Judas Cat (17 page)

Joan was picking up seven dollars and fifty cents. Alex’s eyes met those of another player at the opposite board. He had felt them on him while he was speaking with the doctor—a husky, good looking dark man, whom Alex thought familiar although he could not place him. The man smiled at him when their eyes met, and Alex nodded.

“Did you notice that dark man across the board from us, Doc?” he asked as they moved away.

“Roy Gautier,” Jacobs said. “Lawyer from Riverdale. Ran for State’s attorney last election. Opposition candidate.”

“Wonder where he knows me from.”

“Here, Alex,” Joan said, handing him in the winnings.

“Nope. Fifty-fifty. Count me out three, seventy-five.”

“Four and a quarter,” Joan said. “Your original investment.”

Alex ordered the beer. Jacobs drank half his stein at one trip, the foam clinging to his mustache.

“How’s Mrs. Barnard, Doctor?”

“She’s all right. I was by there tonight.”

“He was telling Waterman she was a sick woman.”

“Between you and me, Alex, I’d say it was nine-tenths temper. It ain’t normal for a skinny little thing like her to have that blood pressure.” The doctor emptied his glass and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “All them Turnsbys have a mean streak in them. I remember my father saying Mike could kill a man if he got mad enough at him, and he’d smile while he was doing it.”

“I wonder whatever happened to Mike and his wife,” Alex said.

Jacobs shrugged. “Before my time.”

“Another beer?”

“No thanks. That hit the spot. I’m going to put another dollar on Man o’ War. Then I got to get home. I’ve got about as much freedom as a pekinese. Goodnight, Miss Joan.”

“You know, he kind of looks like a pekinese,” Alex said. “I don’t think I’ve seen him smile all the years I’ve known him. … What now? Want to try and win a blanket? We can get our fortunes told … How about once around on the ferris wheel?”

“Gosh, I don’t think I’ve been up in one of them since I was in high school.”

Alex led her through the crowd. “Just the thing after a beer,” he said.

As they waited in the seat at each stop for the other seats to fill up, they could see the young heads close together, the legs of kids in the seats opposite them, the whole of Masontown, the stars, the climbing moon, the leaves of the trees catching the carnival lights, the faces looking up at them from the ground. “Do you feel as silly as I do?” Joan asked.

“At least twice as silly. But I don’t care. There’s Mrs. Baldwin pointing us out.”

“Where?”

“You’ll hear her in a minute.”

Sure enough. Even above the rising music, Mrs. Baldwin’s laughter carried to them. “I was just thinking,” Joan said. “Do you know who I was with the last time I went up in one of these things?”

“I’d be interested,” Alex said.

“Freddie Waterman.”

I
T WAS ALMOST ELEVEN
when they returned to Hillside. After he left Joan at home he drove by the station. That part of the building was in darkness. Waterman had to sleep some time, he thought. How closely interwoven things were in Hillside: for example, that Joan should have mentioned Freddie Waterman like that. They had all been in school together, of course. Afterwards he and Freddie had played together on the Hillside basketball team. Freddie was a long string of a kid, built like his father. He was shy, with the same slow humor, and never seemed aware of having said anything amusing. Once they had been trailing Masontown 62-14 when Freddie asked for time. He sat down in the middle of the floor to tie his shoelace, and the coach was fuming on the sidelines. “What in hell are you doing, Waterman?” “I’m taking off my snowshoes,” Freddie said. If he had lived he might have been chief of police in Hillside some day.

Alex was tired, but not sleepy. He drove past the house. His folks were upstairs. The night light was burning in the hall for him. He drove back to 64 and turned up Sunrise Avenue. A light was burning above the garage door at Baldwins’. They were just home from the carnival. There was a light in Mabel’s kitchen. His headlights were reflected in the windshields of cars parked along the street. A lot of people left their cars out in this weather. He had put his away after the package was stolen. Had their failure to find what they wanted in it led them directly to Barnard? Who were “they”? Why did he keep thinking that more than one person was involved? He turned left at the end of the block and returned to 64 on Townline Road. He wondered whom the land between it and Sunrise Avenue belonged to. He could never remember having seen anything planted there. He got a whiff of something that reminded him of Joe Hershel and his goats. The barbecue stand was closed; so was Fitzsimmons’ gas station. He parked the car at the Sunrise entrance of the station, and walked up the street. Somewhere a cat was screeching. Two cats, no doubt. If there was anything he’d never have in the house now, it was a cat. He and Maudie and George Addison and Mabel Turnsby. Nobody had yet said they liked cats. Except Mrs. Liston who kept every stray animal she could lay her charity upon.

He stopped for a moment and looked around. Behind him the gas pumps looked naked without the hose attachments. The light had gone out at Baldwins’. Beside him the goldenrod was grey in the moonlight. There was a ripple of movement in the center of it where some little night animal was scurrying. Beyond it, Andy’s house was dark and forlorn, and patched with the boards Waterman had nailed up over the place the glass was missing. Abreast of the house he saw that Mabel’s light was still on, and he was moved with curiosity as to what she was doing up at that hour. She herself had said that she was always in bed at ten-thirty. The rasp of Andy’s gate would have sounded like thunder in the stillness. He went to the goldenrod side of his house and climbed the fence, pushing the sunflowers out of his face. At Andy’s back steps he was opposite Mabel’s. The kitchen blinds were drawn, but the old lady was silhouetted against them like a cartoon character in the movies. And she was talking. Mabel Turnsby had company.

There was a wide expanse of moonlit ground between the two houses, and Alex hesitated getting caught in it, should Mabel look out. Before he had made up his mind what to do, the kitchen light went out. He heard the scraping of a bolt across the door but no one came out. He drew his coat collar up to cover the whiteness of his shirt and crept along the side of Mattson’s house, ready to fall to the grass should anyone look out. He could not go too far, lest the visitor get out the back door without his seeing him. Presently a light went on upstairs, its reflection falling on the grass near Alex. He instinctively dropped to the ground, and at that moment a man hurried down Mabel’s steps and across the lawn to the south, stepping over the forsythia bushes. Before Alex had made it around the fence, he heard the grind of a starter, and the smooth steady acceleration of the motor. He saw the dark sedan pass, its driver lost in the tree-shadowed street, and ran after it, seeing it turn through the station toward Riverdale. He climbed into his own car and whirled it around. The minute or two start was enough. Only when he was near the top of Cobbler’s Hill, did the driver turn on his lights. Alex followed as far as Three Corners catching the tail-light as he reached the crest of each hill. At Three Corners he lost it, for he could concentrate only on the highway, and the light did not re-appear there. The driver had taken one of the two side roads and eluded him. He swung around at the restaurant parking lot, and went home, passing the darkened Barnard house.

I
T WAS TWENTY MINUTES
after seven the next morning when Alex left the house. The day was overcast and muggy, but the clouds did not seem heavy enough for rain. Next door, Will Withrow was hauling the garden hose out of the basement. “Out early, aren’t you, Alex?” he called.

“A little. Some rain would sure help, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s why I’m putting up the sprinkler. It rains every time I do it. What’s the latest on Mattson?”

“His funeral, I guess.”

“How come you didn’t put anything about him in the paper? That coroner’s report all by itself looked funny. It gave me the creeps.”

His father was right, Alex thought. It gave him a sinking feeling in his stomach. “That was all I knew for sure,” he said.

“Don’t give me that stuff, kid. You could write two volumes on rumors alone.”

“That’s just what I didn’t want to publish.”

“It’s a queer attitude for a newspaper. Altman’s like a boil. Got me out of bed. Council meeting tomorrow morning. He’s as busy as a lone rooster.”

“He’s always busy,” Alex said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” his neighbor said. “He’s about to be a father again.”

“Don’t you call that busy? See you later, Will.”

He walked down to the post office first. The council meeting was inevitable. Whenever Altman wanted something, he called a council meeting. For a week before it, he would run from one member to the other selling them on his idea. The meeting wasn’t much more than a formality unless someone like his father was on the council. He tried to remember who was serving this term. Business people, all of them. If Altman convinced them that Waterman was pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp, things could be tough.

The post office was the only modern building in town. It was not the newest, but its design was modern, and it had two front entrances. At this hour the farmers were in town to pick up their mail. Most of them did not care to bother with rural delivery. They wanted the latest papers and an excuse to talk with their neighbors. The two super markets on the square opened at eight o’clock, and the men lingered on the post-office steps until then. That morning the flag above the building hung limp in the heavy atmosphere, and the men were constantly wiping the moisture from their faces.

“… I’m telling you, Al. Doc killed that mare as sure as if he’d taken a sledge hammer to her … a butcher …”

The words made Alex stop abruptly as he came abreast the three men talking together on the steps. One of them noticed him then. He nodded. “Morning, Alex.”

“Good morning,” he said, and walked on. Not another word was spoken among them until the door swung closed behind him. It must have been Barnard they were talking about; otherwise the silence would not have been so abrupt, so obvious. No one involved in the investigation now was safe from gossip, from the twisted interpretation of whoever cared to pass along a tale. He wondered if he would ever again feel the same toward the people in Hillside. At the main window he asked if Dan Casey had started on his rounds yet. They were still sorting mail. Presently the carrier came out the door. His grey shirt was already dark with sweat.

“I won’t keep you a minute,” Alex said.

“As long as you like,” Casey said. “They can wait a bit. They got the
Sentinel
this morning. You disappointed us, Alex. Not even a word on the old man, and everyone talking about him. I says to the missus last night, ‘wait till you see what the
Sentinel
says. The kid’s been in it from the start.’ And now the devil a word.”

“I’ll make it up to you next week,” Alex said. “I wanted to ask you about Mattson’s mail.”

“There’s nothing to tell. He didn’t get any.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing to speak of. A couple of mailhouse catalogues once in a while.”

“When’s the last time you left him anything?”

“Away early summer. June maybe. It was a letter from the Addison Industries.”

“Did you leave it in the box or give it to him?”

“I handed it to him, and I thought maybe he’d say something, the way he never got any mail. But the devil a word he said, no more than if he hadn’t a tongue in his head. Just sitting there, tickling that cat of his. It scratched him up bad, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did.”

“I always say you can’t trust a cat. They’re like women: one day sidlin’ up to you, as sweet as sugar candy, and the next they’d scratch the eyes out of your head.”

Casey must not have admitted his low opinion of women often, Alex thought. He was the darling of every one of them who had a mail box. “Did Andy ever ask you to mail any letters for him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Casey said thoughtfully. “A couple of weeks back, now that you mention it. Mabel saw him give it to me and she was waiting for me. ‘Who did he write to?’ she says, the brazened face on her. ‘And will you have a cup of coffee and some cinnamon rolls, Dan?’—the way you’d think I was perishing. ‘Thank you, ma’m,’ I says, ‘but I’m on my rounds.’ I don’t be giving out information like that, not to the likes of her, anyway.”

“Naturally,” Alex said patiently. “How about to the likes of me? Do you remember who the letter was addressed to?”

Casey thought for a moment, his lips pursed together as though he were trying to whistle. “It was a funny name and I can’t lay my tongue on it. An attorney-at-law, it was, up in Riverdale.”

Alex’s mind flashed to the one lawyer he had heard mentioned recently, the man who had smiled at him at the carnival the night before. “Roy Gautier?”

“Ay, that’s the name. It’s a queer sort for this part of the country.”

Alex stopped him before he got going on the subject of names. “Dan, have you mentioned this to anyone?”

“No. Is it important?”

Casey’s eagerness made him wish that he had kept still, but it was too late. “It might be, and it might not. It might be very important. You know Waterman’s having a tough time on this.”

“I do that. I says to my wife the minute the name Addison came up, ‘now there’ll be the devil to pay …’”

“Dan, I’d like to ask you not to mention the letter to a soul for now. I’ll tell Waterman, but that’s all. If we get a case, you’ll be called upon then to testify.”

“Mum’s the word,” said Casey. “You’d never believe it, but I’m told more secrets than the parish priest.”

Alex did not wait. He was afraid that he might learn some of the secrets, and right now he wanted to think that he could trust Dan Casey. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes to eight. He had two hours and a few moments before the funeral. He stopped at the cigar store and bought a package of cigarettes and a Jackson paper. Harry Kruger asked him to share a thermos of coffee, but Alex refused. Harry wanted to talk. “Going to the funeral?” he asked.