Милдред Гордон - Undercover Cat

As she handed him the tissues, she said, “I’ve never seen an FBI man before, except in the movies. I saw Glenn Ford in Experiment in Terror. I thought he was positively, def­initely terrific, didn’t you?”

This was no time to bring up Glenn Ford, he thought. The comparison at this moment between Mr. Ford and himself was devastating.

“He sure was.” Blast Glenn Ford, he thought. If he had been allergic to cat fur, he wouldn’t have looked so good either.

Ingrid cuddled D.C. and rubbed his ears. “I’m sorry I had to wake you up, terribly sorry, but it is almost one o’clock and time for your breakfast. I’ll feed you real good, and you’ll feel better then.”

D.C. licked her and switched his high-fidelity purr to maximum volume.

She turned to Zeke. “Patti says we love him for different reasons. I love him because I need something to mother and care for, and Patti loves him because he’s an old friend, sort of like a comfortable old shoe.”

Patti was so perceptive. She said that for Mike , D.C. was a link with a boyhood that was slipping away, and that he wanted to hold to: days spent stretched out in the back yard under the Chinese elm with D.C. scampering about like a puppy, and Mike throwing a stick, and D.C. retrieving it. And then both dead tired, and sleeping in the shade, with D.C. knowing that Mike would ward off any dragons that happened to be prowling about.

As for their mother, D.C. was the children’s cat, something a child needed while growing up, in the same category as the right books to read, the right school to attend. And for their dad, he was still Darn Cat, a nuisance who stole his easy chair every time he got up and scattered his darn cat hairs all over everything. But Dad enjoyed the hoked-up enmity. He would have been as grieved as the rest of them if anything happened to D.C.

note 4

As Ingrid talked, holding the cat half in her lap, Zeke ap­proached D.C. warily. D.C. eyed him suspiciously as Zeke placed a sheet of speciment paper under a paw, then ran a finger in between the pads and pushed out dirt. Outraged, D.C. yanked the paw back. He knew he should have washed his paws last night but he was so pooped when he got in. Ingrid continued rubbing his ears and that mollified him some, but he had made up his mind definitely. He did not like this jerk, and the sooner he got lost the better. “What’re you doing that for?” Ingrid asked. “I’m going to send this specimen” – he indicated the dirt – “to the lab where they will run it through what we call a spectrographic; examination. That’s a process that works on the principle that every substance – this dirt here, for instance – gives off its own light waves when heated to an extremely high temperature. And the lab photographs the light waves. So we get a picture, so to speak, of the dirt from his paw.

“We’ll also take specimens of soil from different neighbor­hoods around here. Then if this specimen from D.C.‘s paw matches any of the others, that may mean D.C. was in that particular area last night. As you may know, the soil in neighborhoods varies. The soil in your yard may not be any­thing like that a half mile away.”

Ingrid sighed. “I don’t get it.”

Zeke sneezed. “I don’t either but you’ve got to admit I make it sound good in a confusing sort of way.”

He proceeded to set up a flash camera. “I want to get a good picture of him to show the children around here. He may have been in some of their homes, or they may re­member having seen him, and maybe we’ll learn about other neighborhoods he has gone into that you don’t know about.”

When he was ready, he said, “Can you get him to sit up? I’d like a straight-on shot.”

Ingrid lifted D.C. and shoved his haunches into place, but when she let go he sank like a heap of jelly. She tried again, coaxing him and rubbing his ears. “I guess he’s weak from hunger. I’ll get him something to eat.”

After she left the room, Zeke tried to prop the cat up. “Come, kitty, please, kitty,” he said in his most endearing tone. “Nice cat, nice cat.” D.C. reared back and hissed and spat. He recognized a hypocrite when he saw one, and brother, here was one.

“Why you little so-and-so,” Zeke muttered under his breath. “Just you try that again.”

Ingrid returned unexpectedly, bearing a dish of canned cat food. She said coldly, “I heard you swearing. I didn’t think an FBI agent – “

“I was not swearing. I was using some perfectly good king’s English to work off a few repressions.”

“Don’t you like cats?”

“I love them.” He sneezed again. “Honest to goodness, I love them.” Allah forgive me, he thought, and J. Edgar Hoover, and the Kennedy brothers.

“I don’t think if you’re a dog man Patti will like you. She can’t stand dog men. We’ve got a neighbor across the street – he’s awful nice – but Patti can’t stand him because he has a dachshund, and this dachshund comes over all the time to our apricot tree, and the tree is dying, and Patti, who never gets mad about anything, says she’s going to call the police or the fire department or someone.”

She asked unexpectedly, “Do you have a dog?”

“No, not now. I did, a long time ago.”

He had been six that Christmas when his father brought the collie pup home, and Zeke had named him Tom after an old, gnarled ranch hand. The collie had grown up along with Zeke. For seven years they roamed the hills and can­yons together, and went to a country school where the teach­er didn’t mind a dog curled up under a desk. Then one morning Zeke got up to find Tom missing, and went calling him. He found him behind the clump of dark red oleanders, by the corral, shot by an unknown prowler. Two of the ranch hands helped Zeke bury him under a cottonwood, and Zeke carved Tom’s name with his pocketknife across a fence board and put it up as a marker. The last time he was home, two years ago, he had sauntered down to the cottonwood and propped up the marker that years of wind and rain had toppled.

Zeke was proud of the strategy he worked out for tak­ing D.C.‘s picture. It proved, he told Ingrid, that man was smarter than a cat, a moot point in certain circles. It was all a matter of timing. Under Zeke’s instructions, Ingrid lifted the plate of cat food to a calculated point in the air, and D.C. pushed himself up on his haunches to reach for it. He did this only after a certain amount of rumination. He took into consideration, with a glance through nar­rowed eyes at Zeke, that this might prove a trick. But the smell of fish was strong, and he figured he could trust his girl.

As he reached for the plate, Ingrid withdrew it, and in that second before D.C. could follow it, Zeke took his picture.

The flash momentarily blinded them. Afterwards, in tell­ing his fellow agents about it, Zeke credited D.C. with pulling off the fastest cat-disappearing act in history. One second he was on the bed reaching for the dish, and the next he had vanished. Talk about genii. This cat had a built-in one.

“I should’ve taken his prints first,” Zeke said regretfully.

After a brief search they found D.C. under the bed where he dared them to come after him. The FBI be hanged. Ingrid, on her knees, tried to reach him, but he only backed off, look­ing hurt. It was getting so you couldn’t trust anyone.

“I can’t go all the way under,” she said, looking up at Zeke from a position that reversed the head and derriere. “I’ll get dirty and Patti will murder me. I’m supposed to keep my room as clean as Mom does while she’s gone.”

She offered a suggestion. “If you get on the other side, and we both use our arms, one of us can grab him.”

Zeke took off his coat and unholstered note 5 his gun, placing it carefully on the bed. He suppressed an overwhelming urge to use it. He got down on his hands and knees with all of the caution and prudence a man should show when setting forth on a tiger hunt. The thought sped swiftly in and out that if he should be injured, say with a slash across the face, he would find it difficult to explain exactly how it happened in the memo the Bureau would require. And from D.C.‘s expression, it was evident that D.C. intended to scar him for life.