The Cat Who Went Underground (6 page)

When Qwilleran saw the bill, he said, “What kind of pipe am I buying? Gold-plated?”

“It’s plastic,” she said in her humorless way. “Could I have a drink of water?”

He handed her a glass. “Help yourself. I think you know where it is.”

“You gonna be here all summer?” She was wearing lipstick again – a purplish red.

“That’s my intention,” he said with pointed brevity, thinking she might be planning to pay daily social visits.

She looked around the cabin, staring at the Indian throw rugs with their splashes of red. “Pretty rugs.”

A raucous voice was coming from her van. “I believe your short-wave radio wants your attention,” he said.

After she had driven off in her van to the next job, Qwilleran began to suspect the entire Glinko method of doing business. When Joanna fixed the sink the first time, could she have left a fitting loose so that it would start dripping again?

Was this a Glinko technique? Did Mrs. Glinko train her people, like a north-country Fagin?

Suspicious, frustrated, and disgruntled, he needed the therapy of a long lunch hour at the Press Club with half a dozen fellow journalists, but there was no Press Club within four hundred miles of Moose County. There was, however, his old friend Arch Riker. He made a call to the newspaper office in Pickax.

After years without an adequate newspaper, Moose County now had a publication of professional caliber that reached the reading public twice a week, answering their need for local news and local advertising. It was called the Moose County Something, a name that had started as a joke and had persisted. Editor and publisher of the Something was Qwilleran’s lifelong friend from Down Below. He telephoned Arch Riker. “Are you free for dinner tonight, Arch? It’s been a long time.”

“Sure has!” said Riker. Because of his approaching marriage and the pressures of launching a new publication he had not been available for bachelor dinners for many weeks. “I’m free, and I’m hungry. What did you have in mind?”

“I’ve moved up to the cabin for the summer. Why don’t you meet me here, and we’ll go to the Northern Lights Hotel. They have spaghetti on Mondays… How’s your lovely fiancee?”

“Lovely, hell! We broke it off this weekend,” Riker growled into the phone. “I’ll see you at six o’clock… Wait a minute! Where’s your cabin? I’ve never been there.”

“Take the main highway north to the lake, then left for three miles until you see a K on a cedar post.”

The editor’s car pulled into the clearing shortly after six, and Qwilleran went out to meet his paunchy, red-faced, middle-aged friend.

“Man, this is my idea of the perfect summer place!” Riker exclaimed as he admired the weathered logs, hundred-foot pine trees, and endless expanse of water.

“Come in and mix yourself a martini,” Qwilleran said. “We’ll relax on the porch for a while.”

The editor entered the cabin in a state of awe and envy as he saw the massive stone fireplace, the open ceiling trussed with logs, the moosehead over the mantel, and the bar top made from a single slab of pine. “You’re one lucky dog!”

He mixed his drink with the concentration of a research chemist while Qwilleran leaned on the bar, watching the process, knowing enough not to interrupt. Then, “What happened between you and Amanda?” he asked with the genuine concern of an old friend.

“She’s the most cantankerous, opinionated, obstinate, unpredictable woman I’ve ever met,” Riker said. “Enough is enough!”

Qwilleran nodded. He knew Amanda Goodwinter. “Too bad. She’s losing a good man. Do you ever hear from Rosie?”

“She writes to the kids, and they keep me informed. Rosie married again, and they say she has to support him.”

“Rosie lost a good guy, too. How do you feel about living up here? Have you adjusted?”

Riker gave his martini a trial sip, winced, and nodded approval. “Yes, I’m glad to be here. I was relieved to cut loose from the Fluxion, and after the divorce I wanted to get out of the city. I never thought I’d like living in the hinterland, so far from everywhere, but my attitude is changing. My viewpoint is changing.”

“In what way?”

“Remember our front-page story about the chicken coop fire last week? It destroyed 150,000 chickens. When I was working Down Below I would have written a flippant headline about the world’s largest chicken barbecue, assuming the place was fully insured and no particular loss.” He took another sip of his martini.

“Instead, I empathized with the farmer. I’ve never met Doug Cottle, but I’ve driven past his farm – the neat house, well-kept barnyard, huge facility for chickens. And when it happened, I felt real agony over the loss of his property and the fate of all those birds trapped in a burning building. I could imagine his dreams and years of work going up in flames in the middle of the night! Ironic, isn’t it? I’ve edited copy for hundreds of fires Down Below, and I never felt that way before. Am I getting old?”

They carried their drinks to the lakeside porch, where the armchairs were made of three-inch logs hammered together by some anonymous carpenter at some date unknown.

“Sit down, Arch. They’re more comfortable than they look.”

Riker slid cautiously into a hollowed-out seat and breathed a deep sigh of contentment. “Beautiful view! I’ll bet you get some spectacular sunsets. You have a lot of goldfinches.”

“What do you know about birds, Arch?”

“When you raise a family you learn a lot of things you didn’t want to know.”

“My plumber said they’re wild canaries.”

“Your plumber didn’t have three kids working on merit badges in ornithology. What do you hear from Polly, Qwill? Does she like England?”

“I’ve had a couple of postcards. They’ve asked her to give talks to civic groups.”

“I suppose you’ll be seeing a lot of Mildred while Polly’s away.”

Qwilleran’s moustache bristled. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, the answer is no! Mildred lives half a mile down the beach; we both write for the newspaper; her son-in-law is one of my best friends; she’s a great cook. But that doesn’t mean I intend to jeopardize my relationship with Polly.

And, for what it’s worth, Mildred has a husband.”

“Okay, okay!” said Riker, throwing up his hands in surrender. He and Qwilleran had grown up together in Chicago, and their friendship had survived fistfights in grade school, arguments in high school, competition in college, and bickering ever since.

Qwilleran said, “Now that you’ve broken up with Amanda, there’s no reason why you couldn’t take Mildred out to dinner yourself, Arch. On a scale of one to ten I’d give your ex-fiancee a two and Mildred a nine.”

“Not bad!”

“And I’d rate you six-plus.”

Riker threw him a sour look. “Don’t forget I’m your boss.”

“Don’t forget I’m your financial backer.” The Moose County Something had been made possible by a loan from the Klingenschoen Fund, engineered by Qwilleran behind the scenes. “And if you don’t start spelling my name right in my column, the interest rate is going up.”

“I apologize. We gave the typesetter twenty lashes and an hour to get out of town.” Riker looked around the porch. “Where’s that supercat? Has he read any minds lately? Predicted any crimes? Sniffed out any dead bodies?”

“Mostly he’s too busy being a cat – laundering his tail, chattering at squirrels, eating spiders – all that kind of stuff. But yesterday he tore up the front page of your newspaper, Arch. That should tell you something about the Something. He may be protesting the number of typos.”

Koko was a legend among newsmen Down Below – the only cat in the history of journalism to be an honorary member of the Press Club. In addition to feline curiosity and Siamese intelligence he possessed an intuition that could put him on the scent of a crime. With a sniff here and a scratch there he could dig up information that astounded humans who had to rely on brainpower alone.

“He would have made a great investigative reporter,” Riker said. “We always had cats at home, but never any to compare with Koko. I think it has something to do with his whiskers. He has a magnificent set of whiskers.”

“Yes,” Qwilleran agreed quietly, stroking his ample moustache.

Riker leaned forward suddenly and squinted at a small mound of sawdust on the porch floor. “You’ve got carpenter ants!”

“Carpenter what?”

“Ants that chew their way through old wood. You’d better get a fumigator out here.”

Qwilleran groaned. He envisioned another call to Glinko.

Riker misunderstood the reaction. “Well, you don’t want the porch to fall down around your ears, do you? You should get a carpenter out here to examine the logs.”

Qwilleran groaned again. “Let me tell you about the joys of living in a seventy-five-year-old log cabin – the perfect summer place, as you call it.” He explained the Glinko system, described the couple who operated it, and recounted the visits of Joanna Trupp. “Three visits from a plumber in four days!”

“Sounds to me as if she goes for your moustache,” Riker said. “You know how women react to that brush on your lip! Are you going to take her to lunch?”

Qwilleran ignored that quip. “It sounds to me as if the whole Glinko network is a racket. I’ll know more at the end of the summer. If my suspicions are correct, the Something should run an expose!”

“Put Koko on the investigation,” the editor said with a grin.

“I’m serious, Arch! The whole operation stinks!”

“Oh, come on, Qwill! You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. You’d suspect your own grandmother.”

Qwilleran shifted his position uncomfortably.

“What’s the matter? You’re doing a lot of wriggling tonight. I think the porch posts aren’t the only place you’ve got ants.”

“They’re insect bites that itch like hell,” Qwilleran said testily. “About a dozen bites in one spot, and they don’t go away.”

His friend nodded wisely. “Spider bites. Our kids used to get them at summer camp. They last about a week.”

At that moment Koko swaggered onto the porch with a show of authority and stared pointedly at Qwilleran.

“Excuse me while I feed the cats,” he said. “Mix yourself another drink, Arch, and then we’ll go into town for dinner.”

The resort town of Mooseville was two miles long and two blocks wide, strung out along the shoreline at the foot of the sandbluffs.

“One of these days,” Riker predicted, “some horny buck will chase a sexy doe across the top of that hill, and all that sand will come sliding down. We’ll have another Pompeii. I only hope it’s on our deadline.”

At the village limits the lakeshore highway became Main Street, with the municipal docks, a marina, and the Northern Lights Hotel on the north side.

Across the street were civic buildings and business establishments built entirely of logs, or concrete poured to resemble logs. Post office, town hall, bank and stores acted out the charade, and only the Shipwreck Tavern deviated from civic policy. The town’s noisiest and most popular bar occupied what appeared to be the wooden hull of a beached ship.

Qwilleran said, “We’ll stop at the tavern for a quickie and then go over to the hotel to eat.”

The interior of the bar emulated the hold of an old sailing vessel with sloping bulkheads and massive timbers, but instead of creaking hull, slapping waves, and singing whales, the sound effects were of television, jukebox, video games, and shouting, laughing patrons.

“Like the pressroom at the Fluxion!” Riker yelled. “Who are they?”

“Tourists! Summer people! Locals!” Qwilleran shouted back.

A busy waitress with a talent for lip-reading took their order: one martini straight-up with an anchovy olive, and one club soda with a lemon twist. When the bartender received the order, he waved in the direction of their table. Only Qwilleran ever ordered club soda with a twist.

Excusing himself, Qwilleran ambled over to the crowded bar to wedge in a few words with the man who was pulling beer. What followed was a pantomime of frowns, head-shaking, shrugs, and other gestures of helplessness.

“What was that?” Riker shouted.

“Tell you later.”

A whiskered old man in a battered naval cap lurched into the tavern and climbed on a stool; the nearby barflies moved away.

“Who’s that?”

“Antique dealer!” Qwilleran pointed out another colorful ancient in overalls – red-cheeked, bright-eyed, nimble as a monkey. “Gravedigger!”

They were soon blasted out of the Shipwreck Tavern and across the street to the hotel, where the dining room was so quiet, Riker complained, that it hurt his ears. Plastic covers on the tables and paper bibs on the customers identified it as spaghetti night.

“Now I’ll explain,” said Qwilleran. “That perfect summer place of mine that you admire so much is too small for everyday living. I want to build a small addition. I’ve talked to Hasselrich, and it’s approved by the estate, but now comes the problem: finding a builder.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult,” said Riker. “The county has some big contractors.”

“Unfortunately they’re tied up with major projects in the warm months, and they won’t take a small job. The summer people have to resort to itinerant carpenters who drive into town in rusty crates and live in tents.”

“Are they licensed?”

“They get away without a license because they’re a necessary evil. The township looks the other way.”

“I never heard of such a thing!”

“There are plenty of things you never heard of, Arch, until you came to Moose County. It’s like living on another planet… Speaking of planets, do you hear any talk about UFOs?”

“Occasionally from the wire services, but that’s old stuff.”

“I mean – have you heard reports of recent activity over the lake?”

“No,” said the editor with amused interest. “Are there rumors?”

“The summer people discuss visitors from outer space the way you talk about the Chicago Cubs. Why don’t you assign Roger to do a story?”

“Why don’t you do the story yourself? It’s your lead.”

“I’m a nonbeliever. You and I know it’s some kind of meteorological phenomenon, but Roger swears it’s interplanetary, and Mildred acts as if she’s on first-name terms with the crews.”

The salad was crisp, the garlic bread was crusty, and the spaghetti was al dente. “It’s the best thing they do,” Qwilleran said. “All the locals come on Mondays. They let the tourists have the gray pork chops and gray baked potatoes and gray broccoli on the other nights.”