that?”

  “No, but he did say Allan wasn’t suicidal. He said you were investigating his death. I mean, the police were.”

  “Did Finley have any enemies?”

  “No.” She paused, then added, “He wasn’t very outgoing—he didn’t make friends terribly easily—but no one hated him.”

  “Why did you call in sick Friday?”

  She blushed. “We had a date Thursday night. When he didn’t show up, I thought he’d stood me up. I was embarrassed to face him at the office.”

  “You and he were close?”

  “We went out sometimes.”

  “He have any other girlfriends?”

  “I don’t know. We were just friends.”

  “Did he ever moonlight?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did he own a gun?”

  “Oh, no. Allan would be the last—”

  “What did he tell you about Dr. Caleb?”

  “Just that he was helping him learn to relax around people. Allan’s always been a bit uptight.” She remembered Finley was dead and almost sobbed. “Was uptight. I just can’t believe it!”

  “Do you know what accounts he’d been working on lately?”

  “Allan never discussed his accounts,” she said sharply, then added sheepishly, “but I know he was working on the Margolis books Thursday because he had to go to Marina City.”

  “Anything else you can think of I should know about?”

  She shook her head.

  “One last question: was he right- or left-handed?”

  She sniffed and almost smiled. “He was nearly ambidextrous, but basically left-handed. He used to tease that because the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body, only southpaws were in their right minds.”

  Eighteen

  Thinnes and Crowne pulled into the canyon between the Marina City Office Building and the twin corn cobs of Marina Towers, and Thinnes parked the unmarked car in the no-parking zone in front of the doors. He flipped an OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS sign onto the dash, and as they entered the building, Crowne filled him in on Margolis from information in his notebook.