Fredric Brown - The Shaggy Dog and Other Murders

Of course Ruth stood up. I tried to stand, too, but I couldn't move. I struggled, and the struggle woke me.

My lap was empty. Satan One-and-a-Half had just jumped off. It was so quiet that I could hear the soft pad of his feet as he ran for the window. And there was a sound at the window.

There was a face looking through the glass--the face of a man with a white beard!

My hunch had been right. Someone had come for the cat. Lasky, who was dead of morphine, had come back for his black cat which had been run over by an auto and was buried in the back yard. It didn't make sense, but there it was. I wasn't dreaming now.

For an instant I had an eerie feeling of unreality, and then I fought through it and jumped to my feet. The cat, at least, was real.

The window was sliding upward. The cat was on its hind feet, forepaws on the window sill. I could see its alert head with pointed black ears silhouetted against the gray face on the other side of the window.

Then the precariously balanced milk bottle fell from the upper ledge of the window. Not onto the cat, for it was in the center, and I'd made the bottle less conspicuous by putting it to one side. While the window was still open only a few inches, the milk bottle struck the floor inside. It shattered with a noise that sounded, there in the quiet room, like the explosion of a gigantic bomb.

I was running toward the window by now, and jerking the flashlight out of my pocket as I ran. By the time I got there, the man and the cat were both gone. His lace had vanished at the sound of the crash, and the cat had wriggled itself through the partly open window and vanished after him.

I threw the window wide, hesitating for an instant whether or not to vault across the sill into the yard. The man was running diagonally toward the alley, and the cat was running with him. Their course would take them past the linden trees where I'd thought, earlier, I'd seen the darker shadow of a watcher.

Half in and half out of the window, still undecided whether this was my business or not, I flipped the switch of my flashlight and threw its beam after the fleeing figure.

Maybe it was my use of that flashlight that caused the death of a man. Maybe it wouldn't have happened other-wise. Maybe the man with the beard would have run past the watcher in the trees without seeing him. And certainly, as we learned afterward, the watcher had no good reason to have made his presence known.

But there he was, in the beam of my flashlight--the second man, the one who'd been hiding among the lindens. It was Milo Haskins.

The bearded man had been running away from the house; now at the sight of Haskins standing there between him and the alley, directly in his path, he pulled up short. His hand went into a pocket for a gun.

So did Haskins's hand, and Haskins fired first. The bearded man fell.

There was a black streak in the air, and the cat had launched itself full at the pasty moonface of Milo Haskins. He fired at the cat as it flew through the air at his face, but he shot high; the bullet shattered glass over my head. The bearded man's gun was still in his hand, and he was down, but not unconscious. He raised himself up and care-fully shot twice at Haskins.

I must have got out of the window and run toward them, for I was there by that time. Haskins was falling. I made a flying grab at the bearded man's automatic, but the man with the beard was dead. He'd fired those last two shots, somehow, on borrowed time.

I scooped up Haskins's revolver. The cat had jumped clear as he had fallen; it crouched under the tree.

I bent over Haskins. He was still alive but badly hurt.

Lights were flashing on in neighboring houses, and windows were flying up. I stepped clear of the trees and saw Ruth Carson's face, white and frightened, leaning out of an upper window of her house.

She called, "Brian, are you all right? What happened?"

I said, "I'm all right. Will you phone for a police ambu-lance?"

"Aunt Elsa's already phoning the police. I'll tell her."

We didn't learn the whole story until almost noon the next day, when Lieutenant Decker called. Of course we'd been making guesses, and some of them were fairly close.

I let Lieutenant Becker in and he sat down--not in the Morris chair--and told us about it. He said, "Milo Haskins isn't dying, but he thought he was, and he talked. Lasky was Walter Burke." He stopped as though that ought to make sense to us, but it didn't, so he went on:

"He was famous about fifteen years ago--Public Enemy Number Four. Then no one heard of him after that. He simply retired, and got away with it.

"He moved here and took the name of Lasky, and be-came an eccentric cuss. Not deliberately; he just naturally got that way, living alone and liking it."

"Except for the cat," I said.

"Yeah, except for the cat. He was nuts about that cat. Well, a year or so ago, this Haskins found out who his neighbor across the street was. He wrote a letter to the police about it, put the letter in a deposit box, and started in to blackmail Lasky, or Burke."

"Why a letter to the police?" Ruth asked. "I don't see--"

I explained that to her. "So Lasky couldn't kill him and get clear of the blackmail that way. If he killed Haskins, the letter would be found. Go on, Lieutenant."

"Burke had to pay. Even if he ran out, Haskins could put the police on his trail and they might get him. So he finally decided to fool Haskins--and everybody else--into thinking he was dead. He wanted to take the cat with him, of course, so the first thing he did was to fake its death. He boarded it out to a cat farm or cat kennel or whatever it would be, and got another black cat, killed it, and buried it so people would notice. Also that gave color to the idea of his committing suicide. Everybody knew he was crazy about the cat.

"Then, somewhere, maybe by advertising, he found a man about his age and build, and with a beard. He didn't have to resemble Lasky otherwise, the way Lasky worked it.

"I don't know on what kind of a story Lasky got the other guy here, but he did, and he killed him with mor-phine. Meanwhile, he'd written the suicide note, timed his phone call to the police telling them he'd taken mor-phine, and then ducked out--with, of course, the balance of his money. When the police got here, they found the corpse."

"But wouldn't they have got somebody to identify it?" The lieutenant shrugged. "I suppose, technically, they should have. But there wasn't any relative or friend to call in. And there didn't seem to be any doubt. There was the suicide note in Lasky's handwriting, and he'd phoned them. I guess it simply never occurred to anyone that further identification was necessary.

"And none of his neighbors, except maybe Haskins, knew him very well. He'd probably trimmed the other guy's beard and hair to match his, and probably if any neighbor had been called down to the morgue, they might have made identification. A man always looks different anyway, when he's dead."

I said, "But last night why did Haskins--?"

"Coming to that," said the lieutenant. "Somehow the cat got lost from Lasky. I mean Burke. Maybe he just got around to calling for it where it'd been boarded, and found it had got away, or maybe he lost it himself, traveling, be-fore it got used to a new home. Anyway, he figured it'd find its way back here, and that's why he took the risk of coming back to get it. See?"

"Sure. But what about Haskins?" I asked.

"Haskins must have seen the cat come back," said the lieutenant.

I nodded, remembering that Haskins had been mow-ing his lawn when I'd gone to the door.

"He realized it was Lasky's cat and that Lasky had tricked him. If the cat was alive, probably Lasky was too.

He figured Lasky would come back for the cat, and he watched the house for that reason. First he tried to get you to give him the cat by saying it was his. He figured he'd have an ace in the hole if he had the cat himself.