Judas Cat (14 page)

While he waited he looked around the room. Stuffed birds were perched above all the cases, and the inevitable elk, moose and deer heads were mounted on the walls. In the cases were sample fabrics of Indian weaves, beads of many varieties, samples of the barks of all the trees known to Riverdale county. There was a case of butterflies, another of insects, two cases devoted to coins, one to shells and another to the various mineral deposits in the soils of Riverdale. It was compulsory that every child in the county make at least one “field trip” to the museum before passing from the eighth grade. Alex was trying to remember which of his classes brought him there—geography, history, botany …

“Spanish-American War,” the curator said. “Engineers. Philippine Island. You don’t see many of them anymore. I can remember when Civil War decorations were more plentiful. When President Taft was through here he commended me. He came here and stood right where you’re standing this minute …”

“You’ve been here a long time,” Alex said. “I suppose you remember the beginning of the town?”

“No. Not the beginning of the town. But I remember when it became county seat. I remember when Addison built his first plant out there on the river. I remember his people wagoning down from Jackson. There weren’t even trains through here in those days. They moved a lot of stuff up the river. It was a big drink then. Now it’s not even a sip for the cows in pasture.”

“I wonder why he picked this spot,” Alex said.

“See those cases? Minerals. Cheap power on the river. He knew what he was doing.”

Alex thanked the curator and started for home. The old man’s mention of the river reminded him of the typhus epidemic which had caused the first real battle between his father and the powers at the county seat. It was Barnard who had put his finger on the source of infection, as he remembered it, tracing it to the Addison plant disposal. He pulled off the road and entered several questions in his notebook.

W
ATERMAN KEPT TELLING HIMSELF
that he had to stick to facts. Alex Whiting could afford to indulge in fancy because he was looking for a story. As an officer of justice he must keep his mind on the evidences of crime. Barnard’s laboratory was one. And the break-in at Mattson’s house was another. As far as Mattson’s death was concerned, he had very little chance of making a case, with the coroner’s report against it. The vandalism at Barnard’s suggested a poison in the cat, presumably transferable through its claws or teeth, that would not show up in Mattson’s body but would in the cat’s. There was a lot of presumption there, and it would be difficult to convince anyone of it, particularly the county men. Then there was the matter of Alex taking the cat. No matter how he approached it they were not going to be anxious to help. One thing at a time. He stopped at home for a brief lunch, grateful that his wife was at the church working on the ladies’ luncheon for tomorrow.

It was a little after two when he got to Mattson’s house. Mabel was at home. He wondered that she, too, had not gone to the church. She made herself a driving force in every social. He went in Mattson’s back door. It was funny the way you got used to going in back doors. He had not gone in the front door at home that he could remember unless he had company with him, and that had not been for a long time.

He went all over the house himself looking for prints. There were none. In the living room he saw the painting Alex had mentioned. The sun was overhead now and much of the translucence of the picture was gone. If it were valuable, Waterman thought, it was a good thing Alex had seen it. He, himself would scarcely have noticed it at all. He sat down in the big chair. Presuming the cat was carrying some sort of poison, where did he get it? Was he allowed out for the night? If the old man took such precautions in locking himself in, was he likely to open the door in the middle of the night for the cat if he cried to get in? Then there was the question of what the murderer wanted (if there was a murder). Yesterday he might have said that the old man was murdered because he was wanted out of the way (if he was murdered). That was where he had to accept Hershel as a suspect. But now that the house had been broken into, it was obvious that the old man had something whoever did it wanted, and whatever it was, he could afford to wait until the police examination had been made before coming for it. And why that window? It would have been easier to have removed the boards from the back window. But it was in view from Mabel Turnsby’s. And who had the other key?

Waterman laid his head on the back of the chair, and thought of the old man as he had found him. His body had stiffened while he was in terror of the cat. And yet the cat was closed in another room in the morning. Andy was fully dressed and the coroner had put his death at approximately two o’clock in the morning. Mabel told Alex something had awakened her at two-thirty. He would have to go over that again with her himself. The old man had been dressed, but in the bedroom he and Alex had observed the bed. It looked as though he had gotten into it and out again without having slept in it. He might have lain down with his clothes on expecting a visitor. Everything indicated that someone had been with him that night, except that the house had been locked up from the inside. Olson had examined every window. Waterman ran his hands along the cushion of the chair and down between the upholstery. He could remember doing that as a kid, and he could remember Freddie doing it. It never failed to yield a penny or two and a handful of hairpins. In Andy’s chair he found only a stub of a pencil. He got up and went to the couch where he repeated the quest. There, when he removed the bolster, just out of sight, he found the old man’s glasses. He moved them to and from his eyes. Mattson had been extremely far-sighted. He would check with Doc Rose, the optometrist, but he was quite sure that without his glasses the old man would not recognize the hand in front of him. He would not even recognize his own cat.

Waterman thought about that for several minutes. It would account for someone driving in the back way, if he were carrying a strange animal, and if he had to remove one from the house. He could not risk leaving it outdoors for it would surely return. Andy’s was the striped kind, one of which looked like another to the casual observer or to a far-sighted person close at hand. Every farm in the country was propagated with them. He got up and began to walk back and forth between the rooms, and then from window to window again. Every one of them had been fastened with a lock that hooked the upper and lower frames together, everyone except the small window through which the morning light caught the painting. Olson had been examining it when Mayor Altman walked into the house yesterday. Waterman pulled a chair to it and climbed up. He could have reached it easily enough from the floor, but he wanted to examine the hinges near the ceiling. There was a safety catch. It, too, had been locked. Waterman opened the window toward the ceiling and let it drop again. He stepped down and his hand trembled as he reached for the chair to put it back where he had found it. Whoever had been with Andy Mattson the night he died, had known the old man was dead before he left the house. He had thrown the cat into the dining room after whatever devilish business he had accomplished and closed the door between it and Andy. Perhaps he had finished off the old man with threats. Perhaps Andy was already dead. Then he had taken what he had come for, turned out the light and pulled himself up and out of the small window and let it swing closed. He had locked himself out, of course. And if he later discovered he had made a mistake in what he had taken, he did not return then to break in after it. He had relied on the slow wits of the examining officers not to find it, or not to understand it if they found it. And they had not disappointed him, Waterman thought bitterly. He went over the small window for prints, but there were none.

F
ROM THE HOUSE WATERMAN
went back to the workshop. He had padlocked it, and the lock had not been disturbed. Neither had anything in the shop. Mabel was shaking a dust mop from the back porch when he returned, and going over he sat down on the top step. “Mabel, there’s a couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

“You too?” she said. “Young Whiting quizzed me like I was a criminal yesterday. I don’t think you should allow that, Fred.”

“Well, there’s no law says you have to answer him, Mabel, but I don’t think he’s asking things just out of curiosity. We got some serious trouble here. I can’t help wondering why you sent him on that wild-goose chase yesterday. There wasn’t any message for him.”

“I did so get a message. If Hazel says there wasn’t she’s fibbing. Furthermore, you can do your calling some place else after this, if that’s all the thanks I get. People traipsing in and out of my house like it was a parade grounds.”

“Seems to me you’re awful touchy,” the chief said. “It don’t make sense you’re being like that after the way you were helping out yesterday.”

“Yesterday was different,” she said.

Yes, Waterman thought, yesterday was a great deal different. “Mabel, are you sure Andy didn’t give you the key to his place? You’d be the only person he was likely to give it to.”

“I don’t like what you’re saying, Fred Waterman. Not a little bit.”

“All right, Mabel. I don’t blame you if you’re telling the truth. But somebody broke into that house last night, and if they knowed you had a key, I don’t think you’d be very safe yourself.”

“Broke in?” she repeated, the color of her skin paling beneath the rouge.

“Yes. It makes me wonder if maybe Andy gave you something before he died, something the housebreaker might have wanted.”

“No.”

“Would you have any idea of what he might have had that somebody would want awful bad?”

“No. Like I told Alex, we never talked. Not any more than passing time of day.”

“I know,” the chief said. “But sometimes you’ve got ways of finding things out the rest of us wouldn’t think of. Did you know anything about that shack of his out back?”

“What do you mean, did I know anything? I knew he had one, if that’s what you mean. Had his coal delivered out there. I’d see him carting it in wintertimes.”

“Ever see him take any visitors out there?”

“I never seen him take visitors any place.”

“Not even Addison?”

“Not even him. I never seen them go out there.”

“Were you ever in the place, Mabel?”

“Never.”

Waterman sighed. She was as silent as a fish, he thought. And that was strange for her. He had never known her when she didn’t want to tell everything she knew and to make up what she thought would add to it. “Did he let the cat out nights, do you know?”

“He used to. I don’t know about lately.”

“You never heard it crying to get in?”

“No.”

“I wonder if you’d like to tell me what you did and saw Tuesday night,” Waterman said.

“What time?”

“Say, from six o’clock on.”

“I had my supper. Five-thirty that was. Then I went across to the Baldwins’. She’s been selling chances on my quilt, and working tomorrow, she won’t be at the party.”

Waterman interrupted. “Did you notice Andy before you left?”

“He was on the porch when I went out.”

“The cat was with him?”

“On his lap, it was.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“Just said ‘good evening.’”

“But he didn’t act worried?”

“No.” Waterman nodded to her to go on. “Well I must have stayed there till nine o’clock maybe. It was dark when I came home. There was a light in his house but the blinds were down.”

Again Waterman interrupted. “All the blinds?”

“All them on my side of the house,” she said. “And he didn’t generally pull them down. Well, like I say, I came home at nine. There was light in the front of the house and in the dining room. I just didn’t pay any attention to it. I sewed for a while. Fixed myself a cup of Ovaltine about ten and went to bed. I always aim to be in bed asleep by ten-thirty.”

”Were the lights still on in Andy’s place?”

“They were. He stayed up all hours. Even when I woke up at two-thirty, like I told Alex, I didn’t think much about them still being on.”

“What woke you up then?”

“I’ve no idea. No idea at all. I sleep sound.”

“Were the same lights on?”

Mabel waited a few seconds before she answered. “No,” she said slowly, “the dining room light was out.”

“Were the blinds still down?”

“No they weren’t,” she said thoughtfully. “The dining room blind was up. I could see the light from the front room shining through on the floor.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.”

“No movement in the house at all?”

“No.”

“How long were you watching?”

“I wasn’t watching, Fred Waterman. I was just looking. I just took a book and went back to bed.”

“Did you go right to sleep?”

“Practically.”

Waterman got up from the steps and stood beside her. “Did you get a good look at the cat in the window yesterday, Mabel?”

“I saw it, if that’s what you mean. Walking up and down. Up and down.”

“Would you say for sure it was his cat?”

She looked at him, her eyes growing wider. She sucked her lips in close to her teeth, and when she spoke again, her voice was small and unsteady. “I just took for granted it was his cat,” she said. “It looked like his cat.” She cleared her throat. She was trying to control her voice, just as she was trying to control her hands tightening them around the handle of the mop stick.

Waterman’s voice droned on evenly, unperturbed, as though he had not noticed her uneasiness. “Would you have any reason to think now it might not have been his cat?”

“No.”

“Mabel, didn’t you ever hear of Andy Mattson before he came to live here, from your brother, Mike?”

“No.”

“Mike’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Many years.”

“And in the years since they moved from here, and his daughter moved back you ain’t spoken to her?”

“She don’t speak to me,” Mabel said. “And that’s none of your business, Fred Waterman. I don’t have to be persecuted like this.”