Милдред Гордон - Undercover Cat

Ingrid yelled, “Michael!” and Mike quit, much to D.C.‘s displeasure. He crawled along the bed after Mike, shooting out a paw, trying to pull him back.

Mike straightened. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Kelso, old D.C. will take you straight to those guys tonight. He’s braver than most anybody. He wouldn’t be scared to walk right into gun­fire. We’ve got this police dog down the street, the biggest police dog you ever saw, but he doesn’t come up around here since D.C. ran him out a year ago.”

Mike added, “I’ll wait until tomorrow to fire the other rocket.”

He left, and Ingrid followed. She stopped as she passed Zeke, standing quite close to him. “You’re so masterful,” she said. “I wish the boys at school were, but let’s face it, they don’t measure up. They absolutely don’t.”

When she was gone he sat down again in the robin’s-egg-blue chair, and ran his long, bony fingers along the heavy cording. D.C. paused in his ablutions to glare at him, and Zeke glared back. “It’s mutual, chum. It’s mutual.”

Two hours to go.

In the kitchen Ingrid mixed up a batch of scrabble. “He hates me. He just hates me. And it hurts so. I was only trying to help the FBI with the fingerprinting and all. But he thinks I helped the enemy, and he’s never going to sleep on my bed again. He went straight to your room after it happened. Acted like I wasn’t on earth. When I tried to make up, he moved away, like I wasn’t there, and – “

“He’ll get over it,” Patti told her. “He’ll stay in my room for a while to teach you a lesson.”

Ingrid nodded. “I know just how he feels. He’ll forgive me, but not right away.”

After tasting the scrabble, she tossed in another sack of peanuts. “Greg picked me up on the way home from school. Said he’d been looking everywhere for me because he wanted my advice on how to handle a girl who went to him to get a divorce.”

Patti interrupted. “Let me get this straight. He wants your advice?” She added to herself, “Oh, brother!”

“She’s about my age – well, she’s seventeen – and she’s been married only six months. To a high school guy she’s known since she was a kid. And do you know what’s bothering her?”

Invariably she hastened to answer her own questions before anyone else could. “Her husband doesn’t open car doors for her like he did before they were married, or light cigarettes, and carry in the groceries. So she thinks he doesn’t love her any more, and she wants Greg to get her a divorce, but Greg is trying to talk her out of it, although he’ll lose two hundred dollars – that’s how much he charges for a divorce – and he really needs the two hundred.”

“And of course he consulted you. Natch note 7. Since you’re an authority on love.”

“All right! Anyway, he wanted to try out his approach on me. Get my reaction, he said.”

The doorbell rang and Patti hurried to answer. A neighbor woman handed her a letter from her parents that had been delivered by mistake. Patti let out a yell that brought Ingrid and Mike, and they sat on the arms of the overstuffed chair while her fingers ripped into the envelope, which bore the postmark, Helvetia .

” Helvetia ?” asked Mike. “Where’s that?”

” Switzerland , you dumb bunny,” Ingrid told him.

“Well, why don’t they say so?”

Patti took two notes out, one from each of their parents. Their dad wrote about Lucerne , Switzerland . He told how the English had colonized Lucerne , “a former Swiss town,” but, with the usual English diplomacy, permitted the Swiss to fly the Swiss flag and, also with typical English courtesy, tol­erated a certain number of American and German travelers to visit the colony.

Mike said, “He’s as funny as Art Buchwald.”

“Who’s he?” Ingrid asked.

Mike emitted a worldly sigh. “I’m surrounded by morons. I battle ignorance day after day.”

“You don’t know either,” Ingrid countered. “You see a name somewhere and you go around acting like you know him.”

Patti read the note from their mother, who recounted what they had seen in Italy . Their mother would squeeze every possible dollar’s worth out of the trip. She would visit every art gallery and museum and take every tour that could be managed on a back-breaking, foot-wrecking, fourteen-hour-a day schedule. Their dad would go along willingly, although he would prefer to wander down little back streets, and poke into out-of-the-way places, and eat at small inns, and sit at sidewalk cafes, and watch the crowds go by. He was interested in people alive and on the hoof, not in the venera­tion of the old because it was old. He would remark that what the place needed was a wrecking crew to clean up the debris of a thousand years, and their mother would be shocked, not knowing that the people living in the area wished the same, that nights many of them looked at maga­zine pictures of modern bathrooms and yearned for them, but knew they would have to content themselves with the same old drab w.c. note 8 to the end of their days.

This time, their mother’s recital was briefer than usual. As she closed, she wrote, “We’re seeing so many wondrous places that Dad and I’ve dreamed about since we were first married, but sometimes I wonder if it’s worth taking six weeks out of our lives with you, when we have such little time to enjoy you before you grow up and are gone. Our hearts are with you every day, no matter where we go. We love you all so much, and being away seems to make the love a little more precious, until at times it hurts.”

When Patti finished, they sat quiet a long moment, deeply moved. Then Patti said briskly, “Let’s get dinner. They haven’t died, you know.”

Mike cleared his throat. “The minute they get back, I’m going to hit them up for a bicycle, before they forget how much they love me.”

Ingrid turned on him. “You’re horrible. Absolutely horrible. Isn’t he horrible, sis?”

11

Sammy left at seven to pick up the morning newspapers from the large stand at the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys. They bought the newspapers religiously. They remembered a friend, old Al Bricker, a smalltime gangster, who had been apprehended because he failed to read the night before that an informant had tipped off the police. Dan had said, “I read it someplace, knowledge is power, and that’s a truth if there ever was one. We’ll play it the way the big shot executives do. They read everything they can get their hands on about their competitors.”

To date, their reading had provided them with little knowl­edge. The police, and hence the newspapers, apparently knew nothing beyond the bare facts concerning the commission of the crime. Knowing this gave the two a sense of security and eased the tension.

This morning, however, when Sammy returned, he was chewing his gum hard, they way he did when he was shaken. “That dame up front,” he said, referring to the landlady. “She stopped me, and I know she’d been waiting for me to come along. I could tell ‘cause the door opened real quick-like. Not like when somebody’s going out.”

“Get to the point,” Dan snapped.

“Cripes, give me a chance. Well, she stopped me with a good morning, and I tried to hurry by but she asked me be­fore I could, how was your wife. Getting better, I told her. She said she’d cooked a chicken and had some broth and would bring it in. I said she was on a diet. What kind of a diet, she asks me. Never heard tell, she says, of a bronchitis patient being on a diet. I said she’d gone into something worse, and she asked me what, and I said the prethers, and we had to be careful what we gave her.”

“What else?” Dan demanded impatiently.

“That was it. We got to move fast. We’ve got to get rid of the broad before that dame comes around.”