Cat in Wolf's Clothing (9781101578889) (11 page)

“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 herself—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.

Then she just broke up into laughter, saying: “Okay. I'll come. Set me free!” Ten minutes later the three of us walked out of Retro, not exactly arm in arm, but together.

***

From the first moment Judy Mizener saw the wall painting of the ancient Egyptian sun goddess, she was mesmerized. She kept walking back and forth, then approaching the wall paintings, then moving away from them.

“I saw something like this in the museum . . . in the Egyptian Wing. Am I right?” she asked.

“You saw an original. These are bizarre copies, done in pastel and chalk, by Jack Tyre,” I replied.

“Who is this supposed to be?”

“An ancient Egyptian sun goddess—Bast.”

“How did you find them?”

“Jack Tyre had an old lover who told me he used to come into Central Park on weekends with his Siamese cat and come to this cave. It was a long shot. I just decided to check it out because everything had come to a dead end.”

“I thought you were no longer involved with this case.”

“Just because you fired me from Retro doesn't mean I should abrogate my responsibilities.”

“How do you know it was Jack Tyre? Can you be sure?”

“He came here. Who else could it be?”

“Why does each figure have a different cat's head? The rest of the goddess is uniform throughout.”

“You tell me,” I retorted.

She stared at the paintings, then wheeled swiftly toward me. “Are you telling me that . . . ?” She threw up her hands in disbelief. Then came back to her point. “Are you telling me what I think you are telling me?”

“Yes,” I said emphatically, “the heads of the goddess correspond exactly to what we know of the cats of the victims. And the order is sequential. In chronological time.”

“My God!” was all she could say, in a kind of desperate whisper. Then she carefully walked down the wall, staring at each figure in its turn. There was a clattering noise. But it was only Tony dropping the flashlight that Judy Mizener had provided us after she agreed to come with us. He apologized.

“Then Jack Tyre knew all the victims,” Judy Mizener said. “And he drew each cat goddess after he killed each victim.”

“Or before. Or a year after they died. I don't think we can find that out,” I replied. “And it doesn't prove that Jack Tyre murdered all those people with all those kinds of weapons. Besides, he seemed to be a gentle man. It is hard to believe that he could strangle anyone.” I was trying to be as analytical as possible. But I could not yet tell her what I really thought. Because that had to be explored . . . that had to be validated.

She began to pace quickly back and forth in front of the wall—clearly agitated and clearly confused. Then she threw back her head and laughed crazily, forlornly. “What are we talking about?” she asked. “We don't know what the hell we are looking at. It's all still crazy. It doesn't mean anything. Do you understand what I'm saying, Alice? It's just a wall of strange drawings.”

“Amen,” echoed Tony.

“Do you know what kind of goddess Bast was?” I asked Judy Mizener.

“You mean other than being a goddess with the head of a cat? No, I don't know.”

“She was a sun goddess.”

“So what?”

“In ancient Egypt the sun was the reigning god. And it was the sun that guaranteed eternal life.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she replied.

“When an individual died in ancient Egypt, he or she expected to be resurrected in the not-too-distant future—body and soul—and that could be accomplished only by the sun god . . . or those goddesses associated with the sun.”

“And Bast was such a goddess?”

“Correct.”

“Bast could help you live forever?”

“Exactly.”

“What are you telling me? That all this murder and paintings and nonsense like toy mice are coming out of some kind of cult of the dead?”

“It could be. But whatever it is, your Retro won't be any help.”

“It sounds like you're setting me up for something.”

“Yes,” I said forcefully, “I am setting you up. To solve this very ugly case.”

“And how can we do that when we can't even know what all the pieces mean?”

“I think we can trap the killer.”

“If he or she is not Jack Tyre.”

“Exactly.”

“How, Alice?”

“This cave is an important part of Central Park history. It was closed up in the late 1930s. Everyone thinks it has remained sealed. The only ones who knew it wasn't were a few derelicts, Jack Tyre and his cat, and maybe his murderer. I think if the murderer knows that the cave is going to be publicly opened, he or she will get very nervous and try to erase those paintings.”

“But the cave isn't going to be opened.”

“I know. But we can make believe.”

“What's the point of that?”

“Then the murderer will hear a report on TV that the cave is about to be opened because there have been some dead chickens found nearby . . . some remnants of animal sacrifice, which means some kind of voodoo cult may have gotten into the cave. Because of this, the cave will be opened and then resealed.”

“But no such thing is happening.”

“We can fake it.”

“How?”

“Retro. As head of Retro you have access to all the TV reporters. They die for this kind of crime nonsense. You can call them in hush-hush and say that this voodoo cult may be implicated in several dismemberment homicides and that the Parks Department has given you permission to go ahead and open it. They report it. We wait and pick up the murderer.”

“I can't do something like that. What about my credibility in the future? And we don't know if it will lure this mysterious figure out to the cave.”

“It will. Believe me.”

“I just can't do that,” she replied in an anguished voice.

“It's our only chance, Judy. Someone is out there . . . someone very ugly.”

“Are you really telling me that the murderer of those seventeen people is out there and is so frightened at the disclosure of these crazy goddess wall paintings that he will risk his life to erase them?”

I didn't answer for a while. I couldn't tell her what I really believed because she wouldn't understand. Even I didn't understand it completely. Not yet.

It was time to do what I did best—act. It was time to envelop Judy Mizener in an emotional web she could not escape.

“Listen to me carefully, Judy. You go in, day after day, to Retro. You coordinate, you hire, you evaluate. Once in a very great while you come up with something substantial . . . and another major crime is close to being solved. But you know and I know that these toy-mouse murders are choking your computers. They're the ugliest murders you have . . . it's the most perplexing unsolved major crime case in the city and the newspapers don't even know it exists. And Retro drew a total blank, didn't it? Nothing was coughed up. Let's face it, Judy. I was the only one who was even close. I was the one who told you there was a correlation between the missing cats. So you fired me. And lo and behold, we find all the missing cats—don't we? On wall paintings of an Egyptian goddess. Do what I ask you. Please, Judy. I may be wrong. But there is a very good chance I am right. And if I am, you and Retro get the credit. Oh, I know you don't need to be redeemed for firing me. But if you break the case, then Retro becomes a force—a major force. And you along with it. You'll be able to do a lot of things you can't do now. You'll even be able to keep eccentric investigators on the consultant payroll. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. And it's really our last chance to help those poor dead people rest in peace.”

It was a good delivery. It was a powerful speech. It turned her into my little sister, as if I was giving her both profound and inspirational wisdom as to herself and the world. The joke being that she had done much better vis-à-vis the real world than I could ever hope to.

She stared at me, then at Tony, then for a long time at the wall paintings.

“Let's do it,” she finally said in her best fake-professional voice.

***

An hour later, Tony and I sat at a deep back table in the All State Café on West Seventy-Second Street. I was very tired but I was also very hungry. Tony was drinking a brandy. I had a stein of ale.

“They used to have a great tomato salad here,” Tony said, studying the menu. I ordered a rare burger. He ordered a chicken-salad sandwich.

“I hope you know what you're doing, Swede,” Tony said, a slight grin on his still-wounded face.

“What do you think?”

He thought for a while, twirling the bottom of his brandy glass. The restaurant was beginning to fill up.

“I don't think anymore, Swede. I'm back in the theater, don't you remember? I exist now on sheer gall.”

“What's bothering you, Tony?”

“You mean other than confusion and fatigue and frustration and unrequited love?”

“We're not really having an affair, Tony. We can't go to bed every twelve hours.”

“An old-fashioned retort, Swede.”

“I'm basically an old-fashioned woman, Tony.”

“Right. And I'm Jimi Hendrix.” He finished the brandy and ordered another one. When it came to the table, he sipped it and then said, “Tell me the truth, Swede. Do you really think someone will show up in response to the scam?”

“Yes.”

“Who? The murderer?”

For some reason, at that moment I felt motherly toward Tony. I reached across the table and touched his cheek. He jumped back involuntarily, startled. Then he relaxed. “Well, Swede, an overwhelming show of affection. I'm touched.” I smiled and sipped my ale. The hamburger and the chicken salad came. I slowly poured some catsup between the bun.