A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) by Lydia Adamson Read Free Book Online Page B

and several writing or drafting desks, set high on swivels. Along the walls were elaborate built-in fish tanks, where colorful creatures cut like blades through the water.
    Beasley sat in the high-backed armchair, a cream-colored throw over his legs.
    His lover, or companion, or secretary—one doesn’t quite know how to characterize the relationship in a single word—kept circling the two of us but mostly Beasley, as though the pink-cheeked older man were a potential food source. Hence my thoughts about cats and caviar. For that was what it was like: Beasley the caviar on a large and costly cracker, and Vol Teak the inscribing feline, spelling out those quasi-mystical shapes.
    Beasley had been most unfriendly at the start. He’d grilled me extensively as to exactly what kind of “investigator” I was, making the word sound distasteful.
    But the moment I informed him of Lucia’s words—that Peter Dobrynin had spoken bitterly of Beasley’s betrayal of him when he was in need—the imperious Beasley, defensive, launched into a monologue that seemed to go on forever.
    “Yes, I saw him in that debased state. Three years ago this Christmas. The worst had already happened. That he had thrown away the career of the decade was enough of a tragedy. But the man standing before me had thrown away
everything
—all human dignity. Tossed it away! He accosted me on the street. I didn’t recognize him at first. This great dancer . . . this god . . . this force of nature . . . there he was waiting in a doorway. Filthy. Drunk. Off his head.
    “He wanted me to give him a bed!” Beasley exclaimed, the incredulity he clearly had felt that night now back in his voice. “He didn’t
ask
for it. He
demanded
! He was abusive, violent. Reeking of wherever it was he’d been flopping. Why, of course I sent him away. It was simply too much to bear . . . too sad. Dobrynin had simply gone the way of all the others. And there was no way to bring him back.”
    “All
what
others?” I interjected.
    I had affronted him mightily, I could see, by interrupting. He shone his contempt on me like a searchlight. Then, instead of answering my question, he called over his shoulder to Vol, sleek in his stone-washed black jeans and too-small T-shirt: “Perhaps it’s time for coffee, yes?”
    Teak nodded in affirmation but made no move at all to get the coffee.
    I wished that Tony were there with me, with his disconcerting grin. At that moment I could have used his ability to throw people slightly off-balance. But he was at the hotel resting, recuperating from the stupidly self-inflicted wounds he’d suffered in Lucia’s hallway.
    “The other great ones, I meant.” Beasley had resumed his monologue. “The great dancers, the great artists who all descend into hell eventually. Who collapse under the weight of their gifts. Whose fire of genius sets them ablaze.”
    Oh. I got it. That old-fashioned romantic rot that has nothing to do with the real world. But I didn’t bother to protest. It was obvious Beasley himself was not a part of the real world. Rather, he inhabited one from the dim, dim past—a world long gone, if indeed it had ever existed at all.
    “I can even understand,” he went on, “how that poor woman was driven to kill him.”
    “I’m sure Miss Maury would appreciate your understanding, Mr. Beasley, but the fact is, she did not kill him.”
    He dismissed my statement. “Women too numerous to count have thrown themselves away on Dobrynin. He used them like shoehorns.”
    “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
    Beasley carefully folded up the afghan on his lap. There had been no need for it, really; the apartment was quite warm.
    “Ah. But you didn’t
know
Peter, did you? Your loss and your blessing. You see, he gave new meaning to the word ‘excess.’ He would . . . ingest . . . anything—alcohol, barbiturates, cocaine, anything. Anything that would help him slip into the desired state. And of course he