locked her door with Elsie’s key.
Mr. Winkley moved in with me. Cats hunt at night, so their eyes don’t need much light to see, but as far as anyone can tell they don’t see very many colors. Even humans don’t see color except in bright light, but we don’t usually think about it. The Colonel told me. He said if you look outside early in the morning before it gets too light, you won’t see any colors, and I looked one morning and he was right. That’s probably how a cat sees, only they see better than we do. The Colonel knew all about it. He was a pretty smart old guy, that Colonel.
Anyway, I had a dream that night. I was thinking about Nancy’s Virgin Mary statue as I fell asleep. It had a lot of colors; red, blue, white, and gold, and she had on a thing like a sheet that covered the top of her head and most of her arms. She had her arms down, with her hands held open in front of her. She was looking at something behind or above you, but she was looking at you too. I don’t see how they could have made her that way on purpose. Maybe the person who painted her had to work fast and dabbed the dot of one of her eyes a bit off. She had a pretty face, though.
The dream began with a sound like a pop and a whoosh, like opening a can of soda, and the pupil of an eye shot wide open and became a dark room that glowed like a black and white TV when you woke up at two in the morning and they’d gone off the air.
A cat walked on linoleum. I don’t know if it was Mr. Winkley; it might have been. It jumped onto a chair, then from the chair onto a bureau. The statue was on the bureau.
The cat rubbed up against the statue and knocked it off the bureau, and then the cat jumped off and landed on the floor. It put its paws carefully, one after the other, on the linoleum as it walked to the bed, and jumped up on it. It walked on the person on the bed and rubbed its nose against the body. Then it knew that something was not the same as before, and it stopped. The statue, in color now, like it was lighted from inside, was still falling, glittering and twirling, with that funny look in her eyes, and almost smiling. I wanted to catch it but I couldn’t. The cat pushed its nose at the body on the bed, but didn’t get an answer, and the cat wondered what had changed and what it meant. The statue was falling and a train passed going rackety-rack rackety-rack. The cat was afraid, and kept still, waiting for the train to pass. Then there was a crashing sound and I woke up.
I reached for the lamp by my bed but it wasn’t there. Mr. Winkley had knocked it over, and that was the crash I heard in the dream. He jumped up on my chest and started walking in place, looking right at my eyes with his big black eye. He thought I was his mother and he was trying to get milk out of me.
“I’m not your mother,” I said, and put him on the floor. The train passed, and it blew its whistle.
“You don’t even have a mother.”
What Nancy had said the night before, when I was sitting at her table looking at Mr. Winkley’s eye, came back to me: “Help me, Willy.”
A couple of days later I went out for a newspaper. The police hadn’t been back and nobody had gone into Nancy’s room. I walked down the hallway and stopped at her door. It was too quiet in the hotel with Nancy gone.
She didn’t have any relatives, not that anybody knew of. Gladys wrote a story about Nancy for the newspaper, and she ended up having to make up some of it, to fill in the blanks.
“She did have a life,” Gladys said. “She was somebody.”
The reason I was going out for a paper was that I thought maybe Gladys’s story would be in it. I took a canvas shopping bag with me but I didn’t really plan to do much shopping. It was a big bag and you could put a lot of stuff in it and nobody would ever know.
Mostly I just wanted to go out. It was a nice day, and I probably didn’t feel as sad as I was supposed to. Anyway, I was thinking that by the time I got back with the paper it would be time for lunch, and if I cleaned the bathroom and mopped the hallway for Elsie, then she might give me some of her soup.
I always skipped down the stairs because I liked to hear my shoes going kaboom kaboom kaboom. When I was passing Elsie’s parlor Stanley was in there. I stopped. He was sitting in my chair, watching the TV with the sound off and eating a sandwich. Elsie was stirring soup on the hot plate.
“Willy, I need to have a word with you,” she said. She didn’t even look up from her soup, and I couldn’t think how she knew it was me; but like I told you, nothing ever got by her.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Somebody—never mind who—told me they saw an alley cat hanging around the dumpster out back. Have you seen any cats?”
“I didn’t see any cat,” I said. “There’s no cat out there.”
“There are no pets in this hotel. If I hear any more reports I’m calling the exterminator. I don’t want to see any cats.”
“You won’t,” I said. “Maybe it was a skunk. I’m pretty sure I might have seen a skunk out there.”
“If you saw a skunk, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I saw it all right,” I said, looking right at Stanley. “There’s a great big skunk that’s been hanging around here, right under your nose. I’m going make a trap and catch him.”
“I don’t want to hear any more of your foolishness. And another thing,” she said, shaking her spoon at me: “I won’t put up with you banging your feet every time you come down the stairs. I’ve told you enough times now and …”
I wasn’t going to listen to that, and I turned and went down the hall and around the corner. I had my hand on the door knob and I was standing there looking at the floor. I thought, It isn’t my fault Nancy died.
“Willy, I’m not done talking with you! Get back here.”
I opened the door to the street, kept it open for a few seconds, and slammed it shut, so that she’d think I’d gone out.
“I’ve had it with him,” she said to Stanley. “Six weeks behind on his rent, and I’m going to have to put him out. He doesn’t care about anything or anybody, not even himself.”
That was when I thought I heard Stanley go, “Uhm,” but I wasn’t sure.
“Would you like some soup with your sandwich, Stanley?” she said.
Then I definitely heard Stanley, with his big mouth stuffed full of the sandwich, go “Uhmmm. Uhm hm!”
Deaf and dumb my ass! I thought.
As I walked to City Market to get the newspaper, the pieces were coming together. I’d figured all along that he had an angle, and now, finally, I knew what it was: He pretended he was deaf and dumb so that people would think he wouldn’t repeat anything! That way, they’d tell him everything and he’d run right back and tell Elsie. I figured that he was the stool pigeon who ratted out Mr. Winkley to her. It all made sense.
He’d been spying for Elsie all along! I was so shocked that I walked past three cars with the windows open and keys left in the ignition and I hardly noticed, even though one of them was a Chevelle SS 396 with racing stripes and white interior, brand new with dealer plates.
He was Elsie’s spy! That explained how Elsie found out about the time that Francine threw Lucille out the window. And when the Colonel’s science experiment blew up, she’d found out about that too.
I was so lost in thought that I almost bumped into two guys in business suits who were trying to block the sidewalk and I had to tell them to get out of my way.
If