“Middle of October. The sixteenth, to be exact.”
“We wanted to get this chandelier installed before our Halloween party, but I didn’t want to buy it without Arch seeing it. He came home to dinner, and then we drove back to Junktown. Andy was going to open up especially for us. But when we got there, the store was locked up, and no one was in sight. In the meantime I noticed a chandelier in the Cobbs’ window that looked good, so we bought that one instead.”
“Were the Cobbs open at that late hour?”
“No, but we saw someone going up the steps and asked him if the Cobbs would mind coming down to show us the fixture. He went upstairs and got Mrs. Cobb, and we bought it. It was a couple of weeks later that one of my junking friends told me about Andy’s accident, and I never connected—”
“Who was the man who was going up the Cobbs’ front steps?”
“He’s a dealer himself. He has the Bit o’ Junk shop. It really worked out better for us, because the fixture we bought from Mrs. Cobb was painted tin, and I realized afterwards that Andy’s brass chandelier would have been too formal for our dining room.”
“Did you say brass?”
“Yes. Sort of Williamsburg.”
“Not glass? Not a chandelier with five crystal arms?”
“Oh, no! Crystal would be much too dressy for our house.”
That was when Qwilleran kissed Rosie Riker.
Later in the afternoon he made a few additional entries in the log:
—Sold turkey platter, $75.
—Customer broke goblet. Collected $4.50. Showed no mercy.
—Sold apple peeler to make into a lamp, $12.
—Sold bronze grille from Garrick Theatre, $45.
—Photographer sat in banister-back chair. Fluxion will pay for damage.
—SOLD ROLL-TOP DESK, $750!
The woman who came bursting into the shop, asking for a roll-top desk, was not an experienced junker. Qwilleran could tell that by her enthusiasm and her smart clothes.
“The man next door told me you have a roll-top desk,” she announced breathlessly, “and I must have one before Christmas.”
“The one we have is in use,” said Qwilleran, “and the user would be extremely reluctant to part with it.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” she said. “I’ve got to have it for my husband’s Christmas gift. I’ll write you a check, and my driver will pick it up in the morning.”
Qwilleran felt pleased with himself that evening. He had personally taken in almost $1,000 for Mrs. Cobb. He had gleaned information from Rosie Riker that reinforced his theory about the finial incident. And he had broached an idea to the managing editor of the Daily Fluxion that had made a big impression; it if proved to be workable—and the boss felt that it might—it would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.
After dinner Qwilleran was removing his belongings from the pigeonholes of the roll-top desk when he heard a heavy tread coming up the stairs. He opened his door and hailed his neighbor. Ben was still wearing his Santa Claus disguise.
“Ben, what’s a roll-top desk worth?” Qwilleran asked. “There’s no price tag on the one I’m using, and I sold it for seven hundred and fifty, chair included.”
“Oh, excellent swindle!” said the dealer. “Sir, you should be in the business.” He trudged toward his apartment, then turned around and resolutely trudged back. “Will you join me in a drop of brandy and a crumb of rare cheese?”
“I’ll go for some of that cheese,” Qwilleran said. He had just finished an unsatisfactory dinner of canned stew.
His host moved a copper wash boiler from the seat of a Victorian sofa, leaving an oval silhouette in the dust on the black horsehair, and the newsman sat on the clean spot and surveyed the appointments of the room: a bust of Hiawatha, a wooden plane propellor, empty picture frames, a wicker baby carriage, a leather pail labeled FIRE, a wooden washboard, a wigless doll.
Ben brought Qwilleran some cheese and crackers on a plate decorated with an advertisement for an 1870 patent medicine that relieved itching. Then he lowered himself with a groan into a creaking chair of mildewed wicker. “We are faint,” he said. “Our gashes cry for help.” He drank fastidiously from a cracked teacup.
Ben had removed his white beard, and now he looked absurd with rouged nose and cheeks, pale jowls, and powdered artificial eyebrows.
Qwilleran said, “I’ve been in Junktown a week now, and frankly I don’t know how you dealers make a living.”
“We muddle through. We muddle through.”
“Where do you acquire your goods? Where does it all come from?”
Ben waved a hand at the sculptured head of an angel, minus nose. “Behold! A repulsive little gem from the façade of the Garrick Theatre. Genuine stone, with the original bird droppings.” He waved toward a discolored washbowl and pitcher. “A treasure from Mount Vernon, with the original soap scum.”
For half an hour Qwilleran plied his host with questions, receiving flowery answers with no information whatever. At last he prepared to leave, and as he glanced at a few stray cracker crumbs on the seat of the black horsehair sofa, he saw something else that alerted him—a stiff blond hair. He casually picked it up.
Back in his own apartment he examined the hair under a lamp. There was no doubt what it was—three inches long, slightly curved, tapering at one end.
He went to the telephone and dialed a number.
“Mary,” he said, “I’ve made a discovery. Do you want to see something interesting? Put on your coat and run over here.”
Then he turned to the cats, who were lounging contentedly on their gilded chairs.
“Okay, you guys!” he said. “What do you know about this?”
Koko scratched his left ear with his hind foot, and Yum Yum licked her right shoulder.
TWENTY
Qwilleran heard Ben Nicholas leave the house, and shortly afterward the downstairs buzzer sounded, and Mary Duckworth arrived with a fur parka thrown over a skyblue corduroy jumpsuit.
She examined the stiff blond hair.
“Know what it is?” Qwilleran asked.
“A bristle. From some kind of brush.”
“It’s a whisker,” he corrected her, “from some kind of cat. I found it on Ben’s living room sofa. Either my two rascals have found a way to get into the apartment next door, or the spirit of Mathilda Spencer is getting pretty cheeky.”
Mary examined the cat whisker. “It’s mottled—white and gray.”
“It obviously belongs to Yum Yum. Koko’s are pure white.”
“Have you any idea how they could get through the wall?”
Qwilleran beckoned her to follow as he led the way to the dressing room. “I’ve checked out the bathroom. The wall is solid tile. The only other possibility is in here—behind these bookshelves.”
Koko followed them into the dressing room and rubbed his jaw ardently against the books on the lower shelf.
“Beautiful bindings!” Mary said. “Mrs. Cobb could sell these to decorators for several dollars apiece.”
There was a yowl from Koko, but it was a muffled yowl, and Qwilleran looked down in time to see a tail tip disappearing between two volumes—in precisely the spot where he had removed the bound copies of The Liberator.
“Koko, come out!” he ordered. “It’s dusty back there.”
“Yow!” came the faint reply.
Mary said, “He sounds as if he’s down a deep well.”
The man attacked the bookshelf with both hands, pulling out volumes and tossing them on the floor. “Bring the flashlight, Mary. It’s on the desk.”
He flashed the light toward the back wall, and its beamed picked up an expanse of paneling similar to the fireplace wall in the living room—narrow planks with beveled edges.
“Solid,” said Qwilleran. “Let’s clear more shelves . . . Ouch!”
“Careful! Don’t twist your knee, Qwill. Let me do it.”
Mary got down on her hands and knees and peered under
a low shelf. “Qwill, there’s an opening in the wall, sure enough.”
“How big?”
“It looks as if a single board is missing.”
“Can you see what’s beyond? Take the flashlight.”
“There’s another wall—about two feet back. It makes a narrow compartment—”
“Mary, do you think . . . ?”
“Qwill, could this be . . . ?”
The idea occurred to them both, simultaneously.
“An Underground Railway station,” Qwilleran said.
“Exactly!” she said. “William Towne Spencer built this house.”
“Many abolitionists—”
“Built secret rooms—yes!”
“To hide runaway slaves.”
Mary ducked her head under the shelf again. “It slides!” she called over her shoulder. “The whole panel is a sliding door. There’s a robe in here.” She pulled out twelve feet of white cord. “And a toothbrush!”
“Yow!” said Koko, making a sudden appearance in the beam of the flashlight. He stepped out from his hideaway and staggered a little as he gave a delicate shudder.
“Close the panel,” Qwilleran directed. “Can you close it?”
“All but half an inch. It seems to be warped.”
“I’ll bet Koko opened the panel with his claws, and Yum Yum followed him through. She’s the one who did the fetching and carrying . . . . Well, that solves one mystery. How about a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks, no. I must go home. I’m wrapping Christmas presents.” Mary stopped short. “You’ve been emptying your desk! Are you moving out?”
“Only the desk is moving. I sold it this afternoon for seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Qwill, you didn’t! It’s worth two hundred dollars at most.”
He showed her the log of his afternoon session in The Junkery. “Not bad for a greenhorn, is it?”
“Who is this woman who wanted Sheffield candlesticks?” Mary asked, as she scanned the report. “You should have sent her to me . . . . And who was asking for horse brasses? No one buys horse brasses any more.”
“What are they?”
“Brass medallions for decorating harnesses. The English used to use them as good luck tokens . . . . Who’s the customer who got kissed? That’s a devious way to sell a tin knife box.”
“She’s the wife of our feature editor,” Qwilleran said. “By the way, I’ve brought a present for Arch Riker—just a joke. Would you gift-wrap it for me?” He handed Mary the rusty tobacco tin.
“I hope,” she said, reading the price tag inside the cover, “that the Weird Sisters didn’t charge you ten dollars for this.”
“Ten dollars?” Qwilleran felt an uncomfortable sensation on his upper lip. “They were asking ten, but they gave it to me for five.”
“That’s not bad. Most shops get seven-fifty.”
Gulping his chagrin, Qwilleran escorted her down the stairs, and as they passed Ben’s open door he asked, “Does the Bit o’ Junk do a good business?”
“Not particularly,” she replied. “Ben is too lazy to go out looking for things, so his turnover is slow.”
“He took me to The Lion’s Tail last night, and he was throwing money around as if he had his own printing press.”
Mary shrugged. “He must have had a windfall. Once a year a dealer can count on a windfall—like selling a roll-top desk for seven hundred and fifty dollars. That’s one of the great truths of the antique business.”
“By the way,” Qwilleran said, “we went scrounging at the Garrick last night, but all that was left was a crest on one of the boxes, and I almost broke my neck trying to get it.”
“Ben should have warned you. That box has been unsafe for years.”
“How do you know?”
“The city engineers condemned it in the 1940s and ordered it padlocked. It’s called the Ghost Box.”
“Do you think Ben knew about it?”
“Everyone knows about it,” Mary said. “That’s why the crest was never taken. Even Russ Patch refused to risk it, and he’s a daredevil.”
After Qwilleran had watched her return to her own house, he climbed the stairs pensively. At the top of the flight the cats were waiting for him in identical poses, sitting tall with brown tails arranged in matching curves. One inch of tail tip lifted inquiringly.
“You scoundrels!” Qwilleran said. “I suppose you’ve been having a whale of a time, coming and going through the walls like a couple of apparitions.”
Koko stropped his jaw on the newel post, his tiny ivory tusks clicking against the ancient mahogany.
“Want to go and have your teeth cleaned?” the man asked him. “After Christmas I’ll take you to a cat dentist.”
Koko rubbed the back of his head on the newel post—an ingratiating gesture.
“Don’t pretend innocence. You don’t fool me for a minute.” Qwilleran roughed up the sleek fur along the cat’s fluid backbone. “What else have you been doing behind my back? What are you planning to do next?”
That was Wednesday night. Thursday morning Qwilleran got his answer.
Just before daylight he turned in his bed and found his nose buried in fur. Yum Yum was sharing his pillow. Her fur smelled clean. Qwilleran’s mind went back forty-odd years to a sunny backyard with laundry flapping on the clothesline. The clean wash smelled like sunshine and fresh air, and that was the fragrance of this small animal’s coat.
From the kitchen came a familiar sound: “Yawwck!” It was Koko’s good-morning yowl combined with a wake-up yawn, and it was followed by two thumps as the cat jumped down from refrigerator to counter to floor. When he walked into the living room, he stopped in the middle of the carpet and pushed his forelegs forward, his hind quarters skyward, in an elongated stretch. After that he stretched a hind leg—just the left one—very carefully. Then he approached the swan bed and ordered breakfast in clarion tones.
The man made no move to get out of bed but reached out a teasing hand. Koko sidestepped it and rubbed his brown mask against the corner of the bed. He crossed the room and rubbed the leg of the book cupboard. He walked to the Morris chair and stropped his jaw on its square corners.
“Just what do you think you’re accomplishing?” Qwilleran asked.
Koko ambled to the pot-bellied stove and looked it over, then selected the latch of the ashpit door and ground his jaw against it. He scraped the left side of his jaw; he scraped the right side. And the shallow door clicked and swung ajar. The door opened only a hair’s-breadth, but Koko pried it farther with an inquisitive paw.
In a split second Qwilleran was out of bed and bending over the ashpit. It was full of papers—typewritten sheets—a stack of them two inches thick, neatly bound in gray folders. They had been typed on a machine with a loose E—a faulty letter that jumped above the line.
TWENTY-ONE
In the gray-white morning light of the day before the day before Christmas, Qwilleran started to read Andy’s novel. The questionable heroine of the story was a scatterbrained prattler who was planning to spike her alcoholic husband’s highball with carbon tetrachloride in order to be free to marry another man of great sexual prowess.
He had read six chapters when a uniformed chauffeur and two truckers arrived to remove the roll-top desk, and after that it was time to shave and dress and go downtown. He put the manuscript back in the ashpit reluctantly.
At the Fluxion office Qwilleran’s session with the managing editor lasted longer than either of them had anticipated. In fact, it stretched into a lengthy lunch date with some important executives in a private dining room at the Press Club, and when the newsman returned to Junktown in the late afternoon, he was jubilant.
His knee, much improved, permitted him to bolt up the front steps of the Cobb mansion two at a time, but when he let himself into the entrance hall, he slowed down. The Cobb Junkery was open, and Iris was there, moving in a daze, passing a dustrag over the arms of a Boston rocker.
“I didn’t exp
ect you so soon,” he said.
“I thought I ought to open the shop,” she replied in a dreary voice. “There might be some follow-up business after the Block Party, and goodness knows I need the money. Dennis—my son—came back with me.”
“We sold some merchandise for you yesterday,” Qwilleran said. “I hated to let my desk go, but a woman was willing to pay seven hundred and fifty dollars for it.”
Iris exhibited more gratitude than surprise.
“And incidentally, were you saving any old radios for Hollis Prantz?” he asked.
“Old radios? No, we wouldn’t have anything like that.”
That evening Qwilleran finished reading Andy’s novel. It was just as he expected. The characters included a philandering husband, a voluptuous divorcée, a poor little rich girl operating a swanky antique shop incognito, and—in the later chapters—a retired schoolteacher who was naive to the point of stupidity. For good measure Andy had also introduced a gambling racketeer, a nymphet, a dope pusher, a sodomite, a crooked politician, and a retired cop who appeared to be the mouthpiece for the author’s highminded platitudes.
Why, Qwilleran asked himself, had Andy hidden his manuscript in the ashpit of a pot-bellied stove?
At one point his reading was interrupted by a knock on his door, and a clean-cut young man wearing a white shirt and bowtie introduced himself as Iris’s son.
“My mother says you need a desk,” he said. “If you’ll give me an assist, we can bring the one from her apartment.”
“The apothecary desk? I don’t want to deprive her—”
“She says she doesn’t need it.”
“How’s your mother feeling?”
“Rough! She took a pill and went to bed early.”
They carried the desk across the hall, and a chair to go with it—a Windsor with thick slab seat and delicate spindle back—and Qwilleran asked Dennis to help him hoist the Mackintosh coat of arms to the mantel, replacing the portrait of the sour-faced kill-joy.
Then Qwilleran plunged once more into Andy’s novel. He had read worse books, but not many. Andy had no ear for dialogue and no compassion for his characters. What fascinated the newsman, however, was the narcotics operation. One of the antique dealers in the story dispensed marijuana as well as mahogany sideboards and Meissen ewers. Whenever a customer walked into his shop and asked for a Quimper teapot, he was actually in the market for “tea.”
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Ate Danish Modern, Turned on and Off Page 17