Something the Cat Dragged In (12 page)

Pommell put the papers back in the file folder, took off his glasses, and set them down on the desk with a little slap. “Glad I could be of service, Ottermole. Professor Shandy, if you’d care to give some thought to the Guaranteed’s special two-year plan—”

“I’ll talk it over with my wife.”

Shandy took the brochure he was being handed because he could see he had a fat chance of leaving without it. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Pommell.”

*
In Massachusetts, the so-called cherry sheets list the amounts of state aid given to the individual cities and towns each year. They are printed on cherry-colored paper.

T
HE POLICE CHIEF WAS
still looking stunned when he and Shandy left the bank. “Two hundred thousand dollars!” he exploded. “Jeez, maybe I better go pick up Bulfinch right now.”

“What for?” said Shandy. “He hasn’t got the money yet. He’s not going to leave town without it, is he? Would you?”

Ottermole’s face relaxed into a grin. “Hell, no. Okay, Professor, where to next?”

“We have our choice of Congressman Sill, Mr. Lutt, or Mr. Twerks.”

“Some choice! Okay, let’s head for Twerks. He’s nearest. Anyway, Lutt’s probably over at the soap factory and Sill’s not back from Boston yet.”

“How do you know he went?”

“Saw him catching the early bus when I was on my way to the station. He was babbling about some bill coming up for a hearing, I forget what. Chances are Sill did, too, but that won’t make no never-mind to him. He’ll get up and gas along for as long as the moderator’ll let him even if he hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about, same as he does at Town Meeting.”

Shandy fully understood the cause of Ottermole’s rancor. Last session, Sill had managed by sheer volume of words to sabotage the purchase of a new boiler for which Ottermole had put in a request on the perfectly reasonable grounds that the existing one at the station was sixty-two years old and all shot to hell. He himself couldn’t have agreed more with Mrs. Elizabeth Lomax’s expressed opinion that Sill was nothing but an old gasbag.

That wasn’t to say he held any kind regard for Twerks, nor did the greeting they got from the squire of Twerks Hall make him feel any kinder, though it was affable enough. Twerks himself came to the door in what was presumably his leisure garb of slacks in the Buchanan tartan with a peacock-blue pullover stretched across his paunch.

“Well, well,” he boomed. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“That’s a redundant question, isn’t it?” Shandy replied. “You are a member of the Balaclavian Society, are you not?”

“Sure. I get it. So now I’m going to be grilled about Ungley. Poor old duffer, I thought he was retired from the college.”

“He was.”

“Then how come Svenson’s put his tame sleuth on the trail? Watch out, Ottermole. Now that Shandy’s muscled in on your territory, he’ll be taking over the police station next thing you know. Come in, come in. What’ll you have to drink?”

This was Shandy’s first time inside Twerks’s house. Once, he decided, would be plenty. He didn’t like the furniture made of animal horns. There was even a frame of caribou antlers around a steel engraving of President Buchanan and a probably spurious family tree linking the Buchanans with the Twerkses. The carpeting was in the Buchanan tartan, which is among the livelier ones. So were the draperies. Twerks’s slacks, which had looked so incandescent on the doorstep, blended into this mélange of colors until he gave the impression of being a peacock-blue floating blob with a shiny pink bobble on top.

Despite his burly physique, Twerks was not a lovesome sight. His face suggested what happens to a wax figure over a slow fire. Swags of half-melted flesh hung from cheekbones and jawline, so hectic a raspberry shade that had Dr. Melchett been of the party, he’d no doubt have upped Twerks’s dosage of blood pressure pills on the spot. Even the scalp that showed beneath Twerks’s white hair was bright pink. The hair itself was short, flat, and fine, reminding Shandy of a white mouse he’d had to dissect as a youth in biology class. It was that mouse, he’d always felt, which had clinched his decision to stick with plants instead of animals.

Twerks was still offering drinks. Shandy shook his head. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

“Me neither,” said Ottermole with a touching air of conscious virtue. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions about last night. You were at the meeting, right?”

“Sure. I always go. When I can’t think of anything better to do.”

“What time did you leave?”

“When the meeting broke up. Quarter of eleven, something like that.”

“What did you think of Ungley’s talk?” Shandy put in.

Twerks shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t hear much of it. I’d had a few drinks with my dinner and I kind of dozed off for a while. You know how it is. He was talking about cutting up feathers to make pens, I remember that. Didn’t make much sense to me. And buckshot in the inkwells, and sand for a blotter. Hell of a mess to go through just to write a letter. Must be why What’s-his-name invented the telephone. You sure you won’t have a drink?”

“Quite sure,” said Shandy. “And how did you feel this morning when you learned Ungley had been killed?”

“Hell, how would anybody feel? You leave a man alive, you go home and hit the sack, you wake up the next morning and he’s gone. Makes you stop and think.”

“And precisely what did you think, Mr. Twerks?”

With some effort, Twerks managed to raise his eyebrows, causing the festoons of adipose tissue to quiver in a most unappetizing manner. “What did I think? Well, I suppose—oh,
anno domino
and that kind of stuff. You know.”

“You didn’t wonder what Ungley had been doing behind the museum?”

“Naturally I wondered. But like Ottermole here said, I figured he must have got caught short and couldn’t get in to use the john on account of leaving his keys on the table.”

“But he could have made it back to his own place in a few minutes.”

“A lot can happen in a few minutes, Professor. A man’s kidneys aren’t what they used to be when he gets to be Ungley’s age. Or when he gets to be my age, now that I think of it. Excuse me a second, will you?”

Twerks vanished. Shandy and Ottermole were left alone in the midst of this tartan nightmare, with a stuffed moose glaring down at them. Shandy got the impression the moose would have liked to charge were he not inhibited by the fact that three-quarters of him was missing.

“If you ask me, this is a big, fat waste of time,” Ottermole remarked in a low tone, as if not to startle the moose. “What do you bet he’s getting himself another drink?”

“I’d be astonished if he isn’t,” Shandy replied. “Twerks wasn’t down at the clubhouse this morning, was he?”

“Not to the best of my recollection.”

“He appears to be very accurately informed about what was said there.”

“Find me one person in town who isn’t, by now.”

“M’yes, that is a point to consider. Twerks is a bachelor, is he not?”

“Most of the time, yeah.”

“Who keeps house for him?”

“Ethel Purkiser and her husband. Ethel cooks and cleans. Jim cuts the grass and washes the car, stuff like that.”

“Purkiser? I don’t believe I know them.”

“They’re not the kind you’d be apt to run into. I mean, Ethel’s got sense enough to come in out of the rain if you tell her real slow and careful, but with Jim you sort of have to let it sink in a while.”

“Twerks employs them as an act of benevolence, then?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it. Jim and Ethel earn their keep and then some. See, people that are kind of slow in the uptake often make better workers than the smart ones. They do what they’re told instead of arguing back, and they don’t get sick of doing the same things over and over. They don’t keep yelling for more money, either. Long as they’ve got a good roof over their heads and plenty of grub in their bellies, they’re satisfied to take what you give ’em. Twerks is cute as a fox, though you’d never think it to look at him.”

A fox might have a more innate sense of decency, Shandy thought, than to sweat good work at low wages out of people who weren’t equipped to stand up for their rights. He couldn’t see a speck of dust on any of those intricately entangled horns and antlers, and he’d already noticed on the way in how clean the yard around Twerks’s brown-and-yellow monstrosity was, in contrast to most of the leaf-strewn lawns in town, not excluding his own.

Twerks was not only disgusting, he was rude to keep them standing here so long. Ottermole had consulted his digital watch (another present from his doting wife) five or six times before Twerks at last wandered back into the room carrying, as they’d expected, a half-consumed drink;

“Sorry I took so long,” he had the grace to apologize. “I got a phone call. From a friend of mine.”

Again something odd happened to the facial flab. Shandy finally realized Twerks was giving them a knowing wink, to signal that the call had been from a willing woman. He was quite sure it hadn’t.

“Who do you think killed Ungley?” he asked point-blank.

Twerks slopped a little of his drink, then took a hasty gulp to make sure no more of it got wasted. “What do you mean, who killed him? Ungley cracked his skull falling over that harrow. You said so yourself, Ottermole, and so did Melchett.”

“Yeah, well, that was just a preliminary finding,” said Ottermole, giving his jacket zipper a fast up-and-down. “I’ve collected more evidence since then,” he didn’t look at Shandy, “and it turns but he was bashed over the head with that loaded cane he carried. Either his or Henry Hodger’s, that is. We’re not sure yet.”

“That so?” Twerks gave the police chief a look that was remarkably sober, coming from one who took his drinking so seriously. “Then let me tell you something. You’d better be damned sure before you go around making any more cracks like that one, or Henry Hodger’s sure as hell going to slap a lawsuit on you and take you for everything you’ve got. Including your badge.”

And that was about all they got out of Twerks. Not even another chance to turn down a drink, as Ottermole observed bitterly after they’d gone back to the cruiser.

“Damned waste of time,” he snarled. “He was slopped to the eyeballs.”

“I think not,” said Shandy, “and I’m wondering why he tried to make us think he was. I’m also wondering why he didn’t ask us for more details about Ungley’s murder and—er—succeeding developments. Unless that phone call was, in fact, from one of his fellow members, filling him in. Pommell, for instance. What in Sam Hill is that infernal racket? The car’s not blowing up, I hope?”

“It’s just the two-way radio,” Ottermole explained. “Works a little funny sometimes. They must be trying to get me from the station.”

He fiddled with the controls, gave the speaker a few dainty taps, and at last dealt the bottom of the dashboard a lusty kick. At once, transmission became clear as a bell.

“Chief Ottermole. Mayday! Mayday! Hey, Chief, you there?”

“I’m here,” Ottermole bellowed into the transmitter. “Can you hear me, Budge? What’s up?”

“Congressman Sill just sent in a riot call from the college.”

“What the hell’s he doing up at the college? And why can’t Security take care of whatever the hell’s happening?”

“I asked him, Chief. He just kept on bellowing, ‘Send a squadron of police.’ Heck, we couldn’t raise a squadron with a derrick. There’s just you and me on duty, and you said if I left the switchboard you’d—”

“I know what I said, and I meant it. You stay right where you are, Budge. I’ll go find out what the hell’s going on. Any other calls?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Lomax. She can’t find her cat.”

“Edmund?” cried Ottermole, visibly stricken. “Jeez, maybe the killer—”

“Don’t sweat it, Chief. Edmund’s right here, flaked out on your chair. He got sick to his stomach after he ate your jelly doughnut, so I thought I’d better let him sleep it off before I sent him home. I’ll call her back after a while and tell her we pinched him for loitering with intent over at the Ingrams’. He’s got his eye on that cute little white female of theirs with the gray spot over her whiskers.”

“She ain’t that kind of a girl. They had her fixed.”

“So what? The organ may be gone, but the music remains. That’s what my great-aunt Mabel used to say after they took out her whatevers.”

“Never you mind your great-aunt’s whatevers. You been reading them girlie magazines on duty again?”

“Who, me? Say, Chief, you want to come back here and take over? I wouldn’t mind going to the riot myself.”

“Sure you wouldn’t. Anything for a laugh. You stay where you are. And get back to Mrs. Lomax before she has a conniption. She probably thinks Edmund’s been catnapped. Better call George in so I can get you up there if I need you.”

Ottermole broke the connection, frowning. “Now what the hell?”

“What the hell indeed,” Shandy concurred. “It’s not like President Svenson to allow rioting on campus. Unless, of course, he started the riot himself.”

T
HAT SVENSON HAD DONE
so was entirely possible, but what was Congressman Sill doing up there sounding the alarm? Ineffectual old coot though he was, Sill’s lobbying efforts had not been of the sort to endear him to the denizens of Balaclava Agricultural College. Or to any farmers anywhere, for that matter. Maybe the students were burning him in effigy as a pre-Halloween prank and he’d been silly enough to take umbrage.

But how could he have found out what they were up to, and what was he doing in Balaclava Junction when he ought to have been coming back from Boston on the five o’clock bus?

Possibly some exasperated statesman had thrown him out of the committee room neck and crop, and shipped him home in a padded van. It would be agreeable to think so. When Ottermole started the engine again, Shandy settled back to enjoy the ride and speculate with pleased interest on what might actually be happening up on campus.

As they started up the hill, though, he felt his brows beginning to knit. “Is that radio of yours acting up again, Ottermole?” he asked.

“What?” the chief shouted over the chugs and rattles. It was high time Town Meeting voted the police a new cruiser as well as a new boiler. Unless this was the boiler they were riding in.