Cat Who Saw Red
Page 18
The attorney looked acutely uncomfortable.
“Joy’s cat was probably the first experiment,” Qwilleran added.
Maus said, “I feel unwell. Let us discuss this in the morning. I must think.”
That night Qwilleran found it impossible to sleep. He was up, he was down, he tried to read, he walked back and forth in the apartment. Koko was also awake and alert, watching the man with concern. For one brief moment Qwilleran considered a knockout shot of whiskey, but he caught Koko’s eye and desisted. Eventually he remembered some cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. It contained a strong sedative. He took a double dose.
Soon he was sleeping too deeply to dream. The foghorn continued to moan, and the boats hooted their continual warnings, but he heard nothing.
Suddenly he catapulted out the depths of his drugged sleep and found himself sitting up in the dark. In his groggy state he thought there had been an explosion. He shook his head, remembered where he was. A kiln! That’s what it was, he told himself. A kiln had exploded. He switched on the bed lamp.
There had been no explosion—only the fall of a body, the crash of a chair, the crack of a head hitting the ceramic tile floor, the shattering of a window. On the floor, his head bloodied, lay Dan Graham, his legs sprawled across a tangle of gray yarn. The room was crisscrossed with yards and yards of gray strands, like a giant spiderweb.
On the bookcase sat Koko, his ears back and his slanted eyes shining red in the lamplight.
“And that’s how it happened,” Qwilleran explained to Rosemary when she dropped in at Number Six before dinner on Thursday. He was wearing his new suit for the first time, planning to take Rosemary to the Golden Lamb Chop, and the scale indicated he was ten pounds lighter. He also felt ten years younger.
“Koko had booby-trapped the apartment with your ball of yarn,” he said, “and Dan tripped over it in the dark.”
“How do you know Koko spun the web?” Rosemary asked. “More likely it was Yum Yum.”
“I bow to your feminine intuition. Forgive my chauvinism.”
“What was Dan going to attack you with? One newscaster called it a blunt weapon. The newspaper said it was a wooden club.”
“You’d never believe it, but it was a rolling pin! A heavy wooden one that potters use to roll clay for slab pots. When Dan stumbled into the booby trap, the rolling pin flew out of his grasp and broke a window.”
Rosemary shook her head in wonder. “He wasn’t a brainy man, but he was crafty, and I’m surprised he thought he could get away with it.”
“He was all ready to leave the country. The Renault was packed and ready to leave for an early morning flight. He wasn’t even going to hang around to read the reviews of his show.”
The cats had just finished eating a beef and oyster pâté sent up by Robert Maus, and now they were sitting on the desk, washing faces and paws in an aura of absolute contentment. Qwilleran regarded them with pride and gratitude. He remembered the pb on the page in the typewriter.
“I was wrong about one detail,” he went on. “They found William’s body. If Dan had committed only one murder, he could have risen to fame with Joy’s glazes. But when he spiked William’s drink with lead oxide, he was in trouble. He couldn’t dispose of William’s body in the kiln; it was full of pots in the cooling stage. So he stored it in the slip tank in the basement of the clay room.”
There was a knock on the door, and Qwilleran opened it to admit Hixie.
“Did I hear the rattle of ice cubes?” she asked.
“Come in. We’ll open the bottle of champagne the Press Club sent to Koko. And Yum Yum,” Qwill added, with an apologetic glance at Rosemary.
Hixie said, “I wonder how Teahandle, Hansblow, Et Cetera, Et Cetera reacted to the publicity? Television and everything! I’ll bet Mickey Maus is in the soup.”
“It’s a blessing in disguise,” said Rosemary. “Now he’ll retire from law and do what he has always wanted to do—open a restaurant.”
There was another knock at the door—a positive, urgent, angry knock. Charlotte Roop was standing there with tense lips and clenched fists. She marched into the apartment with aggressive step and announced, “Mr. Qwilleran, I would like a drink. A strong drink! A glass of sherry!”
“Why . . . certainly, Miss Roop. I think we have sherry. Or would you like champagne?”
“I need something to quiet my nerves.” She put a trembling hand to her flushed throat. “I have just resigned from the Heavenly Hash House chain. I resigned in moral indignation!”
“But you liked your job so much!” Rosemary protested.
“What happened?” Qwilleran asked.
“The three owners,” Charlotte began, her voice beginning to quaver, “the men I respected so highly have been engaged in the most disreputable maneuver I have ever encountered in the business world. I overheard a conversation—quite by accident, of course—in the conference room . . . Is this champagne? Thank you, Mr. Qwilleran.” She took a cautious sip.
“Well, go on,” said Hixie. “What have they been doing? Watering the soup?”
Charlotte looked flustered. “How can I tell you? It pains me to mention it . . . They are the ones who have been trying to ruin Mr. Sorrel’s restaurant!”
“But they’re not in the same league,” Qwilleran protested. “The Hash Houses don’t compete with the Golden Lamb Chop.”
“The Golden Lamb Chop,” Charlotte explained, “occupies a very valuable corner, with exposure to three major highways. The Hash House syndicate, through brokers, has been trying to buy it, but Mr. Sorrel would not sell. So they resorted to unscrupulous tactics. I am horrified!”
“Would you testify in court?” Qwilleran asked.
“Yes indeed! I would testify even if their gangster friends threatened to—threatened to—”
“Waste you,” Hixie said. “A five-letter word meaning ‘to bump off.’ ”
“If Mr. Maus opens a restaurant, you can manage it for him,” Rosemary said.
The voices of the three women rambled on, and Qwilleran listened with bemused inattention. He liked the gentle-voiced Rosemary; he felt comfortable with her, and comfort was beginning to be of utmost importance. His emotional but brief reunion with Joy had been a misstep in the march of time, and now her memory was relegated to the past, where it belonged. He doubted, however, that he would ever again say that his favorite color was red.
There was a click on the desk, and he looked up to see Koko walking across the typewriter keyboard.
“Look!” Hixie squealed. “He’s typing!”
Qwilleran walked over and looked at the sheet of paper. He put on his glasses and looked again. “He’s ordering a bite to eat,” the newsman said. “Since we moved to Maus Haus, he has learned to like caviar.”
Koko had stepped on the K with his right paw, on V with his left, and then on the R.