Cato's Retreat

Prologue

Last April, I upgraded from a squalid studio in seedy Van Nuys to a spartan guest house in Burbank's burbs. I whittled my inaugural evening away unpacking. At 10pm, I popped a beer and set about exploring my new digs. A subtly concealed missive awaited me inside the medicine cabinet…

04/20/04

First and foremost, welcome to “Cato’s Retreat” (my cheeky nickname for my old/ your new habitation). Fair warning, each of CR’s endearing quirks counterweights an equally queer one. For instance, the front door & floor jamb align poorly, beckoning vermin. Fortunately, endemic insects pose no peril. Endemic arachnids, by contrast, do. Black Widows & Brown Recluses abound. Make a habit of shaking shoes & bed sheets out before sliding into, or between, them.

Now, on to more pressing matters. The colossal debt I owe Gustavo Oro, Hub City’s uncontested king of crank, comes due at day’s end 04/22. Gus has tasked his chief enforcer with its collection. You’ll recognize “Chiquio” by his galactic dimensions, his pronounced Aztec features, and the teardrop tattoos adorning his eyes. Professing ignorance as to my whereabouts guarantees you grievous bodily harm. Instead, employ lethal force preemptively. Given my contribution to what’s become your crucible, it felt only fair that I aid you in resolving it. To that end, you’ll find a scored, & suppressed, pistol beneath a “false bottom” where Cato’s south & west walls meet. When the deed is done, call the names on the next page. While you have my heartfelt thanks, the odds favor you favoring monetary rewards. The key to a bank box containing 12,500K in cash will find you when word of Chiquio’s loss finds me. Godspeed.

Cato Breslin

I stormed the bedroom. New to the domicile, it took what felt like days to divine the southwest corner. Next, I displaced the bed. The tawny floor tiles bled into one another. The sickly ceiling light barely bested ground-level shadows. I parted the curtains to their polarities, but the new moon offered no alms. I took a knee. Still, the tiles told no tales. Palpating their perimeters, I found a discreet rectilinear fracture.

I knocked on Beatrice’s door at 9am the next morning. Her disposition deemed surprise visits unwelcome. She scowled silently, well past the point at which any polite society socialite would have asked me in. I gave her a “Good morning!” that stopped just short of killer kindness. I broke the ice with two, or three, obligatory pleasantries before chancing an innocuous question about Cato. “He kept to himself and paid his rent on time,” she huffed. My next query met with an equally skin-deep, close-ended quip. I proffered the premise I’d prepared, that I wished to return “an artisanal-looking lockbox” I’d found high atop the kitchen cupboards to its presumptive rightful owner. (The box in question was, in fact, a hand-carved heirloom I’d owned for ages. Its purported hiding place implied valuable contents). None of the umpteen ways this gambit could have gone wrong had occurred to me. What if Beatrice offered to steward the box in my stead? Refusal to relinquish it would raise eyebrows. She was, after all, his former landlord. I’d never so much as met him. What’s more, I’d left several sentimentally valuable tchotchkes inside it for authenticity. Surrendering the box would mean surrendering its contents. Fortunately, no misfires occurred. Beatrice didn’t even ask to see the orphaned item, much less claim it. I pressed her for his digits. It had been so long since she’d last dialed them “even the area code” had escaped her. I solicited a forwarding address. Cato hadn’t left one. Blooming ire warmed my face. I flashed Cato’s letter to incite a raw reaction. Beatrice eyed it impassively. I proffered the papers. “Sorry,” she shrugged, “Haven’t seen my ‘readers’ in weeks.” My blood reaching a boil, I began reading the letter aloud. Her home phone rang three, or four, words in. She raised a finger before stomping off to answer it. The call lasted a minute at most. From spilt dribs and drabs, I gleaned that some semiserious misfortune had stricken someone she knew. Beatrice shooed me out like a stray who'd wandered in unbidden. She shut the door on me before I could schedule a time to continue our dialogue. Mere minutes later, her monolithic gas-guzzler poured out of the car port.

I stewed on her stoop longer than I care to confess. I toiled to convince myself that I was enabling an elaborate prank. But, what inspired sadist would work so hard to engineer a ruse he wouldn't get to watch unfold?!

I went from never having taken a sick day to “out sick for the next few days.” I phoned my brother, a command track LEO with the California Bureau of Investigation. I read him the entirety of Cato’s letter. An hour later he called back sounding staid as I’d ever heard him. Cato Breslin did not exist, at least not officially. No rap sheet or DMV records named him. Neither the Franchise Tax Board nor the Department of Fish and Wildlife had ever heard of him. I resolved to abandon my new dwelling in precisely the time it took me to pack up. From there, I would plant my person in front of Beatrice’s carport until she returned. I'd insist she read Cato’s letter, and see the subterranean compartment. Lastly, I'd demand a full refund. Any pushback would end with hell raised, and COPS called.

I returned to my ADU. On opening the door, acrid smoke cinched my throat shut. Fire phalanges bursting from a wall socket clawed at a load of laundry, a feast fit for conflagration. Having no fire extinguisher handy, I grabbed a 2-liter bottle of Sprite and improvised. Amazingly, it worked. I dialed 9-1-1 anyway.

Turns out the “contractor” who built Bea's "granny flat" was neither licensed nor bonded. Upon her return, an inspector from Burbank's FD detailed the depth of shit she’d have been in had I been hurt, never mind killed. I made a point of demanding my refund from her then and there. The joyless crone complied, albeit sullenly.

Seven days I resisted reflecting on the surreal sequence of events I’d just played protagonist to. Alas, curiosity won the week. I dialed Cato’s contact (a black-market crime scene clean-up crew) only to find the numerical sequence nullified.

Though it reads like plot convenience personified, what follows is the truth, the whole and nothing but: Cato’s subsurface cache had been cleaned out, with not so much as a single stray round left behind. However, the gun’s absence never curtailed my conviction that Breslin’s words were gospel.

I told Beatrice to expect me at 6PM on the day of my move-in date. She phoned me around 5 claiming that she couldn’t find her last tenant's key, and needed to have a spare cut. She'd leave my door unlocked in case I got in before she got back. I arrived to find the door locked. I thought little of it, conjecturing that someone Beatrice’s age likely forgets much, often. I passed the time with a paperback. When Bea found me loitering, she insisted that she’d unlocked the door before leaving. She crankily cranked the knob several times. The verdict upheld, she huffed and turned heel.

I entered the guest house for the first time since scoping it out some two weeks prior. Fine dust footprints quickly caught my eye. I tracked them to the bed’s bow. The prints could not have been Beatrice’s, as they were no less than men’s size tens. They could not have been relics, as the house showed signs of a recent, competent cleanse. The prints must have been Breslin’s, remnants from a recent return to his old haunt. That he came and went, without pause, spoke to a purpose, or an urgency. Haste, and anxiety, could easily have poached his focus to the point that he locked the door behind him out of habit. (While Cato having reclaimed his key from Beatrice’s custody without her knowledge is not an impossibility, I didn’t believe that to have been the case. First off, the door handle was the kind one locks, and unlocks, manually from inside. Within days, locking the door on his way out would have become second nature. Furthermore, there’s no reason to discount the banal explanation that Cato made one, or more, duplicate keys during his residency).

As for what motivated him to scrap his original plan, risk arrest for B&E, burglary, larceny and possession of a defaced firearm, the possibilities are too many to contemplate. Maybe the sheer madness of signing his name to the means, and motive, for a marked man’s murder dawned on him. Your guess is as good as mine.

Epilogue

Full disclosure, I’ve redacted specifics from Cato’s dispatch that could compromise his anonymity, or that of his colleagues. I’ve also altered names, including but not limited to Cato’s, just enough to throw aspiring sleuths off the scent.

Cato’s letter now resides with my sibling upstate. Storing it some 400 miles out, in a high-ranking lawman’s hands no less, heightens security for both it and I. I hope.

13 months have passed since I fled “Cato’s Retreat.” Each dusk lessens the likelihood that this narrative’s unknowns will ever become now-knowns. All’s well that ends well.

Name Withheld