Brody arrives home after the Town Hall meeting to a tearful wife, a traumatised son and a dead cat. Frisky - "a big husky tom" - has been whacked in his own front yard by a mobster, whose trouser leg he probably brushed against just before he had his neck snapped. When Brody lifts the lid off the garbage pail, he sees that the family pet's head "had been twisted completely around, and the yellow eyes overlooked its back". It's a description that weirdly recalls the image of a possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Brody races over to Vaughn's house - "a large, Tudor-style stone mansion" - and throws the cat's corpse into the mayor's face, and there is a brief reprise of the two men shouting at each other. The chapter ends with a final phrase - "the gnarled bundle of bone and fur" - that manages to be both pathetic and poetic, and seems almost reminiscent of T.S Eliot.
The Mafia, of course, has a well-established system of using dead animals to get its message across. The canary placed in the mouth of an informer is a warning to others not to 'sing'. The dead fish is a way of letting you know that someone has been done away with. The horse's head in the bed is the quickest way of getting a green-light from a Hollywood studio head. The cat with a broken neck is another way of saying "Be subtle."
