Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

My phone stayed quiet until after ten, and I was in bed when it rang. It was David, headed home from JFK. He was hoarse and weary but he brightened when I told him I’d found what he was looking for.

“Morning’s booked solid,” he said, “but I’ll try to make it after lunch.” As it happened, it was sooner than that.

It was just past dawn when the intercom buzzed, and at first I thought I’d dreamed it. A rain of ice was falling against the window glass, and the sound of it made a fine case for pulling the covers over my head. I had just closed my eyes when the intercom erupted again. My brother was gray and hunched on the little video screen. His head was bare and the collar of his overcoat was up, and he was clutching a newspaper to his chest.

“Let me in,” he said, before I could speak. I pushed the button and opened my apartment door and in a moment I heard footsteps in the stairwell. He came in with head bent, and cold air clinging to his clothes.

“What happened, David?”

“I was on my way to the office,” he said. His voice was choked and his skin had a drowned look to it. So did his eyes. “I almost never buy the News, but today I bought one. I don’t know why.” He put the newspaper on my kitchen counter.

“What happened?”

He opened the paper three pages in, and I followed his shaking finger down the columns. It was alongside an article that bore the headline “Woman’s Body Pulled from River,” and it was murky: a photograph- an extreme close-up- of a red cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and grinning insouciantly. Enlargement made the image grainy and washed the color out, but still you could tell that the cat was a tattoo, inked upon a patch of gray, dead-looking flesh.

The Post named her the Williamsburg Mermaid, because her body had washed up under the Williamsburg Bridge, at the west end. That bit of poetry aside, the article contained nothing I hadn’t read in the Daily News. She’d been found on Sunday evening by a man collecting bottles, and she was, so far, a Jane Doe. The police described her as white, aged twenty-five to thirty-five, slim, with reddish-brown hair and a distinctive tattoo on her leg. As to time of death they were still uncertain, but noted that she’d been in the water “for a while.” As to the circumstances and cause, they said only that these were “suspicious.” A search of missing persons reports for women matching her description was under way, but detectives from the Seventh Precinct asked that anyone with information call the toll-free number.

I looked at the Post’s photo of the red cat; it was identical to the one in the News. The cops hadn’t yet released any pictures of her face, not even sketch work, and I wondered about that, and about how long she’d been drifting in the East River. I closed the newspaper and tossed it on the big oval table. David looked at me for a moment and resumed his pacing. I sat back in the soft leather chair and drank some of the soda water that Michael Metz had left us when he’d asked us to wait in his conference room.

Mike is a senior partner at Paley, Clay and Quick- a very good and pricey lawyer at a very staid and pricey firm. His well-deserved reputation as smart, tough, relentless, and icily calm in the face of chaos keeps his calendar perpetually full, but he’d made time for David and me that morning- not only because he was my frequent client, but also because he was my oldest friend. The only one left from college, and that despite all the calls I hadn’t returned.

I’d more or less dragged David to Mike’s office, though shock and fear had taken any serious fight out of him. It was only in the taxi, locked in traffic on the way to midtown, that he’d come around enough for the anger to bubble up.

“Fuck this!” he’d shouted, and hammered on the Plexiglas partition. The driver glanced back and shook his head. “I have no time for this crap,” David said. His voice was shaky. “I’ve got to get to the office.”

“The office will wait. You need to talk to someone about this.”

He shook his head. “I don’t need shit,” he said, and he reached for the door. I put a hand on his arm.

“You need a lawyer, David.”

“Bullshit,” he said, and shrugged off my hand. But he sat back, and for the rest of the ride had peered silently out the window, his eyes full of nothing.

In Mike’s conference room, ignoring the view of office towers shrouded in cloud, and wearing a hole in the expensive carpet, David found his anger again. “She was making fucking movies?” he said, and made it sound like my fault.

I’d gone over my report with him three times and was getting tired of repeating myself, and anyway it seemed beside the point now. “Videos,” I said. “She made videos. But we’ve got other things to think about.”

“Whatever.” David shrugged and crossed the room again. I took a deep breath. There’d been questions buzzing in my head since I’d first seen the photo of the tattoo, questions I wasn’t eager to ask my brother, but had to nonetheless.

“When’s the last time you spoke with Wren?”

He stopped pacing and squinted at me. His mouth got tight. “We went through all that last week. Nothing’s changed since then.”

“Everything’s changed. Did you hear from her after you hired me…or see her?”

He gripped the edge of the conference table, and his knuckles turned white. “What the fuck are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything, I-”

“The hell you’re not!” He slapped his palm on the tabletop. “Next you’ll want to know whether I’ve got an alibi. Jesus, I thought you were working for me.”

“I am, but I need to know where we stand. Mike will need to know too.”

“Then don’t dance around it- you think I had something to do with this.”

“That’s not what I was asking,” I said, but I wasn’t sure it was true. David was sure it wasn’t.

“Bullshit,” he said. His shoulders slumped and the air went out of him, and he turned to the window. “I haven’t heard anything from her since before I hired you. I had nothing to do with this.”

“Where were you this weekend?”

David made a sour laugh. “I knew we’d get to that.”

“I’m just trying to build a timeline.”

“Right,” he snorted. “I was in London. I left Friday afternoon and came back yesterday, and I was in meetings most of the time. Is that good enough?” It wasn’t, not until we knew when Holly had died, but I didn’t tell David that. I took another deep breath.

“What about Stephanie?” I asked.

He stiffened. “What about her?”

“What does she know about Wren? What did you tell her?”

“Why does that matter?” I looked at David and said nothing. “Whatnow you think she was involved?”

“It’s a question the police will ask.”

At the mention of the police he took a half step back. He ran a hand over his gray face. “I didn’t tell her anything,” he said. “We didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what she knows.”

“She knew something, that much was clear when she came to see me. How could you not-”

“We didn’t talk about it,” he said tightly, and turned on his heel to the window again. Mike saved me from asking more.

He paused in the doorway, a tall, slender figure in impeccable gray pinstripe and a wine-red tie. Partnership had etched fine lines around his narrow features, but his face, still pink from shaving, was somehow still a student’s face, easier to imagine bent over some dusty tome than hypnotizing juries and scaring other lawyers. He ran fingers through his thinning black hair and glanced from me to David, and back again. A smile appeared.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said, and put out a hand to David. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” David gave him a disbelieving look but there was no irony in Mike’s voice and nothing but sincerity in his smile. He was good at that.