The Cat Who Saw Red (16 page)

“Would you like to go to a meeting with me tomorrow night?” she asked. “It’s the dinner meeting of the Friendly Fatties… Nothing personal, of course,” she added.

Qwilleran mumbled that he might consider it.

“So this is the famous Siamese pussycat,” she said on her way out. “Bon jour, Koko.”

“Yaeioux,” said Koko, replying in French.

Qwilleran went to his office to write a routine piece about the cake-baking contest for the second edition and to get a confirmation on his photo requisition. The assignment was on the board for five o’clock, earmarked for Bunsen, and Qwilleran telephoned Dan Graham to alert him.

“Swell! That’s swell!” said Dan. “Didn’t think you’d be able to swing it. That’s a real break. Don’t mind telling you I appreciate it. I’d like to do something for you. How about a bottle? Do you like bourbon? What does your photographer drink?”

“Forget the payola,” Qwilleran said. “The story may never get in the paper. All we can do is write it and shoot the pictures and pray a lot.” And then he added, “Just remembered, I have some friends on the Miami papers, including an art critic who might like to meet Joy while she’s there. Could you give me her address?”

“In Miami? I don’t know. She didn’t know where she’d be holing up.”

“How are you mailing her summer clothes, then?”

“To General Delivery,” said Dan.

Qwilleran waited in the office for the first edition. He wanted to see how they were handling his new column. Prandial Musings appeared in thumb position on the op-ed page — a good spot! — with a photograph of the mustached author looking grimly pleased.

“Who thought of the name for my column?” he grumbled to Arch Riker. “It sounds like gastric burbulance. Ninety percent of our readers won’t know what it means.”

“Make that ninety-eight percent,” said Arch.

“It sounds as if the byline should be Addison and Steele.”

“The boss wanted something dignified,” the feature editor explained. “Would you rather call it Swill with Qwill? That title did cross my mind… How was your weekend?”

“Not bad. Not bad at all. The cats gave me a helluva scare when I got home, but it turned out all right.”

“Any news from Joy?”

Qwilleran related Dan’s story about the alleged postcard and Joy’s alleged plans to go to Miami. “And we’ve had another disappearance,” he said. “Now the houseboy has vanished.”

He went to his desk and telephoned the Penniman Art School. William, who should have been in freehand drawing that hour, was absent, according to the registrar’s office. The newsman then looked up Vitello in the phone book and called the only one listed; it was a tea-leaf reading salon and the proprietor had never heard of William. Blowing into his mustache, as he did when his course was not clear, Qwilleran ambled out of the office. He was passing the receptionist’s desk when a girl who was waiting there touched his sleeve.

“Are you Mr. Qwilleran?” she asked. “I recognized you from your picture. I’m a friend of William Vitello. May I talk to you?” She was a serious young girl, wearing serious glasses and unflattering clothes. The ragbag look, Qwilleran thought. She’s an art student, he decided.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s sit down over here.” He led the way into one of the cubicles where reporters patiently listened to the irate readers, petitioners, publicity-seekers, and certifiable cranks who daily swarmed into the Fluxion editorial offices. “Have you seen William lately?” he asked the girl.

“No. That’s what I wanted to talk about,” she said. “We had a date Saturday night, but he never showed up. Never even called. Sunday I phoned Maus Haus, and he wasn’t there. Some woman answered the phone, but she wasn’t very coherent. Today he’s not in school.”

“Did you get in touch with his mother?”

“She hasn’t heard from him since he took her a birthday present Friday night. I don’t know what I should do. I thought of you because William talked about you a lot. What do you think I should do?”

“William is impetuous. He might have decided to take a trip somewhere.”

“He wouldn’t go without telling me, Mr. Qwilleran. We’ve very close. We even have a joint bank account.”

The newsman propped one elbow on the arm of the chair and combed his mustache with his fingertips. “Did he ever discuss the situation at Maus Haus?”

“Oh, he’s always talking about that weird place. He says it’s full of characters.”

“Did he ever mention Dan Graham?”

The girl nodded, giving Qwilleran a glance from the corner of her eye.

“Anything you want to tell me is confidential,” he assured her.

“Well, I really didn’t take him seriously. He said he was spying on Mr. Graham. He said he was going to dig up some dirt. I thought he was just kidding, or showing off. Billy likes to read spy stories, and he gets ideas.”

“Do you know what kind of irregularity he suspected? Was it a morals situation?”

“You mean — like sex?” The girl bit her thumbnail as she considered that possibility. “Well, maybe. But the main story had something to do with the way Mr. Graham was running the pottery. Something fishy was going on in the pottery, Billy said.”

“When did he last mention this?”

“Friday night. He phoned me after he had dinner with you.”

“Did he mention any specific detail about the pottery operation? Think hard.”

The girl frowned. “Only that… he said he thought Mr. Graham was going to blow a whole load of pots.”

“Destroy them?”

“Billy said he was firing the kiln wrong and the whole load would blow. He couldn’t understand it, because Mr. Graham is supposed to be a good fireman… I’m not much help, am I?”

“I’ll be able to answer that later,” Qwilleran told her. “Wait another forty-eight hours, and if William doesn’t turn up, you’d better notify Missing Persons, or have his mother do it. And another thing: You might check your joint bank account for sizable withdrawals.”

“Yes, I’ll do that, Mr. Qwilleran. Thank you so much, Mr. Qwilleran.” Her wide eyes were magnified through the lenses of her glasses. “Only… all we’ve got in the bank is eighteen dollars.”

Qwilleran returned to Maus Haus on the River Road bus, pondering the pieces of the puzzle: two missing persons, a drowned child, a slandered restaurateur, a lost cat, a black eye, a scream in the night. Too many pieces were missing.

Up in Number Six the cats were snoozing on the blue cushion. They had been busy, however, and several pictures were tilted. Qwilleran automatically straightened them, a chore to which he had become accustomed. The cats had to have their fun, he rationalized. Cooped up in a one-room apartment, they had to use ingenuity to amuse themselves, and Koko found a peculiar satisfaction in scraping his jaw on the sharp corners of a picture frame. Qwilleran straightened two engravings of bridges over the Seine, a Cape Cod watercolor, and a small oil painting of a beach scene on the Riviera. In the far corner an Art Nouveau print had been tilted so violently that it was hanging sideways. As he rectified the situation, he noticed a patch on the wall.

It was a metal patch, painted to match the stucco walls. He touched it, and it moved from side to side, pivoting on a tiny screw. Small arcs scratched in the wall paint indicated that the patch had been swung aside before, perhaps recently. Qwilleran swung it all the way around and discovered what it was concealing: a deep hole in the wall.

Leaning across the bookcase, he peered through the opening and looked down into the two-story kiln room behind his own apartment. The lights were turned on, and Qwilleran could see a central table with a collection of vases in brilliant blues, greens, and reds. Shifting his position to the left, he could see two of the kilns. Shifting to the right, he saw Dan Graham sitting at a small side table, copying from a loose-leaf notebook into a large ledger.

Qwilleran closed the peephole and replaced the picture, asking himself questions: What was its purpose? Did William know about it? Mrs. Marron said he had washed the walls recently. Had William been spying on Dan from this vantage point?

The telephone rang, and Odd Bunsen was on the line. “Say, what’s the assignment you’ve got on the board for five o’clock? It sounds like a sizable job. When do I get to eat?”

“You can have dinner here,” Qwilleran said, “and shoot the pictures afterward. The food here is great!”

“The requisition says two-five-five-five River Road. What is that place, anyway?”

“It’s an old pottery, now a gourmet boarding house.”

“Sure, I know the place. There were a couple of murders there. We keep running stories on them. Any special equipment I should bring?”

“Bring everything,” Qwilleran advised. He lowered his voice with a glance in the direction of the peephole. ‘I want you to put on a good show. Bring lots of lights. I’ll explain when you get here.”

Qwilleran went downstairs to tell Mrs. Marron there would be and extra guest for dinner. She was in the Great Hall, nervously setting the dinner table, which had been moved under the balcony to make room for the pottery exhibit.

“I don’t know what to do,” she was whimpering. “They said they’d do a demonstration dinner, but I don’t know how they want it set up. Nobody told me. Nobody’s here.”

“What’s a demonstration dinner?” Qwilleran asked.

“Everybody cooks something at the table. Mr. Sorrel, he’s making the steak. Mrs. Whiting, she’s making the soup. Miss Roop, she’s —”

“Have you seen William?”

“NO, sir, and he was supposed to clean the stove —”

“Any news from Mr. Maus?”

“No, sir. Nobody knows when he’ll be back… You’re not going to tell him, are you? You said you wouldn’t tell him.”

“We’re going to forget the whole matter,” Qwilleran assured her. “Stop worrying about it, Mrs. Marron.”

Tears came to her dull eyes, and she rubbed them away with the back of her hand. “Everybody is so good to me here. I try not to make mistakes, but I can’t get little Nicky off my mind, and I don’t sleep nights.”

“We all understand what you’ve been through, but you must pull yourself together.”

“Yes, sir.” The housekeeper stopped her nervous puttering and turned to face him. “Mr. Qwilleran,” she said hesitantly, “I heard something else in the night.”

“What do you mean?”

“Saturday night, when I couldn’t sleep, I was just lying there, worrying, and I heard a noise.”

“Outside my window. Somebody coming down the fire escape.”

“The one at the back of the house?”

“Yes, sir. My room is on the river side.”

“Did you see anything?”

“NO, sir. I got up and peeked out the window, but it was so dark. All I could see was somebody crossing the grass.”

“Hmmm,” Qwilleran mued. “Did you recognize the person?”

“No, sir. But I think it was a man. He was carrying a heavy load of something.”

“What kind of load?”

“Like a big sack.”

“How big?”

“This big!” The housekeeper spread her arms wide. “He was carrying it down to the river. When he got beyond the bushes, I couldn’t see him anymore. But I heard it.”

“What did you hear?”

“A big splash.”

“And what happened then?”

“He came back.”

“Did you get a look at his face then?”

“No, sir. There wasn’t enough light at the back of the building — just the bright lights across the river. But I could see him moving across the grass, and then I heard him going up the fire escape again.”

“Is that the one that leads to the Grahams’ loft?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time did that happen?”

“It was very late. Maybe four o’clock.” The housekeeper looked at him hopefully, waiting for his approval.

Qwilleran studied her face briefly. “If it was Mr. Graham, there was probably some logical explanation. Think nothing of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

He went upstairs wondering: Did she really see Dan Graham dropping a sack in the river? She made up a story once before, and she could do it again. Perhaps she thinks I’m the kind that drools over mysteries, and she’s trying to please me. And why all that yes-sir, no-sir business all of a sudden?

In his apartment Qwilleran’s eye went first to the Art Nouveau print over the bookcase, and it gave him an idea. A few months before, he had interviewed a commercial potter who specialized in contemporary figurines, and now he telephoned him.

“This may sound like a crazy question,” he told the potter, “but I’m trying my hand at writing a novel — kind of a Gothic thriller about skulduggery in a pottery. Would it be too farfetched to have a peephole in a wall overlooking the kiln room?”

“So the firing operation could be observed?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

“Not a bad idea at all. I once suspected an employee of sabotaging my work, and I had to set up an expensive surveillance system. A simple peephole might have saved me a lot of money. Why didn’t I think of that? All potters are professional voyeurs, you know. We’re always looking through the spyholes in the kilns, and I can’t pass a knothole in a board fence without taking a peek.”

Odd Bunsen arrived at Maus Haus at five o’clock, and Qwilleran invited him to Number Six for a drink.

“Hey, you’re getting taller,” the photographer said. “It couldn’t be thinner.”

“I’ve lost seven pounds,” Qwilleran boasted, unaware that three of them had been contributed in the beginning by Koko.

“Where are those crazy cats? Hiding?”

“Asleep on the shelves, behind the books.”

Bunsen flopped in the big lounge chair, propped his feet on the ottoman, lit a cigar, and accepted a glass of something ninety-proof. “I wish the boss could see me now. Do you realize the Fluxion is paying me for this?”

“The work will come later.” Qwilleran went to the peephole and checked the metal patch.

“What kind of hanky-panky did you have in mind?”

“Keep your voice down,” Qwilleran advised. “If possible.”

“Are you telling me I’m a loudmouth?”

“To put it tactfully… yes.”

“What’s the assignment all about? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

The newsman sat down and lit his pipe. “Ostensibly you’ll be taking pictures for a layout on Dan Graham, who runs the pottery.”