“Police have already been here,” Reggie shouted, “Couldn’t turn the damn thing off.”
“Were the key holders here?”
“The what?”
“The key holders. There’s two of them. If the alarm goes off—”
“Couldn’t turn it off!” Reggie shouted.
“The key holders?”
“The police.”
“Did someone try to break in?”
“Your daughter hit the panic button.”
“What? My daughter—”
“The cat got run over.”
“Sebastian?”
“Run over by a car. Your daughter hit the panic button, figured that’d bring the police.”
“Where’s my wife?”
“Don’t know where she is. Mrs. Tannenbaum drove your daughter and the cat to the vet’s. Police were mad as hell. Been trying to get you at the office, Junior, you shouldn’t be out sailing on a workday.”
“What vet did they take him to, do you know?”
“Haven’t the faintest. You’d better turn that siren off, Mr. Ziprodt up the block’s got a bad heart.”
The front door was unlocked. I went directly through the house and to the back door, where one of the alarm stations was set into the wall just outside. I took my key ring from my pocket, and searched for the key to the system, wishing it were color-coded like the key at the jail. The siren was still screaming. I found the right key at last, put it in the keyway, and turned it to the right. The siren stopped abruptly. The silence was almost deafening. I went back into the house and to the utility closet, where the burglar alarm control box was mounted on the wall alongside a circuit breaker. I opened the front panel of the box and reset the system, but not the alarm; this had to be done whenever the panic button was hit. I slammed the panel shut, and went immediately to the phone in the study. In the yellow pages, I found under VETERINARIANS-D.V.M. at least a dozen listings. I scanned them quickly, found one that sounded familiar, dialed the number, and asked for Dr. Roessler.
“Dr. Roessler is in surgery, sir.”
“Who’s this I’m speaking to, please?”
“Miss Hilmer.”
“Miss Hilmer, this is Matthew Hope, I’m calling about a gray tabby named Sebastian. Would you—”
“Yes, sir, the cat’s here.”
“How is he?”
“He’s being operated on now, sir.”
“Can you tell me what... how bad is it?”
“His thorax is torn, Mr. Hope. The lungs and heart are exposed. Dr. Roessler is closing the wound now.”
“Thank you, could I... is my daughter there?”
“Just a moment, sir.”
When Joanna got on the line, I said, “Honey, I’m on my way, you just wait there for me.”
“Dad,” she said, “I think he’s going to die.”
“Well, we don’t know that, honey.”
“I tried calling, where were you?”
“With a client.”
“Cynthia said you were on a boat.”
“Yes, I went there first to talk to someone, and then I went to the Police Department to talk to Michael Purchase.”
“I heard on the radio that Michael did it, is that true?”
“I don’t know. Honey, is Mrs. Tannenbaum still there with you?”
“Yes. Did you want to talk to her?”
“No, that’s all right. But please ask her to stay till I get there, would you? Where’s Mommy?”
“I think she went to the beauty parlor, I’m not sure.”
“All right, honey, I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Do you know how to get here?”
“It’s near Cross River, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll remember it when I see it. G’bye, darling.”
“Bye, Dad,” she said, and hung up.
All the way to the vet’s, I kept thinking of Sebastian.
On the day before we’d taken him into the family, Susan had gone down to the basement of our house in Chicago, and found herself face to face with a rat the size of an alligator. Brazen bastard got up on his hind legs and snarled and squealed, sent her screaming up out of the cellar to phone an exterminator who came that afternoon to seed the basement floor with poison pellets. Trouble was, we had a five-year-old daughter and I didn’t like the idea of all that poison lying around, however infrequently she might be visiting the basement. Susan began crying when I suggested the possible danger to Joanna, immediately thinking I was scolding her for having called the exterminator. I told her she’d done exactly the right thing, but that a cat might be a safer deterrent than scattered poison patties.
What I had in mind was a big cat.
I suppose the range of animals varies at any given shelter on any given day. On that particular day in March, seven years ago, there were two cats, eleven kittens, five mongrel dogs, and the most beautiful thoroughbred boxer I’d ever seen. Sebastian was one of the cats, an enormous gray tabby with darker gray stripes, white markings on his face, markings that looked like white socks on all four paws. The one on his right hind paw seemed to have slipped to his ankle. He was prowling the topmost shelf of a cage that contained two separate litters of kittens and a scrawny Siamese that was not only cross-eyed but looked mangy as well. Sebastian paced the shelf like a tiger. He looked fierce and proud and I was certain he was the best rat-catcher who’d ever stalked a basement. “Hey, there,” I said, and he looked at me with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen on man or beast, and gave a short “meow,” and I fell in love with that big old pussycat right then and there. Susan had wandered down to the other end of the room, where she was looking at the boxer. I called her over.
“Well, he’s certainly big enough,” she said.
“Look at those green eyes, Sue.”
“Mm,” she said.
“Let’s find out why he’s here. Maybe he ate his former owners.”
We went outside to where a young man was filling out papers behind a desk. I asked him about the big gray tabby. Was there anything wrong with him?
“No, the mother was allergic to him,” he said.
“The cat’s mother?”
“No, the mother in the family. He’s the gentlest cat. Not a thing wrong with him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sabbatical.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she’s a schoolteacher. The mother.”
“That’s no name,” I said.
“Well, that’s his name.”
Susan and I went back inside again. The cat was still up there on the top shelf, licking himself clean now. We stood outside the cage, watching him.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Susan said. “I was hoping we’d find a white cat.”
“Is he huge, or am I dreaming?”
“He’s enormous.”
“Hey, Sebastian,” I said, and the cat meowed again.
Ten minutes later, we were taking him home in a cardboard carrier. We’d given a donation of twenty-five dollars to the shelter, and already had misgivings about this unknown cat without papers or pedigree. Sebastian broke out of the carrier before we’d driven five miles from the shelter. First his ears popped up out of the opening, then his green eyes wide and curious, and at last his face, white mask over the nose and mouth. He climbed out onto the back seat and looked around.
“The cat’s out,” Susan said.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
But Sebastian only leaped up onto the little ledge inside the rear window, and sprawled there to watch the scenery going by. Never made a sound, didn’t scramble all over the place like most lunatic cats do in a moving automobile. Just sat there with those big green eyes taking in everything. Automobiles never frightened him. One morning — this was after we’d been living in Calusa for almost a year — I got into the Ghia and had driven halfway to the office when I heard a sound behind me. I turned to look, and there was Sebastian sitting on the back seat. I grinned and said, “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” He blinked. Joanna played with him as if he were a puppy. Hide-and-seek, games with string or yarn, races across the lawn. One time she came into the bedroom, beaming, to describe a game she and Sebastian had been playing. “We had the most fun,” she said. “I was chasing him around the sofa, and he was laughing and laughing.” She really did believe he was laughing. I guess I believed it too. For some reason, perhaps because we’d got him close to St. Patrick’s Day, we all thought of Sebastian as Irish. I’d sometimes talk to him in a thick Irish brogue, and he’d roll over on his back to reveal the whitest, softest, furriest belly, and I’d tickle him — and yes, he was laughing, I’m sure he was laughing. I loved that cat with all my heart.