Man’s Best Friend

Nancy Jane Moore

No, I didn’t choose the wrong picture to illustrate a story called “Man’s Best Friend”: The best friend of the title is indeed a cat. The “man” part of the title is accurate, too. This story originally appeared in the anthology Crafty Cat Crimes as one of 100 cat mystery stories. Everyone seems to love a cat tale.

The cat in the photo is Mahasamatman, the Lord of Light, known to his friends as Sam (1982-1997).

I would never have gotten involved, except for the cat.

Yeah, I know, I’ve never been much of one for cats. Real men don’t do cats, that’s my motto. But, hell, the poor little bugger was sitting out there in the rain, scratching at the sliding door—you know my apartment’s got that patio door, opens onto a little grassy area in back—yowling pitifully and looking wet and bedraggled.

Since Laura left I’ve developed a little more compassion for those in pain. So what the hey, I let him in, toweled him dry as best I could. Found a can of tuna in the cabinet. Boy, did that make him happy. He scarfed it right down, then sat down to lick himself the rest of the way dry.

Nice-looking cat, once he’d cleaned himself up. Big green eyes, grayish stripes—I think you call it tabby. Not too big, and kind of lean, like he went out and got his exercise going after mice or something. He leapt right up into my lap, made himself at home, and started to purr.

Well, hell, that suckered me right in. I’d been sitting there, planning to take him to the pound. Feeling a little guilty about it—I always figured taking them to the pound was just the civilized version of putting them in a bag and throwing them in the creek. But once he started purring, I got to thinking that maybe having a cat wouldn’t be so bad.

So your wife walks out, you get kind of maudlin, okay? Laura had told me I was boring, and I’d started to think maybe I was. I liked it, getting affection from someone. Even a cat. I scratched his ears and he purred some more, and I felt kind of good for the first time in a month or so.

Anyway, I hear pets make you live longer.

Eventually it occurred to me that cats got to eat regular, and they can’t just run out to Mickey Ds when they get a mind to. And I didn’t have another can of tuna. Plus he was going to need a bathroom sooner or later, and I did know you can’t just send cats outside twice a day to do their business, like you do dogs.

So even though the rain was still coming down, I went out. This big guy was walking just ahead of me in the hall—must have come from the elevators. Really big guy. Beefy. Looked like he might have played linebacker. He let the front door slam back in my face.

His black Firebird was parked next to my old Toyota in the tenant parking area. I’d noticed the car a few weeks earlier—hard to miss the silver racing stripes and mag wheels. He’d probably just moved in. I fumbled with my keys while he screeched tires.

The Giant was full of customers after eleven. I found the pet food aisle, and about freaked out. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of food they got, just for cats. And cat litter—my God, they must have had twenty brands of that, in all sizes.

Fortunately, this woman was loading her cart right next to me. Really loading it, I mean—cans and cans of stuff. Turned out she had three cats. And she wasn’t some old lady. Kind of a babe, actually.

But she took pity on me. “Keep it simple, for now,” she said. She selected a box of dried food, told me which litter to get, reminded me that I needed some kind of container for the litter, that sort of thing.

“And take him to the vet,” she said. “Stray cats can have all kinds of diseases.”

I could see this pet keeping might get expensive. I wondered if vets cost as much as doctors.

When I got home I did the usual struggle with the door you do when your hands are full of stuff, finally got it open—and the cat goes rushing out between my legs and up the hall. Kind of surprised me. I guess I was expecting him to be sitting curled up where I’d left him, just waiting for me to come back so he could sit in my lap again.

I put the stuff down, and went looking for him. And there he was, up the hall about three apartments, scratching at this door and mewing like his heart was going to break.

So I picked him up, said, “Hey, boy, what’s the deal here?” I tried to think who lived in that apartment. You know, life in the big city, you don’t really know your neighbors.

After a minute, it came to me. A woman lived there. In her early thirties, maybe. No beauty queen, but not a dog either. Nice enough. Hadn’t lived there long. One evening I’d come in the front door while she was struggling with too many bags, and helped her carry them in. And the cat—my new cat—had come running out the door when she’d unlocked it.

Well, what the hell, I could give her all the stuff I’d just bought. I should have thought about asking around to see if anyone had lost a cat. So I knocked on the door. No answer. Knocked louder. Still no answer.

It was after midnight by now, and a week night. And it bothered me. Stupid, really, because I didn’t know enough about her to know her habits. I mean she seemed quiet enough when we met in the halls, but maybe she liked to party all night. Or was staying with a boyfriend.

But it bothered me. I guess it was the cat. I just didn’t think she’d go off and leave him out in the rain. So I knocked again. Still no answer.

Well, hell, her apartment would have sliding doors out to the same garden area as mine—that’s how the building was designed. So I took the cat back into my apartment—he protested loudly all the way—and slipped out my patio doors. Counted over apartments to figure out which one was hers. It seemed to have a light on inside.

Her sliding door was open just a few inches. I banged on it, yelled, “Hey, lady, I found your cat.” No answer. So I tried sliding the door. It didn’t move. Must have been jammed open just enough to let the cat in and out, without letting anyone else in.

So I reached my fingers in, and pushed the curtain aside so I could peek in. And saw a leg, lying at a funny angle on the floor.
That’s all I saw. It’s all I had to see. I went rushing back to my place and called 911.

Well, pretty soon we got cop cars and an ambulance, and even a damn fire truck. Lights flashing everywhere, and all the neighbors outside. The resident manager was standing around, looking a little green. The cops had gotten him to open the door, and he saw her lying there. Blood everywhere.

After awhile they carried her out all zipped in a body bag. And then the cops started asking me questions.

Well, I’d expected that, you know. I mean, I called ‘em. But after a few minutes the questions moved from “About what time did you find the cat” to “how long ago did your wife leave” and it finally hit me: they considered me a suspect.

Hell, no wonder nobody wants to get involved. I do my neighborly duty and the next thing you know, I’m going down to the station with a couple of detectives.

Well, they did ask nicely. They didn’t arrest me or anything, just said, “Would you mind coming back to the precinct with us?” What was I going to do, say no?

The station they took me to in Wheaton looked like it was built in the seventies—all brick and glass. Some architect probably told them, make it look friendly, not like all those forbidding police stations of the past. Let me tell you, it didn’t make me feel any less scared.

First they fingerprinted me—“Just want to check your prints against others on the scene, to eliminate them.” Then they asked, would I mind giving them a sample of my blood. Well, of course, I minded. At that point, I thought long and hard about calling my lawyer, only I didn’t want to call him in the middle of the night. Anyway he’s a divorce lawyer, not a criminal one. So I let them take it. I told them, “Hey, I didn’t do anything but find the body. I got nothing to hide.”

They stuck me in this interview room, and just left me there for awhile. It got kind of eerie, sitting there. I kept thinking I should get up and leave. But maybe they’d locked the door. I didn’t want to know that, so I just sat there.

After what seemed like a couple of hours, two detectives came in, and started asking me questions. And you could tell from the questions, they really thought I’d done it. The guy was doing this nice guy routine—“Hey, buddy, I know what’s it’s like. Your wife leaves, other women shoot you down. You got reason to get angry.”

But the woman cop, she jumped all over me. “You hate women, don’t you? Your wife said you frightened her, that’s why she left, isn’t it?”

And I found myself thinking, my God, did they already call up Laura? I mean, the scenes between us got kind of ugly there at the end, you know. No telling what she’d say about me.

Then the cop went on about the other women in the building, how they felt scared of me. First I’d heard of it. I had visions of the cops waking up all these women up and down the halls, asking them about the murderer in apartment 107.

They kept it up for about an hour or so, and then disappeared for a long time. The room really started to get to me. Nothing to read. No television or anything. Nothing to do but sit there and think. And I didn’t have anything to think about, except how scared I felt.

I swore to myself I’d just demand to call my lawyer when they came back. I didn’t want to—I figured only guilty people needed lawyers and anyway I’d already paid all my money to lawyers during the divorce—but I began to think I’d never get out of there without help. I remembered some sociology professor I had back in college saying, “It’s not whether you’re guilty; it’s whether you look guilty.”

They didn’t come back in until about seven o’clock in the morning. And when they did, the male detective started in the on the nice guy stuff again. Brought me some coffee—kind of old—and a donut from the vending machine. The woman cop just sat there, kind of sullen, watching him get all palsy-walsy with me. And I thought, well, he’s not so bad a guy. I’m not going to need a lawyer here. Truth will out.

And just as I got comfortable—the caffeine and sugar giving me a pleasant buzz—the woman started in again. She just jumped all over me, mentioning the web sites I’d bookmarked—hell, I mean, my wife left me, okay. I’m not dating anybody. So I checked out some kinky web sites. Cheaper than buying Hustler.

I kept looking at the male cop, and he’d give me one of those shrugs, like “sorry, buddy, nothing I can do.” And I didn’t think it would ever stop, until finally just one thought remained in my head: confess. Just tell them what they want to hear, and they’ll leave you alone.

I almost did. You know, we got the death penalty in Maryland these days. Guy kills a woman like that—a sex crime—everybody’s going to want to give him one of those lethal injections.

I knew that, and yet I still came that close to confessing. Scary, really, what psychological tricks can do to you. Make you wonder whether you actually did something.

I’m not sure what I would have done if another officer hadn’t stuck his head in, pulled both cops out of there. They left me sitting there about ten minutes, long enough to pull myself back together, and realize I’d better demand a lawyer before I confessed to every unsolved murder in twenty states.

And then the male cop came back in, said, “You can go home now. We’ve got everything we need.” Didn’t explain a thing. But he did ask a uniformed guy to drive me home. While I was waiting for him, I heard someone mention something about the lab tests coming back. I guess my blood didn’t match.

Thank God for modern science.

I saw the woman detective sitting at her desk, just drinking some coffee. She gave me a look as I left. Didn’t seem apologetic, just disappointed.

I got back home at maybe ten in the morning, thinking mostly about crawling into bed. I could hear the elevator doors open when I was unlocking my apartment door, but I didn’t pay any attention. Frankly, I was leaning up against the door frame, trying not to fall asleep before I got inside. The cat came out, rubbed against my ankles, and then growled. Before I knew it, he ran up the hall, climbed up the leg of this huge guy standing there, and started scratching his face. I swear he was trying for the eyes.

I said, “Oh, shit.” It was the new neighbor, the one I’d seen the night before. The big one. He looked even bigger in the morning light. He swatted at the cat, cursing.

Well, I rushed up there, got an opening, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck, and pulled him off. Probably took some skin. The guy reached toward the cat, like he wanted to strangle him, which I admit didn’t seem like an unreasonable reaction, but I held the cat out of range, and said something dumb like, “Bad cat.” The cat hissed at me, wriggled around, scratched at my wrist, which made me drop him. He raced off down the hall to God knows where.

I told the guy, “Man, I’m really sorry about this. Look, let me get something for those cuts.” I figured, better be conciliatory with this guy, because both he and I knew he could take me apart with one hand.

Funny thing was, he didn’t seem particularly angry. Or not at me, anyway. He rubbed a scratch, looked at his fingers, saw blood, and said, “Damn cat.” And then, “Yeah, I guess I’d better clean up.”

So he followed me along. I grabbed a couple of towels and the antibiotic cream out of the bathroom. He wiped the blood off, threw a towel on the floor, then started putting the ointment on the cuts he could find.

I said again, “Man, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what got into him.” After all, I was thinking, if this guy doesn’t beat the crap out of me for sure he’s going to sue me.

He didn’t seem to be listening. He said, “You got any beer?” I pulled a Rolling Rock out of the fridge—I keep it around for my friends who don’t know what good beer is. He popped the top and chugged about half of  it. And then he said, “That bastard cat never did like me.”

I got it, then. He didn’t think the cat belonged to me. Which meant he knew who the cat belonged to. Which meant . . .

Freaked me out, I tell you. But I kept my cool. “Just can’t tell with cats,” I said.

He swigged the rest of the beer, crumpled the can, threw it at the trash. It missed. “Yeah,” he said. “Cats and women. You just can’t tell.” And walked out.

I waited a minute or so, then called the cops. Again.

They acted pretty skeptical at first. “The cat recognized him?” the male cop kept saying. But they finally agreed to come look at the stuff the guy had touched.

The blood on the towel matched some they’d found it her apartment. Not to mention the nice fingerprints he’d left on the beer can. The cops were sitting in his place waiting for him when he came home.

Turned out he’d killed several other women the same way. He’d move into some big anonymous apartment complex like mine, get friendly with some woman living there—preferably someone new to town, somebody who didn’t have many local friends. After running into her a few times in the hall, acting friendly, he’d ask her out. And by that point, he wouldn’t seem like a stranger.

He was always careful not to be seen with the women. A couple of months after the murder, he’d just move on to a new place. And start the pattern all over again.

Gives me the creeps, just thinking about a guy like that.

The Washington Post did a feature piece on me, all about how sometimes neighbors do get involved in this ugly modern world. Kind of nice, actually. Ran a picture of me with Fred curled up in my lap. That’s what I decided to call the cat. Fred. Just seemed right, you know.

Actually, Fred should really get the credit. I wouldn’t have found her except for him. And I wouldn’t have seen the guy if Fred hadn’t attacked him, much less invited him into my place to clean up. They say cats aren’t too smart, but Fred knows his enemies. And his friends.

No, I think I’ll pass on another beer. Got to get home and feed Fred. I’ve got a date later. Didn’t I tell you? The reporter who did the story. She doesn’t think I’m boring.

Copyright © 2000 Nancy Jane Moore