Cats can't distinguish colors, Qwileran remembered. Joy had told him so. There was something lese about the red urn that bothered the small animal. On the other hand, the red library book also had offended Koko; twice he had pushed it from the bookshelf to the floor.
Qwilleran found the red volume where he had wedged it between two larger books for security. It was quite a definitive book on ceramics, and Qwilleran settled down in his chair to browse through chapters on wedging clay, using the wheel, pulling a lip, beveling a foot, formulating a glaze, packing a kiln, firing a load. It ended with a chatty chapter on the history and legend of the ceramic art.
Halfway through the last chapter Qwilleran felt nauseated. Then the blood rushed to his face, and he gripped the arms of the chair. In anger he jumped up, strode across the room, and swung the book at the red pottery urn, sweeping it off the desk. The cats fled in alarm as the urn shattered on the ceramic floor tiles.
Still gripping the book, Qwilleran lunged out of the apartment and around the balcony to Number One. Robert Maus came to the door, tying the belt of a flannel robe.
"Got to talk to you!" Qwilleran said abruptly.
"Certainly. Certainly. Please come in. I presume you have heard the midnight newscast: a bomb scare at the Golden Lamb Chop. . . My dear fellow,a re you ill? You are shaking!"
"You've got a madman in the house!" Qwilleran blurted.
"Sit down. Sit down. Calm yourself. Would you accept a glass of sherry?"
Qwilleran shook his head impatiently.
"Some black coffee?"
"Dan has murdered his wife! I know it, I know it!"
"I beg your pardon?"
"And probably William, too. And I think Joy's cat was the first victim. I think the cat was an experiment."
"One moment, I beg of you," said Maus. "What is this incoherent outburst? Will you repeat it? Slowly, please. And kindly sit down."
Qwilleran sat down as if his knees had collapsed. "I'll take that black coffee."
"It will require only a moment to filter a fresh cup."
The attorney stepped into his kitchenette, and Qwilleran gathered his thoughts. He was in better control when Maus returned with the coffee. He repeated his suspicions: "First, the Grahams' cat disappeared; then Joy disappeared; then William. I say he has murdered them all. We've got to do something!"
"This is a preposterous accusation! Where is your proof, if I may ask?"
"There's no tangible proof, but I know!" Qwilleran touched his mustache nervously; he thought it better not to mention Koko's behavior. "In face," he said, "I'm going to see a homicide detective tomorrow."
Maus raised a hand. "One moment! Let us consider the consequences before you speak to the authorities."
"Consequences? You mean adverse publicity? I'm sorry, Maus, but publicity is inevitable now."
"But pray what brings you to the . . . . monstrous conclusion that Graham has . . . has — "
"Everything points to it. For years Joy has been outshining her husband. Now she formulates a spectacular glaze that will allow her to eclipse him completely. The man has a sizable ego. He desperately wants attention and acclaim. The solution is simple: Why not get rid of his wife, apply her glaze to his own pottery, and take the credit? The marriage is falling apart anyway. So why not? . . . I tell you it's true! And once Joy was out of the way, Dan took the precaution of destroying all her pottery that carried the new glaze. We found the stuff — "
"You must pardon me if I say," the attorney interrupted, "that this . . . this wild scenario sounds like a figment of an overwrought imagination."
Qwilleran ignored the remark. "meanwhile, Dan discovers that William suspects him, and so the houseboy must be silenced. You have to admit that William ahs been conspicuously absent."
The attorney stared in disbelief.
"Furthermore," the newsman went on, "Dan is preparing to leave the country. We've got to act fast!"
"One question, if you please. Can you produce the prime evidence?"
"The bodies? No one will ever find them. At first I thought he'd dumped then in the river. Then I found a sickening fact in a book — in this book." Qwilleran shook the red volume at his incredulous listener. "In ancient China they used to throw the bodies of unwanted babies into the pottery kilns."
Maus made no move. He looked stunned.
"Those kilns downstairs can heat up to twenty-three hundred degrees! I repeat: The bodies will never be found."
"Ghastly!" the attorney said in whisper.
"You remember, Maus, that the tennis club complained about the smoke last weekend. And William knew something was wrong. Rdinarily pots take twenty-four hours for firing and twenty-four hours for cooling. If you speed it up, they explode! William told me Dan was firing too fast. The pottery door was locked, but William knew about the tiny window in Number Six, overlooking the kiln room . . . Do you know about the peephole?"
Maus nodded.
"And there's another story in this book," Qwilleran said. "It happened centuries ago in China. A barnyard animal wandered into a kiln while it was being loaded. The animal was cremated, and the clay pots emerged in a glorious shade of red!"
The attorney looked acutely uncomfortable.
"Joy's cat was probably the first experiment," Qwilleran added.
Maus said, "I feel unwell. Let us discuss this in the morning. I must think."
That night Qwilleran found it impossible to sleep. He was up, he was down, he tried to read, he walked back and forth in the apartment. Koko was also awake and alert, watching the man with concern. For one brief moment Qwilleran considered a knockout shot of whiskey, but he caught Koko's eye and desisted. Eventually some cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. It contained a strong sedative. He took a double dose.
Soon he was sleeping too deeply to dream. The foghorn continued to moan, and the boats hooted their continual warnings, but he heard nothing.
Suddenly he catapulted out the depths of his drugged sleep and found himself sitting up in the dark. In his groggy state he thought there had been an explosion. He shook his head, remembered where he was. A kiln! That's what it was, he told himself. A kiln had exploded. He switched on the bed lamp.
There had been no explosion — only the fall of a body, the crash of a chair, the crack of a head hitting the ceramic tile floor, the shattering of a window. On the floor, his head bloodied, lay Dan Graham, his legs sprawled across a tangle of gray yarn. The room was crisscrossed with yards and yards of gray strands, like a giant spiderweb.
On the bookcase sat Koko, his ears back and his slanted eyes shining red in the lamplight.
"And that's how it happened," Qwilleran explained to Rosemary when she dropped in at Number Six before dinner on Thursday. He was wearing his new suit for the first time, planning to take Rosemary to the Golden Lamb Chop, and the scale indicated he was ten pounds lighter. He also felt ten years younger.
"Koko had bobby-trapped the apartment with your ball of yarn," he said, "and Dan tripped over it in the dark."
"How do you know Koko spun the web?" Rosemary asked. "More likely it was Yum Yum."
"I bow to your feminine intuition. Forgive my chauvinism."
"What was Dan going to attack you with? One newscaster called it a blunt weapon. The newspaper said it was a wooden club."
"You'd never believe it, but it was a rolling pin! A heavy wooden one that potters use to roll clay for slab pots. When Dan stumbled into the booby trap, the rolling pin flew out of his grasp and broke a window."
Rosemary shook her head in wonder. "He wasn't a brainy man, but he was crafty, and I'm surprised he thought he could get away with it."
"He was all ready to leave the country. The Renault was packed and ready to leave for an early morning flight. He wasn't even going to hang around to read the reviews of his show."
The cats had just finished eating a beef and oyster pate sent up by Robert Maus, and now they were sitting on the desk, washing fjaces and paws in an aura of absolute contentm
ent. Qwilleran regarded them with pride and gratitude. He remembered the pb on the page in the typewriter.
"I was wrong about one detail," he went on. "They found William's body. If Dan had committed only one murder, he could have risen to fame with Joy's glazes. But when he spiked William's drink with lead oxide, he was in trouble. He couldn't dispose of William's body in the kiln; it was full of pots in the cooling stage. So he stored it in the slip tank in the basement of the clay room."
There was a knock on the door, and Qwilleran opened it to admit Hixie.
"Did I hear the rattle office cubes?" she asked.
"Come in. We'll open the bottle of champagne the Press Club sent to Koko. And Yum Yu," Qwill added, with an apologetic glance at Rosemary.
Hixie said, "I wonder how Teahandle, Hansblow, Et Cetera, Et Cetera reacted to the publicity? Television and everything! I'll bet Mickey Maus is in the soup."
"It's a blessing in disguise," said Rosemary. "now he'll retire from law and do what he has always wanted to do — open a restaurant."
There was another knock at the door — a positive, urgent, angry knock. Charlotte Roop was standing there with tense lips and clenched fists. She marched into the apartment with aggressive step and announced, "Mr. Qwilleran, I would like a drink. A strong drink! A glass of sherry!"
"Why . . . certainly, Miss Roop. I think we have sherry. Or would you like champagne?"
"I need something to quiet my nerves." She put a trembling hand to her flushed throat. "I have just resigned from the Heavenly Hash House chain. I resigned in moral indignation!"
"But you liked your job so much!" Rosemary protested.
"What happened?" Qwilleran asked.
"The three owners," Charlotte began, her voice beginning to quaver, "the men I respected so highly have been engaged in the most disreputable maneuver I have ever encountered in the business world. I overheard a conversation — quite by accident, of course — in the conference room . . . Is this champagne? Thank you, Mr. Qwilleran." She took a cautious sip.
"Well, go on," said Hixie. "What have they been doing? Watering the soup?"
Charlotte looked flustered. "How can I tell you? It pains me to mention it . . . They are the ones who have been trying to ruin Mr. Sorrels' restaurant!"
"But they're not is the same league," Qwilleran protested. "The Hash Houses don't compete with the Golden Lamb Chop."
"The Golden Lamb Chop," Charlotte explained, "occupies a very valuable corner, with exposure to three major highways. The Hash House syndicate, through brokers, has been trying to buy it, but Mr. Sorrel would not sell. So they resorted to unscrupulous tactics. I am horrified!"
"Would you testify in court?" Qwilleran asked.
"Yes indeed! I would testify even in their gangster friends threatened to — threatened to — "
"Waste you," Hixie said. "A five-letter word meaning 'to bump off.' "
"If Mr. Maus opens a restaurant, you can manage it for him," Rosemary said.
The voices of the three women rambled on, and Qwilleran listened with bemused inattention. He liked the gentle-voiced Rosemary; he felt comfortable with her, and the comfort was beginning to be of utmost importance. His emotional but brief reunion with Joy had been a misstep in the march of time, and now her memory was relegated to the past, where it belonged. He doubted, however, that he would ever again say that his favorite color was red.
There was a click on the desk, and he looked up to see Koko walking across the typewriter keyboard.
"Look!" Hixie squealed. "He's typing!"
Qwilleran walked over and looked at the sheet of paper. He put on his glasses and looked again. "He's ordering a bit to eat," the newsman said. "Since we moved to Maus Haus, he has learned to like caviar."
Koko had stepped on the K with his right paw, on V with his left, and then on the R.
?
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The Cat Who Saw Red Page 17