Something the Cat Dragged In (23 page)

When she woke, the fire was down to a bed of coals, the couch and the cracker plate were empty. Peter was out in the front hall talking on the phone, softly because she was still asleep, urgently because what he was saying must be important.

“That’s right, Ottermole. I confirmed it with Mrs. Lomax. Yes, I understand your position, but it’s a risk we have to take. Svenson will—naturally, he’d slaughter us both if we left him out. Get hold of Cronkite Swope and call the—no, I understand you’d rather handle the whole thing yourself, but how—oh, I see. By all means, if you’re sure they can manage. Right. Give me five minutes.”

When he hung up, Helen was at his elbow. “Peter, what’s this about risk? Where are you going?”

“My love, what were we talking about just before you deserted me for the arms of Morpheus?”

“You deserted me first. We were talking about cheese, I think. Good heavens, I still haven’t started dinner. What time is it?”

“Half-past ten.”

“You must be starved.”

“Not really. I ate some cheese.”

Helen had her eyes open now. She took a closer look at him. “I must say it’s certainly perked you up.”

“Oh yes. Great stuff, cheese. Stimulates the brain cells. Well,
au revoir, ma chérie.
I’m off to the wars again.”

“Peter Shandy, if you think I’m going to let you go cavorting around all night on an empty stomach—”

“A physical impossibility, my love. Unless of course the stomach belongs to somebody else.”

“You know who did it, don’t you?”

“Let’s say I have a theory. In a little while, I hope, I’m going to have a big, fat, juicy clue.”

The doorbell rang. It was Professor Joad and his test tubes.

“All set, Shandy?”

“All set.
En avant!”

“En avant
where?” Helen insisted.

“To a game of Cops and Robbers, where else? Keep the home fires burning, and pray Fred Ottermole doesn’t bust a zipper.”

Shandy gave her a quick but efficient kiss, grabbed his old mackinaw jacket, and vanished into the night. Helen sighed and went to poach herself an egg.

“HE’S THERE.”

That was Fred Ottermole, breathing hot and heavy into Shandy’s ear. Shandy had an impulse to retort, “I had a feeling he might be,” but didn’t. Ottermole was laying his job on the line here. Who could blame him for acting a trifle jittery? “Right,” Shandy answered. “Let’s move in.”

“Okay.” Ottermole gave one last, nervous tug to a zipper tab and charged up the front steps.

It was the law clerk who came to the door, looking frazzled and a little bit scared. “Yes, sirs? I’m sorry, but Mr. Hodger was just going to bed.”

“That’s what he thinks.” Ottermole unzipped a pocket in the most official manner and pulled out a printed form with some words inked in. “Know what this is?”

“A—a search warrant?”

“Yup.”

The chief regarded the warrant fondly. He must have been yearning for years to wave one of these under some miscreant’s nose. Too bad the law clerk was already so browbeaten that he didn’t do anything except cringe away from the door.

“C—come in. I guess. Mr. Hodger—”

“Go tell Hodger I want him in his office. Pronto, savvy? Deputy Joad will go with you, so don’t take a notion to try anything funny.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” the law clerk assured Ottermole with pathetic sincerity.

He slunk off down the hallway, Joad at his elbows grinning like a catfish. Chemistry professors probably didn’t have all that many chances to get deputized at CCNY. As Cronkite Swope pussyfooted after them, notebook in hand and pencil at the ready, Shandy and Ottermole started pawing through Hodger’s filing cabinets. It didn’t take them long to find what they were looking for.

“Aha!” Shandy hauled out a handful of folders.

His cry brought Cronkite Swope haring back. “What is it, Professor?”

“Ungley’s writing. Ergo, these are his missing files. Looks as if the old lizard wasn’t lounging all those years after all. Great Caesar’s ghost!”

“Holy cow!” added Cronkite Swope, reading over Shandy’s shoulder.

“Cripes,” Fred Ottermole contributed from behind the other shoulder. “Does that say what I think it does?”

“M’yes, I expect it does. Ungley appears to have been a veritable Boswell to the Balaclavians. As soon as he was let in on their important business, he began keeping a complete record. Here, hold this while I find the rest.”

Shandy thrust the folders at Swope and. was rooting through Hodger’s files like a terrier who’s found a rat i’ the arras when the lawyer himself limped in, escorted by Joad and the terrified clerk.

“What’s the meaning of this outrage?” he was roaring. “Whitney, get Judge Jeffreys on the phone.”

“Don’t bother, Whitney,” Shandy told the clerk. “Mr. Hodger will be seeing a judge himself sometime tomorrow morning, I expect. It won’t be Jeffreys, though. I notice Ungley has mentioned him a number of times in—er—most appreciative terms. It must have given the Balaclavians quite a jolt Wednesday night, Mr. Hodger, when Ungley revealed the wonderful surprise he’d been preparing for you over so many years.”

“I have nothing to say,” Hodger snarled, “except that you’re going to pay dearly for this, all of you. I have friends in high places.”

“So you have, and it’s fascinating to see who they are,” said Shandy, still flipping pages. “And how helpful they’ve been, and what they’ve been helpful about, and how much their assistance cost your esteemed society. Why the flaming perdition didn’t you burn this stuff as soon as you got your hands on it, Hodger?”

Hodger did not care to offer an explanation.

“Wow, I’ll say this is hot stuff all right!” Cronkite Swope raced through the files, picking out scraps and ticking them off for future reference. “Care to tell us how this material fell into your hands, Mr. Hodger? Mr. Whitney, would you care to make a statement for the press?”

“If you got anything to say, Whitney, you better spill it fast,” Ottermole growled.

“I—all I know is, I heard them down here that night.”

“What night?”

“Wednesday, after the meeting.”

“Who’s them?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t come down. I sleep upstairs, see, and Mr. Hodger has this bell he rings when he wants help in the night. If he doesn’t ring, I’m not supposed to come downstairs till breakfast time, when the housekeeper comes in. He didn’t ring Wednesday night, so I didn’t come. I thought some of his friends from the club must have brought him home.”

“What time was this?”

“Pretty late, I know that. Seems to me I heard the church clock strike two while they were here.”

“Did your boss usually stay that late at the club?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I mean, Chief. This was the first meeting he’d been to since I came. Mr. Hodger only hired me three weeks ago.”

“That so? Well, you just lost your job, in case you don’t realize it yet. Your boss is going to be away for quite a while. What are we charging him with, Professor?” Ottermole muttered in a frenzied aside.

“Would receiving stolen property do to start with? You might tack on bribery and conspiracy if that sounds too thin. Rack your memory, Mr. Whitney. Are you sure you didn’t hear a voice you could recognize?”

“I did sort of think it might be that Mr. Twerks who lives in the big brown-and-yellow house with all the antlers,” Whitney admitted. “I had to take some papers over there for him to sign one day last week. He’s got this kind of honking way he talks, and he laughs a lot.”

“Was he laughing that night?”

“Yes, some. Mr. Hodger told him to keep quiet.” With nothing left to lose, young Whitney threw caution to the winds. “I remember now. He said, ‘Shut up, Twerks. That blasted young ninny upstairs might hear you.’ He didn’t have to call me a ninny. But it couldn’t have been Mr. Hodger who killed Professor Ungley, could it? He can barely manage to scratch himself, let alone swing hard enough to bash anybody’s skull in.”

“No, it wasn’t Hodger,” Shandy agreed amiably.

“Then who killed Ungley, Professor?” Cronkite Swope pleaded. “Was it Twerks?”

“All will be revealed, Swope. First let’s get Mr. Hodger stowed comfortably in the lockup at the station. Were you planning to read him his rights, Ottermole?”

Ottermole read them with verve and panache. Then he telephoned the police station and asked temporary Deputy Chief Silvester Lomax to send over temporary officer Purvis Mink. Then he deputized Whitney to help Mink take the prisoner and the impounded files down to the lockup.

Shandy was impressed. “Gad, Ottermole,” he remarked, “I didn’t realize you were such a leader of men.”

“Neither did I,” the chief admitted. “Maybe that’s because I never had this many to lead before. You want to get deputized, Cronk?”

“Thanks, Fred, but I’m supposed to remain detached, objective, and personally uninvolved. Anyhow, that’s what it says in the course.” Cronkite Swope now had his diploma,
magna cum laude,
from the Great Journalists’ Correspondence School framed and hung in his mother’s vestibule for all to see and admire.

“Okay, if you say so. Let’s go then. Professor Joad, you better come, too. I guess this’ll be where Professor Shandy wants you to do your stuff. Provided there’s anything to do.”

Even as he watched deputies Mink and Whitney departing with the prisoner, Ottermole didn’t sound as if he quite believed he’d just put the arm on one of Balaclava Junction’s hitherto most respected citizens and was about to jug another.

“Fear not, Ottermole,” Shandy exhorted him.
“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

“Who’s he? Somebody I’ve got to pinch or somebody I ought to deputize?”

“Neither. It’s just a piece of advice Napoleon once gave somebody or other. Onward and upward is the gist. We’ve been right so far, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure why.”

“Simple logic, man. Hodger lived closer to Ungley than any of the other Balaclavians. Hodger has an office. Offices have filing cabinets. Ungley’s files had to be got out of the house in a hurry, for reasons we now understand. Hodger’s office was the easiest place to hide them. Ergo, that’s where we found them.”

Ottermole jabbed the ignition key at the lock. “You mean to say that big moose Twerks, who can’t take three steps without falling over his own feet, managed to search Ungley’s apartment without waking up Betsy Lomax?”

“Far from it. Twerks didn’t do any searching, he was just the caddy. Another exercise in logic. Twerks is the only one of that flaccid flock who’s strong enough to have carried all Ungley’s files at once. We must assume the person who found them in the house was not. Otherwise the person wouldn’t have had to use four of those plastic trash bags instead of just one or two.”

“But why couldn’t the person who took them away have made four separate trips?” asked Swope.

“Because, I expect, that would have quadrupled the chance of being spotted with the swag. Being respectable citizens, the Balaclavians couldn’t afford that big a risk. That’s why Whitney heard Twerks in Hodger’s office, instead of somebody else.”

“So now you’re going after Twerks, right?”

“Our lockup’s only ten feet square, and Twerks is a big guy,” Ottermole worried. “Maybe we should leave him till later.”

“Excellent suggestion,” said Shandy.

“Then who are you going to arrest next?” Swope persisted. “Whom, I mean.” He didn’t want another of Shandy’s lectures on literate reportage just now.

“Good question.” Ottermole popped his lower lip in and out a few times to show he was deep in thought. “Kind of hard to make a decision. You got to approach these crackdowns scientifically.”

Shandy handed him a nickel. “It’s late, Ottermole. Make a decision. Heads we get Sill, tails it’s Lutt.”

“Huh? Call that scientific?” Nevertheless, Ottermole spun the coin. “Tails. Okay, so what are we tagging Lutt for? According to your theory, I mean. Just comparing notes, Cronk. Professor Shandy’s been a lot of help to me in my investigation. He ought to get some of the credit, too.”

“Big of you, Ottermole,” said Shandy, “but I’d be willing to eschew the glory in exchange for an occasional uninterrupted night’s sleep. Let’s see. About Lutt. Oh, the usual, I suppose. Bribery, conspiracy, and abetting murder in the first degree.”

“How the heck did the Balaclavians ever think they could get away with it?” Swope marveled.

Shandy shrugged. “Why shouldn’t they? They always had before. This is going to be rather a lengthy story, Swope. You’ll have a chance to go into the—er—ramifications tomorrow when Ottermole holds his press conference. We decided to give you a scoop tonight because you’re the only reporter so far who hasn’t been willing to make the college look like a hideout for a gang of cutthroats.”

And because somebody had to publish the straight story before Sam Peters came up against Bertram Claude, and Balaclava County readers were the ones who’d be voting, and Swope could be trusted to tell it the way it had to be told. Shandy didn’t feel this was the time to go into all that.

At the rate Fred Ottermole was pushing his beat-up cruiser along, coherent exposition would have been a chancy business anyway. The official pothole season hadn’t yet been declared in Balaclava County, but there were enough bumps and dips in the road, not to mention broken springs and wornout shock absorbers in the car, to freight lengthy conversation with serious risks of a badly bitten tongue.

Rather to Shandy’s surprise, they got to Lumpkin Upper Mills without mishap and parked a short way from the house that soap had built. As they climbed out, he asked, “Who’s guarding Lutt’s place, Ottermole?”

“Clarence Lomax’s boy Frank. Officer Frank Lomax, I mean. Officer trainee anyway, kind of. On the nights he doesn’t have to work at the apple warehouse. I’d like to put Frank on the force full-time, but Town Meeting won’t vote me the money.”

“M’well, now that you’ve exposed a seething hotbed of crime in our midst, maybe our tightfisted taxpayers will think better of their pestiferous penury.”

“Huh! Probably fire me for not having exposed it sooner.” The chief was having another attack of apprehension. “Aunt Edna Jean’s going to be madder’n a wet hornet when I arrest Uncle Lot. She thinks he’s God Almighty. She had my wife down for a nice little something in her will, too.”