The World's Finest Mystery Part 48

"Okay." She sniffed up the last of the tears. "My ex-partner, that is, my ex-boyfriend, he has the cat."

"Ah-ha. Now we're getting to the heart of the doughnut."

"You're really not very good at that, you know?"

"At what?"

"That wisecracking banter stuff. It's not your forte."

"Listen," I said, impatience beginning to win out over greed once again, which has always been one of my most perilous failings. "I find cats, like it says on my card. You want banter, you should..."

She waited. I dot-dot-dotted. Eventually she said, "I should what?"

"Hire a banter specialist," I mumbled.

"See what I mean? Not your forte. Lim has the cat. It's my cat, I've had it for years, ever since I came to this country, but he won't give it back. Now, for reasons I don't choose to share with you, so don't bother asking, I don't wish Lim to know that I know that he has the cat. Okay? So I want you to 'find' the cat, report back to me, then I can confront Lim with your report and demand return of my property. Namely, one cat."

Reasons she didn't choose to share- that'd be female pride, I reckoned. "I don't usually do custody battles," I said. "Too messy"

Marie shook her head. "It's nothing like that. Lim has no claim on the cat, believe me."

"All right," I said. "But I come back to my earlier point- you tell me where the cat is, and I'll-"

"No way!" She reacted as if I'd made an indecent suggestion. "I'm from the States, pal. The land of the proactive consumer. You think I'm going to pay you for doing nothing, you think again."

Counting slowly to ten, and then even more slowly to twenty, I rolled, lit, and smoked a cigarette. It was important that I ignored the loonier aspects of this case and focused on the essentials. That's right- the money. If she wanted to pay me to locate a non-missing cat, that was fine. No one has ever accused me of putting job satisfaction or professional dignity ahead of paying the bills.

"You understand that I charge a daily rate?"

She nodded.

"All right, then. Will you at least tell me where the cat went missing from?"

Marie took an envelope out of her attache case. "In here, you'll find a photo of the cat, the address of the apartment where the cat was stolen from, and the keys to that apartment."

I took the envelope and rattled it. "Can I contact you at this address?"

"No, I'm not there anymore. And before you ask, I don't choose to tell you my current address."

Another slow ten, another slow twenty. A prayer of thanks for nicotine. "That's going to make it hard for me to contact you, Marie."

"I'll contact you," she said.

I'd had enough arguing with foreign maniacs for one day, so all I said was: "Right. Gotcha. You're the boss."

The flat was a two-bedroom place in a moderately prosperous dormitory street near Kentish Town tube station, and although it was fully furnished, right down to a box of tea bags in the kitchen, the unmistakable aroma of human occupation was entirely absent.

This was, undoubtedly, rented accommodation resting between tenants. I knew the type: In my younger days, I'd squatted plenty such, armed only with a paperback guide to property laws, a portable record player, and a couple of Stones LPs. Of course, this was back before I never got married, when I was a young man, before I became a bachelor.

I sat on the naked mattress in the main bedroom, its pillows and blankets piled at one end, and looked down at my unnecessarily soft midriff, and past that to my almost pretentiously scuffed brown shoes, and I thought about how far I hadn't come in thirty years. I still lived in the same kind of places now- difference was, these days I paid rent, like any other mug.

Not to mention that, to my own daily astonishment, I'd turned out to be not a legendary bluesman but a cat finder.

I lifted my gaze off the floor with the kind of effort an Olympian weightlifter uses when he feels the chalk on his palms begin to sludge in the sweat, and let it rest instead on what was clearly Kitty Korner. A piece of plastic sheeting lay across a square yard of carpet, and upon it stood a food bowl, a water bowl, a dirt tray, a p.o.o.p-scoop, a box of dry food, and- And it was all brand new. Unused. Just to make sure, I went over and sniffed the tray. Definitely: Not the faintest whiff of mog. This flat wasn't a cat's previous address. This was a cat's next address.

I picked my knees up off the floor and carried them back over to the bed. I sat down, rolled up a roll-up, and while I smoked it I thought.

Mine is generally a pretty simple line of work, not involving too many brilliant feats of detection. What usually happens is, people's cats wander a bit beyond their territory, get lost, panic, and go feral. They rarely run far, and I've yet to encounter one that has bothered with false doc.u.ments or reconstructive facial surgery. The only truly essential talents required of a cat finder are, in reverse order of importance, low cunning, a high boredom threshold, and exceptional bladder control.

But this... this was clearly something a little odd. Weird, even. And so was my client, Mad Marie.

As I've already implied, I have no particular objection to taking money off mad people. Not wis.h.i.+ng to sound cynical (whilst at the same time not giving a d.a.m.n whether I do or not), I have to make a living. Everyone has to make a living, after all, except archbishops, members of the House of Lords, and whoever's in charge of quality control on the privatised railways. Besides, loopy Americans have just as much right to the services of a cat finder as does anyone else. It would be discriminatory of me to refuse Marie's dosh.

That wasn't my problem. My problem was that despite, on all the evidence, being as crazy as a wasp in a jar full of glue fumes, Marie was solidly in control of this daft game- or whatever it was. That made me uncomfortable.

It wasn't until I was at home in bed that night, failing to sleep, that the very obvious solution finally entered my non-detective's head. Don't follow an invisible cat; follow the client. Brilliant! Obvious, but brilliant.

(The reason I couldn't sleep, by the way, was that every time my eyelids began to droop, I would spring back awake, thinking: I sniff cat trays. For a living. Meanwhile, Howlin' Wolf doesn't even know I exist.) * * *

"Ah Marie, I'm glad you phoned. I have what is known in the argot of the detecting racket as a Hot Lead."

"Oh, you do?"

"Oh, I do."

"Oh." There was a pause, during which I could hear her tongue clicking thoughtfully against her big, s.h.i.+ny gnashers. "Okay. Great. You want to tell me what it is?"

"Not over the phone."

"I see. You are what is known in the argot of the psychiatric racket as A Touch Paranoid."

"Quite possibly. Either way, I'd like to deliver my report face-to-teeth."

"I beg your pardon?"

I shook the telephone and made sizzling noises into the mouthpiece. "Face," I said. "Face-to-face. There's a pub in Harrow called the Load of Hay. Will you meet me there tonight at eight-thirty?"

Another pause, more clicking. "Well... yeah, I guess."

"Great. I'll wear a carnation so you'll recognise me."

"Huh? We've already met."

"Badinage, Marie. Mere banter."

There was a Country and Western night happening at the pub. People have to make their own entertainment in the suburbs, I understand that, it's just a pity that most of them are so bad at it. I have nothing against Country and Western music, provided I don't have to listen to it, but there is something about the sight of middle-aged British suburban folk wearing cowboy clothes and calling each other "Pardner" that I find mildly irritating. If I were ever to visit Montana and discover the pubs there full of middle-aged American suburban folk dressed as Morris Dancers and calling each other "Mate," I would probably react with precisely the same degree of nose-wrinkling distaste.

Or else wet myself laughing, one or the other.

I did a quick tour of the pub, weaving between the bogus cow persons, who were getting outside some beer in preparation for an evening spent steppin' out to the down-home sounds of Willie Wyoming and His Western Wildmen. I'd arrived early for our rendezvous, and I wanted to make sure that Marie hadn't arrived even earlier. It was pretty packed, I wasn't as slim as my elusive client, and as I squeezed past a corner table my hip caught a pint of lager, slos.h.i.+ng its contents onto the lap of a man wearing cowboy clothes several sizes too small for him. He was big and round. Rounder than a pig with a pig inside it. When he spoke it was with a deep, rough Glasgow accent.

"You got a problem, pal?"

"Yeah," I said. "My best friend done run off with my dawg."

To my great relief he laughed at that, slapped me on the back, and said "Yee-haw." I returned the salutation, and returned to my car, parked a few yards away, with a clear view of the pub car park.

She arrived soon after, in a maroon Escort even more clapped-out than my own ancient chariot. She drove it as if it was on fire.

I gave her a moment to get settled, then I phoned the pub on my mobile. It took awhile to make the barman understand my request over the noise of the fiddles and the banjos, but eventually Marie came to the phone.

"Yee-haw, Charlie," she said, her tone weary.

I almost yee-hawed her back, then remembered that I wasn't supposed to know what was going on at the pub. "Hi, Marie. Look, I'm sorry about this, but I can't meet you after all. This red-hot lead? It's suddenly gone critical. I have to chase it before it burns out. Ring me tomorrow, okay? I should have more news for you then?"

I hung up before she could ask any questions. I think that annoyed her: She came out of the pub immediately, muttering to herself, probably about the unreliability of men in general and cat finders in particular. Her tyres sprayed gravel over late-arriving cowpersons as she exited the car park at speed. I followed, a little more sedately.

We ended up in Wembley, where she pulled up outside a small, seriously grotty bungalow, in a street that was more ghostly than quiet. I parked my tin can behind a big van and watched as she fished around in her attache case for the door key.

She went in. I sat in the car, smoking and telling myself that I still had the bladder control of a man twenty years my junior. By way of distraction, I took out the photo she'd given me of the non-missing cat, a fluffy, all-white youngster, and looked at it properly for the first time. Then, for no particular reason beyond boredom, I turned the photo over and read the processing date stamped on the back.

Well now, I thought. That's curious.

Marie came out, got back in her car, and zoomed off again. I let her go. Somewhere in that house, I hoped, I would find the address of Lim, the ex-boyfriend. Looking at the tatty shack, I was confident that it wouldn't be too difficult to get into.

It wasn't. When I knocked on the door, just to make sure that n.o.body was at home, it turned out that somebody was at home. His teeth were smaller than Marie's but his muscles were much bigger.

"Ah," I said, "you must be the ex-boyfriend." But what was he doing at Marie's place?

"I'm Lim," he said, his accent Yorks.h.i.+re. "Nothing ex about me, pal. How about you?"

I stood there, staring into s.p.a.ce, with my mouth open. I can't help it, it's what I look like when I'm thinking. Marie had told me that she'd had the cat for years- "ever since I came to this country." But the cat in the photo wasn't more than two or three years old. And the date stamp on the reverse of the print was from last month.

Stealing pets for ransom isn't an uncommon crime these days, according to the newspapers. My guess had been that Marie and Lim were amateur catnappers who'd fallen out over the spoils.

But if Lim was still here, it didn't look like they'd fallen very far.

Lim seemed to take my silence on his doorstep as an insult. "Tell you what," he said. "I think I'll hit you."

I couldn't think of anything to defend myself with other than my business card.

"Will Find Your Cat? Jesus," he said. "The old bag hired a detective?" He laughed. "You better come in, pal."

I took a step forward, and Lim pushed me hard in the chest. While I was busy falling over, he scarpered out of the kitchen door and away over the back fence. That was fine with me. I rarely chase people, and never if they're running.

In a large cage, which dominated the cramped, underfurnished living room, I found Venus Arisen- white, young, and fluffy. See? Told you I was a cat finder.

A disc hanging from his collar was inscribed with his phone number, but before I had a chance to ring it, Marie came in, looked at me, and said, "h.e.l.l's bells."

"If you run, I won't chase you," I said. "I'll just sit here and wait until you get back."

She dropped down onto a sofa with a big whump and lit a cigarette. She made a big production out of not offering me one. Petty.

"Is the cat all right?"

"Don't worry," I said. "The cat's fine."

"Pity," she said, on a stream of blue smoke. "I was hoping Lim had used it to hit you with. I can't stand cats. Lim's gone, I guess?"

"You just missed him." I sat down on the smelly sofa, between her and the door. Just in case. I tried to think of a bit of banter to cheer us both up, but nothing came to mind. I settled for, "Tell me the story, Marie."

She did, in a quiet, depressingly sane voice. It took me awhile to realise she was crying, she made so little of it.

Lim and Marie wanted to get married. They got a flat sorted out- the one with the all-new litter tray which I'd visited the previous day- but then Lim lost his job, and Marie was d.a.m.ned if she was going to pay for everything, so they came up with the cat-napping plan. Simple. But no sooner had they installed Venus Arisen in his temporary quarters, when Marie met someone else.

"Someone richer," I guessed.

"What? I'm supposed to apologise for having self-worth?" She wiped her nose on her sleeve. "This country, really! The only time you see ambition is on a Scrabble board."

Simply walking out on Lim was, apparently, not an option. "The man is possessive. A fat old milksop of a cat finder like you, no offence intended, Charlie, could not even begin to visualise what I mean when I say that he is possessive."

"Slightly lumpy," I said. "Not fat." I might have objected to milk-sop, too, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure what it meant, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself by objecting to a compliment.

"I knew I had to shake Lim off good and proper, but I couldn't think of a way. Then I saw your stupid advert on a postcard in a launderette window."

"Can you remember which launderette? It'd be a great help for my marketing strategy."

"I convinced Lim that we shouldn't move the cat to the new flat yet, in case we were seen. And then I hired you. You thought I was crazy, didn't you? See, that's what I wanted you to think- I didn't want you taking the job too seriously."

"Yes, Marie," I said. "You give great crazy."

Her entire plan might have served as evidence of her craziness- except that it worked. She a.s.sumed that I would stake out the new flat, since it was the only address I had. She a.s.sumed this because she a.s.sumed that I was cheap, lazy, dishonest, unimaginative, and slightly lumpy, and not a proper detective. That annoyed me: I have never claimed to be a proper detective.

Due to my incompetence, Lim would be sure to spot me (he was over there several times a week, making sure the love nest didn't fall to squatters) and a.s.sume that I was either a cop or a private eye. Why would he a.s.sume that?

She laughed out a cough of smoke. "Let's just say that dear Lim has had his ups and downs in life. He might look like Mr. Clean-"

"He doesn't," I said.

"Well, even if he did, it would be an inaccurate image. Believe me, I know this: If he sees a cop, real or imaginary, he runs." She looked me up and down, ran her tongue over her big teeth awhile, and laughed again. "Bet he's the first person ever to run from a cat finder, though."

"From what you say, isn't he the type to come looking for you, when he thinks it's safe to return?"

"Probably. But I'd be gone."