“Don’t open that book,” came a surly command, “unless you’re buying it.”
Qwilleran’s moustache bristled. “How do I know whether I want it till I read the title?”
“To hell with the title!” said the proprietor. “If you like the looks of it, buy it. If you don’t, keep your sweatin’ hands in your pockets. How long do you think those books will last if every jerk that comes in here has to paw the bindings?”
“How much do you want for it?” Qwilleran demanded.
“I don’t think I want to sell it. Not to you, anyway.”
The other customers had stopped browsing and were looking mildly amused at Qwilleran’s discomfiture. He sensed the encouragement in their glances and rose to the occasion.
“Discrimination! That’s what this is,” he roared. “I should report this and have you put out of business! This place is a rat’s nest anyway. The city should condemn it . . . . Now, how much do you want for this crummy piece of junk?”
“Four bucks, just to shut your loud mouth!”
“I’ll give you three.” Qwilleran threw some bills on the bar.
Cobb scooped them up and filed them in his billfold. “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a sucker,” he said with a leer at the other customers.
Qwilleran opened the book he had bought. It was The Works of the Reverend Dr. Ishmael Higginbotham, Being a Collection of Interesting Tracts Explaining Several Important Points of the Divine Doctrine, Set Forth with Diligence and Extreme Brevity.
Mrs. Cobb burst into the room. “Did you let that dirty old man bully you into buying something?”
“Shut up, old lady,” said her husband.
She had put on a pink dress, fixed her hair, and applied make-up, and she looked plumply pretty. “Come upstairs with me,” she said sweetly, putting a friendly hand on Qwilleran’s arm. “We’ll have a cozy cup of coffee and let Cornball Cobb fume with jealousy.”
Mrs. Cobb started up the creaking staircase, her round hips bobbling from side to side and the backs of her fat knees bulging in a horizontal grin. Qwilleran was neither titillated nor repelled by the sight, but rather saddened that every woman was not blessed with a perfect figure.
“Don’t pay any attention to C.C.,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s a great kidder.”
The spacious upstairs hall was a forest of old chairs, tables, desks, and chests. Several doors stood open, revealing dingy living quarters.
“Our apartment is on that side,” said Mrs. Cobb, indicating an open door through which came a loud radio commercial, “and on this side we have two smaller apartments. Ben Nicholas rents the front, but the rear is nicer because it has a view of the backyard.”
Qwilleran looked out the hall window and saw two station wagons backed in from the alley, an iron bed, a grindstone, the fender from a car, some wagon wheels, an old refrigerator with no door, and a wooden washing machine with attached clothes wringer—most of them frozen together in a drift of dirty ice and snow.
“Then how come Nicholas lives in the front?” he asked.
“His apartment has a bay window, and he can keep an eye on the entrance to his shop, next door.”
She led the way into the rear apartment—a large square room with four tall windows and a frightening collection of furniture. Qwilleran’s gaze went first to an old parlor organ in jaundiced oak—then a pair of high-backed gilded chairs with seats supported by gargoyles—then a round table, not quite level, draped with an embroidered shawl and holding an oil lamp, its two globes painted with pink roses—then a patterned rug suffering from age and melancholy—then a crude rocking chair made of bent twigs and treebark, probably full of termites.
“You do like antiques, don’t you?” Mrs. Cobb asked anxiously.
“Not especially,” Qwilleran replied in a burst of honesty. “And what is that supposed to be?” He pointed to a chair with tortured iron frame, elevated on a pedestal and equipped with headrest and footrest.
“An old dentist’s chair—really quite comfortable for reading. You can pump it up and down with your foot. And the painting over the fireplace is a very good primitive.”
With a remarkably controlled expression on his face, Qwilleran studied the lifesize portrait of someone’s great-great-grandmother, dressed in black—square-jawed, thin-lipped, steely-eyed, and disapproving all she surveyed.
“You haven’t said a word about the daybed,” said Mrs. Cobb with enthusiasm. “It’s really unique. It came from New Jersey.”
The newsman turned around and winced. The daybed, placed against one wall, was built like a swan boat, with one end carved in the shape of a long-necked bad-tempered bird and the other end culminating in a tail.
“Sybaritic,” he said drily, and the landlady went into spasms of laughter.
A second room, toward the front of the house, had been subdivided into kitchenette, dressing room, and bath.
Mrs. Cobb said, “C.C. installed the kitchen himself. He’s handy with tools. Do you like to cook?”
“No, I take most of my meals at the Press Club.”
“The fireplace works, if you want to haul wood upstairs. Do you like the place? I usually get one hundred and ten dollars a month, but if you like it, you can have it for eighty-five dollars.”
Qwilleran looked at the furniture again and groomed his moustache thoughtfully. The furnishings gave him a chill, but the rent suited his economic position admirably. “I’d need a desk and a good reading light and a place to put my books.”
“We’ve got anything you want. Just ask for it.”
He bounced on the daybed and found it sufficiently firm. Being built down to the floor, it would offer no temptations to burrowing cats. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I have pets. A couple of Siamese cats.”
“Fine! They’ll get rid of our mice. They can have a feast.”
“I don’t think they like meat on the hoof. They prefer it well-aged and served medium rare with pan juices.”
Mrs. Cobb laughed heartily—too heartily—at his humor. “What do you call your cats?”
“Koko and Yum Yum.”
“Oh, excuse me a minute!” She rushed from the room and returned to explain that she had a pie in the oven. An aroma of apples and spices was wafting across the hall, and Qwilleran’s moustache twitched.
While Mrs. Cobb straightened pictures and tested surfaces for dust, Qwilleran examined the facilities. The bathroom had an archaic tub with clawed feet, snarling faucets, and a maze of exposed pipes. The refrigerator was new, however, and the large dressing room had a feature that interested him; one wall was a solid bank of built-in bookshelves filled with volumes in old leather bindings.
“If you want to use the shelves for something else, we’ll move the books out,” Mrs. Cobb said. “We found them in the attic. They belonged to the man who built this house over a hundred years ago. He was a newspaper editor. Very prominent in the abolitionist movement. This house is quite historic.”
Qwilleran noticed Dostoyevski, Chesterfield, Emerson. “You don’t need to move the books, Mrs. Cobb. I might like to browse through them.”
“Then you’ll take the apartment?” Her round eyes were shining. “Have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, and then you can decide.”
Soon Qwilleran was sitting in a gilded chair at the lopsided table, plunging a fork into bubbling hot pie with sharp cheese melted over the top. Mrs. Cobb watched with pleasure as her prospective tenant devoured every crumb of flaky crust and every dribble of spiced juice.
“Have some more?”
“I shouldn’t.” Qwilleran pulled in his waistline. “But it’s very good.”
“Oh, come on! You don’t have to worry about weight. You have a very nice physique.”
The newsman tackled his second wedge of pie, and Mrs. Cobb described the joys of living in an old house.
“We have a ghost,” she announced cheerfully. “A blind woman who used to live here fell down the stairs and was killed. C.C. says her g
host is fascinated by my glasses. When I go to bed, I put them on the night table, and in the morning they’re on the window sill. Or if I put them in the dresser drawer, they’re moved to the night table . . . . More coffee?”
“Thanks. Do the glasses move around every night?”
“Only when the moon is full.” The landlady grew thoughtful. “Do you realize how many strange things happened at the auction today? The Sèvres vase, and the chandelier that fell, and the pier mirror that started to topple . . . . It makes me wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“It’s almost as if Andy’s spirit was protesting.”
“Do you believe in that kind of thing?”
“I don’t know. I do and I don’t.”
“What do you think Andy might have been trying to say?” Qwilleran wore a sincere expression. He had a talent for sincerity that had drawn confidences from the most reticent persons.
Mrs. Cobb chuckled. “Probably that the auctioneer was letting things go too cheap. There were some terrific buys.”
“All the junkers call Andy’s death an accident, but I met someone on the street who said he was murdered.”
“No, it was an accident. The police said so. And yet . . .” Her voice trailed away.
“What were you going to say?”
“Well . . . it seems strange that Andy would be careless enough to slip and fall on that thing. He was a very . . . a very prudent young man, you know.”
Qwilleran smoothed his moustache hurriedly. “I’d like to hear more about Andy,” he said. “Why don’t I go and get my luggage and the cats . . . ?”
“You’ll take the apartment?” Mrs. Cobb clapped her hands. “I’m so glad! It will be nice to have a professional writer in the house. It will give us class, if you know what I mean.”
She gave him a key to the downstairs door and accepted a month’s rent.
“We don’t bother to lock our doors up here,” she said, “but if you want a key, I’ll find you one.”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing that I own is worth locking up.”
She gave him a mischievous look. “Mathilda walks right through doors, anyway.”
“Who?”
“Mathilda. Our ghost.”
Qwilleran went back to his hotel and made one telephone call before packing his suitcases. He called the Photo Lab at the Daily Fluxion and asked for Tiny Spooner.
“How’d the pictures turn out, Tiny?”
“Fair. They’re on the dryer. Can’t say they’re graphically articulate. Too many incongruous shapes.”
“Leave them in the Feature slot, and I’ll pick them up Monday. And Tiny,” Qwilleran said, “I want to ask you one question. Give me the truth. Did you or didn’t you—”
“I was nowhere near that blasted crockery. I swear! I looked at it, that’s all, and it started to jiggle.”
“And how about the chandelier and the big mirror?”
“Don’t try to pin those on me, either! So help me, I was twenty feet away when they let loose!”
FIVE
The cats knew something was afoot. When Qwilleran returned to Medford Manor, both were huddled in wary anticipation.
“Come on, you guys. We’re moving out of Medicare Manor,” Qwilleran said.
From the closet he brought the soup carton with airholes punched in the side. Koko had been through this routine twice before, and he consented to hop in, but Yum Yum was having none of it.
“Come on, sweetheart.”
Yum Yum responded by turning into a lump of lead, her underside fused to the carpet and anchored by twenty efficient little hooks. Only when Qwilleran produced a can opener and a small can with a blue label did she loosen her grip. With a sensuous gurgle in her throat, she leaped onto the dresser.
“All right, sister,” the man said as he grabbed her. “It was a dirty trick, but I had to do it. We’ll open the chicken when we get to Junktown.”
When Qwilleran and his two suitcases, four cartons of books, and one carton of cats arrived at the Cobb mansion, he hardly recognized his apartment. The dentist’s chair and parlor organ were gone, and the pot-bellied stove from the auction was standing in one corner. Two lamps had been added: a reading lamp sprouting out of a small brass cash register, and a floor lamp that had once been a musket. The elderly battle-ax over the fireplace still glowered at him, and the depressing rug was still grieving on the floor, but there were certain improvements: a roll-top desk, a large open cupboard for books, and an old-fashioned Morris chair—a big, square contraption with reclining back, soft black leather cushions, and ottoman to match.
As soon as Qwilleran opened the soup carton, Yum Yum leaped out, dashed insanely in several directions, and ended on top of the tall cupboard. Koko emerged slowly, with circumspection. He explored the apartment systematically and thoroughly, approved the red-cushioned seats of the two gilt chairs, circled the pot-bellied stove three times and discovered no earthly use for it, leaped to the mantel and sniffed the primitive portrait, afterwards rubbing his jaw on the corner of the frame and tilting the picture askew. Then he arranged himself attractively between two brass candlesticks on the mantelshelf.
“Oh, isn’t he lovely!” exclaimed Mrs. Cobb, appearing with a stack of clean towels and a cake of soap. “Is that Koko? Hello, Koko. Do you like it here, Koko?” She looked at him in a near-sighted way, waggling a finger at his nose and speaking in the falsetto voice with which cats are often addressed—an approach that always offended Koko. He sneezed in her face, enveloping her in a gossamer mist.
“The cats will like it here,” she said, straightening the picture that Koko had nudged. “They can watch the pigeons in the backyard.”
She bustled into the bathroom with the towels, and as soon as she turned her back, Koko scraped his jaw with vengeance on the corner of the picture frame, pitching it into a forty-five-degree list.
Qwilleran cleared his throat. “I see you’ve made a few changes, Mrs. Cobb.”
“Right after you left, a customer wanted that dentist’s chair, so we sold it. Hope you don’t mind. I’ve given you the pot-bellied stove to fill up the empty corner. How do you like your roll-top desk?”
“My grandfather—”
“The tavern table will be nice for your typewriter. And what do you usually do about your personal laundry? I’ll be glad to put it through the automatic washer for you.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Cobb! That’s too much trouble.”
“Not at all. And please call me Iris.” She drew the draperies across the windows—velvet draperies in streaked and faded gold. “I made these out of an old stage curtain. C.C. got it from a theatre that’s being torn down.”
“Did you do the wall behind the bed?”
“No. That was Andy’s idea.” The wall was papered with the yellowed pages of old books, set in quaint typefaces. “Andy was quite a bookworm.”
“As soon as I unpack and feed the cats,” Qwilleran said, “I’d like to talk to you about Andy.”
“Why don’t you come across the hall when you’re settled? I’ll be doing my ironing.” And then she added, “C.C. has gone to look at a Jacobean dining room set that someone wants to sell.”
Qwilleran emptied his suitcases, lined up his books in the open cupboard, put the cats’ blue cushion on top of the refrigerator—their favorite perch—and drew their attention to the new location of the unabridged dictionary which served as their new scratching pad. Then he walked across the hall to the Cobbs’ apartment. The first thing he noticed was Mrs. Cobb ironing in the big kitchen, and she invited him to sit on a rush-seated chair (A-522-001) at a battered pine table (D-573-091).
“Do you sell out of your apartment?” he asked.
“Constantly! Last Tuesday we had breakfast at a round oak table, lunch at a cherry dropleaf, and dinner at that pine trestle table.”
“Must be hard work, moving the stuff around, up and down stairs.”
“You get used to it. Right now I’m not supposed to lift anythi
ng. I wrenched my back a couple of months ago.”
“How did you get my apartment rearranged so fast?”
“C.C. got Mike to help him. He’s the grocer’s son. A nice boy, but he thinks antique dealers are batty. We are, of course,” she added with a sly glance at her guest.
“Mrs. Cobb—”
“Please call me Iris. Mind if I call you Jim?”
“People call me Qwill.”
“Oh, that’s nice. I like that.” She smiled at the pajamas she was pressing.
“Iris, I wish you’d tell me more about Andy. It might help me write my story about the auction.”
She set the electric iron on its heel and gazed into space. “He was a fine young man! Nice personality, honest, intelligent. He was a writer—like you. I admire writers. You’d never guess it, but I was an English major myself.”
“What did Andy write?”
“Mostly articles for antique magazines, but he liked to play around with fiction. Some day I should write a book myself! The people you meet in this business!”
“How much do you know about the accident? When did it happen?”
“One evening in October.” Iris coughed. “He’d been having dinner with the Dragon at her apartment—”
“You mean Miss Duckworth?”
“We call her the Dragon. She frightens people with that hoity-toity manner, you know. Well, anyway, Andy had dinner with her and then went to his shop for something, and when he didn’t return, she went looking for him. She found him in a pool of blood!”
“Did she call the police?”
“No. She came flying over here in hysterics, and C.C. called the police. They decided Andy had fallen off the stepladder while getting a chandelier down from the ceiling. They found the light fixture on the floor smashed. It was all crystal. Five long curving crystal arms and a lot of crystal prisms.”
“Is it true that he fell on that sharp finial?”
She nodded. “That’s one thing that doesn’t make sense. Andy was always so careful! In fact, he was a fussbudget. I don’t think he would leave that finial standing around where it would be a hazard. Antique dealers are always spraining their backs or rupturing something, but nothing ever happened to Andy. He was very cautious.”
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Ate Danish Modern, Turned on and Off Page 4
