The Judas Cat

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “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.

  Chapter 8

  THE 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.

  Chapter 9

  JOAN 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 a
bout 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.”

  “And the chief doesn’t say a word he doesn’t have to. Ah, Joan, you’d think we didn’t have enough troubles in our own back yards without wars and threats of war.”

  “Sometimes I wonder, Alex, why we have to see evil blown up to the size of war before we do anything about it, before we even recognize it.”

  “We recognize it, but nobody wants to really admit that an offense is the best defense, except maybe a few crusaders. Then somebody slaps a label on ’em and that’s that. Take the county offices. Hardly anybody would say they weren’t corrupt. It’s a joke that all the slot machines get carted away before elections. Do they get destroyed? Oh no. It’s the same old machines operating on the same old corners two months after the same state’s attorney goes back into office. I’ll tell you one thing, Joan. I’ve done a lot of thinking since I’ve been back. The good warm feeling of being home wears off, especially when you see people like Altman in the easy chair next to you. And sometimes when I think of the energy it would take, the expense, the time, to dislodge him … let alone the guys he emulates up at the county, it makes me sick to my stomach. The waste of it, Joan. The horrible, sickening waste.”

  Joan watched the ornament on the car hood seem to ride the center marker of the road for a while. “I don’t think you’re right, Alex,” she said, her voice just carrying above the sound of the motor. “I was thinking tonight how little time, really, the whole long life of Andy Mattson was. From what you’ve just said you could go to two things. You could say that every good effort you make is wasted, for you, at least, and you’ll forgive me if I say you’re setting a very high store by your values—and mind, I agree with them. Or you set yourself up as the sole authority on what’s right and wrong. Again, I’d agree with you now, but I might not always agree with you. To put it very simply, Alex, I don’t think time spent fighting corruption even on its lowest plane is time lost. In fact, I think that’s the only place to fight it. There at least, you know what you’re fighting.”

  “But is there time, Joan? Is there time?”

  “There’s time enough,” she said. “There has to be.”

  They were in Masontown then. Alex looked at the gasoline gauge. “I’d better get some gas before they close up.” He pulled into a station at the one traffic light between Hillside and Riverdale.

  “Hi, Whitie,” the attendant said. “What team you playing with this year?”

  “Fabry’s gang. We’re all old men.”

  “Fill her up?”

  “Got change for twenty, Phil?”

  “No, I don’t, Whitie. I just sent my money up to the bank.”

  “Make it a dollar’s worth then.”

  When the attendant came around to take the money, he stuck his head in the window and said “hello” to Joan. “I hear an old guy up your way got murdered today, Whitie. That a fact?”

  “If it is, the coroner’s going to be surprised,” Alex said. “He returned a verdict of death from natural causes.”

  “Oh.” The man was obviously disappointed. “Funny how things get twisted up, ain’t it?”

  “Not always,” Alex said, starting the motor. “Good night, Phil.”

  Ten minutes later they reached the limits of the county seat. Riverdale had grown into one of the ugliest towns in the state. It had about it the look of age without permanence. At its edge the houses were squat and unfinished looking, although most of them had been there for years. In many places a second house had been built on the lot intended for one dwelling and perhaps a little square for gardening. After seasonal layoffs, the workers had sold half their land to a new influx of laborers, hoping in that way to lay up enough against the next hard pull. This practice scarcely brought harmony to the community, selling to people they resented. And, all in all, it kept a large part of the population interested only in their own troubles, and impervious to town or county business.

  Alex pulled the car out of a streetcar rut, causing it to swerve sharply, and bob along the bricks. “Sorry, Joan,” he said.

  “I hate this street,” she said. “I hate the whole town, in fact.”

  The cemetery to their right was bogged down in weeds. Even in the dim street lights, the shadows of the uncut grass hung across the dusty tombstones. Beyond the cemetery on the lower level near the river, lay Plant Number 4 of the Addison Industries, and from the chimneys blue-green flames whipped into a murky sky.

  “They’re roaring now,” Alex said. “Look at them belch fire.”

  “I guess that’s good,” Joan said.

  Alex looked at her a second. “Go on and say it, honey. ‘It has to be’.”

  He drove around the county building a couple of times. There was a deputy sitting outside the jail. Alex parked the car near the alley and Joan slid over to the driver’s seat when he got out. He winked at her and laid his hand on hers on the steering wheel for a second, for reassurance, Joan thought. “Say a prayer, Joanie.” Yes, she would say a prayer. There were many things to pray for in this venture.

  Alex checked the trunk of the car first to be sure that it was unlocked. He walked past the building. The deputy was reading a magazine in the pale glow of the naked bulb over the door. The bugs and moths were thick as a cloud around the light and every once in a while the deputy slapped at one as it dropped down on him. Across the street the hollow sound of bowling balls striking pins came through the open windows, and from up the street a ways came the sound of traffic but at the moment he could not see a soul except the deputy. Alex turned up the alley and tried to hold himself to a casual pace. The windows were open on the ground floor of the building—barred windows. He was at the back of the jail. Only one window was lighted. Through it, he saw a man sitting on a bunk, reading. Apparently he was the only occupant. The other windows were darkened.

  There was a garbage can outside the jail door. From the angle of its lid, he figured that the night’s pick-up had not been made yet. The morgue was next to the jail, and beside the wide door there was a large metal box. He could feel his heart pounding faster and his hands were moist. There was only a latch on the box and Alex threw it and lifted the lid. The smell of formaldehyde made him catch his breath. In college he had had to give up biology on account of it.

  “Looking for something, buddy?” a soft voice drawled from the last cell window.

  He could see the face indistinctly against the bars. He felt that he had jumped six feet off the ground.

  “Sorry if I made you nervous,” the voice continued. “You must be pretty hard up, filching from the trash cans in this dump. What they give you on plates ain’t good enough for it.”

  “I’m looking for something,” Alex said. “For God’s sake, shut up.”

  “No kidding. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  Inside the box he found two well-wrapped bundles. There was no time to think, to weigh them. He took them both out and let the lid down slowly.

  “It’d be embarrassing,” the prisoner drawled, “if I started a ruckus on the bars in here, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Tell you what. I’m collecting from my friends to get me a decent lawyer.”

  Alex reached into his pocket and drew out the only bill he had. “Here. Go back to sleep and forget you saw me.”

  “It’s for a good cause. Take it off your income tax.”

  Alex picked up the bundles. He had to pass the jail windows again.

  “I wonder if I’ll remember your face. I don’t forget a kind one easy. My friends say I got a long memory. Hope you got what you were after, chum …”

  Amen to that, Alex thought. The f
ifty yards through the alley were the longest he had ever walked. He threw the bundles into the car trunk. Joan had the motor running when he climbed in beside her.

  “What a filthy smell,” she said, shifting the car into gear, “but you had luck.”

  “I hope it’s luck. Now we really need it. Do I smell very bad, Joan?”

  “Just medium bad.”

  It was Barnard himself who came to the door when Alex rang. He was in his shirt sleeves and came out on the steps, closing the door behind him. If he had been asked to guess his age, Alex would have put the veterinary at about fifty, although it was hard to tell by looking at him. He was large boned, but without much flesh. He had huge eyebrows that moved a little every time he spoke. When Alex was a kid they had fascinated him, and when Doc was working on one of his many pups, Alex would watch them for signs of recovery or relapse. Some people’s mouths were expressive, Alex thought. With Doc you saw nothing but the eyebrows.

  “I’m sorry to bother you this late, Doc,” he started.

  “That’s all right, Alex. Jock?”

  Jock was the Whiting’s airedale. “No, it’s not,” Alex said. “I need your help on something and I don’t know whether it’s fair to ask you or not. You heard that old Andy Mattson was found dead today?”

  “Yes. Norah and I were talking about it at dinner. She lived in that house as a girl, you know.”

  “I know,” Alex said. “I might as well tell you the whole story, and if you don’t want to touch it … Well, we’ll see from there.”

  When he finished the veterinary nodded. “It’s a pretty thin case,” he said. “But then if somebody’s trying to cover up, it would be. Do you think Tobin is deliberately whitewashing the business?”