The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal

by Lilian Jackson Braun; Nye

  Just as Bushy was telling about his wife’s grandmother, who lived with them, a sudden impulse triggered the Siamese and catapulted them off the ottoman, round and round the fireplace cube, up the ramp, spiraling toward the roof, racing across the beams, leaping from catwalk to balcony, pounding down the ramp with thundering paws, then swooping to the main level, landing on the ottoman, where they came to a sudden stop and licked their fur. Time: thirty-five seconds.

  “What was that all about?” asked the stunned photographer.

  “I think they’re telling me to go to the steeplechase. I accept your invitation.”

  After the bowls of chili (hot) and coffee (strong), Qwilleran helped carry the photographic equipment to the van, and Bushy asked, “What are you going to do with your orchard? It’s pretty well shot.”

  “I’ll clear out the dead trees and plant something else,” said Qwilleran.

  “You could make it a bird sanctuary. Keep those berry bushes and wild cherries and plant some cedars and maples and things like that. Our yard is a conference center for birdlife. Vicki’s grandmother is a nut about birds.”

  Qwilleran returned indoors to ask the Siamese if they were in favor of a bird sanctuary and was greeted by Koko in his impertinent pose: legs splayed, head cocked, tail crooked.

  “You scoundrel!” Qwilleran said as he picked up the printing blocks scattered around the floor. This time he found a squirrel, a rabbit, an eagle, and a seahorse, two of them hidden under rugs, a trick he attributed to Yum Yum. They’re both bored, he thought. “Would anyone like to go for an outing?” he asked.

  When he produced the harnesses and jingled them invitingly, Yum Yum promptly disappeared, but Koko was ready for action. Harnessed and leashed and perched on Qwilleran’s shoulder, he was soon riding toward the mailbox on the highway. Qwilleran avoided the rutted trail and waded through the weeds in the orchard. Small birds landed on the tips of tall grasses and bounced them up and down, and he could feel Koko’s body trembling.

  Toward the end of the property the cat struggled to get down. Was this the spot where the killer parked his truck or van? More likely, Qwilleran concluded, there was an abandoned bird’s nest in the grass. Some nest builders, Polly had told him, are groundlings.

  Arriving at the highway, he allowed Koko to walk, and the cat investigated tire tracks on the pavement and pebbles on the shoulder. The crime lab had removed the mailbox for analysis, but Koko found a piece of glass they had overlooked. A fragment of a headlight? Or a shard from a whiskey bottle aimed at the mailbox by a Saturday-night carouser?

  Whatever it is, Qwilleran said to himself, we’re staying out of this case. Yet, Koko was tugging on the leash urgently. He was tugging toward the south—the direction in which the last vehicle had turned after the fateful party.

  FIVE

  THE DAY AFTER Qwilleran accepted Bushy’s invitation to the steeplechase, the sun was shining; the weather prediction was favorable; the Siamese were well and happy. Yet, he greeted the day with a mild depression. The triangular windows in the upper walls of the apple barn were performing their usual magic, throwing geometric patches of sunlight about the interior. As the earth turned, those distorted triangles of warmth and brightness moved from place to place, confusing the Siamese, who were always attracted to cozy spots. Ordinarily, Qwilleran was fascinated by this slow-motion minuet of sunsplashes, but on this day he was nagged by a vague uneasiness.

  The morning started well enough with a phone call from Lockmaster. “Qwill, this is Vicki Bushland. I’m so glad you and the cats will be spending the weekend with us.”

  “It will be my pleasure,” he assured her.

  “I hope the weather will be fine. It’s beautiful today. Is the sun shining up there?”

  “It’s working overtime,” he said, making note of the bright triangles on the floor and walls and the front of the schrank. “Is there anything I may contribute to the weekend?”

  “Just bring your binoculars and your camera for the races. The Saturday night party at the Riding and Hunt Club is rather dressy. The women wear long dresses, but black tie is optional for the men. Otherwise, everything’s casual. We have a tailgate picnic at the race course on Saturday.”

  “Sounds good,” he said, more politely than truthfully. Meals alfresco had never appealed to him. The prospect entailed limp paper plates, plastic forks, stuffed eggs with fragments of eggshell mashed into the stuffing, tuna sandwiches gritty with sand, and ants in the chocolate cake. Nevertheless, the experience might produce worthwhile material for the “Qwill Pen,” and he would have an excuse to absent himself from the apple barn during the public open house. On Saturday half of Moose County, at five dollars a head, would be tramping up and down the ramps, no doubt making disparaging remarks about the fireplace design and the contemporary furniture. But his underlying reason for accepting the Bushlands’ invitation may have been his curiosity about the person who had brunched with Polly at the Palomino Paddock, sending her home late, tired, and starry-eyed. No doubt this was the caller with whom she had that brief and guarded conversation while Qwilleran squirmed in a hard oak chair.

  “I’m looking forward to the whole weekend,” he told Vicki.

  “Could you arrive in time for dinner on Friday?” she asked. “We’d have cocktails at six. I’d like to give a little dinner party because my grandmother is dying to meet you. She adored your column when you were writing for the Daily Fluxion, and now we buy the Moose County paper every Tuesday and Friday so she can read ‘Straight from the Qwill Pen.’ Sometimes you switch days, and then the dear lady has a fit!”

  “I’m sure I’ll like your grandmother immensely,” Qwilleran said.

  “We’ll invite a few others you might enjoy meeting. Everyone knows who you are, and all our friends have heard about the time you and Bushy were marooned on the island during a storm. So we’ll all be looking forward to your visit.”

  “None more than I,” he said in the graciously formal style he adopted on such occasions.

  “Do you like pasta? We have to serve something my grandmother can swallow easily.”

  “I consider myself omnivorous—with the small exception of turnips and parsnips.”

  “How about the cats? What do they eat?”

  “Don’t worry about them. I’ll take along some canned stuff.”

  Canned stuff to the Siamese meant red salmon, boned chicken, solid-pack white tuna, crabmeat, and lobster.

  Although feeding the cats would be a simple matter, dressing for dinner at the Riding and Hunt Club would pose a problem. The navy blue suit that Qwilleran reserved for funerals had been lost in a fire. Furthermore, a dinner jacket would be preferable if only to dispel the Lockmaster notion that Moose County was populated with aborigines. He had never owned a dinner jacket. He had rented one for Arch Riker’s wedding twenty-odd years before, and he assumed that the practice was still customary. He assumed that the young potato farmers and sheep ranchers whose wedding photos appeared in the Something were able to rent their dinner jackets and tailcoats from Scottie’s Men’s Shop.

  Time was short. He headed downtown at a pace faster than usual, turning his head only to count the yellow posters in store windows—posters made brighter by the relentless September sun:

  LIVING BARN TOUR

  SAT., SEPT. 17, 10 A.M. TO 5 P.M.

  TICKETS $5

  Scottie greeted him at the door. “Weel, laddie, you’ve done it again!” he said, putting on the brogue that pleased his Scottish and part-Scottish customers. (Qwilleran’s mother, everyone knew, had been a Mackintosh.)

  “Meaning what?” Qwilleran asked.

  “You found another dead body! Canna remember any dead bodies before you moved to town.”

  Qwilleran huffed into his moustache as dismissal of the remark. “I want to rent a dinner jacket and everything that goes with it.”

  “Och! You want to rent? Is the Klingenschoen heir too hard up to buy one?”

  “Look, Scottie, I’ve liv
ed here for four years with no need for formal clothing, and I may never need it again. Waste not, want not.”

  “Spoken like a true Mackintosh! Or was your mother a Mackenzie?”

  “Mackintosh,” Qwilleran growled.

  “ ’Twill make a juicy bit of gossip when the word gets around that the richest man in Moose County is rentin’ a dinner jacket. Every man in your position, laddie, should own a dinner jacket.”

  Reluctantly Qwilleran allowed himself to be sold, and as he was being fitted, the storekeeper brought up the subject of the murder again. “Let them say what they will about VanBrook, it were too bad. Aye, it were too bad.”

  “Was he a good customer of yours?” Qwilleran asked, assuming that Scottie’s reactions would be related to the cash register.

  “Not good, but frequent. He come in here reg’lar to look for turtlenecks in colors they don’t make . . . The police have a suspect, I hear.”

  “I was not aware of that, Scottie. Who is it?” Qwilleran asked innocently.

  “There’s a rumor that Dennis Hough is in hidin’.” He pronounced it Hoe. “The mayor’s wife were in Mooseville to a ladies’ social, and she saw the laddie comin’ out of the Shipwreck Tavern, lookin’ furtive and in want of a shave.”

  “What kind of refreshments were they serving at that ladies’ social? Dennis is driving to St. Louis to see his family for the first time in several months! The gossips want to suspect him because he’s an outsider from Down Below. The people around here, if you ask me, are a bunch of xenophobes.”

  “If you mean they’re slow in payin’ their bills, you hit the nail on the head, laddie.”

  Leaving Scottie’s store, Qwilleran met Carol Lanspeak going into the family’s emporium. “Heard anything?” she asked.

  “Not a word,” he replied. “How about you?”

  “Wait till you hear! We just received a letter that Hilary mailed last Friday, the day before he died, billing us for mileage for that woman from Lockmaster! Eight rehearsals and twelve performances at one hundred forty miles a round trip. Do you realize what that amounts to at twenty-five cents a mile? Seven hundred dollars! I know she used a lot of gas to come up here, but the point is: We didn’t need her!”

  “Can the club afford it?”

  “Well, it’ll put us in the red again. It’s just another example of Hilary’s arrogance. He never gave us a hint that we’d be liable for her travel expenses. Scott Gippel thinks we should just ignore it. We don’t know the woman’s address, and we don’t know who’s handling the estate.”

  “What does Larry say about it?”

  “He hasn’t seen the letter yet. He’ll hit the ceiling!” Her eye caught the yellow poster in the store window. “Your Living Barn Tour is being well publicized, but isn’t a five-dollar admission kind of steep for Pickax pocketbooks?”

  “They’ll pay five dollars just to see the scene of the crime,” he said.

  “That’s ghoulish, Qwill.”

  “But true. You wait and see.”

  Carol went into the store, and Qwilleran went on his way, thinking about the letter posthumously received. Who was VanBrook’s executor? What was the extent of his estate? Who would inherit? Only one person in Pickax, he thought, would know anything about the principal’s connections. The superintendent of schools would have a file on the man. Qwilleran had a sudden urge to lunch with Lyle Compton, and he knew that Compton always liked an excuse to get out of the office.

  Qwilleran phoned the board of education and made a date for noon, then called the Old Stone Mill for a reservation. Thriftily he used the phone in Amanda’s Studio of Interior Design.

  “Have you heard anything new?” Fran asked him when he hung up the phone. “I haven’t been able to pry anything out of Dad. He isn’t talking, not even to Mother, but there’s an ugly rumor circulating about Dennis.”

  “How do these baseless rumors get started?” Qwilleran asked irritably.

  “He left town suddenly.”

  “No doubt headed for St. Louis on family business.”

  “That’s what I think, too, although he didn’t mention it to anyone . . . How did the shoot turn out yesterday?”

  “Pretty good, I guess. Bushy took a lot of pictures and promised to print a complete set for you. I’ll see them this weekend when I go down to Lockmaster. Have you ever been to the steeplechase?”

  “No, but I hear it’s quite a blast.”

  Qwilleran looked at his watch. “I’m meeting Lyle at noon. See you later.”

  “Wait a minute, Qwill. Want to help me make that delivery to Hilary’s house tomorrow?”

  “What time?”

  “Is nine o’clock too early? I know you’re a slow starter.”

  “Not on Wednesday mornings! Mrs. Fulgrove comes to dust, and I like any excuse to get out.”

  “Okay, then. Park behind the studio, and you can help me load the screens in the van. They’re in flat cartons, large but not heavy. And,” Fran added slyly, “we won’t charge you for the two phone calls.”

  Stroking his moustache with satisfaction, Qwilleran left for lunch with a singularly buoyant step. He was going to see what was behind those drawn draperies on Goodwinter Boulevard.

  The Old Stone Mill was a picturesque restaurant converted from a nineteenth-century grist mill, and its outstanding features were a six-foot-seven busboy who talked a lot and an old millwheel that turned and creaked and groaned continuously. The two men were shown to Qwilleran’s favorite table: it had the best view and the most privacy and was comfortably removed from the incessant racket of the ancient wheel.

  As Derek Cuttlebrink sauntered over with water pitcher and bread basket, the superintendent said with his usual cynical scowl, “Here comes our most distinguished alumnus.”

  “Hi, Mr. Compton,” said the gregarious busboy. “Did you see me in the play?”

  “I certainly did, Derek, and you were head and shoulders above all the others.”

  “Gee!”

  “When are you going to complete your education, my boy? Or is your goal to be the oldest busboy in the forty-eight contiguous states?”

  “Well, I’ve got this new girl that kinda likes me, and she doesn’t want me to go away to college,” Derek explained plausibly. “I see her three times a week. Last night we went roller skating.”

  The hostess, hurrying past with an armful of menu folders, nudged him. “Setups on tables six and nine, Derek, and table four wants more water.”

  As the busboy drifted away with his water pitcher, Compton said, “The Cuttlebrinks were the founders of the town of Wildcat, but their pioneer spirit is wearing thin. Every generation gets taller but not brighter . . . What looks interesting on the menu? I don’t want anything nutritious. I get all that at home.” The superintendent was a painfully thin man who smoked too many cigars and scoffed at vegetables and salads.

  Qwilleran said, “There’s a cheese and broccoli soup that’s so thick you could use it for mortar. The avocado-stuffed pita is a mess to eat, but delicious. The crab Louis salad is the genuine thing.”

  “I’ll take chili and a hot dog,” Compton told the waitress . . . “So they finally eliminated VanBrook,” he said to Qwilleran. “I always knew he’d get it someday. Too bad it happened on our territory. It makes Moose County look bad.”

  “If you found him so objectionable, why did you keep renewing his contract?”

  “He was so damned good that he had us over a barrel. There are devils you can live with, you know.”

  “What happens to his estate? Did he have any family elsewhere?”

  “The only personal contact listed in his file is an attorney in Lockmaster. When the police notified me, I talked to this man and asked if there was anything we could do. He told me that Hilary had opted for cremation, with his ashes to be sent to Lockmaster. Then he asked for the name of an estate liquidator, and I referred him to Susan Exbridge.”

  “Hilary was a mystery man, wasn’t he? I’m reading the biography of Sir Edmu
nd Backhouse, the British sinologist, and I see a similarity: A brilliant, erudite man of astounding accomplishments but also an eccentric who doesn’t fit the social norm.”

  “Hilary was that, all right,” Compton agreed.

  “Even his name rouses one’s curiosity, if not suspicion.”

  “Hilary VanBrook was his professional name, assumed when he was acting on the New York stage. It’s not the one used for social security, federal withholding, and so forth, but you have to admit it has a touch of class. His real name was William Smurple—not an auspicious name for a Broadway star.”

  “Or a high school principal,” Qwilleran said. “I hear he claimed to speak Japanese fluently. Was that true?”

  “To all appearances. We had a Japanese exchange student up here one year, and they seemed to converse glibly. So that checked out. I never had any qualms about his credibility, although I often questioned his judgment. We lost a helluva good custodian because of him, and a good janitor is a pearl beyond price. Pat O’Dell had been in the school system for forty years, and you couldn’t find a more conscientious worker or more charismatic personality. He was the unofficial student counselor; the kids flocked to him for advice—a grandfather figure, you might say. Well, Hilary blew the whistle on that unorthodox arrangement! I think he was jealous of the man’s popularity. At any rate, he made it so uncomfortable for old Pat O’Dell that he quit.”

  “What about the Toddwhistle incident?”

  “Kids have been putting things on teachers’ chairs and in principals’ mailboxes for generations! Hilary overreacted. Now that he’s gone, we’ll probably give Wally a diploma, if he wants it. But I’ll bet he earns more money stuffing animals than I do hiring teachers.”

  They ordered apple pie, and Qwilleran asked, “With all VanBrook’s talents and background, why did he choose to live in remote places like Lockmaster and Pickax? Did he ever explain?”