Judas Cat Read online

  “How about his wife?”

  “Shopping maybe. Alex, I think we better sit here a while and put a few things together.” He took a large tablet from his drawer and tore several sheets from it. On one he wrote “J. Hershel,” on another “Mabel Turnsby,” on the third “M. Altman.” “I wonder how many more of these we’ll have before this thing ends. All right, boy. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. What did Mabel have to say this morning?”

  Half an hour later Waterman was reading the notes he had made back to Alex when the mayor’s car pulled up in front of the station. “Thunder and lightning on a summer’s day,” the chief said. “Let me do the talking.”

  The mayor got to the point immediately. “Fred, I understand you and young Whiting have been asking questions in connection with Mattson’s death. I thought the county closed the matter.”

  “They did as far as the county was concerned. I’m just trying to tie up the loose ends from here.”

  “Your ambition is commendable,” Altman said. “I’ll see that the pension board hears about it. But I hope you’re sure of what you’re doing, Fred. People are very impressionable. I had no idea they were so concerned about the old man. Well, a word to the wise …”

  “Sure,” Waterman repeated. “A word to the wise.”

  “Alex, I presume you’re running the coroner’s report, as I asked?”

  “I don’t know whether I am or not, yet, Mr. Altman,” Alex said.

  “I recommend it very highly, Alex. It has always been your father’s practice to print the truth. If you’re looking for sensationalism in this thing, I think you’ll regret it.”

  “I’m looking for the truth, Mr. Mayor,” Alex said. “And if I’m convinced the whole truth is in the coroner’s report when I study it, I’ll see that it’s printed.”

  “I don’t want it next week, Alex. I want it this week.”

  “Mr. Altman, I’m publisher of the Sentinel. Its integrity depends on what I put into it. So does mine.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Waterman said, getting up from his desk. “Did you make the arrangements for the funeral?”

  “Yes. That’s what I came to see you about. Ten o’clock at the cemetery. I’ll make it a simple service, non-denominational. I think it might be appropriate for you to send your assistant up, Fred, and give it a motorcycle escort. The Addisons will be coming down …”

  “Well …” Waterman said. He did not finish. The telephone interrupted him. “I’ll be out,” were the only words he said into it. “I guess you can have Gilbert in the morning, mayor.” He got up from his desk easily. “Alex, want to take a ride over to Three Corners with me?”

  The mayor went out the door with them and around to his chambers in the other wing of the building. In the car, Waterman said, “Barnard’s place was broken into this morning while he was out on that call.”

  Chapter 16

  THE FRONT DOOR TO the house was open when Alex and the chief drove up. They pushed the bell and walked in. Even from the doorway to the laboratory they could see the shambles that had been made of the place, cases smashed, instruments strewn around, glasses broken, as though someone had gone through whirling a brick on a string. Barnard was inside the door, going from one broken piece to another. The veins were standing out on his temples.

  “Holy God,” Alex said.

  Barnard looked up at them and then back at his laboratory. He held his hands palms upward and then dropped them again without speaking.

  “Better not touch anything till I go over it for fingerprints,” Waterman said. “You two better go into the other part of the house till I’m finished.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Barnard?” Alex asked as the two of them went into the living room.

  “Lying down.”

  Waterman had come to the door after them. “Was she here when it happened?”

  “No. She was very nervous this morning. In fact, she didn’t sleep at all last night, so I suggested she go on my call with me and sit in the car. She sometimes does that.”

  “Is there anything missing in there, Doc?” the chief asked.

  “Some specimens I was working on. That’s all I can tell.”

  “I’ve told the chief I brought Mattson’s cat to you, Doc,” Alex said. “Is that what’s missing?”

  “Yes.”

  Alex looked at Waterman. “Maybe you better tell me just what happened as far as you can, Doc,” the chief said, “being as particular as possible about time.”

  Barnard took the cigarette Alex offered him. “I’ve been attending a heifer a few miles from here. I got a call about seven o’clock this morning. We left right away. I saw it was going to take me some time when I got out there, so Norah took the car and went on up to Masontown and did her shopping. She picked me up about eleven and we came right home. With the groceries we went in the back way. The screen had been pulled off a kitchen window. That’s how whoever it was got into the house.”

  “How about the cat?” Waterman asked. “What did you find out about it?”

  “Nothing. I hadn’t a chance to get into my lab at all this morning. The truth is, I didn’t expect to find anything. Nothing irregular was evident from the preliminary tests. Now I don’t know … I just don’t know.”

  “I’m very sorry I got you into this, Doc,” Alex said.

  “I told him he should have sent you away from here last night,” Mrs. Barnard said from the doorway. “I knew something would happen.” Her face was drawn and pinched looking, and as she came in the room with that gliding walk of hers, Alex thought she looked as though she were sleepwalking.

  “Norah, why don’t you stay upstairs and rest, my dear? Chief Waterman will do everything he can.”

  “Have the police ever been able to do enough in this county, Jeffrey? Answer me that.”

  “You will go to your room and rest, Norah. There’s enough confusion in this house now.”

  Mrs. Barnard lingered a moment, a pouting defiance on her face, and then wisped out of the room. “She has never been very well,” Barnard explained. “I’m afraid I’ve become more a father than a husband to her. But that has nothing to do with the business at hand. I admit this thing has shaken me. I had some valuable instruments, and some notes on months of research that were destroyed. I suppose I must start over now. But it’s hard to start over.”

  “Yes,” Waterman said. “It’s always hard to start over. Doc, had you any notion this might happen?”

  “No. No notion. Alex called me last night and warned me that the other package had been taken from his car. But I had no idea they’d go this far.”

  “Did you see anybody around the place when you left this morning?”

  “No. I’d have been suspicious if I had.”

  “Where’d you say you were this morning?”

  “Allendale Farm. It’s near Masontown.”

  “And they really needed you up there?”

  “What do you mean ‘they really needed me?’”

  “The call was on the up and up. It wasn’t to get you out of the house.”

  “It was quite legitimate.”

  “All right, Doc. We’ll see what we can find out. Maybe we’ll get some help out of the county now. But as far as I can see we’d be just as well off without their help.”

  Waterman got his kit from the car and went over the laboratory for prints. Meanwhile, Alex went outdoors. In the back yard of the veterinary’s were several runs for small animals. In one of them was an opossum, and in another segregated one, two white rats. The field at the back of the house was stubbled after the recent threshing. Far beyond it were the farm buildings, fronting on another road. To the west was a large signboard advertising the Hillside Inn; to the east was the only house, about half a mile away. He walked down to it, and inquired if anyone had noticed visitors at the veterinary’s that morning. No one had seen anything. When he returned, Waterman shook his head. “Only one strange set of prints, Alex, and I’ve a hunch they’re yours
. We’ll check and make sure. But I don’t think we’re dealing with the kind that leave trademarks.”

  “I’m going to take my suspicions up to the sheriff’s office,” Waterman said on the way back to town. “If they don’t cooperate then, there’s got to be a reason for it. And maybe we’ll know where to start. You sure needled somebody when you took that cat.”

  “Chief, what do you think of Mrs. Barnard?”

  “Alex, I give up thinking about women a long time ago. They got more angles than the crazy house at a carnival. Why?”

  “Mabel’s her aunt, you know.”

  “Almost everybody’s related to everybody else in Hillside, Alex.”

  “I know. But she didn’t want Doc in on this, and I’d like to know why. Now I’m beginning to get curious as to what’s wrong between them and Mabel.”

  Chapter 17

  ALEX WENT DIRECTLY TO the office from the station. He had less than an hour to decide what was to go into the Sentinel about Mattson’s death. He had the copy of the coroner’s report, but he was still reluctant to print it. All the same he realized that part of his reluctance came from his antagonism toward Altman. Joan and Maude were at lunch. He told his father what had happened at Barnard’s, but there was no time then for talking. He went to his desk and began the account of the old man’s death:

  HILLSIDE’S OLDEST CITIZEN DIES

  Sometime after midnight Wednesday, August 18, Andrew Mattson, 92, died at his home on Sunrise Avenue. Chief of Police Waterman found him at noon the next day. Miss Mabel Turnsby, Mattson’s neighbor, called the police when the old man had not come outdoors that morning.

  Little is known of Mattson, who in his thirty-one years’ residence in Hillside had gained the reputation of being a recluse. His one visitor, the late Henry Addison, came once each year to spend a day with him, and since his death, no one is known to have entered the house until Mr. Waterman broke in the day of Miss Turnsby’s call.

  Alex stopped and lit a cigarette. He picked up a pencil and jotted notes on a pad, repeating the first notes he had made: “Anne, 1933,” and adding: “cat, missing key, package from the car, painting, car seen that night, toys, house broken into, Barnard’s lab, call from Mabel’s, Hershel’s expansion …”

  Maude was coming in from lunch. He waved her away and continued to smoke his cigarette thoughtfully. What could he say about the old man that would be the truth? Altman wanted the coroner’s report published. The reason was obvious. He wanted any suspicions about Mattson’s death allayed. He would like a nice syrupy story that would make it stick. Alex pulled the sheet out of the typewriter and threw it in the waste basket. He stuck his notes in his pocket. Taking the coroner’s report, he went out to Maude’s desk and gave it to her. “You can run this,” he said, “verbatim on the front page.”

  “All right, if you say so,” she said. “Where’s the story?”

  “There isn’t any story. When I’ve got one I’ll give it to you.”

  “You can say something, Alex.”

  “What can I say? That the old man died in his sleep? He didn’t. More drivel about Addison?”

  “Now you listen to me, Alex Whiting. We’ve had enough phone calls here this morning to last us a year. People want an explanation in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “Maude, if I had an explanation, I’d give it to them. Altman wants me to give an explanation, too. He wants me to say the old man died a natural death, all’s right with the world. It isn’t. But at the same time it isn’t right to fill the page with a lot of suspicions I can’t prove. We’ll run the report. That’s what he wants, but the fact that we make no comment on it will tell my story the way I want it told for now.”

  “All right, Alex. But why didn’t you say that this morning? I’ve saved you space. What am I going to put in it?”

  “I’ll get you the doggoned ‘library jottings’.” He stopped at the door and called back: “What kind of calls came in, Maudie?”

  “I can tell you when Andy bought his last pair of shoes, when he got a haircut, when he got his glasses changed. Old lady Liston wanted to know if the cat was killed humanely. She’s on another rampage. We’re doing a story for her on her Mongrel Haven.”

  Glasses, Alex thought. He had not seen any at the house or in the workshop. “Anything else, Maudie?”

  “Tom Ferguson wants to loan you a book on how to detect a criminal.”

  “Nuts,” he said, but he was grinning when he left the office.

  He could remember the smell of the library since he had borrowed his first book. No matter how many new books had been added there were always enough old ones to smell that way. It was like opening an old trunk. Miss Woods gave him a quick, vanishing smile. “I guess we shouldn’t have printed that letter last week,” he said. “Dad wouldn’t have done it. Sometimes my sense of humor is a little perverse.”

  “A participle is a very easy thing to make a mistake on, Alex,” she said. “I found one the other day in George Eliot.”

  She had looked for them, too, he thought. “I know, Miss Woods.”

  “And I remember one in Time magazine and you know how literate they are.”

  “Very.”

  “And newspaper stories are full of them.”

  “I apologize for printing the letter,” he said.

  “Very well, Alex. But you don’t need to print the apology.”

  “No ma’m.”

  “What can I give you?”

  “‘Library jottings,’” he said, “and I’d like to look at your latest Who’s Who, if I may.” He took the book to a table near the window and opened it to Henry Addison. Born in Webber, Massachusetts in 1859, one of two children. It listed his clubs, business affiliations and philanthropic interests. Alex copied it all into his notebook and closed the big book. What good it would do him, he had no idea. Certainly it brought him no closer to a reason for a friendship between the famous man and old Andy. Someone was mowing the grass in the town square. The smell drifted in on the hot wind. He returned the book to Miss Woods. She had her column ready for him. It had been neatly typed, waiting in her drawer for his apology.

  “Thank you, ma’m. Do you know if there’s any way I could trace the stories on the paintings of a French artist, Pissarro. Where each one is, when it was purchased, where?”

  “I should think I could find out from the National Galleries. I’d be glad to try, Alex.”

  “Would you, Miss Woods? I’d appreciate it.”

  “I can send a wire if you want me to.”

  “Maybe that would be best. I’ll pay you whatever it costs.” He pocketed the jottings. “Thank you, ma’m.”

  “Alex, is it true Doctor Barnard’s place was vandalized because he was helping you on Andy Mattson?”

  Out already, he thought. “It was broken into this morning. We’re not sure why, yet.”

  Downstairs in the town clerk’s office, he learned that the 1933 property tax had been paid by money order. The return address was 3467 Paula Ave., Chicago. He wrote it down. “Really going after this thing, aren’t you, Alex?” the clerk said, wiping the sweat from his face.

  “Trying to get a history on the old man. It’s like pulling teeth. You should have a record of the deed on that property, shouldn’t you?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask for that. The danged vaults are like an oven. I’d like to stick Altman in there and let him fry for a while.” The clerk was gone a few moments. He returned with a filing box and a smear of dust on his clean shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. He went over the dusty papers. The property had been deeded to Mattson by Michael Turnsby and notarized in Chicago. Mrs. Barnard had mentioned an agent, but there was no indication on the record that one had been consulted. It seemed reasonable to assume that Andy might have dealt directly with Turnsby. Hillside was a logical place for Andy to come if he intended to make toys, but why was he so secretive about it, and where had he known Turnsby? Or had he merely answered an advertisement of the property in
a Chicago paper? Alex jotted down the dates of the deed and thanked the clerk. “Ever talk with the old man?”

  “Nope. He wasn’t one for talking much. Just pushed his cash through the window and waited for a receipt.”

  “Not even complaints about that goldenrod next to his place?”

  “Nope. I don’t think he had any allergies except people.”

  Waterman was not in the station when Alex went around to that wing. Gilbert said he had gone over to Mattson’s house to look for prints on his way to lunch. Alex returned to the office. The speed with which Maude snatched the librarian’s copy from him and ran it back to the composing room made him feel guilty. The one busy day in the week at the plant and he was walking around in a blue fog. He went back to the plant himself. His father and Joan were proofreading the galleys. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  “Just do what you’re doing,” Maude said. “But do it some place else.”

  Joan looked up at him and smiled. His father winked at him. As indispensable as the fifth wheel, he thought. But he did have work to do. He went into the office and called the Addison Industries at Riverdale. He could see George Addison at three o’clock.

  Chapter 18

  AS HE CLIMBED THE steps of the main office of the Addison Industries, he noticed the date on the foundation stone of the massive brick building, 1895. That was the real beginning of Riverdale. Before that it had probably been a lazy village like Hillside. In fifty-three years it had sprawled and tumbled over thousands of acres, attracting workers from all over the country, and contributing industries, like the tannery and the woolen mill. And what affected one, affected all of them, and all the people in the town.

  At the information desk on the first floor he waited while someone came from Addison’s office to get him. He looked at the floor directory—Advertising department, 2nd floor, north; Accounting, 3rd floor, south; George Addison, 2nd floor; George Addison, Jr., 2nd floor; Henry Addison estate, 5th floor, north. … He looked from the directory to a huge map of the United States, marked with the various plants of the company and subsidiary industries, main plants in New Bedford, Wilkes-Barre, Riverdale, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles …