A Cat Tells Two Tales Read Online Free PDF

called you for a reason, not just to stare at money or buy me coffee. I know a lot of people think I’m a little crazy.”
    “No one thinks that, Jo. Everyone I ever met out there loves you, Jo, just like they loved Harry,” I replied, and I meant it.
    “Well, I know why Harry was murdered now. It was for that money, right? But it doesn’t mean a thing unless we know how he got the money. Because if we know how he got it, we’ll know who wanted it. And I know how to find out who murdered poor Harry. He never threw anything away. He saved letters and bills and business cards and cat-show programs and scraps of paper. He saved everything and it’s all there and all I have to do is go through it all. But I can’t do that, Alice. I can’t see too well. And I don’t have patience. But you can come out for a few weeks, Alice—and your cats too—you can help me. I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars a day. And we can find out what Harry did and who murdered him. Can’t we do that?”
    I didn’t know what to say. If the killers had been after Harry’s cash, why hadn’t they guessed it was in a bank vault? And why kill him? Only he could get the money out. They would want him alive to extricate the cash for them. No, it had to be something else.
    Poor Jo! She looked so vulnerable sitting there, those ridiculous earmuffs all twisted up on the side of her head. I wondered what kind of old woman I would be if I ever reached her age.
    “You don’t have to tell me right now. Take your time, Alice. You can call me at the hotel.”

    When I have to think—I mean really sit down and think—I like to sit in front of my mirror. It’s a sort of reverse-narcissistic game I play that gets my brain working.
    An hour after leaving Jo, I was staring at myself in the mirror. As usual, I found my appearance baffling. As usual, there was the confusion over which one of us was the audience.
    Two plum offers had suddenly appeared. Should I play the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
? I no longer had any allegiance to classical theater. I was interested only in the far reaches of the envelope. I would rather be paid nothing to stand onstage stark naked reciting Baudelaire’s reflections on whores while eating a tangerine. No, I decided the theatrical offer was not pressing. It could wait.
    Jo’s offer was more pressing. The money was certainly tempting. Yet the idea of spending a few weeks with Jo Starobin was unappealing. The woman’s grief was so pervasive that those around her simply couldn’t escape it.
    I stared at my hair. There was a lot of gray in the golden flax these days. My eyebrows were getting paler. The face in the mirror was impassive. I had never understood how people could characterize me as beautiful. My face was too thin—wan, as they used to say. I chuckled. I squared my shoulders. It was my posture that they had always confused with beauty. When I had been younger and walked into a room, I always created a stir. Stage presence.
    I saw a blur move across the upper-right-hand side of the mirror. Then it stopped. Pancho was on top of the bookcase, next to the volumes of the
Tulane Drama Review
, one of which contained a picture of me performing in a one-act play at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.
    Pancho’s image was staring at me.
    Without turning, I said, “Look as long as you want, Pancho.”
    He didn’t answer. His half-tail was moving back and forth. His face was set.
    “Oh, Pancho, why can’t you ever relax? Why can’t you ever play?”
    No response. I longed at that moment to gather Pancho in my arms, but I remained seated. Pancho was a good teacher. His reserve, his peculiar sense of constant danger, made him a good teacher. Some people, some animals, could only be loved from a distance. Intimacy was impossible.
    “Run, Pancho, run,” I whispered to his image in the mirror. All he did was lift a foot and begin to groom it with his tongue. He would flee when he was ready.
    I touched the mirror