Free When the Cat's Away by Kinky Friedman Page A

wouldn’t quite close, I watched the city waken. A stout woman with a shawl unlocks an iron gate. A man in a woolen cap unloads a crate of oranges from a truck. Down the street another man sits by the gutter next to a whiskey bottle and blows on his hands. Two little children in mackerel-snapper uniforms come out of a building with a doorman. A man wearing a coat walks a dog wearing a sweater.
    People walk dogs in Dallas. People walk dogs in California. But in New York sometimes you can see a real man walking a real dog, and there’s something timeless and rather beautiful about it. It’s performance art.
    My mind was starting to wake up a little bit, too. A lot of things were happening to Jane Meara and she wasn’t the kind of person things always happened to. She wasn’t the kind of person whose junkie boyfriend beat her up or who didn’t know that her apartment was being used as a crack kitchen or who found a serial killer in her shredded wheat. She was normal as a blueberry blintze.
    So why had somebody kidnapped her cat? Why had somebody left her a crank note at the Roosevelt Hotel? Why had somebody put a bloody butcher knife on her desk? I didn’t have any hard answers, but a garish mosaic was coming together in my mind’s eye and it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d want to hang in your sitting room.
    The cab screeched to a halt at Twenty-eighth Street next to a man who was vomiting on a police car. The police car was empty and pretty soon so was the man. Make a nice picture postcard. I paid the driver, got out of the hack, and started walking up the street.
    Halfway up the block I found the little Greek coffee shop. It wasn’t hard to find the place. You seen one Greek coffee shop, you’ve seen ’em all. Life imitates John Belushi.
    It was a little after seven but the place was already crowded. Eugene and Jane were sitting at a table by the window and waved me over. Jane looked fragile. Eugene looked nervous. The waitress came to the table, Frisbeed a menu at me, and said, “Whad’ll you have?”
    I said, “Coffee.”
    She took the menu and went away faster than a dream you weren’t sure you had.
    “I’m glad you were able to come,” said Jane.
    “Let’s not get personal,” I said. As a rule, I tried never to appear too sophisticated until the coffee arrived. Jane looked like she was practicing her smile for the first time and Eugene made a let’s-get-on-with-the-show gesture.
    The waitress brought my coffee. I took a sip and waited. Eugene looked at Jane and Jane looked at Eugene. I looked into my coffee cup and wished I were on a little Greek island instead of in a little Greek coffee shop.
    “All right,” I said finally, “spit it.”
    “Well, first of all,” said Eugene, “there’s something I think you ought to know. I didn’t tell the police about it the other day for obvious reasons, but I’ve talked it over with Jane and I think I ought to tell you.”
    “Spit it,” I said.
    “Well, Jim Landis is my boss. I work with Jane, but he’s both of our boss. He’s the publisher. He’s got his own imprint. You know what that is?”
    “I’ve heard the word.”
    “It means he runs his own publishing company.” 
    “So?”
    “So he wasn’t in a restaurant like he told the police— he was in Jane’s office.” Eugene looked at me nervously. I’d have to check it out but it seemed a bit too easy.
    “Maybe I’ll order some pie,” I said.
    “Landis can’t know we talked to you,” said Eugene. “Autism is my middle name,” I said. “What else have you got?”
    Jane reached into her purse, came out with a cassette tape, and handed it across to me. It was an incoming message cassette for an answering machine. “It’s the last message on side B,” she said. “It came in late last night—about two o’clock in the morning, actually.”
    “Okay,” I said. Two o’clock in the morning was about the time the cat had jumped on Ratso’s balls. The two incidents were