The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Ate Danish Modern, Turned on and Off

by Lilian Jackson Braun

  The dealers sat in a circle, and Qwilleran looked at their feet before he looked at their faces. They had tramped upstairs in their outdoor togs, and he saw velvet boots, a single brown suede teamed with a walking cast, some man-sized boots in immaculate white, and assorted rubbers and galoshes.

  He took the nearest vacant seat—on a church pew with threadbare cushions—and found himself sitting between Cluthra’s cast and Russ Patch’s crutches.

  “Looks like the bus stop for Lourdes,” said the redhead with a fraternal lean in Qwilleran’s direction. “What happened to you?”

  “I was felled by an avalanche.”

  “I wouldn’t have struggled up all those stairs, one sloggin’ foot at a time, only I heard you were going to be here.” She gave him a wink and a friendly nudge.

  “How did the picture-taking go?” he asked.

  “That photographer you sent is a big hunk of man.”

  “Did he break anything?”

  “Only a small Toby jug.”

  “Newspapers always assign bulls to china shops,” Qwilleran explained. He was trying to see the soles of the footwear around him, but every pair of feet remained firmly planted on the floor. He turned to Russell Patch and said, “Good-looking boots you’re wearing. Where did you manage to find white ones?”

  “Had to have them custom-made,” said the young man, stretching out his good leg for advantageous display.

  “Even the soles are white!” Qwilleran said, staring at the ridged bottoms and patting his moustache with satisfaction. “I suppose those crutches cramp your style when it comes to scrounging.”

  “I still get around, and I won’t have to use them much longer.”

  “Get anything out of the Ellsworth house?”

  “No, I skipped that one. The kitchen cabinets were grabbed off before I could get there, and that’s all I’m interested in.”

  They lie, Qwilleran thought. All these dealers lie. They’re all actors, unable to tell reality from fantasy. Aloud he said, “What do you do with kitchen cabinets?”

  “The real old ones make good built-ins for stereo installations, if you give them a provincial finish. I’ve got a whole wall of them myself, with about twenty thousand dollars worth of electronic equipment. Thirty-six speakers. You like music? I’ve got everything on tape. Operas, symphonies, chamber music, classic jazz—”

  “You must have quite an investment there,” Qwilleran said, alerted to the apparent wealth of this young man.

  “Priceless! Come up and have a listen some night. I live right over my shop, you know.”

  “Do you own the building?”

  “Well, it’s like this. I rented it for a while and built in so many improvements—me and my roommate, that is—that I had to buy it to protect my investment.”

  Qwilleran forgot to pry any further, because Mary Duckworth arrived. Wearing a short blue plaid skirt, she sat on a kitchen chair of the Warren Harding period and crossed her long elegant legs. For the first time Qwilleran saw her knees. He considered himself a connoisseur of knees, and these had all the correct points. They were slender, shapely, and eminently designed for their function—with the kind of vertical indentations on either side of the kneecap that caused a stir in the roots of his moustache.

  “My Gawd! She’s here!” said a husky voice in his ear. “Keep her away from me, will you? She might try to break the other one.” The redhead’s ample bosom heaved with anger. “You know, she deliberately dropped a cast-iron garden urn on my foot.”

  “Mary did?”

  “That woman,” she said between clenched teeth, “is capable of anything! I wish she’d get out of Junktown! Her shop doesn’t belong here. That high-priced pedigreed stuff spoils it for the rest of us.”

  There was a sudden round of applause as Ben Nicholas, who had been acting as doorman down below, made a grandiose entrance in an admiral’s cocked hat, and then the meeting began.

  Sylvia Katzenhide reviewed the plans for the Block Party on Wednesday. “The city is going to rope off four blocks,” she said, “and decorate the utility poles with plastic angels. They’ve run out of Christmas angels, but they have some nice lavender ones left over from last Easter. Carol singers will be supplied by the Sanitation Department Glee Club.”

  Qwilleran said, “Could we keep The Junkery open during the party? I hate to see Mrs. Cobb lose that extra business. I’d be willing to mind the store for a couple of hours myself.”

  Cluthra squeezed his arm and said, “You’re a honey! We’ll help, too—my sisters and I. We’ll take turns.”

  Then someone suggested sending flowers to the Cobb funeral, and just as they were taking up a collection, they were stunned by a blast of noise from the floor below. It was a torrent of popular music—raucous, bouncy, loud. They listened in open-mouthed astonishment for a few seconds, then all talked at once.

  “What’s that?”

  “A radio?”

  “Who’s down there?”

  “Nobody!”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “Somebody’s downstairs!”

  “Who could it be?”

  “How could they get in?”

  “The front door’s locked, isn’t it?”

  Qwilleran was the first one on his feet. “Let’s go down and see.” He grabbed a wooden sledge hammer that was hanging on the wall and started down the narrow stairs, left foot first on each step. The only other men at the meeting followed—Russ on his crutches and Ben lumbering after them with a pitchfork in his hand.

  The noise was coming from the Cobb apartment. The door stood open. The apartment was in darkness.

  Qwilleran reached in, groped for a wall switch and flooded the room with light. “Who’s there?” he shouted in a voice of authority.

  There was no answer. The music poured out of the small radio on the apothecary desk.

  The three men searched the apartment, Ben bringing up a delayed rear.

  “No one here,” Qwilleran announced.

  “Maybe it has an automatic timer,” Russ said.

  “The thing doesn’t have a timer,” Qwilleran said as he turned off the offensive little radio. He frowned at the writing surface of the desk. Papers were scattered. A pencil cup was knocked over. From the floor he picked up a telephone bill and an address book—and a gray feather.

  As the men emerged from the Cobb apartment, the women were beginning to venture down from the attic.

  “Is it safe?” they asked.

  Cluthra said, “If it was a man, which way did he go?”

  “What was it? Does anyone know what it was?”

  “That crazy radio,” Russ said. “It turned on all by itself.”

  “How could it do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Qwilleran . . . but he did.

  After the dealers had straggled out the front door and Ben had departed for an evening at The Lion’s Tail, Qwilleran unlocked his apartment door and looked for the cats. Yum Yum was sitting on top of the refrigerator with eyes bright and ears alert—eyes and ears a trifle too large for her tiny wedge-shaped face. Koko was lapping up a drink of water, his tail lying straight on the floor as it did when he was especially thirsty.

  “Okay, Koko,” said Qwilleran. “How did you do it? Have you teamed up with Mathilda?”

  The tip of Koko’s tail tapped the floor lightly, as he went on drinking.

  Qwilleran wandered through his suite of rooms and speculated on each one. He knew Koko could turn a radio dial by scraping it with his hard little jaw, but how was this feline Houdini getting out of the apartment? Qwilleran moved the swan bed away from the wall and looked for a vent in the baseboard. He examined the bathroom for trap doors (turn-of-the-century plumbers had been fond of trap doors), but there was nothing of the sort. The kitchenette had a high transom window cut through to the hall, presumably for ventilation, and it would be easily accessible from the top of the refrigerator, but it was closed and latched.

  The telephone rang.
r />   “Qwill,” said Mary’s pleasing voice, “are you doing anything about your knee? You looked as if you were in pain tonight.”

  “I used cold compresses until the swelling went down.”

  “What you need now is a heat lamp. May I offer you mine?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said. “Yes, I’d appreciate it very much.”

  In preparation for his session with the heat lamp, Qwilleran put on a pair of sporty walking shorts that had survived a country weekend the previous summer and admired himself in the long mirror on the dressing room door, at the same time pulling in his waistline and expanding his chest. He had always thought he would look admirable in Scottish kilts. His legs were straight, solid, muscular and moderately haired—just enough to look virile, not enough to look zoological. The puffiness around the left knee that had destroyed its perfection had now subsided, he was glad to note.

  He told the cats, “I’m having a guest, and I want you guys to use some discretion. No noisy squabbles! No flying around and disturbing the status quo!”

  Koko squeezed his eyes and tilted his whiskers in what looked like a knowing smile. Yum Yum exhibited indifference by laundering the snow-white cowlick where her fur grew in two directions on her breast.

  When Mary arrived, carrying a basket, Koko looked her over from an unfriendly distance.

  “He’s not overwhelmed with joy,” she said, “but at least he’s civil this time.”

  “He’ll get used to you,” Qwilleran assured her.

  In her basket she had homemade fruitcake and an espresso maker, as well as a heat lamp. She plugged in the little silver coffee machine and positioned the infrared lamp over Qwilleran’s knee and then sat in the twiggy rocker. Immediately the country bumpkin of a rocking chair looked gracefully linear and organically elegant, and Qwilleran wondered why he had ever thought it was ugly.

  “Do you have any idea what caused the outburst in the Cobb apartment?” she asked.

  “Just another of the cockeyed things that happen in this house . . . . By the way, I wonder why Hollis Prantz didn’t attend the meeting.”

  “Half the dealers stayed away. They probably knew we’d collect money for flowers.”

  “Prantz was here this afternoon, looking for some antique radios the Cobbs were supposed to be saving for him—or so he said. Does that make sense?”

  “Oh, certainly. Dealers make most of their money by selling to each other . . . . How does the heat feel? Is the lamp too close?”

  Soon a rushing, bubbling roar in the kitchen announced that the espresso was ready. It alarmed Yum Yum, who ran in the opposite direction, but Koko made it his business to march into the kitchen and investigate.

  With a mixture of pride and apology Qwilleran said, “Koko’s a self-assured fellow, but Yum Yum’s as nervous as a cat; when in doubt, she exits. She’s what you might call a pussycat’s pussycat. She sits on laps and catches mice—all the things cats are supposed to do.”

  “I’ve never owned a cat,” Mary said as she poured the coffee in small cups and added a twist of lemon peel. “But I used to study them for their grace of movement when I was dancing.”

  “No one ever owns a cat,” he corrected her. “You share a common habitation on a basis of equal rights and mutual respect . . . although somehow the cat always comes out ahead of the deal. Siamese particularly have a way of getting the upper hand.”

  “Some animals are almost human . . . . Please try this fruitcake, Qwill.”

  He accepted a dark, moist, mysterious, aromatic wedge of cake. “Koko is more than human. He has a sixth sense. He seems to have access to information that a human couldn’t collect without laborious investigation.” Qwilleran heard himself saying it, and he hoped it was still true, but deep in his heart he was beginning to wonder.

  Mary turned to look at the remarkable animal. Koko was sitting on his spine with one leg in midair as he washed the base of his tail. He paused with pink tongue extended and returned her admiring gaze with an insolent stare. Then, having finished his ablutions, he went on to the ritual of sharpening his claws. He jumped on the daybed, stood on his hind legs and scratched the papered wall where the book pages overlapped and corners were beginning to curl up tantalizingly.

  “No! Down! Scram! Beat it!” Qwilleran scolded. Koko obeyed, but not until he had finished the sharpening job and taken his time about it.

  The man explained to his guest. “Koko was given a dictionary for a scratching pad, and now he thinks he can use any printed page for a pedicure. Sometimes I’m convinced he can read. He once exposed a series of art forgeries that way.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely . . . . Tell me, is there much fakery in antiques?”

  “Not in this country. An unscrupulous dealer may sell a nineteenth century Chippendale reproduction as an eighteenth century piece, or an artist may do crude paintings on old canvas and call them early American primitives, but there’s no large-scale faking to my knowledge . . . . How do you like the fruitcake? One of my customers made it. Robert Maus.”

  “The attorney?”

  “Do you know him? He’s a superb cook.”

  “Wasn’t he Andy’s lawyer? Quite an important attorney for a little operation in Junktown,” Qwilleran remarked.

  “Robert is an avid collector and a friend of mine. He represented Andy as a courtesy.”

  “Did his legal mind ever do any questioning about Andy’s so-called accident?”

  Mary gave him an anxious glance. “Are you still pursuing that?”

  Qwilleran decided to be candid. He was tired of hearing about Andy’s superlative qualities from all the women in Junktown. “Are you aware,” he said, “that it was Andy who tipped off the police to Cobb’s scrounging?”

  “No, I can’t believe—”

  “Why did he squeal on Cobb and not on Russ or some of the other scroungers? Did he have a grudge against Cobb?”

  “I don’t—”

  “It may be that Andy also threatened Cobb—threatened to tell Iris about his philandering. I hate to say this, Mary, but your friend Andy was a meddler—or else he had an ax to grind. Perhaps he considered that Cobb was trespassing on his own territory when he visited Cluthra.”

  Mary flushed. “So you found out about that, too!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Qwilleran. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  She shrugged, and she was attractive when she shrugged. “I knew that Andy was seeing Cluthra. That’s why we quarreled the night he was killed. Andy and I weren’t really committed. We had an understanding. Not even an understanding—just an arrangement. But I’m afraid I was beginning to feel possessive.” She reached over and clicked off the heat lamp. “That knee has broiled long enough. How does it feel?”

  “Better. Much better.” Qwilleran started to fill his pipe. “After Andy left your house that night—to meet the prospective customers—what route did he take?”

  “He went out my back door, through the alley and into the back of his shop.”

  “And when you followed, you went the same way? Did you see anyone else in the alley?”

  Mary gave Qwilleran a swift glance. “I don’t think so. There might have been one of those invisible men from the rooming house. They slink around like ghosts.”

  “How much time had elapsed when you followed Andy?”

  She hesitated. “Oh . . . about an hour . . . More fruitcake, Qwill?”

  “Thanks. During that time the customers may have come, found the front door locked, and gone away—unaware that Andy lay dead in the back room. Before they arrived, someone else could have followed Andy into his shop through the back door—someone who had seen him enter . . . . Let’s see, how many buildings stand between your house and Andy’s store?”

  “Russ’s carriage house, then the variety store, then this house, then the rooming house where Ben has his shop.”

  “That building and your own place are duplicates of this house, aren’t they?” Qw
illeran asked. “Only narrower.”

  “You’re very observant. The three houses were built by the same family.”

  “I know Russ lives upstairs over his workshop. Who’s his roommate? Is he in the antique business?”

  “No. Stanley is a hairdresser.”

  “I wonder where Russ gets all his dough. He owns the carriage house, wears custom-made boots, has twenty thousand dollars worth of sound equipment, stables a white Jaguar . . . . Is he on the up-and-up? Did Andy think he was simon-pure? Maybe Andy was getting ready to put the finger on him. Where does Russ get his dough? Does he have a sideline?”

  “I only know that he’s a hard worker. Sometimes I hear his power tools at three o’clock in the morning.”

  “I wonder—” Qwilleran stopped to light his pipe. “I wonder why Russ lied to me tonight. I asked him if he’d been scrounging at the Ellsworth house, and he denied it. Yet I could swear that those crutches and those white boots had been through that house.”

  “Dealers are sensitive about their sources of supply,” Mary said. “It’s considered bad form to ask a dealer where he acquires his antiques, and if he answers you at all, he never feels bound to state the truth. It’s also bad form to tell a dealer about your grandmother’s attic treasures.”

  “Really? Who decrees these niceties of etiquette?”

  Mary smiled in a lofty way that Qwilleran found charming. “The same authority who gives newspapers the right to invade everyone’s privacy.”

  “Touché!”

  “Did I tell you about finding the twenty dollar bill?” she asked after they had gazed at each other appreciatively for a few seconds.

  “Some people get all the breaks,” he said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the pocket of my sweater—the one I was wearing on the night of Andy’s accident. The sweater dipped in his blood, and I rolled it up in a ball and stuffed it on a closet shelf. My cleaning woman found it this weekend, and that’s when the twenty dollar bill came to light.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I picked it up in Andy’s workroom.”

  “You mean you found money at the scene of the accident? And you picked it up? Didn’t you realize it might be an important clue?”