“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.
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.