Something the Cat Dragged In

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Neither did I,” the chief admitted. “Maybe that’s because I never had this many to lead before. You want to get deputized, Cronk?”

  “Thanks, Fred, but I’m supposed to remain detached, objective, and personally uninvolved. Anyhow, that’s what it says in the course.” Cronkite Swope now had his diploma, magna cum laude, from the Great Journalists’ Correspondence School framed and hung in his mother’s vestibule for all to see and admire.

  “Okay, if you say so. Let’s go then. Professor Joad, you better come, too. I guess this’ll be where Professor Shandy wants you to do your stuff. Provided there’s anything to do.”

  Even as he watched deputies Mink and Whitney departing with the prisoner, Ottermole didn’t sound as if he quite believed he’d just put the arm on one of Balaclava Junction’s hitherto most respected citizens and was about to jug another.

  “Fear not, Ottermole,” Shandy exhorted him. “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

  “Who’s he? Somebody I’ve got to pinch or somebody I ought to deputize?”

  “Neither. It’s just a piece of advice Napoleon once gave somebody or other. Onward and upward is the gist. We’ve been right so far, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure why.”

  “Simple logic, man. Hodger lived closer to Ungley than any of the other Balaclavians. Hodger has an office. Offices have filing cabinets. Ungley’s files had to be got out of the house in a hurry, for reasons we now understand. Hodger’s office was the easiest place to hide them. Ergo, that’s where we found them.”

  Ottermole jabbed the ignition key at the lock. “You mean to say that big moose Twerks, who can’t take three steps without falling over his own feet, managed to search Ungley’s apartment without waking up Betsy Lomax?”

  “Far from it. Twerks didn’t do any searching, he was just the caddy. Another exercise in logic. Twerks is the only one of that flaccid flock who’s strong enough to have carried all Ungley’s files at once. We must assume the person who found them in the house was not. Otherwise the person wouldn’t have had to use four of those plastic trash bags instead of just one or two.”

  “But why couldn’t the person who took them away have made four separate trips?” asked Swope.

  “Because, I expect, that would have quadrupled the chance of being spotted with the swag. Being respectable citizens, the Balaclavians couldn’t afford that big a risk. That’s why Whitney heard Twerks in Hodger’s office, instead of somebody else.”

  “So now you’re going after Twerks, right?”

  “Our lockup’s only ten feet square, and Twerks is a big guy,” Ottermole worried. “Maybe we should leave him till later.”

  “Excellent suggestion,” said Shandy.

  “Then who are you going to arrest next?” Swope persisted. “Whom, I mean.” He didn’t want another of Shandy’s lectures on literate reportage just now.

  “Good question.” Ottermole popped his lower lip in and out a few times to show he was deep in thought. “Kind of hard to make a decision. You got to approach these crackdowns scientifically.”

  Shandy handed him a nickel. “It’s late, Ottermole. Make a decision. Heads we get Sill, tails it’s Lutt.”

  “Huh? Call that scientific?” Nevertheless, Ottermole spun the coin. “Tails. Okay, so what are we tagging Lutt for? According to your theory, I mean. Just comparing notes, Cronk. Professor Shandy’s been a lot of help to me in my investigation. He ought to get some of the credit, too.”

  “Big of you, Ottermole,” said Shandy, “but I’d be willing to eschew the glory in exchange for an occasional uninterrupted night’s sleep. Let’s see. About Lutt. Oh, the usual, I suppose. Bribery, conspiracy, and abetting murder in the first degree.”

  “How the heck did the Balaclavians ever think they could get away with it?” Swope marveled.

  Shandy shrugged. “Why shouldn’t they? They always had before. This is going to be rather a lengthy story, Swope. You’ll have a chance to go into the—er—ramifications tomorrow when Ottermole holds his press conference. We decided to give you a scoop tonight because you’re the only reporter so far who hasn’t been willing to make the college look like a hideout for a gang of cutthroats.”

  And because somebody had to publish the straight story before Sam Peters came up against Bertram Claude, and Balaclava County readers were the ones who’d be voting, and Swope could be trusted to tell it the way it had to be told. Shandy didn’t feel this was the time to go into all that.

  At the rate Fred Ottermole was pushing his beat-up cruiser along, coherent exposition would have been a chancy business anyway. The official pothole season hadn’t yet been declared in Balaclava County, but there were enough bumps and dips in the road, not to mention broken springs and wornout shock absorbers in the car, to freight lengthy conversation with serious risks of a badly bitten tongue.

  Rather to Shandy’s surprise, they got to Lumpkin Upper Mills without mishap and parked a short way from the house that soap had built. As they climbed out, he asked, “Who’s guarding Lutt’s place, Ottermole?”

  “Clarence Lomax’s boy Frank. Officer Frank Lomax, I mean. Officer trainee anyway, kind of. On the nights he doesn’t have to work at the apple warehouse. I’d like to put Frank on the force full-time, but Town Meeting won’t vote me the money.”

  “M’well, now that you’ve exposed a seething hotbed of crime in our midst, maybe our tightfisted taxpayers will think better of their pestiferous penury.”

  “Huh! Probably fire me for not having exposed it sooner.” The chief was having another attack of apprehension. “Aunt Edna Jean’s going to be madder’n a wet hornet when I arrest Uncle Lot. She thinks he’s God Almighty. She had my wife down for a nice little something in her will, too.”

  “Say, that’ll make a terrific headline, Fred,” cried the inestimable Swope. “ ‘NO SACRIFICE TOO GREAT IN LINE OF DUTY, SAYS OTTERMOLE.’ ” Don’t sweat it. By the time this story breaks, you’re going to be such a hero you might even wind up with a new set of shocks for the cruiser. Mind waiting a second till I reload my camera? I want to get a shot of you making the collar.”

  “That ought to put me in real good with the Buglefords.” Nevertheless, Ottermole made sure his cap was on straight and his zippers all in order. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  He rang the doorbell. After a while, Edna Jean Bugleford came down. Sure enough, she was mad as a wet hornet.

  “Fred Ottermole, are you out of your mind? What in the name of tarnation do you think you’re playing at, waking decent people up at this hour? Does Edna Mae know where you are? And the kind of company you’re keeping?” she added when she’d caught sight of Shandy. “That’s the bird who got Lot all upset. I haven’t seen him so put out since the day they made him resign from the board at the soap factory. He wouldn’t even eat his supper, and I’d made my special meat loaf.”

  “He should have eaten it while he had the chance.” Mrs. Bugleford’s nephew by marriage had got his courage back. “Next meat loaf you bake him, you’ll have to put a file in it. Which way is his room, Aunt Edna Jean?”

  “What do you mean which way is his room? And don’t you Aunt Edna Jean me, Fred Ottermole. I told Edna Mae right from the start she was foolish to throw herself away on you when she could have had William Twerks. Just because you looked so dashing and romantic in your uniform and William was a few years older—what was that about a file in it?”

  Ottermole hadn’t waited to explain. He was already up the stairs. Lot Lutt met him on the landing.

  “Fred Ottermole, you blasted fool, what are you doing in my house at this ungodly hour? Is this another of your silly games of Cops and Robbers?”

  “Yeah, and I’m the cop and you’re the robber. I’m charging you with conspiracy, being an accessory to first-degree murder, and what was that other charge, Professor?”

  “Bribery, I believe, was the word we had in mind.”

  “That’s right, Bribery. Had it right on the
tip of my tongue. Stand still, Uncle Lot. I mean—what the hell do I mean? Mr. Lutt, I guess. Anyway, I got to read you your rights, so quit bellowing and pay attention. Hey, Frank,” he yelled down over the banisters, “you happen to have a pair of handcuffs on you?”

  “No, but there’s some in the cruiser, Chief. Shall I go get ’em?”

  “I’ll need those for Sill. Get a hunk of rope or something. For crying out loud, Cronk, see if you can work in a plug for a few extra bucks in the supply account, can’t you? How the heck does the town expect me to run a major crackdown with two lousy pairs of handcuffs? Okay, this’ll have to do.”

  Ottermole accepted the length of clothesline his part-time assistant brought him and began securing his new prisoner.

  “Untie me, you oaf,” Lutt shouted. “I demand the right to telephone my lawyer.”

  “Take it easy,” said his nephew-by-marriage just removed. “You’ll be seeing him soon enough. We’ve got Hodger in the lockup already. And we’ll be collecting some of your other pals before the night’s out.”

  “How dare you?”

  “Oh, we dare. See, we nabbed Professor Ungley’s secret files, too. I don’t know why you’re so down on the Ottermoles, Aunt Edna Jean. Look what your own sister married into. Cripes, after this, Edna Mae’ll be ashamed to show her face at the Policemen’s Ball. And you nagged her into blowing half my week’s pay on a new dress so she wouldn’t disgrace her high-toned connections.”

  Leaving Edna Jean Bugleford speechless, Chief Ottermole stalked out of the house with the soap magnate under close custody.

  “Okay,” he said when he’d got Lutt stowed in the back seat next to Frank Lomax, “let’s go get Sill.”

  Ottermole hadn’t even bothered to post a guard on the ex-congressman. He’d known the old man’s habits too well. Arresting Sill was mostly a matter of getting him down the stairs and into the cruiser. When Sill got his eyes far enough open to observe his distinguished fellow Balaclavian trussed up beside him, he did manage to start a drunken harangue about something or other. Lutt snarled, “Shut up,” and for a wonder, Sill shut.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE LOCKUP WAS GETTING crowded by the time Ottermole and his assorted deputies had crammed Sill and Lutt in with Hodger. Cronkite Swope was entranced by the visual effect.

  “Wow, let me get a shot of this. Move in closer and sort of put your hands on the bars, Fred, HERO OTTERMOLE CITES NEED FOR BIGGER LOCKUP OR HIGHER MORAL STANDARD IN COMMUNITY.”

  “Look, I don’t want to hog all the glory,” Ottermole protested, neatly elbowing Frank Lomax out of the way and grinning straight into the camera lens. “Frank, how about you calling Solly Swain over at the apple warehouse? Ask him if he’d mind lending us a closed van to transport some prisoners over to the county jail. They got real cells with beds in ’em over there. Want one of my profile, Cronk?”

  “Why not?”

  Swope didn’t, particularly, but he thought perhaps Edna Mae Ottermole might like it to hang over her mantelpiece. The Fane and Pennon was going to have to get out another extra after tonight’s work. They might as well convert to a daily and be done with it.

  Shandy gave Ottermole a couple more minutes’ vanity-sating time, then he urged, “Come on, let’s get Twerks.”

  “But what about Pommell, and Smuth, and—and whoever?” Swope finished lamely.

  “All things in good order. We have to proceed scientifically. Ask Ottermole.”

  “Yeah,” said the chief. “Okay, Professor. Frank, you stay here and help your uncle Silvester guard the prisoners. Or go get the van if Solly says we can have it.”

  “Why can’t we ask President Svenson to let us borrow one from the college?” put in deputy Joad, who was beginning to feel rather out of it.

  Shandy smiled enigmatically. “President Svenson has other things on his mind just now. Ready, Ottermole?”

  “Yeah. Say, Silvester, if Edna Mae calls, tell her everything’s under control, but for Pete’s sake don’t mention about me arresting her uncle. I got to figure out some way to break the news easy so’s she won’t bean me with the frying pan. Not that he’s really her uncle, you understand, only her aunt’s brother-in-law by marriage. But you know how it is.”

  Silvester Lomax, being after all a Lomax, said he knew just how it was and not to sweat it, Fred. It happened even in the best of families.

  Shandy cleared his throat. Ottermole said he was ready. “You ready too, Cronk?”

  “You bet!” Swope finished putting a fresh film pack into his Polaroid and headed for the station door, a steely glint in one eye and a gleam of pure delight in the other. For him, the ride in the cruiser couldn’t go fast enough, though Shandy was relieved to be out in the night air, away from the unsociable atmosphere around the lockup.

  As they approached Twerks’s mustard-and-chocolate pile, a vast, ominous hulk loomed up from the murk like the last of the dinosaurs. “Yesus, what took you so long?” whispered Thorkjeld Svenson.

  At least he’d probably meant to whisper. To the strung-up senses of Cronkite Swope, the noise suggested the distant roaring of maddened trolls, deep within some mountain cavern. Peter Shandy, on the other hand, thought the president sounded rather cheerful. He always did when he sensed a fight in the offing.

  “Now?” Svenson growled.

  “Now,” Shandy agreed. “Go get him, President.”

  Thorkjeld Svenson strode up to William Twerks’s front door and thumped. The wood was solid walnut, four inches thick. It began to buckle. Fred Ottermole winced.

  “Say, President, could you knock a little softer? He’ll be accusing me of police brutality.”

  “Arrgh,” said the great scholar, and thumped again.

  That fetched Twerks, his sparse, light hair sticking up in little stiff quills around his cannonball head, his Buchanan tartan bathrobe imperfectly clasped around a frame almost as big as Svenson’s.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” he bellowed.

  With so distinguished an audience, Chief Ottermole couldn’t resist the urge to ham it up a little. “You’re what’s going on, Twerks. You’re going on down to the station and join the gang. I’m arresting you for being an accessory to the murder of Professor Ungley and the robbery of his flat. Anything else, Professor Shandy?”

  “You might put in the premeditated murder of Ruth Smuth,” Shandy suggested.

  “Huh? Honest, no kidding?”

  “No kidding,” Shandy assured him. “Go ahead, Ottermole. Stick it to the bastard good and proper.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so. And for the—uh—you sure it was premeditated?”

  “I couldn’t be surer. Isn’t that right, Mr. Twerks?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” snarled the biggest Balaclavian.

  “I’m sure you do. Moreover, I shouldn’t be surprised if you got a fair amount of enjoyment out of strangling Mrs. Smuth. Though I expect you were rather galled at having to take your orders from the person who gave them. You like to think you’re high man on the totem pole, don’t you?”

  “You’re talking through your hat, Shandy. I don’t take orders from anybody. Except—”

  “Go on,” said Thorkjeld Svenson in his gentlest, hence most dangerous, tone. “Who?”

  “Don’t bother trying to get a confession out of him, President,” said Shandy. “The people who’ve been using him as their one-man goon squad had Mrs. Smuth’s death planned well in advance. I found the particulars of their plot neatly documented in the files Ungley kept so scrupulously all those years when we thought he was just sitting around gathering dust. Ruth Smuth was getting too swollen with her own importance. Wasn’t that your problem, Twerks? The group you work for had found her useful enough a few years ago when they organized that misbegotten silo fund for the purpose of getting a hold on the college. Lately, though, she’d been getting too chummy with their other puppet, Claude, and too uppish about trying to run the show her own way. And she’d have taken o
ver, because most of your crowd were getting old and running out of steam. You’re not the man you used to be. Are you, Mr. Twerks?”

  “Like hell I’m not!” Twerks reached up and snatched a set of seven-pronged antlers off the wall. “Get out of here or I’ll kill you all.”

  Stabbing and thrusting like a maddened water buffalo, he began herding them back toward the door. In one mighty leap, Thorkjeld Svenson had grabbed a four-foot elephant tusk and stood before him, waving the tusk like a Viking broadsword.

  “En garde, you bastard.”

  Tusk clashed upon antler as the two human behemoths lunged together. Shards of broken horn filled the air. Twerks hurled the shattered antlers from him and heaved up a staghorn hat rack.

  “Holy cow,” yelled Ottermole. “It’s the Battle of the Titans.”

  “Fred, can’t you stop them?” Cronkite Swope shouted.

  “You crazy? I’m just kicking myself because I didn’t bring the kids. They’re nuts about monster movies.” Ottermole dodged an oncoming corneous prong and found a reasonably safe perch atop a pile of woven cow horns that was probably meant to be a sofa. “Too bad we haven’t got some popcorn. Attaboy, President!”

  “OTTERMOLE COMES OUT SQUARELY ON SIDE OF LAW AND ORDER.” Swope had built himself a barricade of ottomans upholstered in the Buchanan tartan and was pursuing his journalistic calling more or less unscathed by flying chitin. “Darn it, why didn’t I bring a movie camera? Nobody’s going to believe this if I write it up the way it’s happening.”

  To Ottermole’s loudly voiced regret, it didn’t keep happening long. Twerks caught his foot on the head of a tiger skin rug, suffered a bitten instep, and crashed to the floor howling, “Foul!”

  “No foul. Tiger.” Thorkjeld Svenson wiped sweat out of his eyes with the tail of his shirt, cast an expert eye over the chipped end of his elephant tusk, flung it aside, and balled his fists. “Get up and fight, you yellow yackal.”

  Ottermole sighed, disentangled his breeches from the cow horns, and reached for the handcuffs he’d salvaged from Congressman Sill. “Sorry, President Svenson, but I guess I better run him in before you damage the evidence any more.”