In a Cat’s Eye
‘Curious Incident’ meets ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in this crime-noir debut.The police said Nancy OD’d and she was a tramp. But she wasn’t; she was my friend. I didn’t see her Virgin Mary statue in her room, and I said some guy killed her and took it. Mr. Winkley was in the hallway meowing. The Colonel knew all about crimes. He said, Okay Willy we’ll conduct an investigation… There were a lot of suspects in that hotel.When a young woman in her locked room is found dead with junk in her veins, three friends follow a twisted trail of clues through the Morpheum – a seedy, crumbling hotel, home to the lost, the forgotten, the dreamers, and a killer.
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IN A CAT’S EYE
KEVIN BERGERON
Authonomy by
HarperCollinsPublishers
Table of Contents
The day before I found her dead started like any other day. I’d been at The Morpheum for about a year. It was a nice hotel and I had a lot of friends there. Sometimes you think some guy’s your friend but he might not be, so you have to be careful, because that guy might get you in trouble.
You always had to go by Elsie to get in or out. She kept her door open in the daytime so that she could see out into the hallway, and she always sat in this stuffed chair with her feet up on a card table that I’d cut the legs down for her because her ankles got puffy. I liked to help her and she said I was handy and I could fix things. I had a key to the supply closet and nobody else did, and I had tools.
She had her feet up on the table I fixed for her, and she had furry slippers, and nylon stockings rolled down just below her knees. She was the landlady. She sat in that chair every day, all day long, and she didn’t miss much. Nothing got by her, not in the daytime anyway. Sometimes things happened at night, and she didn’t see any of that.
Anyway, I had just made it down the hallway past her parlor, thinking she hadn’t seen me, and I was turning the door knob when she called my name.
“Willy!”
I figured either she had a job for me or she wanted my back rent. It was a sunny day and was going to get hot later, and I wanted to go out.
“Willy!”
I smelled soup cooking on her hot plate. I had a lot of things to do outside, but I hadn’t eaten yet, either.
“Willy, get in here. I want to talk to you.”
Sometimes Elsie had me eat lunch with her. I went into her parlor. She was watching TV with the sound off. I thought they might be showing the spacemen, but they weren’t. I fixed the rabbit ears on the TV to give her a better picture; it didn’t hurt to be nice to her. Her pillow had slid out from behind her neck.
“Let me fix your pillow for you, Elsie,” I said.
She grabbed the pillow away from me when I tried to fix it for her. I guess she just didn’t want to be comfortable. I sat in the chair I always sat in and we looked at the TV.
“They don’t show the spacemen anymore,” I said.
“You mean the astronauts. They came back from the moon over a month ago. What makes you think it would be on TV now? Whatever put that idea into your head?”
“I don’t know.”
It was just doctors and nurses on TV, and Elsie always watched that.
“Something has gotten into Nancy,” she said.
“It’s that Roy,” I said.
“Willy, has Roy been bothering Nancy?”
“He’s been following her around. She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he’s a drug dealer. Francine said the police caught him and cut his arm off.”
“You know better than to believe anything Francine says. The police don’t cut people’s arms off.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just telling you what Francine said.”
“Roy lost his arm in an accident.”
“He sells dope to little kids.”
“Stop talking about people. You don’t know anything about Roy. He always pays his rent on time.”
“I’d like to know where all his money comes from,” I said.
“He gets disability. You’re not disabled. You could work.”
I never liked Roy, and I didn’t think Elsie liked Nancy going around with him any more than I did, but she wasn’t going to say anything bad about him. I figured that Nancy probably felt sorry for Roy on account of he had only one arm, like she’d felt sorry for Mr. Winkley because he had only one eye. When Mr. Winkley was living out on the street and he had pneumonia, Nancy took him in. He went in and out her window. Elsie didn’t know about Mr. Winkley, and I wasn’t going to tell her. I was sorry that Mr. Winkley only had one eye, but I wasn’t sorry for Roy, because he caused enough trouble with one arm that he didn’t need another one.
“I’ll tell that Roy he better stay away from her if he knows what’s good for him,” I said. I never did like that Roy.
“You’ll tell him no such thing, Willy. You just stay away from him. Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yeah.”
We watched TV with the sound off, and I thought, Roy has been bothering Nancy.
“She’s lost weight,” Elsie said.
“I know,” I said. “She’s not happy like she used to be.”
“She said her door was sticking. You told me you fixed it.”
“I did. I put on a new deadbolt just last week.”
“And she said the hinges were loose. When she gets back from work, would you take a look at it?”
“Yup.”
“Talk to her, Willy. See if you can find out what’s troubling her.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find out and let you know right away, Elsie.” I liked to find out things for her.
We were looking at the TV. I was thinking that maybe Elsie had forgotten the soup, but I didn’t want her to think I was hinting for her to give me some, so I didn’t say anything.
