Slugfest

Twenty-two

The only other person I’d seen in the building was the cat lady. I rang her bell and, as expected, she didn’t answer. Nothing. I rang again. This time I heard the staticky crackle of the intercom, but no one spoke. This was a careful woman—after all, she answered the door with a door bar in her hand.

“Excuse me, ma’am. It’s me. The woman on five, I mean four. Lucy’s friend. I’ve locked myself out of the building.” I heard nothing for a few minutes, then I looked through the glass panel and saw what looked like a thin periscope or a snake with a curved head. Next, a tanned hand and a slightly crepey wrist. The door opened.

“I brought my bar,” she said. “Just in case.”

“Thank you. That was smart.” Paranoid, but smart. The cats, Tommy and Moochie, had followed her down and now trailed us back up the stairs. She unfolded my note and the pet poison flyer. “Did you leave this for me?” she asked.

I nodded.

“That was very thoughtful,” she said, as though I’d donated a kidney. “Where are you from?”

I toyed with the idea of telling her I was from the Midwest or the South or the planet Zoran, which could be the only possible explanation for why I’d done something nice for a total stranger. But I decided the truth was the best way to go.

“Brooklyn.”

So was she. In her book that made us kindred spirits. She looked at the menus. “I’ve got a tray of baked ziti in the oven. I could open a bottle of wine.” Cooked food. Five minutes away. And it was baked ziti, which I hadn’t eaten since my mother had inexplicably packed up and moved to Florida. There was no way I could really smell the oregano and tomato sauce, but I imagined I did. I said yes.

Her name was J. C. Kaufman. J. C.’s apartment was a marvel of efficiency. In one modestly sized studio she had a kitchen, a dining area, a living room with a working fireplace, and an office with a drafting table and two computer monitors. A tight spiral staircase led to a sleep loft. When I told her I was a gardener, she insisted on showing me her garden, an eight-by-ten terrace lined with planters and punctuated with whiskey half barrels. Three of them held rhododendrons and two had evergreen shrubs that may have been Pieris.

“You can’t tell now, but I have Japanese maples and clematis in the spring. Come back inside—it’s still cold out here at night. I just wanted to show it to you.”

J. C. was an editor. Videos, not books. She got started in the eighties, working on promotional tune-ins for the soaps. We swapped war stories.

“I’ve seen hundreds of these so-called stars come and go. The young ones—they all think they’re the next Meryl Streep. They’re not. It’s all hair and lip gloss. And Botox. You could crack walnuts on their foreheads. Now, Susan Lucci, she’s a class act. And even more beautiful in person. She does, of course, have a big head. They all do. All famous people.”

I was regretting my decision to join her for dinner. I didn’t know anything about soap stars or how big people’s heads should be and didn’t want to appear uninterested. She waved off my offer to help, put on a pair of silicone mitts, and took the ziti out of the oven, placing it on the butcher-block cart that defined her kitchen area. The whole apartment filled with the fragrance of the stinking rose, and the top of the ziti was burnt in five or six places where the cheeses had bubbled up. J. C. pulled off the mitts and fetched a bottle of Barolo.

“I’ll get glasses. You want to help, keep Moochie away from our dinner. I don’t mind a few cat hairs on my food, but it turns some people off.” She walked to a shallow china cabinet near the front door. Just as she suspected, Moochie made his move toward the sizzling baking dish the minute his mistress turned away. I was less worried about pet dander than I was about him burning his paws.

“Go on, Moochie.” I tried to shoo him away. “Go on.”

J. C.’s head poked around the corner. Her eyes were wide. She held two glasses and an index finger was pressed against her lips. At first I thought it was her special way of communicating with the cat. She motioned to the front door with her head; then I heard what she’d heard. Footsteps in the hallway, and they could only be heading upstairs to Lucy’s apartment. Then we heard someone rummaging around. Had we left the downstairs door open? J. C. was frozen to the spot. She pointed to the phone on the far end of the wooden table, and I took the receiver out of the cradle and tiptoed toward the terrace, ready to dial 911. She viciously shook her head and pointed to the bathroom, where presumably it was less likely I’d be overheard than outside where the sound might drift up to where the intruders were.

By the time I’d hung up, two sets of footsteps had scrambled down the stairs and out the front door, which shut with a slam. We heard the tinkle of glass as one of the panels must have broken.

“Damn.” J. C. finally moved and put down the glasses she’d been gripping during the entire incident. She looked like she was tempted to take a swig right from the bottle; instead she poured two large ones. “I’d say the wine’s had time to breathe. Me, too.” Neither of us minded that Moochie had started dinner without us.

When the cops knocked on J. C.’s door, we were startled, then realized if a glass panel had been broken in the front door, they wouldn’t have needed to be buzzed in. Still, J. C. slid the metal disc that covered the door’s peephole to one side and waited a full minute before putting her eye against the door to see who it was. “Old habit,” she said, removing the bar and unlocking the door.

Officers Vargas and Wilson spent a few moments getting the story, then they went upstairs to search Lucy’s apartment while we stayed at J. C.’s until they said it was safe.

“They really did some damage,” Wilson said, leading the way through the door I’d foolishly left open. I didn’t know what to think but followed him, expecting the worst. Nothing looked that different to me. The cops couldn’t understand why I was so relieved. “It doesn’t look that bad,” I said. “Oh, that.”

Vargas stood inside the hole in the wall Lucy’s contractor boyfriend had started to join the apartments and never finished. One hand was on each side of the wall as if he were holding them up. “Looks like Iron Man crashed outta here.”