Free A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) by Lydia Adamson

Mr. Brodsky. Peter Dobrynin was out of my league, out of my range of experience. All his adoring friends had loved him, they said, pitied him, mourned for him—and ultimately refused to help him. They had probably all had a sexual relationship with him. So if sex was some part of the motive for murder, any one of them could conceivably have killed him.
    But so what? If Dobrynin had indeed been as promiscuous and irresponsible as everyone said, then the list of suspects might well fill up several pages on a legal pad. Any one of the dots in what our mayor had called the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York could have pulled the trigger.
    As for his three lost years, if his closest friends had been unable or unwilling to find him, he must have really covered his tracks with a vengeance. If he had indeed become a classic derelict and been murdered by a peer for a motive as ordinary as a swig of Ripple—as Betty Ann Ellenville had suggested—it was doubtful the killer would ever be found. And that was the worst possible scenario for Lucia Maury.
    The pillow in my lap was brocaded. I ran my palm over the raised design. There were so many questions that kept popping up. Sure, the derelict theory was attractive, and logical in some respects. After all, derelicts do kill other derelicts. The milieu itself is violent. But how many derelicts would be able to muster the skill and foresight needed to plant a weapon so fastidiously? And even if so, why under Lucia’s desk? This “derelict” would have had to have known that Lucia and Dobrynin had been fractious lovers in the past. But while I could picture two derelicts sharing a bottle on some frozen street corner, I couldn’t see them revealing to each other biographical details of their pre-derelict love affairs.
    Belle peeped around the corner. I waved her in. She moved up onto the coffee table, settling on Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic study of the Masai. The cat’s cute, near tail-less rump made me smile. Somewhere in the past I had read about the number of vertebrae in the tail of the average feline. I wondered how many were missing from Belle’s truncated tail.
    She leapt onto my lap. “You lack a good twenty to twenty-five vertebrae, my beauty,” I teased her. “Eat your heart out.”
    She boffed my right shoulder then, only playing—her claws were held in check.
    This white-paw attack was completely harmless, but for some odd reason it resurrected the terrible sight of Peter Dobrynin’s corpse. And in a split-second I realized why. White, bare feet. Clean white feet at the end of long legs, stretched out for all to see on the illumined expanse of the balcony.
    I felt a surge of adrenaline.
    Many derelicts go shoeless, even in winter.
    But his feet were
clean
.
    There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Dobrynin had entered the State Theater wearing shoes.
    The murderer had removed them.
    A bottle of wine was a stupid enough motive for murder. Was a pair of shoes a better one?
    Or was there some much more convoluted explanation?
    I had no answers yet. But that pumping adrenaline was a very good sign.
    I gathered my things and scooped up the unalert cat for a kiss she rejected. “Belle, my
belle
,” I told her, “there just may be a little caviar in your future.”

Chapter 13
    I saw the little red light blinking. Only one call had come in. One was enough.
    “The ballistics report has been submitted.”
    It was the soft, modulated voice of Frank Brodsky.
    “The bullet that killed Mr. Dobrynin on Christmas Eve was fired from the weapon found taped beneath the desk in Lucia’s office. A .25–caliber, semiautomatic, Czech-made handgun.”
    The attorney had spoken the words calmly, as if he were a TV newsreader forecasting mixed clouds and sun.
    I felt a little sick to my stomach. I looked unhappily at Tony, who had hobbled along with me to Brodsky’s office. But Tony seemed more interested in the impressive array of Hudson River paintings than in police