Something the Cat Dragged In (25 page)

At the station, Twerks put up only token resistance. Svenson offered sweetly to stay and guard him, in the hope that he’d perk up enough for another round after he’d had a chance to rest. As Twerks was complaining about his tiger bite and seemed indisposed to attempt a jail break, Ottermole consented. It was as well Svenson didn’t choose to come, anyway. Those springs weren’t going to take much more punishment.

This time, at least, they hadn’t far to go. Cronkite Swope, who’d elected to sprint the distance, was there to meet them when Ottermole pulled up to the curb.

The chief got out first, fiddling with the cuffs of his black leather jacket. “Cripes, I haven’t been this nervous since the day I got married,” he muttered. “Why the hell didn’t you give me a little more advance notice so’s I could rent a tux, Professor?”

“Sorry about that, Chief. Here, don’t forget your car keys. It would be a shame if some playful soul took a notion to swipe the cruiser while you were in the midst of the biggest crackdown in the history of Balaclava County. Dorkin, is that you?” Shandy added in a low murmur as a shadow drifted away from one of the clipped cedars on the well-raked lawn.

“Yeah, it’s me. I mean it’s I. Okay, Chief. All aboard and ready for the bomb to drop.”

“Then come on,” said Ottermole with a wild, desperate laugh. He rushed ahead as if he were storming a barricade, and thumped on the elegantly molded brass knocker.

It was the foreign maid who answered, still wearing her uniform but looking as if she’d been asleep in it. “Nobody here,” she told them, and tried to shut the door.

“The hell there isn’t.” Ottermole had exceptionally large feet and was a fast man in a door jamb. “Steppo asideo, sister. Either they come down or we go up. And never mind trying to escape by the back way, Pommell,” he yelled up the stairway. “We’ve got a cordon around the house.”

The cordon was Ottermole’s brother-in-law, Joe Bugleford, with a baseball bat, but the Pommells didn’t have to know that.

“You tell ’em, Chief,” cried Budge Dorkin.

“Never mind me.” Ottermole was again a leader of men. “Show Professor—I mean Deputy Joad where to go. He knows what he’s supposed to do.”

“You bet!”

Joad took a firmer grip on his test tubes, and hastened after Dorkin. Mr. and Mrs. Pommell, both in green wool bathrobes over green-and-white striped his-and-hers pajamas, stormed downstairs.

“What’s the meaning of this outrage?” Pommell was demanding. That must be the Balaclavians’ stock reaction to late-night police raids. Like “We all left in a group.” Something they’d got together and agreed upon in case they happened to need a suitable remark in a hurry. The sort of remark that showed how used they were to working as a group. And perhaps not a terribly bright remark, and not so bright a group as they’d thought they were.

“What’s the meaning of it is that your friend Hodger’s under arrest and so are—”

Shandy dug an elbow into Ottermole’s ribs. “Not him,” he whispered.

“Oh yeah. And so is she. Mrs. Pommell, I’m arresting you for the murder of Professor Ungley, and anything you say may be used against you so you better not get started. You neither, Mr. Pommell. I’m arresting you as an accessory. Mind if I read you both your rights at the same time? We’re in kind of a hurry. Professor Shandy, you know how to work these handcuffs?”

“I think I can manage. And I must warn you, Mrs. Pommell, that I have no compunction against striking ladies who themselves go around whanging old men over the heads with silver foxes, so you may as well quit trying to scratch my eyes out in the presence of witnesses.”

Despite his admonition, Shandy had a struggle securing the deadlier of the species. Budge Dorkin finally had to snap the cuffs on while Shandy held Mrs. Pommell’s clawing hands behind her ample back. The husband was no problem. He acted like a man in shock, which he no doubt was, submitting to be manacled with no more than another feeble, “This is an outrage.”

The maid looked terrified but held out her own hands with a resigned meekness that wrung Shandy’s heart. He shook his head.

“That’s quite all right, miss. You’re not under arrest. I expect the main reason they hired her was that they figured she couldn’t understand what they were up to. Don’t you think so, Ottermole? We’ll have to get an interpreter and question her, assuming we ever find out what language she speaks.”

“That’s up to you guys at the college. Come on, we better see what Joad’s come up with,” the chief replied.

“I cannot imagine what you imbeciles think you’re talking about.” Mrs. Pommell wasn’t giving up the struggle yet.

“Oh, I daresay you can,” Shandy answered cheerfully enough. “Those new sheepskin covers on your car seats don’t exactly harmonize with your—er—lifestyle, you know. I expect they were the best you could manage under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“Let’s just step around to the garage and get that report from our staff chemist. After you, Mrs. Pommell, and don’t—er—try any funny business. Did I phrase that correctly, Ottermole?”

“Fine.”

Ottermole also appeared to be fighting the effects of shock. Arresting the banker who held your mortgage could have that sort of effect, Shandy supposed. Still, he’d done it. Ottermole might not be the world’s greatest intellect, but by gad, the man had guts. Shandy only hoped to God Joad had found what he’d been sent to look for.

Nor did he hope in vain. When they got to the garage, the chemistry professor rushed to meet them, grinning from stem to gudgeon.

“In a word, my dear colleague, eureka! All over the front seat, just as you predicted. They’d obviously tried hard to wash out the stains, but no go. Bled like a stuck pig when you beaned him with Hodger’s cane, didn’t he, Mrs. Pommell?”

“Who is this person?” she demanded. “How dare he speak to me like that? Is he trying to claim Professor Ungley was murdered in our car?”

“He’s Professor Joad, a highly qualified chemist,” Shandy told her, “and he’s not implying. He’s completed blood tests that prove beyond any possibility of doubt that Ungley was in fact killed in your car.”

“That’s impossible! Professor Ungley never accepted rides after our meetings. Everybody in the club knew that.”

“Correction, Mrs. Pommell. Everybody in the club said that, after Ungley was dead and you’d agreed on the yarn you were going to spin. The truth is, Ungley was a very lazy man. The notion of his insisting on asserting his independence by walking home alone on a dark, frosty night is so much horsefeathers. Ungley would have leaped at a chance to be chauffeured in style, as in fact he did.

“Being a knave of the old school, he doffed his hat before he climbed into the car. He wouldn’t have bothered to do that if there hadn’t been a lady present, and you were the only woman in the group. You didn’t anticipate his hand would close in that unusual cadaveric spasm on the hat, naturally. Nor, we must further assume, did Ungley expect his affable hostess to dash his brains out after he’d delivered such an eloquent address.

“It was not about penknives, as you tried to make us believe, but about how he, unbeknownst to you all, had kept a full record of your exploits with which to dazzle posterity. Mass approbation would have been more the ticket from his point of view, I expect. No doubt you did manage a spot of backslapping and a few discreet huzzahs while you were thinking up the most expeditious way to get rid of him. I can’t think why it didn’t dawn on any of you years ago that Ungley was soft as a grape.”

That raised the question of whether Ungley’s associates were much saner, but Peter thought he wouldn’t pursue it.

“So then,” he went on, “I presume the pair of you beat it the hell out of there while somebody else—Twerks, no doubt, on account of his superior strength and his lame-brained failure to wrest the hat out of Ungley’s hand or smear enough blood on that harrow peg to be convincing—lugged the body around back and set the stage for the alleged accident. You came back home, thought up that silly lie about Ungley’s having been robbed of five hundred mythical dollars, cleaned up the car, and changed out of the blood-spattered clothes Ottermole will doubtless discover hidden in the house.”

“What if they dumped ’em somewhere?” the chief suggested.

“They won’t have had a chance. Mrs. Pommell could hardly waltz their duds down to the dry cleaner’s, or burn them in front of the maid. If they threw them away, the clothes might be salvaged and recognized as theirs. Their most sensible course would have been simply to sponge out the stains as best they could and hang the garments back in their closets, which I expect you’ll find is what they did. We must congratulate you also, Mrs. Pommell, for your presence of mind in taking Ungley’s keys so you could search his flat for those precious memoirs he’d told you about. You did a magnificent job of searching. No doubt you insisted on carrying it out yourself, on the grounds that no mere man could be so thorough or so tidy. Right, Mrs. Pommell?”

Her lip curled. Shandy kept pounding at her.

“You weren’t expecting anything so—er—copious, of course. Knowing Ungley’s cloak-and-dagger propensities, you perhaps envisioned something more in the nature of a strip of microfilm rolled up inside a hollow turkey quill. You should have remembered Ungley was once a teacher of the old school. Er—no pun intended. I meant that he’d have been habituated to preparing his notes in longhand on ordinary writing paper, large enough to be read easily in the classroom. Since he owned a filing cabinet, that must have been where he always used to file his notes. Now, Ungley was a man of rigidly fixed habits. Faced with what he no doubt considered a scholarly task, he’d have handled it the same way he’d prepared his papers and lectures. I doubt whether it would ever have occurred to him there might be another way.”

Budge Dorkin wasn’t all that interested in the late Professor Ungley’s scholarly methods. “What beats me is why she didn’t get one of the men to bump him off,” he wondered.

“I expect none of the men was ready to take the initiative,” Shandy told him. “From the evidence, it would appear that while the rest were dithering on the sidewalk, Mrs. Pommell simply grabbed Hodger’s cane, slid into the back seat of her car, and invited Ungley to ride in front with her husband. As the old man was getting in, she slugged him with the loaded handle of Hodger’s cane, told Hodger to take Ungley’s and pretend it was his, and gave Twerks the bloodstained one to put beside the body. It wasn’t bloodstained by then, of course. She’d have wiped it as clean as she could on a tissue or something. The cane had to be found with the body but the blood had to be on the harrow peg to make Ungley’s death look convincingly like an accident.”

“She didn’t wipe the cane shaft,” Joad objected. “I fingerprinted it just for the heck of it, and found a fair number of smudged prints. None of them looked like a woman’s.”

“No, they wouldn’t have been Mrs. Pommell’s. She’d have been wearing her kid gloves. Mrs. Lomax says so, anyway, and she’d know. As to the other prints, some of them must be Twerks’s, but that could have been got around. Any of the Balaclavians could say Ungley’d dropped his cane and they’d picked it up for him, or something of the sort, and the rest would back him up. Not that they expected to be questioned.”

“Jeez, they’re a cocky lot,” said Ottermole. “Finding Ungley’s blood on the cane that was supposed to be his wouldn’t give you anything to hang on them, either.”

“True enough,” said Shandy. “Finding the bloodstained cane in Hodger’s possession, of course, would have been a very different matter.”

“How did you know the canes had been switched, Professor?” Budge Dorkin asked. “They’re just alike, aren’t they?”

“Not if you examine them closely. The ferrule of the cane Mrs. Lomax found beside Ungley was worn down by hard use, and there were a number of nicks and scratches on the shaft. The one we got from Hodger on Thursday is in much better condition.”

“But Hodger’s is newer,” Ottermole objected. “Remember he told us Ungley gave it to him as a present after he’d been admiring the one Ungley got for himself?”

“Yes, but he didn’t say how long ago he received it. Anyway, carried is the operable word here. Bear in mind Hodger is badly crippled. He really uses a cane, leaning on it heavily for support when he walks and poking it ahead of him to test for a firm footing. Ungley was just a vain old coot with a theatrical streak that was gratified by carrying a dangerous weapon in such an elegant guise. He used to flourish his cane around a lot, but I can’t recall ever watching him use it to shore up his faltering footsteps. I may remind you that I’d seen Ungley around campus off and on ever since I came to Balaclava.”

“Yeah, and I’ve seen him around the village a lot ever since I can remember,” Ottermole corroborated. “I remember him waving that cane at us kids when he got sore at us, but now that you mention it, I don’t think I ever saw him leaning on it the way Hodger does. Hey, I just thought of something else. You know those keys of his? I’ll bet Mrs. Pommell never found them inside the clubhouse like she claimed. I bet she had ’em in her pocketbook all the time,”

“Perspicacious of you, Chief. Swope, you’d better make a note for posterity that Chief Ottermole has done an impressive job of unraveling this tangle of evasions and obfuscations.”

“I got a picture of me examining Ungley’s corpse,” Ottermole added with becoming modesty. “The wife wants to frame it for over the mantelpiece, but you can borrow it first to put in the paper if you want.”

“Gee, thanks, Chief,” said the reporter. “So can I say you’ve got the case wrapped up now?”

“Cripes, I hope so, Cronk. I feel as if I’m running the Black Hole of Calcutta already. Dorkin, how’d you like to take Mr. and Mrs. Pommell down to the station and book ’em. Joe—I mean, Deputy Bugleford here can help you stuff ’em into the lockup.”

“Deputy Joad may as well go along, too, in case the—er—prisoners take a notion to become unruly,” Shandy suggested. He meant Mrs. Pommell. The banker had no more fight in him than a wet sock. “We shan’t be needing a staff chemist any longer, Joad. I expect you’d like to go home and get some sleep.”

“Who, me?” The chemist chortled. “I’m fresh as a daisy. Fresher. But I’d be delighted to help Dorkin cage your birds. Form up, folks. This way to the hoosegow. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to clink we go.”