Judas Cat Read online

  “Mr. Whiting?” a boy said.

  Alex followed him up the steps to the second floor and through row after row of desks. There was the sound of business machines and typewriters, and the rumble of many voices telephoning, dictating, gossiping … invoice department, sales department, export department. The executive offices were partitioned off by half-wood, half-glass panels. George Addison arose and shook hands with him across the desk. His secretary picked up her book and left the office.

  “I presume you want to see me about Andrew Mattson,” Addison said, settling back in his chair and motioning Alex to one.

  “Yes. I thought with the friendship between your father and him, you might be able to tell us something about him”

  Addison was a pleasant-faced man—sixty, maybe. His hair was thin and greying. He had taken off his glasses when Alex came in. If he had met him on the street, Alex thought, he would not have known him from a barber, a pharmacist, a bookkeeper.

  “Your mayor called me yesterday,” Addison said. “I guess it was about time for Mattson to die. Not many of us live that long, eh?”

  “Not many,” Alex agreed.

  “I never met the old man myself,” Addison said. “My father was very fond of him, had a great respect for him.”

  “Why?”

  Addison scratched his nose. “By gosh, when you put it directly, I don’t know. We never talked much about him. It was one of those things I took for granted. I remember father saying he was getting queer. But I didn’t ask him to explain. There were times when we thought he was getting a little queer himself. You know how old men are. Father was eighty-nine when he went, you know.”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “He died last spring, didn’t he?”

  “April.”

  “Do you know if Mattson had any relatives?” Alex asked.

  “Altman—that’s your mayor’s name, isn’t it?—asked me that yesterday. To tell you the truth, I don’t know a thing about him. I think my father must have come to know him away before my time. As I said, it was something we took for granted. Father had many old cronies. I recall having heard that Mattson loaned him money once.”

  “That seems kind of strange to think about now,” Alex said, “when you think of the size of Addison and the simplicity of Mattson’s four rooms.”

  “My father was a very simple man, for all his acumen,” Addison said.

  “Did you ever work together?” Alex asked, stepping over his own lack of tact in using the word “simplicity.”

  “Possibly. It’s quite possible. When father got older, he became active in a lot of pet projects, mathematical theories, mostly. He had a very keen mind for an old man. I’ve always had the notion that’s what he and Mattson talked about. It might have been my imagination, of course, but I could just see the two old boys going at it hammer and tongs. Before he went to see him, father would be busy for a week, very secretive about it all, but I saw some of his papers once—problems that would choke a horse.”

  “Did you ever have the notion they might be building something?”

  “No. That never occurred to me. Why?”

  “No particular reason,” Alex said. “Andy had the reputation of being handy at carpentry and the like. Your father was quite an art collector at one time, I believe. I saw the collection when I was at the University. I think there’s a valuable painting in Mattson’s house—a Pissarro. I remember his work in the Addison Collection. I wondered if we could get any of their story out of that.”

  Addison was thoughtful. “I’d like to make inquiries. Let me talk to the curator and let you know.” He wrote the name of the artist on a pad. “I presume the house will be impounded?”

  Alex thought that it was likely.

  “By the way, Mattson wasn’t broke, was he?”

  “No. There was nearly two hundred dollars in cash in the house.”

  Addison smiled. “This might amuse you,” he said. “My father provided twenty-five thousand dollars for him in his will, but the estate doesn’t go to probate until this week when the court convenes. Well, I thought about the old man one day and wondered if he might be hard up. I think father used to take him something now and then. So I wrote to him advising him of the legacy and offering to send him something if he needed it. He wrote me a note that would have curled my hair as to what he thought of my charity. He told me to give the twenty-five thousand to an organization for displaced persons. What do you think of that for a man of ninety-two?”

  “I would be the last person in the world to underestimate Andrew Mattson,” Alex said.

  “Just so,” Addison said. “I thought of the letter yesterday when Altman called. I had no intention of so disposing of the money before that, of course. In fact, I could not have done it until the will was settled. If no heirs to Mattson show up, I’ll turn the letter over to the state.”

  “I wonder if the twenty-five thousand will turn up any heirs,” Alex said. Addison had not answered his direct question on the subject a moment before.

  “If there are any, that will do it,” said Addison. “As they say on the radio, it works every time.”

  “Do many people know of the bequest?” Alex asked.

  Addison put on his glasses. “No. There was no secret about it, but the provisions of a will aren’t generally known before an estate goes to probate. Mattson might have spoken of it, but I doubt that from what I’ve heard of him.”

  “So do I,” Alex said. “I guess there isn’t much else, Mr. Addison.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t know much more about him than when you came.” He got up and came around the desk to walk to the door with Alex. “I wish I could be of more help.”

  “Maybe we should let the old boy rest in peace,” Alex said. “But as Chief Waterman says, we don’t know enough about him to put on his tombstone.”

  “Altman said his cat had scratched him up. That was a terrible thing. Cats are strange animals. I wouldn’t have one in the house, myself. They belong in a barn yard.”

  “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Addison.”

  “Not at all. Thank you for coming up. By the way, if money’s needed for the funeral, tell whoever’s handling it, I’ll take care of it.”

  The two men shook hands, and as though it were a signal, the boy was at his side to guide Alex out of the office.

  It had been a well conducted interview, he thought grimly. Addison had conducted it. There were things he might have asked directly, for example, the business with Altman and Hershel, but he had no one’s word for that except Lou Ivantic. Hershel had not mentioned it to Waterman either. He drove to the Riverdale County Museum. It was called a museum, but it might well have been called a curiosity shop, having everything from an enormous collection of Indian arrowheads to pewter mugs said to have come over with the early French explorers. The old curator was an authority on everything that pre-dated 1900. Alex gave him the service ribbon and button he had taken from Andy’s suitcase, and waited while he checked it in a catalogue he himself had compiled.

  While he waited he looked around the room. Stuffed birds were perched above all the cases, and the inevitable elk, moose and deer heads were mounted on the walls. In the cases were sample fabrics of Indian weaves, beads of many varieties, samples of the barks of all the trees known to Riverdale county. There was a case of butterflies, another of insects, two cases devoted to coins, one to shells and another to the various mineral deposits in the soils of Riverdale. It was compulsory that every child in the county make at least one “field trip” to the museum before passing from the eighth grade. Alex was trying to remember which of his classes brought him there—geography, history, botany …

  “Spanish-American War,” the curator said. “Engineers. Philippine Island. You don’t see many of them anymore. I can remember when Civil War decorations were more plentiful. When President Taft was through here he commended me. He came here and stood right where you’re standing this minute …”

  “You’ve been here a lon
g time,” Alex said. “I suppose you remember the beginning of the town?”

  “No. Not the beginning of the town. But I remember when it became county seat. I remember when Addison built his first plant out there on the river. I remember his people wagoning down from Jackson. There weren’t even trains through here in those days. They moved a lot of stuff up the river. It was a big drink then. Now it’s not even a sip for the cows in pasture.”

  “I wonder why he picked this spot,” Alex said.

  “See those cases? Minerals. Cheap power on the river. He knew what he was doing.”

  Alex thanked the curator and started for home. The old man’s mention of the river reminded him of the typhus epidemic which had caused the first real battle between his father and the powers at the county seat. It was Barnard who had put his finger on the source of infection, as he remembered it, tracing it to the Addison plant disposal. He pulled off the road and entered several questions in his notebook.

  Chapter 19

  WATERMAN KEPT TELLING HIMSELF that he had to stick to facts. Alex Whiting could afford to indulge in fancy because he was looking for a story. As an officer of justice he must keep his mind on the evidences of crime. Barnard’s laboratory was one. And the break-in at Mattson’s house was another. As far as Mattson’s death was concerned, he had very little chance of making a case, with the coroner’s report against it. The vandalism at Barnard’s suggested a poison in the cat, presumably transferable through its claws or teeth, that would not show up in Mattson’s body but would in the cat’s. There was a lot of presumption there, and it would be difficult to convince anyone of it, particularly the county men. Then there was the matter of Alex taking the cat. No matter how he approached it they were not going to be anxious to help. One thing at a time. He stopped at home for a brief lunch, grateful that his wife was at the church working on the ladies’ luncheon for tomorrow.

  It was a little after two when he got to Mattson’s house. Mabel was at home. He wondered that she, too, had not gone to the church. She made herself a driving force in every social. He went in Mattson’s back door. It was funny the way you got used to going in back doors. He had not gone in the front door at home that he could remember unless he had company with him, and that had not been for a long time.

  He went all over the house himself looking for prints. There were none. In the living room he saw the painting Alex had mentioned. The sun was overhead now and much of the translucence of the picture was gone. If it were valuable, Waterman thought, it was a good thing Alex had seen it. He, himself would scarcely have noticed it at all. He sat down in the big chair. Presuming the cat was carrying some sort of poison, where did he get it? Was he allowed out for the night? If the old man took such precautions in locking himself in, was he likely to open the door in the middle of the night for the cat if he cried to get in? Then there was the question of what the murderer wanted (if there was a murder). Yesterday he might have said that the old man was murdered because he was wanted out of the way (if he was murdered). That was where he had to accept Hershel as a suspect. But now that the house had been broken into, it was obvious that the old man had something whoever did it wanted, and whatever it was, he could afford to wait until the police examination had been made before coming for it. And why that window? It would have been easier to have removed the boards from the back window. But it was in view from Mabel Turnsby’s. And who had the other key?

  Waterman laid his head on the back of the chair, and thought of the old man as he had found him. His body had stiffened while he was in terror of the cat. And yet the cat was closed in another room in the morning. Andy was fully dressed and the coroner had put his death at approximately two o’clock in the morning. Mabel told Alex something had awakened her at two-thirty. He would have to go over that again with her himself. The old man had been dressed, but in the bedroom he and Alex had observed the bed. It looked as though he had gotten into it and out again without having slept in it. He might have lain down with his clothes on expecting a visitor. Everything indicated that someone had been with him that night, except that the house had been locked up from the inside. Olson had examined every window. Waterman ran his hands along the cushion of the chair and down between the upholstery. He could remember doing that as a kid, and he could remember Freddie doing it. It never failed to yield a penny or two and a handful of hairpins. In Andy’s chair he found only a stub of a pencil. He got up and went to the couch where he repeated the quest. There, when he removed the bolster, just out of sight, he found the old man’s glasses. He moved them to and from his eyes. Mattson had been extremely far-sighted. He would check with Doc Rose, the optometrist, but he was quite sure that without his glasses the old man would not recognize the hand in front of him. He would not even recognize his own cat.

  Waterman thought about that for several minutes. It would account for someone driving in the back way, if he were carrying a strange animal, and if he had to remove one from the house. He could not risk leaving it outdoors for it would surely return. Andy’s was the striped kind, one of which looked like another to the casual observer or to a far-sighted person close at hand. Every farm in the country was propagated with them. He got up and began to walk back and forth between the rooms, and then from window to window again. Every one of them had been fastened with a lock that hooked the upper and lower frames together, everyone except the small window through which the morning light caught the painting. Olson had been examining it when Mayor Altman walked into the house yesterday. Waterman pulled a chair to it and climbed up. He could have reached it easily enough from the floor, but he wanted to examine the hinges near the ceiling. There was a safety catch. It, too, had been locked. Waterman opened the window toward the ceiling and let it drop again. He stepped down and his hand trembled as he reached for the chair to put it back where he had found it. Whoever had been with Andy Mattson the night he died, had known the old man was dead before he left the house. He had thrown the cat into the dining room after whatever devilish business he had accomplished and closed the door between it and Andy. Perhaps he had finished off the old man with threats. Perhaps Andy was already dead. Then he had taken what he had come for, turned out the light and pulled himself up and out of the small window and let it swing closed. He had locked himself out, of course. And if he later discovered he had made a mistake in what he had taken, he did not return then to break in after it. He had relied on the slow wits of the examining officers not to find it, or not to understand it if they found it. And they had not disappointed him, Waterman thought bitterly. He went over the small window for prints, but there were none.

  Chapter 20

  FROM THE HOUSE WATERMAN went back to the workshop. He had padlocked it, and the lock had not been disturbed. Neither had anything in the shop. Mabel was shaking a dust mop from the back porch when he returned, and going over he sat down on the top step. “Mabel, there’s a couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

  “You too?” she said. “Young Whiting quizzed me like I was a criminal yesterday. I don’t think you should allow that, Fred.”

  “Well, there’s no law says you have to answer him, Mabel, but I don’t think he’s asking things just out of curiosity. We got some serious trouble here. I can’t help wondering why you sent him on that wild-goose chase yesterday. There wasn’t any message for him.”

  “I did so get a message. If Hazel says there wasn’t she’s fibbing. Furthermore, you can do your calling some place else after this, if that’s all the thanks I get. People traipsing in and out of my house like it was a parade grounds.”

  “Seems to me you’re awful touchy,” the chief said. “It don’t make sense you’re being like that after the way you were helping out yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was different,” she said.

  Yes, Waterman thought, yesterday was a great deal different. “Mabel, are you sure Andy didn’t give you the key to his place? You’d be the only person he was likely to give it to.”

  “I don’t l
ike what you’re saying, Fred Waterman. Not a little bit.”

  “All right, Mabel. I don’t blame you if you’re telling the truth. But somebody broke into that house last night, and if they knowed you had a key, I don’t think you’d be very safe yourself.”

  “Broke in?” she repeated, the color of her skin paling beneath the rouge.

  “Yes. It makes me wonder if maybe Andy gave you something before he died, something the housebreaker might have wanted.”

  “No.”

  “Would you have any idea of what he might have had that somebody would want awful bad?”

  “No. Like I told Alex, we never talked. Not any more than passing time of day.”

  “I know,” the chief said. “But sometimes you’ve got ways of finding things out the rest of us wouldn’t think of. Did you know anything about that shack of his out back?”

  “What do you mean, did I know anything? I knew he had one, if that’s what you mean. Had his coal delivered out there. I’d see him carting it in wintertimes.”

  “Ever see him take any visitors out there?”

  “I never seen him take visitors any place.”

  “Not even Addison?”

  “Not even him. I never seen them go out there.”

  “Were you ever in the place, Mabel?”

  “Never.”

  Waterman sighed. She was as silent as a fish, he thought. And that was strange for her. He had never known her when she didn’t want to tell everything she knew and to make up what she thought would add to it. “Did he let the cat out nights, do you know?”

  “He used to. I don’t know about lately.”

  “You never heard it crying to get in?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if you’d like to tell me what you did and saw Tuesday night,” Waterman said.