Judas Cat

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “No carfare?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I always wanted to see California. That’s why I hit the road in the first place. And every time I hook a ride I think’s taking me there, I end up in Pittsburgh. Ever been in Pittsburgh?”

  “Never,” Alex said.

  “I been there eighteen times.”

  “Look, my friend,” Alex said, “I’ve got plenty of troubles of my own. And I haven’t got money to send you to California. I don’t think I would if I had it. If you have anything you want to tell me, I’ll see that you get all the police protection Hillside can give you.”

  “Don’t get excited, buddy. Maybe we can negotiate this. Suppose I was to tell you some guy hired me to help him break into a veterinary’s laboratory a couple of days ago?”

  “I’d say I wanted you to go over to the police station with me right now and tell Chief Waterman about it.”

  “What do I get out of it?” the man snapped.

  “It depends what we get out of it,” Alex said, his patience stretching near the breaking point. “We’re investigating a murder. If your evidence helps us, you should get a clean bill.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” the tramp said.

  Maude came out of the plant. “Call Roy Gautier at Riverdale, Alex,” she said.

  “Is he your lawyer?” the tramp asked. “Mine too.”

  Alex went into his office and called Gautier.

  “That information I was getting for you from Jackson,” the lawyer said. “It’s pretty complicated. I think you should come up.”

  “I’ll be there around noon,” Alex said. “Anything you can give me now on it?”

  “Just that the stuff went on the market a hell of a long time after it was patented.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you,” Alex said.

  “Look, I’ll do everything I can do for you,” he said to the tramp when he returned. “I can’t promise you more than that. I’m up to my ears.”

  The tramp shrugged. “Okay, since you put it that way. I’ll take my chances.”

  Alex turned to Maude. “Anything new?”

  “Not a call this morning except that. We’re getting the silent treatment now. Alex, I honestly believe if you don’t come out with the confidence of the town after the meeting today, you’ll be out of business.”

  “Say your prayers, Maudie. We’re been through tough ones before. Come on, fellow.”

  As the two of them reached the street, Alex saw the man he had seen at Barnard’s and at the dance. The tramp saw him too. He was gone instantly, disappearing around the side of the Sentinel building. Across the street, the man whom Alex now felt sure was following him, went into Pete’s restaurant. Maude came out of the office.

  “Did you see that guy disappear?” Alex said. “Like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “I saw him,” Maude said. “I saw the character who frightened him, too. He was old Henry Addison’s chauffeur.”

  Chapter 39

  ALEX LOOKED AT THE sidewalk beneath his feet. Words had been scrawled there in chalk. “Turnsby’s nose is as long as a hose …” An obscene phrase followed about Alex and Joan.

  “Go on, Alex,” Maude said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “It won’t be cleaned up by erasing that. God help us. Even the kids are poisoned.”

  Chapter 40

  A MOIST HEAT WAS already settling over Hillside when Alex left Maude. If he had heard the word “scorcher” once that morning, he had heard it a half dozen times. Along the main street he could see the little clusters of people gathering under the store awnings. White aprons and overalls … the Saturday morning crowd. These had done their shopping, the farmers at least, for those who had it yet to do were hurrying to and from the stores with a haste that defied the heat. He was aware that the chauffeur had made his choice between him and the tramp, and was moving out of the restaurant a block behind him now. The constant presence of this man was beginning to wear on Alex. It was like carrying a guilty conscience … the thought of him crept in upon the processes of his mind every so often and took over. Henry Addison’s chauffeur. Was he still in the Addison employ? Did he have the key to the whole business? Or was he on a specific mission? Probably that. What would be gained by turning back, catching the fellow and threatening to knock the daylights out of him? An assault and battery charge. He needed that on top of everything else. And there was no time now, not even for thinking about him. Humphrey Bogart at the Bijou, as he passed. Matinee today. For a second he enjoyed the suggestion of normalcy. Then the words on the sidewalk came back to him.

  “Good luck, Whiting.” It was Tom Pasteriki who called it out.

  “Thanks,” he said. The group Tom was with spread like a fan, each to get a look at Alex as he passed. It was the same all the way up the street. Many of the people fell in behind him at a little distance. As he turned across the street to the town square, he could see that the chauffeur was making himself anonymous among them.

  The town clock struck a quarter to nine although its hands showed twenty minutes to. Out of habit, Alex looked at his watch. Some fifty people were already around the building. They might work Sunday to make up for it, but news of the emergency council meeting had taken them from their routines. He knew most of them: fanners, tradesmen, toymakers. They were like the crowd at Andy’s gate the day they found the old man, like all crowds drawn to a spectacle—restless, moving apart for better views, swelling together for exchange of rumor.

  “Got yourself into something this time, didn’t you, Whitie?” It was Bill Tanberg. He was foreman of the lumber yards and had gone to high school with Alex.

  “Up to my neck. They’re going to have to make this an open meeting by the looks of it,” Alex said. “Wonder why they don’t move into the fire station and leave the doors open.”

  “Or in the square,” Tanberg said. “Boy, old man Fabry’d give his arm to be in the North woods today. The mayor’s got him over a barrel.”

  Frank Fabry owned the lumber yard and was on the council this term.

  “How over the barrel?” Alex asked.

  Tanberg leaned closer. “He wants to sell lumber, don’t he? A nice building boom wouldn’t hurt him none.”

  “I see,” Alex said. He saw a lot of things. Frank Fabry was one of the people he had counted on. He was a friend of his father’s. He was also a regular advertiser in the Sentinel. If they didn’t have friends after this, they were bound to have enemies, and enemies who could hurt them. Fabry would take out his resentment on the Sentinel, not on the mayor.

  Alex spotted Eric Swanson heading their way. With him was Jim Brenner, the young math teacher at the high school. They were all his age, all war vets. They played ball together, made up bowling teams in the wintertime. They were good, familiar faces and he felt better. But most of them had voted for Altman the year before. The mayor was no fool. He knew how to get the young vote, and he knew their influence at home. He made big talk about the kids who had been in the services, and bigger talk about the need to provide businesses for all of them. Not jobs, businesses. The years they might have apprenticed they had spent in foreign countries. What they’d lost in practical experience, they’d made up in horse sense. They had the right to take up not where they’d left off, but where they might have been. Whatever his motives, Altman often talked sense …

  “Hi, Eric. Jim.”

  “Hey,” Swanson said, “the old girl really caught you at it, didn’t she? Ain’t you got no sense, Whitie? There’s a lot of places you can go besides under Turnsby’s nose.”

  “Cut it,” Alex said.

  “Oh. Sensitive, huh? Well, like my old lady said this morning, a person just doesn’t make up that stuff out of whole cloth. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  Eric was kidding, Alex thought, but his mother was not. It was probably on the lips of every woman in town, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

  “Have you got anything yet?” Brenner asked. “The whole damned town�
�s like a boil. Something’s got to cut into it.”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I honestly don’t know. We got a lot of things but they don’t add up yet. All I want is a chance to add them up.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to get it, Whitie. They’re doing this up like experts, smear a little here, bully a little there. A little bribery—not out in the open, you know, nothing you could really call ‘bribery,’ but a smooth, slick job that’ll flatten you out like a steam roller went over you.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said.

  “I’m just telling you, kid. I’m pulling for you, but I’m telling you Waterman and you don’t have a minnow’s chance in a trout stream.”

  Three of the six council members had already arrived. They mounted the steps like guests of honor and stood together under the portico talking importantly. Frank Fabry was blustering, as he always did when unsure of the situation. Matt Sanders was there. He was the oldest council member. He’d been in the plumbing and heating business since before Alex’s father had started the Sentinel. Recently he added the word “contractor” on his shop window. Arleen Baldwin was the only woman on the council, and the only woman who had ever served on it. She was cashier in the bank. Just then her laugh rang out over the whole crowd and hushed them for a moment. It started at a gurgle and moved up the whole range of the noon siren.

  Will Withrow, the Whiting’s next-door neighbor, edged through the crowd. He owned a building and loan office but made most of his money selling insurance. He poked Alex in the ribs as he passed him.

  “Cheer up, kid. It can’t be that bad.”

  Alex straightened up. To hell with them, he said to himself, but knowing that was no help. Joe Hershel went up the steps next. How he had changed his tune! He stopped only a second to speak to the other members and then went inside. He wouldn’t be caught dead standing next to Mrs. Baldwin. She was a good five-foot nine and built along the lines of a large carrot. Next to her Joe looked like a radish. Alex glanced back over the crowd. A youngster was trying to get through to return his library books.

  “It ain’t open, sonny,” somebody said to him. “See, there’s the librarian.”

  Alex followed the gesture. Miss Woods was talking with the Dwight sisters, little old ladies who ran a tea room opposite the theatre. They were friends of Mabel’s. He remembered one of them on her porch the day Andy was found. Miss Woods was probably telling them about the painting, he thought disconsolately. The mayor was looking out at the crowd from the chamber windows. Only Sorenson had not arrived. He ran the Hillside Inn, and would resent the mid-morning meeting more than any of them. Sam was a reasonable man, and in the last election he had opposed Altman in the primaries.

  Mr. Whiting drove up then. Barnard was with him, and at the same time, Alex saw Doctor Jacobs park his car across the street. As soon as his father was half way up the walk Alex went around to the station. They would not start the meeting without his knowing it.

  Waterman was hunched over his desk when Alex entered. He did not look up. Gilbert was about his morning chore of polishing his automatic. “Hi,” he said.

  Alex nodded and sat down on the chair next to the chief’s desk. “You look like I feel,” he said.

  Waterman pushed the crumpled paper he had taken from Andy’s place over to him. “I found this in Mattson’s stove,” he said. “Take it to the light, Alex, and then compare it with this writing of Mabel’s.” He watched him until he had examined the papers. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Chief. It looks like the same writing, but it’s different, too.”

  “Mabel writes easy-like,” Waterman said. “Whoever wrote that signature of hers was pressing hard.”

  “Andy was practicing Mabel’s signature,” Alex said after a moment. “Is that what you think?”

  “That’s how I figure it. On that letter Gautier had, he wrote kind of bold, didn’t you say?”

  Alex nodded. “But he could still draw mighty thin lines on some of those toy diagrams.”

  “Sure. But if he was practicing, and being farsighted like that, he’d lean hard till he got the hang of it. But don’t ask me why. I just don’t know.” He unlocked his desk drawer and drew a telegram from it. “Here’s the one to gag on.”

  CONFIDENTIAL. MICHAEL TURNSBY COMMITTED STATE INSTITUTE FOR CRIMINALLY INSANE 1925. COMPLAINANT HENRY ADDISON. TURNSBY DIED THERE NEXT YEAR. STILL CHECKING WALTER TURNSBY. WILL INFORM.

  Alex gave the telegram back to Waterman. “So that’s it,” he said. “Strange, something like that wouldn’t get out, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is. It took me by surprise like it would anybody else in Hillside. I was right here in 1925. It just didn’t get out, Alex. It couldn’t have been in the papers any place.”

  “The way Mabel has clamped up every time we mention Mike Turnsby, I’d say she knows.”

  “Yes,” Waterman said, “and that’s what was eating the Barnards.”

  The town clock was striking nine. “That’s it,” Alex said.

  “I’m kind of losing heart on this thing,” Waterman said slowly. “I feel real dirty about it, like I’d been digging in a graveyard. We don’t let any of these things out, Alex. It wouldn’t be right.”

  The feeling of defeat was pressing tighter about Alex, and his doubts were multiplying. “Do you suppose we’re in the wrong pasture altogether, Chief?”

  Waterman eased himself out of the chair, leaning on his desk wearily. “No, not altogether,” he said, “but remember this, Alex. Mattson’s autopsy report. We need a confession of guilt. Guilt to what, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know, for being a policeman so long.”

  Through the station window, Alex could see the rim of the crowd. Something was going on, for people were straining to see the portico steps. “A couple of things I didn’t mention, Chief. That fellow I saw at Barnard’s yesterday—he was at the dance last night, and across the street watching our office this morning. It turns out he used to be chauffeur and sort of a bodyguard for old Addison. And who should show up in the office this morning but the tramp that saw me take the cat from behind the morgue. He says somebody hired him to assist in the smashup of Barnard’s place.”

  “Couldn’t he tell you who?” said Waterman.

  “I don’t know if he could or not. He wanted police protection, but just as we were starting for here, he caught sight of the chauffeur and ran like a scared rabbit.”

  “That’s in the bucket with all our luck,” the chief said. “The only stuff we get solid we can’t use. Try telling Altman about the tramp and him disappearing. He’d say we dreamed it. Is the chauffeur fellow here now?”

  Alex pointed him out. “I’m wondering if he’s still working for the Addisons.”

  “So am I,” the chief said.

  “I got a call from Gautier this morning. I’m going up there after this. On those items Andy had from the Jackson papers—it looks as though Addison kept the stuff off the market until he was damned good and ready to cash in on them.”

  Waterman looked at him keenly. “I’d want legal advice before monkeying around with that story,” he said. “It’ll just have to wait. Come on, boy, the band’s tuned up by this time.”

  The crowd was shifting toward the front of the fire department as Alex and the chief went outdoors. The firemen were moving the two trucks to the street and the people parted to let them through. Someone tugged at Alex’s sleeve. “Did you find anything on the letter, Alex?” It was Dan Casey, his letter bag bulging at his side.

  “Not yet, Dan.”

  “Ah, that’s a dirty shame the way you won’t have a chance now.”

  “I’ll have a chance if I hang for it,” Alex said.

  “Ha,” said Casey. “I knew it. I knew it. I says to the missus at breakfast, there’ll be a fight for it. That kid’s got the gumption of his old man, says I.”

  Alex and Waterman pushed on. The sight of his father on the hall steps spirited Alex. His white head was
bobbing in and out among the people he knew, as he made his feelings known. “We brought them into the open anyway,” Mr. Whiting said when Alex reached him. “But oh, dear Lord, we’re in for it. If I was on the council itself. But no, I had to retire this year. I’ll not retire again till they bury me.”

  Barnard looked ill, Alex thought. In two days the lines seemed to have deepened all the way from his eyes to the corners of his mouth, as though he had been tightening the muscles of his face against pain. “Doc, we know one of the fellows that smashed your lab. He slipped away from us, but we’ll find him.”

  Mayor Altman was banging his gavel on a table that had seen no more serious business than a pinochle game for many years. The council members around the table looked self-conscious, except for Matt Sanders. As the years went by, his face seemed to settle more and more into the mold of a cigar store Indian. He stared straight ahead of him, his arms folded across his chest and his legs spread apart. Mrs. Baldwin was caught at the top of a giggle with the falling of the gavel, and her voice lingered hysterically above the silence for a second. Sorenson, Hershel, Fabry and Withrow, and the mayor’s vote in case of a tie, Alex thought.

  “It’s a heart-warming show of civic spirit for all of you to come out on a scorcher like this,” Altman began, “and on a work day. It certainly proves the crisis we have reached here in Hillside. Indeed, I wouldn’t have called this meeting if I did not consider it a crisis myself. We have agreed to hold the meeting where the most of you can hear the issues, but on condition that you don’t interrupt unless in an orderly fashion, as do the members of the council. It is not a wedding we are attending. It is more in the nature of a wake.”

  The mayor cleared his throat. The crowd was so quiet that he could be heard by the man at the end of the square if he were listening.

  “Last Wednesday Andrew Mattson died in Hillside at the age of ninety-two. I wonder who among us will live that long? …”

  Alex’s eyes met his father’s for a moment. This would have been prejudice before a jury. But this was no jury, and these prejudices would not be undone.