Judas Cat (4 page)

The same things were said over and over again to each newcomer on the scene. Alex wished that he could get away quickly. It was curiosity that had brought him there himself in a way, and yet its manifestations in this mob of people sickened him.

“Alex. Alex Whiting!”

Miss Turnsby was flailing her way through the crowd to him. She pulled him back into her yard after her. “Look what they’re doing to my lawn,” she said. “Look at my forsythia and they bloomed the first time this year. How can people carry on this way?”

She was almost in tears, as close to tears as Mabel ever came, he thought. She had more in this crowd than she bargained for and he wanted to say as much to her. But what was the point? Instead he collared a youngster leaping across the bushes and assisted him into the crowd on the sidewalk. “How would you like it if this was your place?” he said.

“Aw, I wouldn’t put it past the old maid to have done him in herself.”

The words “done in” passed through the crowd like a fly.

The county ambulance pulled up then, and presently the attendants carried Andy’s remains out of the house. The deputy and the coroner followed them. Alex drifted back to where Waterman was standing at the side of the house. Together they watched the crowd dwindle down to a handful of men who might have been seen talking in the same fashion on the post office steps any day of the week.

“Ain’t people the dangedest things?” Waterman said.

“Aren’t they?” said Alex. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Want to go through the old man’s things?”

“I’d like to. I’d like to see what I can find out about him.”

“I’ll be in the station, Alex. I’d appreciate your making a list of anything you find.”

Alex, alone in the house, wondered where he should begin. It was singularly bare of any of the comforts one associates with a long-time residence. The drapes were faded and dust-ridden, and there were no cushions except those that were a part of the sofa. A bucket half-filled with coal stood by the old-fashioned stove, evidently there since the last fire in spring. Three volumes stood between a set of tarnished book ends on the table, untouched and unread for years, by their appearance. Alex looked at the titles:
Theories of Compressed Air, Hydraulics
and Thomas Paine’s
The Age of Reason.

He picked up one of the science books and blew the dust from it. At one time it had been well read and studied, with notations in the margins. Alex did not know much about hydraulics, but he gathered from the jottings, that whoever owned the books did. On one page after another, problems had been neatly copied in the white spaces, illustrating the theories or questioning them. Alex turned to the flyleaf.
Andrew Mattson, 1893.
The writing was bold, well-disciplined.

He looked at
The Age of Reason.
There was an inscription on the flyleaf, the writing thin and delicate:

To Andrew,

Heaven forgive my encouraging you—but bless you in your pursuit of truth.

My love,

October 11, 1885 Anne

1885. That was sixty-three years ago. Alex tried to imagine how Andy Mattson might have looked then. He would have been about thirty. Who was Anne? Someone in love with him? His sister? “… in your pursuit of truth,” she had written. There should be other books in the house, writing, evidences of study. Or had he abandoned the pursuit when he came to Hillside?

He opened the drawer to the table. In it were tax receipts on the property, one for each year from 1917 to date, except for 1933. Alex took a notebook from his pocket and jotted down “Tax—1933?” He thought for a moment and then wrote “Anne?” On another page he began the list for Waterman.

In a tin box in the corner of the drawer was one hundred and eighty-three dollars in cash. That was all.

He switched off the light and went into the dining room. There were only the table and chairs, cheap, upholstered furniture that looked faded with age but not with use. The cupboard contained nothing but dishes.

In the bedroom, the one chest of drawers contained clothes. There was a trunk in the closet, and an old suitcase lined with dismal striped canvas. They were both empty except for a small faded campaign ribbon and a button marked USA that rattled out of the suitcase pocket. Alex put them in a handkerchief and replaced the luggage. In the overcoat and one suit coat he found nothing but a few cents in change. Andy’s extra pair of shoes were on the closet floor.

In the bathroom, the shelf above the sink held soap, a bottle of iodine, a razor and tooth paste. Alex looked at his reflection in the age-speckled mirror. Tan and healthy, he felt out of place in this house, and somehow weary with the loneliness of it. The only thing of warmth he had seen was the inscription in Tom Paine, and that had been written sixty-three years before.

He looked at the box of old Jackson newspapers and decided to return to them at another time. Now he wanted to get away from the house. Something inside him ached for the old man who, apparently, had outlived by many years his desire to live.

Outdoors, he escaped the feeling of depression. Gilbert was sprawled in the sun in the long grass between Andy’s house and Miss Turnsby’s.

“Find anything?” he asked.

“Nothing to speak of,” Alex said.

Even the last stragglers of the crowd were gone now, except for the ladies gathered on Miss Turnsby’s porch. None of them liked Mabel. She was a person they included “because they couldn’t very well get out of it.” But if the old lady was aware of it she never let on, for there was not a function in town she missed. And all this was a part of being good neighbors. Alex thought. There was something cruel about it. Everyone wanted to be liked, and probably Mabel more than anyone else in town.

“Better not let anybody in there yet, Gilbert,” he said. “Not till we hear from the coroner.”

“Not me.” He patted the revolver on his hip.

Alex wondered if it were safe for him to carry it, but he did not say anything.

“If you see the chief tell him not to forget I’m here.”

“Okay, Gilbert.”

Alex looked at his watch as he started for the car. It was after four. Maude would be waiting at the office with a hundred things that needed doing. Miss Turnsby leaned over the porch railing. The other ladies smiled and nodded. He felt that they were watching to see his attitude toward her.

“What did you find, Alex?”

“Nothing interesting, ma’am.”

“Those men were from the county. Are they burying him at the county farm?”

“I don’t know that.”

Mabel Turnsby was angry. He could feel the sting of her eyes although her mouth was smiling at him. You couldn’t like her even if you wanted to. He wondered how old she was, powdered and primped up, with the high collar covering her neck.

“If there’s anything I can do …” she said.

She wanted something to throw to her guests, some nibble of gossip to reward her for the patient vigil she had kept on Andy. At some time he might want every fragment of information she could give him. He walked over to the railing, motioning for her to lean down.

“I’m thinking of trying to start his story where he might have had a love affair once that ended unhappily.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about it until I find out more.”

She nodded somewhat abstractly as though she were turning the thought over in her mind. He did not wait to see whether she passed it along to her friends.

He felt uncomfortable with himself as he climbed into the car. It was a cheap thing to do, telling old Turnsby that. But he had to tell her something to keep her on his side. On his side for what? Why did the idea of Andy Mattson’s being murdered persist? He was ninety-two years old. The doors and windows to the house were locked from the inside. He knew the coroner’s report without seeing it. And yet the terror on the old man’s face stayed with him. Why should all the windows be closed up tight on the warmest days of summer?

The sweet smell of the goldenrod reached him through the open car window. He could see the yellow panicles bending in the wind like women praying at an outdoor meeting. The field was so bright in contrast to the bleakness of Andy’s house.

Andy did not have any close neighbors except Mabel Turnsby. The town seemed to have stopped growing there. The back yards of all the houses on that side of the street ran into the prairie. Half a mile away was Townline Road. Where it joined Highway 62 there was a barbecue stand. That was the nearest building to the east.

Across the street the property holders seemed to have indulged themselves in acres of front lawns. For the most part they were well-to-do people—Art Baldwin, the barber, whose wife was cashier at the First National Bank; Martin Fabry, Fabry and Sons Lumber and Coal; Ned Oakes, owner of Hillside’s one shoe store, and Matt Sanders, the plumber. The four of them owned the entire west side of the street. It was strange, Alex thought, that the town had been built out that way, increasing in property value up to the east side of Sunrise Avenue. There a fringe of wooden frame houses remained from several generations back. Mabel’s house was the best of them, and all the others belonged to people of a lower income—workers in the toy factory for the most part.

“Something wrong with the buggy?”

It was Gilbert, and Alex realized that he had been sitting there for some time. The ladies on Miss Turnsby’s porch were looking at him. “No,” he said. “I was just thinking. See you later.”

When Alex returned to the
Sentinel
office the plant had closed. Maude and Joan were still in the office. He liked this time of day best there. The presses were off and there was not the pressure of grinding out the routine printing orders that kept them in business.

“I wonder what you’d be like if you had to meet a dateline oftener than once a week,” Maude said. “What happened? We heard you had the coroner over there.”

“The old man’s dead,” Alex said.

“Complete coverage,” Maude said.

Joan came over from her desk to Maude’s. She had attended the state university with Alex, and when he had gone into the army, she had come into the
Sentinel
office, doing what Mr. Whiting called “leg work,” enjoying his own sententiousness. “I’ve dug up everything I could find in our files on the old man, Alex. It’s not much. Addison mostly. The last time he was here was March 12.”

“Thanks, Joan. That’s what I figured. There isn’t much any place on Mattson, I’m afraid, not even in his house. I’ve been up there poking around all afternoon. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems to me there’s something fishy about it.”

“How, fishy?” Maude said.

“I don’t know exactly.” He sat down on the side of her desk and fit a cigarette. He offered one to Maude and she took it. Before she lighted it, however, she glanced up to see if the Venetian blinds had been drawn. Alex grinned.

“You old hypocrite,” he said.

She exhaled a healthy burst of smoke and brushed the hair back from her forehead. Alex could not remember when her hair had not look disheveled, and the gesture with the heel of her palm was as familiar as breakfast. Her fingers were always black with ink.

“Never mind that. Let’s hear what happened over there.”

Alex told them.

“The poor soul,” Maude said. “I’ve never liked cats myself. You can’t tell when they’ll turn on you. Regular Judases. What do you think’s fishy about it?”

“I’ve got a feeling something’s missing out of the house, Maude. It’s as bare as a bone.”

“Did you talk to Mabel Turnsby? She’s had an eye on him for thirty years. I think she’d have married him yesterday if he’d have had her.”

“That’s a dirty crack.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Up till ten or fifteen years ago I’d have done it myself.”

“Why then?”

“He was a handsome man, Alex. I was shocked to find out how old he was.”

“Do you remember anything about him, Joan?”

“Not very much. We were frightened of him as youngsters. We used to call him ‘the cat man.’”

“I wonder why a cat and not a dog,” Alex said. “I always associate cats with old ladies.”

“That’s a silly association,” Maude said. “I had an experience with Mattson once. Not much of an experience. More an impression. You know how curious everybody was when old Henry Addison came to see him? Well, one day about three years ago I thought I’d stick my nose into it. When Mabel called—it was always her told us he was there—I went up and sat on her front porch with her the whole blessed day waiting for him to come out. I thought they were playing chess maybe. Anyway, along about four o’clock the chauffeur arrives and I got down by the gate. The chauffeur tried to get rid of me every way, but I stuck it out till Addison came down the steps.

“‘Mr. Addison,’ says I, ‘the Hillside
Sentinel
would like to do a story on you and Mr. Mattson, such old friends, and you being famous and all that.’

“Addison looked me over and called off the chauffeur. Mattson was standing on the porch grinning down on us like the devil himself. ‘I think Mr. Mattson would be the person for you to approach,’ says the big bug, ‘especially since he’s a member of your community.’

“I knew what I’d get out of Andy—what the little boy shot at, so I stood my ground. ‘We’d like to have a few words from you about him, Mr. Addison,’ says I. ‘It would be important, you commenting on one of our people.’ I never felt Andy was one of our people but I said it anyway. Addison was flustered, I could see that. He hedged around as though he could feel Andy’s eyes on the back of his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t oblige you, madam,’ he says. ‘Mr. Mattson’s a very humble man. But he is the smartest man I have ever known.’

“With that he turns, nods to Andy, and gives his arm to the chauffeur. Old Andy was leaning against a porch pillar, almost as tall and thin as it was. He just threw back his head and laughed like a man of forty. I was mad, spitting mad, and I could see old Turnsby’s white top bobbing around the windows like a ping-pong ball.”

Alex stepped on his cigarette. “I get more interested in Andy Mattson every turn I take,” he said. “Now I better get home. Dad’ll be wanting to know what’s happened.”