A Cat Tells Two Tales Read online

  “They couldn’t just have picked this house by chance,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is the one house for miles around that a thief wouldn’t enter. It’s run-down. It looks like a slum compared to all the houses around it.” My comment irritated him.

  “Look,” he said, speaking to me very simply, as if I were some kind of idiot, “it could have been a random break-in or it could have been premeditated. We’ll never know until we find them, and we’ll never find them if we can’t trace what they stole, and we can’t trace that stuff if Mrs. Starobin doesn’t give us that inventory list.”

  We sat together in silence until Jo came down again. I said good-bye to her, nodded to the detective, and started back to the cottage to collect the cats and the luggage. The cab would wait for me on the main road.

  When I reached the door of the cottage, I heard the most peculiar sound. At first I thought it came from within—that the cats were carrying on. But it came from outside, from the rear of the cottage, in the clump of pin oaks. It sounded like a hurt, crazed animal.

  What could it be? I didn’t really want to find out. There was nothing about the cottage inside or out that I could approach without fear. Harry’s corpse had guaranteed that. But I couldn’t leave it either. The sound was too pathetic.

  I started moving around the cottage carefully, quietly. The wind was picking up, scattering dry twigs. The sounds stopped. I stopped. They started again.

  When I turned the corner, I realized what I was hearing—someone weeping so hard that the whole body seemed to resonate. It was the stable girl, Ginger. Her hands were braced against the back of the cottage as if she were too weak to stand without support.

  She heard me approaching, but she couldn’t compose herself. I stopped two feet or so away. I had never seen anyone weep like that.

  I didn’t know what to do. But I had to do something. I placed my hand on her wrist and squeezed. “They’ll find the kittens, Ginger,” I said.

  She screamed at me, gasping for breath: “Fuck the kittens. I hate the kittens,” and then she just collapsed.

  I knelt beside her, trying to cradle her body against me. But she was thrashing about.

  “Harry,” she started to whisper again and again with a desperate persistence: “Harry, Harry, oh God, Harry.”

  Then she grabbed me and held on. We huddled there on the ground in the dark cold. Finally, she started recovering her composure.

  Her behavior perplexed me. Why had she sought out an isolated place to weep? Jo was weeping. Weeping was acceptable; almost demanded. A much-loved man had been murdered. Obviously Ginger didn’t want someone to see her weeping. But who? And why?

  I helped her up. She couldn’t speak, but merely nodded her thanks. It had to be Jo Starobin from whom she wanted to hide her horrendous grief. But why hide grief from Jo? Jo, above all, would understand.

  Unless, of course, it was the grief of a lover.

  As I walked Ginger to the front of the cottage, holding tightly to her arm, I realized with astonished certainty that this young girl and old Harry Starobin had been lovers.

  4

  At six in the morning, four days after Harry’s murder, I heard from Jo Starobin again. Her call woke me from a deep sleep. As usual, at that time in the morning my apartment was freezing. As usual, Bushy was on the pillow next to me. Pancho was somewhere else, plotting his next escape attempt.

  “Am I speaking to Alice Nestleton?”

  That’s what I heard when I picked up the phone. For some reason, in my sleepy state, it seemed to be one of the funniest things I had ever heard. Is this Alice Nestleton? Is this Joan of Arc? Is this Ti-Grace Atkinson?

  My laughter irritated the caller.

  “Maybe I have the wrong number. I’m looking for Alice Nestleton.”

  “This is she,” I answered, which seemed even funnier.

  “Alice, it’s Jo. Jo Starobin.”

  I felt stupid and ashamed. “Jo, I’m sorry. I just got up.”

  “I’m sorry to call so early. I’m in Manhattan, at the Hotel Tudor.”

  “On Forty-second Street?”

  “Yes. Can you meet me this morning? At nine o’clock?” Her voice was hurried, demanding, hopeful.

  Did I have any appointments? I couldn’t remember any. I said that I would meet her.

  “At the Chemical Bank,” she said, “on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Third Avenue.”

  And then she hung up abruptly. I listened dumbly to the dial tone. Then I replaced the receiver and pulled the blankets around me. I was glad she had called. In the days since the murder I had tried desperately to think of some gesture or some way to tell her that I understood her grief. But nothing had seemed authentic enough, so I had done nothing—not a card, not a flower, not a call; nothing. Now, at least, I could be of some assistance. Maybe she wanted a shoulder to cry on. Maybe she wanted to tell me about Harry.

  The phone rang again as I was dressing. It was Carla Fried.

  “Are you back in Montreal?” I asked.

  “No,” she laughed, “Atlanta. Something came up. You know how it is with us famous theater people.”

  I hoped she wasn’t going to press me about the part. I had other things on my mind.

  “Look, Alice, I just wanted to tell you how wonderful it was seeing you and talking to you. I could talk to you for five days straight.”

  “Like old times,” I said.

  “Like old good times,” she corrected, and then said breathlessly, as if she was in a great hurry, “Look, Alice, I don’t know my schedule. But if I pass through New York on my way back, let’s get together again.”

  I agreed. She hung up. Given the horror of what had happened in Old Brookville, the idea of my old friend Carla Fried dashing across the country like a Hollywood version of a theatrical entrepreneur seemed somewhat frivolous.

  I left my apartment, which is on Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, at eight o’clock and walked slowly uptown. It was one of those peculiar days between Christmas and New Year’s Day when people seemed exhausted and confused. A black teenager’s boom box blared some rap song that I foolishly thought for a moment was an updated version of a Christmas carol.

  I arrived at the bank around eight forty-five. Jo was standing there like a lost child, wearing a pair of old-fashioned earmuffs.

  “We’re early. We’ll wait,” Jo said.

  It had never dawned on me that Jo really wanted to go into the bank. I had thought it was just a place to meet. But she obviously was waiting for the bank to open. She looked terrible—exhausted, nervous, confused. She grabbed hold of my arm and held it.

  When the bank doors opened, I followed Jo inside and down a flight of stairs to a large glass door obviously locked from the inside. Jo rang a buzzer. The door opened and an elderly man wearing a gray jacket with a white carnation ushered us into the safe-deposit-vault area. Jo signed a slip and handed him a key. He vanished into the vault area and returned quickly with a large steel box, which he carried toward the rear of the room, Jo and me following.

  We entered a small carpeted room with three chairs and a long table. He set the box down on the table and left the room without a word, closing the door behind him.

  We just sat there and stared at the box. I didn’t understand what we were doing there.

  Finally Jo said, “I was down here yesterday to pick up Harry’s will. Do you know that it was the first time in fifteen years I had looked in the safe-deposit box?”

  “I never had one,” I replied.

  “Oh, they’re quite nice, quite functional,” Jo replied, and I caught a hint of sarcasm. Or was it bitterness?

  “Would you please open the box for me, Alice?” she asked.

  I leaned over, disengaged the latch, and lifted the heavy steel top. I straightened up quickly. Inside was more money than I had ever seen in my life. The box was stuffed with packs of hundred-dollar bills held together by rubber bands.

  “D
o you see it? Do you see it?” she asked in a hysterical whisper.

  I passed my hand over the top layer, gingerly touching the money.

  “Three hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars, Alice. Three hundred and eighty-one thousand! Where did Harry get all this money? Why didn’t he tell me? How did he get the money?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t even fantasize an answer.

  “Do you know what I think, Alice? I think this is why he was murdered. I think this is why.” She slammed the top of the box shut.

  “Have you told the police?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied abruptly. She paused, staring at me, and then said, “I was going to tell them. But I thought about it. And now I’m not. Look, Alice, Harry and I didn’t have a dime. Everything was mortgaged. We owe everybody. And I think Harry wanted this money to pay off our debts and give us the farm free and clear. Harry would want me to use the money for that. Whatever he did to get the money, I know he did it for us, and the cats, and the carriage horses. This was his Christmas present to all of us, and if I tell the police, they’re going to impound the money or do something like that or take half of it for taxes. Do you see what I mean, Alice? I’m not being a thief. I know what Harry would have wanted.”

  “He never said anything about this, Jo?” I asked skeptically.

  “Never. Not a word. I swear, Alice. Never, never, never.” Then she stood up, placed her palms on either side of her head, saying, “Do you think he robbed a bank? Poor Harry. Maybe he robbed a bank because he wanted a Christmas present for all of us. I said to him about a month ago, when we couldn’t pay the heating-oil people, that I was so sick of it I wanted to die. He just kissed me on the forehead and said I shouldn’t get upset.”

  She started to cry, then caught herself and clapped her hands together as if she was a teacher and I was a boisterous kindergarten pupil. “I want a cup of coffee, Alice. Can you take me for a cup of coffee?”

  Five minutes later we were sipping coffee from containers in the Citicorp Atrium. On the walk over, Jo had kept chattering nervously: “Have you ever seen so much money?” “Did you see the way it was packed?” “All those rubber bands. All those hundred-dollar bills!”

  As hundreds of children raced through the atrium, brought there to view the Scandinavian Christmas decorations, which hung from ceiling to floor, Jo sent me for another cup of coffee and for something sweet. I returned with a raisin Danish. She began picking off the raisins with a plastic spoon.

  “Now, listen to me, Alice Nestleton,” she said. “I called you for a reason, not just to stare at money or buy me coffee. I know a lot of people think I’m a little crazy.”

  “No one thinks that, Jo. Everyone I ever met out there loves you, Jo, just like they loved Harry,” I replied, and I meant it.

  “Well, I know why Harry was murdered now. It was for that money, right? But it doesn’t mean a thing unless we know how he got the money. Because if we know how he got it, we’ll know who wanted it. And I know how to find out who murdered poor Harry. He never threw anything away. He saved letters and bills and business cards and cat-show programs and scraps of paper. He saved everything and it’s all there and all I have to do is go through it all. But I can’t do that, Alice. I can’t see too well. And I don’t have patience. But you can come out for a few weeks, Alice—and your cats too—you can help me. I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars a day. And we can find out what Harry did and who murdered him. Can’t we do that?”

  I didn’t know what to say. If the killers had been after Harry’s cash, why hadn’t they guessed it was in a bank vault? And why kill him? Only he could get the money out. They would want him alive to extricate the cash for them. No, it had to be something else.

  Poor Jo! She looked so vulnerable sitting there, those ridiculous earmuffs all twisted up on the side of her head. I wondered what kind of old woman I would be if I ever reached her age.

  “You don’t have to tell me right now. Take your time, Alice. You can call me at the hotel.”

  When I have to think—I mean really sit down and think—I like to sit in front of my mirror. It’s a sort of reverse-narcissistic game I play that gets my brain working.

  An hour after leaving Jo, I was staring at myself in the mirror. As usual, I found my appearance baffling. As usual, there was the confusion over which one of us was the audience.

  Two plum offers had suddenly appeared. Should I play the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet? I no longer had any allegiance to classical theater. I was interested only in the far reaches of the envelope. I would rather be paid nothing to stand onstage stark naked reciting Baudelaire’s reflections on whores while eating a tangerine. No, I decided the theatrical offer was not pressing. It could wait.

  Jo’s offer was more pressing. The money was certainly tempting. Yet the idea of spending a few weeks with Jo Starobin was unappealing. The woman’s grief was so pervasive that those around her simply couldn’t escape it.

  I stared at my hair. There was a lot of gray in the golden flax these days. My eyebrows were getting paler. The face in the mirror was impassive. I had never understood how people could characterize me as beautiful. My face was too thin—wan, as they used to say. I chuckled. I squared my shoulders. It was my posture that they had always confused with beauty. When I had been younger and walked into a room, I always created a stir. Stage presence.

  I saw a blur move across the upper-right-hand side of the mirror. Then it stopped. Pancho was on top of the bookcase, next to the volumes of the Tulane Drama Review, one of which contained a picture of me performing in a one-act play at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.

  Pancho’s image was staring at me.

  Without turning, I said, “Look as long as you want, Pancho.”

  He didn’t answer. His half-tail was moving back and forth. His face was set.

  “Oh, Pancho, why can’t you ever relax? Why can’t you ever play?”

  No response. I longed at that moment to gather Pancho in my arms, but I remained seated. Pancho was a good teacher. His reserve, his peculiar sense of constant danger, made him a good teacher. Some people, some animals, could only be loved from a distance. Intimacy was impossible.

  “Run, Pancho, run,” I whispered to his image in the mirror. All he did was lift a foot and begin to groom it with his tongue. He would flee when he was ready.

  I touched the mirror with my fingers, running them along the glass just as I had run my hands along the top of the money in the safe-deposit vault.

  Jo’s offer had been financially generous. Two hundred dollars a day for two weeks ran to twenty-eight hundred dollars tax-free. That was a lot of cat food. Plus, the offer came at a good time. The first few weeks of the new year were always depressing and empty of possibilities.

  I smiled at myself in the mirror, a bit grimly. An old lover of mine had once told me that my smile was terrible; it was totally dishonest. I made a face. It was irritating but true that I often evaluated myself by what men I had known told me. Why did I believe them? I was too old for such nonsense.

  A blur flashed across the mirror. Pancho was on the move.

  I picked up a hairbrush and balanced it in my hand. It was a beautiful tortoiseshell brush with fine, stiff bristles.

  It was perfect for a head of thick hair like that stable girl had, I realized. Ginger had that gorgeous thick red hair. I remembered her with a sudden flash of hatred. My reaction was so bizarre, I stood up and walked away from the mirror. I sat down on the bed.

  Why wasn’t I feeling compassion for that girl, like I felt for Jo?

  Ginger’s grief had been stupefying. She had wept like someone who had lost everything. No, I realized, I did not hate her. I was jealous of her.

  Why? Because Harry and she had been lovers!

  Agitated, I left the bed, walked into the hallway, and then back to the bedroom.

  Why was I jealous? Harry had been a surrogate absent father—kindly, eccentric, wise, comforting, safe. Was that the way I had
really felt? No, I wanted to be in that girl’s place. I wanted to mourn Harry as a lover.

  I walked quickly down the hallway and into the living room. I scooped Bushy off the sofa and hugged him. He accepted the attention stoically.

  “Bushy!” I called his name. He looked past me. I whispered into his ear, “You knew all along I would accept Jo’s offer, didn’t you? You knew it all along.”

  I lay down on the sofa, still holding him. There was no reason not to go back out there. I had discovered Harry’s corpse. Why shouldn’t I discover his murderers? What else were fantasy lovers for?

  5

  I left the cottage and walked hastily toward the main house. It was a wet, cold morning. The trees were threatening—naked, precarious, hovering over the property. I had no qualms about leaving the cottage because Pancho and Bushy had settled in nicely; although Pancho seemed perplexed at the lack of space in which to flee. He would have to develop a circular flight.

  “Is that you, Alice?” Jo cried out from the kitchen when I entered.

  Then she appeared in a ludicrous outfit. She was wearing a huge leather apron with deep pockets—like a blacksmith would wear—and around her neck was an enormous and very frayed kitchen towel. “You arrived just in time. I was making eggs,” she said.

  Her ancient kitchen table with its splintered wooden legs was piled with utensils and condiments, as if she was embarking on a major feast rather than a modest breakfast for two. She pointed to the clutter and said, “Harry always made the eggs. He used to say I didn’t know how to fry them, scramble them, poach them, or even boil them. I never knew whether he was serious or not. Well, here I am, without Harry, and I’m going to make eggs. How would you like them, Alice?”

  “Scrambled would be fine, Jo,” I replied, sitting down at the table to watch her. It was zany, but that was one of the Starobins’ most wonderful qualities: they always did things outlandishly.

  Carefully, almost painfully, she broke five eggs in a saucer and then proceeded to whip them with a flourish, her blacksmith’s apron continually getting in the way. When the scrambling was finished, she collapsed suddenly into a chair.