Judas Cat (7 page)

“Why?”

“No particular reason. Take a look around here, Alex. I didn’t mean to speak sharp to you, Miss Joan.”

“It’s our own fault,” she said. “It just gave me a start.”

“Look at this place,” Waterman said. “You’ll get more than that.”

Alex was getting his first feeling that Andy Mattson had ever been alive. There was a work bench the length of the building, about twenty feet. The light he had turned on hung from a cord above the bench, shaded by an old-fashioned office globe, green on the outside and white within. Directly beneath the light was a drafting board built above the bench. It had been sandpapered smooth, but a film of dust clung to it now. Beside the drafting board was a tall stool, the kind bookkeepers used many years before. Chief Waterman sat down on it and stretched his long legs.

“Some nest, ain’t it?” he said.

In one corner of the room was the coal bin. Beside it was a sink between the work bench and the bin. A couple of feet from the other side of the bin was a stove, the same kind that was in the house, and beyond that, against the wall, an old leather couch with an Indian blanket folded at the bottom.

“Andy must have worked here at night,” Alex said.

“A queer old duck,” the chief said, “sitting on the front porch dozing that way all day, and larking out here at night. Except he wasn’t larking. Beats everything what you don’t know about people.”

Beneath the table of the bench was a row of drawers. Alex opened one after another of them. “Would you look at the tools he had?”

Some of the finer tools were wrapped in cotton batten. “Took care of ’em too,” Waterman said. “They say you can tell a workman by the care he takes of his tools.”

The bench was cupboards from one end to the other beneath the drawers. Alex opened the doors. “Joan, take a look at this,” he said. He threw the beam of his flashlight over a tray of miniature animals carved by hand.

Joan picked one up and turned it around and around. “What beautiful, beautiful work.”

“Here’s one that works on some sort of track,” Alex said. He opened one cupboard after another. “There’s everything—farm animals, wild animals, little men, trains, tractors. Would you look at this squirrel!”

Waterman took it from him. Its legs were on wires that gave it an amazing mobility. It could be wound up by turning the tail. Waterman set it loose across the bench. It ran and bobbed and stopped. “Watch, Alex.” In a second it started up again and repeated its life-like routine. “Did you ever see a squirrel more like it?”

“Never.”

“Everything’s got the same naturalness,” Waterman said. “It’s like he spent a lifetime watching things move and making them over like he was God.”

“That may be the reason he was so fond of cats,” Joan said. “They have wonderful movement, the staccato sort of thing when they’re kittens, and a gracefulness as they mature.”

“That might be it,” Alex said. In the last cupboard he found the wired board into which some of the animals could be set and operated on a battery. “I wonder what he used for models for the inanimate things.”

“Mail order catalogues,” Waterman said. “They’re in the desk part under the drafting board. There’s sketches too, and arithmetic going into the x, y, z business. I used to wonder what good that did anybody.”

Across the bottom of the two cupboards were blocks of wood and two sheets of metal. Alex drew his finger along them. The dust was very heavy. “He hadn’t been working lately,” he said. “But I don’t know how he could have done it this long. This stuff takes a steady hand and good eyes.”

“Just now I wouldn’t put anything past him,” the chief said. “But it looks like we might visit Joe Hershel at the toy factory, don’t it?”

Alex closed the cupboard doors and straightened up. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Somebody told me tonight Altman was going over plans with Hershel for an expansion of the factory. He heard the name Addison mentioned between them.”

“That a fact?” Waterman said. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I wonder if this is what the old man and Andy worked on when he came to see him.”

“Henry Addison wasn’t very active in the Industries for quite a while,” Alex said.

“No. That’d be George, and they don’t go in for this kind of stuff.”

“Any more word on the post-mortem, Chief?”

“It’s finished,” Waterman said. “I’ll get a copy in the morning. Just like they figured, weak heart aggravated by the attack from the cat. Dead eight to ten hours.”

“What about the cat?”

“Nothing wrong with it except the tear in its stomach from the glass, the bullet hole in its head and a sore under the right forearm.”

“I’d say it was in pretty bad shape,” Alex said. “What kind of sore?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t say. What kind of sores do cats get?”

“Cat sores,” Alex said. “Do you honestly think they did an examination on it, Chief?”

“Between you and me, Alex, I don’t. If something showed up in the tests on the old man, maybe they would have.”

“Chief, Joan and I walked in along an old path from the barbecue stand. There was a car through there recently. There’s grease on the grass tops where it brushed the transmission. I don’t think anybody’s delivered coal here in months.”

Waterman didn’t say anything for a moment. The corners of his eyes were crinkled the way he looked at Alex trying to weigh the importance of what was said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. The county’s closed the case up. Or to put it right, they didn’t find any case. If I go looking for one and don’t find it …” He let the sentence finish in his mind and in theirs. Waterman was getting old, Alex thought. There was a motion before the town board for his pension next year. “But I’ll tell you something else that’s kind of funny, boy. Andy had an extra key made to his back door the other day, and it ain’t showed up any place.”

“Would Mabel have it?”

“She says no.”

They stood a few seconds, the three of them, looking around the room. “Anything personal here?” Alex asked. “Anything that would give you a clue to the old man himself?”

“Not a thing.”

“No deed to the property, or anything like that?”

“Nope.”

“Where do we go from here, Chief?”

“I don’t know, Alex. I want to think about it tonight. I’m going to board up that window in the house. Then I’ll go out back with you and see where you say that car was.”

“I rather hate to leave here,” Joan said. “There’s something about this room. It gives you a feeling of a whole life, almost a world.”

“It does,” said Alex, looking around it once more, and at the squirrel Waterman was returning to its place in the cupboard. “Andy made everything, just everything people use.”

“Except one thing,” Waterman said, straightening up. He laid his hand on the revolver in his holster. “Out of all them little gadgets there ain’t a gun. Out of all them little men, farmers, coal miners, engineers—out of them all, there ain’t a soldier.”

They went outdoors.

T
HE SOUND OF WATERMAN’S
hammer in the quiet night gave Joan a choking feeling, as though the nails were hurting something, or sealing off the air from something in which there was still life. She shivered. In August the nights already had an autumn dampness, however hot the days. Alex was holding the flashlight for Waterman. Across the yard there was a light in Miss Turnsby’s kitchen, and Joan remembered the many times when as a youngster she had sold chances on Mabel’s quilts for church bazaars, and the good things Mabel made to eat that never tasted quite so good if you ate them in her house. “Ah, Miss Turnsby’s cookies,” or “These are Miss Turnsby’s spiced apples?” At socials people always recognized them and relished them, but at her own table everything had the tang of jessamine just as there was always the scent of it about her person … There were times when she thought of herself in Mabel’s terms, capable, self-reliant, but not self-sufficient. Mabel made a show of being that. Maude Needham was more adept at it. She had become aggressive, belligerent, fiercely efficient with certain masculine traits that forced you to meet her on her terms. No one ever felt sorry for Maude because she lived alone. She made you think she liked it, and even now, Joan thought, perhaps she did. But Mabel was a mixture of pride and fawning that made her the butt of old maid jokes.

A half moon was edging over the tree tops …
“How oft, hereafter, rising, shall you look for me
…” How many times from his front porch had the old man watched it rise? Each rising was no more in time than the washing of waves in an hour’s watch on the lake shore. No more? It was less than that. The quiet between the falls of the hammer carried the tinkling sound of music the half mile from the barbecue stand, but Joan thought it might have been hundreds of miles from there, or perhaps nowhere at all except in her imagination. Waterman seemed to have been hammering for ages. The familiar at the moment was the unfamiliar. She knew why this feeling was upon her. There was so much of Alex that she knew, the easy, sure way of him, his tenaciousness, his weighing of right and wrong … his light hair that looked as though it had the texture of a baby’s, the way it curled on damp days or when he was perspiring, the calluses on his hands from the ball bat and the lawn mower, the smell of his shaving soap when he came into the office in the morning, the acid smell of him when he had been playing ball … and so much that she did not know, and of which she was ashamed for wanting to know, and then unashamed because she was honest with herself as she could be honest with no one else. Maude knew. Perhaps others did too. She was twenty-seven. There might have been a reason for Maude’s knowing in what Joan felt quite sure she knew of Maude. Although she admitted it to no one, much less to herself, Maude had been in love with Charles Whiting through all the years she had worked for him. Her roughness was the defense she had thrown up early in the relationship. People, Joan thought, their complications, their frustrations.

“That ought to hold it,” Waterman said.

J
OAN AND ALEX WALKED
back across the field when the chief left them. “Want to go back to the stand?” he asked.

“No. I think not, Alex. I think I’ll go on home.”

“I’ll drive you in.”

“Do you think Mrs. Wilkes might have seen someone drive in there last night, Alex? They’d have to go pretty close to the stand and she and Jimmie live in the back.”

“I thought of that. But this is no time to ask her with that gang around.” He sat at the wheel a moment before starting the motor. “That darned cat bothers me. What did they take it up there for if they weren’t going to examine it? I wish I’d picked it up myself now. I don’t think they’d have missed it and I could have taken it to Doc Barnard. He’d know what was wrong with it if anyone would.”

“How do they dispose of it at the county?” Joan asked.

“Incinerator, I guess … I wonder. Maybe it’s worth a try. Can you ride up to Riverdale with me, Joan?”

She held her watch close to the dashboard. “It’s ten minutes to nine. I’d like to,” she said.

It was twenty-one miles to Riverdale through a series of hills and woods that formed the nicest country in the state. They were mostly dairy farms of a hundred to two hundred acres each. The smell of fresh straw was in the air from the recent harvest, and there a canvased threshing machine stood like a prehistoric animal in the moonlit fields. At Three Corners, a village three miles from Hillside, with only a general store and a restaurant where truck drivers made their half-way stop, Alex and Joan passed the Barnard house. A car was parked in the driveway.

“If I thought I had a chance of getting the cat I’d stop and tell Doc what I’m doing,” Alex said. “It’ll be kind of late when we get back. The whole thing’s a harebrained idea anyway.”

“Maybe not,” Joan said. “They’ve been so casual up there.”

“Casual’s too nice a word for it.”

“Alex, do you think Barnard’s the person to help you?”

“I don’t know of anyone else. I’ve brought every dog I ever had to him. He’s more than a veterinary. He’s a scientist. Remember that typhus epidemic? We were kids then. But he and Dad fought that almost single-handed.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Joan said. “Supposing you find the cat and take it to him. Let’s even say he finds something wrong with it, then what, Alex? You’ll have gone outside the county authority.”

“There’s a lot of maybes in there,” he said. “I’ll take them up if I come to them.”

A rabbit bobbed in front of the headlights. Alex slowed down and the animal scurried parallel to the car for a few yards. “It’s hard to believe a man in his nineties could do such intricate work, isn’t it?” Joan said.

“And why?” said Alex. “That must be how he’s made his living all these years. Why haven’t we heard about it? What do you know about Joe Hershel, Joan?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I think his father came here from the old country. The factory’s been there a long time, forty years or so. Mr. Hershel must be in his fifties. He’s on the council now. He’s very self-conscious about his size, and doesn’t go out much. He and his wife raise goats as a hobby. They have two children. Joe is a dentist in Masontown, I think. Alice works in the First National Bank.”

“A walking Who’s Who,” Alex said, grinning.

“He had a tough time of it during the Depression,” Joan continued, “but government work during the war pulled him out of it.”

Mention of the war returned both of them to thoughts of Andy Mattson. “Leave it to Waterman to notice there weren’t any soldiers in Andy’s menagerie,” Alex said.

“He misses Freddie terribly.”

“He never mentions him,” Alex said, “but sometimes when he’s looking at me, I can almost feel him thinking about him.”

“It’s tragic what happened to Mrs. Waterman,” Joan said. “I remember when she’d hardly go to a card party. Staying home most of the time, a quiet sort of person. Very pleasant, but not much to say. She and mother were good friends. Now she doesn’t stay in the house a minute she can help, unless she has all sorts of people around her. And she talks a blue streak about nothing at all.”