The Cat Who Turned On and Off

by Lilian Jackson Braun

  Mary was waiting for him in the walled garden, and although she was warmly wrapped, she was shaking. "Wh — what was the matter?" "Just a drunk," he told her. "You'd better get indoors before you catch cold. You're shivering." They went upstairs, and Qwilleran prescribed hot drinks for both of them.

  As Mary warmed her hands on her coffee cup, he studied her face. "You were telling me — just before the dog barked — about your recurrent dream." She shuddered. "It was a nightmare! I suppose I was feeling guilty because I had been unpleasant to Andy." "What did you dream?" "I dreamed… I kept dreaming that I had pushed Andy to his death on that finial!" Qwilleran paused before making his comment. "There may be an element of fact in your dream." "What do you mean?" "I have a hunch that Andy's death was not an accidental fall from a ladder." As he said it, he again felt the telltale prickling in his moustache.

  Mary became defensive. "The police called it an accident." "Did they investigate? Did they come to see you? They must have inquired who found the body." She shook her head.

  "Did they interview people in the neighborhood?" "It was not necessary. It was obviously a mishap. Where did you get the idea that it might have been… anything else?" "One of your talkative neighbors — this morning — " "Nonsense." "I assumed he must have some reason for calling it murder." "Just an irresponsible remark. Why would anyone say such a thing?" "I don't know." Then Qwilleran watched Mary's eyes grow wide as he added, "But by a strange coincidence, the man who told me is now on his way to the morgue." Whether it was that statement or the startling sound of the telephone bell, he could not tell, but Mary froze in her chair. It rang several times.

  "Want me to answer?" Qwilleran offered, glancing at his watch.

  She hesitated, then nodded slowly. He found the phone in the library across the hall. "Hello?… Hello?… Hello?

  … They hung up," he reported when he returned to the living room. Then noticing Mary's pallor, he asked, "Have you had this kind of call before? Have you been getting crank calls? Is that why you stay up late?" "No, I've always been a night owl," she said, shaking off her trance. "My friends know it, and someone was probably phoning to — discuss the late movie on TV. They often do that. Whoever it was undoubtedly hung up because of hearing a man's voice. It would appear that I had company, or it might have seemed to be a wrong number." She talked too fast and explained too much. Qwilleran was unconvinced.

  7

  Qwilleran went home through snow that was ankle-deep, its hush accentuating the isolated sounds of the night: a blast of jukebox music from The Lion's Tail, the whine of an electric motor somewhere, the idle bark of a dog. But first he stopped at the all-night drugstore on the corner and telephoned the Fluxion's night man in the Press Room at Police Headquarters and asked him to check two Dead on Arrivals from the Junktown area.

  "One came in tonight and one October sixteenth," Qwilleran said. "Call me back at this number, will you?" While he was waiting, he ordered a ham sandwich and considered the evidence. The death of the man in a horse- blanket coat might have no significance, but the fear in Mary's eyes was real and incontrovertible, and her emphatic insistence that Andy's death was an accident left plenty of room for conjecture. If it was murder, there had to be motive, and Qwilleran had an increasing curiosity about the young man of superior integrity who made citizen's arrests. He knew the type. On the surface they looked good, but they could be troublemakers.

  The phone call came in from the police reporter. "That October DOA was filed as accidental death," he said, "but I couldn't get any dope on the other one. Why don't you try again in the morning?" Qwilleran went home, tiptoed up the protesting stairs of the Cobb mansion, unlocked his door with the big key, and searched for the cats. They were asleep on their blue cushion on top of the refrigerator, curled together in a single mound of fur with one nose, one tail and three ears. One eye opened and looked at him, and Qwilleran could not resist stroking the pair. Their fur was incredibly silky when they were relaxed, and it always appeared darker when they were asleep.

  Soon after, he settled in his own bed, hoping that his mates at the Press Club never found out he was sleeping in a swan boat.

  It was then that he heard the odd sound — like soft moaning. It was the purring of cats, but louder. It was the cooing of pigeons, but more guttural. It had a mechanical regularity, and it seemed to be coming from the partition behind his bed — the wall that was papered with book leaves. He listened — keenly at first, then drowsily, and the monotony of the sound soon lulled him to sleep. He slept well that first night in the Cobb mansion, dreaming pleasantly of the Mackintosh coat of arms with its three snarling cats and its weathered blues and reds. His pleasurable dreams were always in color; others were in sepia, like old-time rotogravure.

  On Saturday morning, as he began to emerge from slumber, he felt a great weight pressing on his chest. In the first stages of waking, before his eyes were open and before his mind was clear, he had a vision of the iron coat of arms, crushing him, pinning him to the bed. He struggled to regain his senses, and as he succeeded in opening his eyelids, he found himself staring into two violet-blue eyes, slightly crossed. Little Yum Yum was sitting on his chest in a compact and featherweight bundle. He took a deep breath of relief, and the heaving of his chest pleased her. She purred. She reached out one velvety paw and touched his moustache tenderly. She used the stubble on his chin to scratch the top of her head.

  Then, from somewhere overhead, came an imperious command. Koko was sitting on the tail of the swan, making pronouncements in a loud voice. Either he was ordering breakfast, or he was deploring Yum Yum's familiarity with the man of the house. Koko seemed to have strong ideas about priorities.

  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 consomm‚, 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, tho
ugh." "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 thir-teen. 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 mo-ment, 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 ‚clat. 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 farm- house 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 under- stand. 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.

  8

  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.