“Tell me the truth, Swede, do you want me to go upstate again?”
“Would you, Tony? I thought you were very down on my crime-solving abilities lately.”
“Watch what I do, not what I say. Sure, I’ll try going up again. But why don’t you find a closer Desolate Swamp? Like around the corner.” He laughed at his own retort.
“What about Central Park?”
There was something nonjoking in my voice. “Are you serious, Swede?”
Was I serious? Was it worthwhile to follow Jack Tyre into the park . . . his beautiful Siamese cat draped over his shoulders? Was there a Desolate Swamp in Central Park? And if so, why would he bring his cat there? For the same reason that Jill Bonaventura sent her cat there?
“I remember you telling me, Swede, about one of the brothers—one of the last victims—who used to take his cat into the park.”
“To the Ramble, to be specific,” I replied.
“I thought only drug dealers and cruising gays hung out there.”
Tony was showing his age. Years ago, the Ramble had had a terrible reputation. It was a dangerous place to walk around in—isolated, heavily wooded, and filled with all kinds of desperate characters. But it had been cleaned up for the bird-watchers, although once in a while one read about the body of a French tourist being found there.
“The Ramble is a big place, Swede, and I never heard of a place called Desolate Swamp there.”
“His girlfriend told me Jack Tyre went to a cave.”
Tony whooped with sarcasm. “Right, Swede, and it was there that he turned into Batman . . . no, Mouseman.”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
His face turned grim. “Listen, Swede. I will go where you want me to go. That’s what I signed on for. All I want you to know and admit is that you’re putting more and more hope on facts that are becoming more and more obscure and unimportant. That’s all I’ve been trying to tell you the last few days. That’s all I meant when I said you were going around the bend.”
“All we’re going to do is take a walk in the park, Tony, and trace the route Jack Tyre used to take on those bucolic weekends his ex-lover told me about. That’s all, Tony.”
Then I dug out of the closet a packet of maps and came up with one I had bought many years ago. It was titled: “The Ramble: A Central Park Walk.” And it had a great deal of historical and natural lore as well. I read to Tony the section on the cave.
“‘Under the bridge is a manmade cave, which has been closed for safety reasons since the 1930s. For many years you could row right up to the cave and enter by boat or descend steps cut into the slope beside the cave to get inside. Today the inlet leading to the cave is no longer navigable, it has been silted in with soil washed down the slopes.’”
I handed Tony the map. He looked at it for a few minutes, turning it over in his hands as if it was some complex oceanographic chart.
“Why would Jack Tyre take his cat to play in front of or on top of a sealed cave?”
“I don’t know, Tony, that’s what we’ll find out.”
“How desperate you are becoming, Swede.”
“I thought you liked desperation, Tony,” I chided him.
“Only in bed,” he replied.
“Go home now . . . I mean go to your hotel. Meet me tomorrow morning in front of the statue at Fifty-Eighth and Fifth.”
“Which statue? What time?”
“I think it’s William Tecumseh Sherman. Make it ten o’clock.”
“You’re mad at me, Swede.”
“Well, you know how it is with us desperate people,” I replied sardonically. He kissed me once gently on my neck and left. I was so weary I didn’t know what to do next, so I just sat and stared at the map of the Ramble.
Chapter 17
On the one hand it was absurd, and on the other hand it was profound. I mean, only an out-of-work actress with a very strong background in fantasy could have gotten upset at noticing a relationship between Tony Basillio and Alice Nestleton on one hand, and Jack Tyre and Georgina Kulaks on the other hand. Only an out-of-work actress could have discerned the powerful (chuckle) connection between a bouquet of garbage and a bouquet of leaves.
As I was dressing that morning to meet Tony, I knew quite well that I was grasping at straws. So what? Keep grasping!
My head was in a strange place. I was alternately bitter and hopeful . . . nasty and gentle . . . constricted and loose. One moment I prayed that Tony would go back to his family, and the next moment I desired him. One moment I was absolutely gleeful that Judy Mizener had fired me from Retro, and the next moment it was the biggest failure and disappointment in my life. One moment I knew that I held the secret of the Toy Mouse Murders in my head and heart, and the next moment I was a billion miles from even the slightest comprehension of the case.
I stared at myself in the mirror.
I looked strange. Not poorly. Just strange. Or maybe a tiny bit crooked. I laughed. My head was being consumed by the murders. By crooked pictures on walls. By desolate swamps real and imagined.
He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house.
My God! What did it all mean? What was nonsense and what was not? I suddenly and savagely began to brush my long hair.
***
Tony was already there when I arrived. He was not in good humor, obviously angry at himself that he had allowed me to rope him into yet another wild-goose chase. We entered the park at Fifth Avenue and then headed toward the West Drive.
It was a glorious spring morning. Very quickly, all our bad feelings dissipated, and we joined arms and walked like we were sashaying lovers. It was so nice, in fact, that I asked Tony if he would mind taking the walking tour of the Ramble with me as outlined in the map I had.
He smiled at me slyly. “I agree with you, Swede. I think we should prolong this cave nonsense as long as possible. Can you imagine what will happen if one of those park cops asks us what we’re doing?”
“Just tell the truth, Tony,” I replied, “just tell him we’re looking for an abandoned cave in which a dead man took his abandoned cat to play in some desolate swamp.” It was one of the most absurd things I have ever heard, even if I said it. We both started laughing. It was a fine lark now. I opened the map.
“We have to go back east for a while. The walking tour starts at the Loeb Boathouse.”
“Lead on,” Tony cried out extravagantly.
Like retarded tourists, we joyously followed the walking tour. First there was the large hemlock, the gateway to the Ramble; then the heavily wooded rock ledge called the Point; then the enormous sink of willows called the Oven. On and on we went, consulting the map every ten feet so we didn’t stray from the tour.
The deeper we went into the Ramble, the more isolated we became except for the occasional bird-watcher or homeless person, who passed us without comment.
“How are we doing?” Tony asked, stopping dead in his tracks and signaling that he truly needed a rest.
“Our next stop,” I said pedagogically, “is number six—the Rustic Shelter. Then the Gill or Spring.”
“And then?”
“And then the Lost Waterfall and then the Lookout.”
“Lord . . . when will it all end?”
“Number nine—the cave. Right after the Lookout. Hold on, Tony, we’re almost there.”
We started walking again and passed a whole colony of homeless who seemed to have established themselves on a wooded slope.
I stopped suddenly.
“What’s the matter?” Tony asked.
“It seems that we walked over this stone bridge twice,” I replied, confused.
�
��You can’t walk over the same bridge twice,” he retorted.
“No, Tony, you have it wrong—the saying is, ‘You can’t step in the same stream twice.’ “
He laughed and kissed me. Then he turned around and leaned against the iron railing, staring out over the Central Park Lake, the shores of which were very close below us.
“Wait a minute,” he yelled out. “How about: ‘You can’t star in the same play twice’? Or: ‘You can’t climb on the same stage twice’? Or: ‘You can’t apply the same greasepaint twice’?”
“Calm down, Tony, you’re getting out of control,” I cautioned him, studying the map carefully. Suddenly I laughed out loud.
“What’s the matter with you, Swede?”
“Tony, according to this map, we aren’t lost. In fact, this iron railing, the one you’re leaning on, is right over the top of the cave.”
We both leaned over the iron railing. We were perched over a very large rock structure.
“The opening must be lower,” Tony said. We climbed down the side carefully. It was steep but accessible. When we reached the bottom, we could see that one of the sides consisted of poured concrete.
“That must have been the opening at one time,” I said, kicking the concrete closure gently.
“Let’s just walk around it,” Tony said. We started to circumnavigate the rock cave. The underbrush became thicker.
“The damn thing is enormous,” Tony muttered, kicking at the twisted shrubs. The face of the rock was sheer. There didn’t seem to be any other opening at all.
“Maybe crazy Jack used to come here just to sit on it or climb it. Maybe his cat was a rock climber.” I ignored Tony’s comment and kept moving. We were halfway around it when we saw a pile of beer cans and garbage near the base. We stopped and looked up.
“Swede! Look there!” I stared up at the rock. About twenty feet from the ground was a large dark gash. “It could be a shadow or it could be an opening,” I said.
Carefully, slowly, the twigs cutting into our hands and faces, we climbed the steep rock. It was an opening . . . but one so narrow that we had to squeeze in with great effort. Tony lit a match. Directly inside were more beer cans and crushed fast-food containers. The homeless had flung their garbage through the opening.
“It looks like it goes deeper,” Tony said. He lit another match and we followed the wall.
About twenty yards from that narrow entrance the cave opened up into a large high chamber. One could feel breezes as if the rock was porous.
The deeper we walked, the lighter it became, but it was impossible to tell from where the light entered.
The chamber narrowed and made a left turn; became so narrow that Tony and I could not walk side by side; we had to walk single file.
Then the passageway widened again, but Tony stopped short so suddenly I tripped against him.
“We have company, Swede,” he said.
I stepped past him and stared at the far wall of the chamber. I could hear Tony pull in his breath.
It was a huge bizarre wall painting of a woman in a long white robe.
She had the head of a cat.
“There’s more of them, Swede! Look!” Tony whispered.
My eyes moved along the wall. There were sixteen such paintings. All of them alike except for the head. There was a different cat head on each painting.
“Let’s get out of here, Swede, this is very spooky,” Tony urged, pulling at my arm. I shook him off. My body was literally tingling from what I was looking at.
“Don’t you know who you’re looking at, Tony?”
“No.”
“You are looking at Bast, the Egyptian goddess who was the personification of the gentle and life-giving heat of the sun. The cat was sacred to Bast and she is usually depicted cat-headed.”
A hundred points of light seemed to be bursting in my head; a hundred memories. It was like a scroll being unraveled right in front of me.
“How many murders were there, Tony?” I asked.
“Seventeen.”
“Right. But only sixteen paintings. The last two victims, the Tyre brothers, had only one cat. Seventeen victims, sixteen cats, sixteen paintings.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Swede?”
I was becoming so excited I could hardly reply. Things were falling into place like a pinball machine. Disparate elements were joining. I had never felt such intellectual excitement in my life.
“Tony,” I finally said, “walk over to the third painting.”
“Why?”
“Just do it!”
He walked over to it, and even though there was light in the chamber, he lit two matches and held them together, stretching his arm high up along the painting.
“Do you know who you are looking at now?” I asked him, my voice quivering from the excitement I felt.
“A lady with the head of a cat.”
“That’s the face and head of Jill Bonaventura’s white cat, Missy.”
Tony snuffed out the matches and stepped back. He looked confused. Then he said, “Third painting, third victim, third cat.”
“Right, Tony!”
Then he said, excited: “Then the last painting has to be a Siamese cat head because the two brothers had a Siamese cat.” He started to turn in place, laughing and whooping like a banshee, the sounds echoing off the walls and assailing our ears. Suddenly he stopped acting stupid. He looked at me blankly. “But so what, Swede? What the hell does this mean?”
I ignored his question. And asked him: “Do you have any cash on you?”
“Sure.”
“Then let’s take a cab down to Retro.”
“Anything you say, Swede.”
Slowly, carefully, still dazed by the splendor, force, and perplexity of the wall paintings, we made our way out of the cave.
Chapter 18
The ugly clock on the wall read 2:20 in the afternoon. Tony and I had now been waiting for Judy Mizener for more than two hours.
Tony was nervous and angry at being kept waiting. I really didn’t mind it. I had a lot to think about . . . to sift through. The finding of those remarkable cave paintings had been a massive shock to my nervous system. There was too much to think about. There were too many possibilities that had suddenly opened up. I was like a bloodhound that, after days of futile hunting in a forest that yields no scents, is suddenly given dozens of scent clues as the hunted’s clothing begins to turn up piece after piece.
“Where did you work, Swede?”
“In a cubicle down the hall, near the computer room.”
“This place is depressing.”
I nodded in agreement and closed my eyes. The chair was uncomfortable. The cat goddess, Bast, kept popping in and out of my consciousness . . . as if it was a fashion show . . . with each reappearance on the runway assuming a different cat face.
Finally Judy Mizener came out of her office and stared balefully at both of us.
“I really am very busy,” she said.
“It’s important.”
“And I prefer not to have ex-employees of Retro wandering around. Couldn’t this have been done on the phone?”
“Not really,” I said, standing up and holding my ground.
“Okay. Come in.”
Tony and I walked into her small cramped office. One wall was piled high with different-color files.
I introduced Tony to her. She nodded and slid back behind her desk.
“Now, what can I do for you?” she asked.
I started to speak and then stopped. It was important to be careful. I had to get Judy Mizener into that cave now. But if I was to speak about an ancient sun goddess with the head of a cat painted on a cave in Central Park, she would think I was crazy. She had to see Bast her
self—in the cave . . . she had to see the faces of the victims’ cats.
“We are very close to breaking the case,” I said simply.
She stared at me, not answering, as if trying to evaluate my sanity, my honesty. Then she stared at Tony . . . up and down . . . as if evaluating him as an employee.
“Is that right?” she finally responded coolly, archly.
I pressed on. “We found some evidence . . . the most important evidence that has been uncovered so far.”
“Where is it?”
“It isn’t portable. You’ll have to come with us and bring a camera.”
“What is it, specifically?”
“It’s very hard to describe.”
“Try.”
“I’d rather not. I’d rather you came with us now.”
She exploded. “Look! I can’t just run out of my office every time someone comes in with a crazy scheme.”
“You better go with us,” Tony said quietly.
“Is your friend threatening me?” Judy asked me, startled.
“He’s just being helpful.”
The phone on her desk rang. She picked it up quickly and spoke a few words . . . something about a computer run . . . then slammed the receiver down.
“How long do you think it will take?” she asked me.
“We’ll take a cab outside. Figure two hours.”
She leaned back in her chair, picked up a pencil, and began to drum it on top of the phone. It was bizarre. I felt like a director trying to coax a great star to interpret a certain role with more precision. But I really didn’t know enough about her personality to push the right buttons. Should I pray to the sun goddess Bast? Even more absurd. Why hadn’t I made this woman my friend from the very beginning? Why hadn’t Judy Mizener and I been friends?
Tony fixed the problem in a lunatic way. The strain of the scene was just too much for him, so he leapt up and went into one of his lunatic impersonations, this time of a Southern Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher. “Sister,” he yelled at Judy Mizener, “I’m gonna set you free . . . I’m gonna set you free . . . I’m gonna break the prison bars for thee.” Judy Mizener stared at me as if my companion had gone crazy and I should control him.
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