“I’ve noticed that. They get very picky if you miss a payment.”
“They learn that in landlord school,” I said.
“That must also be where they learn to turn the heat on in the summer.”
“And that sixty-two degrees is plenty comfortable in the winter,” I said. “And how much money they save by turning off the water periodically for mysterious repairs.”
“Maybe you should come over and see what you can do,” she said.
“Now?”
“I told you,” she said. “My landlord is trying to evict me.”
“Did he leave an eviction notice on your door?”
“No, that’s not what he left. He’s an old Greek, he doesn’t know about eviction notices.”
“So what did he leave?” I asked.
“A dead cat,” she said.
13
OLDE CITY PHILADELPHIA is one of those strange, hybrid places that could only have been conceived in the fevered imagination of some Senate subcommittee charged with finding tax loopholes for the financially deranged. It started out two hundred years ago as a residential district, where our founding fathers worshipped at Christ Church during their deliberations over the Constitution, but swiftly devolved into a manufacturing and distribution area where the sugar shipped to Philadelphia from the Caribbean was refined and the iron ore shipped down the Delaware River was smelted and the wood shipped from the South was turned on a lathe into fine and not so fine furniture. Fifteen years ago it was a tidy little area of small factories and wholesalers and restaurant supply warehouses filling the whole of the suburban restaurant market with bar stools and formica tables and huge copper pots. But then some senator slipped a loophole into the tax code allowing tax breaks for renovations of historically significant buildings, and a whole new real estate scam was born.
The clever guys bought up all the old and rotting industrial buildings in Olde City and syndicated them in a series of limited partnerships in which the limited partners badly overpaid for the opportunity to get a piece of the tax break. With the limited partners’ money in hand, leveraged with high-interest mortgages, the clever guys converted all these decrepit buildings into fancy condo units, setting high enough prices for the units so that the limiteds could get a decent return. It all would have worked just fine except that no one wanted to live in an industrially zoned corner of the city with no restaurants or stores or nightclubs and the clever guys couldn’t unload their high-priced condos at a high enough price to pay the mortgages. One by one the partnerships collapsed into insolvency, including the partnership owned by Dr. Saltz and his fellow investors, and with insolvency came tax recapture and sheriff sales of the buildings. After the clever guys had run off with their commissions and fees, what was left were the lawsuits and hundreds of luxury units interspersed among seedy wholesale outlets, serenaded daily by the rumbling of factory machines coming through filthy block windows.
I found a spot outside a shoe store with a hand-lettered sign, WHOLESALE ONLY, in its sooted window and parallel parked my little Mazda between a van and a pickup truck. Like all men, I believed I was the world’s greatest parallel parker, and I banged the pickup only once as I squeezed into my space. Veronica had said she lived in one of the rehabbed Olde City buildings on the same street as Christ Church, so I followed the tall white spire to Church Street and continued on through the narrow cobblestone alley to her building. It had been a sugar refinery in its more authentic days, but now windows had been knocked into its high brick walls and an elevator rose up and down a large steel and Plexiglas tube appended to the side. There was a parking lot and a courtyard in front and stores had been planned for the lower level, but the plate-glass windows were papered over. The whole look of that empty plaza and its vacant stores was one of desolation. I found her number on the security board and she buzzed me up.
The cat lay on the carpet in front of her door, its head sodden with blood.
I kneeled down beside the corpse like a homicide detective in a bad movie and dipped two fingers in the puddle of blood around the cat’s head. I don’t know why I did that, it is just something that homicide detectives who lean over corpses in bad movies always seem to do, and I regretted it immediately. The blood was still damp. I was just about to wipe my fingers clean on the cat’s fur when she opened the door.
“It’s still dead, I suppose,” said Veronica.
She was leaning face forward against the partly open door, her thin pelvis resting against the edge of the door so that I could only see half of her. Her brown hair spilled forward, lightly, like a veil, giving her simple, pretty face an air of mystery. She was wearing blue jeans and a gray ribbed sleeveless T-shirt. Her feet were bare. Wearing jeans, with her hair loose and flowing forward like it was, she looked more the artist than the mistress. There was something sharp and bohemian about her that was very different from the finely dressed society woman she had seemed that night in the limousine with Jimmy Moore and at the museum.
I looked at her longer than I had intended to before I turned back to the cat.
“It looks like its throat was slit,” I said. “Did you know this cat?”
“Can anyone ever know a cat?” she said and then opened the door wide and turned to go back into her apartment.
Quickly I wiped my still wet fingers on the dead cat and rose to follow her, closing her door behind me.
Her apartment was a huge brown duplex with heavy splintering beams overhead and a varnished floor of thick, uneven slabs of wood. There was one wall of brick, the rest were white, and there were huge, sliding-door windows on the far wall. The main area was furnished with a wraparound couch and a projection TV, and there was a long dining room table covered with piles of papers and unopened envelopes. The kitchen was filthy, dishes stacked haphazardly in the sink, and the living room furniture was covered with pants and shirts scattered here and there. A sweatshirt leaned back comfortably over the edge of a chair. To the side of the entrance was a flight of heavy stairs that reached a wide loft open to the living area. It was a large, masculine space, that apartment, even the mess that covered it was masculine, and when Veronica sat down on the sofa and curled her legs beneath her she seemed small and foreign there.
“Nice place,” I said, looking around.
“What about the cat?”
“The cat, the dead cat,” I said, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing there. “Have you called the police?”
“About a cat?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“This is not just any dead cat,” I said. “This cat was murdered.”
“I’m not going to call the police about a cat,” she said. “What I think we should do is get rid of it and then figure out how to get my landlord off my neck.”
“How do you know it’s your landlord?” I asked.
“Who else would it be?” she said.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s first get rid of the cat.”
“There are some bags in the closet,” she said. “And paper towels somewhere around in the kitchen.”
“You’re not going to help?”
“Do I look like the kind of girl who messes with dead cats?”
There was a bright yellow Strawbridge & Clothier bag in the closet and a roll of paper towels on a cluttered kitchen counter. I wadded up one of the paper towels and used the wad as a mitt as I grabbed the cat’s tail and lifted. It was surprisingly light. While placing it in the bag I kept it as far from me as possible, as if the damn cat could suddenly come to life and swat at my face with its claws. When the cat was in the bag I did what I could to wipe the excess blood from the carpet. It was a pale red carpet, which helped hide the blood, but when I was through there was still an ominous stain. Strangely, the stain didn’t look like a cat’s head; it looked like a fish. Maybe the final wish of a dying cat directed the flow of blood from its incised throat. Maybe not. When I was finished wiping I dumped all the bloodied towels in the Strawbridge bag and rolled it up tight and dropped it down the trash chute in the hallway.