The Cat Who Turned on and Off (13 page)

“Twenty-two.”

“Single?”

“Engaged She’s a nice girl. I wanted to give them some antique silver for Christmas, but Dennis doesn’t approve of anything old . . . . Oh, dear! I forgot the presents for the mailman and the milkman. There are two envelopes behind the clock in the kitchen—with a card and a little money in them. Will you see that they get them—in case I don’t come home right away? I wrapped up a little Christmas treat for Koko and Yum Yum, too. It’s in the top drawer of the Empire chest. And tell Ben that I’ll make his bourbon cake when I get back from the—from Cleveland.”

“How do you make bourbon cake?” Keep her talking.

“With eggs and flour and walnuts and raisins and a cup of bourbon.”

“Nothing could beat that coconut cake you made yesterday.”

“Coconut was C.C.’s favorite,” she said, and then she fell silent, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing beyond the windshield.

When Qwilleran returned from the airport in the Cobb station wagon, he saw a fifth of a ton of
Fluxion
photographer squeezing into a Volkswagen at the curb.

“Tiny!” he hailed him. “Did you get everything?”

“I went to five places,” Tiny said. “Shot six rolls.”

“I’ve got another idea. Do you have a wide angle lens? How about shooting a picture of my apartment? To show how people live in Junktown.”

The staircase groaned when the photographer followed Qwilleran upstairs, and Yum Yum gave one
look at the outsize stranger decked with strange apparatus and promptly took flight. Koko observed the proceedings with aplomb.

Tiny cast a bilious glance around the room. “How can you live with these crazy anachronisms?”

“They grow on you,” Qwilleran said smugly.

“Is that a bed? Looks like a funeral barge on the Nile. And who’s your embalmed friend over the fireplace? You know, these junk dealers are a bunch of graverobbers. One guy wanted me to photograph a dead cat, and those three dames with all that rusty tin were swooning over some burial jewelry from an Inca tomb.”

“You’re not tuned in,” Qwilleran said with the casual air of authority that comes easily to a newsman after three days on a new beat. “Antiques have character—a sense of history. See this bookrack? You wonder where it’s been—who owned it—what books it’s held—who polished the brass. An English butler? A Massachusetts poet? An Ohio schoolteacher?”

“You’re a bunch of necrophiles,” said Tiny. “My God! Even the cat!” He stared at Yum Yum, trudging into the room with a small dead mouse.

“Drop that dirty thing!” Qwilleran shouted, stamping his foot.

She dropped it and streaked out of sight. He scooped up the gray morsel on a sheet of paper, rushed it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

After Tiny had left, Qwilleran sat at his
typewriter, aware of an uncommon silence in the house. The cats were snoozing, the Cobb radio was quiet, Ben was about his business elsewhere, and The Junkery was closed. When the doorbell rang, it startled him.

There was a man waiting on the stoop—an ordinary-looking man in an ordinary-looking gray car coat.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m Hollis Prantz. I have a shop down the street. Just heard the bad news about brother Cobb.”

Qwilleran nodded with the appropriate amount of gloom.

“Rotten time of year to have it happen,” said Prantz. “I hear Mrs. Cobb has left town.”

“She went to Cleveland for the funeral.”

“Well, tell you why I came. Cobb was saving some old radios for me, and I could probably unload them in my shop during the shindig tomorrow. Mrs. Cobb would appreciate it, I’m sure. Every little bit helps at a time like this.”

Qwilleran waved toward The Junkery. “Want to go in and have a look?”

“Oh, they wouldn’t be in their shop. Cobb had put them aside in his apartment, he said.”

The newsman took time to pat his moustache before saying, “Okay, go on upstairs,” and he added, “I’ll help you look.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll find them.” The dealer bounded up the stairs, two at a time.

“No trouble,” Qwilleran insisted, following as
quickly as he could and trying to catch a glimpse of the man’s boot soles. He stayed close behind as Prantz opened a coat closet, the window seat, the armoire.

“Look, friend, I hate to take up your time. I know you must be busy. You’re writing that series for the paper, they tell me.”

“No problem,” said Qwilleran. “Glad to stretch my legs.” He watched the dealer’s eyes as they roved around the apartment and returned repeatedly to the desk—the apothecary desk with its tall bank of miniature drawers. Crowded on top of the lofty superstructure were some pewter candlesticks, the stuffed owl, a tin box, a handful of envelopes, and the Cobbs’ overworked radio.

“What I’m interested in,” said Prantz, “is equipment from the early days—crystal sets and old beehive radios. Not so easy to come by . . . . Well, sorry to trouble you.”

“I’ll be in to see your shop,” Qwilleran said, ushering him out of the apartment.

“Sure! It’s a little unusual, and you might get a bang out of it.”

The newsman looked at the dealer’s footwear. “Say, did you buy those boots around here? I need a pair like that.”

“No, these are old,” said Prantz. “I don’t even remember where I bought them, but they’re just ordinary boots.”

“Do the soles have a good grip?”

“Good enough, although the treads are beginning to wear slick.”

The dealer left without offering Qwilleran a view of his soles, and the newsman telephoned Mary Duckworth at once. “What do you know about Hollis Prantz?” he asked.

“Not much. He’s new on the street. He sells tech-tiques, whatever they may be.”

“I noticed his shop the first day I was here. Looks like a TV repair shop.”

“He has some preposterous theories.”

“About what?”

“About ‘artificially accelerated antiquity.’ Frankly, I haven’t decided whether he’s a prophetic genius or a psychopath.”

“Has he been friendly with the Cobbs?”

“He tries to be friendly with everyone. Really
too
friendly. Why are you interested?”

“Prantz was just over here. Invited me to see his shop,” the newsman said. “By the way, have you ever been to the Ellsworth house?”

“No, I haven’t, but I know which one it is. The Italianate sandstone on Fifteenth Street.”

“When you go scrounging, do you ever take Hepplewhite?”

“Scrounging! I never go scrounging! I handle nothing but eighteenth century English.”

After his conversation with Mary, Qwilleran looked for Koko. “Come on, old boy,” he said to the room at large. “I’ve got an assignment for you.”

There was no response from Koko, but Yum Yum
was staring at the third shelf of the book cupboard, and that meant he was snuggling behind the biographies. That’s where Qwilleran had first met Koko—on a shelf between the lives of Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci.

He pulled the cat out and showed him a tangle of blue leather straps and white cord. “Do you know what this is?”

Koko had not worn the harness since the day in early autumn when he had saved Qwilleran’s life. On that occasion he had performed some sleight-of-paw with the four yards of nylon cord that served as a leash. Now he allowed the halter to be slipped over his head and the belt to be buckled under his soft white underside. His body pulsed with a rasping purr of anticipation.

“We’ll leave Yum Yum here to mind the house,” Qwilleran told him, “and we’ll go and play bloodhound.”

As soon as the apartment door was opened, Koko bounded like a rabbit toward the furniture stacked at the front end of the hall, and before Qwilleran could haul in the cord, the cat had squeezed between the spindles of a chair, scuttled under a chest of drawers, circled the leg of a spinning wheel, and effectively tangled the leash, leaving himself free to sniff the finial hidden in the jumble.

“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Qwilleran said, as he worked to free the cord and extricate the cat. Some minutes later, he lugged the protesting Koko, squirming and squawking, to the door of the
Cobb apartment. “I have news for you. This is where we’re going to explore.”

Koko sniffed the corner of the worn Oriental rug before setting foot on it. Then, to Qwilleran’s delight he walked directly to the apothecary desk, stopping only to scratch his back on a copper coal-hod filled with magazines. At the desk Koko hopped to the chair seat and then to the writing surface, where he moved his nose from right to left across an envelope that had come in the mail.

“Find anything interesting?” Qwilleran inquired, but it was only a telephone bill.

Next Koko reared on his haunches and regarded the bank of small drawers—twenty-four of them with white porcelain knobs—and selected one on which to rub his jaw. His white fangs clicked on the white ceramic, and Qwilleran gingerly opened the drawer he indicated. It contained a set of false teeth made of wood. Guiltily the newsman opened other drawers and found battered silver spoons, primitive eyeglasses, tarnished jewelry, and a few bracelets made of hair. Most of the drawers were empty.

While Qwilleran was thus occupied, a feather floated past his nose. Koko had stealthily risen to the top of the drawer deck and was nuzzling the stuffed owl.

“I might have known!” Qwilleran said in disgust. “Get down! Get away from that bird!

Koko sailed to the floor and stalked haughtily from the apartment, leading the newsman behind him on a slack leash.

“I’m disappointed in you,” the man told him. “You used to be good at this sort of thing. Let’s try the attic.”

The attic room had been romantically remodeled to resemble a barn, the walls paneled with silvery weathered planks and hung with milking stools, oil lanterns, and old farm implements. A papier-mâché steer, relic of a nineteenth century butcher shop, glared out of a corner stall, and a white leghorn brooded on a nest of straw.

In the center of the room, chairs were arranged in a circle, and Qwilleran was fascinated by their decrepitude. He noted an ice cream parlor chair of wire construction, badly bent; a Windsor with two spindles missing; a porch rocker with one arm, and other seating pieces in various stages of collapse. While he was viewing these derelicts, Koko was stalking the white feathered biddy on her nest.

The man yanked the leash. “I don’t know what’s happened to you,” he said. “Pigeons—owls—hens! I think I’m feeding you too much poultry. Come on. Let’s go.”

Koko rushed downstairs and clamored to get into his apartment, where Yum Yum was calling him with high, pitched mews.

“Oh, no, you don’t! We have one more investigation to make. And this time try to be objective.”

In Ben’s apartment furniture was herded together without plan, and every surface was piled high with items of little worth. Ben’s long knitted muffler was draped incongruously over the chandelier, dangling
its soiled tassels, and his many hats—including the silk topper and the Santa Claus cap—were to be seen on tables, hatracks, chair seats and lamp chimneys.

Qwilleran found the apartment layout similar to his own, with the addition of a large bay window in the front. With one ear tuned to the sound of a downstairs door opening, he stepped cautiously into each room, finding dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and a ring in the bathtub, as he had expected. In the dressing room, jammed to the ceiling with bundles and boxes, he looked for boots, but Ben, wherever he was, had them on his feet.

“No clues here,” Qwilleran said, starting toward the door and casually lifting his red feather from Ben’s silk topper. He yanked the leash. “And you’re no help any more. It was a mistake to get you a companion. You’ve lost your talent.”

He had not noticed Koko, sitting up like a squirrel, batting the tassels of Ben’s long scarf.

When the time came for the meeting in Hernia Heaven, Qwilleran climbed to the third floor with some discomfort. His bad knee, although it had improved during the day, tightened up at nightfall, and he arrived at the meeting with a noticeable limp.

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.

“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.”