Лилиан Браун - The Cat Who Knew A Cardinal

The morning started well enough with a phone call from Lockmaster. "Qwill, this is Vicki Bushland. I'm so glad you and the cats will be spending the weekend with us."

"It will be my pleasure," he assured her. "I hope the weather will be fine. It's beautiful today. Is the sun shining up there?"

"It's working overtime," he said, making note of the bright triangles on the floor and walls and the front of the schrank. "Is there anything I may contribute to the weekend?"

"Just bring your binoculars and your camera for the races. The Saturday night party at the Riding and Hunt Club is rather dressy. The women wear long dresses, but black tie is optional for the men. Otherwise, everything's casual. We have a tailgate picnic at the race course on Saturday."

"Sounds good," he said, more politely than truthfully. Meals alfresco had never appealed to him. The prospect entailed limp paper plates, plastic forks, stuffed eggs with fragments of eggshell mashed into the stuffing, tuna sandwiches gritty with sand, and ants in the chocolate cake. Nevertheless, the experience might produce worthwhile material for the "Qwill Pen," and he would have an excuse to absent himself from the apple barn during the public open house. On Saturday half of Moose County, at five dollars a head, would be tramping up and down the ramps, no doubt making disparaging remarks about the fireplace design and the contemporary furniture. But his underlying reason for accepting the Bushlands' invitation may have been his curiosity about the person who had brunched with Polly at the Palomino Paddock, sending her home late, tired, and starry-eyed. No doubt this was the caller with whom she had that brief and guarded conversation while Qwilleran squirmed in a hard oak chair.

"I'm looking forward to the whole weekend," he told Vicki.

"Could you arrive in time for dinner on Friday?" she asked. "We'd have cocktails at six. I'd like to give a little dinner party because my grandmother is dying to meet you. She adored your column when you were writing for the Daily Fluxion, and now we buy the Moose County paper every Tuesday and Friday so she can read 'Straight from the Qwill Pen.' Sometimes you switch days, and then the dear lady has a fit!"

"I'm sure I'll like your grandmother immensely," Qwilleran said.

"We'll invite a few others you might enjoy meeting. Everyone knows who you are, and all our friends have heard about the time you and Bushy were marooned on the island during a storm. So we'll all be looking forward to your visit."

"None more than I," he said in the graciously formal style he adopted on such occasions.

"Do you like pasta? We have to serve something my grandmother can swallow easily."

"I consider myself omnivorous - with the small exception of turnips and parsnips."

"How about the cats? What do they eat?"

"Don't worry about them. I'll take along some canned stuff."

Canned stuff to the Siamese meant red salmon, boned chicken, solid-pack white tuna, crabmeat, and lobster.

Although feeding the cats would be a simple matter, dressing for dinner at the Riding and Hunt Club would pose a problem. The navy blue suit that Qwilleran reserved for funerals had been lost in a fire. Furthermore, a dinner jacket would be preferable if only to dispel the Lockmaster notion that Moose County was populated with aborigines. He had never owned a dinner jacket. He had rented one for Arch Riker's wedding twenty-odd years before, and he assumed that the practice was still customary. He assumed that the young potato farmers and sheep ranchers whose wedding photos appeared in the Something were able to rent their dinner jackets and tailcoats from Scottie's Men's Shop.

Time was short. He headed downtown at a pace faster than usual, turning his head only to count the yellow posters in store windows - posters made brighter by the relentless September sun:

LIVING BARN TOUR SAT., SEPT. 17, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. TICKETS $5

Scottie greeted him at the door. "Weel, laddie, you've done it again!" he said, putting on the brogue that pleased his Scottish and part-Scottish customers. (Qwilleran's mother, everyone knew, had been a Mackintosh.)

"Meaning what?" Qwilleran asked.

"You found another dead body! Canna remember any dead bodies before you moved to town."

Qwilleran huffed into his moustache as dismissal of the remark. "I want to rent a dinner jacket and everything that goes with it."

"Och! You want to rent? Is the Klingenschoen heir too hard up to buy one?"

"Look, Scottie, I've lived here for four years with no need for formal clothing, and I may never need it again. Waste not, want not."

"Spoken like a true Mackintosh! Or was your mother a Mackenzie?"

"Mackintosh," Qwilleran growled.

" 'Twill make a juicy bit of gossip when the word gets around that the richest man in Moose County is rentin' a dinner jacket. Every man in your position, laddie, should own a dinner jacket."

Reluctantly Qwilleran allowed himself to be sold, and as he was being fitted, the storekeeper brought up the subject of the murder again. "Let them say what they will about VanBrook, it were too bad. Aye, it were too bad."

"Was he a good customer of yours?" Qwilleran asked, assuming that Scottie's reactions would be related to the cash register.

"Not good, but frequent. He come in here reg'lar to look for turtlenecks in colors they don't make... The police have a suspect, I hear."

"I was not aware of that, Scottie. Who is it?" Qwilleran asked innocently.

"There's a rumor that Dennis Hough is in hidin'." He pronounced it Hoe. "The mayor's wife were in Mooseville to a ladies' social, and she saw the laddie comin' out of the Shipwreck Tavern, lookin' furtive and in want of a shave."

"What kind of refreshments were they serving at that ladies' social? Dennis is driving to St. Louis to see his family for the first time in several months! The gossips want to suspect him because he's an outsider from Down Below. The people around here, if you ask me, are a bunch of xenophobes."

"If you mean they're slow in payin' their bills, you hit the nail on the head, laddie."

Leaving Scottie's store, Qwilleran met Carol Lanspeak going into the family's emporium. "Heard anything?" she asked.

"Not a word," he replied. "How about you?"

"Wait till you hear! We just received a letter that Hilary mailed last Friday, the day before he died, billing us for mileage for that woman from Lockmaster! Eight rehearsals and twelve performances at one hundred forty miles a round trip. Do you realize what that amounts to at twenty-five cents a mile? Seven hundred dollars! I know she used a lot of gas to come up here, but the point is: We didn't need her!"

"Can the club afford it?"

"Well, it'll put us in the red again. It's just another example of Hilary's arrogance. He never gave us a hint that we'd be liable for her travel expenses. Scott Gippel thinks we should just ignore it. We don't know the woman's address, and we don't know who's handling the estate."

"What does Larry say about it?"

"He hasn't seen the letter yet. He'll hit the ceiling!" Her eye caught the yellow poster in the store window. "Your. Living Barn Tour is being well publicized, but isn't a five-dollar admission kind of steep for Pickax pocketbooks?"

"They'll pay five dollars just to see the scene of the crime," he said.

"That's ghoulish, Qwill."

"But true. You wait and see."

Carol went into the store, and Qwilleran went on his way, thinking about the letter posthumously received. Who was VanBrook's executor? What was the extent of his estate? Who would inherit? Only one person in Pickax, he thought, would know anything about the principal's connections. The superintendent of schools would have a file on the man. Qwilleran had a sudden urge to lunch with Lyle Compton, and he knew that Compton always liked an excuse to get out of the office.