Cat Who Saw Red

by Lilian Jackson Braun

“Lower your voice,” Qwilleran said with a frown. “While you’re preparing to shoot pictures, I want to browse around the premises, so take a lot of time doing it.”

  “You got the right man,” said Bunsen. “I can set up a tripod slower than any other photographer in the business.”

  Later, at the dinner table, everyone liked the Fluxion photographer. Bunsen had a way of taking over a social occasion, bursting on the scene with his loud voice and jovial manner and stale jokes, jollying the women, kidding the men. Rosemary smiled at him, Hixie giggled, and even Charlotte Roop was fascinated when he called her a doll-baby. Max Sorrel invited Bunsen to bring his wife to dinner at the Golden Lamb Chop some evening. Dan Graham had not yet arrived.

  For the first course Rosemary stood at the head of the table and demonstrated a sixty-second cold soup involving yogurt, cucumbers, dill, and raisins.

  “Best soup I ever tasted!” Bunsen announced.

  Dan Graham, arriving at the table late, was greeted coolly by the Maus Haus regulars, but the photographer jumped up and pumped his hand, and the potter glowed with suppressed excitement. He had had a haircut, and his shabby clothes were neater than usual.

  Sorrel sautéed steak au poivre, which was served with Mrs. Marron’s potato puffs and asparagus garnished with pimiento strips.

  Then Charlotte Roop demonstrated the tossing of a salad. “Dry the greens carefully on a linen towel,” she said. “Be careful not to bruise the leaves. Tear them apart tenderly . . . And now the dressing. I add a little Dijon mustard and thyme. Toss all together. Gently! Gently! Forty times. Less dressing and more tossing—that’s the secret.”

  “Best salad I ever tasted in my whole life!” Bunsen proclaimed.

  “A salad has to be made with love,” Miss Roop explained to him, beaming and nodding at his compliments.

  For dessert Hixie prepared cherries jubilee. “Nothing to it,” she said. “Dump the cherries in the chafing dish. Throw in a blob of butter and slosh it around. Then a slurp of cognac. Oops! I slurped too much. And then . . . you light it with a match, Voilà!”

  The blue flame leaped from the pan, and the company watched the ritual in hypnotized silence. Even Odd Bunsen was speechless.

  As the flames started to burn out, Qwilleran thought he heard a crackling sound. He glanced up at Hixie and saw her lofty bouffant hairdo unaccountably shriveling. Jumping up, he tore off his jacket and threw it over her head. The woman shrieked. Chairs were knocked over as Sorrel and Bunsen rushed to help.

  It was a stunned and wide-eyed Hixie who emerged from under the jacket, her hands exploring what was left of her hair. “It feels like straw,” she said. “I guess I sprayed too much lacquer on it.”

  “Come on, Bunsen,” Qwilleran said. “You and I have got to go to work. Dan, are you ready?”

  “Wait a minute,” said the potter, walking to the head of the table. “I haven’t done anything tonight—I can’t cook—so I’ll sing you a song.”

  The diners sat down and listened uncomfortably as Dan sang about the charms of Loch Lomond in a wavering tenor voice. Qwilleran watched the pathetic Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and felt almost guilty about the ruse he was planning.

  The song ended and the listeners applauded politely, all except Bunsen, who hopped on a chair and shouted “Bravo!” To Qwilleran he muttered: “How’m I doing?”

  As the diners wandered away from the table, chattering about Hixie’s narrow escape, Qwilleran helped the photographer carry his equipment in from the car.

  “You fellows certainly use a lot of gear,” said the potter.

  “Only for big assignments like this,” Bunsen said, bustling about with exaggerated industry.

  “Here’s what we had in mind,” Qwilleran explained to Dan. “We want a series of pictures showing how you make a pot, and then a few shots of you with some of your finished work.”

  “Wait a minute,” the photographer interrupted. “It’ll never get in the paper. Who wants to look at a homely old geezer?” He gave Dan a friendly dig in the ribs. “What we need is a gorgeous blonde to jazz it up. Are you hiding any dames upstairs?”

  “I know what you mean,” the potter said. “You fellows always like cheesecake. But my old lady’s out of town.”

  “How about pets? Got any cats? Dogs? Parakeets? Boa constrictors? Best way to get your picture in the paper is to pose with a boa constrictor.”

  “We used to have a cat,” Dan said apologetically.

  “Why don’t we borrow one of Qwill’s spoiled brats?” the photographer said with sudden enthusiasm. “We’ll put him in a big jug with his head sticking out—and Dan in the background. Then you’ll be sure of making the front page.”

  FOURTEEN

  Koko, wearing his blue harness and leading Qwilleran on the twelve-foot leash, entered the pottery with the confidence of one who had been there before. There was no hesitation on the threshold, no cautious sniffing, and none of that usual stalking with underslung belly.

  Qwilleran said, “Let’s start by taking some shots of Dan at the wheel.”

  “To be honest with you fellows, I specialize in slab-built pots,” Dan said. “But if that’s what you want—” He scooped up a handful of clay from a barrel and sat down at the power wheel.

  “Leave the cat out of this picture,” Qwilleran instructed the photographer. “Just get a series of candids as the pot takes shape.”

  “It won’t be too good,” the potter said. “I’ve got a bad thumb.” The clay started to spin, rising under his wet hands, then falling, building up to a core, lowering into a squat mound, gradually hollowed by the potter’s left thumb, and eventually shaped into a bowl.

  All the while, Bunsen was clicking the camera, bouncing around from one angle to another, and barking terse instructions: “Bend over . . . Glance up . . . Raise your chin . . . Don’t look at the camera.” And all the while, Koko was exploring the studio, nosing a clutter of mortars and pestles, crocks, sieves, scoops, ladles, and funnels. Fascinated by things mechanical, he was especially interested in the scales.

  “The big story,” Dan insisted, “is about my glazes. I’ve come up with something that’s kind of cool, if you know what I mean.”

  “First, let’s look at the clay room,” Qwilleran insisted. “There may be some possibilities there for action shots.”

  Dan hung back. “There’s nothing in that room but a lot of equipment we don’t use anymore. It’s all fifty, sixty years old.”

  “I’d like to have a look,” Bunsen said. “You never know where you’ll find a great picture, and I’ve got lots of film.”

  It was cold and damp in the dimly lighted clay room. Qwilleran asked intelligent questions about the blunger, pug mill, and filter press, meanwhile keeping an eye on Koko and a firm hand on the leash. The cat was attracted to a trapdoor in the floor.

  “What’s down there?” Qwilleran asked.

  “Nothing. Just a ladder to the basement,” the potter said.

  The newsman thought otherwise. Joy had called it the slip tank. He leaned over and pulled up on the iron ring, swinging open the door and peering down into blackness.

  A strange sound came from Koko, teetering on the edge of the square hole. It started as a growl and ended in a falsetto shriek.

  “Careful!” the potter warned. “There are rats down there.”

  The newsman pulled Koko back and let the trapdoor fall into place with a crash that shook the floor.

  “Smells pretty potent in here,” Bunsen observed.

  “That’s the clay ripening,” Dan explained. “You get used to it. Why don’t we go to the kiln room? It’s more comfortable, and there’s not so much stink.”

  The high-ceilinged kiln room with its mammoth ovens and flues was pleasantly warm and clean, having neither the mud of the clay room nor the dust of the studio. On a table in the center stood a collection of square-cut vases and pots with the radiantly colorful glazes Qwilleran had glimpsed through the peephole. From a distance he had been attra
cted to their brilliant blues, reds, and greens; at close hand he saw that they were much more than that. There seemed to be movement in the depths of the glaze. The surfaces looked wet—and alive. The two newsmen were silent and curious as they walked around the ceramics and studied the baffling effect.

  “How do you fellows like it?” asked Dan, aglow with pride. “I call it my Living Glaze.”

  “Sort of makes my hair stand on end,” Bunsen said. “No kidding.”

  “Amazing!” said Qwilleran. “How do you do it?”

  “Potter’s secret,” Dan said smugly. “All potters have their secrets. I had to work out a formula and then experiment with the fire. Cobalt oxide makes blue. Chromium oxide makes green, except when it comes out pink. You have to know your onions, if you know what I mean.”

  “Crazy!” said Bunsen.

  “You can change colors by adding wood ash—even tobacco ash. We have a lot of tricks. Use salt, and you get orange-peel texture. I’m just giving you some interesting facts you can use in your article, if you want to make notes.”

  “Did Joy know you’d come up with this Living Glaze?” Qwilleran asked.

  “Oh, she knew, all right!” The potter chuckled. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if the old gal’s nose was out of joint. Probably why she made herself scarce. She’s got a pretty good opinion of herself, and she couldn’t stand to see someone steal the show.” He smiled and shook his head sadly.

  “I like the red pots best,” Qwilleran said. “Really unusual. I’m partial to red . . . So is Koko, I guess.” The cat had jumped to the tabletop with the weightlessness of a feather and was gently nosing a glowing red pot.

  “Red’s hardest to get. You never know how it’ll turn out,” Dan said. “It has to get just so much oxygen, or it fades out. That’s why you don’t see much red pottery—honest-to-gosh red, I mean. Would you fellows like to peek in the kiln?” Dan uncovered the spyhole in one of the kilns, and the newsmen peered into the blazing red inferno. “You get so you can tell the temperature by the color of the fire,” the potter said. “Yellow-hot is hotter than red-hot.”

  “How long does it take to fire a mess of pots?”

  “Two days on the average. One day heating up, one day cooling down. Know why a dish cracks in your kitchen oven? Because your stove heats up too fast. Betcha didn’t know that.”

  “Well, let’s shoot some pictures,” Bunsen said. “Dan, we’ll get you standing behind the table with the crockery in the foreground. Too bad these pictures aren’t in color . . . Now, we’ll put Old Nosy into one of the biggest pots. You’ll have to take his harness off, Qwill . . . Where’s Old Nosy?”

  Koko had wandered off and found a loose-leaf notebook on one of the other tables, and he was sharpening his claws on the cover.

  “Hey, don’t do that!” Qwilleran shouted, and then he explained: “Koko uses a big dictionary as a scratching pad—it’s one of our family jokes—and he thinks that’s what all books are for.”

  The photographer said, “You slip him in the pot, Qwill, hind feet first. Then step back out of the way and hope he stays put. Dan, you hang on to the pot so he doesn’t kick it over. Old Nosy’s got a kick like a mule. If he tries to jump out shove him back down. I’ll shoot fast. And don’t look at the camera.”

  Qwilleran did his part, jamming the squirming cat down into the square vase, and then he stepped away. He missed the rest of the performance; he was curious about the notebook Koko had been scratching. The cover was labeled Glazes. With a casual finger Qwilleran flipped open the cover and glanced at a few words written in a familiar scrawl:

  Wuu uuu.......... 66

  Quuuz.............. 30

  Cwu uuy.......... 4

  He riffled the pages quickly. Even without his glasses he recognized Joy’s cryptic writing from cover to cover.

  “Okay,” said Bunsen. “That should do it. Old Nosy’s turning into a pretty good model. What do you want next, Qwill?”

  “How about some pictures of Dan in his living quarters?”

  “Great!” said the photographer.

  Dan protested. “No, you fellows wouldn’t want to take any pictures up there.”

  “Sure we do. Readers like to know how artists live.”

  “It’s a rat’s nest, if you know what I mean,” the potter said, still balking. “My wife isn’t much of a housekeeper.”

  “What are you scared of?” the photographer said. “Have you got a broad up there? Or is that where you hid the body?”

  Qwilleran kicked him under the table and said to Dan, “We just want to give the story a little human interest, so it won’t look like a commercial plug. You know how editors are. They’ll give the story more space if there’s a human interest angle.”

  “Well, you fellows know how it’s done,” Dan said reluctantly. “Come on upstairs.”

  The Grahams’ loft was one large cave, with Indian rugs on the wall, lengths of Indian fabric sagging across the ceiling, and a floor carpeted from wall to wall with old newspapers, books, magazines, half-finished sewing, and dropped articles of clothing. Crowded in that one room, without arrangement or organization, were beds, barrels, tables, kitchen sink, chairs, packing boxes covered with paisley shawls, and mop pails full of pussy willows. Two pieces of luggage were open on one of the beds.

  “Taking a trip?” asked Qwilleran in his best innocent manner.

  “No, just packing some of my wife’s clothes to ship down south.” He closed the suitcases and set them on the floor. “Sit down. Would you fellows like a beer or a shot? Us potters have to drink a lot because of the dust.” He winked broadly.

  “I’ll take a beer,” Bunsen said. “I’ve swallowed a little dust myself.”

  Qwilleran, who had carried Koko up the stairs, now placed him on the floor, and the cat hardly knew which way to turn. He stepped gingerly across a slippery stack of art magazines and sniffed a pile of clothing in odd shades of eggplant and Concord grape. They were obviously Joy’s garments; they had the familiar look of old curtain remnants that had been given a homemade dye job.

  The newsman plied Dan with questions: Is it true they used to glaze pottery with pulverized jewels? What’s the temperature inside the kiln? Where does the clay come from? What’s the hardest shape to make?

  “A teapot,” Dan replied. “Handles can crack in the kiln. Or the spout drips. Or the lid doesn’t fit. Sometimes the whole thing looks like hell, although the ugliest ones sometimes do the best pouring.”

  Bunsen took a few more pictures of Dan gazing out the window at the lights across the river, Dan reading an art magazine, Dan drinking a can of beer to counteract the dust, Dan scratching his head and looking thoughtful. The photographer had never shot a series so complete, or so ridiculous.

  “You’ve got good bones in your face,” he commented. “You could be a professional model. You could do TV commercials.”

  “You think so?” Dan asked. He had loosened up and was relishing the attention.

  By the time the shooting session was over, Qwilleran and Koko had examined every inch of the room. There was a phone number written on a pad near the telephone, which the newsman memorized. Koko found a woman’s silver-backed hairbrush, which he knocked to the floor while trying to bite the bristles. The cat also showed interest in a large ceramic jardiniere containing papers and small notebooks and a packet of dusty envelopes tied with faded ribbon. Qwilleran managed to transfer the envelopes to his inside jacket pocket. A familiar prickling sensation on his upper lip had convinced him it was the right thing to do.

  The newsmen finally said good night to Dan, promised him some copies of the pictures, and trooped back to Qwilleran’s apartment, dragging a reluctant cat on the leash.

  “Okay, let’s have it,” Bunsen demanded. “What’s this playacting all about?”

  “Wish I knew,” Qwilleran admitted. “As soon as I find out, I’ll buy you a porterhouse on my expense account and fill you in on the sordid details.”

  “How are you goin
g to explain to that poor guy when the Fluxion runs a half-column head shot and twenty words of copy?”

  Qwilleran shrugged and changed the subject. “How’s Janie?”

  “Fine, considering everything. We’re expecting another in August.”

  “How many have you got now?”

  “Five . . . no, six.”

  Qwilleran poured a stiff drink for Bunsen and opened a can of crabmeat for Koko and Yum Yum. Then he dialed the number he had found on the Grahams’ telephone pad. It proved to be an overseas airline.

  He also thought about Joy’s silver-backed hairbrush; he had given it to her for Christmas many years before. Wouldn’t she have taken it if she intended to leave town? A hairbrush was as important as a toothbrush to that girl. She used to brush her long hair by the hour.

  “Say,” Qwilleran said to Bunsen, “do you still hang around with that scuba diver you brought to the Press Club last winter?”

  “I see him once in a while. I’m doing his wedding pictures in June.”

  “Would you ask him to do us a favor?”

  “No sweat. He loves the Fluxion after that layout we gave him in the magazine section. What did you have in mind?”

  “I’d like him to go down under the wharf behind this building. Just to see what he can find. And the sooner the better.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know, but a large unidentified object was dumped into the river in the middle of the night, and I’d like to know what it was.”

  “It could be halfway to Goose Island by now.”

  “Not necessarily. The body of the sculptor who drowned here was found lodged against the piling under the boardwalk.” Qwilleran patted his mustache smugly. “I have an idea something might be trapped down there right now.”

  After the photographer left, the newsman sat at the desk and opened the pack of letters he had filched from the jardiniere. They were all addressed to Helen Maude Hake and had been mailed at various times from Paris, Brussels, Sydney, and Philadelphia: I miss the thrill of you, the lure of you, you beautiful witch . . . Your warm and tender love haunts my nights . . . Home soon, beloved . . . Be true to Popsie or Popsie will spank. All the letters were signed Popsie.