Something the Cat Dragged In

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Dozens, no doubt. I never thought to ask. Is the number of Ottermole progeny germane to the issue at hand?”

  “Who knows? The most germane thing I can think of is, what happened to Professor Ungley’s files?”

  “Spoken like a true librarian. By what route did we progress from Cops and Robbers to Ungley’s files?”

  “Somebody robbed the professor and copped his files, silly. A woman, I should think. Men wouldn’t have sense enough to think of plastic bags.”

  “In October they would. Men—some men of low understanding, that is—have the insane habit of raking dead leaves into trash bags and carting them to the dump instead of dumping them on the compost heap. This is the season for dead leaves, ergo anybody of criminal tendencies would naturally be thinking of stuffing things into plastic trash bags.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Helen, “what about our own yard?”

  “What, indeed?”

  “It needs raking.”

  “Why do women have this perverse talent for sneaking up on a man and whamming him over the head with some inconsequential chore when he has his mind on weightier issues?”

  “Because men have this perverse talent for weaseling out of the chores on the specious grounds that doing a little honest work around the place is less important than playing Cops and Robbers with Fred Ottermole. Do you two honestly expect to find bloodstains on that floor?”

  “Not we two, no. We expect Frank Joad to find them if in fact they exist.”

  “You didn’t tell me Professor Joad would be among those present. I do like that man. He’s never once asked me to look up a statistic about anything whatsoever. If it’s that big a party, why can’t I come?”

  “No reason, I suppose. We might invite Mrs. Joad and Mrs. Ottermole while we’re about it.”

  “Now you’re being snide and cynical. I’m sure it will be a dreadful bore anyway. While you’re crawling around getting splinters in your knees, I shall flounce off in a huff and return Mary Enderble’s cake plates she left at Iduna Stott’s the day we had the party for Grace Porble.”

  “I suppose that makes sense, but kindly refrain from telling me how. Whatever happened to the pie you mentioned a while back?”

  “I’ll get it. You sit there and meditate on weighty issues. Such as the effects of eating too much apple pie and cheese.”

  She gave him a hefty serving nevertheless. He polished it off in pensive mood. Helen was right about those files, damn it. Without that finicking robbery of his flat, Ungley’s death would surely have been written off as either an accident or a mugging that resulted from his trip to the bank. And without Betsy Lomax, the robbery would never have been noticed.

  But anybody who knew Mrs. Lomax well, and that included not only her multifarious family and social connections but also faculty people like Shandy for whom she’d worked over the years, would realize what folly it was to think Mrs. Lomax wouldn’t notice. Ergo, the robber was either somebody who didn’t know Mrs. Lomax well or somebody brash enough to think he could pull off an undetectable burglary right under the sharpest nose in Balaclava County. Somebody, perhaps, cocky enough to beard Thorkjeld Svenson in his own lair. Summing it up in words of one syllable, Ruth Smuth.

  Shandy finished his pie, kissed his wife, changed his pants, phoned Ottermole, and walked across the Crescent to collect Frank Joad, who now lived in the house once occupied by the Cadwalls. The Joads were a jolly lot, all science-minded: The little daughter sprouted alfalfa seeds in the kitchen and kept an ant farm in her bedroom. The two sons manufactured rockets in the cellar. Mrs. Joad went around to the local grade schools and gave the children wonderful talks full of smells and fizzes. One of the boys had obligingly skinned a knee and the father was demonstrating how to make sure his offspring was exuding real human blood when Shandy arrived.

  “All set, Frank? I told Ottermole we’d be right down. He’s going to let us in with Ungley’s key. He said Congressman Sill demanded to be present during the investigation, but Ottermole told him nothing doing.”

  “One might think Sill had hogged enough limelight for one day,” said Joad. “Did you happen to see him on the news this evening?”

  “I saw him in the flesh, unfortunately. I happened to be on campus while he was spouting.”

  “What was all that about his allegedly importing a goon squad from Boston to start the fracas?”

  “No allegedly about it. I don’t know whether Sill or someone else brought them, but they were definitely not Balaclava students. They wouldn’t say where they came from, but wherever it was, they’ve gone back there. I hope to God they stay.”

  “And to think I left New York for a life of peace and quiet in the country. Well, let’s go see about the gore on the floor. Stick a Band-Aid on that knee, Ted, so the bugs won’t get in.”

  Joad bunged a few bottles and test tubes into his pocket and announced he was ready to travel. They walked down to the clubhouse where they found Fred Ottermole already crawling around scanning every crack and cranny through an oversized magnifying glass.

  “What ho, Sherlock,” was Shandy’s first remark. His second was, “Good God, what a moth trap!”

  “Oh, hadn’t you been in before?” said Joad. “I haven’t, mainly because I’d never noticed the place was here. Why don’t they get some decent exhibits, for God’s sake?”

  “Why should they? They’ve never yet opened the place to the public,” Shandy told him. “They’re always going to, but so far it’s failed to happen. Find anything that looks promising, Ottermole?”

  “Maybe.” The chief pointed to a biggish stain on what was left of an oriental rug. “What do you think of this?”

  Joad did some sleight-of-hand with his phials and philtres, then announced his verdict. “This appears to be where somebody upset the coffeepot. Circa 1937, I’d say offhand. They don’t go in much for being finicky, do they?”

  “Maybe they equate dust and cobwebs with an aura of antiquity.”

  Shandy rubbed his chin and took visual inventory. If he hadn’t known this was supposed to be an exclusive club-room, he’d have assumed he was in some old duffer’s hayloft that hadn’t been redded out in a coon’s age.

  He saw an old-fashioned hat block, the kind that came apart in sections, propped on a shelf next to some discolored wax flowers under a cracked-glass dome, rusted flatirons and curling-tong holders, mildewed books with their backs peeling and covers hanging askew, a wicker doll carriage in which slumped an eyeless china doll, her kidskin hands and feet chewed off by mice.

  There was a hand plow with most of its share rusted away, a few bottomless pots and kettles, a tin candlestick that must have had something heavy dropped on it sometime or other. There wasn’t a dratted thing in the entire place, as far as Shandy could see, that was whole or sound or worth a second glance. What the flaming perdition did the Balaclavians think they had a right to be so exclusive about, holding their ill-attended meetings in a dump like this?

  Maybe they’d been so snotty about blackballing prospective members because they were ashamed of how little they’d managed to accomplish in all these years. But why hadn’t they done more? There couldn’t be any dearth of money in that crowd: the banker, the lawyer, Twerks with his inherited wealth and nothing to spend it on but booze and tartan carpets, Lutt the soap-fat man, Ungley with that astonishing dragon’s hoard soaked away in Pommell’s bank. There was Sill with his alleged connections; why couldn’t he have got some halfway decent exhibits on loan from somewhere? Why didn’t Mrs. Pommell and her housekeeper go over and dust around a bit, if the men wouldn’t bother? She made enough stir in all the other clubs she belonged to. How could she have been coming year after year to sit among this junk and not so much as straighten up the clutter on the shelves?

  Yet there was the chair she’d sat in. At least there were six chairs arranged in a formal rank in front of the table behind which Ungley must have stood when he spoke. There were his penknives, still fanned out in a precis
e semicircle. Ungley had been fussy enough to have done an occasional hand’s turn, if it came to that, or at least pay Mrs. Lomax to come in and clean.

  Shandy’s thoughts went back to that sterile, depressing first-floor flat where nothing apparently had changed position except Ungley’s reclining chair, until last night. What was Alonzo Bulfinch making of his new quarters? It mightn’t be a bad notion to stop by after they’d got through here, and find out whether Bulfinch had turned up anything of interest among his late uncle’s effects. Shandy had a hunch they weren’t going to find anything here, and they didn’t. After an hour’s vain searching, Joad and Ottermole were ready to call it quits.

  “I’m afraid we’ve struck out,” Joad was sighing. “Unless they spread a drop cloth before they bopped him, I’d say the man must have been killed somewhere else. You searched the grounds for bloodstains, I suppose?”

  “My boys and I were out there the whole morning, just about,” Ottermole told him. “It was tough with all those slimy weeds to paw through. What we could do, I suppose, is take a mower and chop down the weeds so you could test ’em at the college laboratory.”

  “I’m game,” said Joad. “I could give the weeds to my freshmen as a lab assignment. They can test for blood, and other things while they’re about it. Automotive pollutants, for instance. Let me grow in a field by the side of the road and run afoul of man.”

  “What I can do,” said Ottermole to show he was sparking on all cylinders, “is mow one section at a time, and put the clippings in marked plastic bags. Those big ones, like you dump dead leaves in.”

  Shandy’s lip drew back. He was about to bark his views on dumping dead leaves in anything, most particularly in plastic bags. Then he thought perhaps he wouldn’t. Otter-mole had been through a rough enough day already. So had he, for that matter. And he still had those test papers to correct. And he’d meant to drop in on Bulfinch. And how the flaming perdition did he keep getting into these messes, anyway?

  “Good thinking,” he said instead. “Well, Ottermole, I expect you’d like to get home and park your badge. We’ll see you tomorrow. Come on, Joad, let’s mosey back up the hill.”

  He’d decided to skip Bulfinch for tonight, but Bulfinch was not to be skipped. As he and Joad started up the side street that led past Mrs. Lomax’s house, who should appear but the new security guard in person, charging down Mrs. Lomax’s front steps like a man with a mission. As it turned out, he was, and had.

  “Evening, Professor. I didn’t expect to see you again quite so soon. Clarence just phoned me and asked if I could get up to the campus early. Purvis Mink’s wife’s gallstones are acting up again, so Purve had to leave before his shift was finished.”

  “Too bad,” Shandy answered. “Did you get a chance to settle in?”

  “Oh sure, no problem. Betsy brought down a few plants to make the place look more homey, and Edmund’s been in to visit. Say, that cat’s a character! He went off on a toot this afternoon and got himself arrested for vagrancy. Fred Ottermole brought him home in the police cruiser. This town sure is a far cry from Detroit, I can tell you. I like it, though, the way everybody knows everybody.”

  He threw a politely inquiring glance toward Shandy’s companion.

  “This is Professor Joad from the Chemistry Department,” Shandy explained. “Alonzo Bulfinch, our new security guard. He’s Ungley’s nephew. Joad and I have been down testing for bloodstains at the Balaclavian Society, Bulfinch. We didn’t find any and hadn’t really expected to, but it was one more thing that needed to be done.”

  “Nice of you to bother. It’s a shame my uncle’s causing you all this trouble. As for myself, I don’t know what to think about this whole affair. I’ve been wishing I could have got to meet him before he died, but from what Betsy says—now, there is one wonderful woman. She had me up to supper. Best meal I’ve thrown a lip over since my wife died. Then we sat and watched the news and—but anyway, Betsy says my uncle was never one for sociability. He mightn’t even have liked me.”

  Bulfinch made the remark in a mildly surprised tone, and Shandy could see why. This chirrupy little chap wouldn’t be apt to have much trouble getting himself liked, as a rule. So Mrs. Lomax had asked her new tenant up to supper. Helen would be interested. So was Shandy himself, though he supposed the invitation must have had something to do with Bulfinch’s being Silvester Lomax’s friend. And possibly a dash of proving Betsy could set as good a table as Maude any day of the week.

  All of which didn’t get Peter out of correcting that set of test papers. By the time he’d parted from Joad and Bulfinch and gone in to perform his much-postponed task, the hour was well advanced. All in all, he reflected when at last he was free to snuggle down beside his gently slumbering wife, this had been quite a day.

  Sleep was welcome, but Shandy didn’t manage to enjoy much of it. He’d only just got nicely launched into a dream of cruising down the great, gray-green, greasy Limpopo River in a sternwheeler, searching for the perfect alligator pear and weeping crocodile tears because he couldn’t find any, when he felt a jolting and shaking.

  “Hard a-starboard,” he muttered. “They’re mating two points abaft the banyan tree.”

  “Peter, for goodness’ sake!”

  “Ungh? Oh, it’s you, Helen. Come to me, my little alligatress.”

  “Stop that, you sex maniac. Thorkjeld’s in another swivet.”

  “Here?”

  “No, on the phone a moment ago. He wants you up at Security right away.”

  “He’s out of his mind.”

  Nevertheless, Shandy sat up and began hurling on the garments he’d too recently taken off. “What time is it?”

  “Half-past two. Some woman’s been murdered. One of the guards just found her body on the grounds.”

  “Who was she? Did he say?”

  “No, you know Thorkjeld. He just makes noises. It sounded to me like Ruth Smuth, which is ridiculous. Nobody’s named Ruth Smuth.”

  Shandy heaved a mighty sigh. “Not now, maybe, but somebody was this afternoon. Ruth Smuth was the woman who started the shemozzle. I wonder who decided to end it. Would you happen to know what I did with my other shoe?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  RUTH SMUTH HAD HEADED her last committee, no doubt about that. The blue-and-white scarf she’d been sporting in front of the television cameras was still around her neck, pulled deep into the flesh and fastened behind with a careful square knot so it wouldn’t slip. Someone had wanted to make perfectly sure she died.

  “This is exactly how I found her.” Alonzo Bulfinch wasn’t sounding so chipper now. “I didn’t touch a thing, just put out the call on my walkie-talkie and stood by till my partner came.”

  “As was right and proper,” said Clarence Lomax, although nobody had intimated it wasn’t. “Well, now that you folks are here, I better go on back to the office and relieve Silvester.”

  Nobody tried to stop him. They were preoccupied with the shape on the ground. Shandy was shaking his head.

  “From the way she’s laid out, a person might think Harry Goulson killed her.”

  He’d come across a surprising number of corpses in recent months, but Ruth Smuth’s was the neatest he’d seen yet. Except for the horribly suffused face and the protruding tongue, she might have paused to rest on her way to one of her committee meetings. Her red coat was smoothed down over her knees, all its buttons in order. As far as Shandy could tell by the not inconsiderable light from the large battery lantern Bulfinch was carrying, she didn’t even have a run in her stockings.

  The white gloves she’d been wearing at the demonstration were still on Mrs. Smuth’s hands, still reasonably clean. Her hair was still firmly shellacked into place. There seemed no way this could be a case of rape and robbery. It looked more like a tidy professional assassination, and Shandy had a terrible feeling it was nothing else.

  Or was it? Looking down at the body, Shandy found another picture creeping unwanted into his mind, of Thorkjeld Svenson rolli
ng up that thick telephone directory and wringing it in two with his bare hands. Quod erat absurdem. Thorkjeld Svenson would never strangle a woman. He’d never strangle anybody. At least not from behind. At least not in cold blood, and that scarf had been most properly tied. Svenson wouldn’t have bothered with a scarf, much less a knot. He was a bare-hands fighter.

  Just suppose, though, the president had met Ruth Smuth wandering around the grounds here where she’d no business to be any time, much less at this hour. Suppose he’d challenged her, as well he might. Suppose she’d got scared, as she damn well should have. Suppose she’d turned to run away and Svenson had grabbed her by the scarf to pull her back. Suppose Peter Shandy quit supposing. Svenson wouldn’t have laid her out so neatly if he did happen by accident to strangle her. He was not a tidy man, as Sieglinde had often been heard to remind him.

  Tidiness. It kept cropping up. Shandy thought of Ungley, so tidily propped against that harrow with his hat still in his hand, and of the old man’s apartment, so tidily searched. There was no special reason to think of Ungley in connection with Mrs. Smuth. Except that people didn’t usually get murdered around Balaclava Junction within so short a distance and during so short a span of time.

  And there was a tie of sorts between them, come to think of it. More than one, unfortunately. In the first place, there was Congressman Sill. He’d been associated with them both just before they died, though in different ways. That was the good one. The bad one was the college. Ungley’d been on the faculty here, he’d still taken his meals here, still drawn that oversized pension Svenson was so steamed up about. Ruth Smuth had spent a lot of time here back during the fund drive for the silo, and had been around here the past couple of days trying to collect what she’d claimed as her reward for past services. And Svenson had been more than steamed at Mrs. Smuth.

  The hell with that. What about Alonzo Bulfinch? Ungley hadn’t been popular with anybody, even some of his alleged confreres at the Balaclavian Society, but he’d doddered on unscathed until his long-lost nephew hove into town. Ruth Smuth had got Svenson’s back up, and no doubt a good many other people’s as well because she was that kind of woman; but nobody’d done her in until Bulfinch became a security guard on the campus she’d chosen to infest.