The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (15 page)

Jane’s door was ajar and there was no light on.

“Jane?” he called, and knocked once. Then he went in. “Jane?—Where’s the light here, Eddie boy?” Hank groped, and after a few seconds, found a light switch. He heard footsteps coming down from the next floor, and instinctively he closed the door. Something was wrong here. He looked around at Jane’s living room in astonishment. He’d been here before, but only once. “What the hell happened?” he whispered to himself. The place was a shambles. A robbery, he thought. They’d dumped the stuff in the middle of the floor and intended to come back.

Hank moved towards the heap on the floor. He pulled the madras cover back slowly.

“Holy cow!—Holy
cow
!”

Eddie flattened himself against Hank’s sweater and closed his eyes, terrified and wanting to hide.

“Jane?” Hank touched her shoulder, thinking maybe she’d fainted, or been knocked out. He tried to turn her over, and found that her body was a bit stiff and not at all warm. Her face, her neck were dark red with blood. Hank blinked and straightened up. “Anybody else here?” he called towards the next room, more boldly than he felt.

He knew there was no one else here. Slowly it dawned on him that Eddie had killed Jane with his little teeth, maybe with—Hank was looking at a kitchen knife a few feet away on the floor. Then he saw the cream-and-pink colored conch shell. “Get down, Eddie,” he whispered. But Eddie wouldn’t be dislodged from the sweater.

Hank picked up the knife, then the shell. He washed them both at the sink in the kitchenette, and saw a faint pinkness run off the shell. He turned the shell upside down, and shook the water out of it. He dried it thoroughly with a dishtowel. He did the same with the knife. Jane must have attacked Eddie. Hadn’t Rose hinted as much? “We’re gettin’ out, Eddie! Yes, sir, yes, sir!”

Then Eddie heard the comforting sound of the zipper that closed Hank’s jacket all the way up. They were going down the stairs now.

Hank had not forgotten to wipe the doorknobs when he left Jane’s apartment, and he had made sure the door locked behind him in a normal way. Hank had thought to telephone the police at once, when he’d been in Jane’s apartment, then had thought to telephone them later once he got Eddie home safely. But he didn’t. He wasn’t even going to telephone Rose. Rose wouldn’t want any part of it, and Hank knew she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. The body would be found soon enough, was Hank’s opinion, and he didn’t want Eddie blamed for it. The police, if he’d rung, would have asked him what he knew about it, and they’d have found out somehow about Eddie, even if Hank had tried to hide him.

So Hank bided his time on Perry Street, Greenwich Village, where he shared an apartment with two young men, and two days later, he caught an item in a newspaper saying that Jane Garrity, aged forty-two, unemployed secretary, had been found dead in her apartment in Red Cliff, New Jersey, victim of an attack by an unknown assailant or assailants, maybe even children, because her wounds and blows had not been severe. The actual cause of death had been a heart attack.

The police would know Jane’s record, Hank thought, and the company she kept. Let them worry about it. Hank reproached himself for having given Eddie to Rose, but she’d been fond of Eddie, and Hank had felt a bit guilty when he and Rose had broken up. But now that he had Eddie back, Hank was not going to part with him. Eddie showed no further interest in opening doors, because he was happy where he was. He had a small room to himself, with ropes to swing on, a basket bed, no door at all, and one of Hank’s friends, a sculptor, constructed something like a tree for Eddie in the living room. Hank began writing a rather long epic poem about Eddie, whose life story was to be veiled, metamorphosed, allegorized.
The Conqueror Monkey
. Only Hank and Eddie knew the truth.

Hamsters
vs
. Websters

T
he circumstances under which Julian and Betty Webster and their ten-year-old son Laurence acquired a country house, a dog, and hamsters, were most sudden and unexpected for the family, and yet it all hung together.

One afternoon in his air-conditioned Philadelphia office Julian suffered a heart attack. He had pain, he sank to the floor, and he was whisked to a hospital. When he had recovered some five days later, his doctor gave him a serious talk. Julian would have to stop smoking, reduce his working hours to six or less per day, and a country atmosphere would be better for him than living in an apartment in Philadelphia. Julian was shocked. He was only thirty-seven, he pointed out.

“You don’t realize how you’ve been driving yourself,” the doctor replied calmly, smiling. “I’ve spoken with your wife. She’s willing to make the change. She cares about your health, even if you don’t.”

Julian was of course won over. He loved Betty. He could see that the doctor’s advice was reasonable. And Larry was hopping with joy. They were going to have a real country house with land, trees, space—a lot better than the silly paved playground of the big apartment building, which was all Larry could remember, since his family had moved there when he was five.

The Websters found a two-story white house with four gable windows and an acre and a half of land, seventeen miles from Philadelphia. Julian would not even have to drive to his office. His firm had changed his job from that of sales manager to sales consultant, which Julian realized was another way of saying traveling salesman. But his salary remained the same. Olympian Pool built swimming pools of all sizes, shapes and colors, heated and unheated, and also provided vacuum and filter-cleaning devices, purifiers, sprays and bubble-makers, and all kinds of diving boards. And Julian, he realized himself, made a good impression as salesman. His appointments were follow-ups of responses to mailed advertisements, so he was sure of being received. Julian was not high pressure. His manner was quiet and sincere, and he didn’t mind disclosing difficulties and extra expenses from the start, if he saw that there were going to be any. Julian chewed his reddish-brown mustache, pondered, and expressed his opinion with the air of a man who was thinking out loud about his own problems.

Now, Julian got up at eight, strolled around his garden-in-progress, breakfasted on tea and a soft-boiled egg instead of coffee and cigarettes, looked at the newspaper and worked the crossword—all according to doctor’s orders—before departing in his car around ten. He was due home around four, and that was the end of his day. Meanwhile, Betty measured windows for curtains, bought extra rugs, and happily took care of all the details that were necessary to make a new, bigger house a home. Larry had changed schools and was getting along well. It was the month of March. Larry wanted a dog. And there were rabbit warrens in an outhouse on the property. Couldn’t he have rabbits?

“Rabbits breed so,” said Julian. “What’ll we do with them unless we sell them, and we don’t want to start that. Let’s get a dog, Larry.”

The Websters went to a pet shop in their nearest town with the idea of inquiring about a kennel where they could buy a terrier or German shepherd puppy, but in the pet shop there were such splendid looking basset puppies, that Betty and Larry decided they had found what they wanted.

“Very healthy!” said the woman of the shop, fondling a floppy-eared, brown and white puppy in her arms.

That was obvious. The puppy grinned and slavered and wriggled in his loose hound’s skin, which was so ready to fill out with the aid of Puppy-Spruce, Grow-Pup, dogbone-shaped biscuits and vitamins, all of which Julian bought in the shop.

“Look at these, Pop!” Larry said, pointing to some hamsters in a cage. “They’re smaller than rabbits. They could live in the little
rooms
we’ve got.”

Julian and Betty agreed to buy two hamsters. Only two, and they were so darling with their soft, clean fur, their innocent, inquisitive eyes, their twitching noses.

“All that space should be filled a little bit!” said Betty. She was as happy as Larry with the day’s purchases.

Larry absorbed what the pet shop woman told him about hamsters. They should be kept warm at night, they ate cereals and grains of all kinds, and greenery such as carrots and turnips. They were nocturnal, and did not like direct sunlight. Larry installed his two in one of the cubicles in the rabbit warren. There were six such cubicles, three above, three below. He provided water and a pan of bread, plus a bowl of sweet corn from a tin he had found in the kitchen. He found an empty shoe box, which he filled with old rags, and this would be the hamsters’ bedroom, he hoped. What to name them? Tom and Jerry? No, they were male and female. Jack and Jill? Too juvenile. Adam and Eve? Larry thought he would decide on names later. He could tell the male, because of a black patch between his ears.

Then there was the puppy. The puppy ate, peed, slept, and then awakened to play at two in the morning the first night. Everyone woke up, because the puppy had quit his box by the radiator and scratched at Larry’s door.

“I
love
him!” said Larry, half asleep, rolling on the floor in pajamas with the puppy in his arms.

“Oh, Julian,” said Betty, collapsing into her husband’s arms. “What a wonderful day! Isn’t this better than city life?”

Julian smiled, and kissed his wife on the forehead. It was better. Julian was happy. But he didn’t want to make a speech about it. He’d had a tough time quitting cigarettes, and now he was putting on weight. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

Larry, in his big room all his own, browsed in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on the subject of hamsters. He learned that they were of the order
Cricetus frumentarius
, belonging to the mouse-tribe
Muridae
. They made burrows some six feet deep which were vertical and sinuous. This burrow might have three or four chambers, in the deepest of which would be hidden the grain which the hamsters stored for the winter. Males and females and the young had separate rooms for sleeping. And when the young were only three weeks old, they were thrust from the parental burrow to fend for themselves. A female might have a dozen offspring at a time, and from twenty-five to fifty during her fertile eight months of the year. At six weeks, the female was ready for pregnancy. For four months of the year, or during winter, the hamsters hibernated, and fed upon the grain they had stored in their burrow. Among their enemies were owls and men who, at least in times past, had dug up their burrows in order to get at the grain the hamsters had stored.

“A dozen babies at a time!” said Larry to himself, astounded. A thought of selling them to his school chums crossed his mind, and just as quickly vanished. It was more pleasant to dream about a dozen tiny hamsters covering the floor of the three-foot by three-foot warren where his two now were. Probably they could fill all the six warrens before hibernation time.

Hardly six weeks had passed, when Larry looked into the barred front of the warren, and saw ten tiny hamsters suckling or trying to at the nether part of the female, whom Larry had named Gloria. Larry had just come home from school on the yellow bus. He let his book satchel fall to the ground, and he pressed his face close to the bars.

“Golly!—Gosh! Ten—no,
eleven
!” Larry went running to tell the news. “Hey, Mama!”

Betty was upstairs hemming a counterpane on the sewing machine. She came down to admire the hamster babies to please Larry. “Aren’t they adorable! Like little white mice!”

The following morning, there were only nine in the warren, which Larry had carefully barricaded with newspaper to a height of eight inches behind the bars, so the little ones could not fall out. Where had the other two gone? Then he remembered, with a twinge of horror, that the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
had said that the mother hamster often ate inferior or sickly babies. Larry supposed that that was what had happened.

Julian came home at 4:30, and Larry dragged him out to show him the little ones.

“That’s awfully quick. Isn’t it?” said Julian. He was not much surprised, as hamsters were related to rabbits after all, but he wanted to say the right thing to his son. Julian’s mind just then was on a swimming pool, and he strolled out with his briefcase still under his arm to take another look at his lawn.

Larry followed him, thinking that the lawn would offer an ample burrowing area for his hamsters and their offspring when winter rolled around—a long time away as yet. It would surely be better for the hamsters to hibernate in the ground than in straw in the brick warrens. They should have the right to store their grain supplies, as it said in the encyclopedia. The basset puppy had loped out to join Larry, and Larry scratched the top of the puppy’s head while trying to pay attention to his father.

“. . . or a nice pale blue pool, Larry my boy? What shape? Kidney shape? Boomerang? Clover?”

“Boomerang!” said Larry, pleased by the word at the moment.

Julian wanted to put in his order at once with his company. Olympian Pool was terribly busy in the spring and summer months, and far from getting priority as an employee, Julian knew he might have to wait a bit. Olympian boasted of being able to create a swimming pool in a week. Julian hoped he could get one while there was still some summer left.

Larry had brought a few of his chums to his house for milk and cookies after school, and to show them his hamsters. The little ones were now a bigger attraction. A couple of the kids wanted to pick the little ones up, which Larry permitted, after separating the mother. Larry picked the mother up by the back of the neck, as his books advised.

“Your mother doesn’t mind the babies,” asked Eddie Carstairs, in a guarded way.

“Why should she?” Larry said. “They’re my pets. I take care of them.”

Eddie glanced over his shoulder, as if to see if Larry’s mother might be coming. “I’ll give you more if you want. My parents want me to get rid of ’em. But my father doesn’t feel like drowning ’em, you see? Well—if you want them—”

It was settled in a trice. The next afternoon, Eddie came on his bicycle around 4 p.m. with a cardboard carton on the handlebars. He had ten baby hamsters for Larry, of two different litters so they were not exactly the same age, plus three adult hamsters, two of which had orange spots, which Larry thought quite beautiful, since they introduced a new color to his hamster warren. Eddie was furtive.

“You don’t have to worry,” Larry said. “My mother won’t mind.”

“You never know. Wait and see,” said Eddie, and he declined politely to come in for milk and apple pie.

Larry released two of the adult hamsters in the garden, and watched with pleasure as they nosed their way about in their new freedom, sniffing irises, nibbling grass, moving on. Mr. Johnson, the basset puppy, loped out just then, and started to chase one of the hamsters who at once disappeared into the lavender bushes, baffling Mr. Johnson. Larry laughed.

A couple of days later, Betty noticed the new babies in two more warrens. “Where’d they come from?”

Larry sensed a faint disapproval. “Oh, one of the kids in school. I said I had room. And—well, you know I’m good at taking care of them.”

“That you are.—All right, Larry, this once. But we don’t want too many, do we? All these are going to produce more, you know.”

Larry nodded politely. His thoughts swam. His status had risen at school because he could take on hamsters and knew a lot about them, and on his own property he had the warrens that hamsters needed, not some old crate or cardboard box. Another thought of Larry’s was that he could release adults or even young hamsters from the age of three weeks onward whenever he wished in the garden. For the time being, he intended to be an outlet for hamsters among his friends. At least four of his schoolmates kept hamsters and had too many.

Three men arrived one afternoon with Larry’s father to look over the lawn in regard to a swimming pool. Larry followed at a distance, keeping an eye on certain hamster burrow exits which he knew, and which he had concealed by discreet heaps of leaves and twigs. Some burrow outlets were obvious, however, and he had heard his father say, “Damned
moles
!” once to his mother. His father was supposed to jog twice around the lawn every morning, but did not always do it.

Now a workman in blue overalls and with a tape measure sank into a burrow up to his ankle, and laughed. “Moles’ll help us out a little, don’t you think, Julian? Looks like they’ve got it half dug already!”

“Ha-ha!” said Julian, to be friendly. He was talking to another workman about the boomerang shape, telling him at which point he wanted the outer arc of it. “And don’t forget with the excess soil, my wife and I want to create a kind of hill—a rock garden eventually, you know. Over there.” He pointed to a spot between him and a pear tree. “I know it’s on the blueprint, George, but it’s so much clearer when you can see the land in front of your eyes.”

That was in late May. Larry now had a second litter from his original hamsters. The remaining single hamster was a female, and she soon had a litter by the original male, whom Larry had named Pirate, because of the black patch on his head. Larry thought if he held down his warren population to about twenty—three adults and a dozen or more little ones—his parents wouldn’t complain. Since the hamsters were nocturnal, no one ever saw the garden hamsters in daytime, not even Larry. But he knew they were making burrows and doing all right, because he could see the burrow exits in various places in the lawn and garden, and could see that the grass seed, the corn kernels, also the peanuts that he put out in the afternoon were gone by the next day. Larry now had a bicycle, didn’t have to take the school bus, and he spent much of his three dollars a week allowance on hamster food bought after school at the village grocery, which had a pet food section.

All that stored away! Or maybe eaten at once, Larry thought, because surely it was early to start saving for winter. He knew the garden was full of three-week-olds. Larry was tempted to demand twenty-five cents for every hamster he took on from his school chums and ten cents for a baby, to help pay for food, but he resisted. Larry in his fantasy imagined himself the protector of hamsters, the friend who gave them a happier life than the one they had known before, when they lived in cramped boxes.