The Collection (149 page)

“Was there?”

“Yes. There was more than enough; five hundred and ten
dollars, to be exact. There wasn't any will, and there wasn't any estate,
except the money left over after the cremation, and some furniture. The
landlord, the guy who owned the house and had rented it to Lasky, made the
court an offer for the furniture and they accepted it. Said he was going to
leave it in the house, and rent the place furnished.”

I asked, “What happens to the money?”

“I dunno. Guess if no heir appears and no claims are made
against the estate, the state keeps it. It wouldn't amount to very much.”

“Did he have any source of income?”

“None that could be found. The police guess was that he'd
been living on cash capital, and the fact that it had dwindled down to a few
hundred bucks was part of why he gave himself that shot of morphine. Or maybe
he was just crazy.”

“Shot?” I asked. “Did he take it intravenously?”

“Yes. Say, the gang's been asking about you. Where are you
hiding out?”

I almost told him, and then I remembered how close I had
come this evening to getting a composition started. And I remembered that I
wasn't lonesome any more, either.

I said, “Thanks, Monty. I'll be looking you up again some of
these days. If anyone asks, tell 'em I'm rooming with an Eskimo in Labrador. So
long.”

I went back to Ruth and told her. “Everything's on the up
and up. Lasky's dead, and the cat is dead. Only the cat is over in my living
room.”

I went across the back way, as I had come, and let myself in
at the kitchen door. The cat was still there, asleep again in the Morris chair.
He looked up as I came in, and damn if he didn't say “Miaourr?” again, with an
interrogative accent.

I grinned at him. “I don't know,” I admitted. “I only wish
you could talk, so you could tell me.”

Then I turned out the lights, so I could see out better than
anyone outside could see in. I pulled a chair up to the window and watched
Ruth's house.

Soon the downstairs light went out, and an upstairs one
flashed on. Shortly after that I saw a man and woman who were undoubtedly
Ruth's uncle and aunt let themselves in the front door with a key. Then,
knowing she was no longer alone over there, I made the rounds of my own place.

Both front and back doors were locked, with the key on the
inside of the front door, and a strong bolt in addition to the lock was on the
back door. I locked all the windows that would lock; two of them wouldn't.

On the top ledge of the lower pane of each of those two
windows, I set a milk bottle, balanced so it would fall off if anyone tried to
raise the sash from the outside. Then I turned out the lights.

Yellow eyes shone at me from the seat of the Morris chair. I
answered their plain, if unspoken, question. “Cat, I don't know why I'm doing
this. Maybe I'm crazy. But I think you're bait, for someone, or something. I
aim to find out.”

I groped my way across the room and sat down on the arm of
his chair. I rubbed my hand along his sleek fur until he purred, and then,
while he was feeling communicative, I asked him, “Cat, how did you ring that
doorbell?” Somehow there in the quiet dark I would not have been too surprised
if he had answered me.

I sat there until my eyes had become accustomed to the
darkness and I could see the furniture, the dark plateau of the grand piano,
the outlines of the doorways. Then I walked over to one of the windows and
looked out. The moon was on the other side of the house; I could see into the
yard, but no one outside would be able to see me standing there.

Over there, diagonally toward the alley, in the shadow of
the group of three small linden trees— Was that a darker shadow? A shadow that
moved slightly as though a man were standing there watching the house?

I couldn't be sure; maybe my eyes and my imagination were
playing tricks on me. But it was just where a man would stand, if he wanted to
keep an eye on both the front and back approaches of the cottage.

I stood there for what seemed to be a long time, but at last
I decided that I'd been mistaken. I went back to the Morris chair. This time I
put Satan One-and-a-Half down on the floor and used the chair myself. But I'd
scarcely settled myself before he had jumped up in my lap. In the stillness of
the room, his purring sounded like an outboard motor. Then it stopped and he
slept.

For a while there were thoughts running through my mind.
Then there were only sounds — notes. My fingers itched for the piano keys, and
I wished that I hadn't started this damnfool vigil. I
had
something, and
I wanted to turn on the lights and write it down. But I couldn't do that, so I
tried memorizing it.

Then I let my thoughts drift free again, because I knew I
had what I'd been trying to get. But my thoughts weren't free, exactly. They
seemed to belong to the girl, Ruth Carson. . . .

I must have been asleep, because she was sitting there in
the room with me, but she wasn't paying any attention to me.

We were both listening respectfully to the enormous black
cat which was sitting on the piano while it told us how to ring doorbells by
telekinesis.

Then the cat suggested that Ruth come over and sit on my
lap. She did. A very intelligent cat. It stepped down from the top of the piano
onto the keyboard and began to play, by jumping back and forth among the keys.
The cat led off with

“La Donna e Mobile” and then — of all tunes to hear when the
most beautiful girl in the world is sitting on your lap — he started to play
“The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Of course Ruth stood up. I tried to stand, too, but I
couldn't move. I struggled, and the struggle woke me.

My lap
was
empty. Satan One-and-a-Half had just
jumped off. It was so quiet that I could hear the soft pad of his feet as he
ran for the window. And there was a sound at the window.

There was a face looking through the glass — the face of a
man with a white beard!

My hunch had been right. Someone had come for the cat.

Lasky, who was dead of morphine, had come back for his black
cat which had been run over by an auto and was buried in the back yard. It
didn't make sense, but there it was. I wasn't dreaming now.

For an instant I had an eerie feeling of unreality, and then
I fought through it and jumped to my feet. The cat, at least, was real.

The window was sliding upward. The cat was on its hind feet,
forepaws on the window sill. I could see its alert head with pointed black ears
silhouetted against the gray face on the other side of the window.

Then the precariously balanced milk bottle fell from the
upper ledge of the window. Not onto the cat, for it was in the center, and I'd
made the bottle less conspicuous by putting it to one side. While the window
was still open only a few inches, the milk bottle struck the floor inside. It
shattered with a noise that sounded, there in the quiet room, like the
explosion of a gigantic bomb.

I was running toward the window by now, and jerking the
flashlight out of my pocket as I ran. By the time I got there, the man and the
cat were both gone. His lace had vanished at the sound of the crash, and the
cat had wriggled itself through the partly open window and vanished after him.

I threw the window wide, hesitating for an instant whether
or not to vault across the sill into the yard. The man was running diagonally
toward the alley, and the cat was running with him. Their course would take
them past the linden trees where I'd thought, earlier, I'd seen the darker
shadow of a watcher.

Half in and half out of the window, still undecided whether
this was my business or not, I flipped the switch of my flashlight and threw
its beam after the fleeing figure.

Maybe it was my use of that flashlight that caused the death
of a man. Maybe it wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Maybe the man with the beard would have run past the watcher
in the trees without seeing him. And certainly, as we learned afterward, the
watcher had no good reason to have made his presence known.

But there he was, in the beam of my flashlight — the second
man, the one who'd been hiding among the lindens. It was Milo Haskins.

The bearded man had been running away from the house; now at
the sight of Haskins standing there between him and the alley, directly in his
path, he pulled up short. His hand went into a pocket for a gun.

So did Haskins's hand, and Haskins fired first. The bearded
man fell.

There was a black streak in the air, and the cat had
launched itself full at the pasty moonface of Milo Haskins. He fired at the cat
as it flew through the air at his face, but he shot high; the bullet shattered
glass over my head. The bearded man's gun was still in his hand, and he was
down, but not unconscious. He raised himself up and carefully shot twice at
Haskins.

I must have got out of the window and run toward them, for I
was there by that time. Haskins was falling. I made a flying grab at the
bearded man's automatic, but the man with the beard was dead. He'd fired those
last two shots, somehow, on borrowed time.

I scooped up Haskins's revolver. The cat had jumped clear as
he had fallen; it crouched under the tree.

I bent over Haskins. He was still alive but badly hurt.

Lights were flashing on in neighboring houses, and windows
were flying up. I stepped clear of the trees and saw Ruth Carson's face, white
and frightened, leaning out of an upper window of her house.

She called, “Brian, are you all right? What happened?”

I said, “I'm all right. Will you phone for a police
ambulance?”

“Aunt Elsa's already phoning the police. I'll tell her.”

• • •

We didn't learn the whole story until almost noon the next
day, when Lieutenant Decker called. Of course we'd been making guesses, and
some of them were fairly close.

I let Lieutenant Becker in and he sat down — not in the
Morris chair — and told us about it. He said, “Milo Haskins isn't dying, but he
thought he was, and he talked. Lasky was Walter Burke.” He stopped as though
that ought to make sense to us, but it didn't, so he went on:

“He was famous about fifteen years ago — Public Enemy Number
Four. Then no one heard of him after that. He simply retired, and got away with
it.

“He moved here and took the name of Lasky, and became an
eccentric cuss. Not deliberately; he just naturally got that way, living alone
and liking it.”

“Except for the cat,” I said.

“Yeah, except for the cat. He was nuts about that cat.

Well, a year or so ago, this Haskins found out who his
neighbor across the street was. He wrote a letter to the police about it, put
the letter in a deposit box, and started in to blackmail Lasky, or Burke.”

“Why a letter to the police?” Ruth asked. “I don't see—”

I explained that to her. “So Lasky couldn't kill him and get
clear of the blackmail that way. If he killed Haskins, the letter would be
found. Go on, Lieutenant.”

“Burke had to pay. Even if he ran out, Haskins could put the
police on his trail and they might get him. So he finally decided to fool
Haskins — and everybody else — into thinking he was dead. He wanted to take the
cat with him, of course, so the first thing he did was to fake its death. He
boarded it out to a cat farm or cat kennel or whatever it would be, and got
another black cat, killed it, and buried it so people would notice. Also that
gave color to the idea of his committing suicide. Everybody knew he was crazy
about the cat.

“Then, somewhere, maybe by advertising, he found a man about
his age and build, and with a beard. He didn't have to resemble Lasky
otherwise, the way Lasky worked it.

“I don't know on what kind of a story Lasky got the other
guy here, but he did, and he killed him with morphine.

Meanwhile, he'd written the suicide note, timed his phone
call to the police telling them he'd taken morphine, and then ducked out —
with, of course, the balance of his money.

When the police got here, they found the corpse.”

“But wouldn't they have got somebody to identify it?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “I suppose, technically, they
should have. But there wasn't any relative or friend to call in. And there
didn't seem to be any doubt. There was the suicide note in Lasky's handwriting,
and he'd phoned them. I guess it simply never occurred to anyone that further
identification was necessary.

“And none of his neighbors, except maybe Haskins, knew him
very well. He'd probably trimmed the other guy's beard and hair to match his,
and probably if any neighbor had been called down to the morgue, they might
have made identification. A man always looks different anyway, when he's dead.”

I said, “But last night why did Haskins—?”

“Coming to that,” said the lieutenant. “Somehow the cat got
lost from Lasky. I mean Burke. Maybe he just got around to calling for it where
it'd been boarded, and found it had got away, or maybe he lost it himself,
traveling, before it got used to a new home. Anyway, he figured it'd find its
way back here, and that's why he took the risk of coming back to get it.

See?”

“Sure. But what about Haskins?” I asked.

“Haskins must have seen the cat come back,” said the
lieutenant.

I nodded, remembering that Haskins had been mowing his lawn
when I'd gone to the door.

“He realized it was Lasky's cat and that Lasky had tricked
him. If the cat was alive, probably Lasky was too.

He figured Lasky would come back for the cat, and he watched
the house for that reason. First he tried to get you to give him the cat by
saying it was his. He figured he'd have an ace in the hole if he had the cat
himself.

“He didn't intend to kill Lasky; he had no reason to. He
just wanted to follow him when he left, and find out where he was and under
what identity, so he could resume the blackmail. But Lasky saw him there when
you turned on the flashlight. Lasky went for a gun. Haskins had brought one
because he knew he was dealing with a dangerous man. He beat Lasky, I mean
Burke, to the draw. That's all.”