Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) (11 page)

By the time we were halfway up the stairs the whole house was up, wondering who was making the commotion at two in the morning. Miranda told them.

She told them in the most graphically scatalogical terms I'd ever heard used by an educated woman from a good home. And she ended the diatribe by saying it was all Beth's fault for having asked me here.

I turned my back on the look Beth Stimson gave me. I stood watching Ford accompany Mathew Hazan into his room to speak with him alone. Now being calmed and comforted by the circle of her comrades, one of the nicer things Miranda called me was a “fiend.” Ford was out of Mat's room in less than fifteen minutes. He finally looked at me, and it was with sadness rather than rage.

I went into my second-class citizen's room and was packed in ten minutes. I looked around for Lulu, but I couldn't find her. I wanted to say good-bye.

Ford walked with me to my car.

“Win a few, lose a few, Alice,” Ford said as I turned the motor over.

I had no trouble finding the road back to New York.

Chapter 18

I was trying to convince Bushy I was happy to see him. But I don't think he believed me—probably because I was crying my eyes out.

As soon as I entered my apartment I fell onto the sofa and began to weep. But at the same time I was trying to embrace the befuddled Bushy. He backed away stiffly, his eyes never leaving my face. I knew I'd be paying for abandoning the cats for some time to come. Pancho wasn't around, but I could hear him scrabbling around on the high cabinets in the kitchen.

I could see that Tony had piled the mail and messages on the long dining room table. He had obviously made an effort to be neat, but the piles had collapsed and mail was scattered everywhere.

His carefully built hill of letters had probably collapsed as quickly and thoroughly as my murder case had—as easily as Miranda Bly had punctured it.

Not only had my trap proved futile, even ludicrous, but I had literally been thrown off the premises. Yes, I'd been shown to be less than a stellar crime solver. But my tears were also for the shame I felt—the humiliation. Start to finish I'd been patronized, tolerated, ignored, talked down to by that group of self-important musicians. They'd made me feel like an unwanted child. And why? Because
I
didn't have any inside dirt on Lenny Bernstein.
I
didn't go to cocktail parties with Jamie Laredo, or own any bootleg cassettes of Maria Callas. For the Riverside String Quartet, that was enough of a reason.

Of course, I knew now the nature of my mistake. I realized now why everything had gone wrong. It had all been based on a pivotal mistake: I had not understood that Mat Hazan was part of the original cat-theft ring; probably, in fact, the ringleader. And because I had left him out of the equation, it never dawned on me that they would cook up such a simple but persuasive alibi—that he and Miranda were making love in the house while Will Gryder was being murdered.

I knew in my bones I was right—knew what had transpired. I
had
shaped all the information John Cerise had fed me into a coherent explanation. But it was all ashes now—all of it. I'd never work for Beth Stimson again. She hated me now. The six of them had all come together in the face of my threat. But that is, I suppose, what a united group of any kind is all about, precisely what the critics had flayed the Riverside Quartet alive for failing to do: playing together, sticking together, acting as one.

Bushy was slowly moving toward me again, obliquely, as if on tiptoe. Pancho stuck his head into the living room for a minute. “Oh, so you've come crawling back to us,” is what he seemed to be saying. “So what?” And off he ran on his perpetual rounds.

There's a lot I should do, I told myself: Call Basillio to let him know I've come back early; go over and thank Mrs. Oshrin for all her help; call my agent and various cat-sitting clients. I blew my nose and picked up a yellow pad and pencil. It was only then that Bushy deigned to join me on the couch. He liked to chew erasers.

Sitting there with pad and pencil in hand, the thought came to me that I ought to write Ford Donaldson. But what was I going to say to him? Sorry I couldn't produce your murderer as promised? But I believed I had. Sorry you had to camp out for seven freezing hours in a dilapidated shed? Sorry I wasn't quick enough to understand all the ramifications of the conspiracy?

No, I wasn't going to write any of that. It was best to leave it alone.

I was punch-drunk with exhaustion. After all, I'd been up all night, had driven nonstop all the early morning. I fell fast asleep in the middle of scratching Bushy's ruff.

***

“What is going
on
here, Swede?”

I was looking into Tony Basillio's grinning face.

“Listen, madam, I was hired to feed two cats and two cats only. I come here in good faith to do my job, and look what I find. Well, I'm sorry, Swede, but my contract is quite clear—
two cats
.”

Still groggy, I felt Tony kissing the top of my head. Then he helped me to a sitting position and placed a cup of black coffee in my hand and stepped back.

“What time is it, Basillio?”

“One in the afternoon. Are you home to stay, or just grabbing a change of thermal underwear?”

“Oh, I'm back. Am I ever. I've been run out of the state of Massachusetts.”

I drank from the coffee cup. My head and body ached dully. I needed a bath in the worst way. And I was starving.

I handed the cup back when I was finished. “What's your financial situation, Tony?”

“Relatively flush—hundred and thirty-five bucks, cash.”

“Know what I want? I want a glass of red wine and the biggest, bloodiest hamburger in town—with tomato and onion . . . and no bun.”

“It's yours. I plight thee my troth. Let us away.”

“After my bath,” I said. “Can you feed the cats for me?”

Less than an hour later we were sitting in a booth in a serviceable bar and grill on Second Avenue. I was taking lusty gulps of my red wine and waiting for the burger to arrive.

“Boy, do you look unhappy,” Tony said.

“Well, I am.”

“Why don't you tell Uncle Tony what happened up there?”

I guess I needed to do just that. I narrated the train of events that had transpired from the moment I'd picked up the car and joined the queue on the Taconic Parkway, all the way up to sobbing on my sofa this morning. In fact I got so caught up in my own story that when I'd finished it, my food—which had been delivered during the scene where Mrs. Wallace was force-feeding me English muffins—was now cold. I picked along the edges of the hamburger.

Tony was looking at me strangely. “Something bothering you, Basillio?” I said.

“Well, not exactly ‘bothering.' But . . . well, I was just thinking . . . isn't it possible that Miranda really
was
just feeling guilty about her friend and wanted to send that necklace to her?”

“Anything's possible, Tony—theoretically.”

“What I mean to say is, no offense, but your whole trip up there seems so farfetched.”

“Farfetched? What an interesting word choice. What, precisely, do you find so farfetched?'

“To be honest, everything . . . the whole
schmear
. Stolen Scottish cats. The novel. Aunt Bessie, or whatever her name was supposed to be—who doesn't really exist. The whole milieu, shall we say, is very unbelievable.”

“What are you saying, Tony? That nothing I described to you really happened? That it didn't exist in the real world?”

“No, of course not. I just—”

“Look, don't try to . . . evaluate it . . . like someone trying to be
truthful
onstage. Or like a stage
set
, in your present case. It wasn't a piece frozen in time.”

“Okay. I'm just saying it's hard to believe this Riverside Quartet—this group of serious, highly trained musicians, for godsake—is so collectively wicked. No, ‘wicked' is not the word. I mean ‘conspiratorial.' The way you tell it, it's like you were thrown in among a pride of lionesses who were perpetually in some kind of feeding frenzy.”

I pushed my plate away, having eaten the sodden, pale tomato. Tony's imagery struck some kind of chord. At first I hadn't thought of the quartet and the men around them as raging lions, because what was between them was hidden, internecine. It was only after one spent time with them all, only after one became, for whatever reason, open to them, that one sensed their collectively predatory nature. And that was probably why the whole episode had so exhausted and defeated me.

“Hey, listen, Swede,” he said, pushing back his long black hair with both hands, “you can't win em all. What's so funny?”

“Nothing. It's just that Ford Donaldson tried a very similar cliché on me. ‘Win a few, lose a few' was the one he chose. Now you're telling me I can't win them all.”

“Why do you think they call them clichés? They're common expressions.”

“Hmm. Spoken with uncommon valor,” I noted, not really knowing what I meant by that. Goodness, I
was
tired, when one glass of mediocre California red could make me so foolish. I ordered another.

“Should have taken me up there with you,” Tony said.

“Why?”

“Because I have a tin ear. I'd have been more objective.”

That was hilarious, I thought.

Well, in any case, it was good to be home.

Chapter 19

I have always liked that expression, “getting back in the swing of things.” It's hard to say what it really means, but one always knows whether or not one has accomplished it.

It took about a week after my return from the Covington Art Center for the rhythm of my life to regain anything remotely resembling “swing.”

It was two weeks before I managed to stop poring over what I had found in Will Gryder's room—the old photographs, the faded cat breeding charts, the little computer disk—examining the items, over and over, in a kind of bewildered nostalgia. Had I really been all wrong about the case? Was my version of the facts “farfetched”? And what was I supposed to do with the things now—send them to Will's sister?

By the end of week three, the memory of the Riverside String Quartet was like the memory of a toothache. I stopped talking about them, stopped worrying about them, and thought about them only to be thankful that the dull, throbbing pain of it all was gone.

Tony, however, had become obsessed with one element of it, and one element only: Lulu's failure to chase the mice. For the hundredth time he asked me, “Why wouldn't she go after the mice, Swede? Didn't you ever figure out why not?”

No, I had to say again. I never did.

He said maybe the dog was blind, maybe she had lost her sense of smell. I reminded him that Lulu was a cat, not a dog. He replied that he knew that; he just liked that old country saying so much—“That dog won't hunt”—that he used it for cats and people and elephants. In fact, the mystery of why Lulu wouldn't hunt began to derange poor Basillio. He started demanding that I let him move in; he moaned that he was weary of occasional sex and occasional intimacy; said that my intermittent coldness toward him was the real reason his return to the world of stage design had been such a spectacular failure—even for him, a man who cultivated failure with a passion.

Tony's incomprehensible flights were only part and parcel of getting back into the swing of things.

And then the swing broke, about a week before Thanksgiving.

My phone rang that cold Tuesday morning. I picked up, and was startled to hear the voice at the other end of the line.

“Alice, hello! This is Leo Trilby.”

Why was the director of the
Beast in the Jungle
fiasco phoning me? We were by no means friends. We hadn't even gotten along as coworkers—not during rehearsals and not during the run—if those few pitiful performances could be called a “run.”

“Look, Alice, I'm going to be in your neighborhood this afternoon. You know that Italian place on Twenty-ninth and Third? Why don't we meet there—about three. I thought I could buy you a cappuccino.”

I didn't answer.

“You like cappuccino, don't you? And cheesecake?”

It was hard to know what to say. I liked them very much.

***

“I thought perhaps I ought to mend some fences,” Leo said by way of greeting. He was waiting for me at one of the small round tables, tense and hyperactive as ever. Leo Trilby was barely out of his twenties, actually, but he had an affected British air that made him seem much older. No doubt he'd picked up his mannerisms during his studies at Oxford. He
was
rather brilliant, though, his mind constantly racing with theories and leaping ahead so fast that his directorial instructions were incomprehensible.

He began to talk as soon as I sat down. “It wasn't your fault, you know, and it wasn't my fault, either. One simply shouldn't try to modernize Henry James. But that was the playwright's mistake, wasn't it? I mean, God! He, James, that is, was modern enough for his age. But you can't turn his insights into wisdom for the nineties, can you? Are you with me on that, Alice?”

“Oh, I don't know, Leo.”

He leaned in toward me. He was a short, powerfully built man and he was wearing a turtleneck, which only enhanced the physical resemblance to the young Norman Mailer. His face was blunt. He had thick black hair, badly shorn, and thick eyebrows, and his constantly roving eyes were deep in their sockets.

“It is so terribly hard for people like us in this business, isn't it?” he said.

“It surely is, Leo,” I said, savoring the not-too-sweet cheesecake that was the specialty of the café.

“I mean, one would be hard pressed to name a better actress in your age category, Alice. And where has it gotten you? Are you Streep? Are you Close? Are you even Cher? No. And you never will be, my dear. As for me, I'm good—damn good. We both know that. But I can never connect with the money. The money, the money, the money! The money people will always look upon me as an
enfant terrible
, when really I'm not that at all. I simply have my principles.”

Leo sat back and exhaled hugely. He lit a cigarette and then stubbed it out immediately.

“If I gave you a hard time, Alice, forgive me. I want to be your friend. I want to be your colleague. And mark my words, the wheel will turn again. We
will
be together again someday—I know it. The wheel simply has to turn in our direction sometime. In our business, Alice, something always happens.”

I had little idea what he was talking about. But I nodded in complete agreement, picking up crumbs of pie crust with my fork.

“Yes, the wheel always turns,” he repeated. And then, as if to buttress his position, he picked up his folded
New York Times
and waved it under my nose. “Did you see this stunning piece of news? They're about to spend
six million
dollars on that lame-brained musical from England.” Leo thrust the newspaper at me. It was turned to the entertainment section.

I read only a few sentences of the article about the impending arrival of a splashy new musical based on a Jane Austen novel. I stopped reading it because I caught sight of the boldface heading over another, much shorter article:
RIVERSIDE STRING QUARTET WILL DISBAND
, the title read.

The story was simple. The Riverside String Quartet, the first and most celebrated all-woman chamber music group, had announced that after nearly twenty years it was disbanding as a result of personal difficulties and professional differences among its members. The article went on to detail the history of the group, its most successful tours and recordings, and the critical acclaim the women had enjoyed over the years.

The last paragraph of the article announced that Mathew Hazan, the longtime business manager/agent of the quartet, would soon take up a high administrative position at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

I continued to stare down at the type on the page, dazed. Leo's mouth continued to move. I didn't hear a word.

How could this have happened? I knew that the group was up at Covington on a retreat because their European performances had been so poorly received. I knew that the death of Will Gryder had hurt them both as a group and individually. But to dismantle the quartet after all these years? It didn't make sense . . . unless . . . unless my failed trap had put the fear of God into at least two of the members. Unless they were terribly frightened by what Miranda Bly must have told them after I'd left.

But this had to be Hazan's doing. He was the beast in that jungle. And not only had he escaped scot-free, he was also dissolving the quartet and was about to start a wildly lucrative and coveted job. The man should be in a sewer somewhere.

Leo kept talking. I could hear him again. He was telling me he had to leave now, but he'd be seeing me again soon, working with me—the very thought of it nourished and excited him, he said.

And then he was gone, and I was alone at the table. He had carried the
Times
away with him. My rage was growing, suffocating me. It was like being zippered into a tight dress. I would
not
allow Mat Hazan to get away with this! I could not sit by and watch him move on, like a slick record-company entrepreneur, from one label to another. Not when he was leaving a trail of murder and deceit behind him.

I decided to clear this case, at whatever cost.

The waiter was a nice young man they called Lucky. He set another cappuccino down in front of me. There would be no charge for it, I knew. But I was too angry to drink it.