Then I bundled all the resentment that had spilled upon the floor as I cleaned up the dead cat and headed back to the apartment. What is it about me, I wondered. Is there a KICK ME sign on my forehead that can be seen only by women? Do they have a club and pass around my name as a dependable sucker who can be counted on to clean up dead cats in emergencies? I mean, if I was sleeping with the woman, then, sure, it would be okay to be on my knees with paper towels, cleaning up the blood from some dead feline on her doorstep, but when it’s someone else’s girl, why am I the one doing the cleaning? I went back to the apartment angry as hell and fully prepared to tell Veronica that I was a lawyer, dammit, not a janitor and that I was leaving and that the next time she had a problem with a dead cat she should call her friend Jimmy Moore.
She hadn’t moved from the couch but in the short time I had been gone she had grown more beautiful. “It’s taken care of,” I said, my anger balling up like a wet paper towel in my throat.
“What did you do with it?” she asked.
“Down the garbage chute.”
“That’s cold.”
“What was I going to do, bury it in the hallway? Look, I have to go.”
“What about my Greek landlord?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Pay your rent.”
“He wants to kick me out anyway. I have a special deal because of Jimmy, but now with Jimmy in trouble he figures he can kick me out and rent it for twice as much.”
“How much do you pay for this?” I asked.
“A hundred a month.”
“Jesus,” I said. The apartment was worth ten times that. I wondered what Jimmy had done for the old Greek to get such a deal for his girlfriend.
“What should I do? He wants me out. He killed a damn cat to get me out.”
“And you’re sure it’s him?”
“He’s crazy. He slit the cat’s throat.”
“Look. I’m a lawyer, not the SPCA. I don’t know what I can do for you. I have to go. I have a lot of work tomorrow.”
She stood up and walked toward me, her hands clasped and to her side. “Can you at least look at my lease?”
“Why isn’t Jimmy here?” I asked. “Isn’t this cat thing and this landlord thing his problem?”
“Jimmy doesn’t want to know my problems. He has a wife with enough problems to keep him busy till Memorial Day. He’s at some political dinner with her tonight, so I’m on my own.”
I stared at her, trying to keep hold of my anger, but she smiled nervously. She looked very young for a moment and I wondered how old she was. She looked like a college kid, a sweet pretty college kid, suddenly very needy and soft. Why wasn’t she in college? I lifted my hands and said, “Where can I wash up?” She pointed me to a bathroom up the stairs.
I was washing my hands in the sink, scrubbing violently with a thick lather of soap, trying my best to get the cat off my fingers, when I noticed, between the toilet and the bathtub, a litter box. It was filled with clay pellets. The ends of neat little cat turds poked above the surface.
I agreed to look at her lease. I cleared a space at the dining table and examined what she gave me while she went upstairs for a moment. It was not the standard form filled with paragraph after paragraph of tiny print giving the landlord all the power to screw the tenant that the law allowed. Instead, she had given me a two-page, double-spaced document, signed by Veronica Ashland, lessee, and Spiros Giamoticos, lessor, that provided she could stay there as long as she wanted for $100 a month and that the landlord could never raise her rent or kick her out. The only rule was that she couldn’t sublease without Giamoticos’s consent. Noticeably absent were provisions about late payment or eviction. From the face of the lease it was apparent that Jimmy Moore had done a whopper of a favor for Spiros Giamoticos, in return for which Spiros had given the apartment to Moore’s girlfriend for next to nothing. It was little wonder that Spiros wanted out of the lease.
While sitting at the dining room table I noticed her mail arranged in rough piles. While she was still upstairs, I took the liberty of looking through it. There was a final notice from the electric company, an overdue notice from the water company, a letter from the American Record Club threatening her with a lawsuit if she didn’t pay for the compact disks she had ordered, a MasterCard bill showing a balance owed of over three thousand dollars. Her mail looked much like my mail. I searched through other piles until I found a letter from her bank. It had already been ripped open. I glanced around to make sure she hadn’t quietly come back down into the room or was looking from the balcony, and then took out the statement. It was a checking account, in her name and in Chester Concannon’s name, with a grand total of $187.92, down from $1349.92 the month before. She had written a $62 check to her credit card company to pay the minimum balance. The rest of the entries were cash withdrawals from different ATMs around the city. I stuffed the statement back into the envelope.
“Your landlord here can huff and puff all he wants,” I told her when she came back down, “but there is nothing he can legally do to kick you out as long as you pay your rent.”
“What about the cat?”
“Call the police or file for a restraining order. I could file a motion for you, but other than that I don’t know. Getting Jimmy to talk to him would be your best bet. What did Jimmy give this Giamoticos, anyway, to get you this lease?”
“A street,” she said.
“A street,” I said, shaking my head. “He gave away a public street just like that?”
“It wasn’t a big street,” she said with a shrug. “More like an alley. I needed a place, so Jimmy introduced a bill or something.” She stood before me with her arms crossed, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She wanted something, but she didn’t know how to ask.
“Listen, Veronica,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry, but I couldn’t help noticing all your overdue bills. Are you going to be able to pay them off?”
She laughed nervously and leaned over me at the table, turning her papers facedown. She smelled terrific and fresh, like a cherry tree in full blossom. “No,” she said. “Who can pay all their bills now, really? Bad times all over, right?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll do what I always do. When I get a big enough pile I give them to Jimmy who gives them to Chet who takes care of them.” That was why Concannon’s name was on her account, I figured, to make it easier for him to supply her with the councilman’s cash when her money got low.
“Don’t you work?”
“I’m thirsty,” she said, looking down at me as I sat by the dining room table. Her breath was minty, as if she had just been upstairs gargling. “Are you thirsty? Finding a dead cat in the hallway always makes me thirsty. Let’s get a drink.”
I was tired and I had work to do tomorrow and there were a lot of things I needed to be doing, but the mintyness of her breath, her long slender arms, the way she leaned over me at the table, it all sent my stomach afluttering. My throat tightened on me, so that when I said, “Sure,” it came out in a raspy whisper.
Outside her building, as she held onto my arm and led me off to a bar she knew near Independence Hall, I glanced behind us on Church Street. I caught the glint of the streetlight off the cobblestones and then, farther back, the shine of a boomerang hovering over the tail end of a black limousine. The car’s lights were off, and I couldn’t see inside, but whatever sexual charge had been within me dissipated immediately, grounded by the sight of that car. It was too dark to make out the license plate, but I had no doubt at all as to who the owner was. That was Jimmy Moore’s limousine and whoever was inside was staking out the councilman’s girlfriend. And there I was, my arm linked in hers, stepping out with her into the night. It was a warmish fall evening, the air thick and humid like in springtime, but by the time we had turned from Church Street onto 3rd I was shivering.