Lilian Braun - The Cat Who Turned On and Off

Abruptly Mary Duckworth stood up and wandered around the room hunting for her cigarette holder. She found it and sat on the sofa and let Qwilleran offer her a light. After one deep inhalation she laid the cigarette down and curled up as if in pain, hugging her knees. "I miss Andy so much," she whispered.

Qwilleran had a desire to reach out and comfort her, but he restrained himself. He said, "You've had a shock, and you've been living with your grief. You shouldn't bottle it up. Why don't you tell me about it? I mean, everything that happened on that night. It might do you some good." The warmth of his tone brought a wetness to her dark eyes. After a while she said, "The terrible thing is that we quarreled on our last evening together. I was feeling peevish. Andy had… done something… that irritated me. He was trying to make amends, but I kept goading him during dinner." "Where did you have dinner?" "Here. I made beef Bordelaise, and it was a failure. The beef was tough, and we had this personal argument, and at nine o'clock he went back to his shop. He said someone was coming to look at a light fixture. Some woman from the suburbs was bringing her husband to look at a chandelier." "Did he say he would return?" "No. He was rather cool when he left. But after he'd gone, I felt miserable, and I decided to go to his shop and apologize. That's when I found him — " "Was his shop open?" "The back door was unlocked. I went in the back way — from the alley. Don't ask me to describe what I saw!" "What did you do?" "I don't remember. Iris says I ran to the mansion, and C.C. called the police. She says she brought me home and put me to bed. I don't remember." Intent on their conversation, neither of them heard the low growl in the kitchen-at first no more than a rattle in the dog's throat.

"I shouldn't be telling you this," Mary said.

"It's good to get it off your mind." "You won't mention it, will you?" "I won't mention it." Mary sighed deeply and was quiet, while Qwilleran smoked his pipe and admired her large dark-rimmed eyes.

They had mellowed during the evening, and now they were beautiful.

"You were right," she said. "I feel better now. For weeks after it happened, I had a horrible dream, night after night. It was so vivid that I began to think it was true. I almost lost my mind! I thought — " It was then that the dog barked-in a voice full of alarm. "Something's wrong," Mary said, jumping to her feet, and her eyes widened to their unblinking stare.

"Let me go and see," Qwilleran said.

Hepplewhite was barking at the rear window.

"There's a police car at the end of the alley," the newsman said. "You stay here. I'll see what it's all about. Is there a rear exit?" He went down the narrow back stairs and out through a walled garden, but the gate to the alley was padlocked, and he had to return for a key.

By the time he reached the scene, the morgue wagon had arrived, and the revolving roof lights on the two police vehicles made blue flashes across the snow and the faces of a few onlookers and a figure lying on the ground.

Qwilleran stepped up to one of the officers and said, "I'm from the Daily Fluxion. What's happened here?" "Routine lush," said the man in uniform with a smirk. "Drank too much antifreeze." "Know who he is?" "Oh, sure. He's got a pocketful of credit cards and a diamond-studded platinum ill bracelet." Qwilleran moved closer as the body was loaded on a stretcher, and he saw the man's coat. He had seen that coat before.

Mary was waiting for him in the walled garden, and although she was warmly wrapped, she was shaking. "Wh — what was the matter?" "Just a drunk," he told her. "You'd better get indoors before you catch cold. You're shivering." They went upstairs, and Qwilleran prescribed hot drinks for both of them.

As Mary warmed her hands on her coffee cup, he studied her face. "You were telling me — just before the dog barked — about your recurrent dream." She shuddered. "It was a nightmare! I suppose I was feeling guilty because I had been unpleasant to Andy." "What did you dream?" "I dreamed… I kept dreaming that I had pushed Andy to his death on that finial!" Qwilleran paused before making his comment. "There may be an element of fact in your dream." "What do you mean?" "I have a hunch that Andy's death was not an accidental fall from a ladder." As he said it, he again felt the telltale prickling in his moustache.

Mary became defensive. "The police called it an accident." "Did they investigate? Did they come to see you? They must have inquired who found the body." She shook her head.

"Did they interview people in the neighborhood?" "It was not necessary. It was obviously a mishap. Where did you get the idea that it might have been… anything else?" "One of your talkative neighbors — this morning — " "Nonsense." "I assumed he must have some reason for calling it murder." "Just an irresponsible remark. Why would anyone say such a thing?" "I don't know." Then Qwilleran watched Mary's eyes grow wide as he added, "But by a strange coincidence, the man who told me is now on his way to the morgue." Whether it was that statement or the startling sound of the telephone bell, he could not tell, but Mary froze in her chair. It rang several times.

"Want me to answer?" Qwilleran offered, glancing at his watch.

She hesitated, then nodded slowly. He found the phone in the library across the hall. "Hello?… Hello?… Hello?

… They hung up," he reported when he returned to the living room. Then noticing Mary's pallor, he asked, "Have you had this kind of call before? Have you been getting crank calls? Is that why you stay up late?" "No, I've always been a night owl," she said, shaking off her trance. "My friends know it, and someone was probably phoning to — discuss the late movie on TV. They often do that. Whoever it was undoubtedly hung up because of hearing a man's voice. It would appear that I had company, or it might have seemed to be a wrong number." She talked too fast and explained too much. Qwilleran was unconvinced.

Qwilleran went home through snow that was ankle-deep, its hush accentuating the isolated sounds of the night: a blast of jukebox music from The Lion's Tail, the whine of an electric motor somewhere, the idle bark of a dog. But first he stopped at the all-night drugstore on the corner and telephoned the Fluxion's night man in the Press Room at Police Headquarters and asked him to check two Dead on Arrivals from the Junktown area.

"One came in tonight and one October sixteenth," Qwilleran said. "Call me back at this number, will you?" While he was waiting, he ordered a ham sandwich and considered the evidence. The death of the man in a horse- blanket coat might have no significance, but the fear in Mary's eyes was real and incontrovertible, and her emphatic insistence that Andy's death was an accident left plenty of room for conjecture. If it was murder, there had to be motive, and Qwilleran had an increasing curiosity about the young man of superior integrity who made citizen's arrests. He knew the type. On the surface they looked good, but they could be troublemakers.

The phone call came in from the police reporter. "That October DOA was filed as accidental death," he said, "but I couldn't get any dope on the other one. Why don't you try again in the morning?" Qwilleran went home, tiptoed up the protesting stairs of the Cobb mansion, unlocked his door with the big key, and searched for the cats. They were asleep on their blue cushion on top of the refrigerator, curled together in a single mound of fur with one nose, one tail and three ears. One eye opened and looked at him, and Qwilleran could not resist stroking the pair. Their fur was incredibly silky when they were relaxed, and it always appeared darker when they were asleep.

Soon after, he settled in his own bed, hoping that his mates at the Press Club never found out he was sleeping in a swan boat.