Something the Cat Dragged In (26 page)

“Really!” sniffed Mrs. Pommell. With surprising dignity, all things considered, she gathered her green bathrobe around her striped pajamas and decided to come quietly.

I
T HAD BEEN A
long night. Now it was past daybreak. Still nobody felt like going to bed. When Shandy and Svenson said they supposed they might as well mosey on back up the hill, Fred Ottermole and Cronkite Swope offered to walk them home. When the four of them met Alonzo Bulfinch coming off the night shift and he offered them coffee at his place, they went.

When Betsy Lomax came downstairs with a plate of coffee cake because she thought she’d heard Lonz bringing some friends home and knew he didn’t have anything in the house to feed them, they welcomed her company. When Edmund sauntered in behind her, they welcomed him, too. When Fred offered Edmund a piece of his coffee cake from force of habit, Mrs. Lomax said Edmund was welcome to have it if Fred was fool enough to part with it, though she couldn’t see why four grown men were making such a time over one little cat all of a sudden.

“Edmund’s not so little,” said Cronkite Swope. “Besides, he’s a great detective.
SMARTEST CAT ON FORCE DUE FOR PROMOTION, SAYS OTTERMOLE
.”

He took off his lens cap and snapped a picture of Edmund eating coffee cake for the special edition of the
Balaclava County Weekly Fane and Pennon,
for which type was even then being set. “Now how about a full statement for the press, Fred? There are still a few things I don’t quite understand.”

“You and me both, Cronk,” Ottermole answered, with his mouth full. “Come on, Edmund, quit hogging the cake.”

He settled the cat more cozily on his lap. Edna Mae would have one heck of a time getting the hairs off his pant legs, no doubt, but she wouldn’t mind. She’d be thinking about that impressive montage of photographs and headlines she was going to make for over the mantelpiece after the extra came out. Which reminded him he ought to be thinking about his public image.

“What I mean is, I’m more a man of action than a man of words.” Edna Mae had told Fred that some months before she’d presented him with the fourth member of his Cops and Robbers team, and he’d liked the sound of it. “I’ll let Professor Shandy fill you in on the details. Talking’s what he gets paid for.”

“The hell it is,” Svenson mumbled, though in an amiable and non-threatening manner. “Talk, Shandy.”

“M’well, since you insist. Thank you, Bulfinch.” Shandy took a sip from his freshly refilled coffee cup, and talked.

“I haven’t yet had time to read everything we found in those files of Ungley’s, but I did manage to skim through some of the more—er—informative portions while Ottermole and you others were packing the prisoners off to jail. The gist of his minstrelsy is that the Balaclavian Society has been a far more active organization all these years than any outsider ever suspected. They’ve been supporting the spirit of free private enterprise in a fairly big way. I took a partial list of businesses with which the members have been involved at various times in their—er—fundraising ventures.”

“Can I see?” Cronkite Swope took Shandy’s list and his eyes, as Betsy Lomax remarked later to her cousin Evelyn, bugged out like a bullfrog’s. “Erroneous Enterprises, Profits by Proxy, Fabricated Fiscal Fund—wowie! They sure knew how to pick ’em. Every single one of these, companies has been in big trouble for one thing or another.”

“Yes,” said Shandy, “and every single one of them made a great deal of money for a few principal shareholders before its sins found it out. A hefty chunk of the money made for the Balaclavians has been spent by them to further the cause of high-mindedness in government, of which Bertram Claude is such a sterling exponent. It was they who bought Claude his seat in the state legislature and also they who’ve been throwing such great wads of cash around trying to shove Claude into Sam Peters’s seat so they’d have a tame puppy instead of an irresistible force to deal with at the national level.”

“Holy cats!”

“Precisely. Their
folie de grandeur
appears to have increased in direct ratio to their years of successful covert operations. I can’t think why else they’d have hung on to that history Ungley wrote, even though they did have wits enough left to get it out of his highly unreliable hands as soon as they found out it existed. No doubt they were cocky enough to believe nobody would ever dare to go snooping around Hodger’s office for clues to a murder that wasn’t supposed to have been taken for anything more than an unfortunate accident. They thought they’d covered their tracks perfectly, and they were, after all, leading citizens of Balaclava County.”

“I don’t know who ever gave ’em that idea but themselves,” Mrs. Lomax sniffed. “Not but what the Ungleys used to be a well-thought-of family in years past, or so I’ve always heard. I daresay your uncle would have been all right, Alonzo, if that crowd hadn’t got their hooks into him. If you want my humble opinion, he was just a fussy old coot who’d have been well enough pleased to spend the rest of his life puttering around with his books and snoozing in his easy chair. But I suppose Pommell and Hodger and the rest got to flattering him and shoveling money into his pockets, and he got carried away. Puffing himself up with his own importance while they were calling him a fool behind his back. Right in my own house, and I didn’t even know it.”

“Now, Betsy.” Alonzo Bulfinch reached out a comforting hand to pat her on the arm. “A decent woman like you couldn’t be expected to realize what a gang of thieves and cutthroats like them were up to. What I can’t figure out is why they rung my uncle in on it, if he was the kind of fool he sounds like to me.”

“I’m surprised at you, Alonzo. Why, Edmund here could tell you the answer to that one, if cats could talk. No, Fred, don’t you dare give him any more of that cake. He’s fat enough already. Where was I? Oh, yes. In the first place, Alonzo, you ought to remember your uncle had an in at the college. Naturally, they were out to get Sam Peters because he must have been putting a spoke in their wheels from the word go, so naturally they’d want a spy up at the college because it’s the college that’s done more than anybody else but Sam himself to keep him in office.”

“Huh!” Thorkjeld Svenson was too great a man to snicker, but he was emitting noises suggestive of mirth. The idea of Ungley’s being a spy appeared to have been too much for his sense of gravity.

Mrs. Lomax wasn’t to be flustered by having a mere college president make noises at her. She patted her neatly combed gray hair and swept up some crumbs with a paper napkin.

“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. They’d figure they had to keep tabs on what you folks were up to, wouldn’t they? And if you’ll pardon me for saying so, President Svenson, I don’t think Professor Ungley ever forgave you for making him retire the way you did. Not that he wanted the work, Lord knows, but that’s neither here nor there. He was mad at you and ready to do you a bad turn if he could, is what I’m driving at.

“The other thing to remember is that having a professor in the club sort of dressed up their membership list and made them look more high-toned and intellectual, which would give them an excuse for never getting anything practical accomplished. They wouldn’t have let in any of the real brainy professors, but I daresay they figured poor old Ungley was safe enough. They must have known they could twist him around their fingers any way they wanted to. He was too lazy to go stirring up trouble like that Smuth woman.”

“An astute analysis, Mrs. Lomax,” Shandy approved. “Ungley came in handy as window dressing in a good many ways, I expect. For instance, if anybody had the effrontery to ask what in Sam Hill went on at those monthly meetings of theirs, the Balaclavians could always say, ‘Professor Ungley gave us a most erudite lecture on toothpick cases,’ or whatever. I wonder if he ever did get around to delivering one of his discourses.”

“If he did, I don’t suppose they listened,” Mrs. Lomax sniffed. “Not but what he’d go on talking whether anybody was paying attention or not. Once he got wound up, you’d just have to stand there and let him wind down, like an old-fashioned gramophone.”

“True enough. I don’t suppose they’d reckoned on his being such an everlasting bore. Or on that exaggerated sense of the theatrical which prompted him to pen his dramatic secret history of their doings. No doubt they thought he was working off his—er—cloak-and-dagger proclivities in relatively harmless ways, such as carrying that loaded cane on his perilous espionage missions to and from the faculty dining room.”

Ottermole was stretched back in one of Ungley’s armchairs, tickling Edmund over the eyebrows. “I wonder why he gave a cane like his to Hodger and not to the others?”

“I suppose because Hodger needed a cane and the rest didn’t,” Shandy replied. “Ungley liked money too well to fling it about on presents that would be stuck in a closet and forgotten. Also, I expect he had wits enough about him to realize Hodger was the real leader among them. Hodger, Lutt, and perhaps Mrs. Pommell would have been the executive committee. Pommell was the money man. He’d evidently developed some ingenious ways of laundering funds through the Guaranteed for political payoffs as well as for the members’ personal coffers. There was a note among Ungley’s papers reminding him to have Pommell clarify those methods for the club records after Ungley’d revealed the joyful tidings about their existence.”

“Funny,” said Thorkjeld Svenson. “Records. Only work Ungley ever did without being driven to it. And they killed him for keeping them.”

“Let that be a lesson to us all,” chirped Alonzo Bulfinch. “Sill was the bagman, I suppose, and Twerks the muscle. He’s ah ex-commando, Clarence tells me. Not a bad little organization for a place like Balaclava Junction. Did they ever pull off anything really big, I wonder?”

Shandy set down his empty cup. “They were pretty agile at getting state contracts awarded to firms they had dealings with, since they gave lavish support to certain people they believed they could count on to deliver the goods. Not all their candidates got elected or appointed, thank God. Some took the money and then disappointed them by turning honest. Claude was their biggest success to date, from their point of view. They were confident they could snag Peters’s seat for him. The campaign wasn’t going anywhere near so well as they’d hoped, despite the immense sums of money they’d poured into it, but they still had an ace up their collective sleeve.”

“Goddamn silo,” growled Thorkjeld Svenson.

“Yes, that was their well-laid plan that went agley. They’d had it cooking on the back burner for years, as we now know. They hadn’t originally planned to murder Mrs. Smuth after she’d done her stunt, but they did have a contingency plan all drawn up in case it fizzled. I’m afraid we—er—hastened her demise by causing that demonstration to backfire. If their propaganda ploy had succeeded—”

“Couldn’t,” barked Svenson. “Not enough morons in our district. Take a major scandal to budge Peters. Created one. Dumped it in my lap. Meant to set me up as the killer. Preserving their heritage. Urrgh!”

He emitted a few low rumbles, then went on in a more civilized tone. “Don’t waste your sympathy on the Smuth woman, Shandy. She didn’t know she was putting her head on the block, but she must have realized she was playing a dirty game. Chose to. Ambitious. Grievous fault.”

“And grievously hath Mrs. Caesar answered it,” Ottermole put in most unexpectedly. “We had to learn Shakespeare in school. Not the ‘Mrs. Caesar’—I made that up myself.”

“You’re a man of unexpected parts, Ottermole,” said Shandy. “President, I hope you’re right about Mrs. Smuth.”

“I am. Wrong once. Not twice. Who picked her?”

“Mrs. Pommell, according to Ungley’s report. They were in some women’s club together, and Mrs. Pommell—er—saw the potential. She appears to have handled a good many of the practical details. Hodger and Lutt were the resident Machiavellis. Even before they started grooming Claude to be a state representative, they’d already made their plan for him to be the long-range gun they’d fire against Peters.”

“I wonder how they managed to get hold of him?” Bulfinch remarked.

“Sill ran into him at the State House. Fetching sandwiches for one of the people Sill was—er—doing business with at the time. Ungley makes Claude sound like one of those movie starlets who get discovered in drugstores. Anyway, the members checked Claude out pretty thoroughly and decided he had winning ways, so they greased a few palms, hired an advertising agency, and managed to buy him his chance to put a few more blots on our escutcheon. Once he was in office, of course, Claude belonged to the Balaclavians. They’d bought him: curls, dimples, and all. Ungley even put down how much they paid to get his teeth capped.”

“That doesn’t surprise me any,” said Mrs. Lomax, starting to gather coffee cups. “I wondered who was forking out for his television commercials. Those things cost an awful lot of money, Alonzo tells me.”

“They do indeed,” Shandy confirmed. “Ungley himself, who was no doubt the least affluent of the Balaclavians, claimed he’d already contributed almost fifty thousand dollars to the campaign.”

“Our money,” Svenson growled.

“Oh yes. You’ll be charmed to know, President, that the college financed Ungley’s entry into the Balaclavian Society. Back when he was still teaching, if such it could have been called, Hodger and Pommell managed to get then-president Trunk over some kind of fiscal barrel. They then set up a touching melodrama in which Ungley was made to appear the hero who saved the college from bankruptcy.”

“Trunk,” sighed Svenson. “Good farmer. Lousy administrator.”

Shandy nodded. “One gathers Trunk was an excellent college president in many respects, but none too swift at reading the fine print on a contract. Being rock-bottom honest himself, he must never have paused to consider that maybe the other chap wasn’t. At any rate, he let Ungley pull the fat out of the fire for him. A few days later, when Ungley trotted into his office with a shiny new contract Hodger had drawn up for him to sign, Trunk bombed again. Perhaps he felt so deeply obligated to Ungley that he couldn’t refuse. More likely, he didn’t realize how much all those incremental percentages would add up to as time went on. That’s where a good part of your inheritance came from, Bulfinch.”