“I can believe whatever I discern. Who else would be standing here at the balcony edge but Kitty O’Connor, crooning ‘Pretty bird’ to the lovely American call girl whot ‘ad just made Mr. Matt ‘istory for the foiled purpose of said Kitty the Cutter.”
“Whew. You females play hardball. Which is what I gratefully still have, thank Bast!”
“I am not interested in the intactness of your anatomy,old dude. I am making a point that if Miss Kitty was around and about that night, and annoyed that Mr. Matt was stealing a march on her plot to disgrace him by disgracing himself first, she might take it out on the poor call girl he called upon: the ‘Pretty bird’ she hated more than even herself, or she would have never fixated on undoing a mere male, who are undone by the very nature of their gender to begin with.”
Well, these are fighting words, but I do not know where to begin. So I decide to build my case. It does not take much, simply calling a few witnesses who are already hanging about the place.
I could say I just put my lips together and whistled, but the fact is we hep cats are never much good at the wolf whistle game. It takes a certain canine swagger to pull off.
So instead I merow to the ether and hope that a thing with feathers will answer my call.
I am answered in spades: one turtledove, two French hens, three Budgerigars, four calling birds, five cockatiels, etcetera, ad nauseam. You would not think so many feathered friends inhabited the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel, but then you would not think, would you? Best to leave that to experts, like myself.
I call my first witness. Literally.
“Did you see a tall young lady on stilted heels pausing by the balcony?” I inquire.
“Tweet.”
“Please repeat that response in English for the jury.”
My jury is a twelve-part-harmony team of various feathered friends.
“Yes. Pretty bird,” says Blues Brother on cue.
I flash a triumphant glance at Miss Midnight Louise.
“So the phrase, ‘Pretty bird,’ is pretty common to the avian world,” I follow up like the sharp legal wit I am.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bird-biter,” the little ‘keet answers.
I pace impressively before it. “So it was indeed a bird that called Miss Vassar to her death?”
“No, sir,” says the ‘keet.
“What do you mean, ‘No, sir’?”
He fluffs his feathers and bites his toenails and works on various unmentionable portions of his underlayment, and then he sings again.
“It was a cat, sir. A feline person of the pet persuasion. I saw it.”
“A cat, sir?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Would you repeat that for the jury?”
“Indeed, sir, repeating is my business, my only business.”
By now I have gone farther than any defense attorney would, save for 0. J. Simpson. If only there were a dog in the case to lay all the blame upon. Kato, my Akita friend, wherefore art thou?
“What cat?” I demand.
“Pale-colored, with a little dark feathering. Very attractive for a fur-body. Seated. Upon the balcony. The human lady in question was on her cell phone, but then she noticed the balancing act occurring not five feet away from her. She was most distressed.”
“How distressed?”
“She abruptly terminated her conversation, ‘Pretty bird,’ and reached out to extract the cat from the railing. Well, you sir, being a cat, can understand how unfortunate that misguided good Samaritan gesture was.”
I say nothing, for to do so is to incriminate my breed and my brethren of the court. And mostly myself.
“Pretty bird,” mourns Blues Brother. “She reached so far and then farther. The fickle feline jumped down to the floor. The poor human female leaned over the railing and fell down to the glass ceiling far below. Pretty bird. Bye-bye.”
I stand astounded. And corrected. No one killed the little doll known as Vassar except her own soft heart.
She died trying to rescue one of my kind, albeit a pampered, perfumed kind.
Joan of Arc indeed. The name Hyacinth comes to mind. At least Mr. Matt is set free by my kind’s obligation. This was an accidental death. The only Kitty involved was the unknown feline fatale balanced on the balcony. Ah, my anonymous Juliet, how fatal thou art.
Chapter 44
Wake
Matt thought he must be dreaming, but he had thought that a lot lately.
There came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping .. . not on his or Poe’s chamber door, but on the glass of the French doors to Matt’s patio.
He ignored it as an audible hallucination.
He was two stories up. His patio was a pathetic thing compared to the other units’ outdoor areas. It remained as he had found it: furnished by one dusty white plastic lawn chair. Temple’s patio was a whimsical mini-Disneyland of potted plants and creative seating. His was a wasteland. His private garden was miles away at the Ethel M chocolate factory, filled with sere, thorny cacti.
Tap, tap, tap.
There wasn’t even a tall tree nearby to scratch a branch over his door glass. The venerable palm in the parking lot ended by just tickling the underside of his balcony.
He supposed Midnight Louie could have leaped up to his balcony from the palm tree, but Midnight Louie would never knock, or scratch, or mew for entry. Matt didn’t know much about cats, but that much he knew about Midnight Louie.
So … nothing was there. Nobody was there.
There was barely anybody here, Matt thought, still reeling from the past few days’ events.
Rap, rap, rap.
Matt rose from his red-suede vintage sofa and moved to the balcony patio. The absence of curtains made his figure the well-lit star on an obscure stage, he knew, while the anonymous tapper on the patio remained in the dark, invisible.
He wasn’t afraid of the invisible, so he jerked one of his French doors wide open, daring cutthroats, sneak thieves, and random murderers to have at him.
In the soft Mercurochrome glow from the parking-lot lamp, he spied a black form balanced impeccably on the narrow wrought-iron railing … not Midnight Louie, but Midnight Max.
Matt regarded his visitor, reflecting for the first time that Max reminded him of Flambeau, the master thief in a Father Brown story, those genteel literary exercises in crime, punishment, and Roman Catholic theology by G. K. Chesterton.
Balanced like a mime-acrobat on the railing, Kinsella waved his current calling card: the tall black-labeled bottle of amber liquid with which he had apparently leaned forward to rap on the glass.
Despite the skill of such a trick, Matt recognized that the bottle was whiskey and that Kinsella had already been drinking from it.
“Top of the evening to ye,” Kinsella greeted him in a stage brogue. “Mind if I come in?”
Matt did mind, but he was too curious to refuse. Before he could nod, the magician had untangled himself from the iron railing and vaulted into the living room in one liquid motion.
“To what do I owe—?” Matt asked, omitting the phrasethat usually followed those words: the pleasure of your company.
Max Kinsella evoked many feelings in Matt, but companionability was not one of them.
Kinsella didn’t answer directly. Did he ever? Matt wondered.
Instead he held the bottle up to the central ceiling fixture. The glass was such a dark brown that almost no light penetrated it.
“This,” Kinsella announced, “is the finest Irish whiskey in the world, Bushmill’s Millennium at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the Irish distill the finest whiskeys in the world. The word ‘whiskey’ is Gaelic in origin, did you know that?”
“Yes. It means ‘water of life.’ The Irish also have the finest addiction to alcohol in the world.”
“Ah. Not a tad of the Auld Sod in your soul.”
“Polish-American.”
“So you’re a beer man.”
“I don’t drink much of anything.”
Kinsella shrugged, quirked an eyebrow, and flourished the bottle in one fluid gesture.