Judas Cat (2 page)

“He used to scare the devil out of us when we were kids,” Alex said, “the way he’d look at us with those eyes of his. You know the way kids exaggerate things.”

“Hey Alex,” someone called from the gate, “something happened to the old man?”

Alex was waiting on the steps. He waved but did not say anything.

“Doggone Mabel Turnsby,” Waterman said. “She’s been setting on that phone since she called me. We’ll have the whole town down on us.” He tried the two windows on the porch. They were locked and the blinds were drawn over the dusty panes of glass. The old man’s rocker moved a little in the hot wind. Its cane bottom was hollowed with its many years of service.

“We better go round back,” the chief said.

Alex followed him. Mabel tapped on her window for their attention and then pointed. Following her directions they looked up. The cat was walking the length of the window seat inside, back and forth, as though it were in a cage. Waterman approached the window there and tried to open it. The cat lunged at him against the glass and he jumped back.

“Something queer all right,” he said. “That cat’s like a cornered badger.”

Mabel came down her back steps, wiping her hands in her apron. Alex tipped his hat.

“There’s something wrong. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Yes, Mabel,” the chief said. “I think the old boy’s gone.”

“Gone? Dead, don’t you mean?”

“Dead, gone, departed. However you want to put it.”

She followed them to the back door. The cat had measured their steps and waited for them at the kitchen window, its back arched. The chief hesitated.

“Aren’t you going to try the door?” Mabel asked.

Waterman took out his gun and examined the chamber. The last time he had used it was for target practice out on the baseball field at the edge of town. But he had kept it oiled.

“What’s that for?” said Mabel.

“You’re asking too doggoned many questions, Mabel Turnsby. I’d be more than grateful to you if you’d go back in the house.”

“I’ll be real quiet, Fred.”

She’d be as quiet as a magpie, he thought. In all the years Andy had lived there she had probably got no closer to him than the tops of the kitchen curtains. Now she wasn’t going to miss a trick. He put his hand against the window. The cat flew at it, screaming and tearing at the glass.

“See,” he said, “that cat’s vicious.”

Mabel had already retreated several steps. “Mercy,” she said. “I’ll just watch from my porch till I hear the gun.”

“Trouble with this town is you can’t see if a man’s sleeping or dead without everybody hanging over you,” the chief said. “I ain’t going to trust that cat, Alex. I just ain’t taking any chances.”

The door was locked. Waterman took an old mop handle and smashed the glass of a window. The cat leaped for the hole, tearing its stomach on the jagged glass and shrieking with pain. Waterman fired, blessedly silencing the cry. The distraught animal drew itself together like a caterpillar and fell to the porch.

“I never saw or heard anything like that,” Alex said.

Waterman knocked out the rest of the glass and climbed through. Alex went in after him. There was a peculiar odor in the house, as though no air had been in it for many hours. There were dishes on the table, washed, but already filmed with dust. A huge box of old newspapers stood between the wall and the stove. Alex stopped to look at them. Then the ancient refrigerator started up, a familiar noise to be so startling. Alex and Waterman looked at one another.

“Come on, boy.”

The bathroom was at one side of the hallway out of the kitchen. Opposite it was the bedroom. The bed had not been made, but neither did it look slept in. Waterman stood over it a few seconds. “Kind of looks like he got in and out again without staying very long, don’t it?” he said. He pulled up the blind. There were no more buildings on that side of the street until Fitzsimmons’ gas station at the corner. The goldenrod was thick in the field, something the health department should have attended. The window was locked and the dust had gathered on the lock as though it had not been opened for many days. The old man’s pajamas lay across the one chair in the room.

Alex followed Waterman into the dining room. Here the shades were up, and Alex thought, the glare of midday light was more eerie than the gloom of the bedroom. The furniture was inexpensive and unused, but the upholstery had faded until the design was indistinguishable. A sliding door beyond was closed.

“It’s been swept lately,” Alex said.

Waterman stood at the bay window, and Alex could see a drop of perspiration running down his temple. “This is where Mabel saw the cat all morning,” the chief said. He went to the door then and pulled it open, the rollers squeaking as though it had not been used for a long time. The living room was almost dark, seeming darker after the brightness from which they had come. The blinds were drawn, but even in the dimness, they could see the figure of the old man huddled up on the sofa. His cane lay on the floor beside him.

“He’s a goner, all right,” Waterman said. “Better not raise the shades in here till we see what happened.”

Alex found the wall switch.

“Holy Joseph,” Waterman said.

The old man was twisted up like a baby, his arm over his face as though he were protecting it. His white shirt sleeve was stained with blood. The chief pulled the stiffened arm away from the face. Andy’s eyes were open. They were black and fierce, but there had been terror in them when he was dying, and it had remained after the life had gone out of him.

“Those scratches,” Alex said, “the poor old guy.”

“I think we better get Doc Jacobs,” Waterman said.

“It must have been the cat,” said Alex. “But he’s had it for years.”

“It looks like it all right. But that door was closed, and he don’t look like he got up and closed it, and then came back here to lie down in this position.”

“I don’t get it,” Alex said.

“I don’t either,” said Waterman. “That’s why I want Doc Jacobs up to take a look at him.”

Mabel appeared in the doorway. “What’s happened, Fred?”

Waterman was across the room as though he had flown it. He whirled her out. “You get out of here, Mabel Turnsby,” he said, “and stay out till you’re invited.”

A
LEX WENT TO CALL
the doctor, taking Mabel out of the house with him. She went reluctantly, hesitating here and there to get a look at something as they passed. It was hard to like her, Alex thought, a person with curiosity at a time like this. But then she had not seen Mattson’s face. He unlocked the door and held it for her to precede him.

“Tell Gilbert to post Central where we are and come up here,” the chief called.

“My, but he’s nasty this afternoon,” Mabel said.

“Upset,” said Alex. “It wasn’t easy for him to kill that cat.”

“Terrible,” she said. “Poor Andy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Very.”

“I told Fred Waterman. I told him this morning. But he had to take his own good time getting here.”

“May I use your phone, ma’m?”

She led him up the back steps and through the kitchen. What a difference between her place and Andy’s, Alex thought. To a man living alone a house is nothing. To a woman, everything. The floor linoleum was waxed and highly polished. In front of a wicker rocker was a hooked rug. Mabel was famous for her rugs and quilts. In the center of the porcelain-topped table was a bowl of sweet William and marigolds.

In the living room Mabel fluffed up the cushions while Alex phoned. She did not intend to miss the calls. Her face didn’t betray her curiosity, but it didn’t betray anything, except, perhaps, a brashness, Alex thought. It was neatly powdered and rouged, and as nondescript as her grey-white hair which she wore gathered up straight into the knob on the top of her head.

The Turnsbys were once important people in Hillside, in fact, in the whole of Riverdale county. They had been among the first settlers over a hundred years before. A street occupied now almost entirely by the lumber and coal yards had been named after them. But somehow you never connected Turnsby Street with Mabel, or at least not until you were sitting in her living room and looking up at the faded pictures of bearded and braided Turnsbys in their oval frames. There was a strong family resemblance among all of them, and it had come down to Mabel.

“Why’s Fred Waterman so crabbed with me?” she asked when Alex had finished his calls. “After all, he’d never come near the place if I didn’t plague him into it.”

“What made you call him?”

“Andy Mattson never missed a morning on that porch, rain or shine till this. And that cat—it acted queer.”

“How, queer?”

“Just human like. Walking up and down as though it was calling for help.”

“Ever seen the cat close up, Miss Turnsby? Close enough to pet him?”

“I’m not one for petting things, but I’ve seen him close enough, I guess. Had to get rid of my Bessie, the way he was over here all the time, yowling and screeching and carrying on enough to distract a person. … Something indecent about it.”

“But the cat wasn’t vicious? He didn’t go after you?”

“Mercy, no. He was a sight more friendly than his master.”

I
N THE OLD MAN’S HOUSE
Waterman, having covered the body, went from room to room again, getting from each of them the feeling that Andy Mattson had been dead much longer than was apparent. He wondered if it was not the way with very old people. They left off doing the things that seem so necessary to ordinary life, like polishing shoes or mending linen or putting up curtains. Andy’s dishes were on the table from the last time he had prepared a meal. They were probably never in the cupboard from one meal to the next. In the refrigerator he found two cans of condensed milk, one of them half used. There was a can of cat food, also partially used and an unopened jar of prepared spaghetti. No relishes or catsups such as he always found cluttering up the refrigerator at home. On the floor was a saucer where the cat had probably taken its last meal. How long ago, he wondered. A glass with a half-burned red candle in it stood on the sink.

Alex returned from Mabel’s. “There’s a real crowd out there, Chief. Want me to try and break them up?”

“They’d only come back again. What’s keeping Gilbert?”

“Probably walking over,” Alex said.

The two of them went into the living room. “I wouldn’t touch anything, Alex,” Waterman said. “I just don’t like the looks of this thing. It doesn’t make sense, a man of ninety-two getting murdered. But then murder never makes sense except to one person.” He drew the blind away from the window far enough to look out. “Would you look at Mabel out there? Jawing away two-forty like it was a wedding. And Dan Casey. I never knew a guy who walked all over town for a living to be on hand so quick.”

Alex was looking around the room, careful not to touch anything.

“What a way to live,” he said. “As bare as Cobbler’s Hill in winter time.”

“Here comes Gilbert now,” the chief said, dropping the blind. “You didn’t tell Turnsby anything?”

“Just that Andy was dead.”

“If this is murder,” the chief said. He rubbed the back of his neck.

Alex looked at him. The chief was getting a stoop, Alex noticed. Waterman had been chief of police in Hillside as long as he could remember, and he had always looked the same, tall, spare, with thin straight hair that was grey now. He squinted a bit when he looked at you as though he wanted to understand you exactly. Alex remembered that his son had been killed in the war, and he knew that was part of the reason the chief liked having him around.

“I don’t know, Alex. Seems funny, being a policeman forty years and never coming on a murder.”

“But how can it be murder, Chief? This place was locked up tight.”

“I don’t know. But I think I’ll call the sheriff’s office just to be on the safe side.”

Gilbert’s arrival on his motorcycle stirred the imagination of the people gathered at the gate. They pressed around him for information.

“No statements,” he said. “No statements till I’ve talked with the chief.”

He clanged the gate behind him and bounded up on the front porch. He banged on the door and kicked at it when it wouldn’t open.

“Come around the back way, you danged fool,” the chief called.

Gilbert’s face was flushed when he ran down the steps and around the house. He could hear the snicker of the crowd. The color drained away when he saw the sheet. He looked beneath it and then at the chief without speaking.

“You’ll stay here till Doc Jacobs comes. Don’t let anybody in except Alex, here. And Gilbert, you can look. But don’t touch anything.”

The boy nodded.

“I’m going over now and call the sheriff.”

Gilbert gradually regained his self-assurance. “Was he murdered, Alex? Buckshot, maybe?”

“We don’t know yet. His cat may have scratched him up.”

“He looks more like a disk ran over him. Remember when Johnnie Lyons got his leg cut up?”

Alex went into the dining room. Andy Mattson got his name in the
Sentinel
once a year. That was when Henry Addison came to visit him—and now thinking of the times when he had written up the visit, he could not recall having ever said anything more descriptive of Andy than that he was the life-long friend of the inventor. Words like “solitary” and “secluded” sometimes got into the items about him, but for the most part they were accounts of Addison and the empire he had built since the days when Mattson was supposed to have loaned him five hundred dollars. As far as Alex was concerned, Andy had always been a part of the town, a queer old codger stupid parents frightened their kids with because of the fierceness of his eyes and the sharpness with which he spoke. But Andy had never harmed any one, and Alex remembered stopping at the house once when he was twelve or thirteen years old. He was delivering
Sentinels
to everyone in town free. His father had been on one of his crusades then. Mattson had taken the paper from him at the door. Alex remembered his fine teeth, and the eyes, of course, and the voice, for the old man gave out with a great “Ha,” when he saw what it was. “The revolutionary press. Good! Good boy, good father.” After that Alex defended him when he heard tales about his queerness, and later when he came across pictures of John Brown in his history book, he thought he looked like Andrew Mattson. But that was all he knew of the hermit who lay dead in the living room.