The steam was hissing and clanking in the radiators, and when the heat came on in this old house, the whole building smelled of baked potatoes. Qwilleran got up and diced some round steak for the cats and heated it in a spoonful of consommé, while Koko supervised and Yum Yum streaked around the apartment, chased by an imaginary pursuer. For his own breakfast the newsman was contemplating the sugary bun that had become unappetizingly gummy during the night.
As he arranged the diced meat on one of the antique blue and white plates that came with the apartment, he heard a knock on the door. Iris Cobb was standing there, beaming at him.
“I’m sorry. Did I get you out of bed?” she asked when she saw the red plaid bathrobe. “I heard you talking to the cats and thought you were up. Here’s a fresh shower curtain for your bathtub. Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, it’s a good bed.” Qwilleran protruded his lower lip and blew into his moustache, dislodging a cat hair that was waving under his nose.
“I had a terrible night. C.C. snored like a foghorn, and I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Is there anything you need? Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine, except that my toothbrush has disappeared. I put it in a tumbler last night, and this morning it’s gone.”
Iris rolled her eyes. “It’s Mathilda! She’s hidden it somewhere. Just hunt around and you’ll find it. Would you like a few antique accessories to make your apartment more homey? Some colored glass? Some figurines?”
“No, thanks, but I’d like to get a telephone installed in a hurry.”
“You can call the phone company from our apartment. And why don’t you let me fix you a bite of breakfast? I made corn muffins for C.C. before he went picketing, and there’s half a panful left.”
Qwilleran remembered the sticky breakfast roll glued to its limp paper wrapper—and accepted.
Later, while he was eating bacon and eggs and buttering hot corn muffins, Iris talked to him of the antiques business. “You know the dentist’s chair that was in your apartment?” she said. “C.C. originally found it in the basement of a clinic that was being torn down, and Ben Nicholas bought it from him for fifty dollars. Then Ben sold it to Andy for sixty dollars. After that, Russ gave Andy seventy-five for it and put new leather on the seat. When C.C. saw it, he wanted it back, so Russ let it go for a hundred and twenty-five, and yesterday we sold it for two hundred and twenty dollars.”
“Cozy arrangement,” said Qwilleran.
“Don’t put that in the paper, though.”
“Do all the dealers get along well?”
“Oh, yes. Occasionally there’s a flare-up, like the time Andy fired Russ for drinking on the job, but it was soon forgotten. Russ is the one with the gorgeous blond hair. I used to have lovely blond hair myself, but it turned ashen overnight when I lost my first husband. I suppose I should have something done to it.”
After breakfast Qwilleran called the telephone company and asked to have an instrument connected at 6331 Zwinger.
“There will be a fif-ty dol-lar de-pos-it, sir,” said the singsong female voice on the line.
“Fifty! In advance! I never heard of such a thing!”
“Sor-ry. You are in zone thirteen. There is a fif-ty dol-lar de-pos-it.”
“What’s the zone got to do with it?” Qwilleran shouted into the mouthpiece. “I need that phone immediately, and I’m not going to pay your outrageous deposit! I’m a staff writer for the Daily Fluxion, and I’m going to report this to the managing editor.”
“One moment, please.”
He turned to the landlady. “Of all the high-handed nerve! They want eight months’ payment in advance.”
“We get that kind of treatment all the time in Junktown,” Iris said with a meek shrug.
The voice returned to the line. “Ser-vice will be sup-plied at once, sir. Sor-ry, sir.”
Qwilleran was still simmering with indignation when he left the house to cover his beat. He was also unhappy about the loss of his red feather. He was sure it had been in his hatband the night before, but now it was gone, and without it the tweed porkpie lost much of its éclat. A search of the apartment and staircase produced nothing but a cat’s hairball and a red gum wrapper.
On Zwinger Street the weather growled at him, and he was in a mood to growl back. All was gray—the sky, the snow, the people. At that moment a white Jaguar sleeked down the street and turned into the carriage house on the block. Qwilleran regarded it as a finger of fate and followed it.
Russell Patch’s refinishing shop had been a two-carriage carriage house in its heyday. Now it was half garage and half showroom. The Jaguar shared the space with items of furniture in the last stages of despair—peeling, mildewed, crazed, waterstained, or merely gray with dirt and age—and the premises smelled high of turpentine and lacquer.
Qwilleran heard a scuffing and thumping sound in the back room, and a moment later a husky young man appeared, swinging ably across the rough floor on metal crutches. He was dressed completely in white—white ducks, white open-necked shirt, white socks, white tennis shoes.
Qwilleran introduced himself.
“Yes, I know,” said Patch with a smile. “I saw you at the auction, and word got around who you were.”
The newsman glanced about the shop. “This is what I call genuine junk-type junk. Do people really buy it?”
“They sure do. It’s having a big thing right now. Everything you see here is in the rough; I refinish it to the customer’s specifications. See that sideboard? I’ll cut off the legs, paint the whole thing mauve, stripe it in magenta, spatter it with umber, and give it a glaze of Venetian bronze. It’s going into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Lost Lake Hills.”
“How long have you been doing this kind of work?”
“Just six months for myself. Before that, I worked for Andy Glanz for four years. Want to see how it’s done?”
He led the way into the workshop, where he put on a long white coat like a butcher’s, daubed with red and brown.
“This rocker,” he said, “was sitting out in a barnyard for years. I tightened it up, gave it a red undercoat, and now—watch this.” He drew on a pair of plastic gloves and started brushing a muddy substance on the chair seat.
“Did Andy teach you how to do this?”
“No, I picked it up myself,” said Patch, with a trace of touchiness.
“From what I hear,” Qwilleran said, “he was a great guy. Not only knowledgeable but generous and civic-minded.”
“Yeah,” the young man said with restraint.
“Everyone speaks highly of him.”
Patch made no comment as he concentrated on making parallel brushstrokes, but Qwilleran noticed the muscles of his jaw working.
“His death must have been a great loss to Junktown,” the newsman persisted. “Sorry I never had the opportunity to meet—”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the refinisher interrupted, “but he was a hard joe to work for.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody could be good enough to suit Andy.”
“He was a perfectionist?”
“He was a professional saint, and he expected everybody to operate the same way. I’m just explaining this because people around here will tell you Andy fired me for drinking on the job, and that’s a lie. I quit because I couldn’t stand his attitude.” Patch gave the red chair seat a final brown swipe and dropped the brush into a tomato can.
“He was sanctimonious?”
“I guess that’s the word. I didn’t let it get under my skin, you understand. I’m just telling you to keep the record straight. Everybody’s always saying how honest Andy was. Well, there’s such a thing as being too honest.”
“How do you figure that?” Qwilleran asked.
“Okay, I’ll explain. Suppose you’re driving out in the country, and you see an old brass bed leaning against a barn. It’s black, and it’s a mess. You knock on the farmhouse door and offer two bucks for it, and most likely they’re tickled to have
you cart it away. You’re in luck, because you can clean it up and make two thousand percent profit . . . . But not Andy! Oh, no, not Andy! If he thought he could peddle the bed for two hundred dollars, he’d offer the farmer a hundred. Operating like that, he was spoiling it for the rest of us.” The refinisher’s frown changed to a grin. “One time, though, we were out in the country together, and I had the laugh on Andy. The farmer was a real sharpie. He said if Andy was offering a hundred dollars, it must be worth a thousand, and he refused to sell . . . . You want another example? Take scrounging. Everybody scrounges, don’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know these old houses that are being torn down? After a house is condemned, you can go in and find salable things like fireplaces and paneling. So you salvage them before the demolition crew comes along with the wrecking ball.”
“Is that legal?”
“Not technically, but you’re saving good stuff for someone who can use it. The city doesn’t want it, and the wreckers don’t give a damn. So we all scrounge once in a while—some more than others. But not Andy! He said a condemned house was city property, and he wouldn’t touch it. He wouldn’t mind his own business, either, and when he squealed on Cobb, that’s when I quit. I thought that was a stinkin’ thing to do!”
Qwilleran patted his moustache. “You mean Andy reported Cobb to the authorities?”
Patch nodded. “Cobb got a stiff fine that he couldn’t pay, and he would have gone to jail if Iris hadn’t borrowed the money. C.C.’s a loud-mouth, but he’s not a bad guy, and I thought that was a lousy trick to pull on him. I got a few drinks under my belt and told Andy off.”
“Does Cobb know it was Andy who reported him?”
“I don’t think anybody knows it was a tip-off. Cobb was prying a staircase out of the Pringle house—he told us all he was going to do it—and the cops came along in a prowl car and nabbed him. It looked like a coincidence, but I happened to hear Andy phoning in an anonymous tip.” The refinisher reached for a wad of steel wool and started streaking the sticky glaze on the chair seat. “I have to comb this now—before it sets up too hard,” he explained.
“How about Andy’s private life?” Qwilleran asked. “Did he have the same lofty standards?”
Russell Patch laughed. “You better ask the Dragon . . . . About this other thing—don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have any hard feelings against Andy personally, you understand. Some people carry grudges. I don’t carry a grudge. I may blow my stack, but then I forget it. You know what I mean?”
After Qwilleran left the carriage house, he made a telephone call from the corner drugstore, where he went to buy a new toothbrush. He called the feature editor at his home.
“Arch,” he said, “I’ve run into an interesting situation in Junktown. You know the dealer who was killed in an accident a couple of months ago—”
“Yes. He’s the one who sold me my Pennsylvania tin coffeepot.”
“He allegedly fell off a stepladder and allegedly stabbed himself on a sharp object, and I’m beginning to doubt the whole story.”
“Qwill, let’s not turn this quaint, nostalgic Christmas series into a criminal investigation,” the editor said. “The boss wants us to emphasize peace-on-earth and goodwill toward advertisers until the Christmas shopping season is over.”
“Just the same, there’s something going on in this quaint, nostalgic neighborhood that bears questioning.”
“How do you know?”
“Private hunch—and something that happened yesterday. One of the Junktown regulars stopped me on the street and spilled it—that Andy had been murdered.”
“Who was he? Who told you that?” Riker demanded.
“Just a neighborhood barfly, but great truths are spoken while under the influence. He seemed to know something, and twelve hours after he talked to me, he was found dead in the alley.”
“Drunks are always being found dead in alleys. You should know that.”
“There’s something else. Andy’s girl friend is obviously living in fear. Of what, I can’t find out.”
“Look, Qwill, why don’t you concentrate on writing the antique series and getting yourself a decent place to live?”
“I’ve got an apartment. I’ve moved into a haunted house on Zwinger Street—over the Cobb Junkery.”
“That’s where we bought our dining room chandelier,” said Riker. “Now why don’t you just relax and enjoy the holidays and—say!—be sure to visit The Three Weird Sisters. You’ll flip! When will you have your first piece of copy?”
“Monday morning.”
“Keep it happy,” Riker advised. “And listen, you donkey! Don’t waste any time trying to turn an innocent accident into a Federal case!”
That directive was all the encouragement Qwilleran needed. It was not for nothing that his old friend called him a donkey.
EIGHT
With a stubborn determination to unearth the truth about the death of Andy Glanz, Qwilleran continued his tour of Zwinger Street. He walked past the Bit o’ Junk antique shop (closed)—past The Blue Dragon—past a paint store (out of business)—past a bookstore (pornographic)—until he reached a place called Ann’s ’Tiques, a subterranean shop smelling of moldy rugs and rotted wood.
The little old white-haired woman seated in a rocking chair resembled a dandelion gone to seed. She looked at Qwilleran blankly and kept on rocking.
“I’m Jim Qwilleran from the Daily Fluxion,” the newsman said in his courtliest manner.
“Nope, I haven’t had one o’ them for years,” she replied in a reedy voice. “People like the kind with china handles and a double lid.”
Qwilleran inspected the litter of indescribable knick-knacks and raised his voice. “What’s your specialty, Miss Peabody?”
“No sir! No discounts! If you don’t like my prices, leave the things be. Somebody else’ll buy ’em.”
Qwilleran bowed and left the shop. He walked past a billiard hall (windows boarded up)—past a chili parlor with a ventilator exhausting hot breath across the sidewalk (rancid grease, fried onions, sour mop)—until he reached the fruit and tobacco shack of Papa Popopopoulos. There was an aroma of overripe banana and overheated oil stove in the shack. The proprietor sat on an orange crate, reading a newspaper in his native language and chewing a tobacco-stained moustache of great flamboyance.
Qwilleran stamped his feet and clapped his gloved hands together. “Pretty cold out there,” he said.
The man listened attentively. “Tobac?” he said.
Qwilleran shook his head. “No, I just stopped in for a chat. Frankly, that last pouch I bought was somewhat past its prime.”
Popopopoulos rose and came forward graciously. “Fruit? Nize fruit?”
“I don’t think so. Cozy little place you’ve got here. How long have you been doing business in Junktown?”
“Pomegranate? Nize pomegranate?” The shopkeeper held up a shriveled specimen with faded red skin.
“Not today,” said Qwilleran, looking toward the door.
“Pomegranate make babies!”
Qwilleran made a hasty exit. There was nothing to be learned, he decided, from Andy’s two protégés.
It was then that he spotted the shop of The Three Weird Sisters, its window filled with washbowl and pitcher sets, spittoons, and the inevitable spinning wheel. Arch Riker might flip over this junk, but Qwilleran had no intention of flipping. He squared his shoulders and marched into the shop. As soon as he opened the door, his nose lifted. He could smell—was it or wasn’t it? Yes, it was—clam chowder!
Three women wearing orange smocks stopped what they were doing and turned to regard the man with a bushy moustache. Qwilleran returned their gaze. For a moment he was speechless.
The woman sitting at a table addressing Christmas cards was a brunette with luscious blue eyes and dimples. The one polishing a brass samovar was a voluptuous orange-redhead with green eyes and a dazzling smile. The young girl standing on a stepladder hanging r
opes of Christmas greens was a tiny blonde with upturned nose and pretty legs.
Qwilleran’s face was radiant as he finally managed to said, “I’m from the Daily Fluxion.”
“Yes, we know!” they chorused, and the redhead added in a husky voice, “We saw you at the auction and adored your moustache. Sexiest one we’ve ever seen in Junktown!” She hobbled toward him with one foot in a walking cast and gave his hand a warm grasp. “Pardon my broken metatarsal. I’m Cluthra. Godawful name, isn’t it?”
“And I’m Amberina,” the brunette said.
“I’ve Ivrene,” said a chirping voice from the top of the stepladder. “I’m the drudge around here.”
The redhead sniffed, “Ivy, the soup’s scorching!”
The little blonde jumped down from the ladder and ran into the back room.
Flashing her dimples, the brunette said to Qwilleran, “Would you have a bowl of chowder with us? And some cheese and crackers?”
If they had offered hardtack and goose grease, he would have accepted.
“Let me take your overcoat,” said the redhead. “It’s awfully warm in here.” She threw her smock back over her shoulders, revealing a low-cut neckline and basic architecture of an ample nature.
“Sit here, Mr. Qwilleran.” The brunette moved some wire carpet beaters from the seat of a Victorian settee.
“Cigarette?” offered the redhead.
“I’ll get you an ashtray,” said the brunette.
“I smoke a pipe,” Qwilleran told the sisters, groping in his pocket and thinking, If only the guys in the Feature Department could see me now! As he filled his pipe and listened to two simultaneous conversations, he glanced around the shop and saw lead soldiers, cast-iron cherubs, chamber pots, and a tableful of tin boxes that had once held tobacco, crackers, coffee, and the like. The old stenciled labels were half obliterated by rust and scuffmarks, and Qwilleran had an idea. Arch Riker said he collected tin; this was the chance to buy him a crazy Christmas present.
“Do you really sell those old tobacco tins?” he asked. “How much for the little one that’s all beat up?”
“We’re asking ten,” they said, “but if it’s for yourself, you can have it for five.”
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Ate Danish Modern, Turned on and Off Page 7
