Cat Tales (15 page)

Sidley. It's obvious he could whip his weight in arthritic rabbits.

They hauled both Sidley and the untidy body away, then searched the house from top to bottom, pulling out all the drawers, checking for loose floorboards. They made so much racket, I was tempted to vacate again. Living with Sidley isn't rewarding enough to put up with that sort of nonsense. Finally, they strung long yellow tape across all the doors, except mine, and departed.

The prospect of milk vanished, I settled in for a long, hungry afternoon. Outside, the stupid birds carried on with no one to teach them discretion.

S
IDLEY RETURNED that night, “out on bail,” and more distraught than ever. He'd been forced to put up the deed to his rundown bungalow in order to spring himself and now paced the worn floorboards of the living room. They creaked at every other step. “I don't care if Vincent did live next door,” he said. “I had no reason to kill him. We'd barely spoken since he moved in!”

He lurched to a halt in the middle of the floor and we both studied the brownish-red stain. The aroma of blood lingered, more interesting to me, I was fairly certain, than to Sidley, who's never shown the least capacity to appreciate the finer things in life.

“I'm not supposed to be in here,” he said finally. “No one is — it's an official crime scene. But how else am I going to figure out what happened? And besides, I have nowhere else to go."

Well, you could go to the fridge,
I thought helpfully, then nudged his leg with my nose. It was sheer practicality, of course. I always think best on a full stomach.

Sidley tottered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I paced back and forth, rubbing against his pants legs. “Obviously, she wanted me out of the house,” Sidley said as he poured milk into my bowl. “But why? Whoever killed Vincent could have done it anywhere, unless they specifically wanted to implicate me.”

I lapped the milk, thinking. Each time after Sidley left, the invading strangers used the phone. Then later the phone would ring and they answered it. So — it was obvious! To find out what was going on, Sidley should make the phone tell what it knew. It was a dreadful device, capable of the most earsplitting clamor, and I wouldn't have been surprised if it was behind the whole mess. I couldn't imagine why Sidley put up with the cheeky thing in the first place, the way it rang whenever it felt like it, taking his mind off me at the most inopportune moments.

I darted into the living room, leaped onto Sidley's chair, which was beside the telephone, and yowled.

“Shhh!” Sidley grabbed at me. “Hudson, I'm not supposed to be here! No one is! If you're not quiet, someone will call the police again, and this time they won't let me out on bail!”

I slithered out of reach, still yowling. Sometimes Sidley can be so dense.
The phone, idiot!
I thought at him.
Pick up the stupid phone and make it tell what's
been going on in here!

He skirted the chair, attempting to corner me against the end table. I straddled the phone, arched my back, and raked his unprotected hand with bared claws on his next try.
Not me! The phone!

He leaped back, hand in his mouth. “Hudthon!” he said indistinctly around the injured flesh. I nudged the black handset off its stand with my nose and then gazed at it meaningfully with blazing green eyes. The hard plastic shape clattered to the floor and dangled on its curly cord.

Sidley extracted his bleeding hand from his mouth and wrapped it in a handkerchief. “Are you saying the killer might have used the phone?” The springs creaked as he sank down in the chair. “The last number I called was Official Time this morning in order to set my watch, so if I hit the redial button and get a different number, it would be someone the killer called!”

The phone started making those nasty off-the-hook noises that always set my fur on edge. I arched my back and spit at it, so he hastily depressed the biggest button, then pushed one of the smaller ones. The phone sang one of its silly little songs.

“Hello?” Sidley said. “Marie?” His straggly eyebrows rose expressively. “What do you mean — how did I get this number? Someone dialed it from my phone this morning, either before or after they murdered my neighbor in my living room with my own screwdriver!” He flinched, then stared at the handset and shook his head. “She hung up, Hudson. I don't suppose I should be surprised.”

H
EY, don't under estimate yourself, old son, I thought, then curled up, tail to nose, to catnap on the arm of his easy chair.

I was awakened later by a stealthy knock at the front door. I stretched. Not the police, I supposed, since, on those lame television shows Sidley was so fond of, they rarely bothered with proprieties at the homes of suspected murderers.

Sidley, also dozing in the chair, stiffened. “Wha—?”

Ever the poet,
I thought, then trotted to the door to investigate. The traitorous she, Marie, was on the front porch. I detected her particularly noxious reek of squished flowers at once.

“Herm?” she whispered, her voice as smooth as a cat slinking after a robin. “It's me, Marie. Let me in! I want to explain!”

Sidley stumbled up out of the chair. “Explain it to the police!” He snatched up the phone and punched in three quick numbers.

I gazed back over my shoulder at him. He sounded almost forceful, an altogether different sort of Sidley. How unusual.

The lock rattled, then the front door swung inward. Marie ducked under the yellow tape into the living room. She had a key in one hand and a small, but efficient looking gun in the other. “Hang up the phone, Herm. It's too late for dramatics.”

“Oh, I suppose you've come here to admit this morning had more to do with dead bodies than yellow-bellied sapsuckers!”

I laid my ears back as she snatched the phone out of his hand, then slammed it back into its cradle. “Cut the act, Herm. Uncle Emilio knows you're a federal agent,” she said coolly.

“Me?”

“Yes,
you,”
she said. “Face it. Nobody could be as clueless as you pretend to be.”

Sidley sank back into his easy chair.

“You did have us fooled at first,” she said, “but now we're wise to your act. It's time to put our cards on the table. That snake Bert Visotti won't be singing to the feds about Uncle Emilio's business anymore, and you're going to take the fall, unless . . .”

Sidley glanced at the phone, then turned his gaze deliberately aside. His fingers trembled. “Unless?”

“Unless you join the family.”

Sidley was beyond words at this point. I darted up and sat in his lap with my ears flattened.
He doesn't
need another family,
I thought crossly.
He has me.

“I mean, think about it,” Marie went on. “You've made being boring into a fine art. We could send you anywhere, use you to get any sort of information, and no one would ever suspect a thing.
We
certainly wouldn't have, when the feds moved Cousin Bert next door, except you were just too perfect. Nobody can be that bland. You're going to have to lighten up a little.”

Two bright spots of red bloomed in Sidley's colorless cheeks. “Really?” he said in a strained voice. His fingers crept toward the phone. “I hadn't realized I'd overplayed my hand that badly.”

The stupid phone doesn't know anything else,
I thought.
Let's jump her together and scratch her eyes
out.

Sidley's fingers groped. The phone teetered in its cradle, then fell off. He froze and we all three stared. In another second or two, it was going to make those awful off-the-hook noises that always made me want to leap out of my fur. I yowled low in my throat.

“Hang it up, Herm!” Marie was insistent.

“No,” Sidley said quietly. “Hang it up yourself.”

Someone hang it up!
I thought, lashing my tail with anticipated displeasure, but then it was too late. The phone went into its loathsome act, wailing at a pitch that threatened to make my ears bleed. They both ignored it.

“If you won't join us,” Marie said, “Uncle Emilio's instructions are to kill you.”

“Go ahead,” Sidley said. He was pale and rigid and seemed somehow taller than usual. “And then see if you can get one of my other neighbors to take the blame for
that.
Of course, two killings in the same house might look even more suspicious.”

The phone went on caterwauling and I joined in, running back and forth on top of the chair.
Make it
stop!
I thought angrily at Sidley.

“Oh, I don't know,” Marie said. “Remorse and all that. Perhaps you came back to the scene of the crime and then killed yourself out of guilt.”

If neither one of them would shut up that stupid phone, then it was up to me. Otherwise, my brains were going to boil inside my skull and Marie might as well use the gun to put us both out of our misery.

I leaped from the back of the chair and knocked the phone off onto the floor. It kept screeching anyway, so I leaped down and bit its hard plastic head while I tried to disembowel its button-studded belly with my hind claws. I heard a click, then a three note song.

“Get away from that phone!” Marie's voice held a new, frantic note. The living room exploded and something raked me with bared claws. Through a hot red veil, I dimly heard Sidley yelling, Marie screeching. I tried to bite my mysterious attacker, but my teeth closed only on air.

M
y side throbbed as though a raging Airdale had thrown me against a wall. I tried to lift my head to sniff the injury and failed. Whatever was going on, I thought groggily, I was not going to like it.

“He'll be all right, Mr. Sidley,” someone was saying in an aggravatingly cheerful voice.

The air had a familiar reek — metal and plastic and antiseptic. The vet's office! I yowled weakly in disgust. How unfair! It was not even close to shot or fleabath time.

“It's nothing to worry about, hardly more than a flesh wound,” the voice said blithely, though I bet she would have felt differently if it had been
her
flesh. “I'll be able to take the stitches out in a few days.”

“Can I leave him for a couple of hours?” Sidley asked. “I talked the police into bringing me here first, but I have to go down to the station and clear up the details. They've got a squad car waiting out front.”

N
O! I managed to open my eyes. The room raced around in sickening circles as though it'd sniffed too much catnip.
Don't leave me at the vet's, you idiot!

“Of course you can.” The vet reached down to stroke behind my ears and I was too weak to sink my teeth into her hand as she deserved. “Hudson is a hero. He was absolutely brilliant, hitting Redial to call 911 and summon the police. And don't worry about the bill. There won't be any charges. It's the least I can do for such a clever, brave cat.”

“That's very, um, k-kind of you,” Sidley managed, as always, awkward as a six-month-old kitten in the presence of a mateable female. “Perhaps I could repay your kindness to Hudson by t-taking you out to dinner, or —” He looked away and bit his lip. “I don't suppose you like bird-watching?”

No!
I thought at him in desperation.
This is not the
time to finally find your nerve!

“Why, I love bird-watching.” Her face went the most amazing shade of pink as though no one had ever asked her to do something that stupid and boring in her entire life. “When would you like to go?”

I laid my head between my paws and sighed.

S
o, that's all the thanks a cat gets for saving the day, six stitches along the ribcage that preclude any serious attempts at stalking junebugs and subsequent invasions of my home by the vet without warning. I will say that she leaves the wretched needles behind when she visits, and, much to my surprise, she does know exactly where a cat likes to be scratched, not that I ever let on when she's hit that certain spot.

Now, if she could just teach Sidley how to bring home a dead bird from time to time, I might be willing to reconsider my position on this matter. And who knows? Stranger things have happened.

The author tells us, “I wrote ‘Cat Call' as a follow-up to a story titled ‘Cat and Mouse' published in
Crafty Cat Crimes
a few years back, also featuring Hudson
and Sidley. Although I cohabit with 167 pounds of
dog at the moment (Akita + Siberian Hussy — I
mean Huskey), I was once owned by a large grey cat
who decided he would live with me, whether I
wanted him to move in or not. His name was Hudson
and we did very well together.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

by Jack Williamson

T
he day had been great until Janice called. Christmas had always been special, though it was different now. She loved to remember the old days when the whole family got together at Aunt Miranda's. The big dinner, with turkey and ham and Cousin Julia's mincemeat pies, was always on Christmas Eve. The gifts were waiting under the tree, to be opened before breakfast next morning.