The Yellow Cat Mystery (11 page)

Mrs. Williams’s eyes were closed and her lips were moving soundlessly as the broadcaster stopped speaking. She rose and bent over and kissed Tommy on the top of his head as Champ checked a yawn and moaned.

“Good night, darling,” she said to Tommy. She held his face between both of her hands for a moment and then she turned off the light.

“Good night,” Tommy said. And he was glad that his mother had turned off the light, because of the tears that were welling into his eyes.

At two o’clock the next morning Socker Furlong and Dan Forbes came back to the Williams home and stretched out wearily in comfortable chairs in the Williams living room and waited for the telephone to ring. At four o’clock Mr. Williams came back from the bean fields and said that danger of frost that night had passed.

Through the long, lonely hours of that Saturday morning before dawn, the three men paced the room—waiting, waiting for the telephone to ring.

When the sun came creeping out of the ocean, a great gleaming ball of fire, the telephone had not yet rung.

O
N
Friday afternoon, Chuck Nielson had been standing with his back toward the door of his restaurant and he was laughing so heartily at something a customer at the food bar had said that he didn’t see Djuna and Champ as they approached the counter.

Djuna stood there, patiently waiting to be noticed, while Champ sat down on the floor beside him, and counted the customers in the dining room. Champ’s nose kept wrinkling and quivering as new and interesting smells came to him from the kitchen. After a few moments he could stand it no longer and he gave off three impatient barks. He barked as though he knew that Chuck had promised him a bone and was asking “Where is it?”

“Quiet, Champ!” Djuna said as Chuck Nielson swung around.

“Hi-ho, Djuna,” he said cordially. “I hear you have Champ with you. I’ll get his bone.” He went back along the counter and through the half door that led to the kitchen. He reappeared almost immediately through a door on the outside of the counter. In his hand he held a large bone that had not been too carefully scraped of meat.

Champ’s tail began to wag so hard that it was wagging Champ as Chuck bent and offered him the bone. Champ’s strong jaws fastened on the bone, but, as Djuna thanked Chuck, Champ opened his mouth to give him a word of thanks, too. The bone fell out of his mouth and he scrambled so hard to get it back that everyone in the place laughed and Chuck said, “That’s what you get for trying to talk with your mouth full.”

While Djuna had been waiting to get the bone for Champ he had, seemingly, been interested only in that. But at the same time his mind was busy trying to think of some way he could find out the truth about Pedro and his boat. It was while he waited for Chuck Nielson to come back out of the kitchen that he remembered the numbers fastened to the bow of Pedro’s fishing boat. He decided that after Champ got his bone he would go back to Captain Andy’s and find out from Captain Andy, or someone, what they meant, and then copy them down. “It must mean,” he thought, “that the boat is registered some place, and wherever that place is I can find out the truth.”

After he had thanked Chuck again for Champ’s bone they made their way outside and turned to the left on Atlantic Avenue toward the yacht basin. The sky was becoming overcast and the soft warm breeze that had been blowing from the east had shifted and was now a cold north wind. Djuna noticed, as he passed the parking space at the south end of the yacht basin, that all of the fishing boats were out. But in the second section he noticed a sleek white cruiser that had numbers on its bow. He hesitated for an instant and then walked along the planking that formed a walk between the different sections, toward the cruiser.

There were two men sitting in deck chairs on the afterdeck of the trim craft, and as Djuna approached one of them called, “Are you aboard a boat in the basin?”

“No, sir,” Djuna said. “I—I just wanted to ask a question.”

“No one’s allowed in here who doesn’t belong to a boat,” the man said, eying Champ and his bone distastefully.

“I’ll get right out,” Djuna said. “I just wanted to know why boats have numbers on the front?”

“On the bow,” the man corrected grumpily. “Every power boat must carry ’em,” he added.

“Is—is the number registered some place?” Djuna asked.

“With the Coast Guard,” the man said. “Now scram!”

“Yes, sir,” Djuna said, and he hurried back out on the street and made his way down to Captain Andy’s boat yard. There was no one in sight in the yard, so he sauntered across it to the wharf. Pedro’s black boat rocked in the swell from a passing cruiser as Djuna approached it.

“Pedro! Oh, Pedro!” he called as he stepped on the wharf. When there was no answer he waited a few minutes and then looked carefully around. When he was quite sure there was no one watching him he took a small notebook and a pencil from a hip pocket and copied down the numbers attached to the bow.

just before the street door to Captain Andy’s boat yard opened and Djuna entered, there had been two men sitting in the little cabin of Pedro’s boat. One of them was Pedro and the other was Dr. Hammer. Pedro was listening to Dr. Hammer with a quizzical smile on his lips as the dentist said, “No, he’s
not
just ‘another keed.’ Young Tommy Williams’s father told Mr. Hamilton at the bank all about this boy they call Djuna, this morning, and Hamilton told me. He’s a mighty smart little apple. He has helped put a half-dozen men in the jug, and if we don’t do something about it he might put
us
there.”

“Poof!” Pedro said, and he made a humorous twisting motion with his hands to show what he could do to Djuna.

“Muscles are all right in their place,” Dr. Hammer said angrily, “but brains are better. Now get this through your thick head. I told you I heard them discussing both of us in the Snack Bar. The lights are dim in there and you can hardly see when you come in from the beach. I was in the next booth to them but they couldn’t see me. That kid, Djuna, told the other one that your name isn’t Marteeno. He said you were the Yellow Cat and suggested that the police were looking for you.”

“How he know that?” Pedro asked suspiciously.

“I haven’t the faintest idea how he found it out,” Dr. Hammer said. “But he saw you when you pulled that stupid trick of passing a note to me yesterday in Nielson’s Restaurant. He’s a sharp little rat, that kid. He has linked us together.”

“’But like I tol’ you in thee note, I need monay,” Pedro said.

“Shut up and listen,” Dr. Hammer shouted. “The other kid suggested that they ought to go and tell the police, but Djuna said he wasn’t sure what they ought to do; they might get in trouble if they went to the police without proof. So he’ll get proof, and
then
he’ll go to the police—and we’ll be wondering how we got in the hoosegow!”

It was just then that Djuna opened the door of the boat yard and entered. They saw him through a porthole as he approached Pedro’s boat, and they waited in strained silence while Djuna called Pedro’s name.

When Djuna copied down the registration number of Pedro’s boat from the bow, Pedro’s beady eyes were thin slits as he made that same twisting motion with his hands. But this time it wasn’t humorous. He did it with deadly earnestness and Dr. Hammer quietly nodded his head. At the same time he put his fingers to his lips.

They crouched in the cabin, tense and silent, while Djuna moved down the wharf until he was opposite the cockpit. They waited, like two spiders in a web, until Djuna stepped over the coaming and down into the cockpit to peer into the cabin.

Pedro’s powerful hands came out like two clutching talons to fasten themselves on Djuna’s neck before he could cry out. The two hands cut off his wind and then it was knocked from his body as he was hurled to the deck. He lay there gasping horribly as his hands and feet were securely tied and a gag was forced brutally into his mouth. He tried gallantly to struggle but he was helpless. He heard Champ barking his sharp, shrill bark and hoped against hope that someone would know he was calling for help and would come to help them.

“Get your engine going!” Dr. Hammer panted hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here and get rid of him!”

A moment later the motor roared to life and Djuna felt the boat quiver as Dr. Hammer cast off the mooring lines and Pedro threw the gear in reverse and backed out into the Inland Waterway.

Djuna could hear the water lapping the bow of the boat and running along the sides as Pedro swung the wheel and laid the nose on a point up the waterway. And he could feel the air grow colder as the wind shifted again and began to blow from the northwest. He could hear rain beating on the roof of the cabin as the wind grew in volume and the boat began to pitch.

“Take thees wheel,” Pedro called to Dr. Hammer as Champ began to bark more savagely and Djuna realized that Champ was aboard the boat. “I take care of that leetle black dog.”

Djuna saw Dr. Hammer take the wheel and saw Pedro’s legs disappear through the doorway into the cockpit. A moment later he heard Champ snarling with new fury and then he heard Pedro’s scream before he began to curse in Spanish.

“I feex you!” Pedro screamed above the chug of the motor and the whine of the wind. Djuna heard a terrific thump and then a shrill yelp from Champ, followed instantly by a splash. Then he heard Champ’s defiant bark from astern of the boat and heard it grow fainter and fainter as the boat drew away.

Djuna wished now, more than he had ever wished for anything in his life, that he had followed his inner promptings and gone to the beach to get Tommy to come with him, or at least had told Tommy that he was going to Captain Andy’s boat yard. Two of them would have been safer than one; or, if Tommy hadn’t come with him, at least now he would have known where to begin to search. But as it was, no one knew where he had gone, and no one might ever find out.

Djuna closed his eyes while Dr. Hammer and Pedro, who had taken the wheel again, glowered down at him. His wrists and ankles were becoming numb from the tight ropes cutting cruelly into them. He wanted to cry but he fought back his tears, resolving that he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing him cry.

A few minutes later he could tell when Pedro cut the speed of the boat and swung slowly to the left. Darkness seemed to close in over the boat as overhanging branches brushed the sides and cut out the light.

Then it was gliding through open water again and there was a slight bump as Pedro killed the engine and said, “Make the lines fast, Doc.”

Then the boat lay still and there was no movement or sound except the rush of the wind through treetops and the movements of the two men aboard the boat.

“All right, let’s get him,” Dr. Hammer said, and the two men came into the cabin, picked Djuna up by the feet and shoulders, and carried him out to the cockpit. They lifted him and rolled him to the dilapidated dock, beside which a flat-bottomed rowboat, half full of water, was also moored. Without speaking they climbed up beside him and carried him across a short stretch of sand and onto the porch of an unpainted ramshackle hut that stood about thirty feet from the water’s edge.

Djuna got only a brief glance at his surroundings as they carried him across the short stretch of beach. He saw that the dock jutted out into a small lagoon that was entirely surrounded by mangrove trees, with mangrove oysters clinging to their tentacle-like roots. There seemed to be no entrance or exit to the still, dark pool. Behind and on both sides of the shack there was a tangle of palms, water oaks, pines, scrub and palmetto that made the place appear to be a small island in the maze of tidal channels that in places honeycombed the swamps and morasses along the Inland Waterway.

Silently they carried Djuna inside and dumped him on the floor as they would have dumped a sack of meal. He saw that the single room contained an old iron bed covered with a dirty mattress, a single table, two kitchen chairs, a dilapidated stove for cooking, and a few battered cooking utensils. The floor was bare. The two holes that had been cut window-size in the sides of the building were covered with mosquito netting.

“Well, what we do weeth heem, Doc?” Pedro asked as he looked down at Djuna with beady eyes.

“Get rid of him!” Dr. Hammer snapped, and added:
“Permanently.”

Djuna was sick with icy terror as he looked up at Dr. Hammer. His face, in spite of the colored glasses, was alive with malignant hatred. Djuna could see death glittering in the eyes behind the glasses.

He shivered as Pedro said, “That, she ees reesky. Mebbe we catch a rope aroun’ our necks.”

“You’ll have one around it if we don’t,” Dr. Hammer snarled. “I’m not going to have this little rat upset all my work at the last moment. Another day and—”

Pedro’s sullen face lit up and he said, “You theenk you will ’ave enough monay for the beeg, fas’ boat in another day?”

“No,” Hammer said. “That’s going to take another few days, Pedro. You’ll just have to be patient.”

“How can I be what you call patient when the Border Patrol may grab me any minute?” Pedro asked. “Suppose he ’as tol’ someone I am the Yellow Cat. I can’t go back to Cap’n Andy’s boat yard.”