The Cat Who Sniffed Glue (7 page)

Qwilleran gazed down at the papers on the floor. To his surprise they were all envelopes. New envelopes. His stationery drawer was open. When he scooped up the scattered items he noticed fang marks in the comers, and all the gummed flaps had been licked clean.
Sitting down in his desk chair he swiveled to face the culprits. He surmised that Yum Yum had opened the drawers with her famous paw, and Koko, who was attracted to any kind of adhesive, had been on a glutinous binge. Once before, he had ungummed a whole sheet of stamps, and had paraded impudently around the apartment with an airmail stamp stuck on his nose.
"Well, my friends," Qwilleran began calmly, "do I have to start locking my desk drawers? What's the matter with you two? Are you bored? Unhappy? Is there something lacking in your life? Is your diet inadequate?"
Koko, the usual spokesman for the pair, had no comment.
"You have epicurean food and the recommended daily allowances of vitamins. Do you realize there are cats who have to scrounge for their food in garbage cans?"
There was no reply.
"Has the cat got your tongue?"
Still no answer. Qwilleran doubted that Koko was even listening.
"You don't know how lucky you are. Some cats live outdoors all year in snow and sleet and torrential rains. You have a steam-heated apartment with private bath, TV, wall-to-wall carpeting, and..."
Qwilleran huffed into his moustache as the truth dawned upon him. Koko - with a glazed expression in his eyes and a peculiar splay-legged stance - was high on glue!
"You devil!" he blurted. And then he had a second thought. Koko never did anything unusual without a good reason. But what could this reason be?
-Scene Seven-
Place: Tipsy's Restaurant in North
Kennebeck
Time: Later that evening
Introducing: POLLY DUNCAN
MR, O'DELL, Qwilleran's
part-time houseman
LORI BAMBA, a friend of
Koko and Yum Yum
WHEN QWILLERAN picked up Polly Duncan at the library he asked, "I'm glad you can have dinner with me. Do you mind if we drive out into the country? The bad news has made me restless and uneasy, I need to talk about it."
Her voice was soft and gentle, with a timbre that he I found both soothing and stimulating, "I understand, I Qwill, A tragedy like this makes people want to huddle together." She gave him a needful glance that was all too brief.
"I thought we might go to go to Tipsy's. Do you know anything about it?"
"The food is good, and it's very popular," Polly said brightly, as if determined to make this a cheerful evening. "Did you know the place was named after a cat? The founder of the restaurant was a cook in a lumbercamp and then a saloonkeeper. During Prohibition he went Down Below and operated a blind pig. After Repeal he came back up here with a black-and-white cat named Tipsy and opened a steakhouse in a log cabin."
"What was his name?"
"Gus. That's all I know. But he was legendary around here, and so was Tipsy. That was fifty or sixty years ago.
The place has changed hands many times, but they always retain the name."
They drove through typical Moose County terrain: rolling pastureland dotted with boulders and sheep, dairy farms with white barns, dark stretches of woods, abandoned mines with the remains of shafthouses. At a fork in the road a signpost indicated that it was three miles to West Middle Hummock. The other branch of the road led to Chipmunk (2 miles) and North Kennebeck (10 miles).
"West Middle Hummock isn't far from Chipmunk, is it?" Qwilleran observed. "A study in contrasts," Polly said. The highway soon ran through a cluster of substandard dwellings: cottages with sagging porches and peeling paint, sheet-metal shacks, trailer homes hardly larger than gypsy wagons, and larger houses advertising rooms to rent.
"The rooming houses were brothels in the early days of Chipmunk," she said.
Youths were hanging around the burger palace and the party store, drinking from cans and blasting the atmosphere with their boom boxes. Qwilleran thought, Are these the rowdies who broke into the school, trashed the dental clinic, and opened the hydrants? Is this where Chad Lanspeak hangs out? Are the Fitch murderers holed up in this town?
North Kennebeck, on the other hand, was a thriving community with a grain elevator, condominiums, an old railway depot converted into a museum, and Tipsy's - a log-cabin restaurant that attracted diners from all parts of the county.
The exterior logs were dark and chinked; the interior was whitewashed and inviting, with rustic furnishings and a casual crowd of diners. Under a spotlight in the main dining room hung a portrait of a white cat with black boots and a black patch that seemed to be slipping down over one eye. It gave her the look of a tipsy matron.
Polly said, "She also had a deformed foot that made her stagger and added to her inebriated image. How are your cats, Qwill?"
"Koko is happy that I've started collecting old books. He prefers biographies. How he can distinguish Plutarch's Parallel Lives from Wordsworth's poems is something I don't understand."
"And how is dear little Yum Yum?"
"That dear little Yum Yum has developed an unpleasant habit that I won't discuss at the dinner table."
He ordered dry sherry for Polly and, for himself, Squunk water with a dash of bitters and a slice of lemon. (The village of Squunk Comers was noted for a flowing well, whose waters were said to be therapeutic.) Raising his glass in a toast, he said, "To the memory of a promising young couple!"
"Harley was an admirable young man," Polly said sadly.
"Koko took an instant liking to him. No one seems to know much about his wife. The paper said they were married in Las Vegas, and I thought that unusual. The affluent families around here seem to like big weddings at the Old Stone Church - with twelve attendants and five hundred guests and a reception at the country club."
"When David and Jill were married, their wedding cost a fortune."
"Harley's wife never came to the Theatre Club, yet the newspaper said both couples were going to the rehearsal and both couples were wearing rehearsal clothes."
Polly raised her eyebrows. "Did you ever read a news story that was completely accurate?"
They consulted the menu. It was no-frills cuisine at Tipsy's, but the cooks knew what they were doing. Polly was happy that her pickerel tasted like fish and not like seasoned bread crumbs. Qwilleran was happy that his steak required chewing. "I always suspect beef that melts in my mouth," he said.
The conversation never strayed far from the Fitch case. Polly worried about Harley's mother, who was a trustee on the library board. "Margaret has very high blood pressure. I'm afraid to think how she may react to the shock. She's such a wonderful person-so generous with her time, always willing to chair a committee or captain a fundraising event - not just for the library, but for the hospital and school. Nigel is the same way. They're beautiful people!"
"Hmmm," Qwilleran mused, unsure how to react to this outpouring of sentiment - so unusual for Polly. "It will be rough on David," he ventured to say. "He and his brother were so close."
"Yes, and David was the more sensitive of the two, but Jill will give him the support he needs. She has a firm grip on her emotions. Did you notice that it was Jill who was quoted in the newspaper? When she and David were married, everyone in the wedding party was nervous except the bride."
"Didn't it surprise you to learn that we've had an armed robbery in Moose County?" he asked.
"It was bound to happen. Firearms are plentiful up here. So many hunters, you know, with rifles, shotguns, handguns. The majority are responsible, law-abiding sportsmen, but... these days anything can happen." She shot him a quick, inquiring glance. "I don't hunt, but I do have a handgun."
Qwilleran's moustache bristled. Her reserved personality, her gentle manner, her quiet voice, her matronly figure, her conservative dress - nothing suggested that she might have a lethal weapon in her possession.
"Living alone on a country road, I feel it's only prudent," she explained. "What's happening Down Below is beginning to happen here. I've seen it coming. I don't like it."
"Why don't you move into town?" he suggested.
"I've lived in that little house ever since Bob died. I adore my little garden. I like the wide-open spaces. I enjoy living on a dirt road and seeing cows in a pasture when I drive to work."
"Sometimes one has to compromise, Polly."
"Compromise doesn't come easily to me."
"I've noticed that," Qwilleran said. Polly declined dessert, but he was unable to resist the lemon-meringue pie.
"Have you ever seen the Fitch estate?" he asked.
"Several times. When Margaret and Nigel lived in the big house, she gave a tea for the library board every Christmas. They have hundreds of acres-beautiful rolling country with woods and meadows and streams and a view of the big lake from the highest hill. The mansion that Cyrus Fitch built in the 1920s is a large rambling place. They say he designed it himself. He was a militant individualist! An avid collector, too. Harley and David grew up there - among big-game trophies, rare books, Chinese-temple sculpture, medieval armor, and all the exotic things that people collected in the twenties if they had money. When David married Jill, his parents built them a modem house on the property. When Harley married, he and his bride moved into the mansion and his parents took a condominium."
"Can one drive into the property?"
"It's a private road, but there's nothing to stop anyone from entering."
"What is there to attract burglars? I can't imagine that the thieves were interested in rare books or mounted rhinoceros heads."
"There was jewelry handed down in the family. I imagine Harley's wife received some of it after they were married."
Qwilleran stroked his moustache thoughtfully. "I have a feeling the killer or killers had been there before."
When they left Tipsy's and started the drive back to Pickax in the first pink of the sunset, he asked, "How do you like the Moose County Something?"
"I rejoice that we have a newspaper once more, but the name is appalling."
"It's only temporary until the readers cast their ballots."
"I was surprised at the size of it."
"It will settle down to twenty-four pages as time goes on. They plan to publish Wednesdays and weekends until the new plant is finished, then go to five days a week. I'm going to write a feature column."
.'What about your novel?" Polly asked sharply.
"Well, Polly, I've reached the painful decision that I'm not geared for producing fiction. For twenty-five years my career was based on ferreting out facts, verifying facts, organizing facts and reporting them accurately. It seems to have stultified my imagination."
"But you've been working on your novel for two years!"
"I've been talking about it for two years," he corrected her. "I'm getting nowhere. Maybe I'm just lazy."
"You disappoint me, Qwill."
"You overestimate me. You were expecting me to be a north-woods Faulkner or a dry-land Melville."
"I was expecting you to write something of lasting value. Now you will simply produce more disposable newspaper prose. Your columns in the Daily Fluxion were always well-written and informative and entertaining, but are you living up to your potential?"
"I know my limitations, Polly. You're setting a goal for me that's unrealistic." He was becoming annoyed.
"It was your idea to write a novel."
"It's every writer's idea to write a novel sooner or later, but not all of us have the aptitude. On my desk I have a bushel of notes and a fistful of half-written pages." Unfortunately his voice was rising. "I need the discipline of a newspaper job! That's why I'm writing a column for the Moose County Something." His tone had a finality that implied: Like it or not!
Polly looked at her watch. They were nearing the center of Pickax. "I enjoyed having dinner with you."
"Won't you come up to the apartment for a nightcap?"
"Not tonight, thanks. I have things to do." Her voice was curt.
The last few blocks were driven in silence. With a brief good-night she transferred to her own car in the library parking lot - the cranberry-red two-door he had given her for Christmas during a surge of holiday spirit, grateful sentiment, and emotional delirium. When she drove away, the blue silk scarf in the gift-wrapped box was still on the back seat of his car, quite forgotten.
It was too good to last, he thought, as he drove around the Park Circle to his carriage house. His relationship with Polly was inevitably coming to an end. Once loving and agreeable, she had become critical. She thought their intimacy gave her license to direct his life, but he was his own man. That was why his marriage had failed a dozen years before.
As he unlocked the door of the carriage house, he heard the telephone ringing, and he ran up the stairs, hoping... hoping that Polly had changed her mind... hoping she had driven a few blocks and had stopped at a phone booth...
The voice he heard, however, was that of Mr. O'Dell, the white-haired houseman who had been school janitor for forty years and now conducted his own one-man janitorial service.
"Sure, an' it's sad news tonight," said Mr. O'Dell. "Young Harley was a good lad, but he married the wrong colleen, I'm thinkin'. Will yourself be needin' me tomorrow, now? It's a new grandson I have in Kennebeck, and the urge is upon me to lay eyes on the mite of a boy."
"By all means take the day off, Mr. O'Dell," said Qwilleran. "Was everything all right when you were here?"
"All but the little one. Herself did her dirty outside the sandbox again. It's bothered about somethin', she is."
Qwilleran immediately phoned Lori Bamba in Mooseville, the young lady who seemed to know all about cats. He described the situation. "Yum Yum has always had good aim until recently. I bought a second commode, thinking she wanted facilities of her own, but she ignores the pan and bestows her souvenirs on the bathroom floor."
"It might be stress," Lori said. "Is she under stress?"
"Stress!" he shouted into the phone. "I'm the one who's under stress! She lives a life of utter tranquility. She has a comfortable apartment with all conveniences - two gourmet meals every day, brushing three times a week. She has a reserved seat on my lap every time I sit down. And I hold intelligent conversations with both of them, the way you recommended."
"Have you made any recent changes in her environment?"
"Only new wallpaper in the living room. I don't see why that should concern her."
"Well," said Lori, "you should observe her closely, and if any other symptoms develop, take her to the doctor."