The Cat Who Turned on and Off (4 page)

The two-hundred-year-old desk was removed, and the spectators waited eagerly for the next item.

At this point there was a significant pause in the action, as the auctioneer spoke to the attorney. It was a pantomime of indecision. Then they both nodded and beckoned to a porter. A moment later a hush fell on the crowd. The porter had placed a curious object on the platform—a tall, slender ornament about three feet high. It had a square base topped by a brass ball, and then a shaft of black metal tapering up to a swordlike point.

“That’s it!” someone whispered behind Qwilleran. “That’s the finial!”

Beside him, Mrs. Cobb was shaking her head and covering her face with her hands. “They shouldn’t have done it!”

“We have here,” said the auctioneer in slow, deliberate tones, “the finial from a rooftop—probably an ornament from an old house in the Zwinger reclamation area. The ball is solid brass. Needs a little polishing. What am I offered?”

The people seated around Qwilleran were shocked.

“Makes my blood run cold,” one whispered.

“I didn’t think they’d have the nerve to put it up.”

“Who’s bidding? Can you see who’s bidding?”

“Very bad taste! Very bad!” someone said.

“Did Andy actually fall on it?”

“Didn’t you know? He was impaled!”

“Sold!” snapped the auctioneer. “Sold to C.C. Cobb.”

“No!” cried Mrs. Cobb.

At that moment there was a spine-chilling crash. A bronze chandelier let loose from the ceiling and crashed on the floor, narrowly missing Mr. Maus, the attorney.

It had been a splendid Victorian mansion in its day—a stately red brick with white columns framing the entrance, a flight of broad steps, and a railing of ornamental ironwork. Now the painted trim was peeling, and the steps were cracked and crumbling.

This was the building that housed the Cobbs’ antique shop, The Junkery, and the bay windows on either side of the entrance were filled with colored glass and bric-a-brac.

After the auction Qwilleran accompanied Mrs. Cobb to the mansion, and she left him in the tacky entrance hall.

“Have a look at our shop,” she said, “while I go upstairs and see if the apartment is presentable. We’ve been selling out of it for two months, and it’s probably a mess.”

“It’s been vacant two months?” Qwilleran asked, counting back to October. “Who was your last tenant?”

Mrs. Cobb looked apologetic. “Andy Glanz lived up there. You don’t mind, do you? Some people are squeamish.”

She hurried upstairs, and Qwilleran inspected the hallway. Although shabby, it was graciously wide, with carved woodwork and elaborate gaslight fixtures converted for electricity. The rooms opening off the hall were filled with miscellany in various stages of decrepitude. One room was crowded with fragments of old buildings—porch posts, fireplaces, slabs of discolored marble, stained-glass windows, an iron gate and sections of stair railing. Customers who had drifted in after the auction were poking among the debris, appraising with narrowed eyes, exhibiting a lack of enthusiasm. They were veteran junkers.

Eventually Qwilleran found himself in a room filled with cradles, brass beds, trunks, churns, weather vanes, flatirons, old books, engravings of Abraham Lincoln, and a primitive block and tackle made into a lamp. There was also a mahogany bar with brass rail, evidently salvaged from a turn-of-the-century saloon, and behind it stood a red-shirted man, unshaven and handsome in a brutal way. He watched Qwilleran with a hostile glare.

The newsman ignored him and picked up a book from one of the tables. It was bound in leather, and the cracking spine was lettered in gold that had worn away with age. He opened the book to find the title page.

“
Don’t
open that book,” came a surly command, “unless you’re buying it.”

Qwilleran’s moustache bristled. “How do I know whether I want it till I read the title?”

“To hell with the title!” said the proprietor. “If you like the looks of it, buy it. If you don’t, keep your sweatin’ hands in your pockets. How long do you think those books will last if every jerk that comes in here has to paw the bindings?”

“How much do you want for it?” Qwilleran demanded.

“I don’t think I want to sell it. Not to you, anyway.”

The other customers had stopped browsing and were looking mildly amused at Qwilleran’s discomfiture. He sensed the encouragement in their glances and rose to the occasion.

“Discrimination! That’s what this is,” he roared. “I should report this and have you put out of business! This place is a rat’s nest anyway. The city should condemn it . . . . Now, how much do you want for this crummy piece of junk?”

“Four bucks, just to shut your loud mouth!”

“I’ll give you three.” Qwilleran threw some bills on the bar.

Cobb scooped them up and filed them in his
billfold. “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a sucker,” he said with a leer at the other customers.

Qwilleran opened the book he had bought. It was
The Works of the Reverend Dr. Ishmael Higginbotham, Being a Collection of Interesting Tracts Explaining Several Important Points of the Divine Doctrine, Set Forth with Diligence and Extreme Brevity.

Mrs. Cobb burst into the room. “Did you let that dirty old man bully you into buying something?”

“Shut up, old lady,” said her husband.

She had put on a pink dress, fixed her hair, and applied make-up, and she looked plumply pretty. “Come upstairs with me,” she said sweetly, putting a friendly hand on Qwilleran’s arm. “We’ll have a cozy cup of coffee and let Cornball Cobb fume with jealousy.”

Mrs. Cobb started up the creaking staircase, her round hips bobbling from side to side and the backs of her fat knees bulging in a horizontal grin. Qwilleran was neither titillated nor repelled by the sight, but rather saddened that every woman was not blessed with a perfect figure.

“Don’t pay any attention to C.C.,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s a great kidder.”

The spacious upstairs hall was a forest of old chairs, tables, desks, and chests. Several doors stood open, revealing dingy living quarters.

“Our apartment is on that side,” said Mrs. Cobb, indicating an open door through which came a loud radio commercial, “and on this side we have two
smaller apartments. Ben Nicholas rents the front, but the rear is nicer because it has a view of the backyard.”

Qwilleran looked out the hall window and saw two station wagons backed in from the alley, an iron bed, a grindstone, the fender from a car, some wagon wheels, an old refrigerator with no door, and a wooden washing machine with attached clothes wringer—most of them frozen together in a drift of dirty ice and snow.

“Then how come Nicholas lives in the front?” he asked.

“His apartment has a bay window, and he can keep an eye on the entrance to his shop, next door.”

She led the way into the rear apartment—a large square room with four tall windows and a frightening collection of furniture. Qwilleran’s gaze went first to an old parlor organ in jaundiced oak—then a pair of high-backed gilded chairs with seats supported by gargoyles—then a round table, not quite level, draped with an embroidered shawl and holding an oil lamp, its two globes painted with pink roses—then a patterned rug suffering from age and melancholy—then a crude rocking chair made of bent twigs and treebark, probably full of termites.

“You
do
like antiques, don’t you?” Mrs. Cobb asked anxiously.

“Not especially,” Qwilleran replied in a burst of honesty. “And what is that supposed to be?” He pointed to a chair with tortured iron frame, elevated on a pedestal and equipped with headrest and footrest.

“An old dentist’s chair—really quite comfortable for reading. You can pump it up and down with your foot. And the painting over the fireplace is a very good primitive.”

With a remarkably controlled expression on his face, Qwilleran studied the lifesize portrait of someone’s great-great-grandmother, dressed in black—square-jawed, thin-lipped, steely-eyed, and disapproving all she surveyed.

“You haven’t said a word about the daybed,” said Mrs. Cobb with enthusiasm. “It’s really unique. It came from New Jersey.”

The newsman turned around and winced. The daybed, placed against one wall, was built like a swan boat, with one end carved in the shape of a long-necked bad-tempered bird and the other end culminating in a tail.

“Sybaritic,” he said drily, and the landlady went into spasms of laughter.

A second room, toward the front of the house, had been subdivided into kitchenette, dressing room, and bath.

Mrs. Cobb said, “C.C. installed the kitchen himself. He’s handy with tools. Do you like to cook?”

“No, I take most of my meals at the Press Club.”

“The fireplace works, if you want to haul wood upstairs. Do you like the place? I usually get one hundred and ten dollars a month, but if you like it, you can have it for eighty-five dollars.”

Qwilleran looked at the furniture again and groomed his moustache thoughtfully. The
furnishings gave him a chill, but the rent suited his economic position admirably. “I’d need a desk and a good reading light and a place to put my books.”

“We’ve got anything you want. Just ask for it.”

He bounced on the daybed and found it sufficiently firm. Being built down to the floor, it would offer no temptations to burrowing cats. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I have pets. A couple of Siamese cats.”

“Fine! They’ll get rid of our mice. They can have a feast.”

“I don’t think they like meat on the hoof. They prefer it well-aged and served medium rare with pan juices.”

Mrs. Cobb laughed heartily—too heartily—at his humor. “What do you call your cats?”

“Koko and Yum Yum.”

“Oh, excuse me a minute!” She rushed from the room and returned to explain that she had a pie in the oven. An aroma of apples and spices was wafting across the hall, and Qwilleran’s moustache twitched.

While Mrs. Cobb straightened pictures and tested surfaces for dust, Qwilleran examined the facilities. The bathroom had an archaic tub with clawed feet, snarling faucets, and a maze of exposed pipes. The refrigerator was new, however, and the large dressing room had a feature that interested him; one wall was a solid bank of built-in bookshelves filled with volumes in old leather bindings.

“If you want to use the shelves for something else,
we’ll move the books out,” Mrs. Cobb said. “We found them in the attic. They belonged to the man who built this house over a hundred years ago. He was a newspaper editor. Very prominent in the abolitionist movement. This house is quite historic.”

Qwilleran noticed Dostoyevski, Chesterfield, Emerson. “You don’t need to move the books, Mrs. Cobb. I might like to browse through them.”

“Then you’ll take the apartment?” Her round eyes were shining. “Have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, and then you can decide.”

Soon Qwilleran was sitting in a gilded chair at the lopsided table, plunging a fork into bubbling hot pie with sharp cheese melted over the top. Mrs. Cobb watched with pleasure as her prospective tenant devoured every crumb of flaky crust and every dribble of spiced juice.

“Have some more?”

“I shouldn’t.” Qwilleran pulled in his waistline. “But it’s very good.”

“Oh, come on! You don’t have to worry about weight. You have a very nice physique.”

The newsman tackled his second wedge of pie, and Mrs. Cobb described the joys of living in an old house.

“We have a ghost,” she announced cheerfully. “A blind woman who used to live here fell down the stairs and was killed. C.C. says her ghost is fascinated by my glasses. When I go to bed, I put them on the night table, and in the morning they’re on the window sill. Or if I put them in the dresser drawer, they’re moved to the night table . . . . More coffee?”

“Thanks. Do the glasses move around every night?”

“Only when the moon is full.” The landlady grew thoughtful. “Do you realize how many strange things happened at the auction today? The Sèvres vase, and the chandelier that fell, and the pier mirror that started to topple . . . . It makes me wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“It’s almost as if Andy’s spirit was
protesting.
”

“Do you believe in that kind of thing?”

“I don’t know. I do and I don’t.”

“What do you think Andy might have been trying to say?” Qwilleran wore a sincere expression. He had a talent for sincerity that had drawn confidences from the most reticent persons.

Mrs. Cobb chuckled. “Probably that the auctioneer was letting things go too cheap. There were some terrific buys.”

“All the junkers call Andy’s death an accident, but I met someone on the street who said he was murdered.”

“No, it was an accident. The police said so. And yet . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“What were you going to say?”

“Well . . . it seems strange that Andy would be careless enough to slip and fall on that thing. He was a very . . . a very
prudent
young man, you know.”

Qwilleran smoothed his moustache hurriedly. “I’d like to hear more about Andy,” he said. “Why don’t I go and get my luggage and the cats . . . ?”

“You’ll take the apartment?” Mrs. Cobb clapped
her hands. “I’m so glad! It will be nice to have a professional writer in the house. It will give us
class,
if you know what I mean.”

She gave him a key to the downstairs door and accepted a month’s rent.

“We don’t bother to lock our doors up here,” she said, “but if you want a key, I’ll find you one.”

“Don’t worry about it. Nothing that I own is worth locking up.”

She gave him a mischievous look. “Mathilda walks right through doors, anyway.”

“Who?”

“Mathilda. Our ghost.”

Qwilleran went back to his hotel and made one telephone call before packing his suitcases. He called the Photo Lab at the
Daily Fluxion
and asked for Tiny Spooner.

“How’d the pictures turn out, Tiny?”

“Fair. They’re on the dryer. Can’t say they’re graphically articulate. Too many incongruous shapes.”

“Leave them in the Feature slot, and I’ll pick them up Monday. And Tiny,” Qwilleran said, “I want to ask you one question. Give me the truth. Did you or didn’t you—”

“I was nowhere near that blasted crockery. I swear! I looked at it, that’s all, and it started to jiggle.”

“And how about the chandelier and the big mirror?”

“Don’t try to pin those on me, either! So help me, I was twenty feet away when they let loose!”