The Yellow Cat Mystery (16 page)

“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!” Socker Furlong said, pretending to be playing a trumpet to herald their coming as they came up the steps together.

Djuna was the first one to find his voice as he screamed,
“Miss Annie!”
No one would have known that only a few days before he had almost been battered lifeless. He darted out of his chair and almost lifted Miss Annie Ellery off her feet as he hugged and kissed her.

“How in the world did you get down here?” he whispered in her ear, because he knew how hard it had been for her to scrape up the money to get
him
down there.

“Great glitterin’ glories of Golconda!” said Miss Annie, her eyes twinkling, “Can’t a body take a little trip to Florida if she wants to?” Then she whispered in his ear, “Mr. Hamilton sent for me and is paying for everything. I
flew
down and I’m going to fly back!”

Then everyone at the table was surrounding and greeting Miss Annie Ellery, and Champ was adding his shrill bark of greeting, too. When she could, Miss Annie detached herself from all the people and went over and said hello to Champ. Champ was very glad to see her but almost before she had finished he cradled his head on his forefeet again and went back to the job of keeping an eye on Mrs. Pulham’s big, yellow cat.

After all had taken their places, with Miss Annie sitting between Socker Furlong and Dan Forbes, Mr. Hamilton said, “We’re going to turn our party over to Mr. Furlong for a bit so that he can ask Djuna to explain a few things that have been puzzling all of us and, I hope, will make everything clear to Miss Annie. After that I’m sure you will all enjoy the turkey dinner my chef has prepared—that is, he prepared all of it except one dish which was supplied by that master of the culinary art, Mrs. Williams. As is fitting for a person who knows all about beans, Mrs. Williams has honored us with her Vegetable Panache—”

“What’s
that?”
Djuna whispered at Tommy.

“A layer of fresh green beans and then a layer of fresh lima beans, and then a couple of more layers of each, with whipped cream covering the top, an’ when it seeps down through, oh, boy!” Tommy whispered back.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Hamilton finished when he could, “I give you Socker Furlong!”

Everyone shouted and cheered and clapped and one or two of the people at the table had happy tears in their eyes, which is fitting on such an occasion, and especially if the occasion occurs on Christmas Eve.

As Socker Furlong rose to his feet with a wide grin on his cherubic face Rilla Hamilton pounded her fist on the table and said shrilly, “I don’t want to hear any ol’ speeches! I want to eat
now
an’ get my presents!”

“Rilla! Be quiet!” Mrs. Hamilton said severely. Mr. Hamilton didn’t say anything. He looked at Rilla hopelessly and his mouth tightened.

Then Rilla’s face turned very red as Tommy Williams leaned around Bobby Herrick and hissed “Horsumpphat!” in her ear.

“As I was about to say,” Socker Furlong said, smiling at Rilla, “everything is under control. Cross-eye Costello, alias Dr. Hammer, is in the prison ward at the hospital, slightly the worse for wear, after tangling with Djuna.

“Ramón Gomez, known to the great Art of Modified Murder as the Yellow Cat, and to most of you here as Pedro Marteeno, is also in the hoosegow, our friend of the Border Patrol, Dan Forbes, having taken care of that. Now,” Socker went on as he smiled down at Djuna, “if we can just get our worried-looking little friend Djuna to open up and tell us just how they got there, everything will be hunkee doree, as they say in the south of France!”

When everyone craned his neck to look at Djuna, the worried look Socker had mentioned increased and at the same time Djuna’s face became very, very red as he began to squirm in his chair.

“He’s just an old smarty-cat!” Rilla sniffed disdainfully, and that was just what Djuna needed to put him at his ease. As he began to laugh, everyone began to laugh with him.

“Well,” he said hesitantly when he had stopped laughing, “a cat is what started it all, so that’s where I’d better begin. When I first got here,” he went on, looking at Miss Annie, “I met Mrs. Pulham, and she asked Tommy and me to take her cat, Tootler, to the new dentist, Dr. Hammer, to get his teeth fixed.” Tootler looked up, yawned at the people staring at him, and went back to sleep.

“At least, I guess that’s when it started, because Dr. Hammer acted so funny when we took Tootler to him,” Djuna explained. Then a couple of creases appeared between his eyes and he said with conviction, “What I mean is, Dr. Hammer just didn’t
act
like a dentist and he seemed scared to death at the idea of fixing Tootler’s teeth. He—”

“He ought to be!” Mrs. Pulham put in indignantly. “And he’d better look out for me, if he ever gets out of jail!”

“Well,” Djuna said, “I noticed a couple of funny things in Dr. Hammer’s office that morning, but they didn’t mean anything until later on.”

“That’s the way you’re
always
doing!” Tommy said excitedly. “You notice things and you don’t say anything about them and the next thing anybody knows you’re about half dead!”

“Now, wait a minute, Tommy,” Socker laughed. “Let’s give the guy a chance. Go on, Djuna. What did you notice?”

“One thing I noticed,” Djuna went on, “was an oxygen tank. I knew what it was because I saw one like it in the Riverton Hospital when I went to see Spitfire, that circus man, when he was hurt. I just couldn’t imagine why Dr. Hammer needed an oxygen tank. If it had been the kind of tank I saw in a dentist’s office when he pulled Miss Annie’s tooth—I mean, that he used to put her to sleep—I wouldn’t have thought anything of it.”

“But it wasn’t, eh?” Socker said. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Djuna said. “I noticed a couple of ridge-hooks and I couldn’t imagine what he’d use those for either. I knew what they were because Mr. Boots, a painter and carpenter in Edenboro, had a ladder with ridge-hooks on—”

“Ridge-hooks?” Mr. Hamilton said. “What are they, Djuna?”

“Well,” Djuna said, “they’re just iron hooks that are fastened on the end of the kind of ladder you hang on things. You don’t lean the ladder against things. Mr. Boots uses his for painting roofs. It hangs right straight up and down if you hook it over something, or you hook it over the ridge of a house if you’re painting a roof.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” Mr. Hamilton said, and everyone else nodded, too.

“And then another thing I noticed,” Djuna said, “was some lengths of wood that Dr. Hammer had sawed on a chair in his reception room. They were sawed just about the length of the rungs of a ladder. I supposed that Dr. Hammer was going to make a ladder, but I couldn’t imagine what he was going to use that for, either, unless he was making a fire escape.”

“There
aren’t
any fire escapes on that building, Horace!” Mrs. Hamilton said down the length of the table to her husband. Mr. Hamilton looked startled but he didn’t say anything back.

“Well,” Djuna said again, after he saw that Mr. Hamilton didn’t have anything to say, “that afternoon when Tommy and I were going to the beach we stopped off, on the way, at the bowling alleys right across the arcade in the Hamilton Block from the bank. Bobby Herrick, here, told us all about bowling and showed us Dr. Hammer’s special bowling ball.”

“You don’t mean to say that you got an idea from that!” Dan Forbes exclaimed.

“Oh, no,” Djuna said quickly. “But something happened when we came out of the bowling alleys that made me wonder about Dr. Hammer again.”

“Ah, the plot thickens!” said Socker as he grinned encouragement at Djuna.

“When we came out of the bowling alleys,” Djuna said, “there were a couple of men in the arcade with a long, round tank of some kind on a little truck. They were looking for Dr. Hammer’s name on the directory on the wall. His name hadn’t been put up there yet, so they asked Tommy and me, as we passed, if we knew if there was a dentist named Hammer in the building. We told them where his office was and while we were telling them I looked at the tank carefully because I remembered the oxygen tank I’d seen in Dr. Hammer’s office. I saw that the tank had just ordinary cooking gas in it. But I didn’t think much about that, either, until I asked Dr. Hammer something the next day.”

“What about the day you c’m to my boat yard with Tommy an’ found out about Pedro?” Captain Andy wanted to know.

“That was the same afternoon, after we met Amaryllis on the beach,” Djuna said, and he looked at Tommy and they both grinned. “After we talked to Rilla we went over to see Cap’n Andy and we met Pedro, because his boat was tied up there. He told us he was a fisherman and we saw that his boat was called
My Goat
. After we talked with him he took us over to Nielson’s Restaurant to buy us a milk shake. Dr. Hammer was eating there and I remembered that when we first met him with Mr. Williams and Mr. Hamilton the day before he told Mr. Hamilton that he cooked his own breakfast and lunch in his office and then came over to the restaurant to get one good meal each day. Just for something to say I said to Dr. Hammer, ‘I bet you like the food here better than you do the stuff you cook on the gas range in your office.’”

“‘It’s an electric range,’ Dr. Hammer said, ‘but doesn’t make my cooking any better.’ So then I wondered about the tank of cooking gas, and it puzzled me because I was sure dentists didn’t give that kind of gas to people when they pulled their teeth.”

Djuna took a sip of water and then went on:

“So Tommy and I talked it over at lunch that day and after I found out about his boat having been
El Gato
we were sure that Pedro was the Yellow Cat and that he was hiding, or something, but we didn’t know what to do about it.”

“That was the day that Dr. Hammer was having lunch in the next booth and heard you talking?” Socker asked.

“Yes,” Djuna said and he shook his head ruefully. “It was so dark in there we didn’t even see him. I told Tommy about the note I saw Pedro slip to Dr. Hammer, too, and I was hoping, after they grabbed me on Pedro’s boat and took me to that island, that Tommy would remember to tell someone about that, so the police would check on Dr. Hammer and find out what he was doing, but Tommy forgot about it.”

“My gosh!” Tommy exploded. “You’d have forgot it, too, if you’d had as many things to think about as I did—with you and Champ disappearing and Pop’s beans freezing!”

“I guess I would have,” Djuna acknowledged, and added, “Well, I guess that’s about all you don’t know.” He looked at Miss Annie and said, “You read about most of it in the papers, didn’t you, Miss Annie?”

“Most of it,” Miss Annie said. “But I didn’t understand about that tank of cooking gas.”

“Chief Daley doesn’t understand about that either, Djuna,” Socker said with a grin. “You better bring him up to date on all the fine points of detecting.”

Chief Daley scowled at Socker and said: “As I understand it, you’d just be another reporter if Djuna hadn’t supplied you with a couple of scoops to make you a feature writer!”

“Don’t let us old dodos throw you off your story, Djuna,” Socker said, grinning at Chief Daley.

“Well,” Djuna went on slowly, “after they tied me up and took me up to that island and I heard Pedro and Dr. Hammer talking, I began to put things together because I knew I had to if I didn’t want to be weighted down and thrown in the Atlantic Ocean with my hands and feet tied. I kept going over and over the things that I’d seen in Dr. Hammer’s office—the tank of oxygen and the tank of cooking gas he’d had delivered there, and the ridge-hooks, and the ladder rungs.

“I remembered that Mr. Williams had told me that about one hundred thousand dollars went through the Dolphin Beach Bank every day and that the bank closed at two each afternoon. And I remembered the pigskin bag Dr. Hammer had left at Rilla’s house to bring the shells to his office in, and the doll he was going to fix, and that Rilla had to go to his office at 4:15 in the afternoon, exactly, to get her doll, and—”

“Why didn’t you tell me, or someone, about these things, Djuna?” Mr. Williams asked. “After all—”

“Jiminy crimps!” Djuna said, and then excused himself as his face got red. “I didn’t think any of them were important until I found out that Dr. Hammer wanted Pedro to drown me. I
thought
Pedro was hiding and that there was something awful funny about Dr. Hammer and I was pretty sure that if Pedro was a crook Dr. Hammer must be one, too. But I didn’t give it any real thought until I knew that Dr. Hammer wanted me out of the way,
right away
. He seemed to be in an
awful
hurry. I could tell that Pedro didn’t know very much more about Dr. Hammer than I did. But when I found out I was going to be killed I began to try to figure out some way to save myself.”

“I can’t say a body could be blamin’ you f’r that,” Captain Andy put in dryly.

“So,” Djuna went on, “I went over and over all the things I’d seen and heard, and tried to figure out how they’d fit together. Finally, I remembered some pictures I’d seen, and some words about the pictures explaining them, and it all began to fit together.”

“Pictures!”
Rilla screamed. “Funnies, you mean?”

“Hush, Rilla,” Mrs. Hamilton said.

“What were they, Djuna?” Dan Forbes asked, and his voice was intensely interested.

“Well,” Djuna said again, and he took a long breath. “I remembered a picture I saw in one of those picture magazines a little while ago. I don’t remember which magazine it was in, but they were some pictures of a blow-torch that had been built by some college professor who said there were lots of ways it could be used, but that some of them, like breaking into banks, are illegal. I knew then that Dr. Hammer was going to rob the Dolphin Beach Bank!”

“That’s what I don’t understand, Djuna,” Miss Annie said, and her voice was tense now, too.

“What it said under the pictures,” Djuna explained, “was that the blow-torch reached the temperature of fifty-five hundred degrees and could cut through thick concrete and six inches of steel in just a couple of minutes. And I remembered it said that a fine stream of aluminum dust was blown out of the tip of the torch—with a stream of oxygen, and four blazing jets of ordinary city gas that people use for cooking.” Djuna closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head as he remembered the long horrible hours he had been tied in the shack on the island while he figured these things out. “I knew then why Dr. Hammer had the oxygen and the ordinary gas in his office.”