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In a Cat’s Eye
Kevin Bergeron


‘Curious Incident’ meets ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in this crime-noir debut.The police said Nancy OD’d and she was a tramp. But she wasn’t; she was my friend. I didn’t see her Virgin Mary statue in her room, and I said some guy killed her and took it. Mr. Winkley was in the hallway meowing. The Colonel knew all about crimes. He said, Okay Willy we’ll conduct an investigation… There were a lot of suspects in that hotel.When a young woman in her locked room is found dead with junk in her veins, three friends follow a twisted trail of clues through the Morpheum – a seedy, crumbling hotel, home to the lost, the forgotten, the dreamers, and a killer.









IN A CAT’S EYE

KEVIN BERGERON









Authonomy by

HarperCollinsPublishers


Table of Contents

Cover (#u7d72472e-75a2-5e31-ae38-4673bb0790f7)

Title Page (#u8ff4f983-47cc-5b10-945d-f2776d45c6fe)

Chapter 1 (#u78230107-1099-54c5-9475-846f19e281a7)

Chapter 2 (#u39bdbdea-c6eb-5323-8738-877a77279c65)

Chapter 3 (#u0bc5392d-bb2e-5ede-8a29-395b586a99b0)

Chapter 4 (#uabeff198-6add-58fc-9ffe-a315a66bf39c)

Chapter 5 (#u64080302-db93-5517-ac64-6087f5fd1fa1)

Chapter 6 (#u66f614ba-af87-59ac-a8f2-46bab277932b)

Chapter 7 (#u856ee570-11bf-5d2c-a2fe-4889b63ddc17)

Chapter 8 (#u1ac5c1aa-be1a-5f9a-a612-e5edb430a635)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About Authonomy (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 (#ulink_a1c757fb-a344-573a-894a-b4c8b4ab9ac6)


The day before I found her dead started like any other day. I’d been at The Morpheum for about a year. It was a nice hotel and I had a lot of friends there. Sometimes you think some guy’s your friend but he might not be, so you have to be careful, because that guy might get you in trouble.

You always had to go by Elsie to get in or out. She kept her door open in the daytime so that she could see out into the hallway, and she always sat in this stuffed chair with her feet up on a card table that I’d cut the legs down for her because her ankles got puffy. I liked to help her and she said I was handy and I could fix things. I had a key to the supply closet and nobody else did, and I had tools.

She had her feet up on the table I fixed for her, and she had furry slippers, and nylon stockings rolled down just below her knees. She was the landlady. She sat in that chair every day, all day long, and she didn’t miss much. Nothing got by her, not in the daytime anyway. Sometimes things happened at night, and she didn’t see any of that.

Anyway, I had just made it down the hallway past her parlor, thinking she hadn’t seen me, and I was turning the door knob when she called my name.

“Willy!”

I figured either she had a job for me or she wanted my back rent. It was a sunny day and was going to get hot later, and I wanted to go out.

“Willy!”

I smelled soup cooking on her hot plate. I had a lot of things to do outside, but I hadn’t eaten yet, either.

“Willy, get in here. I want to talk to you.”

Sometimes Elsie had me eat lunch with her. I went into her parlor. She was watching TV with the sound off. I thought they might be showing the spacemen, but they weren’t. I fixed the rabbit ears on the TV to give her a better picture; it didn’t hurt to be nice to her. Her pillow had slid out from behind her neck.

“Let me fix your pillow for you, Elsie,” I said.

She grabbed the pillow away from me when I tried to fix it for her. I guess she just didn’t want to be comfortable. I sat in the chair I always sat in and we looked at the TV.

“They don’t show the spacemen anymore,” I said.

“You mean the astronauts. They came back from the moon over a month ago. What makes you think it would be on TV now? Whatever put that idea into your head?”

“I don’t know.”

It was just doctors and nurses on TV, and Elsie always watched that.

“Something has gotten into Nancy,” she said.

“It’s that Roy,” I said.

“Willy, has Roy been bothering Nancy?”

“He’s been following her around. She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he’s a drug dealer. Francine said the police caught him and cut his arm off.”

“You know better than to believe anything Francine says. The police don’t cut people’s arms off.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m just telling you what Francine said.”

“Roy lost his arm in an accident.”

“He sells dope to little kids.”

“Stop talking about people. You don’t know anything about Roy. He always pays his rent on time.”

“I’d like to know where all his money comes from,” I said.

“He gets disability. You’re not disabled. You could work.”

I never liked Roy, and I didn’t think Elsie liked Nancy going around with him any more than I did, but she wasn’t going to say anything bad about him. I figured that Nancy probably felt sorry for Roy on account of he had only one arm, like she’d felt sorry for Mr. Winkley because he had only one eye. When Mr. Winkley was living out on the street and he had pneumonia, Nancy took him in. He went in and out her window. Elsie didn’t know about Mr. Winkley, and I wasn’t going to tell her. I was sorry that Mr. Winkley only had one eye, but I wasn’t sorry for Roy, because he caused enough trouble with one arm that he didn’t need another one.

“I’ll tell that Roy he better stay away from her if he knows what’s good for him,” I said. I never did like that Roy.

“You’ll tell him no such thing, Willy. You just stay away from him. Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yeah.”

We watched TV with the sound off, and I thought, Roy has been bothering Nancy.

“She’s lost weight,” Elsie said.

“I know,” I said. “She’s not happy like she used to be.”

“She said her door was sticking. You told me you fixed it.”

“I did. I put on a new deadbolt just last week.”

“And she said the hinges were loose. When she gets back from work, would you take a look at it?”

“Yup.”

“Talk to her, Willy. See if you can find out what’s troubling her.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find out and let you know right away, Elsie.” I liked to find out things for her.

We were looking at the TV. I was thinking that maybe Elsie had forgotten the soup, but I didn’t want her to think I was hinting for her to give me some, so I didn’t say anything.

“She has a steady day job,” Elsie said. “She pays her rent on time every week.”

I wanted to get her off the subject of rent.

“She’s got a bank account,” I said. “She told Gladys, and Gladys told me, that she had a thousand dollars in it.”

“Well I shouldn’t be at all surprised; and she’s only twenty-one. Nancy’s a nice young woman.”

“Yup.”

“You’re a young man. What are you, nineteen or twenty?”

“I guess. You don’t want to burn your soup,” I said. “Are you going to have lunch?”

“You can still make something of your life.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Why won’t you apply for a job at the restaurant?”

Elsie was always nagging me about getting a job. Her brother ran a diner a few blocks from The Morpheum. Stanley worked there part time for Elsie’s brother, washing dishes. I figured that if I went to work for Elsie’s brother, any money he paid me I’d have to pay right back to Elsie for rent and then for all I knew she’d give it right back to her brother, and that didn’t seem fair to me.

“It’s honest work,” she said. “I think that a nice young woman, like Nancy, would be wanting for some young man, I mean a nice young man who worked and had some money in his pocket, to take her to see a movie. If I was a young woman, that’s what I’d want.”

She was trying to fix me up with Nancy. I didn’t think I could ever ask Nancy out; not that I hadn’t thought about it. I liked Nancy a lot, but she was way up there and I was way down here. She never made you feel that way, though. It’s just that I saw her as like an angel or something, and I was—well …

“I’m not the guy for her,” I said.

“You paid your debt to society, Willy.”

“Yeah.” I’d paid and then some. Up society’s, I thought.

“She won’t wait forever, what with all the nice young working men there are today. A young woman expects a young man to express his feelings and not keep them inside; and as pretty and sensible, as nice a young woman as Nancy is—time waits for no man.”

Elsie didn’t understand. A girl like Nancy, I’d only drag her down, and I didn’t want that.

“Now don’t forget, when Nancy gets home, to fix her door. Talk to her, Willy. She needs someone to talk to.”

I had a lot of things to do outside and she wasn’t going to give me any soup, so I left.




2 (#ulink_aeb9f9db-52d3-5239-a566-660fb6621037)


The sun was bright that day and I couldn’t see anything at first. I waited on the sidewalk until my eyes got used to the light, facing the building with my back to the sun, looking through a big window that had tape on it. The room was empty except there was a table with a red squeeze bottle that was a chef with a pointy hat where catsup came out. He was always there grinning at you. It must have been a lunch place once.

After I got done looking at the chef I walked around town for a long time, but all I found was a blue jay feather. Then right away I found some jelly doughnuts in back of the bakery, and a dime and a nickel underneath the machines at the Laundromat.

I was walking along minding my own business and eating a jelly doughnut when some guy tried to jump me down by the river. It was some guy I’d seen around town and I thought he’d been following me. He said something when I walked by, asked me if I had a cigarette, and I didn’t like the way he said it. I figured he was planning to jump me. I went over to ask him what he was looking at and he gave me a dirty look so I went to smack him and he pushed me into the river and shook his fist and walked off. Now that I think about it, maybe he’d only wanted a cigarette. Still, a guy could grab your wrist when you’re handing him a cigarette, and there might be another guy in the bushes. I thought the guy might be going to jump me.

When I was done walking I went in the alley out back of The Morpheum to see if Mr. Winkley was out there, and he was sitting on top of the dumpster looking up the fire escape at Nancy’s window.

“I’m waiting for her too,” I said. I don’t usually talk to cats, though. “I’m going to fix her door.”

He stood up and began turning around in circles on top of the dumpster and meowing.

“I just got jumped,” I said.

He went into the dumpster and started hopping around on top of the trash. Then he stopped and stared at the trash that was in there.

“I smacked the guy,” I said.

We all figured that Mr Winkley had probably lost his eye in a fight. Before Nancy had him fixed he got into fights all the time, but he lost most of them. You kind of hate to do that to them, but you can’t live with them any other way, and they fight and get in trouble all the time. After his operation he didn’t fight as much.

It must have been a mouse in the dumpster. Mr Winkley stood still and waited. He probably figured that the mouse would forget he was there, and come back out.

He waited for a while but the mouse didn’t come back, and he hopped back out, sat down again on top of the dumpster, and started butting the side of his head against my hand and purring.

“If I had just kept on walking, then maybe he wouldn’t have jumped me,” I said.

Mr Winkley was washing his face and then he stopped and looked up at the window. He jumped from the dumpster onto the fire escape, ran up and went through the hole in the screen. Nancy was home.

I headed back. Stanley was standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette. Every time you’d see him he’d either be leaning against a wall or walking on the sidewalk with his head down like he was looking for pennies. He always had a mean look on his face and he never talked to anybody. He was in his forties and still washed dishes. I thought, That guy is a loser, and always trying to start something. As soon as he saw me he snapped his head away because he’d never look at you. I didn’t like any guy looking at me, but a guy that never looks at you and never says anything, you never know what that guy’s thinking or when he might sneak up on you.




3 (#ulink_57d64c0a-9148-5808-ba3e-256650f275d6)


Nancy had three locks on her door: a keyhole lock below the door knob, a deadbolt that you could only work from inside the room, and a sliding chain lock. She had them all locked when I knocked on her door. She unlocked the three locks and opened the door and I went in.

“The hinges are loose, Willy,” she said. She shook the door to show me. “I think the wood might be bad, and it sticks when I try to close it. Can you fix it so that nobody can break in?”

The truth is that if you know how, you can break into just about anything, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Sure,” I said. “When I’m done, it’ll be like Fort Knox.”

It would have taken about ten minutes to tighten the hinges and plane the edge of the door, but I made a big deal out of it to make Nancy feel better, and I was thinking that Elsie might let me slide another week on the rent; and I didn’t mind having an excuse to spend some time around Nancy. I had a set of unused hinges and some extra-long drywall screws in the supply closet, and some old receipts and paper bags from Peavey’s Hardware.

Nancy watched and we talked some while I worked. I was taking my time. I had the door off and was taking the hinges off when Howie and Francine came in from the street. They were talking as they came up the stairs.

“Francine, had I only realized what you meant when you said you were going to start keeping a diary, I would never have encouraged you to buy that notebook. You will succeed only in upsetting yourself further.”

Howie was about fifty-five, I guess. He went to college once. Francine was older than Howie.

“I’ve been nothing but good,” she said, “and everybody treats me like dirt.”

They stopped when they came to us, and Francine held up a notebook.

“I’m keeping book on everything that happens around here,” she said. “I’m going to make sure that it all comes out even.”

“Willy is fixing my door,” Nancy said.

Francine didn’t like that Nancy had changed the subject.

“Always make them work for it, just the way I taught you,” Francine said. “Any girl that’s got what you got don’t ever have to give nothing for free.”

“Francine,” Howie said.

“Butt out, Howie,” she said. “Who asked you? Anyhow, this is girl talk.”

She put her hand on Nancy’s shoulder and whispered in Nancy’s ear, “Has Gladys turned you out yet, honey?”

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“Never mind the jailbird,” Francine said.

“Willy paid his debt to society,” Nancy said. She was holding Mr. Winkley. “He’s fixing my door because he’s a nice guy and he likes to help people.”

“I can see you don’t need me anymore,” Francine said to Nancy, “now that you have Gladys to teach you; but don’t you ever forget that I’m the one that taught Gladys.”

Francine always claimed that she had been a prostitute, and she was teaching everybody else how to be a prostitute. She had to believe that she had something that people wanted bad enough that they’d pay her for it. It wasn’t true; nobody had ever wanted her.

“Lock your front door and make them come in the back,” she said to Nancy. “That’s the way Howie does it.”

“Francine, I think we should go now,” Howie said.

“This is all going in the book,” Francine said. She was writing in her book like a cop writing a ticket. Then she slapped the notebook and put it in her handbag and started patting Mr. Winkley, and Nancy handed him over to her. Mr. Winkley was biting Francine’s finger.

“I never had a baby of my own,” Francine said.

She walked down the hall holding Mr. Winkley. Then she turned around.

“Come on, Howie; we’re going now. Howie?”

“I’ll be along in a minute, Francine.”

Francine was mad at Howie for not going with her, and she went into her room with Mr. Winkley.

Nancy swept her floor and Howie stood there watching me work on the door. I knew what he was up to.

“That looks like a job for two men,” he said. I liked Howie, but I didn’t want him butting in on my job.

“I don’t think so, Howie,” I said.

“Many hands make light work.”

“Nope.”

“If we work on this together, then I can talk to Elsie and she’ll give us both a little something, in exchange for our effort. I know how to talk to her. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty, right down the middle.”

“No, Howie. I’m sorry.”

“You might need me to go to Peavey’s to buy new hardware. Those old hinges look worn out to me.” That Howie would get the money from Elsie, and then instead of buying the hinges, he’d spend it all on beer. I didn’t like him butting in on my job.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll split fifty-fifty, on the hinges and anything you can get out of Elsie. We’ll have to plane the edge of the door. There’s a plane up on the third floor, in one of the empty rooms, somewhere. See if you can find it. While you’re doing that, I’ll check and see what we have in the supply closet.”

“Willy, you’re a true friend,” he said, and hurried upstairs to the third floor.

I went to the supply closet where I had the set of hinges and receipts I told you about. I cleaned the hinges with Brasso so they’d look like new, keeping an eye on the stairway where Howie had gone up. I put them in the Peavey’s bag along with a receipt for two dollars and ninety-nine cents, and dropped the bag out a window. Then I went down and told Elsie that I needed three dollars to go out and buy new hinges.

She gave me three dollars and I was gone for maybe an hour or so, and then I came in with the bag that I threw out the window.

“Have you been drinking?” she said.

“No,” I said. I showed her the hinges and gave her the receipt and a penny; but I felt guilty, cheating Howie like that.

When I went up to Nancy’s room Howie was sitting on the floor in the hall, pretending to be working on the door. He’d probably come out when he heard me coming up the stairs. He had a bottle of beer, and that made me feel better, because I’d meant to save him some of the Thunderbird I’d bought, but I’d ended up drinking the whole bottle sitting on the railroad tracks in the sun. I figured the Colonel must have given him the beer, because it was the Colonel’s brand. I asked Howie where Nancy was and he said that he’d been talking to the Colonel in the Colonel’s room, and when he came out, she was gone. Then he saw the paper bag from Peavey’s in my hand.

“You have hurt me deeply, Willy,” he said. “I trusted you, and you have betrayed that trust.”

“If you had gotten the money from Elsie you would have gone out and spent it all just like I did. Anyway, you’re the one who showed me how to save the old receipts for pretending to buy things we already have.”

“Just because I do it, that doesn’t make it right, does it? I regret that I have sometimes set a poor example. You have not only betrayed my trust; you have betrayed Elsie’s trust as well.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way.

“Come on, let’s get to work,” he said. Howie was a pretty good guy. When he was young he’d had his own insurance business in a town about fifty miles down the road. He’d been seeing some queer guy, and when he ran for mayor the guy told Howie to give him money or he’d tell everybody. It all came out. Howie’s wife took him to the cleaners and that’s when he started drinking. He had a son that was grown up but the son would never see him.

We worked on the door for a while and the Colonel came out and watched. He was tall and thin, and his white hair was cut flat on top. He was retired from the Air Force. I planed the edge of the door and Howie used a hammer and chisel to make a fit for the new hinges. He was making a lot of noise so that Elsie would hear us downstairs and know we were working. Gladys came barging out.

“Pipe down!” she said. “Can’t anybody have any peace and quiet around here?” She came down the hall to see what was going on, and by the time she got to us she wasn’t mad anymore.

“What are you bums doing, ripping up the joint?” she said. “Pardon me, Colonel; I don’t include you in that category. It’s those two bums I was referring to, I mean, to who I was referring, to whom I refer. Did I say that right, correctly?”

Gladys read a lot, and she was on a self-improvement kick, learning how to talk with the right grammar. She was always on some kick. I liked Gladys. She was a kick.

“These two workmen are repairing young Nancy’s door,” the Colonel said.

“You keep an eye on those two, Colonel,” she said.

Gladys was no spring chicken and she had gone to fat some. She wore a babydoll nightgown around the hotel and didn’t comb her hair, but she wasn’t too bad to look at, and she didn’t mind you looking. I asked her if she had seen Nancy.

She yawned and stretched with her hands held above her head, and if there’d been a light on in the hallway you could have seen through her nightgown. The Colonel and I were looking, but Howie didn’t pay attention; his hinges swung the other way.

“She went out,” Gladys said. “Cat’s in my room, ripping up the wallpaper. He just attacked one of my wigs. I need male companionship. Mr. Winkley is my male companion. No, I don’t know where she went. I’m not her mother.”

I was squatted down working on the lower hinge. Gladys started pounding on the top of my head with her fist. “When are you going to fix my door?” she said. “You bum.”

I swung my arm to push her arm away. “Cut it out, Gladys,” I said.

Something thumped in Gladys’s room.

“I’m going to kill that cat,” she said, and went back into her room, and after a while the Colonel left for his room.

“Roy’s been bothering Nancy,” I said to Howie. “She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

“I assure you, Willy, it won’t last long. She’s not right for Roy.”

“He’s not right for Nancy,” I said.

We finished working on the door and I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette and thinking about a story the Colonel had told me, all about these soldiers that hid inside a wooden horse they’d made, and the enemy dragged the horse inside the walls of their own city. Maybe you already know the story, but I thought it was just the Colonel that knew about it and told me. I was thinking about that story when I heard Nancy’s footsteps coming up the stairs. I knew everybody’s footsteps.

I listened as she walked down the hall and knocked on Gladys’s door. I heard Gladys say, “He was a little angel, no trouble at all,” and then Nancy and Mr. Winkley went to her room. A few minutes later she came out and walked toward my room. She stood outside my door for a minute, walked halfway back to her room, then again to my room, and knocked on my door. I went to answer it.

“Hi Nancy.”

“Hi Willy.”

“I fixed your door. Howie helped.”

“I know.” The way she said it, you’d have thought that me and Howie fixing her door was the greatest thing that ever happened.

“We put on new hinges with longer screws, and planed the edge. It works real good now.”

“It does. It works real good. I feel so much safer now. You’re a wonder, Willy. I don’t know what any of us would do without you. You’re so handy.”

“I’m good with tools,” I said. “Everybody says so.”

“I know. They do. You’re really good with tools, Willy.”

“Nobody can ever break in now.”

“There’s something I wanted to ask you about, because you know so many things and I don’t know sometimes. It’s nothing too overly personal or anything like that.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Well, it’s something about Mr. Winkley. There’s some other things too, and I was just wondering if you’d had dinner yet.”

“Nope.”

“You come over for dinner?”

“Sure. Now?”

“I’d better go back to my room first, on account of I have to freshen up. You wait a few minutes, then you come over, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in. That way we can try out the door.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I guess this is goodbye. Goodbye.”

“Bye, Nancy. See you in a few minutes.”




4 (#ulink_c87f9f42-98dc-5c20-b97f-d871feb03cf9)


I waited about five minutes and then I went and knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” she said, as if she didn’t know it was me. I think she just wanted to be proper and formal about it, to keep everything on the up and up.

“It’s me; Willy.”

She unlocked the keyhole lock and the deadbolt, opened the door against the chain, and looked out to make sure it was me. Then she pulled the chain from the slide and let me in.

“Willy! I’m so glad that you could come.”

“Yeah; me too.”

“Is Stanley out there in the hall?” she whispered.

“Stanley? No. Why?”

“He was out there a while ago. Lately it seems like everywhere I go, there’s Stanley. Then when I look at him he turns quick and walks away.”

I opened the door and looked up and down the hall.

“Has he been bothering you?” I said.

“No, but I think he’s been following me. Poor Stanley. I think he just wants somebody to talk to.”

“I’ve got a feeling he wants more than to just talk. He never talks to anybody. I don’t like him following you around like that.”

“I was in Gladys’s room yesterday,” she said. “I’d left my door open, and when I came back, Stanley was standing in my doorway. He wanted to tell me something but he couldn’t get himself to say it. I said, ‘What is it, Stanley? Tell me,’ but his face turned all red and he just shook his head and left.”

“He had no business snooping around in your room,” I said. “Don’t worry; when I’m done with that guy, he won’t be bothering you.”

“Don’t do anything, Willy. He’s just a lonely man who’s deaf and dumb and shy. He’s overly gentle and sensitive.”

“That’s what he wants everyone to think. It’s all an act. He’s got some kind of an angle.” I stepped back into the room and closed the door.

“The door works so good, I mean, it works so well, now,” she said. She must have been taking grammar lessons from Gladys. “You’re a wonder, Willy. You’re so handy.”

She gave me a bottle of beer. She didn’t open one for herself, because Nancy would never drink beer or anything that had alcohol in it. She said for me to make myself comfortable while she got dinner ready. Mr Winkley was looking down at his cat food, trying to decide if he wanted to eat it or not. I walked around the room and looked at everything. She didn’t have a lot of stuff. A blue Bakelite alarm clock radio on her nightstand and the Virgin Mary statue on her bureau were the only colorful things.

“Statue” maybe isn’t the right word. It was more like what they call a figurine. Nancy’s mother gave it to her just before she died, when Nancy was nine, and I believe that Nancy used to kneel and pray to it every day when she was alone. The figurine was the one thing she cared about the most, and that is why I think of it as a statue, though it was only about the size of a ten-inch pipe wrench.

I don’t know that I saw the statue that night, because you wouldn’t always notice something like that. But like I told the cops, if it hadn’t been there, I’m pretty sure I would have not seen it.

There wasn’t much to see out the window, mostly just the side of another brick building across the alley, but if you got close and looked sideways you could see some trees and grass. Nancy was working at the stove and then she went over to Mr. Winkley who was drinking water from his bowl on the floor. She stooped down and looked at his face, and I couldn’t think why she did that. Then she went back to working at the stove.

We had hamburger mixed in with macaroni, onions, catsup, and potato chips. She said it was her mother’s recipe. Mr Winkley was standing on the table with his head right in my plate, so that it was hard for me to get any. I had to keep pushing him away. We were sitting there eating and she started to pick up her glass of milk, and flinched.

“Did you hurt your arm?” I said.

“My wrist,” she said. “It comes and goes. I don’t even remember when it started, so it can’t be anything. It’s from holding my trimmer knife. I told Mr. Horne and he said he was going to move me out of the cutting department, but he never did.

“He used to be so nice. Then one day I was late coming in to work and by mistake I hung my coat on the wrong rack where the office girls hang theirs and they told him and he gave me a warning. It’s a permanent warning too, so I’ll always be on probation, forever. I’m just a trimmer, that’s all I am.”

“Somebody ought to put that guy’s lights out,” I said.

She put her glass down on the table, and Mr. Winkley stuck his head in it and was lapping his tongue trying to get at the milk. She tilted the glass so he could have some milk.

“Even the girls I work with on the trimmer line were like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ I guess I thought I was some hot … stuff.” Nancy never used swear words. “So now I just try to stay out of everybody’s way.”

She held Mr. Winkley’s face in her hands, and squinted at it. There was something about his face that she kept looking at.

“You should make them get out of your way,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

“My mother always told me,” she said, “that if you were good to people and played your cards right, you could get anything you wanted, but I don’t know anymore.”

“Watch this,” I said. I stood up and grabbed two legs of the table, one in each hand, and lifted the table up over my head. Then I set it back down.

“You’re so strong, Willy.”

She picked up the dishes and took them to the sink. I stayed sitting at the table with Mr. Winkley, and watched her back as she did the dishes. She was a small girl, but she was wearing shorts that were even shorter than she was. She dropped a spoon and bent over to pick it up, and I was trying to think if she looked better from the back or the front, but I couldn’t decide.

She was washing the dishes with her back to me and she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Her saying that out of the blue struck me, because nobody had said anything about anybody going anywhere. Now when I think about it, she might have meant that her life wasn’t going anywhere; but I don’t know.

“You’re not going away, are you?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody, but I can tell you because you’re my friend: I’ve been thinking I might get a bus ticket and ride until I see a nice quiet place, like a farm with a red barn and a big field and trees, and a pond with ducks in it; where nobody knows me and I won’t be in anybody’s way. I’ll get off the bus and go up and knock on the door and get a job as a cook.”

I figured she was just dreaming, and she wasn’t really going away.

“You’re a good cook,” I said; “but what about Mr. Winkley? They might not let him on the bus.”

She stopped working on the dishes and spoke with her back to me.

“I was wondering,” she said, “if maybe you would take care of him; I mean, just until I got settled in.”

I saw the corner of a suitcase sticking out from under her bed.

“Don’t go,” I said. “He’d miss you too much. Besides, you’d have to quit your job. You’d lose all your seniority. You’re the best trimmer they have. You’d have to give Mr. Horne two weeks’ notice. It’s a law. If you don’t, then the police will get you and bring you back.” I knew that wasn’t true, but I didn’t want her to go away.

“They’ll never find me,” she said.

“What’s the story with you and Roy?” I said. I had to find out for Elsie, but I wanted to know for myself too, and I thought maybe she was going because she wanted to get away from Roy.

She went back to the dishes.

“No story,” she said. “He’s just a friend.”

Some friend, I thought; she’d just got done saying that I was her friend. I didn’t want to push it, so I just said, “If he’s been bothering you …”

“Stay away from him, Willy.” She turned around and dried her hands with a towel. “He’s a lot bigger than you are. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

I didn’t like her saying I was small.

“Roy isn’t as big as everybody thinks,” I said. “I could take that guy, easy, but I don’t like to pick on guys that have only one arm.”

“You’re just the right size,” she said. “Anyway, there’s a lot of things going on in my life and I don’t know. Never mind me. Roy isn’t bothering me.”

She came over and sat across the table from me. Mr. Winkley was on the table turning around in circles and rubbing against her hand. Nobody said anything and Nancy looked sad about something. When she finally talked, it was like she was talking to herself.

“It’s green now,” she said.

“What’s green?”

“His eye.”

“Him?” I said. “Mr. Winkley?”

“It’s green now. That’s because you’re here.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought they were on drugs, but I didn’t think that Nancy would ever take drugs.

“Cats’ eyes are green,” I said. “Sometimes they’re blue. Some cats have blue eyes.”

“That’s not what I mean. Lately, sometimes his eye gets black, and real big, like a saucer. It scares me.”

“You must have had a bad dream or something,” I said. I didn’t like her talking crazy like that.

“It seems silly now,” she said. “It’s when I’m alone; I’m not afraid when you’re here.”

You could just barely hear piano music coming through the wall from Gladys’s room. It sounded like classical music and I thought Gladys was improving herself. Mr. Winkley went to sleep on the table. It was getting dark and we listened to the music. When the music ended Mr. Winkley woke up and stood up on his hind legs and grabbed onto my wrist, and started arm wrestling with me.

“It’s getting dark earlier now than it used to,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Why does it do that, Willy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It does that every year. In the winter it will be dark most of the time.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m glad it’s not the other way around. I mean, it’s better to have the sun in the summertime, when it’s nice outside, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes. Mr. Winkley was still grabbing my wrist trying to pull it down. He bit down on the back of my hand and stared at me like he was saying he was going to beat me one way or another. That’s when I saw that his eye, which had been green just a few minutes before, was big and black, and I realized that was what Nancy had been talking about. I could see why it scared her. It did look like a saucer, like he was a machine that could kill you and didn’t care. It was like he was two different cats.

“Help me, Willy.”

Her saying that when it was so quiet in the room scared me. I didn’t know what she meant.

“I can’t reach the cabinet over the sink,” she said. “I need a big tall man to help me put these dishes away.”

I was taller than Nancy and I could reach the cabinet to put the dishes away for her.

“Mr. Winkley won’t hurt you,” I said. “I’ll show you.” I picked him up and handed him to her and we looked at his big black eye. He must have been wondering why we were looking at him like that.

“Keep looking at his eye,” I said. I went and turned on the light.

“It turned green,” she said.

I turned the light off and on a few times so she’d get the idea, and then I explained the whole thing to her, how cats can see in the dark, and how humans’ eyes do the same thing only not as much. I knew all about it.

I was about ready to leave and she started telling me about this movie that was supposed to be very good. I wanted a cigarette and Nancy wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t smoke in her room because Nancy wasn’t the kind of girl who would ever smoke.

I was getting ready to leave again and she said, “I have to show you my bird book.” She went and got the book. She sat down at the table, and I pulled up my chair beside her so she could show me the bird pictures. She’d circled in pencil the ones she’d seen. I didn’t even know she was interested in birds.

She pointed to a picture of a bluebird and said, “My mother used to say that when you see a bluebird, it brings you happiness. I always used to look for them.”

There was no circle around the bluebird. She turned the page.

“This one, the purple finch, is our official state bird,” she said.

“It’s pretty,” I said. I wasn’t looking at the picture, though; I was looking at her. That’s when I realized, like a light bulb going on over my head, that she had been telling me about the movie because she wanted me to ask if I could take her to see it. She must have gotten the idea from Elsie.

She told me she’d bought the book some weeks or months before, along with a bird feeder and some seeds. She got the feeder out of the closet to show me.

“I was going to put it outside my window,” she said, “and I was pretty hepped up about it at first, but then it seemed kind of stupid. It’s too dark in the alley. The birds won’t go there. Anyway, I don’t know how to put it together.”

“The birds will come,” I said. “It’s not always so dark in the alley. I can drill holes in the brick for the screws and make a hanger for it, and we’ll put it outside your window. You put some seeds in it, and pretty soon a bird will come to it, and then the other birds will come too.”

“Do you think I might get a bluebird? Oh Willy, I’ve never seen a bluebird!”

“Sure,” I said. “There’ll be lots of bluebirds; all kinds of birds; blue, red, yellow, all different colors. When do you want me to put it up?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. How about tomorrow morning?”

“Okay,” I said.

When I was standing at the door to leave I asked her if I could take her to see the movie. It was playing for only one more night.

“I’d love to,” she said.

“I’ll be over in the morning to set up the bird feeder.”

“I’m glad you came over, Willy.”

“Me too.”

“I’m not afraid now,” she said.

“I’m never afraid of anything,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Goodnight, Willy.”

I don’t know how it happened, if it was that she started to hold her right hand out for a handshake or what, but we were standing close and her right hand came up and I took it in my left hand and then she took my right hand in her left hand, so that we were holding hands, and then our hands sort of floated up to our shoulders. She was looking up at my eyes and I was looking down at hers, and my eyes must have been saying please, because hers were saying yes. Then we let go of each other’s hands, and hers moved up my arms and around the back of my neck, and mine went down and around her waist. Then we were kissing, but it was only a few seconds and she pushed against my shoulders and sort of slipped away from me.

She put my hands by my sides, patted the front of my tee shirt, and let out a deep breath.

“Well,” she said. We were still looking at each other’s eyes.

“So,” she said.

I tried to hold her again but she wasn’t so sure. My hands were all over her and she was sort of pushing me away.

“Willy, I’m not who you think I am,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve made so many stupid mistakes and I don’t even know if I can stop making them. I still haven’t got everything straightened out.”

“It’s the same with me,” I said. “None of that matters now. It’s only now and tomorrow that matters.”

I didn’t want to leave, and I never wanted to hurt her.

“Nancy, could I … would you mind if I asked you if I could …?”

Just then Mr. Winkley knocked a pot off the table and ran under the bed.

“Oh, that cat,” she said. She put the pot back on the table looked under the bed and told him he was a bad cat. Then she came back.

“Now where were we?” she said.

I want to stay with you tonight, I almost said. If I had just said it out loud, everything would have turned out different, but I didn’t say it.

“We were saying goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight, Willy.”

“Goodnight, Nancy.”

I left.

I couldn’t sleep so I went out for a walk. I walked around for about an hour and all I could think about was Nancy. I remembered the suitcase under her bed, and her saying that she wasn’t going anywhere. Sometimes at The Morpheum you’d be friends with somebody and then they’d leave in the middle of the night and not even say goodbye, and you’d never know what happened to them. I was afraid that when I went to Nancy’s room the next morning, she’d be gone.

I hadn’t really spent all of the money that Elsie had given me for the hinges. I’d only told Howie that because I didn’t want him borrowing it. I still had a little over two dollars, and that was enough for two movie tickets, a drink, and some popcorn.




5 (#ulink_d7f9e8a3-3fab-5f7e-b98c-ed807e7a88ce)


When I woke up the next morning Mr. Winkley was meowing outside my door. He made for me to follow him to Nancy’s room. She had never let him run loose like that before. He started meowing again and I picked him up and put my hand over his mouth so that Elsie wouldn’t hear. I knocked and called Nancy’s name but there was no answer. I tried her door and it was locked. I didn’t want to think that she had left in the middle of the night without taking Mr. Winkley. I knocked on Gladys’s door and called to her.

“Gladys!”

“Pipe down out there!” she said. “People are trying to sleep!”

“I’m looking for Nancy. She’s not in her room.”

“Yeah well I haven’t seen her.”

The Colonel stuck his head out from his room, which was right next to mine. With his flat-top haircut and thin face, his head sticking out sideways looked like a triangle.

“Willy,” he whispered, like he had some secret to tell me. He looked up and down the hallway to make sure nobody else was out there, and waved for me to come over. I thought maybe he knew where Nancy was.

“Come here,” he whispered. “I have something to show you.”

We went in and Mr. Winkley hopped up on the Colonel’s bed and went to sleep. It turned out the Colonel just wanted to play chess. He’d invented a foolproof strategy that he wanted to try out on me.

“I can’t play chess now, Colonel,” I said. “Nancy’s gone. I was supposed to put up her bird feeder, but she doesn’t answer her door, and it’s locked. Mr. Winkley was in the hall meowing. Something’s wrong.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation,” he said. “You’ve taken quite a fright. Why don’t you just sit down here, and while we’re awaiting Nancy’s return, we can have a little game.”

“This isn’t a game,” I said. “She was afraid that somebody might break into her room, and then last night she said she might be leaving.”

“Well then, that explains it. You see, she’s not going anywhere. She only wants you to think that. You still have a lot to learn about the female mind, my boy. Sit down and I’ll explain.”

I sat at his table. The chess board was all set up on it.

“Her fears,” he said, “which prompted her to engage your services in repairing her door, are all in here.” He pointed to his own head. “Don’t you see? It’s not the outside intruder she fears, but her innermost desires which she cannot acknowledge.”

“What are you talking about, Colonel?”

“A young woman’s desires. It is highly dubious that she ever had any intention of leaving. She probably placed Mr. Winkley outside your door, pinched him until he meowed, and then ran off when you opened it. She wants to make you aware of how much you care for her.”

Mr. Winkley jumped off the bed and went to scratching the Colonel’s door.

“You see,” he said, pointing at Mr. Winkley. “There is an entity whom we see as the devil, who scratches at the door of our unconscious. We lock our door against him, thinking to keep him out. But where is he, really? He is inside.” The Colonel pointed at Mr. Winkley, then at his own head. “He’s not trying to get in. He wants only to be let out, to be free, where he cannot harm us.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. “I’m going to ask Elsie if she’s seen Nancy,” I said.

“Oh posh, Elsie is probably in cahoots with Nancy. The two are doubtlessly engaged in a conspiracy.”

“I’m going to find Nancy.”

“Very well, then. I’ll go with you.”

“Okay. Don’t let Mr. Winkley out.”

I ran down the stairs and asked Elsie if she’d seen Nancy.

“She hasn’t gone out,” Elsie said. “She must be in her room.”

“I don’t think so. She doesn’t answer her door, and it’s locked.”

“Did you say anything to upset her, Willy? Nancy might not want to see you.”

By then the Colonel had come down the stairs, and we went outside and looked up and down the street.

“Her window!” I said, and ran around the back of the hotel and up the fire escape.

When I got up to Nancy’s window I tried to open it but it was latched. I squatted down and looked in. I couldn’t see much at first, because the sun was bright and the light was off in her room.

Then I saw her lying on the bed, and I knew. When somebody looks right at you, and your eyes lock onto theirs; when neither one of you moves and time stops and the bottom falls out of your stomach, you just know right away. She didn’t move, and nobody could sleep with their arm twisted behind them like that and their eyes wide open. A needle and syringe hung from the crook of her other arm fallen off the side of the bed, and a rubber cord was tied above. You always know when somebody’s dead.

I was squatted there at the window, and I looked down at the ground through the grate, because I didn’t want to see Nancy like that. It felt like the fire escape was pulling away from the building, and I grabbed onto the window ledge to keep from falling. I tried to stand and I lost my balance and fell against the railing. By then the Colonel had come around to the back of the building and I saw him standing on the ground in the alley looking up at me and his mouth was moving and I could see that he was shouting something, but it was like they turned the sound off and I couldn’t hear anything.

He must have known from the way I looked, because he ran back around the corner.

I caught up with him inside the hotel as he and Elsie were going up the stairs.

Elsie wouldn’t call the police until she was sure, and she wouldn’t give me or the Colonel her key ring. We finally made it to Nancy’s room and waited while Elsie caught her breath and sorted through the keys, but she couldn’t open the door because the deadbolt was locked, and it was the kind that works only from the inside.

The police had to break in the door to get into the room. The hinges didn’t come off, and the keyed lock didn’t break because Elsie had unlocked it. The deadbolt and chain lock were ripped off the door frame, but still screwed to the door.

It was only a few seconds between the time the door swung open and the time the police moved us away, and I thought I didn’t see the statue. I didn’t exactly not see it, though, so I wasn’t sure.

“I think it was probably there last night because I didn’t see it missing then,” I told the cop. He had a small book he was writing my answers in. “It should be on her bureau.”

“Wait here,” he said. He went in the room and talked to the other cop, and came back.

“Okay, Willy,” he said. I wanted to ask about the statue but he went off to talk to Elsie.

Then the other cop came out of the room and went over to talk to the first cop, and I thought they were talking about me, because I was the last one to see Nancy alive. I went over and asked them about the statue.

“You seem very interested in that statue,” the first cop said. They wouldn’t tell me anything. I walked away and the cops were whispering something, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

They weren’t looking, and they hadn’t said to stay out of the room. I wanted to see if the statue was in there, and I turned the door knob.

“Hey!” The first cop ran over and threw me against the wall. My knees gave out and my back slid down the wall and I ended up sitting on the floor against it.

With all the commotion Elsie never heard Mr. Winkley meowing in the Colonel’s room, and she never saw his dish or his litter box in Nancy’s room.

A doctor came and then they took her away. They locked her door with Elsie’s key.




6 (#ulink_67ddc0b0-a4c0-55cc-a55f-a5ada45524d1)


Mr. Winkley moved in with me. Cats hunt at night, so their eyes don’t need much light to see, but as far as anyone can tell they don’t see very many colors. Even humans don’t see color except in bright light, but we don’t usually think about it. The Colonel told me. He said if you look outside early in the morning before it gets too light, you won’t see any colors, and I looked one morning and he was right. That’s probably how a cat sees, only they see better than we do. The Colonel knew all about it. He was a pretty smart old guy, that Colonel.

Anyway, I had a dream that night. I was thinking about Nancy’s Virgin Mary statue as I fell asleep. It had a lot of colors; red, blue, white, and gold, and she had on a thing like a sheet that covered the top of her head and most of her arms. She had her arms down, with her hands held open in front of her. She was looking at something behind or above you, but she was looking at you too. I don’t see how they could have made her that way on purpose. Maybe the person who painted her had to work fast and dabbed the dot of one of her eyes a bit off. She had a pretty face, though.

The dream began with a sound like a pop and a whoosh, like opening a can of soda, and the pupil of an eye shot wide open and became a dark room that glowed like a black and white TV when you woke up at two in the morning and they’d gone off the air.

A cat walked on linoleum. I don’t know if it was Mr. Winkley; it might have been. It jumped onto a chair, then from the chair onto a bureau. The statue was on the bureau.

The cat rubbed up against the statue and knocked it off the bureau, and then the cat jumped off and landed on the floor. It put its paws carefully, one after the other, on the linoleum as it walked to the bed, and jumped up on it. It walked on the person on the bed and rubbed its nose against the body. Then it knew that something was not the same as before, and it stopped. The statue, in color now, like it was lighted from inside, was still falling, glittering and twirling, with that funny look in her eyes, and almost smiling. I wanted to catch it but I couldn’t. The cat pushed its nose at the body on the bed, but didn’t get an answer, and the cat wondered what had changed and what it meant. The statue was falling and a train passed going rackety-rack rackety-rack. The cat was afraid, and kept still, waiting for the train to pass. Then there was a crashing sound and I woke up.

I reached for the lamp by my bed but it wasn’t there. Mr. Winkley had knocked it over, and that was the crash I heard in the dream. He jumped up on my chest and started walking in place, looking right at my eyes with his big black eye. He thought I was his mother and he was trying to get milk out of me.

“I’m not your mother,” I said, and put him on the floor. The train passed, and it blew its whistle.

“You don’t even have a mother.”

What Nancy had said the night before, when I was sitting at her table looking at Mr. Winkley’s eye, came back to me: “Help me, Willy.”




7 (#ulink_4f442317-243a-5321-8061-010041bf01dd)


A couple of days later I went out for a newspaper. The police hadn’t been back and nobody had gone into Nancy’s room. I walked down the hallway and stopped at her door. It was too quiet in the hotel with Nancy gone.

She didn’t have any relatives, not that anybody knew of. Gladys wrote a story about Nancy for the newspaper, and she ended up having to make up some of it, to fill in the blanks.

“She did have a life,” Gladys said. “She was somebody.”

The reason I was going out for a paper was that I thought maybe Gladys’s story would be in it. I took a canvas shopping bag with me but I didn’t really plan to do much shopping. It was a big bag and you could put a lot of stuff in it and nobody would ever know.

Mostly I just wanted to go out. It was a nice day, and I probably didn’t feel as sad as I was supposed to. Anyway, I was thinking that by the time I got back with the paper it would be time for lunch, and if I cleaned the bathroom and mopped the hallway for Elsie, then she might give me some of her soup.

I always skipped down the stairs because I liked to hear my shoes going kaboom kaboom kaboom. When I was passing Elsie’s parlor Stanley was in there. I stopped. He was sitting in my chair, watching the TV with the sound off and eating a sandwich. Elsie was stirring soup on the hot plate.

“Willy, I need to have a word with you,” she said. She didn’t even look up from her soup, and I couldn’t think how she knew it was me; but like I told you, nothing ever got by her.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Somebody—never mind who—told me they saw an alley cat hanging around the dumpster out back. Have you seen any cats?”

“I didn’t see any cat,” I said. “There’s no cat out there.”

“There are no pets in this hotel. If I hear any more reports I’m calling the exterminator. I don’t want to see any cats.”

“You won’t,” I said. “Maybe it was a skunk. I’m pretty sure I might have seen a skunk out there.”

“If you saw a skunk, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I saw it all right,” I said, looking right at Stanley. “There’s a great big skunk that’s been hanging around here, right under your nose. I’m going make a trap and catch him.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of your foolishness. And another thing,” she said, shaking her spoon at me: “I won’t put up with you banging your feet every time you come down the stairs. I’ve told you enough times now and …”

I wasn’t going to listen to that, and I turned and went down the hall and around the corner. I had my hand on the door knob and I was standing there looking at the floor. I thought, It isn’t my fault Nancy died.

“Willy, I’m not done talking with you! Get back here.”

I opened the door to the street, kept it open for a few seconds, and slammed it shut, so that she’d think I’d gone out.

“I’ve had it with him,” she said to Stanley. “Six weeks behind on his rent, and I’m going to have to put him out. He doesn’t care about anything or anybody, not even himself.”

That was when I thought I heard Stanley go, “Uhm,” but I wasn’t sure.

“Would you like some soup with your sandwich, Stanley?” she said.

Then I definitely heard Stanley, with his big mouth stuffed full of the sandwich, go “Uhmmm. Uhm hm!”

Deaf and dumb my ass! I thought.

As I walked to City Market to get the newspaper, the pieces were coming together. I’d figured all along that he had an angle, and now, finally, I knew what it was: He pretended he was deaf and dumb so that people would think he wouldn’t repeat anything! That way, they’d tell him everything and he’d run right back and tell Elsie. I figured that he was the stool pigeon who ratted out Mr. Winkley to her. It all made sense.

He’d been spying for Elsie all along! I was so shocked that I walked past three cars with the windows open and keys left in the ignition and I hardly noticed, even though one of them was a Chevelle SS 396 with racing stripes and white interior, brand new with dealer plates.

He was Elsie’s spy! That explained how Elsie found out about the time that Francine threw Lucille out the window. And when the Colonel’s science experiment blew up, she’d found out about that too.

I was so lost in thought that I almost bumped into two guys in business suits who were trying to block the sidewalk and I had to tell them to get out of my way.

If I told anybody what I knew, then it would be all over the hotel: “Stanley talked! Willy heard him talking with Elsie!” Then it would be Stanley this and Stanley that, and everybody would be talking to him all the time. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a spy. I decided I was going to fix his wagon and make him shut his big mouth.

I went into City Market and there was nobody minding the store. The place was empty. I took a newspaper off the rack, walked to the cooler, grabbed a bottle of Thunderbird and waited at the counter.

“Anybody home?” I said.

There was no answer. The register was right there in front of me. With all the crime there was, you would think that Old Man Watson would have known better than to leave everything wide open like that. Grabbing the Thunderbird had been a reflex. I didn’t know if I had the money to pay for it.

I walked to the door and opened it, to see if Mr. Watson was maybe out sweeping the street or something like that, being careful to hold the bottle so that it stayed inside the store. I looked up and down the street and I didn’t see anybody. I wrapped the bottle in the newspaper so that it wouldn’t get broken, and started to put it in the shopping bag.

I heard Mr. Watson coming up the stairs from the basement. My knees buckled like my legs were getting ready to run, but my hands scrounged in my pockets and came up with ninety cents; a nickel short. The top half of me wasn’t going to follow my legs, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I looked around and there was half of a nickel sticking out from the edge of the mat by the magazine rack. Mr. Watson was an old man and I picked up the nickel and was standing at the counter when he came in from the back.




8 (#ulink_5ed5f9da-9f95-5a4c-9f39-60eb591852e9)


When I got back to the hotel Stanley was still sitting in my chair and I thought, He’s Elsie’s little pet. She wanted to know what was in the shopping bag, and I showed her the bottle and the newspaper. She said she had a new policy and from now on she didn’t want me bringing alcohol into the hotel anymore. She was just being nasty. Stanley was sitting there watching everything.

I started for my room and Elsie said, “You have something else in that bag. Show me what it is.”

“It’s none of your business,” I said. That set her back some, because I never talked like that to her. But I didn’t like the way she’d been treating me since Nancy died, and her having Stanley spying on everyone. She didn’t have any legal right to look in my bag, and she knew it.

I stomped up to my room and closed my door, and put the bag on the floor. Mr. Winkley stuck his head out of the bag, looked around to make sure of where he was, and came out of the bag.

“Watch out for that Stanley,” I said. “He’s a spy.”

By this time Mr. Winkley had gotten used to living in my room, and the way he went out was by the balcony. I’d leave the balcony door open, and he’d go out through a hole he’d made in the screen door, jump up on the balcony railing, then onto the limb of an elm tree, and climb down the tree, tail end first, to the sidewalk. He’d walk down the sidewalk and around the corner to the back of the hotel, and I’d find him on the fire escape, meowing and pawing at Nancy’s closed window. He wouldn’t climb the tree and come in by way of the balcony. I’d tried putting him in his tree so that I could point up at the balcony, thinking maybe he’d catch on, but he grabbed the front of my shirt with his claws so that I couldn’t even get him onto the tree. He was so used to coming in through Nancy’s window that he didn’t know any other way.

I’d known that I’d find him at Nancy’s window when I came back from City Market, and that’s why I took the shopping bag with me. Every time I climbed the fire escape to get him I looked through the window trying to see the bureau where Nancy kept the statue, but her bureau was against the same wall as her window, and so even with my cheek pressed against the glass I couldn’t see but only a corner of the bureau and I didn’t know if the statue was or wasn’t there. If it wasn’t in her room, I wondered, where was it?

Mr. Winkley wanted to go out again, and he began scratching at the closed balcony door, and looked at me and meowed. I couldn’t keep sneaking him by Elsie without her knowing. Sooner or later he’d meow or start jumping around inside the bag or something.

“You can’t go out,” I said. “Maybe later.”

He was mad at me because I wouldn’t let him go out, and he walked over to a pair of underpants I’d left on the floor and he looked right at me and started pissing on them. I yelled, “Hey!” and he ran under the bed.

I opened the bottle, lit a cigarette and lay on the bed. There was a spider web in the corner of the room, up near the ceiling. A spider had been living there for a week or so, and I used to watch him. He just sat in the middle of his web and waited.

Everyone was saying that Nancy had OD’d on heroin or some other drug, either accidentally or on purpose. The police must have thought so too, because they hadn’t been back. I didn’t believe it, though.

I took a drink from the bottle and set it down on the floor next to the bed. I was watching the spider to see what he would do.

I didn’t think that Nancy would ever use drugs, so I didn’t think she died by accident. She was a Catholic, and I didn’t think that Catholics committed suicide. So if it wasn’t an accident, and she didn’t commit suicide, then somebody must have killed her.

I was still watching that spider, but he was just sitting in the middle of his web. I took the last drag from my cigarette and dropped it on the floor. Sooner or later that spider would move. I kept my eyes on him and slid my foot off the bed, squashed the cigarette under my shoe, and swung my foot back up on the bed.

It had to have been murder, because it couldn’t have been anything else; but who, why, and how, I didn’t know. Probably the killer lived in the hotel, because every night Elsie always locked the outside door, and she watched the hallway like a hawk the rest of the time. We all had a key to the hotel, and I wondered if someone from outside might have gotten hold of one of the keys. But the killer must have spent some time in Nancy’s room before, to get to know the layout, how the locks on her door worked, how to get in and out leaving the room locked from the inside, and all like that. She hadn’t had any visitors from outside the hotel, I didn’t think. Probably the killer was somebody I knew.

Mr. Winkley jumped up on the bed and lay down next to me.

Gladys’s room was right next to Nancy’s, and I wondered if maybe there was a secret panel between their rooms, or if Gladys maybe cut a hole in the wall. Gladys’d had a junk habit, but as far as I knew she’d been clean for a couple of years. That’s what she said, anyway. She and Nancy were friends, so I didn’t think she killed Nancy.

The Colonel and Howie were my friends, so I didn’t think it could be either of them.

Francine wasn’t smart enough.

Elsie could hardly walk up the stairs without help.

Roy had been bothering Nancy, and maybe she told him to stop bothering her, and he decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could. Or maybe she was going to report him for selling drugs and he gave her a hot shot to shut her up. It would be hard for him to do it with only one arm, but he was pretty strong.

I had another half of a cigarette in my pocket, and I lit it and drank from the bottle.

Stanley was the joker in the deck; he could be anything or anybody. I thought, He pretends he can’t talk, and he’s a sneak and a spy, and always kissing up to Elsie. He’d been following Nancy, and she told me that he’d been snooping around in her room. He could have recorded all the details of the inside of her room in his mind, probably had a photographic memory, or maybe had taken pictures with a hidden camera, all the while planning how he’d do it. I couldn’t think of any reason he’d want to kill her, but a guy like that, you never know what he’s thinking anyway. He could have a reason that, even if you knew what it was, still wouldn’t make any sense.

There were others in the hotel, but nobody she knew well or who would have been in her room.

I was patting Mr. Winkley and all of a sudden a thought popped into my head, but it didn’t have anything to do with the murder: I was wondering if Mr. Winkley had a belly button. I was still watching the spider, but my hand was feeling all around Mr. Winkley’s stomach and I couldn’t find his belly button. He must have had a mother. I thought I’d ask the Colonel; he would know.

I figured the killer was either Stanley or Roy, but even if I knew just who the killer was, I still didn’t have any idea how they could have gotten in and out with the door and window locked. Besides her being a Catholic, there was one other thing that made me pretty sure she didn’t kill herself, and it was something that I couldn’t tell the police.

I finished the Thunderbird and dropped my cigarette in the empty bottle, and it hissed and went out. She’d been murdered; I knew that much.

A butterfly was flying around in my room. I picked up the paper from the nightstand and went through it. There was nothing about Nancy. I set the paper down beside me on the bed.

The butterfly was fluttering around against the ceiling, in the corner near the web. It kept flying into the two walls and the ceiling. It wanted to go someplace different, and I wondered why it didn’t just fly out the window so that it could be outside. I guessed it didn’t know which way to go. It probably didn’t know what was outside anyway, so it just kept bouncing off the two walls in the corner. I wondered if the spider knew the butterfly would end up doing that, and if that was why he built his web there.

Mr. Winkley saw that the butterfly was cornered and he jumped from my bed onto my bureau and pawed at the air above his head, but the butterfly was just out of his reach. That spider was still waiting.

The police weren’t going to do anything. Except for Mr. Winkley, the killer and I were the only people in the world who knew that Nancy had been murdered. I didn’t like to think that I had something in common with the killer. It made me feel guilty. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it, but the only other way was for me to believe what everyone else believed, that Nancy used drugs and killed herself, and I wasn’t going to believe that.

The butterfly got caught in the web and was trying to get out. The spider waited until the butterfly was tired, then ran over and turned her over and over with his feet, and smothered her in silk. All this time Mr. Winkley was waving his paw trying to reach the web. I didn’t want him pulling it down; I wanted him to just leave it alone. Nancy was dead, and he was playing around like he didn’t even care. That cat was getting on my nerves.

I threw the newspaper at him but it fell apart before it got there. He jumped off the bureau and went after the newspaper sheets. He flung one up in the air and it landed on top of him and he scrunched down, hiding under the sheet of newspaper.

Nancy was dead and Mr. Winkley wasn’t. I thought it should have been the other way around. I’d just start to get Nancy off my mind and then I’d see him fooling around like that and it would remind me of her and I’d feel bad all over again. I thought, He doesn’t care about anything or anybody, not even himself.

He was still hiding under his newspaper, not moving. He was playing a game but I wasn’t. I said, “That cat is going to learn a lesson.” I scrunched down on the floor and slowly put my hands out toward the newspaper he was hiding under. I was just about to grab him when he pounced at me, swiping the air with his claws. I jumped back and stood up. He’d almost clawed my face. Then he stared at a spot on the floor as though there was something there, a small bug or something, but I didn’t see anything. He got down ready to pounce at the spot, and then he gave up the idea. He looked up at me like he was asking, What?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.” I picked him up, and I wasn’t mad at him anymore.

I figured his brain was so small that he had to forget things right away or he wouldn’t have any room for new things. Probably Nancy was as big a part of him as she was of me, but it was just that he was smaller than I was. In his own way he missed her even more than I did, and that was why he got mad at me and pissed on my underpants. I was beginning to think that he probably shouldn’t be spending so much time outside. I didn’t know if he was smart enough to keep from getting hit by a car or attacked by a dog.




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