Judas Cat (10 page)

“I wonder why,” Alex said.

“I think I know. Nat Watkins’ wife went up to Jackson two weeks ago. I think she’s getting a divorce. Imagine. A divorce in Hillside.”

“Scarcely police business, though,” Alex said.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s all over town he threatened to beat her. Then tonight he calls her long distance begging her to come home, and she says if he ever threatens her again she’ll get a disturbance warrant for him or something like that …”

Alex made up his mind then not to use the phone when Sarah was on duty. And he was reasonably certain that Chief Waterman didn’t give a damn about the Watkins’ divorce.

I
N THE MORNING MR.
Whiting announced that he intended to relieve Alex at the office for a few days. He tried to make it sound casual, but his eyes were dancing at the prospect. They drove downtown together. Neither of them mentioned the incidents of the last night, but before he got out of the car, Mr. Whiting laid his hand on Alex’s arm for a moment.

“Son, you aren’t trying to be smart on this thing and work it alone, are you?”

“No,” Alex said, although he realized as he said it that that was exactly what he had been doing. He met his father’s eyes for a moment and then grinned sheepishly.

“Let him do the police work, Alex, unless he asks you. He’s a wily old duck.”

Alex stopped at the office only long enough to leave word with Joan as to where he would be. Maude caught sight of him going out the door. “Alex Whiting, two o’clock on anything you’re running on Mattson. And I mean two o’clock. We’re not paying overtime tonight.”

“Okay, Maudie. I’ll have it in. Joan has the rest of my stuff.” On the way to the station he tried to think of what he could write about Mattson. Precious little, and at the moment he was not well disposed toward running the coroner’s report, as Altman demanded. Waterman had just arrived when Alex walked into the station. The chief looked tired and uneasy.

“I hear you were looking for me last night,” Alex said.

“Nothing very much. I thought we might get together on a couple of things. I want to go out and see Hershel this morning, but first I got to meet the nine-forty from Jackson …”

Alex was trying to remember a recent association with Jackson. The long distance call Sarah had recorded at the exchange last night: Nat Watkins and his wife. It was foolish to think that everything in Hillside stood still because of Mattson’s death. People still ate breakfast and went to work, quarreled and made up, and Mrs. Watkins probably was coming home to a husband for whom Waterman was holding a disturbance summons.

“Alex, maybe it’s none of my business, but you called Doc Barnard kind of late last night …”

“I came over to tell you about it,” Alex said. He told him the whole story.

“Maybe it was kind of kiddish,” Waterman said when he was finished, “but I’m glad you did it. Now we got some notion there’s real grounds for an investigation, even if Doc don’t come up with anything spectacular.”

“He promised to call me this morning.”

“If he promised, he’ll call. Gilbert’s on his way up for our copy of the report.”

“I’d like to go through the old house again,” Alex said. “And I’d like to sit down and talk to Mabel Turnsby.”

Waterman threw him the key to the house. “Go easy on Mabel, Alex. She’s as touchy as a sore tooth. See if you can find out if that was her fingerprint.”

Mabel Turnsby was at the door before Alex reached her top step. The flower boxes on the porch were freshly watered, and as Alex looked back at her lawn, he saw that most of the damage from yesterday’s crowd had been repaired.

“I’ve been wondering if you weren’t ever coming to see me, Alex Whiting. Seems a pity to me Fred Waterman couldn’t put someone with experience on the case. Although who that’d be in Hillside, I’m sure I don’t know.”

Alex laid his hat on the cretonne-covered sofa, and sat down beside it. Miss Turnsby picked up the hat and hung it on the hall tree.

“Well, there may be a lot of angles to this thing, Miss Turnsby. All I’m looking for is a story on Andy Mattson. As far as the case goes, there may not be any at all.”

“Fudge,” she said. “How can you tell that till you investigate?”

“You’re right, of course,” Alex said.

Mabel settled herself in a straight-backed chair, and he was reminded of Mrs. Barnard’s erectness pouring tea the night before. “Now, what do you want to ask me, Alex?”

“First, a question for Chief Waterman. I’d like to know if you touched anything in Andy’s place?”

“Certainly not.”

“Accidentally, I mean. With your hands, maybe when we were in there yesterday.”

“No,” she said, more thoughtfully. “I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Try to think carefully, Miss Turnsby. It might be important.”

“I guess I know what I did,” she said.

Alex sighed. “Did you ever cut one of your fingers, so that there’s a scar on it?” he asked patiently.

“Oh. As a matter of fact I did. Cut it as a girl with the bread knife. It taught me a lesson I never forgot. Don’t ever cut with the knife facing you. See?” She showed him the index finger of her left hand.

“Now couldn’t you have leaned that hand on a chair, say, in Andy’s place?”

“No,” she said.

Alex was about to let it go. Obviously it was her print the county men found. Then Mabel changed her mind. “Oh, I could too. I know when I did it. When you were dragging me out I caught hold of a chair.”

“That’s right,” he said, although he would not have said he dragged her out. “The deputy sheriff found the print. Now do you see how important little things can be?”

“Mercy,” she said.

“Now I’d be grateful to you, Miss Turnsby, if you’d tell me all you can about Andy Mattson.”

“From when he came here?”

“I’d like that.”

“Well, I was a young woman, then. It’s thirty years ago. Naturally, a fine looking man like him, well, it seemed kind of nice, most Hillside men being gone off to the war.”

He was going to have to take all the trimmings of her poor vanity.

“I tried to be neighborly. It seemed right pleasant to have someone respectable there …” Alex wondered if the implication was that she did not consider her brother and his wife respectable. “… and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.”

“Why?”

“He always looked kind of sad. But he didn’t take to sympathy. I tried being nice to him. Went out with him several times. We had the grandest dances in those days. People aren’t sociable like they used to be. But it just didn’t seem proper, me going out with him, and him so much older.”

“Any idea what made him unhappy?”

“No. And once in a while, being neighbor-like I tried to find out. He was just awful close-mouthed.”

“Ever hear him mention the name Anne?”

Something in Miss Turnsby’s eyes sharpened, and yet her expression remained unchanged and she answered quickly. “Not that I remember.”

Alex felt that she was lying. But it might have been that the old man had mistakenly called her by the name. For all his intended logic, Alex had embroidered on his idea of Anne … beautiful, strong-minded, trying to condition herself to Andy’s agnosticism, maybe his anti-social ways, and then despairing of it. He shook his head. It was silly, sentimental stuff and Miss Turnsby was talking to him. She had asked him to have coffee and rolls.

“Thank you,” he said. “I do love a cup of coffee in the middle of the morning.”

The coffee had been prepared beforehand. And she had baked the cinnamon rolls that morning. He wondered if that was what he had smelled in the house and about her. But to prepare fresh rolls in hopes of a caller … it told of her loneliness. At the table she seated herself opposite him so that she had a full view of the street and Andy’s house.

“Have you any idea where Andy came from, or why he picked Hillside?” he asked.

She shook her head and then leaned across the table confidentially. “He didn’t learn them fine manners of his in any small town,” she said. “And the way he made things when he was younger, I’d say he was a mighty well-educated man.”

“What kind of things?”

“Bird houses and the like. He gave me one once. I had it for years. There was one thrush came there every spring. Then a grackle came and drove him away. They’re mean birds, and noisy and homely like witches. It just broke my heart so I took it down.”

Alex sipped his coffee thoughtfully. An old-fashioned coffee grinder was sitting on the cupboard with a jar of coffee beans beside it. “Andy must have been a fine figure of a man in his day,” he said.

“Indeed he was. Spruce, down-right dapper, as we used to say.”

“These rolls are delicious, ma’m. You’re a wonderful cook.”

“For plain cooking I can’t be beat,” Miss Turnsby said.

Alex nodded. “Andy held his age mighty well until the last few years, didn’t he? I wonder when he began to show it.”

“I can tell you that,” she said. “He closed up the house for a couple of months about fifteen years ago and went off. Right in the depression it was. I guess we all remember them years. I began to think he was gone for good. Then he was out on the porch like usual one morning. I took him over some rolls. Same as these, I remember. And my, he was different. Thanked me. Told me that afternoon how nice they were. He wasn’t a mean man before that, mind you, Alex, but he had an awful bite.”

“And after that?”

“He wasn’t neighborly, exactly. But he passed time of day, and it seemed people just didn’t think much about him anymore.”

“But it was then people began thinking of him as an old man?”

“I think so. I remember saying how stooped he was, and he didn’t take care of himself like he did before that.”

“I don’t know that it means anything,” Alex said, “but could you put it more closely what year it was?”

“Let me see,” she said. She had a habit of sucking in her under lip when she was thinking. “It was the first year during the depression my Endicott stocks paid anything. Not much, but I got the check the same morning he came back and it kind of cheered me up, them both coming on the same day. It’s right lonesome with no neighbor on the kitchen side of the house. What will they do with his place now, Alex?”

“I don’t know for sure. I think it’s impounded for so long to see if any heirs show up. I’d be grateful if you could tell me the year he went away. Maybe from there we could learn something about him.”

Miss Turnsby pulled the chair from the table to the cupboard. Putting a newspaper on it, she climbed up and took a tin box from the top shelf. Alex helped her down. She returned to the table with a yellowing notebook. He watched her fingers as she turned the pages. They were nimble fingers for a woman in her seventies.

“Here it is,” she said. “1933. And they came due in July.”

Alex put the date in his notebook. It coincided with the year of the missing tax receipt. “Thank you, Miss Turnsby. Maybe it means something, maybe not. You can’t ever tell in these things. Can I put the box up for you?”

“Much obliged,” she said.

When Alex returned to the table he finished his coffee.

“Can I warm you another cup?”

“No thanks, ma’m. I’m going to have to be moving soon. I don’t suppose Andy mentioned anything about where he’d been that trip?”

“No. I hinted around a bit. My mother taught me never to ask direct questions. It’s the best way I know of not finding out anything.”

Alex smiled. “Anything else you can think of I should know, Miss Tumby?”

“Not off-hand, there isn’t.”

“I wonder where he got the cat. Did he have it for long?”

“Ten years or more. I think it just come to him.”

“Cats have a way of doing that,” Alex said. “He took good care of it, didn’t he?”

“Like a baby. Fed it more than he ate. Good stuff from what Mrs. Durkin says.”

He got up from the table and folded the linen napkin she had given him. Even that was hand embroidered, with the monogram M.T. “I’m going over and take another look around. May I go out your back door?”

“Of course, Alex. Tell your mother to be sure and come to the luncheon tomorrow. It’ll be nice even if she don’t play cards. There’ll be bunco.”

He noticed a ring of keys on a hook by the door and he wondered if one of them did not match the key to Andy’s house in his pocket. Mabel was holding the screen door open for him. She picked up the broom.

“My mother tried to teach me that indirect question business,” Alex said, “but it doesn’t work for me. Did you hear or notice anyone over at Andy’s place the night before last?”

“No, and I looked too. Something woke me in the middle of the night and I looked out the window. His lights were still on, but then he stayed up till all hours, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

“About what time was that?”

“Two-thirty. I looked.”

“Any idea what wakened you?”

“No. Most nothing wakes me, except cats screeching. I can’t abide that. Got rid of my Bessie on that account.”

Alex pushed some excelsior from the step with his toe. “Thanks for breakfast, Miss Turnsby. Your rolls are out of this world.”

“Alex,” she said, following him down the steps, “why did they look for fingerprints?”

“They always do when a person dies suddenly like that.” As he climbed through the long grass between the houses, he could hear her sweeping the steps behind him.

A
LEX OPENED ALL THE WINDOWS
in Andy’s kitchen to let in the sunlight. The place was damp and musty. All in all, he was well satisfied with his chat with Miss Turnsby. At least one of the pieces to the puzzle had fallen into place: the tax receipt and Andy’s trip. He was rather pleased with himself for the way he had gone about it. He walked all through the house. Nothing had changed. The house looked as though nothing in it had changed for twenty years, and yet, he thought, standing in the living room, something was different there although the furniture was all as he remembered it. It was the mid-morning light from the small window, and its rays fell between him and a painting he had not even noticed in the artificially lighted room yesterday. Now it had the luminousness of the misty sunlight that probably came to it only at this hour of the day. Alex went to a chair across the room from it and sat down. There was nothing at all in the room except the painting from where he sat—a long sweep of meadow into a sparse wood that almost sang with changing fragments of color, as though there was the movement in it of birds or dampened leaves myriad in the sunlight as the wind stirred them. He looked at it for a long time and then grew conscious of his heartbeat, noisy in the quiet room. He closed his eyes that he might think of other things. The chair in which he sat was molded to the shape of a body, and he did not quite fit, for Andy Mattson was a larger man. But here the old man must have sat for many hours through many days through many years, and enjoyed an ecstasy he shared with no one. He got up and went to the picture. The artist was the famous French impressionist Pissarro. Alex realized that his knowledge came of having gone to an exhibit with Joan when they were both in college. The exhibit was on loan to the university from the Addison collection.