Lies and Ice Cream

by John Didday

“So why this hotel?”

Detective Harry Winslow watched the face of the young man who had asked. Harry couldn’t answer truthfully, so he kept quiet.

“Tell me, Detective, why did I have to come all the way to the Flatiron district for a ‘quick conversation’?”

Harry sighed. “The Gramercy is near my precinct,” he offered.

Of course, Harry hadn’t picked the Gramercy Park Hotel for its convenience, although he did appreciate it. And he liked the bar itself: its red velvet curtains and the low light from the hanging chandeliers relaxed a person, even when talking with the police.

The inquisitive young witness was the third person Harry had interviewed this week about the robbery down at the SoHo Museum of Ice Cream. The Museum was one of these Instagram-friendly locations where kids can take their pictures with good lighting in front of colorful exhibits for $75 and a couple hours’ wait in line. A cute and funny place for a crime to be committed.

What wasn’t funny or cute was the crime itself: a masked man had forced staffers and guests onto the floor at gunpoint then gone straight to the safe, entered the pass, and emptied it out. The crook had escaped with a hundred grand, and Harry had no doubt that it had been an inside job, most likely aided by one of the few museum staffers who knew the safe’s passcode.

The boy sitting here at the bar had been operating the old-fashioned ice cream and soda pop bar at the end of the museum tour, where the gunman had first drawn his gun. Harry hoped the baby-faced boy was his man, because the tour guide, the chef, and the accountant he’d interviewed before had gotten him nowhere.

“You’re 21,” Harry said, changing the subject. “I’ll buy you a drink.” Harry rattled his signet ring against the bar.

“Okay.” The boy folded his skinny arms across his chest.

Winslow scrutinized the boy’s face. Light brown hair that seemed to fall perfectly regardless of whether it was combed. Even without a paper hat, the boy looked like he worked in a fifties diner; he had the kind of face so lean and bright that you wouldn’t worry about your health when ordering a milkshake from it.

Of course, looks can be deceiving.

The bartender, an old stalwart with gray hair and watery eyes, arrived. “Hey Ernest,” Harry Winslow nodded. “A highball for me, and that charcuterie I like.” Harry turned to his guest. “What about you, kid?”

“Thanks. Just a beer is fine,” the boy said, shifting in his seat as the bartender stepped away.

“So, detective, I’m here,” the boy stated, leaning forward from his perch on a stool. “Like I told you when you came down to the shop, I didn’t see anything. The lights went dark. The thug told us to lie face down and plug up our ears. I heard a few screams. It all took a couple minutes.”

Harry watched the way the boy placed his hands in his lap. They didn’t shake, and he didn’t touch his face between sentences, although Harry suspected the boy’s words were rehearsed. How much could a person really know about someone from the outside, though? Harry wasn’t a mind reader.

The bartender returned with the drinks and charcuterie, and movement behind the man’s shadow caught the boy’s eye. “Who’s this?” he asked, flicking his eyes up the bar past Harry.

Harry turned. A longhaired calico cat was sauntering toward them down the long bar. “The Gramercy Cat,” Harry answered. “Right on time when the salami arrives, of course.” Harry scooped the furball off the bar and into his lap, where it sniffed the air toward the charcuterie. Harry pushed the platter down the bar toward the boy, and the cat relaxed into his lap.

“You were saying?” Harry prodded.

“Yeah, well, there wasn’t anything else. The hostess said the guy wore a mask when he showed up. You checked the cameras, right?”

“The cameras had all been unplugged the day before. Tapes wiped. No fingerprints.”

“Huh,” the boy said, his face still as a mask.

Harry nodded toward the charcuterie. “Bite of salami?”

The cat was now comfortable, and Harry was petting it with both hands.

The boy gazed down at the plate. Looking back up at Harry, he stared for a moment. “I’ll ask you a last time. What are you aiming at, bringing me here, Detective Winslow?”

Winslow patted the cat, a smile emerging on his face. “You know, kid,” Winslow said, ignoring the question, “this cat’s a fourth-generation hotel cat.”

The boy took a sip of his beer. “All right,” he said, sighing and nodding.

“Back in 1925 when the Gramercy was built, they took in his great-great-great grandfather as a mouser.”

The boy glared at the cat: black, orange, and white fur curled up on Harry’s lap.

“But, as it turned out, the cats that live here always stopped chasing mice. You see, this is a New York City hotel, and five hundred new faces come through here every day, so the cat learned to get its food from the guests. Turns out that’s a hell of a lot easier than grappling a subway rat for a meal.” Harry chuckled. This was always his favorite part.

The boy raised his hands in front of him. “What has this got to do with the robbery? I didn’t come here to hear you lecture me about cats. I’ve got a life, Detective. A job.”

Winslow took his hands off the cat and formed a prayer for just another moment of time. “So what I mean is, this cat makes his bread by befriending guests in the hope that they’ll offer him a snack. Watch this.”

Winslow leaned forward, selected a thin piece of prosciutto from the plate beside the boy, and dangled it in the air. The cat sprang up onto the bar where it meowed, its whiskers shivering and its eyes locked onto the sliver of meat.

“He likes cured meats best,” Harry said, dropping the thin ham onto the counter where the cat pawed it into its mouth.

Winslow pushed the charcuterie board back to the boy. “Give it a try,” he said.

The boy rolled his eyes and picked up a hunk of salami. “Here, kitty,” he said, thrusting the meat forward.

The fluffy cat gingerly stepped up on the bar and began to walk toward the boy. It lifted its paws then set them down, edging forward, but before it took another step, froze in place. Harry watched closely and held his breath. The puffy, feline tail twisted in the air once, twice, three times, and then the cat spun around and stepped back into Harry’s lap.

“Well there you have it!” Winslow spouted, spraying highball onto the bar. “You saw it Ernest?” Winslow asked the bartender, who’d been standing quietly a few feet away.

“I saw it, Harry.”

The boy scoffed, his face drenched in disgust. “What are you talking about?”

“The cat doesn’t trust you,” Harry shot back.

“Well so what?”

“This cat can read people better than any person who has ever lived.”

The boy sputtered.

“It has been trained since birth to know who is going to be nice to it and who isn’t. It’s in its damn genetics to tell who’s good or not.”

The boy’s eyebrows tightened. “You mean the cat can tell whether or not I want to feed it?”

“No, I don’t mean that. Ernest saw it, I saw it. You tried to feed it the salami, and the cat wouldn’t take it. This kitty loves salami more than anything in the world, but if it won’t take it from you, that means it can smell something about you, feel it. You’re rotten to the core.”

The boy was turning beet red. “And how do you know it doesn’t just dislike my eyebrows?”

“This cat knows. It’s helped me solve a hundred cases. I hate to break it to you, kid, but you’re a psychopath.”

The boy sat still and closed his eyes. While they were still closed, the tension left his face and body. His mouth shifted into an icy smile. “Well, Detective, so what if I am? What are you going to do, take this cat into the courtroom and put its paw on a bible?”

Winslow waited for the kid to continue, but when he didn’t, spoke. “Is that a confession?”

“Of course it’s not!” the boy shouted, startling a couple seated nearby. The boy grinned menacingly. “You’ve got nothing. No proof.”

“Well then,” Harry said, running a hand through his thinning hair and rubbing his hands together. “I guess I’ll have to find another way to nail you.”

“So am I free to go?”

“Just give me a second,” Harry said. “I need to run to the bathroom, and I want to get some details from you before you leave. Is that all right?”

“Fine.”

Harry set the cat down, stood and shuffled past the velvet curtains into the Gramercy’s hallway bathroom. He took a deep breath; he wished he had another trick up his sleeve. Unfortunately, he knew of no magic air freshener in the bathroom that could accumulate evidence, no enchanted bar of soap that would lead him to the smoking gun.

Stepping back into the bar a minute later, Harry noticed that the couple who had been seated behind him and the boy at the bar were talking to Ernest the bartender and pointing at the cat.

“Do you mind if we take a picture with it?” one of them said. Ernest didn’t mind. “Thank you, it’s just for Instagram.”

“Ins...” Harry muttered to himself. He looked at the boy, confirming he was still sitting at his stool, although with growing impatience.

Harry stepped in between the photogenic couple and the suspicious boy. “Hey,” Harry said to the couple. “I haven’t got a smartphone. Could you two show me all of the Instagram photos taken at the Museum of Ice Cream on January fifth?”

The boy’s face went pale.

Resting one hand on the boy’s shoulder to keep him in place, Harry began swiping the phone through hundreds of photos the public had tagged at the museum. Thousands.

“You expect me to sit here for this?” the boy probed. “All people do is take pictures there.”

Harry thought for a moment and shifted the photo date back to January fourth, the day before the robbery. Photos of tourists smiling gleefully in front of the bar, with the boy in the background. Photos of people eating sundaes the boy had made. A photo without the boy?

Harry leaned in closer to the screen and saw it. The bar was empty, but in the mirror behind the bar, crouching down, was the boy, hand on the power cord to the security camera.

When Harry displayed the evidence, the boy’s smug visage cracked. “My brother put me up to it,” he babbled. “He was the one with the gun.”

Harry cuffed him and called for officers at the nearby station to take him away.

When it was all over, Harry sat back at the bar and ordered a highball to celebrate. “And bring another charcuterie,” he added, remembering the real hero. As he handed the cat a hunk of salami, one of the patrons who had given him their phone leaned close.

“Hey, Officer,” they whispered. “is it true, all that stuff you were saying about the cat? That’s just an interrogation technique you use to get them worrying. Right?”

Ernest the bartender chuckled from a few feet away. Harry looked at the patron and smiled, then shifted his gaze and thought about whether he could answer truthfully.