The Judas Cat

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “We’ll stay in the kitchen and not track up the house,” Waterman said.

  The old woman’s lips were almost white and her skin hung as loose about her face as the clothes upon her back. All the primness, the nattiness and the pride were gone. Even her hair was straggling out of the bun. She sat at the porcelain-topped table, her hands yellow on its whiteness. Waterman sat down beside her. Alex stood by the window. Barnard and Mr. Whiting pulled chairs a bit away from the table and sat down.

  “Mabel,” Waterman started, “there ain’t nothing in this world worth the pain you’re going through, and what you’ve been keeping from us is coming out bit by bit in spite of you and the Addisons, Altman … All of you put together can’t stop us from getting at the truth now. Give your conscience a rest, dear lady, and give us a chance to have some peace and respect in the town we’ve lived in all our lives, like you …”

  Mabel’s lower lip began to tremble and she caught it between her teeth.

  “You should have known we’d find out about your brother Mike, if you made us go looking for it. We didn’t talk about that. We didn’t tell anybody in the town, even when you started that nasty talk about Alex here. That wasn’t like you, Mabel. I don’t know what it was made you do it. I just don’t know. Knowing you all these years, and seeing you around church and visiting with the missus, making things for poor people … it just kind of hurts deep down inside me, seeing you go bad like that.”

  She began to cry then, quiet sobs that seemed to choke out of her frail body. Alex turned his back on them. If this was the only way, there should have been a more merciful one.

  “Won’t you tell us the truth now?” Waterman persisted.

  “I can’t. Don’t you see there’s nobody I can trust?”

  “Not even me, now?” Waterman said.

  “No,” she wailed. “I don’t want a cat like Andy got.”

  “God in heaven, let’s get out of here,” Barnard said. The sweat was streaming down his face. He rubbed a drop from his nose with the back of his hand.

  Waterman looked at him, a fierce, silencing look. “Mabel,” he continued in his easy manner, “I’m going to give you a chance to let all your troubles go out the door with us when we leave here. Let me have what you took from Andy’s house the night after he died.”

  “I never took anything,” she said.

  “Yes you did,” Waterman said patiently. “You took it because he told you to. He gave you a key to his house. He wanted you to have it if he died. He trusted you, Mabel. You were the only person in the world he trusted. We know what it was he left you—a codicil to Henry Addison’s will, and we know they want it awful bad. You can’t stand up against them, Mabel. If you’d been in his house when they came back that night, I don’t think you’d have the chance to tell us now. We’ve tried to fight them, and if we don’t win out Alex and me go to jail for contempt of court. Jails weren’t meant for the likes of us, Mabel, or the likes of you …”

  The old lady continued to cry. “You don’t understand at all,” she said. “You just don’t understand … I wish I was dead.”

  Waterman wiped the sweat from his chin onto his shoulder. What now, Alex thought. He could not, or would not lay hands on her and try to force the papers from her. The chief started from the beginning once more, this time telling her the story of what had happened at Mattson’s house, the look on the old man’s face, the signs of loneliness in the house, the good he had hoped to do, the bad to undo, the toys he made and refused to have patented. “They were the doggonedest things you ever saw. Just like real little animals and kids. There wasn’t anything mean in a man like that, Mabel. Maybe he didn’t do things we think good people ought to do, like going to church regular. But I ain’t seen Mayor Altman miss a Sunday, and he’d rather see us go to jail than lose a chance of bringing Addison business into Hillside.”

  “Stop it, Fred,” she cried. “You got no right torturing me like this.”

  “Mabel, I’d give my right arm not to have to say another word.”

  Barnard reached his hand across the table and touched Waterman. “Mabel,” the veterinary said, “Norah and I have never been in this house in all the years we’ve lived here. That was foolish now, letting old grudges do that to us. But we’ve been keeping the same secret. And one way or another we’ve tried to hit back at the Addisons for what they did. It’s no use fighting them alone any more. Maybe Waterman and the Whitings can do what nobody else was able to. But if they can’t, there’s no hope for any of us. Give them the papers, and let’s have an end to this suffering.”

  Mabel’s eyes never left him while Barnard spoke.

  “We’ll try and help you whatever you’ve done,” Mr. Whiting said. “If we get proof of Addison’s concealment of his father’s will we can take him to any court in the land and get justice done to all of us.”

  The fear in the old woman’s eyes was draining away, and something came into them that was almost mirth. A hardened, vicious mirth, Alex thought, that was more sickening than her terror, for he wondered if it was not touched with madness.

  “You simpletons,” she said with a sudden contempt. “You poor Simple Simons.” She pushed herself from the table and got up, her legs less steady than her voice now. She turned away from them and drew a key from her bosom. Alex heard the tiny clink of a pin on the table as she laid it there. She went to the cupboard, unlocked a drawer and drew a white envelope from beneath the linens. It was sealed still with red candle wax.

  She threw the envelope to them, bits of the wax chipping off like specks of blood on the table. It was addressed to Charles Whiting, Hillside Sentinel, in the writing Alex recognized as Andrew Mattson’s.

  “Take it,” she said, and when all of them hesitated, she shouted the words, “Take it! What does anybody care for a Turnsby in Hillside? Who cared for poor Mike, for any of us? And why should it make any difference to me now? I’m an old woman. Cobbler’s Hill is full of Turnsbys. Why should I stay here alone, forlorn, laughed at and pitied?”

  Her whole body quivered in the final emotion of self pity. Waterman picked up the envelope and put it in his pocket.

  “We’ll go now,” he said quietly. “We’ll go the front way, Mabel, if you don’t mind.” He motioned the others ahead of him.

  Alex paused, intending to offer his arm to Mabel that he might help her to a chair. She shrank back as though he had struck her.

  “Come on, boy,” Waterman said. “She’ll be all right.”

  In the living room, while his father unlocked the front door, Alex looked up again at all the Turnsbys, faded pictures of a faded clan. Waterman brushed by him.

  “You go first, Charlie,” the chief said, “then you, Barnard, with me and Alex behind.”

  They stood on the porch a moment, the men in the sedan watching them. “Act like we don’t expect nothing to happen,” Waterman said. “Just walk by ’em.”

  Every step they took seemed measured, and the distance between them and the car narrowed as slowly as the clouds pass in a summer sky. Barnard and Mr. Whiting walked ahead as tense as automatons, and neither of them looked toward the car as they passed. A stifling smell came from the goldenrod where it lay rotting in the open field beside them. They heard the car doors open, and Barnard reached for his handkerchief.

  “I wouldn’t give any signal, Doc, if I was you,” Waterman said. “I got my revolver leveled at your spine.”

  Alex saw the veterinary’s hand fall limp at his side, and they walked on two by two, past the corner of Sunrise Avenue and Highway 64, with the others following close behind. Then from the distance they had put between them and Mabel’s house, three shots crashed into the stillness of the town.

  Chapter 45

  THE FOUR TOWNSMEN STOPPED. Alex, whirling in the direction of the shots, saw that only two men had been following them, and they now were running for the car.

  “Gilbert,” Waterman said. “I forgot the boy. Go back fast, Alex, and let them two go. I got all I
need on them.”

  Alex broke through the Baldwin bushes and leaped across the flower beds. Before he came even with the car it plunged forward and cut the corner through the Fitzsimmons station. In Mabel’s back yard he found Gilbert kneeling over the other thug. The gun lay beside them, and Gilbert was crying and shivering like a wet youngster. “I told him to stop, Alex. I told him twice and he wouldn’t, and I didn’t know what else to do. I kept shooting and he wouldn’t stop.”

  “Take it easy, kid. You did the only thing you could.” He reached beneath the man’s coat and felt for a heartbeat. Wherever Gilbert’s other two shots had gone, one of them had killed the man. “Just stay here a minute, till I get to a phone. Don’t keep looking at him.”

  He ran up Mabel’s steps and tried the door without knocking. When it didn’t give, he put his fist through the glass and then let himself in. Mabel was sitting in the rocker unable to move with fear. “I want a sheet or a blanket,” he said. She only nodded. He went on through the house and took one from the sofa in the living room. “Waterman’s taken Barnard into custody,” he said to her on his way back. “Do you understand?” He shook her by the shoulder. “Miss Turnsby, Barnard can’t hurt you.”

  She nodded at him foolishly. Alex went into the yard and threw the blanket over the dead man. Gilbert had gone into the long grass and was retching horribly. Alex waited until he returned and then took him into the house and told him to wash his face at Mabel’s sink. He brought Mabel a glass of water and held it to her lips. “He’s dead?” she said presently.

  “You’ve got nothing more to be afraid of,” Alex said. “Just stay with her, Gilbert,” he told the boy.

  “I’m all right now,” Gilbert said.

  Alex went to the phone and put through a call to the station. “Please keep trying till you get an answer,” he said. “There’ll be someone there in a minute.” He could hear the steady buzzing of the phone, and while he waited, he tried to go over again in his mind the events concerning Andy’s death. Andy didn’t know Barnard, certainly not well enough to have opened the door to him that night … Walter Turnsby, Addison, Norah Barnard, Gautier, Altman, Hershel, Mabel, the names ran through his mind like cards from a deck in his hand. Then he heard the click of the receiver and his father’s voice.

  “Gilbert killed one of those men when he tried to come into Mabel’s,” Alex said. “Both Gilbert and her are in a bad way.”

  “Hold on a minute, Alex.”

  Waterman came to the phone. “You’re sure he’s dead, Alex?”

  “Yes. The bullet went through his head.”

  “All right. Stay there till your Dad comes. He’ll bring somebody. Then come right back here, Alex. See that nobody moves the body, and you’d better call Doc Jacobs up there for Mabel.”

  When Alex reached the station, Waterman was in his shirt sleeves. Barnard was slumped in the car beside him, his face drawn and worn, looking like a man twenty years his age.

  “Altman’s giving us some help now he’s got the light of heaven on him,” Waterman said. “We got a lot of things to put together, boy, and Doc doesn’t seem to want to help us much. We were right on the codicil but we missed the boat on a couple of things. Read this first.”

  Alex took the opened envelope to the table. He read first Mattson’s note to his father:

  Dear Mr. Whiting:

  If this reaches your hands it will be because I have died before I have accomplished the most important intention of my life. I should consider it a service to me and to many, if you will see that Henry Addison’s will is not probated without an important codicil, a copy of which I give you herewith. Perhaps, with as many years as I have been allowed, I should have learned that men alive are as corruptible as their bodies dead. I have hoped, and still hope that it is not so, and I therefore hope most fervently that this will rot without your ever having seen it. But should it come to you and therefore be incumbent upon you for fulfillment, I pray you are the least corruptible of all men.

  Andrew Mattson (signed)

  August 1, 1948

  Alex laid the letter on the table and read the codicil to Henry Addison’s will:

  It is my intention that certain patents enumerated below, now under the direct or indirect control of Addison Industries, patents, the control of which, I believe, deprive consumers of benefits to which they are entitled by need, and by right of their continuing purchase of Addison products, be declared in the public domain within a year of this date.

  Since it is possible that I may not live to see this directive carried out, I wish these instructions attached as a codicil to my last will and testament, that will to remain unsettled until this directive is fulfilled.

  Below the registration numbers of six patents were listed. The paper was signed by Henry Addison, witnessed by Mabel Turnsby and Andrew Mattson. The word “copy” was marked on the top of the page, and it was dated March 12, 1948.

  Waterman came over to the table when he saw him put the papers back in the envelope. “Alex, I want you to put everything else out of your mind except Riverdale this afternoon. Tell me everything you can remember about what happened at Addison’s.”

  Alex started over it, and Waterman interrupted him now and then with a question.

  “He knew you were under a restraining order?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you how he knew?”

  “No. But I imagine Altman might have taken the trouble to tell him.”

  “I don’t want you imagining anything, Alex. I just want to know what was said. When you mentioned that chauffeur, did his attitude change?”

  “Yes. It seemed as though he believed me then for the first time.”

  “And he had no way of talking to his butler before asking him them questions in front of you?”

  “No. Unless it was all set before I got there.”

  “All right, go on.” Presently he stopped him again. “He seemed to want to edge away from talk about patents?”

  “Yes. He changed the subject when Turnsby said he might have expected the patent business.”

  “All right,” Waterman said. “Let’s get to him and Turnsby. You say they didn’t act like strangers, but you felt there was something wrong between them?”

  “That’s as close as I can come to it, Chief.”

  “I think you can get closer, but you don’t know it yet, Alex. This part I want you to be real careful on. Just exactly what did Walter Turnsby say about the families in front of Addison?”

  Alex went over it again.

  Waterman nodded. He looked at Barnard, sitting with his hands limp now, and his eyes upon his hands, the only movement about him the rise and fall of his shoulders with the heavy breathing. “Doc, I hope you’re listening to this. The time’s coming when you’ll want to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong with it … Now, Alex, I want to go over the Gautier business with you. This time everything. I think it’s me decides what gets out and what doesn’t. What did he tell you that made you so sure George Addison knew his father intended to change his will?”

  “Gautier learned that George Addison tried to have his father declared mentally incompetent last February.”

  “Did he tell you where he got the information?”

  “He implied it was from the doctor who refused to certify. That’s why he doesn’t want it out.”

  “That’s real considerate of him,” Waterman said. He went to his desk and brought back the big tablet with him. “Let’s line up some dates and see what happens.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “Those fellows should be near Riverdale if that’s where they headed.” He laid out the sheets of the tablet. “The Addison will probated yesterday was dated January 2, right? February, George tried to get the old man out of circulation. The codicil was signed March 12, meaning the old man got around George some way. And that was the date Addison last visited Mattson. The will went to probate yesterday without the codicil. That was August 20. Andy wrote your Dad August 1 and hid it
with the copy of the codicil.” He rummaged through the tablet sheets for the one marked “Gautier.” “Andy wrote Gautier dated August 6, right?”

  He pushed the sheet on which he had noted the six dates and events across to Alex. “There’s one date there don’t jibe with the stories. And the way Mattson dated things at the bottom like that, I wouldn’t be surprised but what it was changed and you wouldn’t pay much attention. Got any idea where we could get in touch with that lawyer now?”

  “I think he was going to play golf,” Alex said. “But that was two o’clock.”

  Waterman turned. “Maybe you’d tell us now, Doc, seeing we’re going to put the two of you together in this thing in the end anyway?”

  Barnard met Waterman’s eyes then, and from him he looked at Alex, and then at the clock. “He was to wait for a call from me until six at the country club,” he said.

  It was twelve minutes to six. Waterman went to the phone and called the sheriff’s office. Still they were reluctant to cooperate. “Damnation,” Waterman said, “we’ve killed a man down here. Now will you listen to me?”

  Chapter 46

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER ALTAIAN arrived with Jim Brenner and Joan’s two brothers. Waterman sent one of them to stay at Mabel’s with Gilbert until the coroner arrived. Mr. Whiting and Doctor Jacobs had taken Mabel to the Whiting house. Alex and the chief left the station for Barnard’s place, Waterman carrying his tablet of notes and the envelope Andy had left.

  “Do you think it’s safe to carry those papers around with you?” Alex asked.

  “If anybody gets them, it’ll be because I’m dead, and that’ll be one murder you won’t have trouble bringing charges for.”

  It was grim reasoning, Alex thought, but then, only the grimmest reasoning could have brought Waterman to the truth.

  “It all fits,” Waterman said more to himself than to Alex. “It fits. It’s got to fit.”