Cat Who Saw Red

by Lilian Jackson Braun

  Dan’s mouth fell open. “The bus, I reckon. They run up and down Rover Road all night.”

  Or, thought Qwilleran, did she drive away with the owner of the light-colored convertible at three in the morning? . . . Then the dismal possibility flashed into his mind. It could be that his $750 had financed Joy’s elopement with another man.

  No! He refused to believe that! Still, his face felt hot and cold by turns, and he ran a hand over his forehead. Was he an accomplice or a victim, or both? He was a fool, he decided, either way. His first impulse was to stop payment on the check. As a newsman and a professional cynic he suspected he had been duped, but a better instinct told him to have faith in Joy—if he loved her, and he privately admitted it now: He had never really stopped loving Joy Wheatley.

  I know Joy, he told himself. No matter how desperate she was, she would never do that to me. Then he remembered the scream.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Dan,” he said in a calm voice that belied his confusion, “but are you sure she left the premises voluntarily?”

  Dan, who had been staring gloomily into his coffee cup, looked up sharply. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . I thought I heard a woman scream last night, and shortly after that, I heard a car drive away.”

  The potter gave a short, bitter laugh. “Did you hear that ruckus? Crazy woman! Tell you what happened. When I came home last night, it was sort of late. I know these guys downtown—all artists, more or less—we play poker, drink a few beers. Well, it was sort of late, and Joy was sitting up waiting. Miffed, I guess. There she was—sitting at the wheel and throwing a pot and looking daggers at me when I came in. And you know what? She was working at the wheel with her hair hanging down a mile! I’ve warned her about that, but she’s cocky and never pays any attention to what I say.”

  Dan brooded over the situation, staring into his empty coffee cup until Qwilleran poured a refill and said, “Well, what happened?”

  “Oh, we had the usual scrap about this and that, and she started tossing her head around—the way she does when she gets on her high horse. And then—dammit if she didn’t get her hair caught in the wheel, just as I was afraid. Could’ve scalped her! Could’ve broken her neck if I hadn’t been there to throw the switch and stop the thing. Crazy woman!”

  “And you say she screamed?”

  “Woke up the whole house, probably. I tell you it gave me a holy scare, too. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to that old girl.”

  Qwilleran wore a frown that passed for sympathy, although it stemmed from his own dilemma.

  “I’m not worried. She’ll be back,” Dan said. He pushed his chair away from the table and stood up, stretching and patting his diaphragm. “Gotta get to work now. Gotta start setting up the exhibition. See if you can do anything for me at the paper, will you?” He reached in his hip pocket and found his wallet, from which he carefully withdrew a folded clipping. He handed it to Qwilleran with poorly concealed pride. “Here’s what the top-drawer critic in L.A. said about my one-man show. This guy really knew his onions, I’m not kidding.”

  It was a very old clipping, the newsprint yellow and disintegrating where it had been folded.

  After Dan had left, patting the rear pocket where he had stowed the wallet and the worn clipping, Qwilleran asked the housekeeper, “Who drives a light-colored convertible around here?”

  “Mr. Sorrel has a light car. Kind of—baby blue,” she added with a catch in her voice.

  “Have you seen him this morning?”

  “No, he never gets up early. He works late every night.”

  “I think I’ll take a stroll around the grounds,” Qwilleran told her. “I want to put my cat on a leash and give him a little exercise. And if you’ll tell me where to find the oilcan, I’ll fix that garage door.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Mr. Qwilleran. William is supposed to—”

  “No trouble, Mrs. Marron. I’ll oil the hinges, and William can cut the grass. It needs it.”

  “If you walk down to the river,” she said in a shaking voice, “be careful of the boardwalk. There might be some loose boards.”

  Back in his apartment Qwilleran found the cats bedded down for their morning nap on the bunk, their legs and tails interwoven to make a single brown fur mat between them. He lifted the sleeping Koko, whose body had the limp weight of a sack of flour, and coaxed his yawning head through the collar of a blue leather harness. Then, using a piece of nylon cord as a leash, he led the reluctant cat out the door—still yawning, stretching and staggering.

  They circled the balcony before going downstairs. Qwilleran wanted to read the nameplates on the doors. Adjoining his own was Rosemary Whiting’s apartment from which he could hear the sound of music—then that of Max Sorrel, where guttural snoring could be heard behind the closed door. On the opposite side of the balcony were the nameplates of Hixie Rice, Charlotte Roop, and Robert Maus. Why nameplates? Qwilleran started to wonder, but he dropped the question; there were too many other things on his mind.

  He led Koko down the stairs, across the slick brown tiles of the Great Hall, and out into the side yard of Maus Haus. For Koko, an apartment dweller all his life, grass was a rare treat. On the lawn, still wet from the night’s rain, he tried to inspect each blade personally, rejecting one and snapping his jaws on the next, with a selectivity understood only by his species. After each moist step through the grass he shook his paws fastidiously.

  There was an open carport on the east side of the building, obviously a new addition. It sheltered a dark blue compact and an old dust-colored Renault. The latter did indeed have a hole in the floor, large enough for a size 12 shoe, the newsman estimated.

  From there a gravel path led down to the river, where two weathered benches stood on a rotting boardwalk. The water—brown as gravy in daylight and with an indefinable stench—riffled sluggishly against the old piling.

  Koko did not care for it. He wanted nothing to do with the river. He pulled away from the boardwalk and stayed on the wet grass until they started back up the path. Once he stopped to sniff a bright blue-green object on the edge of the gravel, and Qwilleran picked it up—a small glazed ceramic piece the size and shape of a beetle. Scratched on the underside were the initials J.G. He dropped it in his pocket, tugged on the leash, and led Koko back toward the house.

  From the rear, the misshapen building looked like a grotesque bird with a topknot of chimneys, its carport and garage like awkward wings, its fire escapes and ledges like ruffled feathers. For eyes there were the two large staring windows of the Grahams’ loft, and as Qwilleran looked up at them, he saw a figure inside move hastily away.

  Coming to the three-stall garage, he opened the lift doors. Only one of them creaked, and only one of the stalls was occupied. The car was a light blue convertible. Closing the garage door, Qwilleran examined the car carefully, inside and out—the floor, the upholstery, the instrument panel. It was very clean.

  “What about this, Koko?” he muttered. “It’s almost too clean.”

  Koko was busy sniffing oil stains on the concrete floor.

  When the two returned to Number Six, Koko allowed Yum Yum to wash his face and ears, and Qwilleran paced the floor, wondering where Joy had gone, whether she had gone alone, when (if ever) she would get in touch with him, and whether he would ever see his money again. He had been unemployed for so long, before being hired by the Daily Fluxion, that $750 was a small fortune.

  He wondered if Kipper & Fine had started alterations on his new suit, and he was tempted to call them and cancel the order. Today he felt no desire for a new suit. It had been a short spring. And now—added to his mental discomforts—he realized that he was desperately hungry.

  There was a sudden disturbance on the desk—a shuffling of papers, a clicking of typewriter keys, some skidding of pencils and pens, and then a light clatter as Qwilleran’s new reading glasses fell to the floor.

  Qwilleran sprang to the desk as Koko made a
headlong dive into the big chair. “Bad cat!” The man shouted at him. Fortunately the glasses had been saved by their heavy frames. But Qwilleran felt a tremor in the roots of his mustache when he noticed the sheet of paper in the typewriter. He put on his glasses and looked more closely.

  Koko had discovered the top row of keys. He had put one paw on the numeral three and the other on zero.

  SIX

  Shortly after noon Qwilleran hurried into the Press Club and joined Arch Riker at a table for two, where the feature editor was passing the time with a martini.

  “Sorry to be late,” Qwilleran said. “I had to rush Koko to the vet.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had him out in the backyard at Maus Haus, and he ate a lot of grass. When we got back to the apartment, he threw up, and I thought he’d eaten something poisonous.”

  “All cats eat grass and throw up,” said Riker. “That’s how they get rid of hair balls.”

  “Now I know. They told me at the pet hospital. But I wasn’t taking any chances. Too bad he had to select my new shoes as a receptacle. Both shoes!”

  “You should brush the cats. The kids brush ours every day, and we never have any trouble.”

  “Why don’t people tell me these things? I just paid fifteen dollars for an office call.” Qwilleran lighted a pipeful of tobacco and signaled the waitress for coffee.

  “Well, what’s the big news you mentioned on the phone?” Riker asked.

  Qwilleran puffed his pipe intently and took his time about answering. “History repeats itself. Joy has disappeared—again.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “So she’s up to her old tricks.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Qwilleran said. He told Riker about Joy’s visit to his apartment and her plans for a divorce, but not about the $750 check.

  Riker said: “Rosie was going to call her up and invite her over for some girl talk. She thought it might help.”

  “Too late now.”

  “What does her husband say about it?”

  “He says she’s done it before. He says she always comes back. But he doesn’t know what I know.”

  “What does he look like, anyway? Rosie told me to find out. You know how women are.”

  “He looks and talks like a hayseed. Not Joy’s type at all. Tall and gangling. Washed-out red hair and freckles. Talks like a hayseed, too. He thinks he’s got such a colorful vocabulary, but his clichés are pathetic, and his slang is out of date by about thirty years. If you ask me, he’s a guy who wants desperately to be somebody and never will.”

  “The man who loses the girl never thinks highly of the winner, I might point out,” said Riker, looking smug and enjoying his own trenchant observation.

  “Joy said it herself. She said he’s no crashing success as a potter.”

  “Why would a classy girl like Joy pick someone like that?”

  “Who knows? She always liked tall men. Maybe he’s a great lover. Maybe his freckles appealed to her maternal instinct.”

  Riker ordered another martini, and Qwilleran went on: “Now that you’ve had a drink, I’ll tell you the rest of the story. I lent Joy some money just before she vanished.”

  The editor choked on an olive. “Oh, no! How much?”

  “Seven-fifty.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty? Your prize money?”

  Qwilleran nodded sheepishly.

  “What a pushover! Cash?”

  “I wrote a check.”

  “Stop payment, Qwill.”

  “She may need it—badly—wherever she is. On the other hand,” he said reluctantly, “she may have run off with another guy. Or . . . something may have happened to her.”

  “Like what? Where did you get that idea?” Riker was familiar with Qwilleran’s hunches; they were always totally correct—or totally unfounded.

  “Last night I heard a scream—a woman’s scream—and shortly afterward a car pulled out of the garage.” He tamped his mustache nervously.

  Riker recognized the gesture. It meant that his friend was on the scent of another misdeed, great or small, real or imagined. Qwilleran’s early years on the police beat had given him a sixth sense about crime. What Riker did not know—and would not have believed—was the unique sensitivity in that oversized mustache. Qwilleran’s hunches were usually accompanied by a prickling sensation on the upper lip, and when this happened he was never wrong.

  Riker said, “Got any theories?”

  Qwilleran shook his head. He said nothing about the numbers that Koko had typed, although the recollection made his hair stand on end. “I told Dan about hearing the scream, and he had an explanation. He said Joy got her long hair caught in the wheel.”

  “What wheel?”

  “The potter’s wheel. They use it to throw pots. Dan says she screamed and he came to the rescue. I don’t know whether to believe it or not.”

  “I think you’re worrying without any cause. She’s probably on her way to Chicago to see her aunt, if the old lady’s still living.”

  Qwilleran persisted. “At dinner last night Joy was snapping at everyone. There was something in the air.”

  “Who else lives in that weird establishment?”

  “There’s Robert Maus, the lawyer, who owns the place. He can’t make a statement on any subject, including the weather, without first considering the pros, cons, legal implications, and tax advantages. Very dignified gent. But here’s a curious development: This morning he was nursing a black eye . . . Then there’s Max Sorrel, who owns the Golden Lamb Chop. He comes on strong as a ladies’ man, and it was his car that drove out of the garage shortly after I heard the scream.”

  “But you aren’t positive he was in it,” Riker said. “Joy may have been driving.”

  “If she was, she gave the car a pat on the rump and sent it home again: it was back in the garage this morning. Dan said she probably went on the River Road bus. If so, she picked a fine time; it was pouring rain.”

  “Who else lives there?”

  “Three women. And a houseboy who’s nosy but likable. And a housekeeper.” Qwilleran leaned his elbows on the table and massaged his mustache. He remembered Joy’s remark about a “discreet” extortion scheme and decided not to mention it.

  Riker said, “You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Qwill. Nothing’s happened to Joy. You wait and see.”

  “I wish I could believe it.”

  “Well, anyway, I’ve got to eat and get back to the office. A syndicate salesman’s coming in with some comic strips at two o’clock.” He hailed a waitress. “Bowl of bean soup, meatballs and noodles, salad with Roquefort, and let’s have some more butter at this table.”

  “And what’ll you have, Skinny?” she asked Qwilleran. “You want cottage cheese again?”

  “I’m starving. Quips are not appreciated.”

  “You want a cheeseburger with french fries? Macaroni and cheese? Ham and sweets?”

  “No, I’ll have a poached egg,” he decided with firm resolve, “and all the celery they’ve got in the kitchen. I can burn up more calories chewing celery than I get from eating the damn stuff.”

  “Where are you eating tonight?” Riker asked.

  “I’ve invited Maus to go with me to the Toledo Tombs, and it’s going to be a heroic test of willpower on my part. I hear the food’s the best in town.”

  “That’s the place where you get a fresh napkin every five minutes. Rosie and I went there for our anniversary, and the waiters made me nervous. After they brought the seventeenth clean ashtray, I started flicking my ashes on the floor under the table.”

  That afternoon Qwilleran went to the public library to get a book on French food. He also picked up a book on the art of ceramics, without knowing exactly why. At the liquor store he bought a bottle of sherry and some bourbon in preparation for possible visitors to his apartment. He bought a brush at the pet shop. Finally he stopped at a supermarket to buy f
ood for the cats. Goaded by his own unsatisfied appetite and his financial setback, he was hardly in a generous mood.

  They’re spoiled brats, he told himself. Lobster—red salmon—boned chicken! Other cats eat cat food, and it’s about time they faced reality.

  He bought a can of Kitty Delight (on sale), some Pussy Pâté (two for the price of one), and a jumbo-size box of Fishy Fritters (with a free offer on the back).

  When he arrived home, Koko and Yum Yum were sitting in compact bundles on the windowsill, and their behavior indicated that they sensed the nature of the situation. Instead of chirping and crowing a welcome, they sat motionless and gazed through Qwilleran as if he were invisible.

  “Soup’s on!” he announced, after smearing a dime’s worth of Pussy Pâté on a plate and placing it on the floor.

  Neither of the cats moved a whisker.

  “Try it! The label says it’s delicious.”

  They seemed totally deaf. There was not even the flicker of an ear. Qwilleran picked Koko up bodily and plumped him down in front of the pâté, and Koko stood there with legs splayed, frozen in the position in which he had landed, glaring at the evil-looking purple smear on the plate. Then he shuddered exquisitely and walked away.

  Later that evening Qwilleran described the incident to Robert Maus. “I’m convinced they can read price tags,” he said, “but they’ll eat the stuff if they get hungry enough.”

  Maus deliberated a few seconds. “A béarnaise sauce might make it more palatable,” he suggested, “or a sprinkling of freshly grated Romano.”

  The two men had met in the lobby of a downtown building, where an elevator descended to unknown depths and deposited them in a cellar. The subterranean restaurant consisted of a series of cavernous rooms, long and narrow, vaulted in somber black masonry. It had been a sewer before the city installed the new disposal system.

  The attorney was greeted with deference, and the two men were conducted to a table resplendent with white napery. Seven wineglasses and fourteen pieces of flat silver glittered at each plate. Two waiters draped napkins, lightly scented with orange flower water, across the guests’ knees. A captain presented menus bound in gold-tooled Florentine leather, and three busboys officiated at the filling of two water glasses.