Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“You mind if I wait inside? It’s pretty cold out here.”

He shook his head. “No can do- building rules. Sorry, man.” He leaned against the door.

There was nothing to be gained from a shoving match; I moved my foot back. “Do you remember when you saw him last?” I asked as the door swung shut.

The man shrugged and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said again. He carried his bags to the elevator and watched me through the glass until I walked away.

It was full dark now and snowing harder. The wind was heavier too, swirling between buildings and spinning the snow in dizzying vortices. Spikes of icy air ran down my collar and up my sleeves. Across the street, lights were going out in the pizza parlor, and at the coffee shop the roller gates were already down. I headed east, toward the subway.

I spotted him in less than a block, when he stepped out from the shadow of the senior center and began trudging along behind me. He couldn’t have been worse at running a tail if he’d been pounding on a drum. And I recognized him right away too, from the gray parka and biker boots and big shoulders, and from the wide face with tiny features: Babyface, Holly’s new boyfriend.

I knew he hadn’t tailed me to 108th Street- it would’ve been impossible to miss him on my way there- which meant he’d picked me up at Werner’s place. Which meant he’d been staking it out. I’d have to remember to ask him why. I paused at the corner of 108th and Central Park West and made a show of checking my watch. Babyface ducked behind a van. He was nothing if not earnest.

There was little traffic on CPW: a few cabs cruising slowly south, slewing when their brake lights flared, a FedEx truck double parked at 106th Street, delivering God only knew what in the middle of a blizzard, a Number 10 bus lumbering uptown, and another headed back down. Across the street, Central Park was a landscape through static: bare trees, footpaths, streetlamps, and stone walls, all gray and grainy and dissolving in a whirl of snow. The northbound bus was still three car lengths away when I sprinted across the avenue, and its horn was still braying when I went into the park at a run.

The footpath was slick and I skated downhill and slid to a stop where the path forked north and south. I paused to make sure Babyface was with me. He was- standing by the entrance, backlit and steaming. I moved under a streetlamp, to make sure he could see me, and then I headed south. The path curved uphill and was sheltered from the sideways snow by rocky outcroppings to the left and by a canopy of branches overhead. I stepped off the path and into the gap between two large rocks, and I waited.

I heard Babyface- his fraying breath and scuffing boots- before I saw him, and then a broad expanse of gray nylon passed, like the side of a freighter. I let him go fifty feet up the path and then I stepped out.

“Gets cold, just waiting,” I called.

Babyface spun and his hands came up in a dishearteningly practiced way. “What the hell do you want?”

“Same thing you do, I guess: Gene Werner. You see him around?”

“All I see around is you, and I’m getting fucking sick of it.”

“You get sick of Holly too? Is that what happened to her?”

At the mention of her name, Babyface stiffened and took a step toward me- and stopped in his tracks when a Samoyed came around the corner behind him. The dog was dragging a well-bundled woman on a red nylon leash, and he froze when he saw Babyface and emitted a nasty growl.

Babyface looked at the dog and the woman and then back at me, and looked like he might growl too. Instead, he said, “Fuck it,” and turned and ran up the path, past the woman, and around the corner. The Samoyed barked and snapped, but Babyface never looked back. The woman reeled in her dog, and her mouth was a perfect “O” when I ran past.

I didn’t get far. Babyface sprinted, arms pumping and shoulders bouncing, and took a sharp left where the path forked again. I did the same and I was gaining ground until the next turn, when I hit a wide crescent of ice. My boots flew up and my legs churned in the air like a cartoon, and I came down hard on my ass and elbows and on the back of my head.

Through the rush in my ears, I heard his footsteps fade in the distance, and I thought about hauling myself up and going after him. But my legs had emptied out and my head had filled with sand, and all I could manage was to lie there, while snow fell on my face and wind carried my breath away.

I took inventory in the morning, in the bathroom mirror. The worst was the purple egg on my left hip, followed by the cuts and bruises on my elbows and the knot on the back of my head. I was stiff and limping on my way to the kitchen, but there was coffee at the end of the road, and a note from Clare: “Back later. Coffee’s fresh.” I ran my fingers over the neat lines of tape and gauze on my elbow.

The people on the subway the night before had scrupulously ignored my wet and muddy clothing, and avoided even looking in my general direction. Clare was less circumspect.

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” She’d dropped her book and sat up on the sofa as I limped through the door.

“Slipped on some ice,” I said. I dropped my coat and eased into a chair and winced. Clare bit her lip. I fumbled with the laces of my boots and she’d brushed my hands away and untied them for me.

“Shouldn’t you say some shit like ‘You should see the other guy’?”

I stretched out my leg and winced again. “I am the other guy.”

Clare shook her head. “I don’t do the Florence Nightingale thing,” she’d said. But as it turned out, she did, carefully and with surprising tenderness.

I filled a mug and stared out the frost-framed window. The wind had died since last night, but snow was still falling in small, relentless flakes. The TV news said it was the calm before the secondthe worse- storm that was due to arrive that night. The anchormen read long lists of things that were closed, and likely to stay that way for a while, and field reporters trained their cameras on impassable roads and on the dazed and hapless at the airports. I looked down at Sixteenth Street. The only cars I saw were at the curbsides, buried until spring, and the only people were gray smudges, trudging- one snow-shoeing- down the middle of the road. I wondered what errand Clare was on.

A shower loosened my limbs, and three cups of coffee got my brain cells spinning, but still they found no purchase when it came to Babyface. He was Holly’s new boyfriend. He had a key to her place. He was looking for something or someone- maybe Gene Werner. He had a bad temper. And twice now my conversations with him had ended in bruises. I thought again about the crude green tattoos on his hands, and added some speculation to my paltry pile of facts: he’s maybe been inside recently. It was still adding up to nothing when the phone rang.

It was Mike Metz, who’d somehow made it to his office. I told him about my conversation with Herbert Deering, in Wilton, and about my livelier encounter with Babyface.

Mike was quiet for a while when I was done. “It’d be good to know his name,” he said eventually, “and whether he actually was insideand, if so, what for. It’d also be good to know where he was a week ago last Tuesday, or thereabouts. And the same goes for Werner.”

“Why a week ago Tuesday?”

“That’s when the ME thinks she went in the water, or so my lunch date told me. They think she was in about five days.”

“They have a time of death?”

“Sometime that day- Tuesday- but nothing more precise yet.”

“And the cause?”

“Shot in the face, four times.”

I took a deep breath. “Not your typical suicide, I guess.”