Милдред Гордон - Undercover Cat

Returning to the office, Zeke hurried past a couple of secretaries who would have asked him to a bowling league tournament if he had paused.

When he had first arrived in the Los Angeles field di­vision a year ago, the switchboard operator, who was a strawberry blonde in her late thirties, had warned him that he wouldn’t “last a month with those ghouls around.” And it was true the girls had used all kinds of pretexts for dates, such as would he like to help with plans for the annual picnic? He, in turn, had invented illnesses and urgent business, and had survived by walking briskly and adopting a desperately busy attitude. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem in keeping with his stature as an FBI agent to bring in a desperate criminal one hour, and the next behave like a fugitive.

He found Bob Newton where he had left him, huddled over his reports. “We’re all set for the surveillance tonight,” he told Newton . “She’s letting us use a back bedroom, and the cat leaves the house about dark, which should be around seven thirty-five. I’m on my way out there now to meet him.”

Newton said, “I wish I wasn’t tied down here. I’d like to see how you go about interviewing a cat.”

“I’m getting paw prints, a photograph, the usual. I’m figuring on working this the same as any case.”

Newton rose to stretch his big frame. “You’re lucky to draw a cat. I get so tired of people.”

Zeke grinned and placed the map of the Randall neigh­borhood before Newton . “As far as she knows, the cat has never ventured more than two miles, to this point here where one Lillian Nelson lives. The cat comes around two and three times a week, Miss Nelson says. She’s assistant to an executive out at 20th Century-Fox, Perry Lieber, and will co-operate with us all the way.”

He took a second to study the map. “I thought we’d show Helen Jenkins’ photo around within this radius, to postmen, clerks in supermarkets and drugstores, apartment house man­agers and janitors – really go through the area. And then we’ll get busy making discreet checks on everyone who’s on the voters’ registration lists, although that will take time, what with about four thousand names.”

Newton nodded approval. He liked the way Zeke con­ducted his investigations. He was not only thorough but moved fast.

Newton cautioned him, “Keep it all quiet, Zeke. Remind everyone working with you to move discreetly. You know without me telling you that if those two guys smell an in­vestigation, the consequences could be tragic. If they panic, the odds are overwhelming they’ll murder the victim.”

After they discussed the number of agents and the kind of equipment they would need for the operation, Zeke said, “I’ve got a problem. How’m I going to file him in the in­formants’ card index?”

Bob Newton raised an eyebrow. “The cat?”

“Please. Don’t refer to him as ‘cat.’ It does something to his ego. Now if I put him down in the reports as D.C. Randall, you know the Bureau. Some guy back there on a desk will tear into us, want to know what the idea is of using initials. And if I put him down as Darn Cat Randall, I hate to think of what will happen. They’ll figure I made it up, that I’m being funny. And what about using Randall? Who ever uses a last name with a cat? But you know the Bureau. Full names.”

Newton pulled the phone over. “I think we’d better talk with Washington .”

At an uncluttered, polished desk in the Department of Justice building, the supervisor on the Bank Robbery desk took the call. He was a husky, big-boned, ex-quarterback who overwhelmed the swivel.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Must be a bad connection.”

He jiggled the phone, listened again, pressing the receiver vise-tight against his ear. “Did you say cat? C-a-t? A plain cat?”

He listened some more. “Yeah. D-a-r-n. Darn Cat. Now look here, Newton , somebody’s pulling your leg

. Who checked it out?

Uh-huh

I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.”

He walked briskly down a long, spotless corridor where an errant piece of paper would have been apprehended as quickly as a criminal, and turned into a door marked: DIRECTOR.

The decision came through from the top. Darn Cat henceforth would be listed in the card index and all reports as Informant X-14. Under the anonymous cloak of X-14, his identity would be held secret for all time, and no one, ex­cept those actually working the case, would know that he was of a species other than human.

6

Patti thought the day surely had gone into extra innings. She was that tired as she strolled into Lingerie modeling an Italian knit. She made a complete turn before two women in their thirties and, when one inquired about it, said, “It is smart, isn’t it? It has that something to it. And it’s only thirty-nine ninety-five in Young Misses on the upper level.”

Young misses? Whom did Bullock’s think it was fooling. No one shopping in Young Misses could produce a driver’s license to prove she belonged in that age group.

She turned in a hurry on hearing the crash, and couldn’t believe what she saw. Greg was on the floor wrestling with a mannequin that he had knocked off a display table, a mannequin wearing only a girdle. He was struggling to get a firm hold so he could replace it.

In a couple of steps she reached him, and rescued the mannequin. “The idea,” she said, “and in public.”

As he straightened his clothes, she snapped the girdle. “I don’t know why women have to wear more harness than a dray horse while men with their pot bellies… .”

She took him by the arm and steered him out of Lingerie. He recovered his legal dignity quickly. “Imagine running into you. I was trying to find Glassware.”

“You came through Glassware on your way to Lingerie.”

He smiled guiltily, and in that instant she was tempted to forget about last night, the horrible things he had said, the threat against D.C.‘s life. Her heart began pounding. To stay mad at him would be like trying to hold a grudge against Cary Grant.

Actually, she had to admit, she did not know Greg too well. Their few chance meetings had produced little more than a passing greeting, or a strong desire on her part to strangle him, especially when he complained about D.C. or permitted his dachshund to continue the slow murder of her apricot tree in the front yard.

Inky and Mike knew him far better. Inky, perhaps too well. He was an older man to fall in love with, the way the girls in novels did. Inky pretended that she almost passed out every time he picked her up in the Thunderbird. Once she had insisted on baking him a batch of cookies, and he had said he had never tasted better, when in truth they had all the flavor of sawdust.

As for the neighborhood women, they behaved ridiculously around him, although they did not approve of his way of life. The idea that a man would want a house complete to garbage disposal and flower gardens, but minus a wife, seemed subversive to all womanhood. And the fact that he could cook, and make up his bed every day, which was testified to by the wife with a window that looked directly into his bedroom, was a frontal assault on womankind. The consensus was, therefore, that he should either get an apart­ment or marry. “If he’ll wait a couple of years,” Inky had said, “I’ll make the house legitimate.”

Now he was saying, “I got a little excited last night. It was just that I worked so hard getting that duck. I almost got pneumonia. I stood all day in a blinding rain – “

“I remember. You stated it so brilliantly last night.”

“I was tired, awfully tired. I’d lost a case I’d worked months on.” He ended lamely, “So you can see how it was with me.”

“Did you mean it when you said you’d take a pot shot at D.C. next time you caught him in your yard?”