Something the Cat Dragged In

by Charlotte MacLeod

  As to the recliner, supposing Ungley had been the one to shove it flat, wouldn’t he have flicked it upright again, if only to help straighten himself up? Ungley had, after all, been an old man, and that silver cane he’d toted around must have been more than a status symbol.

  It was odd about that weighted handle. It was odd Shandy hadn’t thought of doing what should have been done before he started horsing around with reclining chairs. Blasting himself for an idiot, he asked, “Mrs. Lomax, may I use your telephone?”

  “Why not use Professor Ungley’s?” she replied, thinking perhaps of her clean kitchen floor.

  Why not, indeed? It was unlikely the now more than hypothetical intruder would have rung up a pal for a chat. And if he had, being adroit enough to get in and out without waking Mrs. Lomax or falling over Edmund, he’d no doubt have had sense enough not to plaster the place with fingerprints. Shandy picked up the phone that was on Ungley’s desk, and called Harry Goulson.

  “Goulson? This is Peter Shandy. Have you begun your Ptolemaic rites on Professor Ungley’s body yet? Then don’t. I’d like to see it first. I’ll be over in a few minutes. And—er—mummy’s the word.”

  Mrs. Lomax gave him a look and he was ashamed, but it was too late now. He hung up and put on an air of brisk efficiency. “Now what about that file cabinet you spoke of?”

  “It’s right here behind the desk.”

  “Ah yes, the desk. Perhaps we might just have a look in here while we’re about it.”

  This was where Ungley had allegedly spent so many hours toiling at the History of Balaclava County he’d claimed to have been at work on for the past quarter-century. According to the notes Shandy found, though, he’d only got as far as 1832, a year in which nothing of any particular significance appeared to have happened.

  The drawers were unlocked and held only trifles: some Balaclavian Society stationery yellowed around the edges, a few stub pens and small bottles encrusted with long-dried ink, notes for lectures that hadn’t been delivered at the college since Thorkjeld Svenson had summarily emeritized Ungley on his accession to power in 1952. There was also a copy of the commencement exercises for that year at which Ungley had been singled out for special recognition since the president had a heart as big as his feet and seldom lopped off a head without some twinge of remorse.

  There were a fair number of other things, but none of the clutter usually found in people’s desks. Mrs. Lomax had been right about Ungley’s finicking ways. Anybody who’d take the trouble to stack forty-eight paper clips in neat rows of six apiece within their little box would not be apt to leave the sofa pillows askew. Shandy swiveled the desk chair around to face the files.

  “I just hope you can get into ’em,” Mrs. Lomax observed. “The professor was always fussier about those files than anything else. He’d hardly let me dust the cabinet, and he always kept the drawers locked. Fred Ottermole’s got the keys down at the station. Do you think maybe we’d better go ask him for them?”

  “Not if you don’t object to another spot of burglary.” Shandy took out his multi-bladed jackknife.

  “I don’t care what you do with that thing, just so’s you don’t expect me to listen to a lecture about it.”

  “I don’t, but would you mind handing me that reading glass off the desk? Before I tackle this lock, I want to make sure there aren’t any fresh nicks or scratches on it.”

  “Why should there be?” Mrs. Lomax asked, peering over his shoulder as he scanned the brass keyholes on the varnished oak drawers.

  “There would be, most likely, if the drawers had been forced, I don’t see any, so we can take it they weren’t. Until now.”

  Shandy applied his blade with judicious pressure. The locks yielded. The drawers opened without protest. Every single one of them was empty.

  Chapter Five

  “WHY, THAT OLD FRAUD,” cried Mrs. Lomax. “All these years, making me think—”

  Shandy held up a shushing hand. “Don’t judge him too hastily, Mrs. Lomax. Notice those scraps of paper and whatnot at the bottoms of the drawers?”

  “Dust and litter,” she sniffed.

  “Exactly, and Ungley was a tidy man. If these files had in fact been empty for any length of time, wouldn’t you have expected he’d make some effort to clean them out? I’d say they were full enough until last night, and that your nocturnal visitor took whatever was in them because he hadn’t found whatever he was looking for anywhere else and assumed it must therefore be in among the stuff in the drawers.”

  “But why go to the bother? Couldn’t he have leafed through them right here?”

  “Certainly he could, but it takes a long time to go through four drawers full of God knows what. Now, I’m no expert on housekeeping like you, but I think I’m safe in saying it’s a lot faster to be messy than neat. This search was carried out so discreetly that it would have fooled anybody except yourself, most likely. Therefore, it would have taken a fair amount of the night, and we know from your and—er—Edmund’s testimony that it couldn’t have been started until sometime after midnight. By six o’clock at the latest, there’d be people stirring around the neighborhood, so my guess is that by the time the searcher got around to the files, he felt he couldn’t take the chance on staying, but decided it would be wiser to carry them off and examine them at leisure. Would there have been any cartons or whatever around to pack them in?”

  “Plastic trash bags.” Mrs. Lomax was brisk and collected again. “There’s a box of ’em in the kitchen. I don’t hold with the dratted things myself, but the professor always used ’em because he was too lazy to empty his garbage every day. He’d keep it tied up in one of those bags so’s it wouldn’t get too smelly, I’d drag it out to put with my own trash on the days I cleaned for him, and wash out the wastebasket and line it with a fresh bag, And air out the kitchen, as you can well imagine,” she added with a sniff.

  “That’s not the way I’d have managed if it was left to me, but that’s what the professor wanted and that was the way it stayed. Terrible set in his ways, Professor Ungley was. I’m just glad I didn’t have to cook for him. He’d get his own breakfast, mostly boiled eggs and toast and jam and instant coffee, far as I could make out from his garbage. Then he’d mosey on up to the college dining room around five o’clock and eat an early supper, then he’d have his glass of milk and maybe a cracker or something at bedtime. That was plenty for a man his age. Mrs. Mouzouka puts on a fairly decent meal as a rule. I’ve eaten there a few times, myself.”

  Shandy nodded. Since Mrs. Lomax cleaned for about half the faculty, she claimed certain faculty privileges which nobody begrudged her. He’d seen her in the dining room often enough himself, tucking into one of Mrs. Mouzouka’s invariably superb meals for all she was worth, but he’d never seen her eating with Ungley. He’d never seen anybody else at Ungley’s table, come to think of it, except once or twice kind old John Enderble, who was also emeritus but still taught his course on Local Fauna and would set off a student riot, no doubt, if he ever decided to retire in earnest.

  As far as Shandy knew, there’d been no protest about dropping Ungley’s course on Early Political History of Balaclava County; only a gentle wonder as to why he’d ever been allowed to teach it in the first place. Somebody had once suggested Ungley had been related to the previous president’s in-laws, and that seemed as reasonable an explanation as any. Still, he’d been a relic of an earlier time and Shandy supposed he himself ought to feel a twinge at Ungley’s passing, but he didn’t.

  Ungley had been either sullen or tedious, according to his mood. He’d contributed nothing of significance to the college and hadn’t even raised a finger on behalf of the Buggins Collection during all the years those precious books had lain neglected in the back room at the library. God alone knew what he’d been allowing to moulder away down there at the Balaclavian Society.

  Now, there was a thought. Maybe Ungley himself had recently decided to transfer those vanished files to the clubhouse. Shandy m
entioned the possibility to Mrs. Lomax and was promptly shot down.

  “Him? When he wouldn’t even transfer his own garbage to the woodshed? He’s never transferred anything except maybe a bag of groceries or his shirts from the laundry in or out of this house since the day he moved in, which would be twenty-nine years ago this past July when they tore down those old flats up behind the college barns to make room for the power plant. They say there used to be rats over there big as woodchucks. Never saw any myself, and I certainly wouldn’t want to.”

  Shandy said he wouldn’t either and was Mrs. Lomax absolutely positive about those files? After all, she was away at work most days, wasn’t she? Couldn’t they have been moved in her absence?

  Mrs. Lomax snorted at the mere notion. “If they’d been taken out in the daytime decent and proper, I’d have heard about it plenty. Been pestered to help on my busiest day, like as not. Furthermore, they’d have gone cabinet and all, wouldn’t they? The easiest way would have been to get Charlie Ross up here with his truck and load the whole shebang aboard at once, and if there was an easiest way to do anything, you can bet your bottom dollar Professor Ungley would have been the man to find it. Let me go get those plastic bags. I noticed yesterday he’d bought a new box because I busted a fingernail trying to open it.”

  She hustled out to the kitchen and Shandy followed her. The box of bags was neatly disposed in a cupboard beside the sink.

  “See there, Professor? I took out the first one yesterday, and you know how the rest bulge out to fill the gap and make the box look as if it’s still full? Well, maybe you don’t, but they do. And look at it now.”

  Mrs. Lomax had a point. The box certainly did not look full. When Shandy counted the bags, he found only seven instead of the dozen it was alleged to have contained. Five gone then, one for the wastebasket, one for each of the four file drawers. Half-filled sacks would be easy enough to drag out to a car, over to the clubhouse by that back route Edmund must have taken with Ungley’s hairpiece, or to any number of other places. Down here in the village, houses were crammed tight together. If Ottermole persisted in calling Ungley’s death an accident, it was going to be one hell of a job tracking down whatever had come out of that cabinet.

  If only the old man had been killed on campus instead of down in the village, Shandy’d have got President Svenson to call in the state police like a shot. But what jurisdiction could Svenson have now over a dead professor whom he’d got rid of thirty years ago as soon as he’d had time to see what Ungley was, or rather wasn’t up to?

  Shandy supposed he might have a go at Svenson anyway, but first he’d better make that projected trip over to Goulson’s and fully satisfy himself that they did in fact have a case of murder on their hands. Mrs. Lomax was already champing at the bit to be gone, she having an urgent appointment up at the Crescent with the Ameses’ vacuum cleaner.

  “Go right ahead, Mrs. Lomax,” he told her. “I’ve got to be back for my eleven o’clock class myself, but I want to see Goulson first. I don’t know whether Mrs. Shandy’s gone over to the library yet, but if you should happen to see her, you might give her a brief rundown about Ungley. If you don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Lomax assured him she wouldn’t mind a bit, and sped Crescentward. Shandy took the path Edmund must have used over to the clubhouse. He could see a few people still hanging around telling each other how Professor Ungley’s head had been impaled on that very peg right there and pointing to the wrong one more often than not.

  Anyway, from what Mrs. Lomax said, Professor Ungley hadn’t been impaled at all, but merely slumped against the harrow when she found him. There was no particular reason to suppose she hadn’t been first on the scene after his death, and still less to imagine anybody would have gone to the bother of lifting him free, then dumping him and running off.

  The scant amount of blood on the harrow peg would seem to rule out impalement or anything else but a hope of fooling some of the people some of the time. To the delight of the onlookers, though, Shandy took out his jackknife again, found a used envelope in his pocket, and scraped a little of the bloodstained rust into it.

  “Hey, Prof,” yelled an urchin of eleven or so, “you goin’ to investigate?”

  “I’m going to investigate what you’re doing out of school on a weekday morning,” Shandy snapped back. “Does your mother know where you are?”

  The youngster muttered a scathing reference to Shandy’s own parentage, then wriggled his way backward out of the gathering and disappeared. Shandy pocketed his sample and went on to Goulson’s. The undertaker was waiting for him, wearing his second-best black coat and an expression of kindly concern.

  “Right this way, Professor. I’ve got the deceased all laid out on the embalming table, with a sheet over him so you won’t have to look any more than you want to, though I don’t suppose a corpse means much more to you these days than it does to me. Still, we mustn’t forget it’s been a human being that meant something to somebody,” he added, for Goulson was a good man withal.

  “Um,” said Shandy. “I wonder what Ungley meant, and to whom. Would you mind rolling him over, Goulson? I want to get a look at that head wound.”

  “Glad to.” The undertaker obliged with professional dexterity. “Want me to wash off the blood? The back of his skull’s kind of messy.”

  “That’s a polite understatement.” Shandy shook his own head. “How in Sam Hill could he have bled so much without getting more of it on that harrow? Goulson, you wouldn’t happen to have a camera handy?”

  “One of the tools of the trade, Professor. Some folks still like to have a picture of the dear departed after we’ve got ’em fixed up and laid out in the casket, you know. In my father’s time, it was more the custom than the exception. Pop used one of those big old box cameras on a tripod that he’d put his head in a black velvet bag to focus. Took a glass plate and you either had to use a magnesium flare or take a time exposure. Not that the exposure was any problem. One thing about our subjects, you’d never have to worry about ’em wiggling around and blurring the image. I’ve still got Pop’s camera and I can do it according to tradition if you’d like, but seeing as how you want it for detecting purposes, I’d better use my new instant-developing color camera. Bought it last year when the wife and I went to Hawaii on our trip. I was going to take pictures of the hula-hula girls, but she wouldn’t let me. Hold on a second.”

  While Goulson went to get the camera, Shandy stood and pondered. Last night there’d been a person inside that framework of flesh and bone. Now there was only a problem, to be disposed of one way and another. Goulson could handle the physical remains. It looked as if Shandy was stuck with the rest.

  He still couldn’t feel anything about Professor Ungley. Could anybody? Mrs. Lomax hadn’t shown more than a decent concern despite her long years’ association with the dead man, and she was by no means a cold-hearted woman. Maybe Ungley’s old cronies at the Balaclavian Society would miss him. Shandy hoped they would, at least a little; but his own concern was still with that disparity between the thick rivulets of dried blood on that bald skull and the tiny dab he’d found on the harrow.

  Ungley might well have been killed somewhere else altogether and brought to where Mrs. Lomax found him. Shandy bent over the embalming table and hefted the body experimentally. It didn’t weigh all that much for so tall a man and dragging him over that frosty, slippery yard wouldn’t be hard. Dumping him beside the harrow and daubing the peg with enough of his blood to fool Fred Ottermole would be a cinch.

  Shandy had searched among the weeds around the, harrow for bloodstains and signs of dragging while he was down there, but of course by then so many people had tramped over the area that there was no hope of a significant find. Edmund the cat might have seen something, but Edmund wasn’t talking. He decided to ponder about something else. For instance, why did Ungley carry a loaded cane when he’d led so sedentary and circumscribed a life? Why had his rooms been so neatly but thoroughly rifled and all his fi
les removed? How could a dull old man who gave boring talks on trivial subjects to a handful of people who had nothing better to do than sit around and let him pontificate have managed to get bumped off in so dramatic a way?

  The obvious explanation was that Ungley had been in possession of something that somebody else wanted desperately to get hold of. It must have been small and easily hidden; otherwise the searcher wouldn’t have bothered messing around behind the sofa cushions. Ungley must have known he was in danger because he had it; otherwise he wouldn’t have carried that secret weapon for protection. Shandy supposed a lead-stuffed silver fox could count as a secret weapon. Unless the old goat just had the lead put in to add weight and make people think the fox was in fact solid silver.

  And if Ungley did have anything small and valuable, why didn’t he put it in a safety deposit box at the bank? He must have had it a long time.

  No, that didn’t necessarily follow. Because Ungley himself was old and everything in his flat had been old, one could too easily assume this hidden thing was old, too, but it needn’t be. He was, after all, in daily contact with the world, or a little bit of it. He went up to the college dining room, he visited the shops, he brought home bags that presumably contained only things like groceries and shaving cream, but what if they didn’t? What if this coveted object was something he had in his possession sometimes but not always?

  Narcotics came instantly to mind, but how in thunderation could old Ungley have carried on any sort of drug dealing right under Mrs. Betsy Lomax’s hunting-hound nose without ever letting her get a whiff of what he was up to?

  That Ungley himself might have been a drug user was not outside the bounds of possibility. He’d been born during the era when mothers swigged patent medicines that were mostly port wine and laudanum, when babies were dosed with paregoric for everything from diaper rash to cradle cap, when morphine pills were kept in big jars on drugstore counters and sold by the handful to anybody who walked in and asked for them. He might have acquired a narcotics habit early in life without even realizing he had one. That could have accounted for his habitual indolence.