In a Cat’s Eye

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

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

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

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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